The death penalty was abolished in Maine in 1876, restored in 1883, and again abolished in 1887.
Penal and Charitable Institutions.—The state penal and reformatory institutions consist of the state prison at Thomaston, the state (reform) school for boys at South Portland, and a state industrial school for girls at Hallowell, established in 1875 and taken over by the state in 1899. The two schools are not places of punishment, but reformatory schools for delinquent boys (from 8 to 16 years of age) and girls (from 6 to 16 years), who have been committed by the courts for violations of law, and, in the case of girls, who, by force of circumstances or associations, are “in manifest danger of becoming outcasts of society.” The prison is in charge of a board of three inspectors and a warden, and each of the other two institutions is in charge of a board of trustees; the inspectors, warden, and trustees are all appointed by the governor and council. Convicts in the prison are usually employed in the manufacture of articles that are not extensively made elsewhere in the state, such as carriages, harness, furniture and brooms. The inmates of the state school for boys receive instruction in farming, carpentry, tailoring, laundry work, and various other trades and occupations; and the girls in the state industrial school are trained in housework, laundering, dressmaking, &c. Paupers are cared for chiefly by the towns and cities, those wholly dependent being placed in almshouses and those only partially dependent receiving aid at their homes. The charitable institutions maintained by the state are: the military and naval orphan asylum at Bath, the Maine institution for the blind at Portland, the Maine school for the deaf (established in 1876, and taken over by the state in 1897) at Portland, the Maine insane hospital at Augusta, the Eastern Maine insane hospital at Bangor, and a school for the feeble-minded (established in 1907) at West Pownal, each of which is governed by trustees appointed by the governor and council, with the exception of a part of those of the orphan asylum, who are appointed by the corporation. Besides the strictly state institutions, there are a number of private charitable institutions which are assisted by state funds; among these are the eye and ear infirmary at Portland, the Maine state sanatorium at Hebron for the treatment of tuberculosis, and various hospitals, orphanages, &c. The national government has a branch of the national home for disabled volunteer soldiers at Togus, and a marine hospital at Portland.
Education.—The school-district system was established in 1800 while Maine was still a part of Massachusetts and was maintained by the first school law passed, in 1821, by the state legislature; but, beginning in the next year, one town after another received the privilege of abolishing its districts, and in 1893 the system was abolished by act of the legislature. A state board of education, composed of one member from each county, was established in 1846, but for this was substituted, in 1852, a commissioner of schools for each county, appointed by the governor, and two years later a state superintendent of schools was substituted for the county commissioners. County supervision by county supervisors was tried in 1869-1872. Since these several changes the common school system has been administered by towns and cities subject to an increasing amount of control through enactments of the state legislature and the general supervision of the state superintendent. The town officers are a superintending school committee of three members and a superintendent. The members of the committee are elected for a term of three years, one retiring every year, and women as well as men are eligible for the office. The superintendent may be elected by the town or appointed by the committee, or towns having not less than twenty or more than fifty schools may unite in employing a superintendent. In cities the committee is usually larger than in towns and is commonly elected by wards. Since 1889 each town and city has been required to furnish textbooks, apparatus and supplies, without cost to the pupils. The minimum length of the school year is fixed by a statute of 1893 at twenty weeks; the average length is about twenty-eight weeks. A compulsory education law, enacted in 1901, requires the attendance at some public or approved private school of each child between the ages of seven and fifteen during all the time that school is in session, except that necessary absences may be excused. For the maintenance of the common schools each town is required (since 1905) to raise annually at least fifty-five cents per capita, exclusive of what may be received from other sources, and to this is added the proceeds of a state tax of one and a half mills on a dollar, one-half the proceeds of the tax on savings banks, a 6% income from the permanent school fund (derived mainly from the sale of school lands), and state appropriations for the payment in part of the superintendence in towns that have united for that purpose. Any section of a town may establish and maintain a high school provided there be not more than two such schools in one town, and the state makes appropriations for the support of such schools equal to one-half the cost of instruction, but the maximum grant to any one such school is $250.
