THE TRANSITION ZONE: NORTHERN HARDWOOD FOREST
THE ROCKY SHORELINE AND THE MARINE ENVIRONMENT
PREHISTORIC MAINERS: THE PALEOINDIANS
THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH SQUARE OFF
TRADE TROUBLES AND THE WAR OF 1812
Maine is an outdoor classroom for Geology 101, a living lesson in what the glaciers did and how they did it. Geologically, Maine is something of a youngster; the oldest rocks, found in the Chain of Ponds area in the western part of the state, are only 1.6 billion years old—more than two billion years younger than the world’s oldest rocks.
But most significant is the great ice sheet that began to spread over Maine about 25,000 years ago, during the late Wisconsin Ice Age. As it moved southward from Canada, this continental glacier scraped, gouged, pulverized, and depressed the bedrock in its path. On it continued, charging up the north faces of mountains, clipping off their tops and moving southward, leaving behind jagged cliffs on the mountains’ southern faces and odd deposits of stone and clay. By about 21,000 years ago, glacial ice extended well over the Gulf of Maine, perhaps as far as the Georges Bank fishing grounds.
But all that began to change with meltdown, beginning about 18,000 years ago. As the glacier melted and receded, ocean water moved in, covering much of the coastal plain and working its way inland up the rivers. By 11,000 years ago, glaciation had pulled back from all but a few minor corners at the top of Maine, revealing the south coast’s beaches and the unusual geologic traits—eskers and erratics, kettleholes and moraines, even a fjord—that make the rest of the state such a fascinating natural laboratory.
Three distinct looks make up the contemporary Maine coastal landscape. (Inland are even more distinct biomes: serious woodlands and mountains as well as lakes and ponds and rolling fields.)
Along the Southern Coast, from Kittery to Portland, are fine-sand beaches, marshlands, and only the occasional rocky headland. The Mid-Coast and Penobscot Bay, from Portland to the Penobscot River, feature one finger of rocky land after another, all jutting into the Gulf of Maine and all incredibly scenic. Acadia and the Down East Coast, from the Penobscot River to Eastport and including fantastic Acadia National Park, have many similarities to the Mid-Coast (gorgeous rocky peninsulas, offshore islands, granite everywhere), but, except on Mount Desert Island, takes on a different look and feel by virtue of its slower pace, higher tides, and quieter villages.
Turn inland toward the Maine Highlands, and the landscape changes again. The Down East mountains, roughly straddling “the Airline” (Route 9 from Bangor to Calais), are marked by open blueberry fields, serious woodlands, and mountains that seem to appear out of nowhere. The central upland—essentially a huge S-shape extending from the Portland area up to the Kennebec River Valley, through Augusta, Waterville, and Skowhegan, then on up into Aroostook County at the top of the state—is characterized by lakes, ponds, rolling fields, and occasional woodlands interspersed with river valleys. Aroostook County is the state’s agricultural jackpot. The northern region—essentially the valleys of the north-flowing St. John and Allagash Rivers—was the last part of Maine to lose the glacier and is today dense forest crisscrossed with logging roads (you can count the settlements on two hands). The mountain upland, taking in all the state’s major elevations and extending from inland York County to Baxter State Park and west through the Western Lakes and Mountains is rugged, beautiful, and the premier region for skiing, hiking, camping, and white-water rafting. Here, too, are seemingly endless lakes for swimming, boating, and birding.
Bounded by the Gulf of Maine (Atlantic Ocean), the St. Croix River, New Brunswick Province, the St. John River, Québec Province, and the state of New Hampshire (and the only state in the Union bordered by only one other state), Maine is the largest of the six New England states, roughly equivalent in size to the five others combined—offering plenty of space to hike, bike, camp, sail, swim, or just hang out. The state—and the coastline—extends from 43° 05’ to 47° 28’ north latitude, and 66° 56’ to 80° 50’ west longitude. (Technically, Maine dips even farther southeast to take in five islands in the offshore Isles of Shoals archipelago.) It’s all stitched together by 22,574 miles of highways and 3,561 bridges.
Maine’s more than 5,000 rivers and streams provide nearly half of the watershed for the Gulf of Maine. The major rivers are the Penobscot (350 miles), the St. John (211 miles), the Androscoggin (175 miles), the Kennebec (150 miles), the Saco (104 miles), and the St. Croix (75 miles). The St. John and its tributaries flow northeast; all the others flow more or less south or southeast.
The Pine Tree State has more than 17 million acres of forest covering 89 percent of the state, 5,900 lakes and ponds, 4,617 saltwater islands, 10 mountains over 4,000 feet, and nearly 100 mountains higher than 3,000 feet. The highest peak in the state is Katahdin, at 5,267 feet. (Katahdin is a Penobscot Indian word meaning “greatest mountain,” making “Mount Katahdin” redundant.)
Maine’s largest lake is Moosehead, in Greenville, 32 miles long and 20 miles across at its widest point, with a maximum depth of 246 feet.
Whoever invented the state’s oldest cliché—“If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute”—must have spent at least several minutes in Maine. The good news, though, is that if the weather is lousy, it’s bound to change before too long. And when it does, it’s intoxicating. Brilliant, cloud-free Maine weather has lured many a visitor to put down roots, buy a retirement home, or at least invest in a summer retreat.
The serendipity of it all necessitates two caveats: Always pack warmer clothing than you think you’ll need. And never arrive without a sweater or jacket—even at the height of summer.
The National Weather Service assigns Maine’s coastline a climatological category distinct from climatic types found in the interior.
The coastal category, which includes Portland, runs from Kittery northeast to Eastport and about 20 miles inland. Here, the ocean moderates the climate, making coastal winters warmer and summers cooler than in the interior (relatively speaking, of course). From early June through August, the Portland area—fairly typical of coastal weather—may have three to eight days of temperatures over 90°F, 25-40 days over 80°F, 14-24 days of fog, and 5-10 inches of rain. Normal annual precipitation for the Portland area is 44 inches of rain and 71 inches of snow (the snow total is misleading, though, since intermittent thaws clear away much of the base).
The southern interior division, covering the bottom third of the state, sees the warmest weather in summer, the most clear days each year, and an average snowfall of 60-90 inches. The northern interior part of the state, with the highest mountains, covers the upper two-thirds of Maine and boasts a mixed bag of snowy winters, warm summers, and the state’s lowest rainfall.
a foggy day on the Maine coast
Maine has four distinct seasons: summer, fall, winter, and mud. Lovers of spring need to look elsewhere in March, the lowest month on the popularity scale with its mud-caked vehicles, soggy everything, irritable temperaments, tank-trap roads, and often the worst snowstorm of the year.
Summer can be idyllic—with moderate temperatures, clear air, and wispy breezes—but it can also close in with fog, rain, and chills. Prevailing winds are from the southwest. Officially, summer runs June 20 or 21-September 20 or 21, but June, July, and August is more like it, with temperatures in the Portland area averaging 70°F during the day and in the 50s at night. The normal growing season is 148 days.
A poll of Mainers might well show autumn as the favorite season—days are still warmish, nights are cool, winds are optimum for sailors, and the foliage is brilliant. Fall colors usually begin appearing far to the north about mid-September, reaching their peak in that region by the end of the month. The last of the color begins in late September in the southernmost part of the state and fades by mid-October. Early autumn, however, is also the height of hurricane season, the only potential flaw this time of year.
Winter, officially December 20 or 21-March 20 or 21, means deep snow and cold inland and an unpredictable potpourri along the coastline. When the cold and snow hit the coast, it’s time for cross-country skiing, ice fishing, snowshoeing, ice skating, ice climbing, and winter trekking and camping.
Spring, officially March 20 or 21-June 20 or 21, is the frequent butt of jokes. It’s an ill-defined season that arrives much too late and departs all too quickly. Ice floes dot inland lakes and ponds until “ice-out” in early-mid-May; spring planting can’t occur until well into May; lilacs explode in late May and disappear by mid-June. And just when you finally can enjoy being outside, blackflies stretch their wings and satisfy their hunger pangs. Along the coast, onshore breezes often keep the pesky creatures to a minimum.
A northeaster is a counterclockwise, swirling storm that brings wild winds out of—you guessed it—the northeast. These storms can occur any time of year, whenever the conditions brew them up. Depending on the season, the winds are accompanied by rain, sleet, snow, or all of them together.
Hurricane season officially runs June-November but is most prevalent late August-September. Some years, the Maine coast remains out of harm’s way; other years, head-on hurricanes and even glancing blows have eroded beaches, flooded roads, splintered boats, downed trees, knocked out power, and inflicted major residential and commercial damage.
Sea smoke and fog, two atmospheric phenomena resulting from opposing conditions, are only distantly related, but both can radically affect visibility and therefore be hazardous. In winter, when the ocean is at least 40°F warmer than the air, billowy sea smoke rises from the water, creating great photo ops for camera buffs but especially dangerous conditions for mariners.
In any season, when the ocean (or lake or land) is colder than the air, fog sets in, creating perilous conditions for drivers, mariners, and pilots. Romantics, however, see it otherwise, reveling in the womblike ambience and the muffled moans of foghorns. April-October, Portland averages about 31 days with heavy fog, when visibility may be a quarter mile or less.
