Maine

Before the Micmac and Abnaki arrived, the “Red Paint” people, descendants of Ice Age hunters, lived in Maine; their burial grounds date to about 3000 BC. Huge oyster-shell heaps on the Damariscotta estuary reflect the food consumption of early inhabitants. The Micmac and Abnaki were the region’s two earliest known nations.⁠[1]

In 1498 John Cabot, sailing for King Henry VII of England, may have explored Maine, though there is no concrete evidence; about a century later European ships briefly visited the area.⁠[1]

In 1607 the Plymouth Company founded the Popham Colony, the same year as Jamestown, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry; Popham did not survive the winters, so Jamestown is regarded as America’s first permanent settlement.⁠[1]

In the 1620s several English settlements were founded along the coast, many of which were later destroyed by climate, hardship and Indian attacks; by the early 1700s only about six survived. MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry had bought most of the land claims, an arrangement that lasted until 1820.⁠[1]

In the first half of the 1700s England and France contested ownership of Maine, and the French supported Indian raids on English settlers. In 1745 William Pepperell of Kittery led forces that captured the French fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, and the Treaty of Paris of 1763 ended all French claims to the territory. Maine’s population doubled from 12,000 to 24,000 between 1743 and 1763 and exceeded 150,000 by the end of the century.⁠[1]

In 1765 a mob seized tax stamps at Falmouth (now Portland), and in 1774 men burned a shipment of tea at York. In 1775 British forces under Capt. Henry Mowatt shelled and burned Falmouth, and in June 1775 Maine patriots captured the British cutter Margaretta off Machias in the first naval battle of the Revolution. In 1779 an American naval expedition to retake Castine ended in the war’s most disastrous naval encounter. About 1,000 Maine men died in the war.⁠[1]

After the Revolution frontier settlers pressed for separation from Massachusetts; coastal merchants resisted until the War of 1812 showed that Massachusetts could not protect the district from British raids. In October 1819 delegates met for three weeks in Portland to write a state constitution, with William King, a Bath merchant and shipbuilder, presiding. The constitution, adopted in 1819, was based on that of Massachusetts.⁠[1][2]

In 1815 Portland founded the world’s first Total Abstinence Society, and in 1834 a statewide organization of temperance societies was formed. In 1851, under Neal Dow, Maine enacted a total ban on the manufacture and sale of liquor, which remained in effect until national Prohibition was repealed in 1934.⁠[1]

On March 3, 1820, Congress passed the act admitting Maine to the Union, turning it from a district of Massachusetts into a self-governing state. The act was part of the Missouri Compromise: Maine entered as a free state, and MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry entered a year later as a slave state.⁠[3][1]

At statehood Maine had nearly 300,000 people, nine counties and 236 towns; William King became the first governor, and Portland was named the temporary capital.⁠[1]

After statehood Maine saw strong growth in lumbering, fishing, shipbuilding, ice harvesting and granite and lime quarrying, along with textile, paper and leather manufacturing. After the Civil War the textile and leather industries surged while farming declined, and in the 1890s hydroelectric plants were built on the Androscoggin, Kennebec, Penobscot and Saco rivers. In the 20th century the expansion of pulp and paper offset the loss of textiles to the South, and large potato, dairy and poultry farms replaced many small family farms; the Great Depression of the 1930s brought the state’s economy to a halt.⁠[1]

On February 24, 1827, Governor Enoch Lincoln signed the bill making Augusta the official capital, and the site was deeded to the state that year. The State House, designed by Charles Bulfinch and built of granite hauled from Hallowell by oxen, had its cornerstone laid on July 4, 1829, and was completed in January 1832 at a final cost of $145,000; the Legislature held its first session there on January 4, 1832.⁠[4]

The boundary with New Brunswick was disputed for years after the Revolution. In 1839 the Maine Legislature raised funds for a 10,000-man force to defend its claims at Madawaska, and several hundred British regulars were sent from Quebec; Congress approved $10 million for war expenses and nearly 50,000 troops were readied, but Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott negotiated a temporary agreement that averted bloodshed in what became known as the “War of the Aroostook.” In 1842 the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, negotiated by Secretary of State Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton, settled the boundary.⁠[1]

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Brunswick. In 1860 Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin was elected vice president under Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States (1861–1865). Born to a frontier farming family in Kentucky, he had less than a year of formal schooling, taught himself law, and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before winning the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1860. During the Civil War he preserved the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.Open the full entry. About 73,000 Maine men served in the Union forces, and ten percent of them died. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard fought at Gettysburg and Bull Run and later founded Howard University, serving as its first president; Gen. Joshua L. Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top, commanded the troops to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox and later became governor and president of Bowdoin College.⁠[1]

In 1890–1891 a three-story rear wing designed by the Boston architect Calvin Spoffard was added to the State House for $150,000; a major remodeling in 1909–1910, to designs by G. Henri Desmond, doubled the building’s length to 300 feet and replaced the dome with the present 150-foot copper-covered dome.⁠[4]

In 1949 Margaret Chase Smith was first elected to the U.S. Senate after nearly a decade in the House, becoming the first American woman elected to both houses of Congress. Edmund S. Muskie was elected governor in 1954 and U.S. senator in 1958, and in 1979 President Jimmy CarterJimmy CarterJimmy Carter (1924–2024) was an American politician and Democrat who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. His administration brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, signed the Panama Canal treaties and established relations with the People’s Republic of China, but he lost his reelection bid amid the energy crisis, inflation and the Iran hostage crisis; after leaving office he founded The Carter Center to work on mediation, election observation and disease control, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.Open the full entry appointed him Secretary of State; George J. Mitchell, who succeeded him in the Senate, served as Senate majority leader from 1988 to 1994.⁠[1]

