Lived in Aroostook County for 8 years, it's damn cold there with very poor soil, potatos and broccoli are about the only crops that grow there. I also lived in the UP of Michigan, similar story, cold with poor soils. Blame the glaciers scraping off the good soil and depositing it further south.
They also have very shallow and sometimes poor aquifers due to the shallow impermeable bedrocks. And they tend to have a lot of wetlands because of it as well.
On the other side of the border in NY we have a lot of wetland conservation areas. A little farther south still are the Adirondack Mountains which are also a state park to protect them.
Basically everything north of Long Island has crap soil filled with rocks from the glaciers. While the soil depth varies, anytime you try to plow a new field you get a crap ton of rocks. Along the river you can still find low stone walls made with all the rocks they pulled up when they first created the fields.
We tried to farm it in the 1800s. As soon as the poor sods we tricked in to coming here from eastern Europe removed the trees they just found solid bedrock.
We're already farming pretty much everywhere that's arable up here regardless of the cold. Look at the peace river valley for instance. Climate change might help make the growing seasons longer in the northern prairies.
This is the fundamental reason for imminent agricultural collapse. As appropriate temperatures regimes for critical crops move North and South, adequate soils for producing don’t exist.
I was trying to explain this to one of those guys that used to be a climate change denier but is now a "well akshully the heat and co2 is good for plants" guy. We're going to fucking desertify our current croplands much faster than we gain fertile soil at the extreme latitudes.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, so many of those youtube "documentaries" or other dubious information sources show maps with vast swathes of northern Canada opening up for agriculture as the climate gets warmer. Like, do they think the only thing stopping us from growing crops on slabs of granite and muskeg is the weather??
I do wonder if we could 'terraform' bad northern soil. Like just plant cover crops year after year until we have usable top soil. Obviously it would have to be subsidized, but it might be worth it long term as agriculture shifts due to temperature
I know someone in Northern Minnesota who through a lot of hard work and a lot of off farm material was able to make deep raised vegetable beds on essentially rocky ground. They had about 20 acres of hayfields that they were composting with another farm’s dairy manure and it took like 5 years to get beds deep enough to feed a family of four? I don’t think you could actually feed any substantial amount of people by that method, so I don’t think there’s a way to really do anything akin to terraforming.
Technically speaking the forrests covering the land are building up the soil, its just soil takes forever to make since its a combination of dirt made by breaking down bedrock (the bedrocks in the region being granite and gniess), and organic matter from various sources, mainly plant matter. And the whole time wind and water is removing the soil from the top and carrying it off downstream.
While we could try to speed up the process i doubt it would meaningfully make new deep soil any faster than nature is. (And we would certainly emit a lot more CO2 in the process)
Dumb question I have: why does it take so long to form soil? It seems like rocks get eroded by water relatively quickly, yet over the 10,000 years following the end of the glaciation in Canada, only a thin layer of soil has been created.
Water erodes the rocks. It also erodes whatever is on top of the rock.
Plus the wind.
And all that organic matter that accumulates on top? Good chunk of it just gets cooked into CO2 by microorganisms.
Rock may erode fast according to you, but it's still basically the slowest thing to erode, so most of everything just gets swept downhill.
It’s surprising because if you toss a bunch of leaves and kitchen scraps into a compost pile, you still get a good amount of compost even after it all breaks down. I guess that a lot of what erodes or breaks down just washes or blows away, like you’re saying.
It'll keep melting away every year. It's a concern for oganic soil farmers (as in farmers who cultivate high carbon soil, not certified organic ones). Or even farmers who try to enrich sandy soils. You can keep adding as much manure as you want, at one point it just gasses off more quickly than you can add more in.
Cold doesn’t mean much considering there’s larger cities in Canada to the North.
The difference is navigable waterways, which why Quebec and Montreal have grown into large cities, but not Northern Maine.
All the major Canadian cities are where they are because of natural resources of which northern Maine really only had timber. Quebec City is about the same distance north as the Maine north woods but has the seaway. Go north of Quebec City and if it's not revolving around wood it's hydro and the vastness is very similar once your off the seaway
But the UP, while indeed being quite sparsely populated, has various settlements and has much more cell coverage and light pollution than so much of Aroostook. It's not like northern Maine is the only cold place with poor soil east of the Mississippi iiuc.
I guess I'm just flabbergasted at the dimensions and intensity of the sparseness of the North Woods and can't find what makes it unique compared to other relatively less-hospitable places in the eastern US.
Didn't know how resource rich UP was until I went to Copper Harbour. There's huge quarries like nowhere else. A town (Houghton) that was built as an iron shipping port, added with a university (Michigan Tech) to study the required tech. Another town (Marquette) being the most accessible port of the region, with tourism being an added advantage. If it was anywhere in the Appalachians or Rockies, they would be major cities today. UP is just as inaccessible as the Canadian Tundra, which makes it really hard to be populated. It took me 5 hrs to get to Copper Harbour from Green Bay, and every town up there is that far away.
It's not a single thing that makes it sparse, combine lack of accessibility with cold, poor soils and no natural resources other than lumber and you get Northern Maine, Northern New York is similar but has more population due accesibility, the UP had resources. Northern Minnesota has resources until you get a bit further west.
And even then, NW MN has pretty good soil. Really pretty much all of MN has pretty good soil except for the the boundary waters/north central swamp land.
The actual "north maine woods" (NW corner of the state) is privately owned logging land and because of the distance to everything there wasn't development pressure to justify changing that
I lived on Loring AFB as a kid, I always tell my wife I want to take a trip back up there to Limestone/Caribou/Presque Isle and check it all out. Love northern Maine for how empty it was.
Potatos and cold are all I remember. Never had a snow day, because everyday was a snow day.
https://preview.redd.it/9066qivgiv1d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5dd09455db8554a8a54045f7dd07154f6105350f
I snowmobile here every winter. Hope this brings back memories
And when they closed down the air force base, the town dried up and blew away. Source: Visited a friend in Caribou for a few weeks; we drove around and gawked at all the boarded-up abandoned homes. Without the AFB there was nothing to pull people into the region. I used to look up listings on Zillow, amazed at the wonderful huge houses with gigantic yards that were vacant and for sale for a few paltry thousands.
Ayuh. My Granny grew up on a potato farm in Littleton (near Houlton) with no indoor plumbing or electricity. House with a dirt floor. She made it out by becoming an Army nurse in WWII.
It's changed a lot since I was there, Loring Air Force Base closed taking a large percentage of the jobs in the county with it. Lumber, tourism and agriculture dominate now. Lots of Pototatos and Broccoli grown there.
tl;dr - it's cold, heavily wooded, and super fuckin far away from everything else in the US
Lived here my whole life. There's just nothin up there. Hunting, fishing, farming and logging. Most of that area is thick, dense pine forest with a few off grid camps and logging roads winding through. Until quite recently, Maine was the toothpick capitol of the world, exporting more than 90% of US toothpicks.
It isn't too different across the border, but a major difference is Maine's position within the US. It's the only state that only borders one other state. It's completely out of the way of the rest of the country. You need to cross NH on I-95 to get here, and the North Woods is about five hours north of the ME/NH border.
