Features

Best of Maine

Thousands of Down East readers took our annual poll to tell us what they love most in Maine — from landmarks to lobster shacks to libraries. Then we chimed in with a few picks of our own. How’d your favorites do?

Seguinland

Straddling the Kennebec River, the midcoast communities of Phippsburg and Georgetown embody the best of Maine’s sylvan, scenic, seagoing character.

By Anne Witty

Mill Town

If you grew up in Mexico, Maine, nothing loomed larger than the paper mill, which gave the town a measure of prosperity, even as mill waste polluted the waters and locals nicknamed the area “Cancer Valley.” In an excerpt from a new book, one writer grapples with that tension.

By Kerri Arsenault

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Departments

North by East

A farmer saves an old stone barn on MDI, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art looks back on old art-colony days, and Maine’s old drive-in theaters are in the limelight again. Plus, a fisherman breaks an old state record in Maine Dispatches.

Food and Drink

Uniting donuts and tacos in hole-y matrimony at Camden’s Boynton-McKay, hitting the streets in pandemic-era Portland, pitting oysters against mussels, and putting Maine ice cream on the map.

Good Things from Maine

A York woman’s beach finds become home décor, while finds in Bristol’s quirky shops include blown-glass garden mushrooms and hoes made of mower blades. Plus, five locally stitched masks for the global pandemic.

Maine Homes

A 1923 bungalow in York brings back childhood memories, and a South American approach to gardening meets the Deer Isle landscape.

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Where in Maine

Maine Moment

Dooryard

Editor’s note, reader feedback, responses to June’s Where in Maine, and more.

Columns

Timelines: Maine’s Moose Hunt Charges Back, Room With a View.

My Favorite Place

Memoirist Abdi Nor Iftin, on New Gloucester’s Big Falls Preserve.

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On the cover: Reid State Park, in Georgetown, by Benjamin Williamson.