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 […]

April 5, 1974: Horror writer Stephen King’s novel “Carrie” is published. It is King’s fourth novel but the first to appear in print. The book and a subsequent movie of the same name make King world-famous. King was born in Portland and raised mostly in Durham, although he also spent part of his childhood in […]

April 4, 1802: Dorothea Dix, who becomes renowned nationwide as a reformer of treatment of the mentally ill and champion of their rights, is born in Hampden. Dix teaches Sunday school lessons in the Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts and witnesses the horrific conditions that people living in such places endure. From 1841 to […]