Maine

Maine's great textile era began when the Bates Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1850 on the Androscoggin River at Lewiston; its first mill went into production in 1852. Benjamin Bates stockpiled cotton before the Civil War, and his mills kept running while many New England mills idled for lack of fiber. Within a generation, Lewiston-Auburn had become one of the largest French-Canadian communities in the United States, as families crossed from Quebec by the thousands to take mill jobs; French became the everyday language of many mill floors and neighborhoods. Around 1900, roughly seventy percent of Lewiston's workforce was employed in the Bates mills, and in 1912–13 the company built the reinforced-concrete Mill No. 5 designed by Albert Kahn. At Biddeford-Saco, the Pepperell and York manufacturing companies ran massive complexes on the Saco River. The mills declined slowly through the twentieth century: the last Bates manufacturing operations ended around 2001, and the former Pepperell mill at Biddeford, the last major textile plant in the state's mill cities, closed in 2009. Maine's mill communities retain one of the densest concentrations of Franco-American identity in the United States.