The state maintains five normal schools: that at Farmington (established 1864), that at Castine (1866), that at Gorham (1879); that at Presque Isle (the Aroostook state normal school, 1903), and the Madawaska training school at Fort Kent, each of which is under the direction of a board of trustees consisting of the governor, the state superintendent of schools, and five other members appointed by the governor and council for not more than three years. At the head of the public school system is the university of Maine, near the village of Orono in Orono township (pop. in 1900, 3257), Penobscot county. This institution was founded in 1865 as the state college of agriculture and the mechanic arts; in 1897 the present name was adopted. It embraces a college of arts and sciences, a college of agriculture, a college of technology (including a department of forestry), a college of law (at Bangor), and a college of pharmacy. The most conspicuous of its twenty-five buildings is the library, built with funds contributed by Andrew Carnegie. In 1908-1909 the university had 104 instructors and 884 students, of whom 113 were in the college of law at Bangor and 420 in the college of technology. The university is maintained with the proceeds of an endowment fund derived chiefly from public lands given by the national government in accordance with the land grant, or Morrill, Act of 1862 (see Morrill, Justin S.) and from the bequest ($100,000) of Abner Coburn (1803-1885); by appropriations of Congress under the second Morrill Act (1890), and under the Nelson Amendment of 1907, by appropriations of the state legislature, and by fees paid by the students. Connected with the university is an agricultural experiment station, established and maintained under the Hatch Act (1887) and the Adams Act (1906) of the national Congress. The government of the university is entrusted, subject to inspection of the governor and council, to a board of eight trustees. Among the important institutions of learning which have no official connexion with the state are Bowdoin College (opened in 1802), at Brunswick; Colby College (Baptist, opened in 1818), at Waterville; and Bates College (originally Free Baptist but now unsectarian; opened in 1863), at Lewiston. In 1900 5.1% of the state’s inhabitants ten years of age and over were illiterate (i.e. could neither read nor write, or could read but not write); of the native whites within this age limit 2.4% were illiterate, of the foreign whites, 19.4%. Of the foreign-born whites 15.7% were unable to speak English.
Finance.—The chief sources of the state’s revenue are a general property tax and taxes on the franchises of corporations, especially those of railway and insurance companies and savings banks; among the smaller sources are licences or fees, a poll tax, and a collateral inheritance tax. The general property tax for state and local purposes is assessed by local assessors, but their work is reviewed for the purpose of equalization among the several towns and counties by a board of state assessors, which also assesses the corporations. This board of three members (not more than two of whom may be of the same political party) is elected by a joint ballot of the two houses of the legislature for a term of six years, one member retiring every two years. The state is prohibited by the constitution from creating a debt exceeding $300,000 except for the suppression of a rebellion, for repelling an invasion, or for war purposes; and every city and town is forbidden by an amendment adopted in 1877 from creating one exceeding 5% of the assessed value of its property. But the state was authorized by an amendment adopted in 1868 to issue bonds for the reimbursement of the expenses incurred by its cities, towns, and plantations on account of the Civil War, and these bonds, with those issued by the state itself during the Civil War, constituted the largest part of the state’s bonded indebtedness. The bonded debt, however, is rapidly being paid; in January 1901 it was $2,103,000, and in January 1909 only $698,000.
History.—During the 16th century and the early part of the 17th, the coast of Maine attracted various explorers, among them Giovanni da Verrazano (1524), Estéban Gomez (1525), Bartholomew Gosnold (1602), Martin Pring (1603), Pierre du Guast, Sieur De Monts (1604), George Weymouth (1605), and John Smith (1614), who explored and mapped the coast and gave to the country the name New England; but no permanent English settlement was established within what are now the borders of the state until some time between 1623 and 1629. In 1603 De Monts received from Henry IV. of France a charter for all the region between 40° and 46° N. under the name of Acadie, or Acadia, and in 1604 he built a fort on Neutral Island at the mouth of the Saint Croix river. This he abandoned in 1605, but some of his followers were in the vicinity a few years later. In the same year George Weymouth explored the south-west coast, kidnapped five Indians, and carried them to England, where three of them lived for a time in the family of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who soon became the leader in founding Maine. In 1607 the Plymouth Company, of which he was an influential member and which had received a grant of this region from James I. of England in the preceding year, sent out a colony numbering 120 under George Popham (c. 1550-1608), brother of Sir John Popham, and Raleigh Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The colony established itself at the mouth of the Kennebec river in August, but, finding its supplies insufficient, about three-fifths of its number returned to England in December; a severe winter followed and Popham died; then Gilbert, who succeeded to the presidency of the council for the colony, became especially interested in his claim to the territory under his father’s charter,[6] and in 1608 the colony was abandoned. In 1609 the French Jesuits Biard and Masse established a fortified mission station on the island of Mount Desert, and although this as well as the remnant of De Monts’ settlement at the mouth of the Saint Croix was taken in 1613 by Sir Samuel Argall (d. 1626), acting under the instructions of the English at Jamestown, Virginia, some of these colonists returned later. In 1620 the Council for New England, the successor of the Plymouth Company, obtained a grant of the country between latitude 40° and 48° N. extending from sea to sea, and two years later Gorges and John Mason (1586-1635) received from the Council a grant of the territory between the Merrimac and the Kennebec rivers for 60 m. inland under the name of the Province of Maine. In 1629 they divided their possession, Gorges taking the portion between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. Numerous grants of land in this vicinity followed within a few years; and in the meantime permanent settlements at York, Saco, Biddeford, Port Elizabeth, Falmouth (now Portland) and Scarborough were established in rapid succession. The Council for New England surrendered its charter in 1635. In the division of its territory Gorges retained the portion previously granted to him, and the region between the Kennebec and the Saint Croix north to the Saint Lawrence, though still claimed by the French as part of Acadia, was conveyed to Sir William Alexander (1567?-1640); later, in 1664, this was conveyed to the duke of York, afterwards James II. of England.
