Prior to the smartphone era, when folks read mainly in analog fashion, a great many of us kept a Maine Atlas and Gazetteer in the glove compartment, or the privy. Published by Yarmouth-based mapmaker DeLorme, this oversized, soft-cover booklet neatly divided this Great State of ours into 96 pages, or quadrants, each of which depicted a specific 16-by-11-inch map in remarkable detail and scale.

Most of you know this, of course. We studied The Gazetteer so as to orienteer our way around the state, to better familiarize ourselves with topographies and place names, in addition to those potential routes that might traverse and connect them. The conditional nature of these journeys is critical to Maine’s mythos. Our unofficial state motto, offered to folks from away seeking directions, spells this out pretty clearly: You can’t get there from hee-yah.

GPS titan Garmin purchased DeLorme back in 2016, along with Eartha, the massive, slowly rotating globe that still occupies three full stories inside the former company headquarters. GPS-enabled mapping applications have reduced the need for physical maps of all kinds. However, the need to better know and understand this place we call Maine remains undiminished.

Case in point: The many odd-ball municipal naming conventions here. Until 1820, Maine was part of Massachusetts, where British place names remain commonplace. This makes sense: Winchester and Boston and Middlesex were the very towns, cities, counties and regions from whence a great many 17th and 18th century settlers hailed. I’m a Masshole born, bred and proud — the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “Masshole” in 2015 (How do you like them apples!?). And so, I endorse this naming convention as quite sensible.

Maine has its share of similarly UK-derived place names among its 23 cities, 430 towns, and 30 plantations. Yet the naming conventions here are more varied and, well, idiosyncratic. Way more. It’s possible, for example, that the founders of Lebanon, Norway, Poland, Mexico, Sweden, Smyrna, Stockholm, Moscow, Carthage, Monticello, Bremen, Rome, Athens, Troy, Denmark, Peru, Palermo, Dresden, Paris, West Paris and South Paris all hailed from these original locations. But I doubt it.

There would appear to be little rhyme or reason to this geographic exotica. Rather, each place was so named for its own particular reason, on account of its own eccentric Creation story. The western Oxford County town of Peru (pop. 1,509), for example, was incorporated in 1821, in solidarity with the South Americans who had just declared their independence from Spain. It had first been organized in 1812 as Plantation Number 1 — a plantation being a rudimentary form of municipal self-government that, by Maine statute, cannot pass or enforce its own local ordinances. Thirty such townships still operate this way, mainly deep in the state’s interior, though the islands of Matinicus and Monhegan also function today as plantations.

Prior to its incorporation, Peru was also known as Thompsontown, in honor of General Samuel Thompson, the former Brunswick tavern keeper and one of Maine’s most prominent Revolutionary War figures. In May of 1775, shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he led 600 militia in capturing and expelling the HMS Canceaux from Portland Harbor, then known as Falmouth Harbor. The Canceaux would, ahem, return in October 1775 and burn most of Falmouth to the ground.

Lisbon (pop. 8853) is the largest of these Maine towns whose names riff on foreign locales. Upon splitting from neighboring Bowdoin in 1799, Lisbon was originally founded as Thompsonborough, another shout-out to the General, who, come his dotage, was a large landowner in nearby Topsham. However, it’s been reported that local townsfolk eventually grew disenchanted with the general’s “political views,” so they changed the name to Lisbon in 1802.

It’s not clear what views might have proved so controversial. Thompson was a legit war hero and no Tory. As a longtime legislator in the Massachusetts General Assembly, he was a known political quantity. He did, however, argue against ratification of the U.S. Constitution during the late 1780s. In doing so, he also pointed out that General George Washington, the man pretty much everyone presumed would lead the new government, was an unabashed slaveholder. Thompson died in 1793, and it’s possible that his reputation suffered over time, as Washington’s grew ever more “marbled”. Today, there isn’t a single Maine town that goes by the name Thompson.