In 1957 the governor’s term was extended from two years to four, with a limit of two consecutive terms.⁠[2]

From 1820 until the 1970s the federal government and Maine treated the Wabanaki Nations as non-sovereign. In the early 1970s the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot asserted land claims; the 1975 case Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton affirmed the federal government’s trust responsibility to the Wabanaki, and rulings in 1979 upheld the tribes’ jurisdiction over their historic reservations. The settlement was concluded in 1980, awarding the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Maliseet $81 million from the federal government to repurchase about 300,000 acres of ancestral homelands; President Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 7919.⁠[5]

In the apportionment based on the 2020 census, Maine kept 2 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, unchanged from the previous apportionment, with an average of 681,791 people per seat. The state has 4 electoral votes for the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections.⁠[6][7]

L.D. 86, An Act to Restore the Former State of Maine Flag, became law on January 7, 2024. It proposed making the former state flag, replaced as the official flag in 1909 and commonly known as the “Pine Tree Flag,” the official flag again, with a buff field, a pine tree in the center and a blue North Star in the upper corner, and the Secretary of State held a public design contest for it in the summer of 2024.⁠[8]

In the referendum of November 5, 2024, the flag proposal (Question 5) received 358,912 votes in favor and 451,366 against, with 29,968 blank ballots, and was rejected.⁠[9][10]

As of November 2026 the governor is Janet T. Mills, sworn in on January 2, 2019, as Maine’s 75th governor and its first woman governor; she is serving her second term. She was Attorney General of Maine in 2009–2011 and 2013–2019, the first woman in the post, and earlier served as District Attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties and was elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 2002.⁠[11]

The Maine State Legislature is a part-time body with a 35-member Senate and a 151-member House of Representatives, plus three non-voting House members representing the Penobscot Nation, the Passamaquoddy Tribe and the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians. Members of both chambers serve two-year terms and are limited to four consecutive terms; the Legislature meets in regular session every year. The judiciary has three tiers: district courts, superior courts and a supreme court.⁠[12][2]

The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 state area measurements give Maine a total area of 35,380 square miles (91,633 km²), of which 30,843 square miles (79,883 km²) are land and 4,537 square miles are water, comprising 2,314 square miles of inland water, 591 of coastal water and 1,633 of territorial water.⁠[13]

The Appalachian Mountains cross the state, which has many lakes and valleys; the highest point is Mount Katahdin at 5,268 feet (1,606 m), and the Atlantic coast is rocky. The last Ice Age glacier shaped Maine’s coastline, and the receding ice sheet left about 2,000 islands. The state describes a 3,500-mile coastline, 6,000 lakes and ponds and 17 million acres of forest, and has 16 counties.⁠[14][1][15]

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Maine’s population at 1,414,874 on July 1, 2025, up 3.8% from the April 1, 2020, estimates base of 1,363,218. Population density in 2020 was 44.2 people per square mile.⁠[16]

American Community Survey data for 2020–2024 show that 4.1% of residents were foreign-born, 36.2% of people aged 25 and over held a bachelor’s degree or higher, and median household income was $74,733 in 2024 dollars.⁠[16]

Preliminary data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis put Maine’s 2024 nominal GDP at $98.606 billion ($98,606 million); real GDP grew 3.0% from the previous year, ranking 17th among the states and the District of Columbia.⁠[17]

Services are the largest component of the state’s output, followed by manufacturing, and pulp and paper products are among the largest manufactured goods; the forest-products sector has declined under international competition but remains a significant employer. Lobster is the only fishing sector that remains significant. Only a small share of the workforce is in agriculture; potatoes from Aroostook County are the main crop, followed by eggs and dairy products, and the state also produces apples and blueberries. Tourists account for a large share of retail and service income. The Maine Yankee nuclear plant closed in 1997.⁠[2]

The University of Maine was founded in Orono in 1865 and is the state’s flagship public research university and a Space Grant and Sea Grant university. In fall 2025 it enrolled 10,644 students (64% from Maine), including 8,225 undergraduates and 2,419 graduate students.⁠[18]

Maine is known as “The Pine Tree State,” and its motto is the Latin “Dirigo” (“I lead”).⁠[15][19]

The state seal shows a shield bearing a pine tree with a moose lying at its foot, supported on one side by a husbandman resting on a scythe and on the other by a seaman resting on an anchor; “MAINE” appears in large Roman capitals below the shield, and “DIRIGO” on a label between the shield and the North Star crest. The description was drafted by a committee under William Moody, the first Senate President, and the present design was fixed by the Legislature in 1919.⁠[20]

The present state flag was adopted by the Legislature of 1909 and shows the state coat of arms on a blue field matching the blue of the U.S. flag. Section 206 of Title 1 of the Maine Revised Statutes specifies that the coat of arms is embroidered in silk at the center on both sides, with a 2½-inch knotted yellow silk fringe, and that a model flag is kept in the Adjutant General’s office.⁠[21][19]

The state tree is the white pine, the state bird the chickadee and the state flower the white pine cone and tassel; the state animal is the moose (1979), the state fish the landlocked salmon (1969), the state cat the Maine coon cat (1985), the state berry the wild blueberry (1991), the state crustacean the Maine lobster (2015) and the state vessel the Arctic exploration schooner “Bowdoin” (1987). The state song is the “State of Maine Song” by Roger Vinton Snow.⁠[19][15]

Maine.gov: Official website: https://www.maine.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Office of Governor Janet T. Mills: Official website: https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Maine State Legislature: Official website: https://legislature.maine.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Maine Department of the Secretary of State: Official website: https://www.maine.gov/sos/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]