Lewiston, Maine

Lewiston was settled in seventeen seventy and chartered as a city in eighteen sixty-three, and its identity was forged entirely by the Androscoggin River. The falls here powered one of the largest concentrations of textile mills in New England. By the eighteen eighties, Lewiston and neighboring Auburn were called the shoe-and-textile capital of Maine.

The mills recruited heavily from Quebec, and French Canadian workers poured in by the tens of thousands. By nineteen hundred, more than half the population spoke French as a first language. The mills closed in waves through the mid-twentieth century, and Lewiston reinvented itself again in the two thousands as a resettlement destination for Somali refugees, giving the city the largest Somali community in New England.

Lewiston has always been a city of newcomers remaking it in their image.