Portland, ME Guides, Vacations, Tourism

The largest city in Maine, Portland was founded in 1632 in a superb position on the Casco Bay Peninsula, and quickly prospered, building ships and exporting great inland pines for use as masts. A long line of wooden wharves stretched along the seafront, with the merchants' houses on the hillside above. From its earliest days, Portland was a cosmopolitan city, with a large free black population that traditionally worked as longshoremen; great bitterness arose when Irish immigrants began to muscle in on the scene in the 1830s. When the railroads came, the Canada Trunk Line had its terminus right on … more »