Camden — Where the Mountains Meet the Sea
Near Camden, Maine
Camden, Maine, calls itself the town where the mountains meet the sea, and for once the tourism tagline is simply accurate. Penobscot Bay spreads out below the town to the south and west, and directly behind the waterfront, Camden Hills rise nearly eight hundred feet above sea level in less than two miles from the water's edge. Few places on the Atlantic Coast let you look down from a mountain summit directly onto salt water and working schooners at the same time.
The Penobscot people who lived here before European settlement gave this place a name that means great swells of the sea, a reference to the profile of the Camden Hills as seen from out on the bay. That name was applied to the local river, the Megunticook, and eventually to the mountain above the town. The town was incorporated in seventeen ninety one and named for Charles Pratt, the first Earl of Camden, a British peer who had argued in Parliament against taxing the American colonies.
The nineteenth century brought Camden an industrial identity that visitors today would scarcely recognize. The Megunticook River drops steeply from the hills to the harbor, and millers used that drop to power woolen mills and shipyards. At the height of the shipbuilding era, Camden yards were launching square-rigged vessels of more than two hundred feet in length, sailing ships that traded across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn to San Francisco. The largest local shipyard, operated by the Carleton family, built the Frederick Billings, reportedly the largest square-rigged vessel ever launched in Penobscot Bay.
That world ended. The last of the big mills has long since closed. The shipyards are long gone. What Camden became instead, starting in the late nineteenth century, is something rarer: a genuinely beautiful small town that remained itself while becoming a destination. The windjammer fleet that operates out of the harbor carries passengers through the same waters the square-riggers used. The hills are still there. The bay is still there. And on a clear October day, when the leaf color is at its peak and a three-masted schooner is rounding the breakwater below the mountain, the slogan earns itself.
