As Maine communities began to lose some of their frontier aspects in the early 19th century and assumed a more settled appearance, civic improvements were initiated. Among these was the regulation of livestock which, in contrast to earlier times, were becoming numerous. Swine, although useful for consuming garbage, in themselves provided a health hazard. No…
were in Maine at least as early as 1736 when a church in York purchased a slave for its minister. John Brown Russwurm was Bowdoin College‘s first black graduate, in 1826. The third black to graduate from an American college, he went on to become the co-founder and co-editor of the country’s first black newspaper,…
is a town in York County, incorporated on March 6, 1830; it ceded land to Shapleigh in 1831. It was part of a much larger tract of land in purchased in 1661 by Francis Small from Chief Sunday of the Newichawannock Tribe. Settled in 1776, the town’s first mill, a grist mill, was built on the Salmon Falls River in 1779 by Joseph Parsons.