Portland, ME Hotels, 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 the 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 the earliest days it was a cosmopolitan city, with a large free black population who 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 Portland's … more »