North Berwick, Maine

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Originally a part of Kittery called Kittery Commons, the area was first settled in 1693 by John Morrell, a Quaker who built a log cabin on Wells Street. It was set off from Kittery in 1713 as part of Berwick, named for Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Anglo-Scottish border. Doughty Falls in the Great Works River provided water power for a sawmill, gristmill and carding mill. After the Revolutionary War, the small mill town grew rapidly. It was set off and incorporated as North Berwick on March 22, 1831.

Development was spurred in 1842 by the arrival of the Portland, Saco & Portsmouth Railroad, joined by the Boston & Maine Railroad in 1873. North Berwick became a railroad hub from which its manufactured goods were shipped, including lumber, shingles, clapboards, wooden boxes, firewood, bricks, carriages, caskets, clocks, stove and shoe polish, toboggans and sleds. Also loaded aboard the boxcars were barrels of apples, blocks of ice cut from frozen ponds, granite from quarries, and tins of corn packed at a canning factory. But the 2 biggest North Berwick businesses during the 19th-century made woolens and farm implements.

In 1834, the Maine Legislature incorporated Lang, Hill & Company to manufacture woolen blankets, called "printing blankets," at a mill beside the Great Works River. Renamed the North Berwick Company, by 1850 its principal owner was "Friend" William Hill, who trained as a machinist at the Great Falls Manufacturing Company in Somersworth, New Hampshire. The wooden mill was destroyed by fire in 1861, but rebuilt in brick in 1862. It produced blankets for Civil War troops. The factory had 40 looms turning out 1,500 yards of flannel daily, in addition to blankets. In 1955, the North Berwick Company would close. Its landmark Greek Revival building was used as the Parrish Shoes factory in the 1995 movie Jumanji.

Local farmer William Hussey designed a cast iron plow in 1835, which led to the founding of the Hussey Plow Company. The North Berwick firm fabricated farm implements. It evolved into the Hussey Manufacturing Company, which produced a variety of items including sewer grates, manhole covers, ladders, ski jumps and chair lifts. Today, it is the Hussey Seating Company, a manufacturer of seats for auditoriums, bleachers for stadiums as well as other spectator facilities. In 2003, it was honored as Maine's oldest family-owned business.

The town's other major contemporary employer is a Pratt & Whitney aircraft engine parts factory and overhaul facility. Built as Simplex Wire & Cable, the structure was purchased and expanded by Pratt & Whitney in 1979 to cover 875,000 square feet (81,300 m2), making it the largest manufacturing plant under one roof in Maine.