Maine History Online

National trends contributed to tourism's vitality in Maine. Summer fevers had driven wealthier Americans into the countryside from their town and city homes since late colonial times, but it was a different kind of health consciousness, one sustained by a growing middle class with time and funds for leisure pursuits and anxiety about urban, sedentary living that fueled tourism in Maine.

Neurasthenia and other nervous disorders, seen as byproducts of frenetic modern life by the 1880s, required a retreat into meaningful, "natural" experiences.

Men would be manlier, and better husbands and fathers, if they could hunt and fish like Indians and the pre industrial men of legends. Women would be calmer, and better wives and mothers, if they could imbibe nature's restorative power.

Summer rentals and resorts were just the first stage of a deeper transformation of Maine's economic reliance on the aesthetics of its natural bounty. The first national park east of the Mississippi River, Acadia National Park began with the name "Lafayette National Park." It brought tourists to Maine to experience the tallest mountain on the coast, Green Mountain, later known as Cadillac Mountain, as well as ocean, lake, and mountain activities and views.

While the area surrounding Mount Katahdin did not become a state park until 1931, people were drawn to the mountain and surrounding peaks and rivers for many years before that. Thoreau climbed Katahdin in 1846 and wrote about it. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a Maine native, women's rights advocate, and author probably was the first woman to climb the mountain, ascending it in 1849.

Oakes Smith began an account of her adventure:

Mount Katahdin, the highest summit of Maine had been from childhood associated with all my dreams of wild and magnificent scenery. Throned in the north amid frost and snows, amid old primeval forests, the haunt only of huge animals, who spurned the luxury of the level country and bid themselves amid its savage recesses, I had often brooded over the intense solitude and wished that some grand old legend of love or strife were mingled with its name; now I rejoice that Katahdin stand unassociated with the puny pulsations of human hearts, a solitary Wendigo, or Stone Giant, heavy with age and seamed with the scars of ages.

Hers and other accounts of adventures in the Maine woods, mountains, and seascapes helped draw more and more tourists to the wilderness Maine represented.

The Appalachian Trail, begun in 1921 and completed in 1937, stretches from Mount Katahdin to Georgia. It, too, draws on and perpetuates Maine as a wilderness.

Another promoter of the Maine outdoors experience was Cornelia "Fly Rod" Crosby of Phillips (1854-1946), who was a fly fisher, hunter, and outdoor enthusiast and who worked for the Maine Central Railroad as parts of its publicity efforts to attract ridership and tourism to Maine. She was proof that women as well as men were interested in outdoor adventures.

The Allagash Wilderness Waterway earned that designation in 1966, when the Maine Legislature took steps to preserve the 92-mile trail of lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams. It already had been a destination for adventure-minded canoeists for many years.

Henry Withee of Rockport and Horace Bailey, a Maine native who lived in Massachusetts, undertook the trip in July 1911.

Withee wrote in his account of the journey, "… almost everybody, except for a few abnormal unfortunates, has a natural love of living in the open, of the woods, and for the wild things that inhabit them."

At the end of his account, he wrote, "We had been in close touch with moose, over a hundred deer, thousands of smaller animals and game-birds, myriads of songbirds, and had the finest fishing one can find in this country. We had sound, hard bodies, clear, alert eyes and minds and thoroughly alert appetites."

Maine tourism, by the early 20th century, had become a full-blown industry, and the state absorbed flocks of vacationing Americans conditioned to see the outdoors as hospitable and healthy and themselves as needing the same.

Temporarily contracting during the Depression years, tourism expanded following the World War II with advances in automobiles, highway systems, campgrounds, and "motor hotels" catering to rising numbers of American families on vacation.

Not everyone in Maine appreciates the tourist economy. Wryly referred to as the "summer plague," tourist season can mean added traffic, crowds, stress, and annoyance for year-round residents.

Despite various complaints and issues associated with tourism, it provides a healthy boost to the Maine economy. In 2006, tourism accounted for 15 percent of the gross state produce and one in six Maine jobs.

What connects lumbering, farming, fishing, and vacationing is Maine's particular situation. Cursed by some, blessed by many, Maine's unique combination of forest, soil, water, and climate has contributed to its economic viability and the vitality of its people who have drawn from their location creatively and resourcefully for centuries.