Old Town, Maine

Old Town sits on the Penobscot River, across from Indian Island, and its name points to what came before the settlers: the Penobscot Nation had a village here long before Europeans arrived. Old Town was incorporated as a town in eighteen forty and as a city in eighteen ninety-one. Its most distinctive industry grew from Indigenous knowledge: the Old Town Canoe Company, founded in eighteen ninety-eight, built canoes using birch-bark techniques the Penobscot people had refined over centuries.

Those canoes paddled by Teddy Roosevelt, carried on expeditions to the Arctic, and outlasted the logging era that first drew settlers here. Old Town Canoe is still one of the best-known canoe brands in North America, a rare case of a Maine mill-town product that never went out of style.