Maine History Online

Urban Maine

Although Maine in 1930 was predominantly rural, the state's largest city, Portland, contained more than 70,000 inhabitants; Lewiston's population stood at 35,000, and Bangor's was 28,000. Maine's cities served a variety of economic functions.

Portland, Bangor, Presque Isle, Fort Fairfield, and Caribou provided commercial services for the surrounding country. Biddeford, Lewiston, and Augusta specialized in cotton textiles. Millinocket, Westbrook, Rumford, Jay, Woodland, and Bucksport made paper products. Auburn, Gardner, Wilton, Augusta, and Hallowell produced shoes. Smaller communities hosted canneries for fish, fruit, and vegetables or mills for various wood products.

Urban Maine welcomed the new economy of the 1920s, which brought low-priced mass-produced automobiles and new electrical appliances like radios, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. But most of these cities, apart from the paper mill towns, lacked the prosperity of America's larger metropolises.

Shipbuilding in Bath continued to decline, and Portland competed with Boston to the south and St. John and Halifax to the north in port facilities. In the 1850s Portland became eastern Canada's major winter port by building a rail line to Montreal, but in the 20th century its facilities fell below standards set by other East-Coast cities. In 1919 the state approved a bond issue to built a modern pier and warehouse on the waterfront, but four years later Canadian tariffs diverted that country's shipping to Halifax and St. John.

Many conservative Portland leaders advocated tourism as an alternative source of economic growth, and the city's port facilities continued to languish.

Maine's Depression Economy

The stock market crash of October 1929 brought an end to the "Roaring Twenties" and ushered in the Great Depression. The causes of this economic disaster are complex, but suffice to say the decade brought the worst economic conditions in the country's history, with as many as one-third of the nation's workforce unemployed.

Industrial states were particularly hard-hit, meaning that Maine's experience was less devastating. Most farm families could at least grow their own food, and in fact many unemployed urban workers returned to the old homestead during the decade. Rural Maine experienced a 5.9 percent increase in population – its first gain since the 1870s.

The Depression was also cushioned by the fact that leading Maine industries like lumber, textiles, fishing, shoes, and leather were already stripped of the excesses that characterized so much of American industry in the 1920s. With tight budgets and low inventories, these firms weathered the Depression in relatively good shape. As late as 1931 the New York Times described Maine's situation as "not particularly abnormal": depression, it seemed, was the usual state of affairs in the beleaguered state.

By 1933 Maine began to feel effects of the Depression. Unemployment rose to an estimated 15 percent; farmers were short of cash for taxes and mortgages; storefronts were boarded up, and tourist travel declined in the coastal villages.

Aroostook County's heavily commercialized potato farmers, who in good years produced about half Maine's agricultural output, were particularly hard-hit. Potato prices ranged from a high of $2 per bushel in 1925 to a low of 21 cents in 1931, a price well below the cost of shipping. Large mortgages meant that farm costs remained constant even when farmers cut back on production; potato growers broke even in just five seasons between 1930 and 1940.

In agriculture and in other areas of Maine's economy, Depression-era declines were compounded by long-term structural problems. The paper industry faced growing competition from Canadian producers when tariffs fell after the turn of the century, and in the 1930s chemists discovered ways of pulping southern pine. With vast tracts of abandoned cotton fields growing back to pine forests, southern production expanded rapidly, as did production in the Great Lakes area.

Mill workers fared reasonably well under these conditions; wages dropped, but owners reduced hours to keep more workers employed. In the woods, pulp-cutters competed against wood imports from northern Europe and Canada and contract workers from Quebec. In the St. John valley some workers spent three weeks in the woods only to come out with $1.50 to $3 in cash – or still in debt for their camp board.

Textile mills faced a similar combination of structural weaknesses and Depression markets as the industry moved south to benefit from lower transport costs and cheaper labor. Mills remaining in Maine already were honed by this competition, and with budgets and inventory low, they ran at 70 percent capacity during the Depression.

Lobster and clam prices fell precipitously since these items were considered luxuries, but here, too, long-term changes – Canadian competition in this case – compounded the problem. In postwar years these market changes would continue to plague Maine's economy.