The
largest city in Maine, Portland was founded in 1632 in a superb position
on the Casco Bay Peninsula, and quickly prospered, building ships
and exporting the great inland pines for use as masts. A long line
of wooden wharves stretched along the seafront, with the merchants'
houses on the hillside above. From the earliest days it was a cosmopolitan
city, with a large free black population who traditionally worked
as longshoremen; great bitterness arose when Irish immigrants began
to muscle in on the scene in the 1830s. When the railroads came,
the Canada Trunk Line had its terminus right on Portland's quayside,
bringing the produce of Canada and the Great Plains one hundred miles
closer to Europe than it would have been at any other major US port.
Some of the wharves are now taken up by new condo developments, though
Custom House Wharf remains much as it must have looked when Anthony
Trollope passed through in 1861 and said, "I doubt whether I
ever saw a town with more evident signs of prosperity." Most
of what he saw of the town was destroyed by an accidental fire in
1866 (Indians in 1675, and the British in 1775, had previously burned
Portland deliberately). Hostels in Portland
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