Back to Lisbon: Why choose the Portuguese capital as a permanent replacement? Another fair question — with no definitive answers. If there were Mainers of West Iberian descent living in West Bowdoin during the early 1800s, there is no record of or public reference to them. As with Peru, the choice may have expressed solidarity with, not necessarily relation to, specific people abroad — perhaps the victims and survivors of the famous 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. This natural disaster proved a cataclysm of worldwide renown, but the event was nearly 50 years past in 1802. Choosing Lisbon could have expressed support for those fighting Napoleon, but the Emperor’s Peninsular Campaign did not begin until 1807.

Maine’s predilection for internationalist town names is made all the more whimsical by those communities that alter pronunciation to better distinguish themselves from the originals — because Madrid, Maine (population 173, pronounced MAD-rid) is always being confused with the longtime Spanish capital.

This appellational tic almost certainly was not developed here. Cairo, Missouri (pronounced Cay-row) and Berlin, New Hampshire (BER-lin) both come to mind. However, with such sterling examples as Madrid, Calais (callous) and Vienna (Vye-enna), it does feel as though Mainers have raised this geographic affectation to high art.

My favorite example is the reason behind this column. I recently learned of a Maine hamlet southeast of Holton called Linneus (pop. 947). I’ve never been there, but it bears a remarkable resemblance to the surname of biologist Carl Linnaeus (pronounced lin-ay-us). This 19th century Swede is the fellow responsible for the convention that provides nearly every living thing on Earth with Latin, binomial nomenclature.

At first, I reckoned the place name, Linneus, had something to do with all the Scandinavians who helped settle remote Aroostook County during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is the home of New Sweden, after all. But no: It’s way more fun than that!!

Because Maine was considered part of Massachusetts for some 200 years, many Bay State individuals and entities owned vast tracts of land up here. Apparently, half the property that once comprised Linneus was owned by Harvard College. It was sold, in 1804, in order to endow a botany professorship down in Cambridge. The township incorporated in 1836; named for Linnaeus, it took the spelling, Linneus. Why? We don’t know. Did locals always pronounce it linney-us? Hard to know, but they do now.

Madrid, which sits quietly astride Route 4 on the way to Rangeley, has recently gone the other way: Today it’s a “deorganized” township, a designation that requires approval from the state legislature. There exist 53 such communities today. Most were created to reduce property taxes and alleviate the trouble/cost of finding/paying municipal employees.

The remote Somerset County communities of Concord and Lexington were created as proper municipalities, right next to each other, just north of Embden Pond. They were founded in 1826 and 1833, respectively — fully 50 years after the founding. The spirit of liberty (and Massachusetts geography) clearly informed these names. Both towns, however, were deorganized in 1930 and 1940, respectively, and today they’re formally known as the Central Somerset Township (pop. 336). Just one catch: While Lexington and Concord sit side by side, on an east-west axis, one must drive 45 minutes — down and around Embden Pond — to travel from one community to the other.

East-west travel in Maine (in all of Northern New England) is extremely burdensome, something analog study of The Gazetteer made very clear: There are precious few roadways, and certainly no interstate highways, that enable direct, efficient travel from east to west, or vice versa. Why? Too many mountains ranging north and south, and too many massive glacier-cut lakes, like Embden Pond, around which one must navigate.

When I first moved to Portland, I would often drive west to New Hamster to play golf or ski or whatnot. Thanks to The Gazetteer, I discerned there were always several distinct routes to consider — some dodging Lake Sebago to the south, the others veering north. The White Mountains could be scaled through one of three different passes or gaps. To ferret out the best route, I would follow one path to N.H., then return to Maine along an alternate path. Invariably, each zig-zagging, mountain-scaling, lake-dodging route proved nearly identical in time and distance! This I found a bit eerie, and thoroughly maddening.

You can’t get there from here? In actuality, our state motto should read this way. “It doesn’t much matter which way you might go from here. Left or right. It doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

Hal Phillips of Auburn has been a working journalist since 1986, and managing director of Mandarin Media, Inc. since 1997. His first book, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America, was published in 2022. Bloomsbury will publish his next effort in 2026. He can be reached at [email protected].