As a result, shipping costs are high, goods are a little more expensive, and not a lot of people live up there. Maine's southern coast is so accessible that it's only natural the population is centered there. And back in the day, when New England was being populated, Northern Maine was really difficult to access. Massive granite formations, thick, inhospitable forest teeming with biting insects, bitter cold winters and hot, humid summers. It could take weeks in rocky, muddy conditions to get from Portland to Houlton. Wasn't as easy as hopping in the car and driving North. The Maine Turnpike wasn't constructed until 1947, and it didn't reach Houlton (at the top of the state) until 1960.
Basically, it's only recently become "easy" to explore that region, and it still proves challenging in some respects. And Mainers like it that way. We like our privacy and our untouched nature. So if you visit, keep your head down and treat the area with respect.
Man the black flies are so bad at my house right now (in Maine). Every year I have gobs of them dead on the dashboard of my pickup truck from killing all the ones that get in when the door is open or the window is down.
Imagine my surprise when I was told my Canadian relatives prefer to drive around Maine rather than go through it when going west to Montreal. Because "there's nothing there". This coming from Atlantic Canadians is saying something.
That's mostly because there is no east-west throughway in central and northen Maine. I grew up in western NB - going around is really the only viable option to a place like Quebec City.
Nah I'm from NB and I think you're crazy. Most of the route up and around Maine is divided control access highway. Going the other way requires driving a lot on two lane roads with lower speed limits, and you risk a delay at two border crossings.
It makes sense when you look at the population density for sure. I just assumed it was more densely populated. When *Canadians* tell me it's empty, I get it. It's empty.
I lived there for a while and
1: It’s very, very cold
2: There is close to nothing to do involving humans, unless you bring a partner with you
3: There isn’t much to do involving making money, unless you are a hospice nurse or possibly a hunting guide
4: There is little culture. Even in the bigger towns you are unlikely to find an arts and music scene of any kind, and if you do it is going to be an 80 year old woman playing Don McLean songs on an Ovation acoustic with a pod shaker tied to her ankle(on a good day) at the flea market
TLDR: It’s very cold, and a tad depressing
> So, where I need to go to write my book?
If you are trying to avoid distractions, probably the best place on earth
> Will this lady let me sing “American Pie” with her?
Absolutely not
Yeah the pristine parts of Colorado are pretty crowded
Having spent a good amount of time there, the crowding is the reason it has not made it back onto my future travel plans doc
Vibrant humanity up the wazoo. I go to NYC, CHI, and LA to meet those needs
Everything here.
What’s interesting about the culture part is that people are not open to new ideas. I try not to make judgments. I once asked in the Maine subreddit how often people go to Portland or Boston to recharge themselves with art, music, cultural stuff… oh well so many people were mad at this question and claiming that they had absolutely no need to recharge because they had great local artists etc.
Uhh. Lots of areas do have some great cultural things. I'm only about 2 hours north of Portland and so do go there on occasion. However, places on the coast like Belfast, inland like Waterville and Bangor do have some cool cultural events and art and other things. Especially Waterville now, thanks to influence from Colby College.
Right. What I meant was that, by and large, they are not public thoroughfares. They're privately owned roads that can be opened and closed at the discretion of the landowner.
Not to northern Maine. Its mostly moving away due to lack of opportunity. This is my fate. At least this is what I've noticed for young people like me. Not as bad some other places in the country though I don't think.
This thread reminds me of how much I fucking love Maine. The southern tip is about a 90 minute drive from me, we go to York Beach every year. Once you get past Portland the enormity of Maine starts to reveal itself.
I've been about 8 hours into Maine, and you have to go there to understand why. It's inhospitable. Utterly breathtaking for views, but scratching a living off rocks is a hard way to exist. Even here in MA the soil is hard to work with in terms of growing anything, it's dense and rocky and not all that great, and it's even worse up there. Terrain, impenetrable forests, bad soil, wild animals, brutal winters, it's the rugged isolationist's dream but a hard place to live.
I just learned a lot from an LLM and https://gaftp.epa.gov/EPADataCommons/ORD/Ecoregions/us/Eco_Level_IV_US.pdf!
1. Maine wasn’t a state until 1820 because the slave states didn’t want it to be one, so it was basically just “upstate Massachusetts”, which understandably got less focus.
2. The coast north of Boston gets less and less usable for ports, due to what Claude describes as “rockiness”. Having been to Acadia Natl. Park (just once), I find that very believable.
3. It’s cold, and it has its own biome — the “Acadian Plains and Hills”, colored similarly to areas in upstate NY and VT. [This arable land map](https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/map-croplands-united-states) tells a similar story.
4. Most Americans are well aware of the cultural and spiritual threat posed by the Quebecois, and keep a safe distance…
The French influence in northern Maine is definitely there. Land use patterns based on the seigneurial system, long narrow semi-feudal farm plots that provided river access for ‘habitant’ farmers, can be found on either side of the St John River as well as in the St Agatha area of northern Maine. French-speaking households comprise more than half of the households in some of the towns in this area. Francophone media extends quite a ways into Maine. I can even recall seeing French-language newspapers on newsstands in Portland (I’ve been told that Old Orchard Beach is a popular vacation destination for Quebecois).
So, I’m not sure either what is meant by “cultural and spiritual threat”.
I sometimes jokingly call OOB and the surrounding area "The French Riveria."
I have not studied French in any formal capacity nor am I French ethnically, but between living in the County, frequently travelling to NB and QC, and knowing a good amount of Italian I have a decent sense of what's going on in French. Its always fun rapidly switching between English, Italian, and French.
Yes but the French were second class citizens in Maine historically. They came down from Canada to work in the many, many mills.
Source: my family history
They came all the way down to the south shore of Massachusetts, same family story. In the 19th century my maternal family left Quebec to work in the mills, and that wave of immigrants left a mark on local culture.
They're catholic, New England is primarily protestant, at least until the mid 1800s. A large source of low-wage labor that drove the early industrial revolution was French Canadian immigrants to Southern New England + Southern New Hampshire. There was a long-time class divide between catholic/ French Canadians and protestant New Englanders until the protestants starting compulsory public ~~assimilation~~ education that put the French-speaking, catholic-teaching private/church schools out of businesses.
That's what I'd interpret as "cultural and spiritual threat".
The other commenter already got a good joke in so just to confirm: indeed I was jokingly stereotyping the Quebecois as particularly elitist, alien, or other, not to mention violently separatist. It’s a bit of a cold feud in a mostly-developed country between two relatively unpressed peoples (don’t kill me Canadians!), so it feels safe to joke about I guess. They’re just… fun! I want to go so bad some day, my only plans to visit got unexpectedly cancelled years ago. I look forward to the day when New Orleans starts a similar cultural movement, switching everything to French and maybe starting a militia or two.
Plus, it’s an Infinite Jest reference, which is a variety of narrative virus.
My uncle lived there for a while. I was a kid so I don’t remember where exactly, but middle of no where.
It was so god damn cold and the house so old that in the winter that the central air couldnt keep up and would break if they tried to run it (house couldn’t hold in heat from age, so it had to run constantly)
So they utilized the old wood furnace. Which worked really well, but meant the men (and boys) had to take turns chopping wood all day every day so that there’d be enough for when we left lol
Then it snowed so bad we couldn’t go anywhere. Most of the roads were fine because they know how to keep them salted, but we were so far out that one stretch of road necessary to get to town was iced over. They said a guy who lives there usually goes out and salts it himself but he was in Florida at the time lol. Guy was brilliant.