The National Weather Service’s official daytime signal system for wind velocity consists of a series of flags representing specific wind speeds and sea conditions. Beachgoers and anyone planning to venture out in a kayak, canoe, sailboat, or powerboat should heed these signals. The flags are posted on all public beaches, and warnings are announced on TV and radio weather broadcasts, as well as on cable TV’s Weather Channel and the NOAA broadcast network.
There it was, the State of Maine, which we
had seen on the map, but not much like
that. Immeasurable forest for the sun to
shine on.... No clearing, no house.... The
forest looked like a firm grass sward, and
the effect of these lakes in its midst has
been well compared.... to that of a mirror
broken into a thousand fragments,
and widely scattered over the grass, re
flecting the full blaze of the sun.
Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods
Looking out over Maine from Katahdin today, as Thoreau did in 1857, you get a view that is still a mass of green stretching to the sea, broken by blue lakes and rivers. Although the forest has been cut several times since Thoreau saw it, Maine is proportionately still the most forested state in the nation.
It also is clearly one of the best watered. Receiving an average of more than 40 inches of precipitation a year, Maine is abundantly endowed with swamps, bogs, ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers. These in turn drain from a coast deeply indented by coves, estuaries, and bays.
In this state of trees and water, nature dominates more than most—Maine is the least densely populated state east of the Mississippi River. Here, where boreal and temperate ecosystems meet and mix, lives a rich diversity of plants and animals.
Three continental storm tracks converge on Maine, and the state’s western mountains bear the brunt of the weather they bring. Stretching from Katahdin in the north along most of Maine’s border with Québec and New Hampshire, these mountains have a far colder climate than their temperate latitude might suggest.
Timberline here occurs at only about 4,000 feet, and where the mountaintops reach above that, the environment is truly arctic—an alpine-tundra habitat where only the hardiest species can live. Beautiful pale-green “map” lichens cover many of the exposed rocks like shapes cut from an atlas, and sedges and rushes take root in the patches of thin topsoil. As many as 30 alpine plant species, typically found hundreds of miles to the north, grow in crevices or hollows in the lee of the blasting winds. Small and low-growing to conserve energy in this harsh climate, such plants as bearberry willow, Lapland rosebay, alpine azalea, Diapensia, mountain cranberry, and black crowberry reward the observant hiker with white, yellow, pink, and magenta flowers in late June-July.
Areas above the tree line are generally inhospitable to most animals other than secretive voles, mice, and lemmings. Even so, summer or winter, a hiker is likely to be aware of at least one other species: the northern raven. More than any of the 300 or so other bird species that regularly occur in Maine, the raven is the bird of the state’s wild places, its mountain ridges, rocky coasts, and remote forests. Solid black like a crow but larger and stockier and with a wedge-shaped tail and broad wings, the northern raven is a magnificent flyer—soaring, hovering, diving, and often turning loops and rolls as though playing in the wind. Known to be among the most intelligent of all animals, ravens are quite social, actively communicating with one another in throaty croaks as they range over the landscape in search of carrion and other available plant and animal foods.
At the tree line and below, where conditions are moderate enough to allow black spruce and balsam fir to take hold, fauna becomes far more diverse. Among the wind- and ice-stunted trees, called krummholz (crooked wood), northern juncos and white-throated sparrows forage. The latter’s plaintive whistle (often mnemonically rendered as “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody”) is one of the most evocative sounds of the Maine woods.
Mention the Maine woods and the image that is likely to come to mind is the boreal forests of spruce and fir. In 1857, Thoreau captured the character of these woods when he wrote,
It is all mossy and moosey. In some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. The trees are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from night’s raven wing. Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semi-human cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.
Well adapted to a short growing season, low temperatures, and rocky, nutrient-poor soils, spruce and fir do dominate the woods on mountainsides, in low-lying areas beside watercourses, and along the coast. By not having to produce new foliage every year, these evergreens conserve scarce nutrients and also retain their needles, which capture sunlight for photosynthesis during all but the coldest months. The needles also wick moisture from the low clouds and fog that frequently bathe their preferred habitat, bringing annual precipitation to more than 80 inches a year in some areas.
In the lush boreal forest environment grows a diverse ground cover of herbaceous plants, including bearberry, bunchberry, clintonia, starflower, and wood sorrel. In older spruce-fir stands, mosses and lichens often carpet much of the forest floor in a soft tapestry of greens and gray-blues. Maine is extraordinarily rich in lichens, with more than 700 species identified so far—20 percent of the total found in all of North America. Usnea is a familiar one; its common name, old man’s beard, comes from its wispy strands that drip from the branches of spruce trees. The northern parula, a small blue, green, and yellow bird of the wood warbler family, weaves its ball-shaped pendulum nest from usnea.
The spruce-fir forest is prime habitat for many other species that are among the most sought-after by birders: black-backed and three-toed woodpeckers, the audaciously bold gray jay (or camp robber), boreal chickadees, yellow-throated flycatchers, white-winged crossbills, Swainson’s thrushes, and a half dozen other gem-like wood warblers.
Among the more unusual birds of this forest type is the spruce grouse. Sometimes hard to spot because it does not flush, a spruce grouse is so tame that a careful person can actually touch one. Not surprisingly, the spruce grouse earned the nickname “fool hen” early in the 19th century, and no doubt it would have become extinct long ago but for its menu preference of spruce and fir needles, which render its meat bitter and inedible (you can get an idea by tasting a few needles yourself).
Few of Maine’s 56 mammal species are restricted to the boreal forest, but several are very characteristic of it. Most obvious from its trilling, far-carrying chatter is the red squirrel. Piles of cone remnants on the forest floor mark a red squirrel’s recent banquet. The red squirrel itself is the favored prey of another coniferous forest inhabitant, the pine marten. An arboreal member of the mustelid family—which in Maine also includes skunks, weasels, fishers, and otters—the pine marten is a sleek, low-slung predator with blond to brown fur, an orange throat patch, and a long bushy tail. Its beautiful pelt nearly led to the animal’s obliteration from Maine through overtrapping, but with protection, the marten population has rebounded.
Nearly half a century of protection also allowed the population recovery of Maine’s most prominent mammal, the moose. Standing 6-7 feet tall at the shoulder and weighing as much as 1,200 pounds, the moose is the largest member of the Cervidae or deer family. A bull’s massive antlers, which it sheds and regrows each year, may span five or more feet and weigh 75 pounds. The animal’s long legs and bulbous nose give it an ungainly appearance, but the moose is ideally adapted to a life spent wading through deep snow, dense thickets, and swamps.
Usually the best place to observe a moose is at the edge of a body of water on a summer afternoon or evening. Wading out into the water, the animal may submerge its entire head to browse on the succulent aquatic plants below the surface. The water also offers a respite from the swarms of biting insects that plague moose (and people who venture into these woods without bug repellent). Except for a limited hunting season, moose have little to fear from humans and often will allow close approach. Be careful, however, and give them the respect their imposing size suggests; cows can be very protective of their calves, and bulls can be unpredictable, particularly during the fall rutting (mating) season.
Another word of caution about moose: When driving, especially in spring and early summer, be alert for moose wandering out of the woods and onto roadways to escape the flies. Moose are dark brown, their eyes do not reflect headlights in the way that most other animals’ eyes do, and they do not get out of the way of cars or anything else. Colliding with a half-ton animal can be a tragedy for all involved. Pay particular attention while driving in Oxford, Franklin, Somerset (especially Rte. 201), Piscataquis, and Aroostook Counties, but with an estimated 76,000 moose statewide, they can and do turn up anywhere and everywhere—even in downtown Portland and on offshore islands.
Protection from unlimited hunting was not the only reason for the dramatic increase in Maine’s moose population; the invention of the chain saw and the skidder have played parts too. In a few days, one or two workers can now cut and yard a tract of forest that a whole crew with saws and horses formerly took weeks to harvest. With the increase in logging, particularly the clear-cutting of spruce and fir, whose long fibers are favored for papermaking, vast areas have been opened up for regeneration by fast-growing, sun-loving hardwoods. The leaves of these young white birch, poplar, pin cherry, and striped maple are a veritable moose salad bar.
Although hardwoods have replaced spruce and fir in many areas, mixed woods of sugar maple, American beech, yellow birch, red oak, red spruce, eastern hemlock, and white pine have always been a major part of Maine’s natural and social histories. This northern hardwood forest, as it is termed by ecologists, is a transitional zone between northern and southern ecosystems and is rich in species diversity.
Dominated by deciduous trees, this forest community is highly seasonal. Spring snowmelt brings a pulse of life to the newly exposed forest floor as herbaceous plants race to develop and flower before the trees overhead leaf out and limit the available sunlight. (Blink and you can practically miss a Maine spring.) Trout lily, goldthread, trillium, violets, gaywing, and pink lady’s slipper are among the many woodland wildflowers whose blooms make a walk in the forest so rewarding at this time of year. Deciduous trees, shrubs, and a dozen species of ferns also must make the most of their short four-month growing season. In the Maine woods, the buds of mid-May unfurl into a full canopy of leaves by the first week of June.
