Howland, Maine

Howland was settled in eighteen eighteen as a logging and milling outpost on the Penobscot River, named for John Howland, a Pilgrim who fell overboard the Mayflower and survived. The river here powered sawmills that fed the great timber boom of the eighteen hundreds, when Penobscot County was one of the largest lumber-producing regions on the continent. At its peak Howland had several mills running around the clock.

The twentieth century brought a pulp mill that kept the town employed long after the virgin timber was gone. Today fewer than thirteen hundred people live here, but the town remains a quiet testament to Maine's defining industry: the forests that built half the houses on the Eastern Seaboard.