The Garden By The Sea: Seven Miles of Sand
Near Old Orchard Beach, Maine
Most of Maine's coast is rock, headland, and cold tide pool. Here it is different. The beach beneath you runs roughly seven miles of continuous, hard-packed sand, sweeping from Old Orchard Beach south into Saco and north toward Scarborough along the gentle curve of Saco Bay.
It is the longest stretch of sand beach in the state, and it is why this place became a resort while the rest of the coast stayed rugged. The name comes from an apple orchard. An early settler named Thomas Rogers reached the mouth of Goosefare Brook in the sixteen hundreds and made his home here, calling it the Garden By The Sea.
The orchard he planted outlived him by generations. The orchard's trees are said to have stood near the shore for generations, so distinctive that sailors reportedly used the old orchard as a landmark to fix their position from out at sea. The trees eventually vanished, but the name stuck.
And that firm, flat sand did more than hold beach umbrellas. It was hard enough to drive on. In the early automobile age it hosted races, and crowds said to number in the tens of thousands watched cars tear along the tide line at low water.
The same hard sand would soon draw a stranger kind of machine down to the shore.
