Maine Trivia & Tidbits - Page 16

Looking for Maine trivia? Try our list Maine little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Crooner Rudy Vallee (1901-1986) grew up in Westbrook (pop. 16,200). He recorded As Time Goes By, making it popular 15 years before it was featured in the film Casablanca. Vallee sang in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, using his megaphone and the backup of the big band.

first appeared: 6/3/2001

The Palabra Museum in Boothbay Harbor (pop. 2,500) has the world’s largest collection of bottles shaped in images of the biblical Moses.

first appeared: 5/27/2001

Rufus Porter (1792-1884)—artist, musician, teacher, and founder of Scientific American—lived and worked in Bethel (pop. 500) as a painter in the 1830s. Porter invented the churn and the corn sheller.

first appeared: 5/20/2001

Chester Greenwood of Farmington (pop. 15,000) received a patent in 1877 for an invention greatly needed in his part of the country—earmuffs.

first appeared: 5/13/2001

Moosehead Lake is the largest body of fresh water in the Northeast and home to the tour boat S. S. Katahdhin, affectionately known as “The Kate.” Built by shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in 1914, it is the company’s oldest floating vessel.

first appeared: 5/6/2001

Monhegan Island, accessible only by mailboat, is an attraction and haven for artists because of its dramatic cliffs. Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, and Jamie Wyeth are among those who have painted there.

first appeared: 4/29/2001

Aroostook County (pop. 76,085), in Maine’s northernmost region, is the world’s largest producer of potatoes and potato seeds (eyes).

first appeared: 4/22/2001

Ninety percent of all sandworms and bloodworms sold as bait to saltwater fishermen come from Maine, where they are raised for that purpose.

first appeared: 4/15/2001

The 1832 stone Fryeburg Public Library houses the written works of Western author Clarence Mulford, who lived his final years in Fryeburg (pop. 1,580) and wrote the Hopalong Cassidy series made famous in the movies starring William Boyd.

first appeared: 4/8/2001

After leaving Lewiston on Dec. 28, 1928, the first international dog-sled mail run arrived in Montreal, Canada, on Jan. 14, 1929.

first appeared: 4/1/2001

Milton Bradley, credited by many with launching the board game industry, was born in Vienna (pop. 848) in 1836. He began a career as a printer. One of his lithographs, a likeness of Abraham Lincoln, sold well—until Lincoln grew a beard and rendered the image out-of-date.

first appeared: 3/25/2001

Admiral Robert E. Peary (1856-1920), the first recorded person to reach the North Pole—on April 6, 1909—graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick (pop. 18,000) in 1877. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) share the same alma mater.

first appeared: 3/18/2001

The G. H. Bass footwear and clothing company, with headquarters in Portland, has been doing business for 125 years. One company notable: Charles Lindbergh made his 1927 trans-Atlantic flight wearing Bass aviation boots.

first appeared: 3/11/2001

Maine has at least 28 cities, towns, or villages that begin with the word “North,” 23 with the word “South,” 22 with “West,” and 28 with “East.”

first appeared: 3/4/2001

Acadia National Park is often described as the place “where the mountains meet the sea.” The park’s granite mountains, lakes and ponds, mixed evergreen and hardwood forests, and ocean shoreline total 47,633 acres and receive 3 million visitors a year.

first appeared: 2/25/2001

Though no iron is produced there now, the original blast furnace and charcoal kiln of the Katahdin Iron Works, built in 1843 to process locally mined ore, still remain in the town of Brownville Junction (pop. 750).

first appeared: 2/18/2001

Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), a native of Gardiner (pop. 6,746), often wrote probing portraits of residents of New England towns, as in Miniver Cheevy and Richard Cory. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, 1924, and 1927.

first appeared: 2/11/2001

In a 1965 world heavyweight title bout between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay (later Muhammed Ali) in Lewiston (pop. 38,000), Clay knocked out Liston in the first minute of the first round of a scheduled 10-round fight. Some people, tuning into the fight on television, missed the knockout.

first appeared: 2/4/2001

—Winslow Homer (1836-1910), best known for his paintings of the sea, lived in an area of Scarsborough (pop. 14,899) called Prouts Neck the last 27 years of his life.

first appeared: 1/28/2001

The state’s seacoast is renowned for its beauty—and for its hazards to navigation. Maine’s shoreline has more than 60 lighthouses. The oldest, at Portland Head, was commissioned by George Washington and completed in 1791.

first appeared: 1/21/2001

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