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:
“I have been oranging and fat,
carrot colored, gaped at,
allowing my cracked o’s to drop on the sea
near Venice and Mombasa.
Over Maine I have rested.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)