Late spring and early summer in the northern hardwood forest is also a time of intense animal activity. Runoff from the melting snowpack has filled countless low-lying depressions throughout the woods. These ephemeral swamps and vernal pools are a haven for an enormous variety of aquatic invertebrates, insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Choruses of spring peepers, Maine’s smallest but seemingly loudest frog, alert everyone with their high-pitched calls that the ice is going out and breeding season is at hand. Measuring only about an inch in length, these tiny frogs with X-shaped patterns on their backs can be surprisingly difficult to see without some determined effort. Look on the branches of shrubs overhanging the water; males often use them as perches from which to call prospective mates. But then why stop with peepers? There are eight other frog and toad species in Maine to search for too.
Spring is also the best time to look for salamanders. Driving a country road on a rainy night in mid-April provides an opportunity to witness one of nature’s great mass migrations as salamanders and frogs of several species emerge from their wintering sites and make their way across roads to breeding pools and streams. Once breeding is completed, most salamanders return to the terrestrial environment, where they burrow into crevices or the moist litter of the forest floor. The movement of amphibians from wetlands to uplands has an important ecological function, providing a mechanism for the return of nutrients that runoff washes into low-lying areas. This may seem hard to believe until one considers the numbers of individuals involved in this movement. To illustrate, the total biomass of Maine’s redback salamander population—just one of the eight salamander species found here—is heavier than the combined weight of all the state’s moose.
The many bird species characteristic of the northern hardwood forest are also most in evidence during the late spring and early summer, when the males are engaged in holding breeding territory and attracting mates. For most passerines—perching birds—this means singing. Especially during the early-morning and evening hours, the woods are alive with choruses of song from such birds as the purple finch, white-throated sparrow, solitary vireo, black-throated blue warbler, Canada warbler, mourning warbler, northern waterthrush, and the most beautiful singer of them all, the hermit thrush.
Providing abundant browse as well as tubers, berries, and nuts, the northern hardwood forest supports many of Maine’s mammal species. The red-backed vole, snowshoe hare, porcupine, and white-tailed deer are relatively abundant and in turn are prey for foxes, bobcats, fishers, and eastern coyotes. Now well established since its expansion into Maine in the 1950s and 1960s, the eastern coyote has filled the niche at the top of the food chain once held by wolves and mountain lions before their extermination in the state in the late 19th century. Black bears, of which Maine has an estimated 25,000, are technically classified as carnivores and will take a moose calf or deer on occasion, but most of their diet consists of vegetation, insects, and fish. In the fall, bears feast on beechnuts and acorns, putting on extra fat for the coming winter, which they spend sleeping (not hibernating, as is often presumed) in a sheltered spot dug out beneath a rock or log.
Autumn is a time of spectacular beauty in Maine’s northern hardwood forest. With the shortening days and cooler temperatures of September, the dominant green chlorophyll molecules in deciduous leaves start breaking down. As they do, the yellow, orange, and red pigments (which are always present in the leaves and serve to capture light in parts of the spectrum not captured by the chlorophyll) are revealed. Sugar maples put on the most dazzling display, but beeches, birches, red maples, and poplars add their colors to make up an autumn landscape famous the world over.
Ecologically, one of the most significant mammals in the Maine woods is the beaver. After being trapped almost to extinction in the 1800s, this large swimming rodent has recolonized streams, rivers, and ponds throughout the state. Well known for its ability as a dam builder, the beaver can change low-lying woodland into a complex aquatic ecosystem. The impounded water behind the dam often kills the trees it inundates, but these provide ideal nest cavities for mergansers, wood ducks, owls, woodpeckers, and swallows. The still water is also a nursery for a rich diversity of invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and Maine’s seven aquatic turtle species, most common of which is the beautiful but very shy eastern painted turtle.
Small woodland pools and streams are, of course, only a part of Maine’s aquatic environment. The state’s nearly 6,000 lakes and ponds provide open-water and deep-water habitats for many additional species. A favorite among them is the common loon, symbol of north country lakes across the continent. Loons impart a sense of wildness and mystery with their haunting calls and yodels resonating off the surrounding pines on still summer nights. Adding to their popular appeal are their striking black-and-white plumage, accented with red eyes, and their ability to vanish below the surface and then reappear in another part of the lake moments later. The annual census of Maine’s common loons since the 1970s indicates a relatively stable population of about 4,000 adults and 250 new chicks each summer.
Below the surface of Maine’s lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams, 69 freshwater fish species live in the state, of which 17 were introduced. Among these exotic transplants are some of the most sought-after game fish, including smallmouth and largemouth bass, rainbow trout, and northern pike. These introductions may have benefited anglers, but they have displaced native species in many watersheds.
Several of Maine’s native fish have interesting histories in that they became landlocked during the retreat of the glacier. At that time, Maine was climatically much like northern Canada is today, and arctic char ran up its rivers to spawn at the edges of the ice. As the ice continued to recede, some of these fish became trapped but nevertheless managed to survive and establish themselves in their new landlocked environments. Two remnant subspecies now exist: the blue-back char, which lives in the cold, deep water of 10 northern Maine lakes, and the Sunapee char, now found only in three lakes in Maine and two in Idaho. A similar history belongs to the landlocked salmon, a form of Atlantic salmon that many regard as the state’s premier game fish and now widely stocked throughout the state and around the country.
Atlantic salmon still run up some Maine rivers every year to spawn, but dams and heavy commercial fishing at sea have depleted their numbers and distribution to a fraction of what they once were. Unlike salmon species on the Pacific coast, adult Atlantic salmon survive the fall spawning period and make their way back out to sea again. The young, or parr, hatch the following spring and live in streams and rivers for the next 2-3 years before migrating to the waters off Greenland. Active efforts are now under way to restore this species, including capturing and trucking the fish around dams. Salmon is just one of the species whose life cycle starts in freshwater and requires migrations to and from the sea. Called anadromous fish, others include striped bass, sturgeon, shad, alewives, smelt, and eels. All were once far more numerous in Maine, but fortunately pollution control and management efforts in the past three decades have helped their populations rebound slightly from their historic low numbers.
Maine’s estuaries, where freshwater and saltwater meet, are ecosystems of outstanding biological importance. South of Cape Elizabeth, where the Maine coast is low and sandy, estuaries harbor large salt marshes of spartina grasses that can tolerate the frequent variations in salinity as runoff and tides fluctuate. Producing an estimated four times more plant material than an equivalent area of wheat, these spartina marshes provide abundant nutrients and shelter for a host of marine organisms that ultimately account for as much as 60 percent of the value of the state’s commercial fisheries.
The tidal range along the Maine coast varies 9-26 vertical feet, southwest to northeast. Where the tide inundates sheltered estuaries for more than a few hours at a time, spartina grasses cannot take hold, and mudflats dominate. Although it may look like a barren wasteland at low tide, a mudflat is also a highly productive environment and home to abundant marine life. Several species of tiny primitive worms called nematodes can inhabit the mud in densities of 2,000 or more per square inch. Larger worm species are also very common. One, the bloodworm, grows up to a foot in length and is harvested in quantity for use as sportfishing bait.
More highly savored among the mudflat residents is the soft-shelled clam, famous for its outstanding flavor and an essential ingredient of an authentic Maine lobster bake. But because clams are suspension feeders, filtering phytoplankton through their long siphon, or “neck,” they can accumulate pollutants that cause illness, including hepatitis. Many Maine mudflats are closed to clam harvesting because of leaking septic systems, so it’s best to check with the state’s Department of Marine Resources or the local municipal office before digging a mess of clams yourself.
For birds and birders, salt marshes and mudflats are an unparalleled attraction. Long-legged wading birds such as the glossy ibis, snowy egret, little blue heron, great blue heron, tricolored heron, green heron, and black-crowned night heron frequent the marshes in great numbers throughout the summer months, hunting the shallow waters for mummichogs and other small salt-marsh fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates. Mid-May-early June and then again mid-July-mid-September, migrating shorebirds pass through Maine to and from their subarctic breeding grounds. On a good day, a discerning birder can find 17 or more species of shorebirds probing the mudflats and marshes with pointed bills in search of their preferred foods. In turn, the large flocks of shorebirds don’t escape the notice of their own predators: merlins and peregrine falcons dash in to catch a meal.
On the more exposed rocky shores—the dominant shoreline from Cape Elizabeth all the way Down East to Lubec—where currents and waves keep mud and sand from accumulating, the plant and animal communities are entirely different from those in the inland aquatic areas. The most important requirement for life in this impenetrable rockbound environment is probably the ability to hang on tight. Barnacles, the calcium-armored crustaceans that attach themselves to the rocks immediately below the high-tide line, have developed a fascinating battery of adaptations to survive not only pounding waves but also prolonged exposure to air, solar heat, and extreme winter cold. Glued in place, however, they cannot escape being eaten by dog whelks, the predatory snails that also inhabit this intertidal zone. Whelks are larger and more elongate than the more numerous and ubiquitous periwinkle, accidentally transplanted from Europe in the mid-19th century.