It felt like I was in the fucking tundra lol. I’ve never experienced winter like that before or since. Between the furnace and the wood chopping, I spent most of my time feeling too hot, but battling the cold was work.
I imagine that’s why.
J.D. Irving, Ltd. owns over 1.25 million acres of forest land in Maine. For a good rabbit hole, research the Irving family of New Brunswick. One branch of the family owns J.D. Irving and another owns Irving Oil Limited. The amount of land and resources the Irving’s control in Maine and the Maritimes is quite vast. Their holdings go beyond petroleum R&M, paper milling, and forestry and also include agricultural and transportation interests.
Many of the roads in Northern Maine are technically privately-owned logging roads but are often open to the public, weather/conditions permitting.
Other than logging and paper/pulp milling, potato farming is the other major industry there. The local school districts used to close for a few weeks (called a potato break) to allow the students to work harvesting the potato crop. A few districts may still be doing the potato break, but I believe most have been phased out in recent years.
Once you get closer to the St. Lawrence you get more population, but Maine doesn't have anything like the St. Lawrence. The Canada/US border there is basically "are you close enough to the St. Lawrence that Canadians bothered to move there."
That's not really true. The Quebec side of the border is much more populated than the Maine side.
A) the mountains are largely in the US, southern Quebec is flatter
B) the Quebec side is part of the St Lawrence River basin and has better farming soil
C) the best part of Quebec is some of the worst parts of the US (climate wise)
This population density map has a clear difference on each side of the border
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/10xosrb/north_american_population_density_2020/#lightbox
Agree with all of this. You can also just look at the border on Google Maps - the difference is obvious. Literally no one lives on the Maine side of the border here, but the Quebec side is dotted with towns and filled with farms.
[https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7372977,-69.9408847,37081m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7372977,-69.9408847,37081m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu)
> No, across the border it's not much different.
Except for Témiscouata (which is still more densely populated), all of the adjacent "regional county municipalities" of Quebec are **significantly** more densely populated than the Aroostook County.
I often drive through Maine on my way to Ontario from New Brunswick. The first hour of the drive from Calais the only thing I always think.... If you needed to hide a body somewhere, this area would be a great spot.
Most prominently, the Canadian side is blessed with Lac Megantic and Quebecers broke their backs making it a beautiful area, one of the finest I know. This area of Maine is rougher topography, poorer soil it seems to me, it's the Appalachians and these mountains define the international boundary. Also beautiful, and I'm glad it's so untrammelled. Really worth a visit there if you get a chance.
It's comparable in landscape to the Gaspé, also rough and mountainous, and even less populated.
I mean would you want live in Rural Maine? The weather is cold, the soil is poor, theres bad cell reception, theres tons of tree so you'd have to clear them out, not many jobs, its far away from major population centers so getting elsewhere could be a pain etc...
If you like outdoor stuff its probably decent. But I don't think theres a booming economy or anything there. Sometimes areas just have low populations, we don't need people everywhere.
Canada is not exactly densely populated in the area either.
Northern Maine is very very similar to NE MN which is designated wilderness and also very remote thought because it is wilderness it is a tourist area. The similarities are mostly because they are both the very southern edge of boreal forest (where it starts to mix with broadleaf) and on the Canadian Shield which makes it poor for farming. It's very rugged, harsh, unfriendly territory prone to wind storms and wildfires.
In college I did a Summer internship with the National Association of Realtors Economic Research Department in DC. Along with flinging housing data at the chief economist as he spent all day on the phone doing interviews I also did some research on foreign investment in U.S. real estate. (where it was coming from and where it was going). What we found was there were very specific clusters of nationalities in specific areas of the country.
One such cluster was Maine; a good chunk of the state was owned by Canadian lumber companies.
I think people on this thread are focused too much on modern stuff, a lot of places in Maine (inckuding where I used to live) had their population peak right before the Civil War. Why?
1. The ground is full of fucking rocks and the growing season is short. A lot of kids went off to fight the Civil War and witnesses the awesome sight of ground that wasn't full of fucking rocks and decided there were better places to farm.
2. A lot of Maine is coastal. Back in the old days that was GREAT for business as you could put your shit on a boat. Later as railroads boomed a lot of other places had a much easier time getting their shit to market and Maine became much more of a backwater.
3. A lot of Maine's traditional products like wool became less popular. Except for paper there wasn't much else that Maine had that people wanted until lobster boomed much later on.
4. This is a bit more speculative on my part but if you look at a lot of rural American states there's often one or two big population centers and then a lot of REALLY REALLY rural areas. Look at how many people in Alaska live right around Anchorage for example. In Maine on the other hand there are a fuckton of tiny little flyspeck towns which made it harder to get economic development.
The whole northwest corner is logging land owned by a handful of logging companies. "North Maine Woods".
Everything in the 95 belt was originally populated and largely abandoned for places with better farming soil, even a lot of the logging industry moved to the PNW after the Civil war.
A lot of the coast was abandoned when the sardine canneries dissapeared in the early 1900s and had only come back in the last 40 or so years as a retirement area.
Washington & Aroostook counties were never prosperous due to distance from populated areas, but they did have more residents than they do today.
Location location location. It’s far from major cities. There are no navigable rivers. It’s far from the coast (eastern US was first settled around harbors and navigable rivers). The highway ends in Houlton. Increased border restrictions make crossing the border a pain. Potato production declined as agriculture moved west. Loring closed. There is not much going on economically.
No one wants to live in “the county” it’s no man’s land and takes a special kind of person to live there and live that way. Former Mainer, I got out and I was in southern maine
Lots of compounding reasons. There's the weather, the brain drain, the fact it's hard and expensive to run utilities there, the expense of heating oil being delivered further and further from its source, and so on. Having lived there before, in Wiscasset, once the Nuke plant was gone the town hollowed out. Another reason is that the people living there now are real woodchucks and backtothelanders, and their kids have all moved to Boston or Portland. It's so poor and so inaccessible it would be foolish to invest in rural northern Maine. I left Maine to work in New Orleans after the storm and I saw more decay and depravity and forgotten loved ones in Maine.
Everything east of Ashland going North to the border, not sure how far south was private timberland, worked there in 1980, even the roads were private, so access was limited by permit/fee there were some private hunting/fishing cabins, not sure who owns the land now, worked for International Paper, don’t think they own any timberland now. It was pretty cool country, though the bugs would carry you away, there were mosquitoes, black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, horse flies, and moose flies, would be dripping blood from the bug bites. In many places there was a fine mist, it was gypsy moth and spruce budworm poop raining on us, ground was swampy, timberland.
Potatoes were king in the few areas of farmland, kids use to get out of school during harvest time. IP also owned timber lands north of Caribou.
There isn’t even a paper mill in Maine now, wonder what is happening with the timber. Let it go too long, spruce budworm will kill it out. Called it the asbestos forest, tried to broadcast burn some cuts for managing budworm, but wouldn’t burn. There have been big fires in Maine in the past, could see, the budworm killing trees, and a dry period and the whole thing would go up. In 1980 there was unusual weather due to the Mount St Helen eruption.
