Falmouth ( ) is a town in Cumberland County, Maine, United States. Falmouth is included in the Lewiston-Auburn, Maine metropolitan New England City and Town Area. The population was 12,444 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Portland-South Portland-Biddeford metropolitan area.
A northern suburb of Portland, Falmouth borders Casco Bay and offers one of the largest anchorages in Maine.
History
Native Americans
Native Americans followed receding glaciers into Maine around 11,000 BCE. At the time of European contact in the sixteenth century, people speaking an eastern dialect of the Abenaki-Pennacook language inhabited present-day Falmouth. In 1614, Captain John Smith observed a local Abenaki-Pennacook band whom he called "Aucocisco" (spelled various) living around western Casco Bay. The regional expert Alvin Morrison chose not call this band "Aucocisco" but simply the "Presumpscot River Wabanaki". Their main summer town was located on the lower Presumpscot, where they grew corn as well as beans and squash. Ten years later, English explorer Christopher Levett met with the Sagamore Skitterygusset at his summer fishing camp at Presumpscot Falls. Their meeting was reported as very positive, however, Levett was unable to return as promised due to unforeseen circumstances.
A combination of warfare and disease decimated Native peoples in the years before English colonization, creating a shatter zone of devastation and political instability in what would become southern Maine. The introduction of European wares in the 1500s reoriented long-standing Native trade relationships in the Gulf of Maine. Warfare soon broke out among groups such as the Mi'kmaq and Penobscot who sought to subjugate their neighbours by monopolizing access to European goods. The arrival of foreign pathogens only served to compound the upheaval in the region. A particularly notorious epidemic between 1614 and 1620 ravaged the population of coastal New England with mortality rates at upwards of 90 percent. Native peoples were not totally destroyed however, maintaining a visible presence in the Casco Bay area until King George's War in the 1740s. French military defeats and increasing settler migration to the area from the southern New England Colonies impelled most Native Americans to assimilate into British colonial society, migrate toward the protection of New France or further up the coast where they remain today.Bruce J. Borque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 16; Emerson W. Baker, “Finding the Almouchiquois: Native American Families, Territories, and Land Sales in Southern Maine,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 73-100; Christopher Levett, A Voyage into New England: Begun in 1623, and Ended in 1624 (London: 1628); David L. Ghere, "The 'Disappearance of the Abenaki in Western Maine: Political Organization and Ethnocentric Assumptions," American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 193–207.
New Casco (1630–1765)
Falmouth's original bounds encompassed the present day cities of Portland, South Portland, Westbrook and Cape Elizabeth. Today's town was known as New Casco, and was only a neighborhood within the larger collection of communities around Casco Bay centered in what is downtown Portland. Falmouth's early years were marked by extreme violence as it lay on a borderland zone between Europeans and Native Americans. Casco Bay represented the northernmost point of British colonial settlement on the east coast until 1713. Numerous wars between 1675 and 1763 among the British, French, and Native Americans rarely left Falmouth unscathed from the violence. English colonists twice abandoned Casco Bay altogether under pressure from French and Indian attacks in 1676 and 1690.
The first European resident was Arthur Mackworth, who lived on the east bank of the Presumpscot River as early as 1630. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony took political control of Maine in 1658 from the heirs of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, they renamed the area Falmouth after an important Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War. Colloquially known as "Falmouth in Casco Bay" to distinguish it from Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, it was the 7th town in the recently formed Province of Maine, later being formally incorporated on November 12, 1718. Joseph Conforti, "Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England;" Lebanon, New Hampshire 2005, 9-12.
One of the earliest structures in the town of Falmouth was a palisaded fort and trading post named Fort Casco built in 1698 at the conclusion of King William's War. The location of the fort can be found today opposite Pine Grove Cemetery on Route 88. Massachusetts built the fort at the behest of local Abenaki desiring a convenient place to trade and repair tools and weapons. A 1701 meeting between the Wabanaki leaders and Massachusetts officials cemented an alliance between the two. A pair of stone cairns were then erected to symbolize the new partnership. The nearby Two Brothers Islands later received their name from this now long-forgotten monument.Emerson W. Baker, “Formerly Machegonne, Dartmouth, York, Stogummor, Casco, and Falmouth: Portland as a Contested Frontier in the Seventeenth Century,” in Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England, ed. Joseph A. Conforti (Lebanon, NH, 2005), 1–19; "Memorial of Propositions made with the Eastern Indians," Documentary History of the State of Maine (1907), 10:87–95.
The peace lasted less than three years. With the inauguration of Queen Anne's War in 1702. Governor Joseph Dudley held a conference at New Casco with representatives of the Abenaki tribes on June 20, 1703, trying to convince them not to ally with the French. His efforts were unsuccessful, as the fort was besieged only two months later by Abenaki Sagamores Moxus, Wanungonet, Assacombuit and their French Allies during the Northeast Coast Campaign. The arrival of the Massachusetts ship Province Galley relieved the fort by dispersing the Wabanaki and the some 500 French with its guns. Peace returned in 1713 with the Treaty of Portsmouth. When the resettlement of present-day Portland began in 1716, the Province of Massachusetts ordered that the fort at New Casco be demolished rather than maintain it.John G. Reid, “Notes and Comments: Unorthodox Warfare in the Northeast, 1703,” Canadian Historical Review 74, no. 3 (1992): 211–20.; Baker, “Formerly Machegonne," 1–19.
