Maine History is the only periodical devoted to scholarship on the history of Maine, and is a peer-reviewed publication. It is published twice a year, in January and July, by the Maine Historical Society in cooperation with the Department of History at the University of Maine. A subscription to Maine History is one of the benefits of membership in MHS.The last three years of issues are not available here but as new issues are published, the back issues are added to this site. Volume I, Number 1, of the MHS Quarterly Newsletter appeared in June 1961. The following January the Society announced that future issues would appear quarterly in February, May, August, and November. For the next eight years the society maintained that schedule. The content consisted of Society news, lists of new members, news of other historical societies, recent writings on Maine history in books, periodicals, and newspapers; recent additions to the Society's library; and suggested readings in Maine history. Book reviews appeared from time to time. In summer 1969 the Newsletter became a scholarly journal. The first issue of the new journal appeared as Maine Historical Society Newsletter, Volume 9, Number 1. Four years later the journal's name was changed to Maine Historical Society Quarterly, and its name changed once more in 1994 to Maine History.
Passing the Time: Artwork by World War II German POW's in Aroostock County
Reviews of the following books: A History of Maine Railroads by Bill Kenny; Rufus Porter's Curious World, Art and Invention in America, 1815-1860 edited by Laura Fecych Sprague and Justin Wolff; Henry Knox's Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller's Heroic Expedition that Saved the American Revolution by William Hazelgrove
"A Most Beautiful and Gratifying Spectacle:" Notes on the Times and Life of the Original Steamer Portland
Steam technology was both a product and a driver of the rapidly evolving economy of America in the early nineteenth century. Although steam boating in Maine originated on the Kennebec, the technology soon expanded to Portland. After the arrival of the city’s first steamboat in 1822, increasing passenger and freight traffic required larger and faster vessels. Through the first decade of the business, the steamers which served Portland were often cast-offs from earlier operations in New York. In 1835, however, local investors convinced themselves a first-rate locally built craft could be profitable. Initially successful, the steamboat Portland struggled against growing competition in the packet trade. Then as a newer steam-driven technology—the railroad— rolled from Boston into Portland in 1842, the boat became surplus and she was sold to a company in New Orleans. Eventually, her usefulness exhausted, she was abandoned and sank into the bay of Indianola, Texas. Entering a challenging market developed over the prior decade by Captain Seward Porter’s Kennebec Steam Navigation Company, the original steamer Portland appeared as a model of local enterprise. After just a dozen years in Maine, however, she disappeared as a victim of the changing market she had been built to satisfy. This article describes the business environment into which the Portland was born, the steamer’s life in the local economy and her passing as a casualty of market change. The author earned the degrees of A.B. from Dartmouth and M.A.T. from Harvard. His involvement in computer technology as an educator led him to a career as director of management information services for Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway, Maine, and later for a national healthcare rights organization. As a student of the history and culture of nineteenth-century Maine, he has compiled and edited a number of works on the subject. He chaired the 2005 Oxford County Bicentennial Commission, and he is the recipient of Maine Historical Society’s 2006 James Phinney Baxter award for historical writing and of its 2014 Neal W. Alen Jr. award for historical research. His most recent work is Diggio, Haybis Korpus & E Plewrisy Unicorn! The Thinkin’ and Doin’ of Ethan Spike, of Hornby, Oxford County, Maine (July 2021), during the compilation of which he first noticed the original steamer Portland chugging into Casco Bay.
