Lewiston doesn’t have a lock on prominent politicians.
The Mainer who rose to the highest elected office in the country came from tiny Paris in Oxford County, where Hannibal Hamlin began a journey that led to the vice presidency during Abraham Lincoln’s first term.
Hannibal Hamlin grew up in Paris but spent much of his adult life elsewhere. Photo courtesy of the Paris Hill Historical Society
Hamlin, born in 1809, attended local schools, including the Hebron Academy, while working at his father’s farm. He even helped run a newspaper, the Oxford Jeffersonian, before moving away to practice law.
Lincoln replaced Hamlin in his second term with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a move meant to attract Union-minded Southerners that backfired when a gunman shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in 1865. His death landed Johnson in the White House for several years of near-constant acrimony between the new president and the Republican Congress that sought to do more to help people who had been held as slaves.
In addition to Hamlin, the western Maine region produced a vice presidential nominee for one of the major parties, Edmund Muskie of Rumford. Muskie was on the Democratic ticket in 1968 with Hubert Humphrey in an unsuccessful bid to block Republican Richard Nixon’s path to the White House.
Muskie, a prominent former Maine governor and U.S. senator, served as the secretary of state during President Jimmy Carter’s administration a decade later.
U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, acknowledges applause after her speech at the Maine Republican Convention in Augusta in 2012.
Among the other leading political figures in the region were U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Auburn, who won renown for her bipartisanship during 16 years in the U.S. House and three subsequent terms in the U.S. Senate.
Born in 1947, Snow never lost an election. She stepped down in 2012 after saying she’d had enough of an increasingly divided Congress, with its “atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies.”
Finally, consider the astonishing Washburn family from Livermore, the 11 children of Israel and Martha Washburn, born between 1813 and 1834.
Spread across the land, they eventually included two governors, including Maine’s Israel Washburn, who led the state through the Civil War; a secretary of state; a U.S. senator; four members of Congress; and the businessman who created General Mills.
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