Maine History Online

Republican leaders skillfully combined the rhetoric of free-soil populism and Whig industrial enthusiasm to win over rural constituencies to the notion that industrial development benefited everyone.

"How many rusticator folks you got up to your place this season, Capt'n?" might be the banter. "Wal, we've got half a dozen, all told, jest now. I kind of hat to have them-kind round under foot, summertimes, but we make out to get a dollar out of 'em some ways or another."

It was evident, the Portland Board of Trade noted, that Maine's prosperity depended "in a large measure upon ... these little centres of industry and trade which supply to such a large degree the commercial advancement of the leading cities of our State."

Chamberlain Reflects on Maine's Economy

In the second half of the century Maine's traditional industries showed little of the vigor they displayed earlier. The lumber, leather, granite, ice, slate, fish, and lime industries still supported more than 40 percent of Maine's working population at the end of the century, but these industries were technologically stagnant and plagued with seasonal layoffs and declining markets. The net value of Maine's products was falling when compared to that of other states.

This trend concerned Maine's political and business leaders. In one of the most thoughtful reflections on Maine's economy in the 19th century, former governor Joshua L. Chamberlain delivered a lengthy speech on "Maine's Place in History" at the nation's centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876.

As befitting the occasion, he praised his fellow Mainers for their contribution to history, but he was driven by circumstances to address Maine's most compelling question: why had its place in this national pageant become, as he put it, so obscure? There was no obvious reason why the meager rivers of southern New England were taxed to their fullest for industrial development, while Maine's bounding waters continued to run unfettered to the sea.

Maine people were acknowledged for their thrift and ingenuity, but still, after 200 years of settlement, "the fact cannot be suppressed, that (Maine) is popularly spoken of as if she were a neighbor to the western savage." Maine, it seemed, had become "old and exhausted," even before its true wealth had been tapped.

The failure to realize Maine's natural potential was usually ascribed to its unfortunate reputation for harsh climate, its eastward-thrusting frontier, or its oppression at the hands of Boston merchants. Discounting these answers, Chamberlain traced Maine's decline to the manner in which its people used their natural bounty.

For two centuries they had been "stripping her forests and murdering her land; shipping away the fertility of her soil ... snatching at the near advantage, and heeding not what was to come." Shipping off their natural resources without transforming them into finished products, they sold their birthright merely to enrich others. A state that relied solely on the sale of its natural materials, Chamberlain cautioned, "will find that when they are gone, she is gone."

Chamberlain's speech, widely reported and sold in bound text, raised questions that were on many minds. Like others of his generation, he advocated a new economy that would extend the reach of human labor through technology and add to the value of its natural resources.

The state boasted more than 1,600 lakes above 600 feet in elevation, and this immense kinetic force was the key to fashioning a new industrial landscape. Chamberlain acknowledged the many small industries that used these water powers, but he envisioned a more progressive force unleashed by combining their energies to power giant factories and mills.

Maine would continue to nourish its roots in the land, not by stripping its resources and sending them away, but by imposing a new industrial regime on the rivers and forest of Maine.

These concerns translated into policies designed to make Maine resources more attractive to financing sources. The legislature loosened its regulations for incorporating banks, railroads, insurance companies, and industrial facilities, offered exclusive rights for development, provided tax rebates and land grants, sold off the remaining public lands, granted flowage rights and other forms of access to natural resources, and lowered tax rates on industrial property.

Republican leaders skillfully combined the rhetoric of free-soil populism and Whig industrial enthusiasm to win over rural constituencies to the notion that industrial development benefited everyone.

"No reasonable opportunities should be neglected to direct the attention of our own citizens and those from abroad, to the favorable and extraordinary advantages found here, for the investment of capital," Governor Henry B. Cleaves announced in 1898. The Portland Board of Trade proposed that Maine "make every concession possible to encourage and promote the manufacturers that we have here, with the same liberal hand that other states so freely offer."

This policy carried the seeds of conflict, however. As Chamberlain noted, these resources sustained a broad spectrum of economic activity. Maine's big manufacturers produced cotton cloth, lumber, paper, and ships. Still, about half the total value of Maine products came from small industrial concerns producing woolen textiles, canned goods, milled flour, foundry products, leather, and printed material – the other pole in what industrial historian Paul Rivard called Maine's "dual economy."

While Maine's promoters embraced a more imperial vision, rural Mainers clung to a society of small shops and mills set in a landscape of farms and villages.