"It May Be Questionable:" Granger v. Avery and the Redaction of Article X, Section 5 from the Maine Constitution
Since January 1, 1876, printed copies of the Maine Constitution have not included Article X, Section 5, which contains Maine’s constitutional duty to guarantee and defend Wabanaki treaties made with Massachusetts. This article offers an explanation of how and why the obscuration of Article X, Section 5 happened. It examines steps taken in 1875 to establish the redaction in relation to stages in the process to settle Joseph Granger v. Peter Avery, a Maine Supreme Judicial Court case that hinged upon a 1794 Passamaquoddy treaty. The timetable favored the financial interests of both Maine and Joseph Granger at the expense of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, which lost fifteen treaty islands as a result of the court’s decision and never received compensation from the state in defiance of Article X, Section 5. Maine officials were likely more immediately concerned about an outlay to Granger stemming from the verdict than to the tribe, as his demands would be harder to ignore. Notably, Frederick A. Pike, the constitutional commission member who proposed the redaction while a decision on Granger was still pending, pushed the Maine House to approve paying damages and other compensation to Granger soon after the redaction took effect. In violation of the now unprintable Article X, Section 5, this sum was taken from the Passamaquoddy Trust Fund. The Passamaquoddy Tribe and their allies protested, but Maine officials paid them no heed. Removing Maine’s Native treaty responsibilities from print all but formalized the government’s unofficial policy of ignoring its constitutional obligations. Catherine M. Burns served as co-curator of “REDACT: Obscuring the Maine Constitution,” an exhibition at the Maine Historical Society. She holds a Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I
Farther North of Boston: Maine's Pull on Robert Frost
The influence and allure of Maine are largely unexamined elements in Robert Frost’s rise to prominence as a poet and in his developing sensibilities as America’s bard. That influence came largely in the persons of Susan Hayes Ward of the Kittery area and Thomas Mosher, a Portland book-maker, both of whom were prescient readers and important publishers of Frost’s early lyrics. The allure came from Maine’s inland lake and farm country, and its promise of a retreat from the public pressure of notoriety that Frost entered into with the American publication of North of Boston. That a lure also arose from the bravery and independence that Frost recognized in Maine’s Indigenous people who had resisted the expansionist settlers in the Kittery area. In the end, however, Maine offered Frost as much in the way of troubling family experiences as it did a return to an agricultural and social simplicity, and so the material a lure of the cities, the manifest destiny of his white, ancestor settlers, and the comfort of notoriety won out over the Camelot he envisioned in Maine for himself and his family. A past President of the Robert Frost Society, Timothy O’Brien taught for thirty-two years in the English Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, retiring in 2016. He has published broadly on such authors as Chaucer, Malory, Henry Fielding, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Bobbie Ann Mason. His work on Frost includes articles in The Robert Frost Review and The New England Quarterly, as well as the book Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, issued by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2010.
Cover, Editors and Editorial Board and Table of Contents with authors' names.
Reviews of the following books: Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country by Joseph Conforti; Midcoast Maine in World War II by Margaret Shiels Konitzky; Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land edited by John J. Kucich; Lives of Consequence: Blacks in Early Kittery & Berwick in the Massachusetts Province of Maine by Patricia Q. Wall
How a Single Historical Document Can Affect Today's World
Edwin A. Churchill received his BS (1965) and MST (1969) at the Wisconsin State University at River Falls and his PhD at the University of Maine in 1979. He was employed by the Maine State Museum from 1971 to 2007, retiring as Chief Curator. Churchill has co-authored or co-edited Maine: The Pine Tree State (1995), American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (1995), and The Great Land Grab: Maine Beaches Ripped from the True Owners: The Towns’ Inhabitants (2019). He has also authored Simple Forms and Vivid Colors: An Exhibition of Maine Paint Decorated Furniture, 1800-1850 (1983; reprinted 2007) and Hail Britannia: An Exhibition of Maine Pewter and Silverplate, 1828-1941 (1992). Churchill has twice been awarded the James P. Baxter Award for best writings in Maine History (1979 & 1986) and the Neal Allen Award for outstanding Contributions in the fields of Maine History and Genealogy (1995). From 1985 to present, he has done extensive research on the question of whether Maine beaches were privately or publicly owned and served as an expert witness in several state trials regarding that matter. Churchill is presently developing a manuscript on English and Penobscot interactions between 1713 and 1786 and is continuing research on Maine’s coastal land patterns from 1640 to present.
Convergence of Contradictions: Abolitionism in Maine
In 1837 a trading sloop arrived home in Thomaston, Maine, from Savannah, Georgia, carrying a fugitive slave, Atticus, who had hidden on board. In violation of federal law, Atticus remained and worked in Maine until he was betrayed and his owner, in pursuit, reclaimed his “stolen property.” When Georgia’s governor demanded the captain and first-mate stand trial in Georgia for theft, the case drew national attention and grew into a fierce political and legal fight that reveals the competing interests and contradictory attitudes Mainers held toward race and slavery. Like most of the North, Maine owed its economic success to the South’s slavery-based economy and robust North-South trade. While Southern sympathies and deep-seated racism entrenched themselves in Maine, so did antislavery sentiment and a strong interracial abolitionist movement, described in private diaries, contemporary journals, local histories, as we l as minutes for church and town meetings. A rare example of Maine’s Underground Railroad accounts for which documentation exists through letters, court records, and newspaper coverage, Atticus’s es cape questions whether Maine’s coastal trading routes were used more frequently in self-emancipation than currently substantiated. Also considered is Maine’s proximity to Canada and the role borderland culture played in race relations and abolitionist activism. The story of Atticus reflects as much about the inherent contradictions within Maine’s antebellum past as it does about the myths it used to reinvent its past after the Civil War. Eileen Kurtis-Kleinman is a Maine-based freelance writer, whose works include Life on an African Slave Ship (Lucent Books, 2001).
