News •
Maine’s chronic economic problems are reflected in the high incidence of poverty. The largest proportion of poverty is found in the rural areas of the state, particularly in the eastern coastal counties and in Aroostook county. Public awareness of Maine’s poverty and of the particular difficulties faced by the state’s small Native American and African American populations has led to vigorous efforts by community action groups, civil rights organizations, and health and housing associations to improve economic opportunity, as well as to deal with the related problems of housing, education, and health. Most poverty assistance is administered by the state’s Department of Human Services.
Maine’s health services are centred on the state’s hospital system. Four large regional hospitals are found in Portland, Lewiston, Waterville, and Bangor. Numerous smaller hospitals are distributed throughout the state. Individual and group practices are still important in providing services for physical and mental health.
Education
Local governments are responsible for public elementary and secondary education, under the general supervision of a state board of education. Most rural areas are served by multi-community school administrative districts. The state operates technical institutes for postsecondary vocational training. The University of Maine, established in 1865 in Orono as a college of agriculture and mechanic arts, offers a broad range of undergraduate and graduate curricula. Private liberal arts colleges include Bowdoin College (Brunswick; 1794), Bates College (Lewiston; 1855), and Colby College (Waterville; 1813).
Cultural life
In its culture as in its social and economic development, Maine reveals the attributes of both a struggling frontier community and an eclectic society immersed in commerce with other cultures. Folktales, songs, local humour, and the short stories and poems of native authors are direct, earthy, and filled with a sense of the absurdity of humans’ awkward attempts to subdue nature.
The tools of the woodsman, farmer, and fisherman are clean and simple, as are the lines of country homes, meetinghouses, and working boats. The great mansions of the old seaports, among some of the finest memorials to an earlier America, are filled with furniture, chests, books, prints, hangings, screens, pottery, and bric-a-brac gathered on the many voyages of Maine’s seafarers to Europe and Asia, as well as with examples of the shipbuilders’ and sailors’ arts of wood carving and scrimshaw. Maine has, in addition, the unique contributions of such groups as the Shakers and its own local versions of the Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic, and Victorian styles of American architecture.
Maine has had a revival in crafts production, including pottery, metalworking, block and silk-screen printing, weaving, furniture making, and carving. State agencies, historical societies, museums, and local associations are engaged in preserving historic sites and in the collection, preservation, and presentation of materials on Maine’s heritage. Maine’s state museum is located in Augusta, and the Marine Maritime Museum is in Bath.
Maine has been, and continues to be, the birthplace or the permanent or seasonal home of many well-known figures in the American arts. They have included such writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and (more recently) Stephen King; the painters Winslow Homer, John Marin, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth; and composer Walter Piston. Among the state’s largest and finest museums are the Portland Museum of Art; the Colby College Museum of Art, which has a large collection of works by Winslow Homer; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center, in Rockland; and the Abbe Museum, in Bar Harbor, which houses a collection of Native American artifacts. Active cultural programs are sponsored by the state’s colleges and universities, museums, community symphonies, workshops and camps, and numerous summer theatres.
Acadia National Park, which encompasses an area of 65 square miles (168 square km), extends over most of Mount Desert Island and Isle au Haut, as well as the Scoodic Peninsula on the mainland; the first national park east of the Mississippi River, it is also one of the most visited in the national parks system. Other recreational attractions include the state’s largest park, Baxter State Park, a wilderness area of more than 310 square miles (800 square km) surrounding Mount Katahdin; the 95-mile (153-km) Allagash Wilderness Waterway; Camden Hills State Park, which includes Mount Megunticook (1,380 feet [421 metres]); and more than 100 other state parks and historic sites. Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, located along 50 miles (80 km) of the southern coastline, is home to more than 230 species of birds. The northern portion of the Appalachian Trail runs through Maine from the New Hampshire border to Mount Katahdin; its 280-mile (450-km) length in the state is the most rugged and isolated section of the trail.
History
Algonquian-speaking Mi’kmaq (Micmac) and Abenaki peoples were the earliest known inhabitants in Maine. The Abenaki were spread across the state along the river valleys and the coasts, where they hunted, fished, and grew crops; the more-warlike Mi’kmaq were concentrated in the eastern portion of the state, extending into New Brunswick. Only scattered tribes survived the arrival of European settlers; many of the surviving Native Americans moved to reservations or were integrated into white communities. Five federally recognized tribes exist in the state today. Of these, only the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot remain in significant numbers. The Native Americans have been remembered in many ways, however: in numerous place-names; in the sites of their camps and burial grounds; in ancient trails and water routes; in the use of the canoe, the snowshoe, and the toboggan; in crops such as corn (maize), beans, and squash; and in the continuing concern for the natural environment.
Explorations and disputes
The first European explorations of Maine are shrouded in mystery. Evidence that Vikings (Norsemen) landed on the coast is scant and disputed, and serious questions exist about some of the early British claims based on John Cabot’s voyages in the late 1490s. Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English explorers did probe the islands and the bays and rivers of the “maine” (mainland) throughout the 16th century; by the first decade of the 17th century, summer fisheries had been established on some of the coastal islands, and fur trade had begun with Native American groups. York (1641), on the southern coast, was the first chartered city in America.
An area of present-day Maine claimed by both the French and English crowns was an intermittent battleground between the English, the Indians, and the French from 1615 until 1675 and a constant battleground from that date until 1763, when the British conquered the French in eastern Canada.
Maine had been given separate provincial status in New England under royal patents granted by Charles I, but the Puritans of Massachusetts claimed and annexed various portions of the territory throughout the 1600s. Massachusetts gained control over the whole of Maine after the proprietor, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, backed the losing side in the English Civil Wars. Frontier settlers in Maine chafed under Massachusetts rule, but the merchants of the coastal towns resisted the separation movement until the War of 1812, when popular resentment against the failure of the Massachusetts Commonwealth to protect the District of Maine against British raids tipped the scales in favour of separation. Maine entered the Union as a free state (i.e., one where slavery was not legal) under the Missouri Compromise in 1820.
The northeastern boundary of the state was a matter of serious controversy between the United States and Britain. The Peace of Paris (1783) at the conclusion of the American Revolution identified the boundary in part as extending along the middle of the St. Croix River to its source and from there north to highlands running northwest to the “head of Connecticut river.” Identifying those highlands proved to be difficult. Efforts at arbitration failed in 1831, and the disputed area was the scene of the so-called Aroostook War of 1838–39. In March 1839 Gen. Winfield Scott arranged a truce calling for joint occupancy of the disputed territory. This remained in effect until 1842, when a settlement was reached that divided the territory virtually in half.