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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com
Maine’s Northern Border Dispute We almost lost the St. John Valley to England by Brian Swartz
Y
ears before he negotiated the 1842 treaty defining Maine’s northern border, Lord Ashburton of Great Britain left his mark on two Maine towns. Signed in 1783 by Britain and the United States, the Treaty of Paris had described a geographically vague northeastern America border: “a line drawn due north from the source of the St. Croix river to the highlands, along the said highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St. Lawrence, and those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean, to the northwestern most head of the Connecticut river.” By 1794, when Britain and the United States signed Jay’s Treaty (named for American negotiator John Jay), both countries agreed that Maine’s eastern border extended along the St. Croix River from Calais to the Chiputneticook Lakes to Monument Brook, considered the river’s northernmost source. Then the border followed the “line drawn due north” to an indeterminate location somewhere nearer the Aroostook River (according to Britain) or the St. Lawrence River (according to the United States).
If American claims held, Maine’s northern border would lie just a few miles south of the latter river and would effectively sever overland communications between Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. To offset this potential strategic disaster, Britain arbitrarily pegged the northern border as running roughly east to west on a latitudinal line somewhere between Presque Isle and Houlton. The disputed region’s primary inhabitants were Acadians who had arrived in the upper St. John River after their expulsion from Nova Scotia by British troops. The War of 1812 did not militarily impact the region, although British forces occupied eastern Maine until 1815. After the war, the virgin timber and expansive unoccupied lands stretching from the upper Penobscot Valley to the St. John Valley lured loggers, farmers, and land speculators northward. Maine gained independence from Massachusetts in 1820; with the state’s eastern, western, and southern boundaries already delineated by the St. Croix River, Piscataqua River, and Atlantic Ocean, legislators decided the northern boundary lay near the St. Lawrence River. Thus Maine would sprawl across the
upper St. John River, a region already governed by New Brunswick. Maine and Canadian loggers cut trees claimed by Augusta and Fredericton, British officials arrested and imprisoned a Maine land agent in the late 1830s, and the resulting contretemps saw Washington and London suddenly facing a shooting war along an obscure international boundary. Sabre-rattling by Maine and New Brunswick alarmed both countries’ leaders, who respectively dispatched Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton in spring 1842 to negotiate a treaty that would officially identify Maine’s northern border. The two men already were friends when they sat down to negotiate in Washington, D.C.. Born in October 1774, Lord Ashburton was already well traveled in the United States. Representing Barings House (a privately held bank), Ashburton arrived in Philadelphia in 1795 to meet with Pennsylvania Senator William Bingham, then in serious financial difficulty. According to www.upperstjohn. com, “William Bingham, one of the biggest investors in Maine lumber lands … had purchased several million acres of land [in 1786] but was (continued on page 48)
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