Also hanging onto these rocks but at a lower level are the brown algae seaweeds. Like a marine forest, the four species of rockweed provide shelter for a wide variety of life beneath their fronds. A world of discovery awaits those who make the effort to go out onto the rocks at low tide and look under the clumps of seaweed and into the tidal pools they shelter. Venture into these chilly waters with a mask, fins, and a wetsuit and still another world opens for natural-history exploration. Beds of blue mussels, sea urchins, sea stars, and sea cucumbers dot the bottom close to shore. In crevices between and beneath the rocks lurk rock crabs and lobsters. Now a symbol of the Maine coast and the delicious seafood it provides, the lobster was once considered “poor man’s food”—so plentiful that it was spread on fields as fertilizer. Although lobsters are far less common than they once were, they are one of Maine’s most closely monitored species, and their population continues to support a large and thriving commercial fishing industry.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for most of Maine’s other commercially harvested marine fish. When Europeans first came to these shores four centuries ago, cod, haddock, halibut, hake, flounder, herring, and tuna were abundant, but no longer: Overharvested, their seabed habitat torn up by relentless dragging, these groundfish have all but disappeared. It will be decades before these species can recover, and then only if effective regulations can be put in place soon.
The familiar doglike face of the harbor seal, often seen peering alertly from the surface just offshore, provides a reminder that wildlife populations are resilient if given a chance. A century ago, there was a bounty on harbor seals because it was thought they ate too many lobsters and fish. Needless to say, neither fish nor lobsters increased when the seals all but disappeared. With the bounty’s repeal and the advent of legal protection, Maine’s harbor seal population has bounced back. Scores of them can regularly be seen basking on offshore ledges, drying their tan, brown, black, silver, or reddish coats in the sun. Though it’s tempting to approach for a closer look, avoid bringing a boat too near these haul-out ledges, as it causes the seals to flush into the water and imposes an unnecessary stress on the pups, which already face a first-year mortality rate of 30 percent.
Positive changes in our relationships with wildlife are even more apparent with the return of birds to the Maine coast. Watching the numerous herring gulls and great black-backed gulls soaring on a fresh ocean breeze today, it’s hard to imagine that a century ago, egg collecting had so reduced their numbers that they were a rare sight. In 1903, there were just three pairs of common eiders left in Maine; today, 25,000 pairs nest along the coast. With creative help from dedicated researchers using sound recordings, decoys, and prepared burrows, Atlantic puffins are recolonizing historic offshore nesting islands. Ospreys and bald eagles, almost free of the lingering vestiges of damage from DDT and other pesticides, now range the length of the coast and up Maine’s major rivers.
Many Maine plants and animals remain subjects of concern. Too little is known about most of the lesser plants and animals to determine what their status is, but as natural habitats continue to decline in size or become degraded, it is likely that many of these species will disappear from the state. It is impossible to say exactly what will be lost when any of these species cease to exist here, but to quote conservationist Aldo Leopold, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
It is clear, however, that life in Maine has been enriched by the recovery of populations of pine marten, moose, harbor seals, eiders, and others. The natural persistence and tenacity of wildlife suggests that such species as the Atlantic salmon, wolf, and mountain lion will someday return to Maine—provided we give them the chance and the space to survive.
This Flora and Fauna section was written by William P. Hancock, former director of the Environmental Centers Department at the Maine Audubon Society and former editor of Habitat Magazine.
As the great continental glacier receded northwestward out of Maine about 11,000 years ago, some prehistoric grapevine must have alerted small bands of hunter-gatherers—fur-clad Paleoindians—to the scrub sprouting in the tundra, burgeoning mammal populations, and the ocean’s bountiful food supply. Because come they did—at first seasonally and then year-round. Anyone who thinks tourism is a recent Maine phenomenon needs only to explore the shoreline in Damariscotta, Boothbay Harbor, and Bar Harbor, where heaps of cast-off oyster shells and clamshells document the migration of early Native Americans from woodlands to waterfront. “The shore” has been a summertime magnet for millennia.
Archaeological evidence from the Archaic period in Maine—roughly 8000-1000 BC—is fairly scant, but paleontologists have unearthed stone tools and weapons and small campsites attesting to a nomadic lifestyle supported by fishing and hunting (with fishing becoming more extensive as time went on). Toward the end of the tradition, during the late Archaic period, emerged a rather anomalous Indian culture known officially as the Moorehead phase but informally called the Red Paint People; the name is because of their curious trait of using a distinctive red ocher (pulverized hematite) in burials. Dark red puddles and stone artifacts have led excavators to burial pits as far north as the St. John River. Just as mysteriously as they had arrived, the Red Paint People disappeared abruptly and inexplicably around 1800 BC.
Following them almost immediately—and almost as suddenly—hunter-gatherers of the Susquehanna Tradition arrived from well to the south, moved across Maine’s interior as far as the St. John River, and remained until about 1600 BC when they, too, enigmatically vanished. Excavations have turned up relatively sophisticated stone tools and evidence that they cremated their dead. It was nearly 1,000 years before a major new cultural phase appeared.
The next great leap forward was marked by the advent of pottery making, introduced about 700 BC. The Ceramic period stretched to the 16th century, and cone-shaped pots (initially stamped, later incised with coiled-rope motifs) survived until the introduction of metals from Europe. Houses of sorts—seasonal wigwam-style dwellings for fishermen and their families—appeared along the coast and on offshore islands.
The identity of the first Europeans to set foot in Maine is a matter of debate. Historians dispute the romantically popular notion that Norse explorers checked out this part of the New World as early as AD 1000. Even an 11th-century Norse coin found in 1961 in Brooklin (on the Blue Hill Peninsula) probably was carried there from farther north.
Not until the late 15th century, the onset of the great Age of Discovery, did credible reports of the New World (including what’s now Maine) filter back to Europe’s courts and universities. Thanks to innovations in naval architecture, shipbuilding, and navigation, astonishingly courageous fellows crossed the Atlantic in search of rumored treasure and new routes for reaching it.
John Cabot, sailing from England aboard the ship Mathew, may have been the first European to reach Maine, in 1498, but historians have never confirmed a landing site. No question remains, however, about the account of Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer commanding La Dauphine under the French flag, who reached the Maine coast in May 1524, probably at the tip of the Phippsburg Peninsula. Encountering less-than-friendly Indians, Verrazzano did a minimum of business and sailed onward. His brother’s map of the site labels it “The Land of Bad People.” Esteban Gomez and John Rut followed in Verrazzano’s wake, but nothing came of their exploits.
Nearly half a century passed before the Maine coast turned up again on European explorers’ itineraries. This time, interest was fueled by reports of a Brigadoon-like area called Norumbega (or Oranbega, as one map had it), a myth that arose, gathered steam, and took on a life of its own in the decades after Verrazzano’s voyage.
By the early 17th century, when Europeans began arriving in more than twos and threes and getting serious about colonization, Native American agriculture was already under way at the mouths of the Saco and Kennebec Rivers, the cod fishery was thriving on offshore islands, Indians far to the north were hot to trade furs for European goodies, and the birch-bark canoe was the transport of choice on inland waterways.
In mid-May 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, en route to a settlement off Cape Cod aboard the Concord, landed along Maine’s southern coast. The following year, merchant trader Martin Pring and his boats Speedwell and Discoverer explored farther Down East, backtracked to Cape Cod, and returned to England with tales that inflamed curiosity and enough sassafras to satisfy royal appetites. Pring produced a detailed survey of the Maine coast from Kittery to Bucksport, including offshore islands.
On May 18, 1605, George Waymouth, skippering the Archangel, reached Monhegan Island, 11 miles off the Maine coast, and moored for the night in Monhegan Harbor (still treacherous even today, exposed to the weather from the southwest and northeast and subject to meteorological beatings and heaving swells; yachting guides urge sailors not to expect to anchor, moor, or tie up there). The next day, Waymouth crossed the bay and scouted the mainland. He took five Indians hostage and sailed up the St. George River, near present-day Thomaston. Maritime historian Roger Duncan put it this way:
The Plimoth Pilgrims were little boys
in short pants when George Way-
mouth was exploring this coastline.
Waymouth returned to England and awarded his hostages to officials Sir John Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who, their curiosity piqued, quickly agreed to subsidize the colonization effort. In 1607, the Gift of God and the Mary and John sailed for the New World carrying two of Waymouth’s captives. After returning them to their native Pemaquid area, Captains George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert continued westward, establishing a colony (St. George or Fort George) at the tip of the Phippsburg Peninsula in mid-August 1607 and exploring the shoreline between Portland and Pemaquid. Frigid weather, untimely deaths (including Popham’s), and a storehouse fire doomed what’s called the Popham Colony, but not before the 100 or so settlers built the 30-ton pinnace Virginia, the New World’s first such vessel. When Gilbert received word of an inheritance waiting in England, he and the remaining colonists returned to the Old World.
In 1614, swashbuckling Captain John Smith, exploring from the Penobscot River westward to Cape Cod, reached Monhegan Island nine years after Waymouth’s visit. Smith’s meticulous map of the region was the first to use the “New England” appellation, and the 1616 publication of his Description of New-England became the catalyst for permanent settlements.
English dominance of exploration west of the Penobscot River in the early 17th century coincided roughly with French activity east of the river.
