Beyond the Piscataqua River is the famous "Pine-Tree State," noted for
its noble forests and its many splendid havens. This is Whittier's
"hundred-harbored Maine," and such are the sinuosities of its
remarkable coast, that while its whole distance from Kittery Point to
Quoddy Head is two hundred and seventy-eight miles, the actual length
of the shore-line stretches to twenty-five hundred miles, and if
straightened out would reach across the Atlantic. The great landmark
of this coast beyond Kittery, standing in gloomy isolation down by the
shore, is the "sailor's mountain," Agamenticus, rising six hundred and
seventy-three feet, a sentinel visible far out at sea. It is a
solitary eminence, lifted high above the surrounding country and
having three summits of almost equal altitude, the sides clothed with
dark forests. This graceful and imposing mountain gave James Russell
Lowell an attractive theme in his _Pictures from Appledore_:
"He glowers there to the north of us,
Wrapt in his mantle of blue haze,
Unconvertibly savage, and scorns to take
The white man's baptism on his ways.
Him first on shore the coaster divines
Through the early gray, and sees him shake
The morning mist from his scalplock of pines;
Him first the skipper makes out in the west
Ere the earliest sunstreak shoots tremulous,
Plashing with orange the palpitant lines
Of mutable billow, crest after crest,
And murmurs 'Agamenticus!'
As if it were the name of a saint."
Almost under the shadow of the mountain is the quiet old town of York,
the "ancient city of Agamenticus," founded by Sir Ferdinando Gorgues
in the early seventeenth century as Gorgeana, the place of first
settlement in Maine. Now it is a summer-resort, with York Beach
stretching along the coast, having Cape Neddick at its northern end
thrust out into the sea, with the curious rocky islet of the Nubble,
and surmounting lighthouse, off its extremity. Four miles beyond,
there projects the frowning promontory of the Bald Head Cliff and its
lofty Pulpit Rock, an almost perpendicular wall rising ninety feet,
with the breakers beating at its base. Farther along, the coast is a
succession of magnificent beaches all the way to Casco Bay, and the
broad road they furnish is the chief highway. Wells is a popular
summer resort, and beyond it the charming little Kennebunk River comes
down through the hills and woods and over falls, past Kennebunkport to
the sea. Then the broader Saco River is reached, its ample current
drawn from the White Mountains, plunging down a cataract of fifty-five
feet around which are gathered the mills of the twin towns of
Biddeford and Saco, having the river between them, and a population of
over twenty thousand. Their steeples rise above the trees, and one of
these, a French Catholic church in Biddeford, has little trees growing
out of its spire. Sawmills and cotton-mills largely use the ample
power of the Saco Falls. The beach fronting Saco gradually dissolves
into the noted Old Orchard Beach, stretching nearly ten miles to
Scarborough River, the finest beach in New England, over three hundred
feet wide and named from an apple orchard that once stood there, of
which the last ancient tree died before the Revolution. There are
numerous hotels and boarding-houses scattered along this broad beach,
and its people completed in 1898 one of the longest ocean piers
existing, which extends nearly two thousand feet into the sea.
Scarborough Beach is beyond, and around the broad end of Cape
Elizabeth is the entrance to Casco Bay, marked by the "Two Lights" on
the eastern extremity of the cape, these powerful white beacons being
about nine hundred feet apart. Almost under their shadow, in 1862, the
Allan Line steamer "Bohemian" was wrecked with fearful loss of life.
Within Casco Bay is an archipelago of over three hundred and fifty
islands, stretching eastward for twenty miles to the mouth of the
Kennebec. Many of these islands are favorite summer resorts, and their
surrounding waters are always haunts for yachts, the bay being an
admirable yachting ground.