When the Mill Goes Quiet: Maine Paper Industry 1990-2016
The paper industry has been a mainstay of Maine’s economy for over a century. Paper mills in all corners of Maine employed numerous workers, purchased wood and supplies locally, and contributed significantly to the state’s industrial base. This conferred not only local recognition but political influence in Augusta. All concerned viewed the paper industry, based on Maine’s extensive forests, proximity to large Northeastern paper markets, abundant hydropower, and a trained workforce, to sustain these communities for another century. By 1990, however, a series of slowly shifting forces began to accelerate, threatening the industry’s cost competitiveness. Larger mi ls based on low-cost fiber appeared globally. At a dizzying pace, electronic communications replaced traditional print media, the principal market for most Maine mills. One after another, leading national companies cut back or closed mi ls, sold land, and finally sold surviving mills to investment groups. The quarter century after 1990 became a challenging time that left a number of former mill towns with lost tax bases, high unemployment, and uncertain futures. The author is a semi-retired forestry consultant living in Wayne, Maine. He attended college at Michigan State and University of Arizona and earned his doctorate at Yale. Following brief stints at the US Forest Service and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, he came to Maine to serve in the Department of Conservation and the State Planning Office. Since 1987, he has been a consultant to wood products and paper companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Northeast’s Changing Forests, published by the Harvard University Forest
Improving the Silence: The Life and Literary Career of John Gould of Maine
The most famous Maine humorist of the twentieth century was John Gould, but little is known of this prominent literary comedian and his contribution to Maine literature, folklore, and history. Gould was a weekly contributor to the Christian Science Monitor for over 60 years, writing humorous pieces about life in Maine, Maine folktales, and even Maine history. He was the author of thirty books, which have been overlooked by scholars as a rich source of creative non-fiction about life in Maine. This paper provides a brief biography and an analysis of his contribution to our understanding of Maine folklore, history, and humor. David B. Raymond is Chairman of the Arts and Sciences Department at Northern Maine Community College where he has taught United States and Maine history for the past thirty years. He has published essays and reviews in such journals as Maine History, The Concord Saunterer, and the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, among others.
PHOTO ESSAY: State of Mind: Becoming Maine
Reviews of the following books: Historic Acadia National Park, The Stories Behind One of America's Great Treasures by Catherine Schmitt; Without Benefit of Insects: The Story of Edith M. Patch of the University of Maine by Elizabeth Gibbs; French and Indian Wars in Maine by Michael Dekker; Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine: The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph Treat edited by Micah Pawling; The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little; Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War by Lisa Books
Publicity and Tourism: The Maine State Government's Response to the Great Depression
During the Great Depression, Maine joined the rest of the nation in economic crisis. While the Depression affected the entire state in some way, the tourism industry took a harsh blow. The deteriorating economy led the Maine State Government to attempt counteracting the ramifications of the Depression. In response to the Depression, the Maine State Government increased advertising and publicity to promote tourism. This response included several publications that today give readers a glimpse into the history of the tourism industry during a difficult time.
John Holmes and the Shifting Partisan Politics of Slavery in Early Maine
The longevity and shifting partisan allegiances of the political career of John Holmes illuminate many of the issues animating Maine politics in the broad statehood era. None of these issues dogged Holmes or revealed the intersection of Maine and national politics better than that of slavery. His seemingly endless political flexibility makes Holmes an unusually good barometer of the mainstream position in Maine on slavery and related issues across this broad period. Matthew Mason is a professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of books including Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic(2006) and Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (2016), and the co-editor of books including John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery: Selections from the Diary (2017).
The Maine Press Association Takes a Stand: Promoting Professional Identity in the Nineteenth Century
This research sought to examine the Maine Press Association in relation to its motivations, particularly in reference to whether the association members saw themselves as professionals. The only other nineteenth century press association which has been examined for evidence of professional aspirations is the Missouri Press Association, in which it has been found that members were actively seeking to professionalize, modeling themselves after the traditional professions of doctors, lawyers and the clergy. References to journalists as professionals are present at an early point in the Maine Press Association’s history, and the number of references increase within a few years after its inception. This research reveals that Maine Press Association members self-identified themselves as belonging to a profession eighty-four times in the first thirty years of their existence, from 1864 to 1893. The finding that the Maine Press Association members called themselves professionals is important information in that it adds to what little we know about journalist professionalization interests in the nineteenth century. This supplies us with the knowledge that professional aspirations were not isolated to Missouri editors. While the finding that the Missouri Press Association had professional aspirations showed that professional aspirations existed among journalists in the mid-nineteenth century, the finding the Maine Press Association also had professional aspirations, even earlier than the Missouri Press Association, pushes the envelope in regard to understanding journalists’ nineteenth century professional aspirations. From this research we now know the geographical spread of the professional aspirations stretched from Missouri to the Eastern Seaboard. Stephen Banning has authored over thirty scholarly journals and is currently an associate professor at Bradley University where he specializes in researching journalistic professionalization.