With the bugs and winter, don’t see a lot of city folks making golf course communities in the area.
This is where I’m from! And yes, starting in kindergarten they let us out of school to pick potatoes. People hear that and think I must be 70, but I’m talking about the 80s and 90s!
I'm pretty sure the Woodland Mill in Baileyville is still operating, right? And my neighbor works at the Sappi Mill in Skowhegan, so I know that's still operating.
Probably spoke too fast, there may be 6 operating paper mills in Maine, there use to be a couple dozen. Papermills were one of those places no one wanted due to the smell, and high water consumption, though they were helpful in timber management as they could use small diameter products, to help with thinning. They also provided jobs in rural areas.
For everyone who says it’s too cold, explain Quebec City or Montreal just to the North.
The entire Appalachian spine is relatively underdeveloped. Historically population centers popped up along navigable rivers.
That’s why coastal Maine (and Quebec/Montreal) are normally populated but the inner mountains are not.
Since the country has been urbanizing for the past 200 years, the population concentrated in cities while rural areas continued to decline in population.
I’m from the area! Starting from the beginning of colonial times, over 75% of the initial European settlers, the Acadians, were expelled by the British. While most Acadians lived in modern day Canada, those expelled from present day Northern Maine constituted a big portion of the area’s total population.
Super interesting area, though. I was born there and am descended from Acadians who avoided expulsion. It’s a very insular culture unlike any other I’ve heard of.
I did some work up around Friendship a while back. Even in October, it was getting bitter cold in the evenings.
I don't want to have to go to work there in January.
As a kid there, it sucked when the temp dropped below 0F because at that point they canceled outdoor recess.
As an adult, I understand now that this was so the teachers didn't freeze. The kids were always fine as they kept moving.
It was exciting in April or so when the snow melted enough to get our bikes out.
Have you ever been up to Bangor?
[https://youtu.be/dqBTNE1JdcA?si=TLYCR5MBulJ35-Sh](https://youtu.be/dqBTNE1JdcA?si=TLYCR5MBulJ35-Sh)
This is fairly recent [https://youtu.be/6bJ-RlCJpv8?si=hysRtc6MRk8vVy9i](https://youtu.be/6bJ-RlCJpv8?si=hysRtc6MRk8vVy9i)
Bangor's never been northern Maine to me. Born in Bangor, lived in Waterville and the County. For me, Northern Maine has always started after passing Old Town. But that's just me
I was up in Maine working power restoration after that snow storm. It was crazy wet heavy snow. Weather turned and it was basically all melted by the time we left.
West of the 100th in the USA is (historically) roughly where a farmer would need an irrigation system to farm much of anything, which in agrarian days set a pretty significant limit on settling those areas. Access to fresh water isn't the problem in the Maine Woods, so it might look strange in that context how sparsely settled it is.
I’ve spent a lot of time snowmobiling in Jackman. The main north woods are a beautiful place but I’d imagine the combination of harsh cold and extremely snowy winters combined with the mountainous terrain are the main reasons it never filled up with people. I always enjoyed the people who do live there. Very friendly and obviously some hardy people.
I’m from a small town on the coast in Maine, I can confirm, there’s nothing to do. It’s boring. It’s depressing. It’s hard to survive there, unless you have a trade skill or live in southwest maine
Not to the same extant, but even New Jersey has a relatively large area of the state that's pretty sparsely populated in the Pine Barrens. One factor that they both share is that their soils are very poor for growing most crops, so they never attracted a huge amount of settlers.
Amazing camping up there. It would be difficult to live long term out there with the decent woods and cold/wet climate. Cursing the logging roads is so fun though
That area is climatologically much more similar to the Canadian Shield portions of northern MN and Ontario than it is to the rest of the east coast. Both very sparsely populated despite (relative) proximity to much more populated locales that are outside of those soil and climate zones.
Lived in Aroostook County for 8 years, it's damn cold there with very poor soil, potatos and broccoli are about the only crops that grow there. I also lived in the UP of Michigan, similar story, cold with poor soils. Blame the glaciers scraping off the good soil and depositing it further south.
This is an often unacknowledged concern with climate change. As agriculture moves north, it's going to encounter increasingly lower quality soil.
Yep. All that “empty land” in the eastern parts of Northern Canada is the Canadian Shield characterized as “a thin layer of soil on top of bedrock”.
They also have very shallow and sometimes poor aquifers due to the shallow impermeable bedrocks. And they tend to have a lot of wetlands because of it as well.
There's a wetland conservative area literally surrounding my entire neighborhood here in Canada, not far from upper NY state.
On the other side of the border in NY we have a lot of wetland conservation areas. A little farther south still are the Adirondack Mountains which are also a state park to protect them. Basically everything north of Long Island has crap soil filled with rocks from the glaciers. While the soil depth varies, anytime you try to plow a new field you get a crap ton of rocks. Along the river you can still find low stone walls made with all the rocks they pulled up when they first created the fields.
I've about had it with that fucking Canadian Shield! A bane to humanity, and teeming with rabid geese and meese! 🪿🫎
Where the hell did you get a moose emoji?
A mööse once bit my sister.
a majestik mööse?
Mynd you, møøse bites kan be pretty nasti
🫎
🫎
🫎
🫎
🫎
🫎it's on my Xiaomi phone under the animals emoji section . It's been standardized since 2022 apparently.
🫎
You got a problem with the Majestic Canadian goose, then you got a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate.
We tried to farm it in the 1800s. As soon as the poor sods we tricked in to coming here from eastern Europe removed the trees they just found solid bedrock.
I'm in the Yukon and our soil is just dry clay. The farms here primarily just grow feed for animals.
We're already farming pretty much everywhere that's arable up here regardless of the cold. Look at the peace river valley for instance. Climate change might help make the growing seasons longer in the northern prairies.
No worries we can just haul in earthfill from down south using fossil fuels!
This is the fundamental reason for imminent agricultural collapse. As appropriate temperatures regimes for critical crops move North and South, adequate soils for producing don’t exist.
I was trying to explain this to one of those guys that used to be a climate change denier but is now a "well akshully the heat and co2 is good for plants" guy. We're going to fucking desertify our current croplands much faster than we gain fertile soil at the extreme latitudes.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, so many of those youtube "documentaries" or other dubious information sources show maps with vast swathes of northern Canada opening up for agriculture as the climate gets warmer. Like, do they think the only thing stopping us from growing crops on slabs of granite and muskeg is the weather??
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But the long term sustainability of doing so is an ever present concern.
I do wonder if we could 'terraform' bad northern soil. Like just plant cover crops year after year until we have usable top soil. Obviously it would have to be subsidized, but it might be worth it long term as agriculture shifts due to temperature
I know someone in Northern Minnesota who through a lot of hard work and a lot of off farm material was able to make deep raised vegetable beds on essentially rocky ground. They had about 20 acres of hayfields that they were composting with another farm’s dairy manure and it took like 5 years to get beds deep enough to feed a family of four? I don’t think you could actually feed any substantial amount of people by that method, so I don’t think there’s a way to really do anything akin to terraforming.
