5 Maine Town Nicknames Nobody From Out of State Understands

You don’t expect to need a translation when someone tells you where they’re from in Maine.

Then they use a nickname, and you’re left trying to match it to a town you’ve actually heard of.

These are the Maine town nicknames nobody from out of state understands.

1. Millinocket

Millinocket goes by “the Magic City” to nearly everyone who grew up there, and the nickname has nothing to do with tricks or theme parks.

Great Northern Paper broke ground on a mill in 1899, in what was still unbroken forest along the Penobscot River’s West Branch.

There was no town yet.

Hundreds of Italian stonemasons built one anyway, working alongside laborers from Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Hungary, and French Canada.

Millinocket became an incorporated town within just two years.

The town’s history office keeps the explanation plain: Millinocket earned its nickname because it grew too fast for the wilderness around it to keep up.

Magic, or something close to it.

2. Presque Isle

Presque Isle answers to the nickname “the Star City,” and the name came from a contest, not a compliment somebody paid the place by accident.

The Presque Isle Chamber of Commerce ran a slogan contest in 1965, and the local paper announced the winner that October.

Bill McKeen, art director at WAGM-TV, the local television station, took home the prize, a $50 savings bond, for the slogan “Star City of the Northeast.”

He picked the word “star” because it suggested leadership, and because five roads happen to converge on Presque Isle like points on one.

The roads did the rest.

Six decades later, Aroostook County’s largest city still prints the nickname on letterhead and welcome signs, even though almost nobody outside the county has ever heard it.

3. Rockland

Rockland once ran on lime, not lobster.

The city took its name in 1850 from the limestone cliffs lining its harbor.

It was chartered as a city four years later, in 1854.

By then, Rockland ran twelve lime quarries and 125 lime kilns, more than any other city in the country.

The nickname “the Lime City” stuck for as long as the kilns kept burning, with lime shipped up and down the East Coast for decades.

The lobster boats came later.

4. Bangor

Locals still call Bangor “the Queen City,” a nickname that outlasted the industry that earned it by more than a century.

By the mid-1800s, Bangor had become one of the world’s leading lumber ports, with mills lining the Penobscot River and lumber shipped out by the ton.

Lumber barons put their fortunes into Greek Revival and Victorian mansions.

Many of them still stand along Broadway today.

No crown required.

Charlotte, North Carolina carries the same nickname today, but Bangor earned it a different way, through the lumber trade instead of a queen’s name.

5. Vinalhaven

The town of Vinalhaven answers to a name many visitors mishear: The Fox Islands.

Ferry passengers who catch a Mainer say it usually assume it's shorthand for Vinalhaven alone, or a typo.

It's neither.

English explorer Martin Pring named the whole archipelago "the Fox Islands" in 1603, after the silver-gray foxes he spotted along the shore.

The name predates Maine's statehood by more than a century.

The strait between Vinalhaven and North Haven is still called the Fox Islands Thoroughfare.

The electric cooperative that powers both islands still carries "Fox Island" in its name, too.

On Vinalhaven, the name never went away.

Down East

Down East breaks the pattern the first five nicknames set: It never belonged to just one town.

It covers the whole coast, and it trips up newcomers before they even glance at a map.

Down East points northeast, up toward Bar Harbor and Washington County, which confuses anyone who assumes "down" means south.

The reason traces to sailing.

Ships heading from Boston used to catch a southwest wind and run downwind along Maine's coast.

That coast bends northeast for hundreds of miles, all the way up toward the Canadian border.

Sailors started calling that run Down East.