J.W. Burleson photo / Boquillas del Carmen, Coah.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

The Portland Company: Maine Industrial Vernacular


The Portland Company, founded in 1846, built and fixed locomotives for the Atlantic & St Lawrence Railway, (AKA the St Lawrence & Atlantic, in Canada). The ST L & A connected Montreal with Portland, Maine, the nearest year-round Atlantic port to central and western Canada.
The Portland Company property is being developed. The final shape of the project hasn't been settled yet, but there's concern in the neighborhood that condominium development on the site will clog the generous views of waterfront available from most streets on that slope of Munjoy Hill.
The Portland Co. buildings remind me of Civil War-era photographs of the tobacco warehouses in Richmond. Same era, I think...humble unsung redbrick. The tobacco warehouse below was an (infamous) prison for captured Yankee soldiers, which is the only reason anyone bothered to take a photograph of it.
The Grand Trunk Railway took over the St L & A line and ran trains from Montreal through New England its India Street Station in Portland, near The Portland Company yards. (The GTR also brought thousands of French Canadian workers to the Maine textile towns of Biddeford, Waterville, Lewiston, Brunswick.)
The India Street Station is gone, but the GTR's railway and steamship office is still there.

The GTR building dates from 1909 and is vacant. I don't believe it is part of the Portland Company parcel, but that whole zone of the waterfront seems to be up for grabs--Portland had better watch out or it's going to be smothered under piles of condos. Big (and I mean BIG) cruise ships have started calling in summer, flooding the area with sudden throngs of bored & antsy shopaholics. The mix of stores along Commercial Street and in the Old Port is getting less interesting by the month as merchants are facing jacked-up rents that can only be paid by high-volume tchotchke parlors.



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