University of Maine

The campus spreading out along the Stillwater River here in Orono is the University of Maine, the state's flagship public university and one of the great land-grant institutions in the nation.

The story begins in eighteen sixty-two, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, granting each state federal land to establish colleges focused on agriculture, the mechanical arts, and practical education for ordinary working people. Maine's legislature accepted the terms in eighteen sixty-three and, two years later, chartered what they called the State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. Communities across the state competed fiercely to host it, bidding with land donations. Orono won, offering roughly two hundred twenty acres of farmland along the Stillwater.

The college opened in September of eighteen sixty-eight with twelve students and two faculty members. It was a humble start for what would become an institution enrolling more than eleven thousand students. In eighteen ninety-seven the legislature renamed it the University of Maine, signaling broader ambitions.

The campus itself carries an interesting footnote: the state hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape genius behind New York's Central Park, to design the grounds. The trustees ultimately rejected most of his plan, but they did adopt his ideas for orienting the campus toward the river and preserving an open parade ground and an arboretum.

Over the next century the university became Maine's engine of research and economic development, especially in forestry, marine science, and engineering. Its hockey teams, the Black Bears, have won two national championships, in nineteen ninety-three and nineteen ninety-nine, and appeared in eleven Frozen Fours, making the program one of the most decorated in college hockey.

Today the University of Maine is also the state's only Division One athletics program, its largest research university, and the institution that has shaped Maine's professional class for a hundred and fifty years. Not bad for twelve students and two professors on a donated farm.