Portland Maine: World Art, New England Ales and Gateway to Acadia
Visit the I.M. Pei-designed Portland Museum with its Winslow Homer collection, taste Belgian-inspired Allagash White and hazy New England IPAs, plan a trip north to Acadia National Park, walk the Longfellow birthplace, ferry to Peaks Island, and watch the lobster fleet work Portland deep harbor.
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Portland Museum of Art
The Portland Museum of Art at 7 Congress Square, founded in 1882, is the oldest public art museum in New England and the finest in northern New England. The Charles Shipman Payson Building, designed by I.M. Pei and Partners and opened in 1983, houses the permanent collection of American and European art. The collection holds 18,000 objects with particular strength in Maine landscape painters including Winslow Homer, who lived at Prouts Neck, and Andrew Wyeth, who spent summers in Cushing, Maine. The museum holds the largest collection of Winslow Homer works in the world, including The Blue Boat from 1892. John Singer Sargent, Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper are also well represented. The adjacent McLellan House, built in 1801, is the oldest surviving Federal-style house in Portland.
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Allagash Brewing and Maine Craft Beer
Maine has one of the highest concentrations of craft breweries per capita in the United States, with over 150 operating breweries across the state. Portland, with a population of only 68,000, supports over 20 breweries within city limits. Allagash Brewing Company, founded in 1995 by Rob Tod, pioneered Belgian-style ales in the American market and its Allagash White wheat beer became one of the bestselling craft beers in New England. The Allagash brewery on Industrial Way offers tours and tastings and has expanded to a barrel-aging program with hundreds of barrels producing sour and mixed-fermentation ales. Bissell Brothers Brewing, opened in 2013 in the Thompson Point entertainment complex, is known nationally for hazy New England IPAs. Oxbow Brewing, Fore River Brewing, and Austin Street Brewing add further depth to the scene.
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Acadia National Park Gateway
Portland serves as the southern gateway city for visitors to Acadia National Park, 160 miles northeast on Mount Desert Island. Acadia, established in 1919 as the first national park east of the Mississippi River, received 3.5 million visitors in 2021. Cadillac Mountain at 1,530 feet is the highest point on the US Atlantic coast and the first place in the continental United States to see sunrise from October through March. The carriage road system, 45 miles of crushed stone paths commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and completed between 1913 and 1940, remains one of the finest examples of designed landscape in the national park system. Bar Harbor, the main town on Mount Desert Island, fills with visitors each summer and offers whale watching, sea kayaking, and lobster dinners on working wharves.
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Longfellow House and Literary Portland
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the most widely read American poets of the 19th century, was born in Portland in 1807 and grew up at what is now the Wadsworth-Longfellow House at 487 Congress Street, maintained by the Maine Historical Society as the oldest surviving structure on the Portland peninsula. Longfellow wrote Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and Paul Revere Ride, which standardized the revolutionary-era story in American cultural memory even though it contains significant historical inaccuracies. Portland has continued its literary tradition through writers including Elizabeth Strout, whose Olive Kitteridge novel and linked stories set in a fictional Maine coastal town won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an HBO limited series.
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Peaks Island and Casco Bay Lines
Peaks Island, accessible by a 20-minute ferry from the Casco Bay Lines terminal on Commercial Street, is the most populous of the Casco Bay islands with roughly 900 year-round residents rising to 5,000 in summer. The island has a car-free culture; visitors walk or rent bikes. The Fifth Maine Regiment Community Center, built in 1888 by Civil War veterans and now a museum, anchors the island cultural life. Casco Bay Lines, operating since 1845 and one of the oldest continuously operating ferry companies in the United States, serves six Casco Bay islands on a year-round schedule. The mail boat run, a 3-hour narrated cruise stopping at multiple islands, is considered one of the most scenic short cruises in New England and departs daily year-round.
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Portland Harbor and Working Waterfront
Portland Harbor, one of the deepest natural harbors on the East Coast, has been a commercial port since the 1630s. The harbor handles petroleum products, road salt, paper products, and a growing container business through the Portland International Marine Terminal. The lobster fishing fleet operating from Portland Landing and adjacent wharves is among the most productive in Maine, which catches over 90 percent of the US lobster supply. The Maine Lobster Festival in Rockport each August celebrates this industry, but Portland waterfront serves the trade year-round. The Portland Fish Exchange, established in 1986 as one of the first computerized fish auctions in the United States, processes daily catches of groundfish from vessels working Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. The working waterfront coexists with tourist infrastructure at Old Port.