In 1604, French nobleman Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts, set out with cartographer Samuel de Champlain to map the coastline, first reaching Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy and then sailing up the St. Croix River. In midriver, just west of present-day Calais, a crew planted gardens and erected buildings on today’s St. Croix Island while de Monts and Champlain went off exploring. The two men reached the island Champlain named l’Isle des Monts Deserts (Mount Desert Island) and present-day Bangor before returning to face the winter with their ill-fated compatriots. Scurvy, lack of fuel and water, and a ferocious winter wiped out nearly half of the 79 men. In spring 1605, de Monts, Champlain, and other survivors headed southwest, exploring the coastline all the way to Cape Cod before heading northeast again and settling permanently at Nova Scotia’s Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal).
Eight years later, French Jesuit missionaries en route to the Kennebec River ended up on Mount Desert Island and, with a band of French laymen, set about establishing the St. Sauveur settlement. But leadership squabbles led to building delays, and English marauder Samuel Argall—assigned to reclaim English territory—arrived to find them easy prey. The colony was leveled, the settlers were set adrift in small boats, the priests were carted off to Virginia, and Argall moved on to destroy Port Royal.
By the 1620s, more than four dozen English fishing vessels were combing New England waters in search of cod, and year-round fishing depots had sprung up along the coast between Pemaquid and Portland. At the same time, English trappers and dealers began usurping the Indians’ fur trade—a valuable income source.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630 and England’s Council of New England, headed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, began making vast land grants throughout Maine, giving rise to permanent coastal settlements, many dependent on agriculture. Among the earliest communities were Kittery, York, Wells, Saco, Scarborough, Falmouth, and Pemaquid—places where they tilled the acidic soil, fished the waters, eked out a barely-above-subsistence living, coped with predators and endless winters, bartered goods and services, and set up local governments and courts.
By the late 17th century, as these communities expanded, so did their requirements and responsibilities. Roads and bridges were built, preachers and teachers were hired, and militias were organized to deal with internecine and Indian skirmishes.
Even though England yearned to control the entire Maine coastline, her turf, realistically, was primarily south and west of the Penobscot River. The French had expanded from their Canadian colony of Acadia, for the most part north and east of the Penobscot. Unlike the absentee bosses who controlled the English territory, French merchants actually showed up, forming good relationships with the Indians and cornering the market in fishing, lumbering, and fur trading. And French Jesuit priests converted many a Native American to Catholicism. Intermittently, overlapping Anglo-French land claims sparked locally messy conflicts.
In the mid-17th century, the strategic heart of French administration and activity in Maine was Fort Pentagöet, a sturdy stone outpost built in 1635 in what is now Castine. From here, the French controlled coastal trade between the St. George River and Mount Desert Island and well up the Penobscot River. In 1654, England captured and occupied the fort and much of French Acadia, but, thanks to the 1667 Treaty of Breda, title returned to the French in 1670, and Pentagöet briefly became Acadia’s capital.
A short but nasty Dutch foray against Acadia in 1674 resulted in Pentagöet’s destruction (“levell’d with ye ground,” by one account) and the raising of a third national flag over Castine.
Caught in the middle of 17th- and 18th-century Anglo-French disputes throughout Maine were the Wabanaki (People of the Dawn), the collective name for the state’s major Native American tribal groups, all of whom spoke Algonquian languages. Modern ethnographers label these groups the Micmacs, Maliseets, Passamaquoddies, and Penobscots.
In the early 17th century, exposure to European diseases took its toll, wiping out three-quarters of the Wabanaki in the years 1616-1619. Opportunistic English and French traders quickly moved into the breach, and the Indians struggled to survive and regroup.
But regroup they did. Less than three generations later, a series of six Indian wars began, lasting nearly a century and pitting the Wabanaki most often against the English but occasionally against other Wabanaki. The conflicts, largely provoked by Anglo-French tensions in Europe, were King Philip’s War (1675-1678), King William’s War (1688-1699), Queen Anne’s War (1703-1713), Dummer’s War (1721-1726), King George’s War (1744-1748), and the French and Indian War (1754-1760). Not until a get-together in 1762 at Fort Pownall (now Stockton Springs) did peace effectively return to the region—just in time for the heating up of the revolutionary movement.
Near the end of the last Indian War, just beyond Maine’s eastern border, a watershed event led to more than a century of cultural and political fallout. During the so-called Acadian Dispersal, in 1755, the English expelled from Nova Scotia 10,000 French-speaking Acadians who refused to pledge allegiance to the British Crown. Scattered as far south as Louisiana and west toward New Brunswick and Québec, the Acadians lost farms, homes, and possessions in this grand dérangement. Not until 1785 was land allocated for resettlement of Acadians along both sides of the Upper St. John River, where thousands of their descendants remain today. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline dramatically relates the sorry Acadian saga.
In the District of Maine, on the other hand, with relative peace following a century of intermittent warfare, settlement again exploded, particularly in the southernmost counties. The 1764 census tallied Maine’s population at just under 25,000; a decade later, the number had doubled. New towns emerged almost overnight, often heavily subsidized by wealthy investors from the parent Massachusetts Bay Colony. With almost 4,000 residents, the largest town in the district was Falmouth (later renamed Portland).
In 1770, 27 Maine towns became eligible, based on population, to send representatives to the Massachusetts General Court, the colony’s legislative body. But only six coastal towns could actually afford to send anyone, sowing seeds of resentment among settlers who were thus saddled with taxes without representation. Sporadic mob action accompanied unrest in southern Maine, but the flashpoint occurred in the Boston area.
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere set out on America’s most famous horseback ride—from Lexington to Concord, Massachusetts—to announce the onset of what became the American Revolution. Most of the Revolution’s action occurred south of Maine, but not all of it.
In June, the Down East outpost of Machias was the site of the war’s first naval engagement. The well-armed but unsuspecting British vessel HMS Margaretta sailed into the bay and was besieged by local residents angry about a Machias merchant’s sweetheart deal with the British. Before celebrating their David-and-Goliath victory, the rebels captured the Margaretta, killed her captain, and then captured two more British ships sent to the rescue.
In the fall of 1775, Col. Benedict Arnold—better known to history as a notorious turncoat—assembled 1,100 sturdy men for a flawed and futile march to Québec” to dislodge the English. From Newburyport, Massachusetts, they sailed to the mouth of the Kennebec River, near Bath, and then headed inland with the tide. In Pittston, six miles south of Augusta and close to the head of navigation, they transferred to a fleet of 220 locally made bateaux and laid over three nights at Fort Western in Augusta. Then they set off, poling, paddling, and portaging their way upriver. Skowhegan, Norridgewock, and Chain of Ponds were among the landmarks along the grueling route. The men endured cold, hunger, swamps, disease, dense underbrush, and the loss of nearly 600 of their comrades before reaching Québec in late 1775. In the Kennebec River Valley, Arnold Trail historical signposts today mark highlights (or, more aptly, lowlights) of the expedition.
Four years later, another futile attempt to dislodge the British, this time in the District of Maine, resulted in America’s worst naval defeat until World War II—a little-publicized debacle called the Penobscot Expedition. On August 14, 1779, as more than 40 American warships and transports carrying more than 2,000 Massachusetts men blockaded Castine to flush out a relatively small enclave of leftover Brits, a seven-vessel Royal Navy fleet appeared. Despite their own greater numbers, about 30 of the American ships turned tail up the Penobscot River. The captains torched their vessels, exploding the ammunition and leaving the survivors to walk in disgrace to Augusta or even Boston. Each side took close to 100 casualties, three commanders—including Paul Revere—were court-martialed, and Massachusetts was about $7 million poorer.
The American Revolution officially came to a close on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris between the United States and Great Britain. The U.S.-Canada border was set at the St. Croix River, but, in a massive oversight, boundary lines were left unresolved for thousands of square miles in the northern District of Maine.
In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson imposed the Embargo Act, banning trade with foreign entities—specifically, France and Britain. With thousands of miles of coastline and harbor villages dependent on trade for revenue and basic necessities, Maine reeled. By the time the act was repealed, under president James Madison in 1809, France and Britain were almost unscathed, but the bottom had dropped out of New England’s economy.
An active smuggling operation based in Eastport kept Mainers from utter despair, but the economy still had continued its downslide. In 1812, the fledgling United States declared war on Great Britain, again disrupting coastal trade. In the fall of 1814, the situation reached its nadir when the British invaded the Maine coast and occupied all the shoreline between the St. Croix and Penobscot Rivers. Later that same year, the Treaty of Ghent finally halted the squabble, forced the British to withdraw from Maine, and allowed the locals to get on with economic recovery.
In October 1819, Mainers held a constitutional convention at the First Parish Church on Congress Street in Portland. (Known affectionately as “Old Jerusalem,” the church was later replaced by the present-day structure.) The convention crafted a constitution modeled on that of Massachusetts, with two notable differences: Maine would have no official church (Massachusetts had the Puritans’ Congregational Church), and Maine would place no religious requirements or restrictions on its gubernatorial candidates. When votes came in from 241 Maine towns, only nine voted against ratification.
For Maine, March 15, 1820, was one of those good news/bad news days: After 35 years of separatist agitation, the District of Maine broke from Massachusetts (signing the separation allegedly, and disputedly, at the Jameson Tavern in Freeport) and became the 23rd state in the Union. However, the Missouri Compromise, enacted by Congress only 12 days earlier to balance admission of slave and free states, mandated that the slave state of Missouri be admitted on the same day. Maine had abolished slavery in 1788, and there was deep resentment over the linkage.
