Maine History Online

Broader railroad networks, new manufacturing centers, and summer colonies and large hotels on the coast and inland lakes provided markets for dairy and cheese products, vegetables, poultry, blueberries, apples, hay, garden crops, and potatoes.

Urged on by agricultural journals, farm clubs, the Maine Board of Agriculture, the Maine State College, and the Grange, farmers experimented with new livestock breeds, better seeds, imported nitrate fertilizers, and crop rotations. In Aroostook County, Irish immigrants moving up the St. John River interspersed with Acadian farmers and shifted to potato monoculture when railroads reached across the river from New Brunswick in the 1870s, eventually making Maine potatoes a standard for the nation.

The war years also were critical to Maine's emerging industrial base, as new wartime markets combined with the reversals in shipping to shift capital from merchant activities to manufacturing ventures.

The Portland Company, the city's only heavy manufacturing establishment, expanded during the war into locomotives, stationary and marine engines, steam boilers, casings, large-bore cannon, and iron work in response to government war contracts. The Casco Iron Works built the pilothouse for the Monitor.

Portland emerged from the war with a mixed commercial-industrial economy, and other Maine towns, many employing women and young girls, manufactured gunpowder, oakum, tents, sailcloth, pumps, blocks, capstans, sails, tents, carriages, knapsacks, clothing, saddlery, and artificial limbs. Lime production skyrocketed as the construction of fortifications drove up prices.

Here again, the Civil War seemed to accelerate a process already in play. Nationally, manufacturing trended upward dramatically in the 1840s, dipped during the war years, then turned upward again until the Depression of 1893.

Likewise, Maine cotton goods production increased in 1850 and continued apace until 1893; boot and shoe and woolen and worsted production gained modestly from 1820 through 1860, accelerated during the war, and remained on the same upward trajectory until 1890.

Bangor's lumber output dropped in 1861 by about a third, yet in 1863 Bangor was once again a "live city," and between 1866 and 1873 returns from the Penobscot booms remained higher than any single peak season before the war. War brought momentary distortions in long-term trends that lasted until the 1890s.

The Civil War had a dramatic effect on Maine's population. Between 1860 and 1870 Maine was one of only two states in the nation to experience a net loss in population, New Hampshire being the other. In the rural uplands and along the eastern coast, population loss was dramatic and profoundly discouraging to those who stayed behind.

The usual explanation is that during the war Maine soldiers learned of the vast opportunities in the virgin soils and timber in the Midwest and followed Horace Greeley's advice, but here again out-migration was nothing new to Maine.

Bangor's lumbermen had been eyeing western timber since the 1830s, when advertisements first began appearing in the Bangor Whig and Courier enticing loggers to the western lumber districts, and by the Civil War, Bangor lumberman Samuel F. Hersey already had towns named after him in Michigan and Minnesota.

Certainly the financial burdens of the war, the new sense of mobility, the rising taxes, and the declines in shipping and fishing activity encouraged the New England diaspora, but the loss of Maine men and women to industrializing cities of the Northeast and to the deep soils and lofty forests of the Midwest issued from more basic causes.

Set in motion by the 1816 "Year without a Summer," outmigration was accelerated by completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the opening of the Midwest by railroad development in the 1850s, and most of all, by the gradual liberalization of federal land policy culminating in the Homestead Act of 1862.

The war's impact was indeed extraordinary, in psychological and cultural terms, but its economic and demographic significance is more obscure.

The war is a central feature in the Maine experience as it is in many other parts of the country. It gave Maine a legend in Joshua Chamberlain and Little Round Top, a political culture based on waving the bloody shirt, and a generation of soldier-statesmen who wove the valiant Union cause into the fabric of Maine memory.

Maine was, in a variety of ways, at a crossroads in 1865, and the Civil War was part of a remarkable conjuncture of trends and special events that made this mid-century decade crucial for Maine.

How the bloody battles on southern soil fit into this economic, demographic, and cultural picture is not a simple question.