April 16, 1778: Continental Army soldier William Bayley of Falmouth, which later became Portland, writes from George Washington’s Revolutionary War encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to his mother in Falmouth, saying he was sick with a fever but has recovered. According to historians’ estimates, 1,700 to 2,000 of Washington’s 12,000 soldiers die of illness, in […]

April 15, 1905: The U.S. War Department transfers ownership of the Kennebec Arsenal in Augusta from the federal government to the state. The arsenal, located on the eastern bank of the Kennebec River within sight of downtown Augusta, is the northernmost 19th-century U.S. arsenal and one of the best preserved. Eight granite structures built from […]

April 13, 1976: President Gerald Ford signs the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, which affects Maine’s fishing industry directly. The law, which takes effect in 1977 and later is amended several times, establishes an exclusive fishing zone 200 miles out to sea from all U.S. coastlines. The law, which prescribes fishery management through […]

April 12, 2019: Bernstein Shur, Maine’s largest law firm, picks a female chief executive officer for the first time. Joan Fortin assumes her new duties in January 2020. At the time of her selection, no woman holds the top job at Maine’s 15 largest law firms, according to a MaineBiz magazine annual survey. Bernstein Shur […]

April 11, 1955: Former U.S. Rep. John Nelson, a Colby College trustee, dies in Augusta at the age of 80. While in Congress, Nelson, a Republican, drew notice for refusing to sign a committee report calling for denying citizenship to naturalized communists. A China native and Colby College and University of Maine School of Law […]

April 10, 1836: The matron in a New York City brothel discovers about 3 a.m. that somebody has killed Helen Jewett, a 22-year-old prostitute from Maine, and has set Jewett’s bed on fire, partially charring her body. One of Jewett’s regular clients, Richard P. Robinson, later is arrested, tried and acquitted amid a storm of […]

April 9, 1991: Prolific author Louise Dickinson Rich, who often wrote about Maine, dies at 87 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Rich, a Massachusetts native who worked as a teacher, met Ralph Rich, an engineer, on a canoeing trip in the Rangeley area in 1933. They married, fled from their workaday world to Maine and lived in […]

April 8, 1851: Neal Dow (1804-1897) is elected mayor of Portland. He quickly uses his influence in that position to lobby successfully for passage later that year of a state law generally banning the purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages, earning Dow the nickname “the Napoleon of Temperance.” The law, which becomes known nationally as […]

April 7, 2010: Maine’s Legislature issues a statement of apology for state officials’ forcible eviction a century earlier of a largely interracial group of residents from Malaga Island, in Casco Bay. The island lies off Phippsburg near the mouth of the New Meadows River. A racially mixed community of squatter fishermen’s families lived there. Newspaper […]