Portland became the new state’s capital (albeit only briefly; it switched to Augusta in 1832), and William King, one of statehood’s most outspoken advocates, became the first governor.
Without an official boundary established on Maine’s far northern frontier, turf battles were always simmering just under the surface. Timber was the sticking point—everyone wanted the vast wooded acreage. Finally, in early 1839, militia reinforcements descended on the disputed area, heating up what has come to be known as the Aroostook War, a border confrontation with no battles and no casualties (except a farmer who was shot by friendly militia). It’s a blip in the historical time line, but remnants of fortifications in Houlton, Fort Fairfield, and Fort Kent keep the story alive today. By March 1839, a truce was negotiated, and the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty established the border once and for all.
In the 1860s, with the state’s population slightly more than 600,000, more than 70,000 Mainers suited up and went off to fight in the Civil War—the greatest per-capita show of force of any northern state. About 18,000 of them died in the conflict. Thirty-one Mainers were Union Army generals, the best known being Joshua L. Chamberlain, a Bowdoin College professor, who commanded the Twentieth Maine regiment and later became president of the college and governor of Maine.
During the war, young battlefield artist Winslow Homer, who later settled in Prouts Neck, south of Portland, created wartime sketches regularly for such publications as Harper’s Weekly. In Washington, Maine senator Hannibal Hamlin was elected vice president under Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (he was removed from the ticket in favor of Andrew Johnson when Lincoln came up for reelection in 1864).
After the Civil War, Maine’s influence in Republican-dominated Washington far outweighed the size of its population. In the late 1880s, Mainers held the federal offices of acting vice president, Speaker of the House, secretary of state, Senate majority leader, Supreme Court justice, and several important committee chairmanships. Best known of the notables were James G. Blaine (journalist, presidential aspirant, and secretary of state) and Portland native Thomas Brackett Reed, presidential aspirant and Speaker of the House.
In Maine itself, traditional industries fell into decline after the Civil War, dealing the economy a body blow. Steel ships began replacing Maine’s wooden clippers, refrigeration techniques made the block-ice industry obsolete, concrete threatened the granite-quarrying trade, and the output from Southern textile mills began to supplant that from Maine’s mills.
Despite Maine’s economic difficulties, however, wealthy urbanites began turning their sights toward the state, accumulating land (including islands) and building enormous summer “cottages” for their families, servants, and hangers-on. Bar Harbor was a prime example of the elegant summer colonies that sprang up, but others include Grindstone Neck (Winter Harbor), Prouts Neck (Scarborough), and Dark Harbor (on Islesboro in Penobscot Bay). Vacationers who preferred fancy hotel-type digs reserved rooms for the summer at such sprawling complexes as Kineo House (on Moosehead Lake), Poland Spring House (west of Portland), or the Samoset Hotel (in Rockland). Built of wood and catering to long-term visitors, these and many others all eventually succumbed to altered vacation patterns and the ravages of fire.
As the 19th century spilled into the 20th, the state broadened its appeal beyond the well-to-do who had snared prime turf in the Victorian era. It launched an active promotion of Maine as “The Nation’s Playground,” successfully spurring an influx of visitors from all economic levels. By steamboat, train, and soon by car, people came to enjoy the ocean beaches, the woods, the mountains, the lakes, and the quaintness of it all. (Not that these features didn’t really exist, but the state’s aggressive public relations campaign at the turn of the 20th century stacks up against anything Madison Avenue puts out today.) The only major hiatus in the tourism explosion in the century’s first two decades was 1914-1918, when 35,062 Mainers joined many thousands of other Americans in going off to the European front to fight in World War I. Two years after the war ended, in 1920 (the centennial of its statehood), Maine women were the first in the nation to troop to the polls after ratification of the 19th Amendment granted universal suffrage.
Maine was slow to feel the repercussions of the Great Depression, but eventually they came, with bank failures all over the state. Federally subsidized programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), left lasting legacies in Maine.
Politically, the state has contributed notables on both sides of the aisle. In 1954, Maine elected as its governor Edmund S. Muskie, only the fifth Democrat in the job since 1854. In 1958, Muskie ran for and won a seat in the Senate, and in 1980 he became secretary of state under president Jimmy Carter. Muskie died in 1996.
Elected in 1980, Waterville’s George J. Mitchell made a respected name for himself as a Democratic senator and Senate majority leader before retiring in 1996, when Maine became only the second state in the union to have two women senators (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both Republicans). After his 1996 reelection, president Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell’s distinguished congressional colleague and three-term senator, Republican William Cohen of Bangor, as secretary of defense, a position he held through the rest of the Clinton administration. Mitchell spent considerable time during the Clinton years as the U.S. mediator for Northern Ireland’s “troubles” and subsequently headed an international fact-finding team in the Middle East.
Politics in Maine isn’t quite as variable and unpredictable as the weather, but pundits are almost as wary as weather forecasters about making predictions. Despite a long tradition of Republicanism dating from the late 19th century, Maine’s voters and politicians have a national reputation for being independent-minded—electing Democrats, Republicans, or independents more for their character than their political persuasions.
Four of the most notable recent examples are Margaret Chase Smith, Edmund S. Muskie, George J. Mitchell, and William Cohen—two Republicans and two Democrats, all Maine natives. Republican senator Margaret Chase Smith proved her flintiness when she spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s. Ed Muskie, the first prominent Democrat to come out of Maine, won every race he entered except an aborted bid for the presidency in 1972. George Mitchell and William Cohen went on to win stellar international reputations. In a manifestation of Maine’s strong tradition of bipartisanship, Mitchell and Cohen worked together closely on many issues to benefit the state and the nation (they even wrote a book together).
In the 1970s, Maine elected an independent governor, James Longley, whose memory is still respected (Longley’s son was later elected to Congress as a Republican, and his daughter to the state senate as a Democrat). In 1994, Maine voted in another independent, Angus King (now a senator), a relatively young veteran of careers in business, broadcasting, and law. The governor serves a term of four years, limited to two terms.
The state’s Supreme Judicial Court has a chief justice and six associate justices.
Maine is ruled by a bicameral, biennial citizen legislature comprising 151 members in the House of Representatives and 35 members in the state senate, including a relatively high percentage of women and a fairly high proportion of retirees. Members of both houses serve two-year terms. In 1993, voters passed a statewide term-limits referendum restricting legislators to four terms.
Whereas nearly two dozen Maine cities are ruled by city councils, about 450 smaller towns and plantations retain the traditional form of rule: annual town meetings. Town meetings generally are held in March, when newspaper pages bulge with reports containing classic quotes from citizens exercising their rights to vote and vent. A few examples: “I believe in the pursuit of happiness until that pursuit infringes on the happiness of others”; “I don’t know of anyone’s dog running loose except my own, and I’ve arrested her several times”; and “Don’t listen to him; he’s from New Jersey.”
When the subject of the economy comes up, you’ll often hear reference to the “two Maines,” as if an east-west line bisected the state in half. There’s much truth to that image. Southern Maine is prosperous, with good jobs (although never enough), lots of small businesses, and a highly competitive real-estate market. Northern Maine struggles along, suffering as much from its immensity and lack of infrastructure as its low population density. The central region lies between the two in every respect; there are a few more population centers and a little more industry. Efforts to stimulate economic development in the less developed areas have experienced fluctuating degrees of success that largely mirror the state of the U.S. economy.
According to state economists, Maine currently faces three challenges. First, slow job growth: Over the past two decades, Maine’s has been about half of the national average. Second, changing employment patterns: Once famed for producing textiles and shoes and for its woods-based industries, now health care and tourism provide the most jobs. Third, an aging population: Economic forecasters predict that more than one in five residents will be older than 65 by 2020, which poses a challenge for finding workers in the future.
Maine’s population didn’t top the one-million mark until 1970. Forty years later, according to the 2010 census, the state had 1,318,301 residents. Along the coast, Cumberland County, comprising the Greater Portland area, has the highest head count.
Despite the longstanding presence of several substantial ethnic groups, plus four Native American tribes (about 1 percent of the population), diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon in Maine, and the population is about 95 percent Caucasian. A steady influx of refugees, beginning after the Vietnam War, forced the state to address diversity issues, and it continues to do so today.
People who weren’t born in Maine aren’t natives. Even people who were born here may experience close scrutiny of their credentials. In Maine, there are natives and natives. Every day, the obituary pages describe Mainers who have barely left the houses in which they were born—even in which their grandparents were born. We’re talking roots!
Lobster is Maine’s most valuable seafood product.
Along with this kind of heritage comes a whole vocabulary all its own—lingo distinctive to Maine, or at least New England.
Part of the “native” picture is the matter of “native” produce. Hand-lettered signs sprout everywhere during the summer advertising native corn, native peas, even—believe it or not—native ice. In Maine, homegrown is well grown.
“People from away,” on the other hand, are those whose families haven’t lived here year-round for a generation or more. But people from away (also called flatlanders) exist all over Maine, and they have come to stay, putting down roots of their own and altering the way the state is run, looks, and will look. Senator Collins is native, but Senator King came from away. You’ll find other flatlanders as teachers, corporate executives, artists, retirees, writers, town selectmen, and even lobstermen.
