Maine historical timeline

Origins

The Wabanaki peoples — Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac — have lived here for thousands of years, and four nations remain in the state today.

Turning points

The coast was contested between France and Britain for over a century, and the fighting reached further into daily life here than in the colonies to the south. Maine was governed as part of Massachusetts until it became a state in its own right in 1820, as one half of the congressional bargain that admitted it alongside a slave state to keep the balance in the Senate.

Influential people

Nineteenth-century Maine ran on timber, shipbuilding and ice. The yards on the Kennebec River built wooden vessels and then steel ones, and still build warships today.

Cultural evolution

From the 1880s the coast became a summer retreat for wealthy families from Boston, New York and Philadelphia, who built on Mount Desert Island and later gave much of it away — Acadia was assembled largely from donated private land, the only national park created that way.

Present-day significance

Lobstering, forestry and tourism carry the modern economy, with Portland the centre of gravity for everything else.