April 9, 1991: Prolific author Louise Dickinson Rich, who often wrote about Maine, dies at 87 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Rich, a Massachusetts native who worked as a teacher, met Ralph Rich, an engineer, on a canoeing trip in the Rangeley area in 1933. They married, fled from their workaday world to Maine and lived in […]

April 8, 1851: Neal Dow (1804-1897) is elected mayor of Portland. He quickly uses his influence in that position to lobby successfully for passage later that year of a state law generally banning the purchase and consumption of alcoholic beverages, earning Dow the nickname “the Napoleon of Temperance.” The law, which becomes known nationally as […]

April 7, 2010: Maine’s Legislature issues a statement of apology for state officials’ forcible eviction a century earlier of a largely interracial group of residents from Malaga Island, in Casco Bay. The island lies off Phippsburg near the mouth of the New Meadows River. A racially mixed community of squatter fishermen’s families lived there. Newspaper […]

April 5, 1974: Horror writer Stephen King’s novel “Carrie” is published. It is King’s fourth novel but the first to appear in print. The book and a subsequent movie of the same name make King world-famous. King was born in Portland and raised mostly in Durham, although he also spent part of his childhood in […]

April 4, 1802: Dorothea Dix, who becomes renowned nationwide as a reformer of treatment of the mentally ill and champion of their rights, is born in Hampden. Dix teaches Sunday school lessons in the Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts and witnesses the horrific conditions that people living in such places endure. From 1841 to […]

March 31, 1907: An irritated President Theodore Roosevelt reluctantly accepts the resignation of West Gardiner native John Frank Stevens (1853-1943) as chief engineer on one of the 20th century’s most challenging engineering projects – construction of the Panama Canal. Stevens, who came on board when the project already was underway and plagued with problems, engineered major […]