With a Little Help from My Friends: Jewish Mutual Assistance in Nineteenth-Century Maine
Jews in 19th-century Maine relied on familial, ethnic, and, to a lesser degree, institutional networks of mutual assistance to survive and thrive. These Jews, who commonly worked as merchants of clothing and other dry goods, counted on family members to get them through hard times and hired fellow Jews to peddle their wares in the countryside. Jewish peddlers and merchants regularly borrowed or loaned cash and goods on credit within a small, tightly knit community that extended across Maine and as far as Boston and New York. Commercial networks also reinforced familial ties as children and in-laws entered the family business, often marrying their father’s employees or business partners. In Bangor and Portland, Jews formed associations—the Ahawas Achim synagogue in 1849 and a chapter of the B’nai B’rith fraternal organization in 1874, respectively—designed to care for ill, deceased, and widowed community members as well as to attend to religious and cultural needs. Although both of these early institutions dissolved within seven to eight years of their founding, and many of their members migrated out of the state, the Jews who settled in Maine before 1880 laid the foundations for communities and organizations that remain vibrant to this day. The present study draws on the records of these institutions and credit reports of approximately 150 individual Jewish businessmen from towns throughout the state, along with census records and local or family histories. David M. Freidenreich is the Pulver Family Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College, where he serves as director of the Jewish studies program and associate director of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life. He is also the founder of Colby’s Maine Jewish History Project (web.colby.edu/jewsinmaine/),which fosters research on Jewish life in Maine by student and community historians. As a member of the religious studies department, he teaches a wide range of courses on Judaism, Jewish history, and comparative religion. After receiving a B.A. from Brandeis University, he earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Most of his scholarship explores attitudes toward adherents of foreign religions within premodern Christian, Jewish, and Islamic sources. Kristin Esdale graduated from Colby College in2016 with a major in chemistry and a minor in Jewish studies. She currently teaches high school science at an international boarding school in Germany.
Two Narratives about a Nineteenth-Century African American Settlement in Rural Maine
African Americans lived in the central Maine townships of Troy and Burnham in the nineteenth century, and a region there is said to contain their abandoned settlement. This is a study of two local narratives about the settlement. Older residents maintain an oral tradition largely based on field evidence, while in-migrants tell a very different story linked to national meanings and events. Using oral histories, documentary research, and archaeological survey work, our research has uncovered much of the story of the African American presence in these towns. While bearers of each narrative tradition feel theirs is an accurate historical account of the place, it appears that the older local narrative is more accurate than the story told by in-migrants. Traditions differ in their factual reliability for historians: the accuracy of a traditional narrative is strongly affected both by the purposes for which it is told, and the rhetorical devices used to achieve those purposes. The author is a retired professor emeritus of anthropology at Unity College. He is interested in historical patterns of land-human interactions (particularly in the northeastern United States), landscape archaeology, and the cultural construction of place in traditional texts. Inquiries are invited at cmarshall@connect.unity.edu. This research was supported in part by an Odiorne grant from the Maine State Archives.
Reclaiming Maine's Archive and History in the Atlantic World, 1822-1876
This essay analyzes the attempt by influential Mainers during the half-century after Maine’s founding as a state to argue for the historical significance of two earlier founding moments: the early seventeenth-century Popham Colony and the purported medieval Norse voyages of discovery to Maine’s coast. By documenting and promoting a narrative of the new state that comprised these moments, they hoped to demonstrate the significance of Maine’s archives and history within those of the nation. In particular, these Mainers could use these founding moments to push against the centrality of Massachusetts within the region’s and the nation’s history. The latter part of the essay focuses on the theory of medieval Norse settlement in North America, which first intrigued Americans in the antebellum period— in particular, the alleged voyages to coastal New England around 1000 CE. The surprising origins of scholarly and popular American interest in Scandinavia took place between the 1820s and 1840s, when this theory was promoted by the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries in Copenhagen via historical societies in the U.S. The Maine Historical Society was among those interested in this history, and after the Civil War it collaborated with the state government to sponsor a trip by an archival agent to Europe and the publication of documentary histories that placed the Norse voyages within the state’s history. Derek Kane O’Leary received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. He recently joined the faculty as a history and literature teacher at Bard High School Early College in Washington, D.C. This article draws on research from his dissertation, Building the American Archive in the Atlantic World, 1776-1879 (UC Berkeley, 2020)