In the 19th century, arriving flatlanders were mostly “rusticators” or “summer complaints”—summer residents who lived well, often in enclaves, and never set foot in the state off-season. They did, however, pay property taxes, contribute to causes, and provide employment for local residents. Another 19th-century wave of people from away came from the bottom of the economic ladder: Irish escaping the potato famine and French Canadians fleeing poverty in Québec. Both groups experienced subtle and overt anti-Catholicism but rather quickly assimilated into the mainstream, taking jobs in mills and factories and becoming staunch American patriots.
The late 1960s and early 1970s brought bunches of “back-to-the-landers,” who scorned plumbing and electricity and adopted retro ways of life. Although a few pockets of diehards still exist, most have changed with the times and adopted contemporary mores (and conveniences).
Today, technocrats arrive from away with computers, faxes, cell phones, and other high-tech gear and “commute” via the Internet and modern electronics.
In Maine, the real natives are the Wabanaki (People of the Dawn)—the Micmac, Maliseet, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy tribes of the eastern woodlands. Many live in or near three reservations, near the headquarters for their tribal governors. The Passamaquoddies are at Pleasant Point, in Perry, near Eastport, and at Indian Township, in Princeton, near Calais. The Penobscots are based on Indian Island, in Old Town, near Bangor. Other Native American population clusters—known as “off-reservation Indians”—are the Aroostook Band of Micmacs, based in Presque Isle, and the Houlton Band of Maliseets, in Littleton, near Houlton.
In 1965, Maine became the first state to establish a Department of Indian Affairs, but just five years later the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes initiated a 10-year-long land-claims case involving 12.5 million Maine acres (about two-thirds of the state) weaseled from the Indians by Massachusetts in 1794. In late 1980, a landmark agreement, signed by President Jimmy Carter, awarded the tribes $80.6 million in reparations. Despite this, the tribes still struggle to provide jobs on the reservations and to increase the overall standard of living. A 2003 and 2011 referenda to allow the tribes to build a casino were defeated.
One of the true success stories of the tribes is the revival of traditional arts as businesses. The Maine Indian Basketmakers Association has an active apprenticeship program, and two renowned basket makers—Mary Gabriel and Clara Keezer—have achieved National Heritage Fellowships. Several well-attended annual summer festivals—in Bar Harbor, Grand Lake Stream, and Perry—highlight Indian traditions and heighten awareness of Native American culture. Basket making, canoe building, and traditional dancing are all parts of the scene. The splendid Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor features Indian artifacts, interactive displays, historic photographs, and special programs. Gift shops have begun adding Native American jewelry and baskets to their inventories.
Within about three decades of their 1755 expulsion from Nova Scotia in le grand dérangement, Acadians had established new communities and new lives in northern Maine’s St. John Valley. Gradually, they explored farther into central and southern coastal Maine and west into New Hampshire. The Acadian diaspora has profoundly influenced Maine and its culture, and it continues to do so today. Along the coast, French is spoken on the streets of Biddeford, where there’s an annual Franco-American festival and an extensive Franco-American research collection. The St. John Valley at the tip of Maine is a host for the 2014 Acadian Congress.
Although Maine’s African American population is small, the state has had an African American community since the 17th century; by the 1764 census, there were 322 slaves and free blacks in the District of Maine. Segregation remained the rule, however, so in the 19th century, blacks established their own parish, the Abyssinian Church, in Portland. Efforts are under way to restore the long-closed church as an African American cultural center and gathering place for Greater Portland’s black community. Maine’s African Americans have earned places in history books that far exceed their small population. In 1826, Bowdoin’s John Brown Russworm became America’s first black college graduate; in 1844, Macon B. Allen became the first African American to gain admission to a state bar; and in 1875, James A. Heay became America’s first African American Roman Catholic Bishop, when he was ordained for the Diocese of Portland. For researchers delving into “Maine’s black experience,” the University of Southern Maine, in Portland, houses the African-American Archive of Maine, a significant collection of historic books, letters, and artifacts donated by Gerald Talbot, the first African American to serve in the Maine legislature.
Finns came to Maine in several 19th-century waves, primarily to work the granite quarries on the coast and on offshore islands, the slate quarries in Monson, near Greenville, and to farm in Oxford County.
In 1870, an idealistic American diplomat named William Widgery Thomas established a model agricultural community with 50 brave Swedes in the heart of Aroostook County. Their enclave, New Sweden, remains today, as does the town of Stockholm, and descendants of the pioneers have spread throughout Maine.
At the turn of the 20th century, Lebanese (and some Syrians) began descending on Waterville, where they found work in the textile mills and eventually established St. Joseph’s Maronite Church in 1927. One of these immigrants was the mother of former senator George Mitchell.
Amish families are increasingly taking refuge in Maine. What began with one colony in Aroostook County has grown to four, including one in Unity.
Arriving after World War II, Slavic immigrants established a unique community in Richmond, just inland from Bath. In the 1950s, the town was home to the largest rural Russian-speaking population in the country. Only a tiny nucleus remains today, along with an onion-domed church, but a stroll through the local cemetery hints at the extent of the original colony.
War has been the impetus for the more recent arrival of Asians, Africans, Central Americans, and Eastern Europeans. Most have settled in the Portland area, making that city the state’s center of diversity. Vietnamese and Cambodians began settling in Maine in the mid-1970s. A handful of Afghanis who fled the Soviet-Afghan conflict also ended up in Portland. Somalis, Ethiopians, and Sudanese fled their war-torn countries in the early to mid-1990s, and Bosnians and Kosovars arrived in the last half of the 1990s. With every new conflict comes a new stream of immigrants—world citizens are becoming Mainers, and Mainers are becoming world citizens.
Mainers are an independent lot, many exhibiting the classic Yankee characteristics of dry humor, thrift, and ingenuity. Those who can trace their roots back at least a generation or two in the state and have lived here through the duration can call themselves natives; everyone else, no matter how long they’ve lived here, is “from away.”
Mainers react to outsiders depending upon how those outsiders treat them. Treat a Mainer with a condescending attitude, and you’ll receive a cold shoulder at best. Treat a Mainer with respect, and you’ll be welcome, perhaps even invited in to share a mug of coffee. Mainers are wary of outsiders and often with good reason. Many outsiders move to Maine because they fall in love with its independence and rural simplicity, and then they demand that the farmer stop spreading that stinky manure on his farmlands, or they insist that the town initiate garbage pickup, or they build a glass-and-timber McMansion in the midst of white clapboard historical homes.
In most of Maine, money doesn’t impress folks. The truth is, that lobsterman in the old truck and the well-worn work clothes might be sitting on a small fortune. Or living on it. Perhaps nothing has caused more troubles between natives and newcomers than the rapidly increasing value of land and the taxes that go with that. For many visitors, Maine real estate is a bargain they can’t resist.
If you want real insight into Maine character, listen to a CD or watch a video by one Maine master humorist, Tim Sample. As he often says, “Wait a minute; it’ll sneak up on you.”
In 1850, in a watershed moment for Maine landscape painting, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), Hudson River School artist par excellence, vacationed on Mount Desert Island. Influenced by the luminist tradition of such contemporaries as Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865), who summered in nearby Castine, Church accurately but romantically depicted the dramatic tableaux of Maine’s coast and woodlands that even today attract slews of admirers.
By the 1880s, however, impressionism had become the style du jour and was being practiced by a coterie of artists who collected around Charles Herbert Woodbury (1864-1940) in Ogunquit. His program made Ogunquit the best-known summer art school in New England. After Hamilton Easter Field established another art school in town, modernism soon asserted itself. Among the artists who took up summertime Ogunquit residence was Walt Kuhn (1877-1949), a key organizer of New York’s 1913 landmark Armory Show of modern art.
Meanwhile, a bit farther south, impressionist Childe Hassam (1859-1935), part of writer Celia Thaxter’s circle, produced several hundred works on Maine’s remote Appledore Island, in the Isles of Shoals off Kittery, and illustrated Thaxter’s An Island Garden.
Another artistic summer colony found its niche in 1903, when Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad, 1865-1929), charismatic leader of the Ashcan School of realist/modernists, visited Monhegan Island, about 11 miles offshore. Artists who followed him there included Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), George Bellows (1882-1925), and Randall Davey (1887-1964). Among the many other artists associated with Monhegan images are William Kienbusch (1914-1980), Reuben Tam (1916-1991), and printmakers Leo Meissner (1895-1977) and Stow Wengenroth (1906-1978).
But colonies were of scant interest to other notables, who chose to derive their inspiration from Maine’s stark natural beauty and work mostly in their own orbits. Among these are genre painter Eastman Johnson (1824-1906); romantic realist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who lived in Maine for 27 years and whose studio in Prouts Neck (Scarborough) still overlooks the surf-tossed scenery he so often depicted; pointillist watercolorist Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924); John Marin (1870-1953), a cubist who painted Down East subjects, mostly around Deer Isle and Addison (Cape Split); Lewiston native Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), who first showed his abstractionist work in New York in 1909 and later worked in Berlin; Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), whose family summered on Great Spruce Head Island, in East Penobscot Bay; and Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), whose reputation as a romantic realist in the late 20th century surpassed that of his illustrator father, N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945).
On a parallel track was sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), raised in a poor Russian-immigrant family in Rockland and far better known outside her home state for her monumental wood sculptures slathered in black or gold. Two other noted sculptors with Maine connections were William Zorach (1887-1966) and Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935), both of whom lived in Georgetown, near Bath.