New Casco was not permanently settled by British colonists until the fall of Quebec in 1759 permanently removed the threat of French and Indian attacks. Living so far away from Portland was dangerous: only one family lived in the town in 1725. An Indian raid in 1745 and the murder of Job Burnal in 1751 represented the risks colonists undertook to live in the area. The majority of the first permanent European inhabitants to the town came after 1740, quickly growing to "62 families" and forming their own parish in 1753 (currently the Falmouth Congregational Church). The population of Falmouth would hover between 1,000 and 2,000 residents for the next two centuries. These residents engaged in farming, fishing, and harvesting masts. Mills on the Presumpscot River, Piscataqua River in West Falmouth, and Mussel Cove powered sawmills, processed agricultural products, and manufactured finished goods by the 1800s.W. M. Willis, Journals of the Rev. Thomas Smith and the Rev. Samuel Deane (Portland, ME: 1849),54, 59–60; http://falmouthcongregationalchurch.org/history/ ; Charlotte Donald Wallace, E Pluribus Unum: a Story of Falmouth, Maine (Falmouth, ME: Falmouth Historical Society, 1976), 19.
Modern Falmouth
In 1765 Cape Elizabeth (then including South Portland) seceded from Falmouth. In 1786, Portland broke away, followed in 1814 by Westbrook, although boundaries between it and Falmouth were readjusted throughout the nineteenth century. Logistics were the reason for these separations. Population had grown by the 1760s to the extent that separate church parishes had formed, creating rival communities more attuned to local concerns. People also complained about the distance between outer areas and the center of the town in present-day Portland. By 1859, fishing and farming were principal trades. Other industries included three shipbuilders, three brickmakers, a sawmill, gristmill and tannery. In 1886, the town also produced boots, shoes, tinware and carriage stock.W. W. Clayton, History of Cumberland Co., Maine (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1880), 269–77.
The extension of trolley service from Portland to the Falmouth Foreside in 1898 initiated the town's transformation from a rural community to an urban consumer society. Trolleys cemented Falmouth's economic connection to Portland and transformed the Foreside neighborhood into a relaxation spot for nearby city dwellers. Portland's Yankee elites relocated the Portland Yacht Club and Portland Country Club to Falmouth in 1885 and 1913 respectively, where they have remained ever since. To promote its line, the Portland and Yarmouth Electric Railway Company opened Underwood Spring Park north of Town Landing in 1899. The park's attractions included a casino, hotel, and outdoor theater. Fire destroyed Underwood Spring Park in 1907 and was not rebuilt. The Portland–Lewiston Interurban also ran up today's Route 100 in West Falmouth. People's growing preference for the automobile spelled the end for trolleys, which ended service in 1933.Edwin B. Robertson, Remember the Portland Maine Trolleys (1982)
In 1943, Percival Proctor Baxter donated Mackworth Island to the state as a wildlife refuge; today it is site of the state school for the deaf and hard of hearing.Soares, Liz. All for Maine: The Story of Governor Percival P. Baxter. Windswept House Publishers (1996).
The advent of the automobile accelerated Falmouth's transition toward becoming a residential suburb of Portland. Military personnel who moved to the town while Casco Bay was base Sail for America's destroyer fleet from 1941 to 1944 bolstered much of this growth. Like many urban areas in the United States during the mid-twentieth century, the automobile, cheaper residential taxes, and the desire for open space channeled an urban exodus away from cities like Portland into neighboring towns such as Falmouth. In the span of fifty years the town's population has skyrocketed from five thousand to over ten thousand residents today. Falmouth's location on the ocean, along with its respected public school system, has made it one of the more attractive communities in Greater Portland. This demand consequently led developers to construct two additional country clubs in 1986 and 1988. The nature of such enclosed neighborhoods and other high-scale subdivisions like it has only recently turned the town into one of the most affluent in Maine.
Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , of which is land and is water. Located beside Casco Bay, the Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Ocean, Falmouth is drained by the Presumpscot River.
Interstate 95 and 295 cross the town in addition to U. S. Route 1 and state routes 9, 26, 88 and 100. It borders the towns of Cumberland to the northeast, Westbrook and Portland to the southwest, and Windham to the northwest. There are two census-designated places occupying the eastern portion of the town: Falmouth CDP to the south and Falmouth Foreside to the north.
Demographics
As of 2000 the median income for a household in the town was $66,855, and the median income for a family was $87,304. Males had a median income of $54,545 versus $35,258 for females. The per capita income for the town was $36,716. About 1.8% of families and 3.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.2% of those under age 18 and 4.7% of those age 65 or over.
2010 census