Indigenous History of Maine
When the last glaciers receded around 10,000 years ago, Maine was occupied by Paleo-Indians who hunted and fished along the resource-rich coastline and rivers. By the time of European contact in the 1500s, the largest Indigenous group in Maine was the Wabanaki, or “People of the Dawn.” The Wabanaki were part of a broader Algonquian confederation that extended from the Great Lakes through New England and into eastern Canada.
The Wabanaki were nearly wiped out by infectious European diseases during the harrowing period from 1616 to 1619 known as the Great Dying. An estimated 75 to 90 percent of Native Americans in New England died from outbreaks of smallpox, tuberculosis and an infection called leptospirosis. Today, remnants of four Wabanaki tribes still reside in Maine: the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot.
First European Contact
The first Europeans set eyes on Maine in 1498, just a few years after Columbus landed in the West Indies. John Cabot—an Italian sailing for King Henry VII of England—was looking for a western passage to China when he surveyed the New England coastline and continued north to Newfoundland.
In the 1520s, France and Spain made competing claims to this corner of the New World. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano landed in the Carolinas and sailed up to New England, where he became the first European to set foot in Maine along the Penobscot River.
Early encounters with the Wabanaki were disastrous—when the Spanish explorer Estêvan Gómez landed in Maine in 1524, he captured 58 Native Americans and sold them into slavery. Later French explorers, aided by fur trappers who spoke the language, were more successful in forming alliances with the Wabanaki.
In 1602, the British explorer named Bartholomew Gosnold visited Maine and promoted it as a prime location for a colonial settlement, with rich soil and waters abounding with fish.
Maine Gets Its Name
In 1605, a British explorer named George Waymouth captured five Wabanaki men from Maine and brought them back to England. Three of them lived with Ferdinando Gorges, a military commander in Plymouth. Gorges taught them English, learned their language and became convinced that Maine should be the site of an English colony. No attempt had been made since the abandoned Roanoke Colony in 1590.
In 1607, at the urging of Gorges and others, King James I established two colonies in the Americas: Jamestown in Virginia and the Popham colony in southern Maine, named after one of its founders, George Popham. The first Maine winter was devastating, and many colonists died, including Popham. Within a year, the remaining colonists returned to England. The first Maine experiment was a failure.
In 1639, Gorges received a royal charter for the Province of Maine and named himself governor. It’s not clear where the name Maine originated. Some say it was named after a small English town, but more likely it was a nautical reference to the mainland to distinguish the territory from New England’s coastal islands.
Gorges never set foot in Maine, and the English Civil War disrupted his plans to establish another colony there. When Gorges died in 1647, the land rights were passed down to his heirs, who sold Maine to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677 for £1,250.
The Revolution and the Burning of Falmouth
During the Revolutionary War, Maine was a colony within a colony. The former province was still part of Massachusetts and mirrored the actions of the Patriot movement in Boston. In 1774, for example, a year after the Boston Tea Party, a group in Maine destroyed a shipment of British tea stored in the town of York.
But the most consequential event in Maine during the Revolutionary period was the burning of Falmouth in 1775. In April of that year, a Falmouth militia led by Samuel Thompson seized a British merchant vessel to enforce the colonial embargo on British goods. The militia then captured a British naval captain, Henry Mowat, who had come to free the merchant ship. That early Patriot victory, known as Thompson’s War, angered the British.
Six months later, Captain Mowat returned to exact his revenge on Falmouth, whose residents he accused of “the most unpardonable rebellion.” Mowat’s ships bombarded Falmouth for a full day, leveling two-thirds of the city. The burning of Falmouth, along with the Boston Massacre, became a rallying cry in the colonies for revolution.
Missouri Compromise and Statehood
After the Revolution, some people in Maine pushed for independence from faraway Massachusetts. The tipping point came during the War of 1812, when the Massachusetts military failed to protect Maine coastal towns from British raids.
Maine residents voted for independent statehood in 1819, but there was a roadblock in the U.S. Senate. The issue was slavery. Missouri wanted to join the union as a slave state, but abolitionist senators were worried about slavery encroaching further north.
After fierce debates, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which welcomed Maine and Missouri as free and slave states respectively, and outlawed additional slave states above the 36-30 latitude line. Maine became the 23rd state on March 15, 1820.
Prohibition and Civil War
Maine was way ahead of much of the country when it came to prohibition. The temperance movement started in Portland, where the Total Abstinence Society was founded in 1815. Prohibition of alcohol dominated Maine politics for most of the 19th century. Maine passed a statewide ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol in 1851, more than half a century before the 18th Amendment began Prohibition nationally.
Maine was also at the forefront of the abolitionist movement. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Brunswick, Maine. And during the Civil War, more than 73,000 Maine men fought for the Union. Ten percent were either killed on the battlefield or died from disease.
Maine Lobsters
Lobster has always been abundant in Maine’s cold coastal waters, but for most of Maine’s history lobster was considered peasant food served to prisoners and indentured servants. Lobsters were even crushed and used as fertilizer for potato fields.
It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that lobster was elevated to a delicacy. In 1910, John D. Rockefeller built a summer home on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, now part of Acadia National Park. According to legend, Rockefeller was accidentally served a lobster stew prepared for the help. He loved it and insisted that lobster be on the menu for all Rockefeller functions. The culinary trend caught on in New York City, where Maine lobsters became an expensive luxury.
Today, 90 percent of all lobsters eaten in the United States are caught off the coast of Maine. The state's lobster industry is operated by more than 5,600 independent lobstermen and contributes more than $1 billion in revenue to the Maine economy.
Date of Statehood: March 15, 1820
Capital: Augusta
Population: 1,362,359 (2020)
Size: 35,384 square miles
Nickname(s): Pine Tree State; Vacationland
Motto: Dirigo (“I lead”)
Tree: White Pine
Flower: White Pine Cone
Bird: Chickadee
Interesting Facts
Agamenticus was the first city to be chartered in what would become the United States in 1641. In 1642, it was renamed Gorgeana and incorporated as the first city. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony annexed southwestern Maine in 1652, Gorgeana was reincorporated as York.
In 1844, Macon Bolling Allen received a license to practice law in Maine, becoming the first licensed Black lawyer in the United States.
After a long stretch of drought-like conditions that began in the summer of 1947, a series of fires destroyed more than 200,000 acres in what became known as the year Maine burned.
The Ice Storm of 1998, which knocked out power to half the state for more than two weeks in January and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, is considered to be one of the worst natural disasters in Maine’s history.
Eastport is the easternmost city in the continental United States. Only slightly farther east is the town of Lubec.