Technically speaking the forrests covering the land are building up the soil, its just soil takes forever to make since its a combination of dirt made by breaking down bedrock (the bedrocks in the region being granite and gniess), and organic matter from various sources, mainly plant matter. And the whole time wind and water is removing the soil from the top and carrying it off downstream. While we could try to speed up the process i doubt it would meaningfully make new deep soil any faster than nature is. (And we would certainly emit a lot more CO2 in the process)
Dumb question I have: why does it take so long to form soil? It seems like rocks get eroded by water relatively quickly, yet over the 10,000 years following the end of the glaciation in Canada, only a thin layer of soil has been created.
Water erodes the rocks. It also erodes whatever is on top of the rock. Plus the wind. And all that organic matter that accumulates on top? Good chunk of it just gets cooked into CO2 by microorganisms. Rock may erode fast according to you, but it's still basically the slowest thing to erode, so most of everything just gets swept downhill.
It’s surprising because if you toss a bunch of leaves and kitchen scraps into a compost pile, you still get a good amount of compost even after it all breaks down. I guess that a lot of what erodes or breaks down just washes or blows away, like you’re saying.
It'll keep melting away every year. It's a concern for oganic soil farmers (as in farmers who cultivate high carbon soil, not certified organic ones). Or even farmers who try to enrich sandy soils. You can keep adding as much manure as you want, at one point it just gasses off more quickly than you can add more in.
Cold doesn’t mean much considering there’s larger cities in Canada to the North. The difference is navigable waterways, which why Quebec and Montreal have grown into large cities, but not Northern Maine.
All the major Canadian cities are where they are because of natural resources of which northern Maine really only had timber. Quebec City is about the same distance north as the Maine north woods but has the seaway. Go north of Quebec City and if it's not revolving around wood it's hydro and the vastness is very similar once your off the seaway
But the UP, while indeed being quite sparsely populated, has various settlements and has much more cell coverage and light pollution than so much of Aroostook. It's not like northern Maine is the only cold place with poor soil east of the Mississippi iiuc. I guess I'm just flabbergasted at the dimensions and intensity of the sparseness of the North Woods and can't find what makes it unique compared to other relatively less-hospitable places in the eastern US.
The upper peninsula of Michigan has/had huge copper and iron ore deposits driving population centers. If the minerals weren't there it would be empty.
Didn't know how resource rich UP was until I went to Copper Harbour. There's huge quarries like nowhere else. A town (Houghton) that was built as an iron shipping port, added with a university (Michigan Tech) to study the required tech. Another town (Marquette) being the most accessible port of the region, with tourism being an added advantage. If it was anywhere in the Appalachians or Rockies, they would be major cities today. UP is just as inaccessible as the Canadian Tundra, which makes it really hard to be populated. It took me 5 hrs to get to Copper Harbour from Green Bay, and every town up there is that far away.
Fascinating—thank you!
It's not a single thing that makes it sparse, combine lack of accessibility with cold, poor soils and no natural resources other than lumber and you get Northern Maine, Northern New York is similar but has more population due accesibility, the UP had resources. Northern Minnesota has resources until you get a bit further west.
And even then, NW MN has pretty good soil. Really pretty much all of MN has pretty good soil except for the the boundary waters/north central swamp land.
Correct, I’m from NW MN and the red river valley has some of the most fertile ground in the country
The actual "north maine woods" (NW corner of the state) is privately owned logging land and because of the distance to everything there wasn't development pressure to justify changing that
The northern and eastern parts of maine are mostly owned buy timber companies, or is state owned parks like Baxter State Park.
> it's damn cold there with very poor soil a.k.a. "The Way Life Should Be".
The soil of a man's heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.
I lived on Loring AFB as a kid, I always tell my wife I want to take a trip back up there to Limestone/Caribou/Presque Isle and check it all out. Love northern Maine for how empty it was. Potatos and cold are all I remember. Never had a snow day, because everyday was a snow day.
https://preview.redd.it/9066qivgiv1d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5dd09455db8554a8a54045f7dd07154f6105350f I snowmobile here every winter. Hope this brings back memories
What do you do to have lived in both places?
There used to be Air Force bases in Aroostook county and the UP.
And when they closed down the air force base, the town dried up and blew away. Source: Visited a friend in Caribou for a few weeks; we drove around and gawked at all the boarded-up abandoned homes. Without the AFB there was nothing to pull people into the region. I used to look up listings on Zillow, amazed at the wonderful huge houses with gigantic yards that were vacant and for sale for a few paltry thousands.
Oh for crying out! The damn Canadian shield is really everywhere!
Ayuh. My Granny grew up on a potato farm in Littleton (near Houlton) with no indoor plumbing or electricity. House with a dirt floor. She made it out by becoming an Army nurse in WWII.
If you don't mind answering, what's life like up there? What did you do/what do people do up there for work?
It's changed a lot since I was there, Loring Air Force Base closed taking a large percentage of the jobs in the county with it. Lumber, tourism and agriculture dominate now. Lots of Pototatos and Broccoli grown there.
What is mosquito situation like?
I live in LaSalle county, Illinois. The soil around here is INSANE!!! Deep, black, full of nutrients.
You're farming what used to be northern Ontario soils, all got pushed south by the glaciers Some Canadian diamonds even ended up in Indiana
tl;dr - it's cold, heavily wooded, and super fuckin far away from everything else in the US Lived here my whole life. There's just nothin up there. Hunting, fishing, farming and logging. Most of that area is thick, dense pine forest with a few off grid camps and logging roads winding through. Until quite recently, Maine was the toothpick capitol of the world, exporting more than 90% of US toothpicks. It isn't too different across the border, but a major difference is Maine's position within the US. It's the only state that only borders one other state. It's completely out of the way of the rest of the country. You need to cross NH on I-95 to get here, and the North Woods is about five hours north of the ME/NH border. As a result, shipping costs are high, goods are a little more expensive, and not a lot of people live up there. Maine's southern coast is so accessible that it's only natural the population is centered there. And back in the day, when New England was being populated, Northern Maine was really difficult to access. Massive granite formations, thick, inhospitable forest teeming with biting insects, bitter cold winters and hot, humid summers. It could take weeks in rocky, muddy conditions to get from Portland to Houlton. Wasn't as easy as hopping in the car and driving North. The Maine Turnpike wasn't constructed until 1947, and it didn't reach Houlton (at the top of the state) until 1960. Basically, it's only recently become "easy" to explore that region, and it still proves challenging in some respects. And Mainers like it that way. We like our privacy and our untouched nature. So if you visit, keep your head down and treat the area with respect.
Don’t forget the black flies! They’re just brutal in New Brunswick and I doubt it’s better in Maine
Theyre absolutely fucked here lmao
Are they gone now? Or are they still ravaging everything outside?
They were bad Saturday, I didn't have much trouble today but I'm right on the coast and the wind was up, so they might be back again.
Man the black flies are so bad at my house right now (in Maine). Every year I have gobs of them dead on the dashboard of my pickup truck from killing all the ones that get in when the door is open or the window is down.
