Rockland

Rockland

Rockland, city, seat (1860) of Knox county, southern Maine, U.S., on the western shore of Penobscot Bay 81 miles (130 km) northeast of Portland. The site, settled about 1719, was originally part of Thomaston; it was separately incorporated in 1848 as the town of East Thomaston and was renamed Rockland in 1850 for the local limestone quarries. Its early development was based on lime production and shipbuilding (the famed clipper ship Red Jacket was built there in 1854). The city is now the commercial hub of the Penobscot Bay region with a significant summer tourist trade. There is some commercial fishing and light industry (cement production, boatbuilding, and welding). Rockland’s harbour, one of the finest on the Maine coast, is a major landing and distribution point for lobsters, which form the basis for the city’s annual Maine Lobster Festival (August). Windjammer cruises are available to tourists in the summer.

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland in 1892. The city’s William A. Farnsworth Art Museum houses a collection of paintings by Andrew Wyeth and his family, and the adjacent Farnsworth Homestead is an example of a 19th-century Greek Revival mansion. Thomaston, immediately southwest, retains a number of elegant old homes that attest to its colonial mercantile past, including Montpelier, a reconstruction of General Henry Knox’s mansion that is maintained as a state memorial museum. A state ferry service operates from Rockland to the offshore yachting-resort islands of Vinalhaven, North Haven, and Matinicus. Inc. city, 1854. Pop. (2000) 7,609; (2010) 7,297.