They came from deep in Asia fifteen thousand years ago, in one of the great migrations in human history, across the bridge of land that has since disappeared into the Bering Sea, between Siberia and Alaska. They settled the continents now known as North America and South America, and they became Incas and Aztecs, Navajo and Sioux, Seminole and, in the Northeast, Algonquin.
Many tribes made up the Algonquin family. Those who settled in what is now Maine came to be known as Abenaki. The word is an English-language version of Wabanaki, which means “living at the sunrise.” To the early Indians, this area was Dawnland, the place where the sun first rises.
We do not know how many there were or precisely how long they lived here. As happened throughout the Americas, they were displaced by whites. But they left their names to mark forever their presence. Madawaska is a town at the northern tip of Maine. At the southern border is the Piscataqua River. The highest point of land is Mount Katahdin. The three largest rivers are the Penobscot, the Kennebec, and the Androscoggin. The largest county in land area is Aroostook. Today only about three thousand Indians remain, mostly Penobscot and Passamaquoddy on reservations in central and eastern Maine and a few Maliseet and Micmac in the north.
For the Indians moving east across the continent, the Atlantic coast was as far as they could go. For the white men who came west across the ocean, it was the first place they came to. Several of the discoverers, some of them well-known, touched at or near Maine: Cabot in 1497, Verrazzano in 1524, John Walker in 1580. The earliest efforts at settlement failed: the French in 1604 at the mouth of the Saint Croix River in eastern Maine, the British in 1608 near the mouth of the Kennebec River in southern Maine. Over the next century more white settlements were established along the coast and up the rivers. Most of these failed too, victims of the continuing conflict between the British and the French. The Abenaki for the most part sided with the French, who used them to conduct raids on British settlers. This slowed the white settlement of Maine, even reversing it in some areas. But in the early eighteenth century, when the British and French had a quarter-century interlude of peace, the settling renewed and then accelerated.
Under the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, the British gained undisputed control of what was then known as Acadia, now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This eventually led to the departure of the French settlers, a noteworthy event in Maine history, and ultimately to the settlement of the northernmost part of Maine by French immigrants from Acadia. That area is now known simply as “The Valley,” a shorthand description of the Saint John River Valley. The Saint John forms the boundary between the United States and Canada along much of northern Maine. In its fertile valley on both sides of the river the French settlers endured and prospered. Today it is a vibrant, friendly, distinct part of Maine where French is still commonly spoken.
White settlement continued to increase in Maine, even though fighting between the British and French was renewed. The final victory over the French in the Battle of Quebec in 1759 consolidated British control over eastern North America. The distraction of a common foe having been removed, many British settlers began to question the motherland’s economic policies, which seemed unfair to the colonies. Maine, by then a district of Massachusetts, had been largely settled from the coast inward. Its economy was based on its ports and the sea; thus hostility was intense to British policies that adversely affected coastal trade. When the colonists in Massachusetts revolted, they had much support in Maine.
Although statehood for Maine had been discussed earlier, it didn’t gather momentum until after the War of 1812. Just as people in Massachusetts had protested British economic policies, people in Maine began to protest Massachusetts’s economic policies. Maine tax dollars were being allocated disproportionately for the benefit of Massachusetts proper. The only way for the residents of Maine to take care of themselves was to govern themselves. In 1819 Maine voters in referendum approved separation from Massachusetts, and on March 3, 1820, Maine became a state. But it almost didn’t happen.
The 1819 referendum provided that Maine would become a state if Congress approved within nine months, or by March 4, 1820. That was thought to be a mere formality that would be accomplished well within the required time. But in Congress Maine’s application for statehood was considered along with Missouri’s, and it became entangled in legislative efforts to end slavery there. For the first time decisions on statehood applications were linked to the question of slavery. From then until the Civil War, that became the standard practice. Finally, on the day before Maine’s deadline, the Missouri Compromise was reached and the two states were admitted, Missouri as a slavery state, Maine as a nonslavery state. Although no one could foresee it at the time, that later became a transforming issue in Maine, shaping the state’s politics for a century.
There were no slaves in Maine and few free blacks, but the linking of Maine’s statehood with Missouri’s, and therefore with the issue of slavery, appears to have generated interest in the subject. Over the first thirty years of statehood, support grew gradually in Maine for abolition. It rose sharply after the publication in 1851 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe at her home in Brunswick, Maine. By the time the Civil War began, Maine was a fervent antislavery state.
The issue split the Democratic Party and led to the swift rise and long dominance of the Republican Party. Democrats had dominated the state’s politics from statehood to the Civil War, but in the ninety-four years from 1860 to 1954 no Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate, only one was popularly elected governor (Louis Brann in 1936), and Democrats controlled both houses of the state legislature only once (in 1912–13). Maine became known as a rock-ribbed Republican state. At the general election in September during the post–Civil War period, Maine citizens always voted Republican for president, as did most of the rest of the country. This led to the saying “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” In 1936, after Franklin Roosevelt carried forty-six of the forty-eight states in his landslide victory, his close friend Jim Farley laughingly changed the saying to “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”
Edmund Muskie broke the Republican dominance in Maine. He was elected governor in 1954, reelected in 1956, and then was elected to the U.S. Senate and reelected four times. Today the state is about evenly balanced and politically competitive: about a third of the voters are registered as Democrats, about a third are Republican, and a third are unenrolled Independents. Currently one U.S. senator is a Republican, and the other is an Independent, and one member of the House of Representatives is a Democrat, the other a Republican.
In Maine, as in much of the country, the years between the Civil War and World War I can be summed up in two words: industrialization and immigration. The two were closely related. The textile industry—cotton and woolen mills—thrived wherever there was an ample supply of water and of labor; Maine had the water, and after the mills came, so did the labor. Dozens of textile mills sprang up on Maine’s rivers, and thousands of immigrants came to work in them: Irish, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian. But by far the largest number came from Canada, almost all of them French Canadians from Quebec. They settled in the industrial cities where the textile mills were: Lewiston, Biddeford, Sanford, Waterville. Some of them went to smaller, newer cities, like Millinocket, Rumford, and Westbrook, where the paper mills were also going up.
Once it became feasible to industrially mass-produce paper out of wood, it was inevitable that Maine would become a center of papermaking. With over 90 percent of its land area forested, with large, fast-flowing rivers to generate electricity to power the mills and move the logs, and with a poor, rural economy desperately in need of steady jobs, Maine must have looked like heaven on earth to the makers of paper.