The National Weather Service has issued a Flood Watch on Mar 15 for Central Interior Cumberland.
Why Maine Became a State (And Not a Commonwealth)
Heather Cox Richardson - March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history... The importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.
Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South. They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.
But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.
Press Herald - After Dr. Nirav Shah became the public face of the state's pandemic response in 2020, the former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention leads recent polling for the Democratic primary in Maine's race for governor. He's one of five Democrats in a field of 22 candidates.
Despite promises of a federal crackdown, enforcement of illegal marijuana grow houses has slowed in Maine. Sheriffs say they're bearing the burden of investigating operations run by transnational criminal groups. "These cases have been very, very difficult to work with compared to any other case I’ve ever worked on," said Guy Dow, a sergeant who has executed search warrants at 10 grow houses across Piscataquis County.
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