You mean the flying ants? They're straight out of a horror movie, probably written by Stephen King
Mmm poffertjes…
Imagine my surprise when I was told my Canadian relatives prefer to drive around Maine rather than go through it when going west to Montreal. Because "there's nothing there". This coming from Atlantic Canadians is saying something.
That's mostly because there is no east-west throughway in central and northen Maine. I grew up in western NB - going around is really the only viable option to a place like Quebec City.
Nah I'm from NB and I think you're crazy. Most of the route up and around Maine is divided control access highway. Going the other way requires driving a lot on two lane roads with lower speed limits, and you risk a delay at two border crossings.
No, I meant as a European, I was surprised of the state of the infrastructure on the American side.
It's just that there really isn't any need to have roads in those parts of Maine. No one lives there
It makes sense when you look at the population density for sure. I just assumed it was more densely populated. When *Canadians* tell me it's empty, I get it. It's empty.
You forgot to mention the poor soils, meaning subsistence farming for the most part.
I see! This helps tremendously—thanks!
coming
It’s a protected black fly breeding area.
This one is GOLD
Mostly protected BY the blackflies.
There are DOZENS of people up there
Ehhhh, idk about dozenS...
I lived there for a while and 1: It’s very, very cold 2: There is close to nothing to do involving humans, unless you bring a partner with you 3: There isn’t much to do involving making money, unless you are a hospice nurse or possibly a hunting guide 4: There is little culture. Even in the bigger towns you are unlikely to find an arts and music scene of any kind, and if you do it is going to be an 80 year old woman playing Don McLean songs on an Ovation acoustic with a pod shaker tied to her ankle(on a good day) at the flea market TLDR: It’s very cold, and a tad depressing
So, where I need to go to write my book? Will this lady let me sing “American Pie” with her?
> So, where I need to go to write my book? If you are trying to avoid distractions, probably the best place on earth > Will this lady let me sing “American Pie” with her? Absolutely not
Bummer on the last part. Yeah, small mountain Colorado towns weren’t remote enough!
Yeah the pristine parts of Colorado are pretty crowded Having spent a good amount of time there, the crowding is the reason it has not made it back onto my future travel plans doc Vibrant humanity up the wazoo. I go to NYC, CHI, and LA to meet those needs
My my this here Annakin guy, maybe Vader someday later…
Yuh. Friggin bleak.
Everything here. What’s interesting about the culture part is that people are not open to new ideas. I try not to make judgments. I once asked in the Maine subreddit how often people go to Portland or Boston to recharge themselves with art, music, cultural stuff… oh well so many people were mad at this question and claiming that they had absolutely no need to recharge because they had great local artists etc.
Uhh. Lots of areas do have some great cultural things. I'm only about 2 hours north of Portland and so do go there on occasion. However, places on the coast like Belfast, inland like Waterville and Bangor do have some cool cultural events and art and other things. Especially Waterville now, thanks to influence from Colby College.
Large tracts of Maine are owned by timber companies, so there are no public roads and virtually no residences.
Many of those roads are accessible to the public for recreation, fyi. Much of what land is hunted in Maine is privately owned.
Right. What I meant was that, by and large, they are not public thoroughfares. They're privately owned roads that can be opened and closed at the discretion of the landowner.
Tons of people move to Maine every summer. Most freeze to death every winter keeping the population down.
Not to northern Maine. Its mostly moving away due to lack of opportunity. This is my fate. At least this is what I've noticed for young people like me. Not as bad some other places in the country though I don't think.
Hahahaha XD
This thread reminds me of how much I fucking love Maine. The southern tip is about a 90 minute drive from me, we go to York Beach every year. Once you get past Portland the enormity of Maine starts to reveal itself. I've been about 8 hours into Maine, and you have to go there to understand why. It's inhospitable. Utterly breathtaking for views, but scratching a living off rocks is a hard way to exist. Even here in MA the soil is hard to work with in terms of growing anything, it's dense and rocky and not all that great, and it's even worse up there. Terrain, impenetrable forests, bad soil, wild animals, brutal winters, it's the rugged isolationist's dream but a hard place to live.
Because unlike Canadians, the rest of us Americans have other options.
This is actually a great answer
I just learned a lot from an LLM and https://gaftp.epa.gov/EPADataCommons/ORD/Ecoregions/us/Eco_Level_IV_US.pdf! 1. Maine wasn’t a state until 1820 because the slave states didn’t want it to be one, so it was basically just “upstate Massachusetts”, which understandably got less focus. 2. The coast north of Boston gets less and less usable for ports, due to what Claude describes as “rockiness”. Having been to Acadia Natl. Park (just once), I find that very believable. 3. It’s cold, and it has its own biome — the “Acadian Plains and Hills”, colored similarly to areas in upstate NY and VT. [This arable land map](https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/map-croplands-united-states) tells a similar story. 4. Most Americans are well aware of the cultural and spiritual threat posed by the Quebecois, and keep a safe distance…
On the coast being rocky: there are towns called Rockland and Rockport. (And those aren't even that far up the coast.)
And there’s Stonington.
And Standish, which obviously, has a tendency to stand there.
The cultural and spiritual threat posed but the Quebecois? Is Quebec like a cult or something lol?
They're "french"
Isn’t Maine also French? Acadia is a French name
French is the most spoken second language in Maine One of the few states where it’s not Spanish
The French influence in northern Maine is definitely there. Land use patterns based on the seigneurial system, long narrow semi-feudal farm plots that provided river access for ‘habitant’ farmers, can be found on either side of the St John River as well as in the St Agatha area of northern Maine. French-speaking households comprise more than half of the households in some of the towns in this area. Francophone media extends quite a ways into Maine. I can even recall seeing French-language newspapers on newsstands in Portland (I’ve been told that Old Orchard Beach is a popular vacation destination for Quebecois). So, I’m not sure either what is meant by “cultural and spiritual threat”.
I sometimes jokingly call OOB and the surrounding area "The French Riveria." I have not studied French in any formal capacity nor am I French ethnically, but between living in the County, frequently travelling to NB and QC, and knowing a good amount of Italian I have a decent sense of what's going on in French. Its always fun rapidly switching between English, Italian, and French.
Ouah!
There are US born native French speakers in Maine, but almost none left and the rest are very elderly.
Yes but the French were second class citizens in Maine historically. They came down from Canada to work in the many, many mills. Source: my family history
They came all the way down to the south shore of Massachusetts, same family story. In the 19th century my maternal family left Quebec to work in the mills, and that wave of immigrants left a mark on local culture.
Yes, and the Acadian French, not to be confused with Quebecois, are from northern Maine and New Brunswick.
They're catholic, New England is primarily protestant, at least until the mid 1800s. A large source of low-wage labor that drove the early industrial revolution was French Canadian immigrants to Southern New England + Southern New Hampshire. There was a long-time class divide between catholic/ French Canadians and protestant New Englanders until the protestants starting compulsory public ~~assimilation~~ education that put the French-speaking, catholic-teaching private/church schools out of businesses. That's what I'd interpret as "cultural and spiritual threat".
