09/18/2026
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Sweet article, but we are only 2 hours from Bangor, not 4 and a half. 😊
Www.eastlandmotel.com
Lubec, Maine is the easternmost town in the United States, and the sun hits West Quoddy Head before it hits anywhere else in the country. About 1,200 people live there now. In 1900 it was closer to 3,000. 🌅
Lubec ran on sardines. At its height the town had more than 20 canneries working the harbor, packing herring that came in by the weir load, and the whole place smelled like fish and smoke and ran on the tide schedule rather than the clock. The last cannery in Lubec closed in 2001, which was also the last sardine cannery in the United States for a while.
The geography is genuinely strange out there. The tides in the Bay of Fundy run over 20 feet, so the harbor empties twice a day and boats sit on mud. Canada is a few hundred yards across the water, and the bridge to Campobello Island, where Franklin Roosevelt summered, is the only international crossing in town. Plenty of Lubec families had relatives on the Canadian side and treated the border as a formality for generations.
The candy striped lighthouse at West Quoddy Head has been there in some form since 1808. Fog is so constant that the station logged hundreds of hours of fog signal operation a year. 🚢
It is four and a half hours from Bangor and there is nothing past it.
What is the farthest edge of New England you have actually driven to?