Gorges named his tract the County of New Somersetshire, and immediately began the administration of government, setting up in 1635 or 1636 a court at Saco under the direction of his kinsman William Gorges. In 1639 he procured for his province a royal charter modelled after that of Maryland, which invested him with the feudal tenure of a county palatine and vice-regal powers of government. He called into existence a formidably large number of officers to govern it, but his charter was in conflict with the other (mutually conflicting) grants of the Council for New England, east of the Piscataqua; and Gorges and his agents met with a determined opposition under the leadership of George Cleeve, the deputy-president of the Lygonia, or “Plough” Patent, which extended along the coast from Cape Porpoise to Casco, and in issuing which the Council for New England had granted governmental as well as territorial rights. Moreover, Puritan Massachusetts, which was naturally hostile to the Anglicanism of Gorges and his followers, interpreted her charter so as to make her northern boundary run east and west from a point 3 m. north of the source of the Merrimac river, and on this basis laid claim to practically the whole of Maine then settled. The factional quarrels there, together with the Commonwealth government in England, made it easy for Massachusetts to enforce this claim at the time, and between 1652 and 1658 Maine was gradually annexed to Massachusetts. In 1672 Massachusetts extended her boundary eastward as far as Penobscot Bay. Ferdinando Gorges, a grandson of the original proprietor, brought before parliament his claim to Maine and in 1664 a committee of that body decided in his favour; but Massachusetts successfully resisted until 1677, when the king in council decided against her. She then quietly purchased the Gorges claim for £1,250 and held the province as a proprietor until 1691, when by the new Massachusetts charter Maine was extended to the Saint Croix river, and was made an integral part of Massachusetts.
The French still claimed all territory east of the Penobscot, and not only was Maine an exposed frontier and battleground during the long struggle of the English against the Indians and the French, but its citizens bore a conspicuous part in the expeditions beyond its borders. Port Royal was taken in May 1690 by Sir William Phipps and Louisburg in June 1745 by Sir William Pepperell, both these commanders being from Maine. These expeditions were such a drain on Maine’s population that Massachusetts was called upon to send men to garrison the little forts that protected the homes left defenceless by men who had gone to the front. During the War of Independence, the town of Falmouth (now Portland), which had ardently resisted the claims of the British, was bombarded and burned, in 1775; in the same year Benedict Arnold followed the course of the Kennebec and Dead rivers on his expedition to Quebec; and from 1779 to 1783 a British force was established at Castine. The embargo and non-intercourse laws from 1807 to 1812 were a severe blow to Maine’s shipping, and in the War of 1812 Eastport, Castine, Hampden, Bangor and Machias fell into the hands of the British.
Maine was in general well governed as a part of Massachusetts, but a geographical separation, a desire to be rid of the burden of a large state debt, and a difference of economic interests as well as of politics (Maine was largely Democratic and Massachusetts was largely Federalist) created a desire for an independent commonwealth. This was felt before the close of the War of Independence and in 1785-1787 conventions were held at Falmouth (Portland) to consider the matter, but the opposition prevailed. The want of protection during the War of 1812 revived the question, and in 1816 the General Court in response to a great number of petitions submitted to a vote in the towns and plantations of the District the question: “Shall the legislature be requested to give its consent to the separation of the District of Maine from Massachusetts, and the erection of said District into a separate state?” The returns showed 10,393 yeas to 6501 nays, but they also showed that less than one-half the full vote had been cast. Acting upon these returns the legislature passed a bill prescribing the terms of separation, and directed another vote of the towns and plantations upon the question of separation and the election of delegates to a convention at Brunswick which should proceed to frame a constitution in case the second popular vote gave a majority of five to four for separation; but as that vote was only 11,969 yeas to 10,347 nays the advocates of separation were unsuccessful. But a large source of opposition to separation was removed in 1819 when Congress, dividing the east coast of the United States into two great districts, did away with the regulation which, making each state a district for entering and clearing vessels, would have required coasting vessels from the ports of Maine as a separate state to enter and clear on every trip to or from Boston; as a consequence, the separation measures were carried by large majorities this year, a constitution was framed by a convention which met at Portland in October, this was ratified by town meetings in December, and Maine applied for admission into the Union. Owing to the peculiar situation at the time in Congress, arising from the contest over the admission of Missouri, the question of the admission of Maine became an important one in national politics. By an Act of the 3rd of March 1820, however, Maine was finally admitted into the Union as a separate state, her admission being a part of the Missouri compromise (q.v.).