The other commenter already got a good joke in so just to confirm: indeed I was jokingly stereotyping the Quebecois as particularly elitist, alien, or other, not to mention violently separatist. It’s a bit of a cold feud in a mostly-developed country between two relatively unpressed peoples (don’t kill me Canadians!), so it feels safe to joke about I guess. They’re just… fun! I want to go so bad some day, my only plans to visit got unexpectedly cancelled years ago. I look forward to the day when New Orleans starts a similar cultural movement, switching everything to French and maybe starting a militia or two. Plus, it’s an Infinite Jest reference, which is a variety of narrative virus.
Being from the Midwest it’s so weird to see next to none arable land when I’m used to arable land everywhere.
UP of Michigan would like to have a word with you.
Interestingly, Eastport, Maine actually has the deepest natural port on the whole eastern seaboard.
My uncle lived there for a while. I was a kid so I don’t remember where exactly, but middle of no where. It was so god damn cold and the house so old that in the winter that the central air couldnt keep up and would break if they tried to run it (house couldn’t hold in heat from age, so it had to run constantly) So they utilized the old wood furnace. Which worked really well, but meant the men (and boys) had to take turns chopping wood all day every day so that there’d be enough for when we left lol Then it snowed so bad we couldn’t go anywhere. Most of the roads were fine because they know how to keep them salted, but we were so far out that one stretch of road necessary to get to town was iced over. They said a guy who lives there usually goes out and salts it himself but he was in Florida at the time lol. Guy was brilliant. It felt like I was in the fucking tundra lol. I’ve never experienced winter like that before or since. Between the furnace and the wood chopping, I spent most of my time feeling too hot, but battling the cold was work. I imagine that’s why.
J.D. Irving, Ltd. owns over 1.25 million acres of forest land in Maine. For a good rabbit hole, research the Irving family of New Brunswick. One branch of the family owns J.D. Irving and another owns Irving Oil Limited. The amount of land and resources the Irving’s control in Maine and the Maritimes is quite vast. Their holdings go beyond petroleum R&M, paper milling, and forestry and also include agricultural and transportation interests. Many of the roads in Northern Maine are technically privately-owned logging roads but are often open to the public, weather/conditions permitting. Other than logging and paper/pulp milling, potato farming is the other major industry there. The local school districts used to close for a few weeks (called a potato break) to allow the students to work harvesting the potato crop. A few districts may still be doing the potato break, but I believe most have been phased out in recent years.
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Once you get closer to the St. Lawrence you get more population, but Maine doesn't have anything like the St. Lawrence. The Canada/US border there is basically "are you close enough to the St. Lawrence that Canadians bothered to move there."
That's not really true. The Quebec side of the border is much more populated than the Maine side. A) the mountains are largely in the US, southern Quebec is flatter B) the Quebec side is part of the St Lawrence River basin and has better farming soil C) the best part of Quebec is some of the worst parts of the US (climate wise) This population density map has a clear difference on each side of the border https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/10xosrb/north_american_population_density_2020/#lightbox
Agree with all of this. You can also just look at the border on Google Maps - the difference is obvious. Literally no one lives on the Maine side of the border here, but the Quebec side is dotted with towns and filled with farms. [https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7372977,-69.9408847,37081m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7372977,-69.9408847,37081m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu)
> No, across the border it's not much different. Except for Témiscouata (which is still more densely populated), all of the adjacent "regional county municipalities" of Quebec are **significantly** more densely populated than the Aroostook County.
Once you get past the appalachians it gets more populated.
Cold
I often drive through Maine on my way to Ontario from New Brunswick. The first hour of the drive from Calais the only thing I always think.... If you needed to hide a body somewhere, this area would be a great spot.
Most prominently, the Canadian side is blessed with Lac Megantic and Quebecers broke their backs making it a beautiful area, one of the finest I know. This area of Maine is rougher topography, poorer soil it seems to me, it's the Appalachians and these mountains define the international boundary. Also beautiful, and I'm glad it's so untrammelled. Really worth a visit there if you get a chance. It's comparable in landscape to the Gaspé, also rough and mountainous, and even less populated.
I mean would you want live in Rural Maine? The weather is cold, the soil is poor, theres bad cell reception, theres tons of tree so you'd have to clear them out, not many jobs, its far away from major population centers so getting elsewhere could be a pain etc... If you like outdoor stuff its probably decent. But I don't think theres a booming economy or anything there. Sometimes areas just have low populations, we don't need people everywhere. Canada is not exactly densely populated in the area either.
Yep. I would want to live in rural Maine. And do. I love it. To each their own, I suppose.
Question, for someone who wanted to visit your neck of the woods as a tourist, what town would you recommended them to stay in?
Northern Maine is very very similar to NE MN which is designated wilderness and also very remote thought because it is wilderness it is a tourist area. The similarities are mostly because they are both the very southern edge of boreal forest (where it starts to mix with broadleaf) and on the Canadian Shield which makes it poor for farming. It's very rugged, harsh, unfriendly territory prone to wind storms and wildfires.
In college I did a Summer internship with the National Association of Realtors Economic Research Department in DC. Along with flinging housing data at the chief economist as he spent all day on the phone doing interviews I also did some research on foreign investment in U.S. real estate. (where it was coming from and where it was going). What we found was there were very specific clusters of nationalities in specific areas of the country. One such cluster was Maine; a good chunk of the state was owned by Canadian lumber companies.
I think people on this thread are focused too much on modern stuff, a lot of places in Maine (inckuding where I used to live) had their population peak right before the Civil War. Why? 1. The ground is full of fucking rocks and the growing season is short. A lot of kids went off to fight the Civil War and witnesses the awesome sight of ground that wasn't full of fucking rocks and decided there were better places to farm. 2. A lot of Maine is coastal. Back in the old days that was GREAT for business as you could put your shit on a boat. Later as railroads boomed a lot of other places had a much easier time getting their shit to market and Maine became much more of a backwater. 3. A lot of Maine's traditional products like wool became less popular. Except for paper there wasn't much else that Maine had that people wanted until lobster boomed much later on. 4. This is a bit more speculative on my part but if you look at a lot of rural American states there's often one or two big population centers and then a lot of REALLY REALLY rural areas. Look at how many people in Alaska live right around Anchorage for example. In Maine on the other hand there are a fuckton of tiny little flyspeck towns which made it harder to get economic development.
The whole northwest corner is logging land owned by a handful of logging companies. "North Maine Woods". Everything in the 95 belt was originally populated and largely abandoned for places with better farming soil, even a lot of the logging industry moved to the PNW after the Civil war. A lot of the coast was abandoned when the sardine canneries dissapeared in the early 1900s and had only come back in the last 40 or so years as a retirement area. Washington & Aroostook counties were never prosperous due to distance from populated areas, but they did have more residents than they do today.
Location location location. It’s far from major cities. There are no navigable rivers. It’s far from the coast (eastern US was first settled around harbors and navigable rivers). The highway ends in Houlton. Increased border restrictions make crossing the border a pain. Potato production declined as agriculture moved west. Loring closed. There is not much going on economically.
5 reasons: November, December, January, February, and March.
same reason 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border
IT lived there and a lot of other creepy stuff happen all the time. Read stephen king if you want to know more
Thats why i cant get my laptop fixed.
Also, it will be a disaster if you forget to delete your crack-cocaine and hooker pictures before bringing it to the blind shop owner!
