All the weeks in Portland History

Well, it’s over. My year of looking into Portland’s history, week-by-week, has come to an end. It was a lot of work to pull it together ever week but it was so worth it. I learned a lot and had a ball doing it. Now my noggin is stuffed with obscure facts about this city. I hope yours is, too.

Thanks for watching and reading. Also, thanks to my editors for letting me dive into this and to Maine Memory Network for giving me access to their vast repository of indexed images.

Here they are, all 46 This Week in Portland History posts and videos I made in 2017.


FEBRUARY
This son of an immigrant Portland bartender won six Oscars
The time that Portland swallowed a neighboring city to steal its voters
Fake news, racism and an unfinished bridge: A Portland soldier’s story
The famous Mainer who was the last man to die of Civil War wounds
When he died, kids paid for his statue with pocket change

MARCH
A storm tore the bow off this ship. The captain still managed to steer it to safety.
How a Portland druggist built an empire on hand cream
Percival Baxter’s generosity started at home in Portland
Charles Dickens did not love Portland

APRIL
The 400-year-old story of Portland’s first absentee landlord
The Portland statue criticized for being too white almost crushed its creator
This lighthouse keeper earned the nation’s two highest awards for bravery

MAY
Maine’s first capital city was only a town
This is why the British burned Portland
After this massacre, Portland was abandoned for 26 years
The Portland mayor who gave the order to shoot into a crowd

JUNE
These two fishermen faced down a sea monster in Casco Bay
This Indian warrior, turned Quaker pacifist, died trying to get home to his son
He wanted firecrackers but ended up a millionaire instead
This Portland train station was demolished to make room for a strip mall

JULY
They shipped her home in a coffin but she wasn’t dead
How Portland’s last ‘whorehouse riot’ got started
This frostbitten man brought Canadian railroad wealth to Portland
An ‘enemy alien’ from the Middle East created these iconic Maine statues
This Portland music teacher carried snakes in his pockets

AUGUST
When a woman making coffee saved a family from drowning
This lighthouse-shaped building is definitely not a lighthouse
How Portland got such a big organ
This Portland street is named for a presidential loser

SEPTEMBER
This Portland artist carved his first public monument at 64
This ghost ship hunted U-boats in Portland Harbor… maybe
A letter to the editor started this Maine Underground Railroad stop
This peaceful park saw the start of a bloody massacre

OCTOBER
A Portland stepmother gave this history-maker the stable family he’d never known
That time the Prince of Wales lost his hat in Portland Harbor
A Portland widow armed only with a frying pan held off the British navy
Portland’s iconic monument was viewed by Italian royalty, then stuffed in a boatload of sulfur
Promised immortality, investors only lost their shirts on this canal scheme

NOVEMBER
8 photos from Maine’s history that give a glimpse of how things used to be
A Broadway star lost his island cottage so thousands of Mainers could have clean water
This Mainer is the only American ever executed for slave trading
The Maine politician who infuriated rivals, hurled insults and fixed Congress

DECEMBER
These Mainers rescued a pair of thieves off this storm tossed island
That time the Civil War was fought in Portland Harbor
John Wilkes Booth was in Portland the night the Civil War broke out
The ship that crashed into Portland Head Light on Christmas Eve

 

Troy R. Bennett

About Troy R. Bennett

Troy R. Bennett is a Buxton native and longtime Portland resident whose photojournalism has appeared in media outlets all over the world.