Maine
Maine was initially part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its boundary with British North America (now Canada) was in dispute for several decades; John Baker unilaterally declared the disputed territory (now part of Aroostook County) to be the "Republic of Madawaska" in 1827, an action that led to the Aroostook War and eventually being settled (and the unrecognized "Republic" dissolved) by the Webster–Ashburton Treaty in 1842.
Politicians of Aroostook County have proposed spinning off the county as a new state since the 1990s. As recently as 2005 the question has been brought up before the state legislature. Proposed names for this state include Aroostook, Acadia, and North Maine.
Representative Henry Joy submitted legislation March 9, 2010 after seeing a report that a group called Restore: The North Woods submitted a plan to preserve 3,200,000 acres (13,000 km2) of forest in northern Maine. Rep. Joy says environmentalists have a plan to take control of 10 million acres (40,000 km2) in northern Maine and hand it over to the government for preservation, kicking everyone out of their homes and not allowing any further development in the region.
Rep. Joy says Maine needs to be split into two states "so the people of northern Maine can decide their own destiny. They don't like being used as pawns in some giant environmental chess game."
Under Rep. Joy's plan, Maine would include York, Cumberland, Androscoggin, Sagadahoc, Lincoln, Waldo, Knox and Kennebec Counties. The newly created state of Northern Maine would include Aroostook, Piscataquis, Somerset, Franklin, Penobscot, and parts of Washington, Hancock and Oxford Counties.
Read more about this topic: List Of U.S. State Partition Proposals
Famous quotes containing the word maine:
“Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all, records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador, and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and they who do the work are called “swampers.” I now perceived the fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)