The Grand Trunk and the Winter Port

Portland owed a large part of its nineteenth-century fortune to a geographic accident and one man's stubbornness. The accident was geography: Portland sits roughly one hundred miles closer to Montreal than Boston does, which in the age of railroads meant lower shipping costs and faster delivery. The stubborn man was John Alfred Poor, a Maine lawyer and railroad promoter who in the eighteen forties recognized that Portland could become Canada's winter port if someone built the rail connection.

Poor lobbied investors in England and Canada, argued his case in multiple state capitals, and eventually won. In eighteen fifty-three, trains began running from Montreal to Portland over what became the Grand Trunk Railway. The line was two hundred ninety-two miles long. It followed the Androscoggin River valley past the northern edge of the White Mountains and descended to tidewater at the Portland waterfront.

The effect was immediate. Montreal's harbor froze every winter, locking in Canadian exports until spring. Portland's harbor did not. From October through April, Canadian wheat, lumber, and manufactured goods moved through Portland en route to markets in Britain and the American South. Portland built enormous rail yards, freight sheds, and grain elevators along the waterfront to handle the traffic. By eighteen sixty-seven, the Grand Trunk had grown into the largest railroad system in the world by mileage.

The freight volume Portland handled for Canada created jobs, capital, and civic ambition that fueled the city's Victorian building boom. When that rail traffic eventually shifted to other ports in the early twentieth century, Portland began a slow fade that lasted decades. But the buildings the Grand Trunk era built are still standing. The Old Port is, in large part, the footprint of John Poor's gamble.