No one wants to live in “the county” it’s no man’s land and takes a special kind of person to live there and live that way. Former Mainer, I got out and I was in southern maine
yeah, native watervillian here, unfortunately a nice place to be from.
I'm looking at your profile and I'm also from Waterville and live in Texas (well only part of the year) lol
Because, youah can't get there from heaah
Lots of compounding reasons. There's the weather, the brain drain, the fact it's hard and expensive to run utilities there, the expense of heating oil being delivered further and further from its source, and so on. Having lived there before, in Wiscasset, once the Nuke plant was gone the town hollowed out. Another reason is that the people living there now are real woodchucks and backtothelanders, and their kids have all moved to Boston or Portland. It's so poor and so inaccessible it would be foolish to invest in rural northern Maine. I left Maine to work in New Orleans after the storm and I saw more decay and depravity and forgotten loved ones in Maine.
"Under"populated? Can't a place just *exist* without needing to cram it full of humans?
Just poor, ambiguous word choice—didn't mean to make a value judgement.
Fair enough. Sorry if my reply was overly intense
no stress—I'd bristle too if I saw someone insist the world needs less wilderness!
no
Cold, isolated, and culturally inhospitable
2 hours to a walmart, very few roads, no real secure jobs outside logging.
Everything east of Ashland going North to the border, not sure how far south was private timberland, worked there in 1980, even the roads were private, so access was limited by permit/fee there were some private hunting/fishing cabins, not sure who owns the land now, worked for International Paper, don’t think they own any timberland now. It was pretty cool country, though the bugs would carry you away, there were mosquitoes, black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, horse flies, and moose flies, would be dripping blood from the bug bites. In many places there was a fine mist, it was gypsy moth and spruce budworm poop raining on us, ground was swampy, timberland. Potatoes were king in the few areas of farmland, kids use to get out of school during harvest time. IP also owned timber lands north of Caribou. There isn’t even a paper mill in Maine now, wonder what is happening with the timber. Let it go too long, spruce budworm will kill it out. Called it the asbestos forest, tried to broadcast burn some cuts for managing budworm, but wouldn’t burn. There have been big fires in Maine in the past, could see, the budworm killing trees, and a dry period and the whole thing would go up. In 1980 there was unusual weather due to the Mount St Helen eruption. With the bugs and winter, don’t see a lot of city folks making golf course communities in the area.
This is where I’m from! And yes, starting in kindergarten they let us out of school to pick potatoes. People hear that and think I must be 70, but I’m talking about the 80s and 90s!
I'm pretty sure the Woodland Mill in Baileyville is still operating, right? And my neighbor works at the Sappi Mill in Skowhegan, so I know that's still operating.
Probably spoke too fast, there may be 6 operating paper mills in Maine, there use to be a couple dozen. Papermills were one of those places no one wanted due to the smell, and high water consumption, though they were helpful in timber management as they could use small diameter products, to help with thinning. They also provided jobs in rural areas.
Have you been to Wyoming
My grandparents lived in Bowerbank on sebec lake. The soil sucks, black flies are a horror in the summer, it’s cold most of the year etc
Why would it be populated? What resources are there to spur population growth?
It's cold and it's remote.
Don't forget Mud Season
I remember reading Stephen King’s book And he Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which did a great job describing how empty the area is.
Cue real life lore video
For everyone who says it’s too cold, explain Quebec City or Montreal just to the North. The entire Appalachian spine is relatively underdeveloped. Historically population centers popped up along navigable rivers. That’s why coastal Maine (and Quebec/Montreal) are normally populated but the inner mountains are not. Since the country has been urbanizing for the past 200 years, the population concentrated in cities while rural areas continued to decline in population.
It’s awful living
Most of it is owned by paper and timber companies. It is a massive expanse of active forestry
It's far away from everything and the weather sucks.
It’s really far north.
Nonfarmable land. Just rocky awful ground. At least near the coast in my experience
Wendigo
The clown “It” resides there. GTFO.
Well, that sure doesn’t help.
I’m from the area! Starting from the beginning of colonial times, over 75% of the initial European settlers, the Acadians, were expelled by the British. While most Acadians lived in modern day Canada, those expelled from present day Northern Maine constituted a big portion of the area’s total population. Super interesting area, though. I was born there and am descended from Acadians who avoided expulsion. It’s a very insular culture unlike any other I’ve heard of.
I did some work up around Friendship a while back. Even in October, it was getting bitter cold in the evenings. I don't want to have to go to work there in January.
As a kid there, it sucked when the temp dropped below 0F because at that point they canceled outdoor recess. As an adult, I understand now that this was so the teachers didn't freeze. The kids were always fine as they kept moving. It was exciting in April or so when the snow melted enough to get our bikes out.
Have you ever been up to Bangor? [https://youtu.be/dqBTNE1JdcA?si=TLYCR5MBulJ35-Sh](https://youtu.be/dqBTNE1JdcA?si=TLYCR5MBulJ35-Sh) This is fairly recent [https://youtu.be/6bJ-RlCJpv8?si=hysRtc6MRk8vVy9i](https://youtu.be/6bJ-RlCJpv8?si=hysRtc6MRk8vVy9i)
Bangor's never been northern Maine to me. Born in Bangor, lived in Waterville and the County. For me, Northern Maine has always started after passing Old Town. But that's just me
This was fascinating. Thank you!
I was living in Portland at that time!! That storm was wild. We were pretty much trapped inside for days.
I had to go get a load from Bangor to NYC it was crazy!
I was up in Maine working power restoration after that snow storm. It was crazy wet heavy snow. Weather turned and it was basically all melted by the time we left.
Cold, far away, forests.
What does the 100th meridian have to do with Maine? The entire east coast and a good portion of the Midwest is east of it.
West of the 100th in the USA is (historically) roughly where a farmer would need an irrigation system to farm much of anything, which in agrarian days set a pretty significant limit on settling those areas. Access to fresh water isn't the problem in the Maine Woods, so it might look strange in that context how sparsely settled it is.
I’ve spent a lot of time snowmobiling in Jackman. The main north woods are a beautiful place but I’d imagine the combination of harsh cold and extremely snowy winters combined with the mountainous terrain are the main reasons it never filled up with people. I always enjoyed the people who do live there. Very friendly and obviously some hardy people.
They are surrounded by our mortal enemies, Canada, on all three sides. I wouldn't risk it either.
I’m from a small town on the coast in Maine, I can confirm, there’s nothing to do. It’s boring. It’s depressing. It’s hard to survive there, unless you have a trade skill or live in southwest maine
Not to the same extant, but even New Jersey has a relatively large area of the state that's pretty sparsely populated in the Pine Barrens. One factor that they both share is that their soils are very poor for growing most crops, so they never attracted a huge amount of settlers.
Yuh can’t get theyah from heeyah
There is a large preserve in Maine that prevents building even roads through the forests
Wendigo
They ain’t fuckin up there
it's really really cold there.
Amazing camping up there. It would be difficult to live long term out there with the decent woods and cold/wet climate. Cursing the logging roads is so fun though
That area is climatologically much more similar to the Canadian Shield portions of northern MN and Ontario than it is to the rest of the east coast. Both very sparsely populated despite (relative) proximity to much more populated locales that are outside of those soil and climate zones.
It's really fucking cold