India Street and the Immigrant Harbor

India Street was Portland's first street, and for more than three centuries it has been the city's front door for people arriving with very little and determined to build something. The pattern began with the earliest European settlers in the sixteen hundreds and has not stopped since.

The great wave arrived in the late eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, driven by the Irish Famine. Tens of thousands of Irish refugees crossed to North America, and many reached Maine because passage to Nova Scotia or Newfoundland cost less than passage to Boston or New York. From eastern Canada, they moved south by road or rail to Portland, arriving at the waterfront and settling in the neighborhoods clustered around India Street and the base of Munjoy Hill. Most started as longshoremen, moving cargo on the docks. Irish mutual aid societies formed quickly. The Irish American Relief Association incorporated in eighteen sixty-three. By eighteen seventy-one it had one hundred fifty members.

By the eighteen nineties, Portland was receiving roughly four thousand immigrants per year through its port. The neighborhood directory by nineteen ten listed Italians and Eastern European Jews alongside the earlier Irish arrivals. A census of Federal Street alone in nineteen twenty recorded residents born in Scotland, England, Ireland, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Russia, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, and Canada.

Portlanders today sometimes treat this diversity as a modern development, connected to the Somali and other African communities that began arriving in the nineteen nineties. But the city has been plural for as long as it has been a port. The newer arrivals are in a line that goes back to the first fishing camp on Falmouth Neck. The street itself remembers even if the placards do not say so.