History & Context

Samuel de Champlain landed at the mouth of the Saco River 400 years ago, and one of Maine’s first permanent settlements was established in 1630 on land that would become the twin cities of Biddeford and Saco. Early colonists scratched out a living by catching fish and cutting timber, despite skirmishes with resident Abenaki Indians.

Biddeford was incorporated as a town in 1718, but it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that businesses harnessed the power of the 40-foot Saco falls and the town began to grow. The streets were soon filled with tenements and the rising fronts of textile and shoe factories, quarries and brickyards, lumber mills, shipyards and granaries. Biddeford added 600 buildings and 36 streets between 1829 and 1849 and petitioned the State legislature to become a city in 1855. The City’s two biggest textile manufacturers—the Laconia Company and the Pepperell Company—opened in 1845 and 1850, respectively; at the height of their production, Biddeford mills employed 12,000 people. Immigrants flooded in from Ireland, Eastern Europe and especially Quebec, bringing with them a distinct mix of cultures, languages and traditions that made Biddeford the most ethnically diverse city in Maine.

Biddeford’s industry had all but disappeared a century later. By the time the last log floated down the Saco River in 1943, the textile mills had already begun to close down. Residents recall watching looms loaded onto flatbed trucks, destined for the southern mills and lower labor costs that sapped Biddeford’s industrial lifeblood. Workers followed the factories, and the rows of austere brick buildings gradually became hulking, hollow reminders of a city that used to be. Biddeford’s last textile company—WestPoint Home, where some 400 workers made Vellux blankets and linens—finally shut its doors in 2009.

Its economy shattered, Biddeford’s community divided and erupted in a series of disputes in the 1980s and 1990s. The coastal centers of Hills Beach, Biddeford Pool, Fortunes Rocks, and Granite Point have long attracted summer residents who were loathe to venture downtown and, as recently as the late 1990s, considered seceding from the City. Town-gown relations faltered as the University of New England campus grew and the City government was plagued by a series of scandals and management issues. Local government has since been overhauled and relationships are on the mend, but uniting the different geographic and cultural communities within the City remains a challenge.

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