Portland, Maine, has a phoenix on its seal after four ruinous fires
Portland, Maine, has been wiped out more than once. Abenaki fighters destroyed the village in 1676, French raiders in 1690, the Royal Navy burned it in 1775, and a Fourth of July fire in 1866 left over 10,000 homeless. Its seal shows a phoenix, and Portland, Oregon, was named after it.
The Eastern Abenaki called the peninsula Machigonne, great neck. The first English attempt at settlement, by naval captain Christopher Levett, who received 6,000 acres in 1623, failed completely; he left ten men in a stone house, sailed home to drum up support, and nobody knows what became of them. A fishing village called Casco followed in 1632, renamed Falmouth after Massachusetts took over in 1658. In 1786 residents of the harbour district called The Neck broke away and chose the name Portland, after the Isle of Portland in Dorset; the Old English root means land around a harbour.
It briefly served as Maine's capital when statehood came in 1820, before Augusta took over in 1832. Maine then led the country in 1851 with a law banning alcohol sales except for medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing use, which eighteen other states copied, and Portland saw a rum riot in 1855. The Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal, finished in 1853, made the city Canada's main ice-free winter port, and the Portland Company built more than six hundred steam locomotives. That trade faded after the Grand Trunk was nationalised in 1923 and traffic moved to Halifax.
Renewal has come unevenly. A highway project from 1967 demolished 130 homes and businesses on Franklin Street, and a shopping mall opened in South Portland in 1971 drained the downtown. Tourists and new businesses later revived the cobbled Old Port, while Bayside and Munjoy Hill filled with shops and condominiums. Gentrification has a cost: in 2015 rents jumped by an average of 17.4 per cent, the second-steepest rise in the country.
Water shapes the city's future. Of its 69.44 square miles, more than two-thirds is water, and the Gulf of Maine is warming fast. A 2022 federal report projected sea level could rise two to six feet by 2100, and in January 2024 a record tide of 14.57 feet combined with rain and wind to flood the waterfront. The 2020 census counted 68,408 residents.
Source: Portland, Maine
