Maine

A part of Massachusetts for a century and a half, separated as one half of a bargain about slavery. The coast was fished and traded from the early 1600s, contested between English and French claims, and repeatedly attacked in the frontier wars; the District of Maine was governed from Boston from 1652. Separation sentiment grew after the War of 1812, when Massachusetts was seen to have left the district undefended against British occupation of its eastern coast. Statehood came in March 1820 as the free half of the Missouri Compromise, admitted alongside Missouri as a slave state to keep the Senate balanced - which makes Maine's admission an artefact of a national argument rather than of its own politics. The northern boundary with New Brunswick remained disputed until the Webster-Ashburton treaty of 1842 ended the bloodless Aroostook War. Shipbuilding, granite, ice and lumber built the nineteenth-century economy, and Bath Iron Works still builds destroyers. Maine has more forest cover by share than any other state. It adopted ranked-choice voting statewide in 2016, the first to do so. Lobster is the defining industry of its coast. Augusta is the capital and Portland the largest city. The state borders only one other, New Hampshire. Acadia was the first national park east of the Mississippi. Its coastline, measured around every inlet, runs longer than California's. Mount Katahdin ends the Appalachian Trail. The state produces almost all the wild blueberries grown in the country. It is the easternmost state, so the sun reaches it first, and the least densely populated east of the Mississippi.

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