Casco Bay Lines and the Island Mail Run
Near Portland, Maine
The ferry terminal at the foot of Commercial Street is the departure point for one of the oldest continuous public transit routes in the United States. Casco Bay Lines has been running boats to the bay's islands since roughly eighteen seventy, making it among the longest-operating ferry services in the country. The mail boat run, which stops at five islands three times a day, is the longest-running mailboat service in the nation.
Scheduled service to the inner bay islands began around eighteen seventy, but a permanent year-round company did not form until eighteen seventy-eight, as the Casco Bay Steamboat Company. Three years later, in eighteen eighty-one, a second line, the Harpswell Line, began service to the outer islands as far as Bailey and Orr's Islands. The two companies merged in nineteen oh seven as the Casco Bay and Harpswell Steamboat Company.
The mid-twentieth century was hard on the ferry. The suburban land boom and improved roads drew people off the islands. When the original Casco Bay Lines declared bankruptcy in nineteen eighty-one, the Maine legislature stepped in, creating the Casco Bay Island Transit District, a quasi-municipal nonprofit, to take over the routes and keep the islands connected to the mainland. The ferry was, in effect, too essential to fail.
Today the system serves seven year-round and seasonal islands: Peaks, Little Diamond, Great Diamond, Diamond Cove, Long Island, Chebeague, and Cliff. Peaks Island, the closest and most populated, is a short ride from the terminal. Cliff Island, the farthest, takes about an hour each way. The passengers riding on a winter weekday, fishermen, teachers, nurses, and children commuting to mainland schools, are the same kinds of people who have depended on this crossing for a hundred and fifty years.
