Gateway to Vacationland: The Making of Portland, Maine

Chapter 1. From Beleaguered Outpost to Booming Port City, 1632–1860

[ 9 ] CHAPTER ONE  From Beleaguered Outpost to Booming Port City, 1632–1860 “InallofNewEnglandthereisnopleasantertownthanPortland,intheState of Maine.” Thus begins Samuel Longfellow’s Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.ItisanappropriateopeningforabookaboutSamuel’sfather,Henry Wadsworth, which includes the poet’s diaries, where Longfellow ceaselessly extols the spectacular beauty of his birthplace and island-studded Casco Bay. He describes Portland as the “beautiful city by the sea,” where foaming waves crash against Portland Head and where, from the Western Promenade, the sun sets brilliantly over distant snowcapped Mount Washington. Free of sandbars, safe for the largest vessels at all stages of the tide (once periodically dredged), Casco Bay and the Fore River docks made Portland in the nineteenth century not only beautiful but—together with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans—one of America’s premier harbors. Fellow poet, historian, and six-term mayor of Portland, James Phinney Baxter, shared Longfellow’s ecstasy at Portland’s natural beauty. “Thus, this beautiful peninsula,” wrote Baxter in the “Story of Portland,” an article for an 1895 issue of New England Magazine, “rising above the blue sea, adorned with sheltering groves, and verdant glades, kept fresh by perennial springs, in due time became the abode of man.”1 Baxter’s 1895 words captured a central truth about Portland, and one that has exerted a driving force shaping the city’s history into the twenty-first century: paramount among its many natural assets was beauty itself. Among [ 10 ] CHAPTER ONE the early voyagers drawn to the beauty of Portland, Baxter counted Norse kings, Henry Cabot, Samuel Champlain, and Christopher Levett of York, England. But, explained Baxter, it was the fur trader George Cleeves who in 1632 planted the first settlement in an area that the natives called Machigonne or The Great Knee.2 By 1658, the year the Massachusetts Bay Court, empowered by Puritan Oliver Cromwell’s victory in England, proclaimed authority over Maine and renamed Cleeves’s settlement Falmouth, forty families lived there.3 In the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century, Falmouth became a theater in a larger, worldwide conflict that historians have called the Great War for Empire. In the form of King Philip’s War, which allied the French and the Wabanaki Indians against British settlers, the conflict in 1676 reached Falmouth and reduced the small but flourishing British trading outpost to ashes. A few Falmouth residents returned in 1681 and, under the command of Governor Thomas Danforth, built Fort Loyal near the foot of India Street, then called King Street. Six hundred people lived in Falmouth by 1688. But no sooner had it regained population and prosperity than the long British-French struggle for empire doomed it a second time. In 1690, during King William’s War (1688–1697), the French under Louis de Baude Frontenac and his Abenaki Indian allies laid waste to Falmouth once more, so desolating it that no townspeople returned until 1715.4 Again, Falmouth resurrected itself, not only as a shipping port for fish and lumber but as a favored mast port for the British navy. It was not alone as a northern port vying with Boston to achieve prominence ; Providence, Rhode Island; Nantucket, New Bedford, and Newburyport, Massachusetts; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and York and Kennebunkport, Maine, all entered the lists. All those places, like Falmouth, had deep, ice-free harbors. For example, Portsmouth in the eighteenth century thrived as the main center of settlement and government of colonial New Hampshire. By the 1770s the Strawbery Banke riverfront of Portsmouth at the mouth of the Piscataquis River had developed a lively European and West Indies trade in lumber, flour, fish, and other local products—trade that would continue to expand.5 In 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, more than 2,000 people inhabited Falmouth Neck (as the peninsular landform was called), which steadily loomed as an important part of the Atlantic World. As it had earlier, the heart of the local economy involved timber, cut by farmers in the richly forested hinterland and floated or carted to coastal sawmills where white pine, Map of the Portland region showing islands, suburbs, and important sites of hotels and tourist attractions ca. 1900–1940. Drawn by Rosemary Mosher, Orbis, LLC. [ 12 ] CHAPTER ONE oak, maple, birch, beech, and elm timber was sawn into board footage, or into barrel staves or shooks, and stored in Falmouth Neck warehouses. Local shipbuilders consumed some...