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my hour was always up before I was even aware of the time, and then it was time to buy groceries and go back to the farmhouse.

    The history of this city is one of constant erasure, change, and reinvention. Portland, Maine (Portland, Oregon, was named after it), covers almost seventy square miles, about a third of which is land and two-thirds, water. It sits on a hilly peninsula on Casco Bay on the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean. The Abenaki, or Wabanaki,tribe, who lived all over New England before any Europeans arrived, called the peninsula Machigonne. In 1623, an English naval captain named Christopher Levett tried to found a village here on six thousand acres granted him by King Charles I, which he proposed calling York, after his hometown. He left a settlement here of ten men in a stone house he’d built (I can only imagine what their life was like), then he went back to England and wrote a book about his new town called York, hoping to drum up money and other settlers, but apparently no one in England wanted to invest in or move to Machigonne. The ten men left behind vanished into the fog of the historical unknown. There’s a fort named after Levett here, but little else.
    Then, in 1633, just a decade later, a fishing village was established on Casco Bay. This was the first permanent settlement of Europeans on the peninsula. The town was called Casco at first by the fishermen who lived there, but it was renamed Falmouth in 1658 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who took control of Casco Bay (as they were fond of doing, forcibly, to various regions of Maine through the decades and centuries).
    In 1676, the Wabanaki destroyed Falmouth in a raid. The village was rebuilt in 1678, and then it was destroyed again in the Battle of Fort Loyal by a combined army of French and Wabanaki. The town wasn’t resettled until after the 1713 Treaty of Falmouth, which established peace with the Wabanaki. But then the settlement was demolished and burned yet again, in the Revolutionary War, when the British Navy bombarded it for nine straight hours on October 18, 1775, leaving three-quarters of the town in ashes.
    The surviving citizens were, understandably, hell-bent on independence. In scrappy Maine fashion, they rebuilt the town and established it as a shipping port, and so it came to pass that, in 1786, it was given the name of Portland, which finally stuck.
    Then disaster struck again: Portland’s fledgling shipping economy almost collapsed twice—first in the Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited trade with England, and then in the three-year War of 1812, when the British blockaded the Atlantic Coast.
    In 1820, after suffering and withstanding the sovereign entitlement and greedy land claims of both Massachusetts from the south and the English Crown by sea for two hundred years, as well as brutal attacks from the northern armies of Canadians and Native Americans, Maine finally became an official state. Portland was the capital for just twelve years, then it moved to Augusta, where it has remained.
    The “Maine Law,” otherwise known as Prohibition, was passed in 1851 in Maine, and shortly thereafter in eighteen other states. Portland became a hotbed of protest, especially among the immigrant Irish population of the city, who felt personally attacked by the law. The Rum Riot took place in 1855 against the mayor, Neal S. Dow, the “Napoleon of Temperance,” whose historically landmarked house, with its plaque bearing Dow’s name, is near Longfellow Square on Congress Street, right around the corner from our house and next door to a 7-Eleven.
    Dow was rumored to have stockpiled a shipment of $1,600 worth of booze. He had, in fact, arranged for the shipment for pharmacists and doctors, since liquor was permitted under the law only for “medicinal and mechanical” purposes, but this fact wasn’t widely reported. A mob of a few thousand protestors gathered; one man was killed by the