A log cabin in New Sweden that is typical of the cabins built by the original settlers in the 1870s as it looked in 1938.

Swedes first settled in Maine in 1870 because the state’s governor at the time, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, wanted to stem the decline in population as Mainers began to move west. He engaged Portland banker and landowner William Widgery Thomas, who knew Swedes and the Swedish language having served as an envoy under President Abraham Lincoln, to return to Sweden and recruit hardy people to settle in northern Maine.