Contemporary year-round or seasonal Maine residents with national (and international) reputations include Vinalhaven’s Robert Indiana, Lincolnville’s Alex Katz, North Haven’s Eric Hopkins, Deer Isle’s Karl Schrag, Tenants Harbor’s Jamie Wyeth (third generation of the famous family), Kennebunk’s Edward Betts, and Cushing’s Lois Dodd and Alan Magee.
The two best collections of Maine art are at the Portland Museum of Art (7 Congress Sq., Portland, 207/775-6148) and the Farnsworth Art Museum (16 Museum St., Rockland, 207/596-6457). The Farnsworth, in fact, focuses only on Maine art, primarily from the 20th century. The Farnsworth is the home of the Wyeth Center, featuring the works of three generations of Wyeths.
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, appropriately, also has a very respectable Maine collection (in a spectacular setting), as does the Monhegan Museum. Other Maine paintings, not always on exhibit, are at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick.
Any survey of Maine art, however brief, must include the significant role of crafts in the state’s artistic tradition. As with painters, sculptors, and writers, craftspeople have gravitated to Maine—most notably since the establishment in 1950 of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Started in the Belfast area, the school put down roots on Deer Isle in 1960. Craft studios are abundant in Maine, and many festivals include craft displays.
Maine’s first big-name writer was probably the early 17th-century French explorer Samuel de Champlain (1570-1635), who scouted the Maine coast, established a colony in 1604 near present-day Calais, and lived to describe in detail his experiences. Several decades after Champlain’s forays, English naturalist John Josselyn visited Scarborough and in the 1670s published the first two books accurately describing Maine’s flora and fauna (aptly describing, for example, blackflies as “not only a pesterment but a plague to the country”).
Today, Maine’s best-known author lives not on the coast but just inland in Bangor—Stephen King (born 1947), wizard of the weird. Many of his dozens of horror novels and stories are set in Maine, and several have been filmed for the big screen here. King and his author wife, Tabitha, are avid fans of both education and team sports and have generously distributed their largesse among schools, libraries, and teams in their hometown as well as other parts of the state.
Other best-selling contemporary authors writing in or about Maine include Carolyn Chute (born 1948), resident of Parsonsfield and author of the raw novels The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts; Cathie Pelletier (born 1953), raised in tiny Allagash and author of such humor-filled novels as The Funeral Makers and The Bubble Reputation; and coastal-Maine resident Richard Russo (born 1949), author of Empire Falls, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and named the year’s best novel by Time magazine.
John Josselyn was perhaps the first practitioner of Maine’s strong naturalist tradition in American letters, but the Pine Tree State’s rugged scenic beauty and largely unspoiled environment have given rise to many ecologically and environmentally concerned writers.
The 20th century saw the arrival in Maine of crusader Rachel Carson (1907-1964), whose 1962 wake-up call, Silent Spring, was based partly on Maine observations and research. The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, headquartered in Wells and comprising 10 chunks of environmentally sensitive coastal real estate, covers nearly 3,500 acres between Kittery Point and the Mid-Coast region.
The tiny town of Nobleboro, near Damariscotta, drew nature writer Henry Beston (1888-1968); his Northern Farm lyrically chronicles a year in Maine. Beston’s wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986), wrote more than 90 books—including Chimney Farm, about their life in Nobleboro.
Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1865-1946), born in Brewer to Maine’s most prosperous fur trader, graduated from Smith College and became a noted expert on Maine (and specifically Native American) folklore. Among her extensive writings, Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast, published in 1941, remains a sine qua non for researchers.
The out-of-doors and inner spirits shaped Cape Rosier adoptees Helen and Scott Nearing, whose 1954 Living the Good Life became the bible of Maine’s back-to-the-landers.
Historical novels, such as Arundel, were the specialty of Kennebunk native Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957), but Roberts also wrote Trending into Maine, a potpourri of Maine observations and experiences (the original edition was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth). Kennebunkport’s Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), author of the Penrod novels and The Magnificent Ambersons, described 1920s Kennebunkport in Mary’s Neck, published in 1932.
A little subgenre of sociological literary classics comprises astute observations (mostly by women) of daily life in various parts of the state. Some are fiction, some nonfiction, some barely disguised romans à clef. Probably the best-known chronicler of such observations is Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, a fictional 1896 account of “Dunnet’s Landing” (actually Tenants Harbor); her ties, however, were in the South Berwick area, where she spent most of her life. Also in South Berwick, Gladys Hasty Carroll (1904-1999) scrutinized everyday life in her hamlet, Dunnybrook, in As the Earth Turns (a title later “borrowed” and tweaked by a soap-opera producer). Lura Beam (1887-1978) focused on her childhood in the Washington County village of Marshfield in A Maine Hamlet, published in 1957, and Louise Dickinson Rich (1903-1972) entertainingly described her coastal Corea experiences in The Peninsula, after first having chronicled her rugged wilderness existence in We Took to the Woods. Ruth Moore (1903-1989), born on Gott’s Island, near Acadia National Park, published her first book at the age of 40. Her tales, recently brought back into print, have earned her a whole new appreciative audience. Elisabeth Ogilvie (1917-2006) came to Maine in 1944 and lived for many years on remote Ragged Island, transformed into “Bennett’s Island” in her fascinating “tide trilogy”: High Tide at Noon, Storm Tide, and The Ebbing Tide. Ben Ames Williams (1887-1953), the token male in this roundup of perceptive observers, in 1940 produced Come Spring, an epic tale of hardy pioneers founding the town of Union, just inland from Rockland.
In the mid-19th century antislavery crusader Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), seldom recognized for her Maine connection, lived in Brunswick, where she wrote The Pearl of Orr’s Island, a folkloric novel about a tiny nearby fishing community.
Mary Ellen Chase was a Maine native, born in Blue Hill in 1887. She became an English professor at Smith College in 1926 and wrote about 30 books, including some about the Bible as literature. She died in 1973.
Two books do a creditable job of excerpting literature from throughout Maine—something of a daunting task. The most comprehensive is Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature, published in 1989 by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader, edited by Wesley McNair and published in 1994 by the University Press of New England, focuses on 20th-century authors.
For Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), Maine provided solitude and inspiration for subjects ranging far beyond the state’s borders. Yourcenar was a longtime Northeast Harbor resident and the first woman elected to the prestigious Académie Française. Her house, now a shrine to her work, is open to the public by appointment in summer.
Maine’s best-known essayist is and was E. B. White (1899-1985), who bought a farm in tiny Brooklin in 1933 and continued writing for The New Yorker. One Man’s Meat, published in 1944, is one of the best collections of his wry, perceptive writings. His legions of admirers also include two generations raised on his classic children’s stories Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan.
Writer and critic Doris Grumbach (born 1918), who settled in Sargentville, not far from Brooklin but far from her New York ties, wrote two particularly wise works from the perspective of a Maine transplant: Fifty Days of Solitude and Coming into the End Zone.
Maine’s best contemporary exemplar of humorous writing is the late John Gould (1908-2003), whose life in rural Friendship has provided grist for many a tale. Gould’s hilarious columns in the Christian Science Monitor and his steady book output made him an icon of Maine humor.
Born in Portland, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) is Maine’s most famous poet; his marine themes clearly stem from his seashore childhood (in “My Lost Youth,” he wistfully rhapsodized, “Often I think of the beautiful town/That is seated by the sea...”).
Widely recognized in her own era, poet Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) held court on Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, welcoming artists, authors, and musicians to her summer salon. Today, she’s best known for An Island Garden, published in 1894 and detailing her attempts at horticultural TLC in a hostile environment.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) had connections to Camden, Rockland, and Union and described a stunning Camden panorama in “Renascence.”
Whitehead Island, near Rockland, was the birthplace of Wilbert Snow (1883-1977), who went on to become president of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. His 1968 memoir, Codline’s Child, makes fascinating reading.
A longtime resident of York, May Sarton (1912-1995) approached cult status as a guru of feminist poetry and prose—and as an articulate analyst of death and dying during her terminal illness.
Among respected Maine poets today are William Carpenter (born 1940); Kate Barnes (1932-2013), Maine’s first Poet Laureeate, 1996 to 1999; and her successors to the post: Baron Wormser, 2000-2005; Betsy Scholl, 2006-2010; and Wesley McNair, named in 2011.
Besides E. B. White’s children’s classics, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, America’s kids were also weaned on books written and illustrated by Maine island summer resident Robert McCloskey (1914-2003)—notably Time of Wonder, One Morning in Maine, and Blueberries for Sal. Neck-and-neck in popularity is prolific Walpole illustrator-writer Barbara Cooney (1917-1999), whose award-winning titles included Miss Rumphius, Island Boy, and Hattie and the Wild Waves. Cooney produced more than 100 books, and it seems as if everyone has a different favorite.
C. A. (Charles Asbury) Stephens (1844-1931) for 60 years wrote for the magazine Youth’s Companion. In 1995, a collection of his vivid children’s stories was reissued as Stories from the Old Squire’s Farm.
Maine can also lay partial claim to Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923), author of the eternally popular Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; she spent summers at Quillcote in Hollis, west of Portland.