Millinocket, Maine

Millinocket is a town in Penobscot County, Maine, United States. The population was 4,114 at the 2020 census. It contains the census-designated place of the same name.

Millinocket's economy has historically been centered on forest products and recreation, but the paper company closed in 2008.

Millinocket is an Abenaki word that means land of many islands. For more than 10,000 years the area now known as Millinocket was inhabited by the Penobscot (their name for themselves is Pαnawάhpskewi), an Indigenous people from the Northeastern Woodlands region whose name means the people of where the white rocks extend out.

The area was settled in 1829 by Betsy and Thomas Fowler and their family, who cleared land for a farm near Shad Pond. Other families followed in 1837. In 1846, Henry David Thoreau hired members of the Fowler family as guides on a trip to Mount Katahdin, which he wrote about in The Maine Woods. When the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad extended service to Houlton in 1894, the line ran through the area, opening it to development.

Charles W. Mullen, an engineering graduate from the University of Maine, proposed a hydroelectric dam on the Penobscot River. He recognized the falls as an ideal water power source to operate a large pulp and paper mill. Mullen contacted Garret Schenck, vice president of the International Paper mill at Rumford Falls and an expert in the industry, about building a pulp and paper mill near the dam. Schenck agreed, and set about obtaining the necessary financial backing.

After securing land rights, the chosen site was at the junction of the West Branch of the Penobscot River and Millinocket Stream, where it stands today. Things moved quickly, and on May 15, 1899, construction began on the new Great Northern Paper Company paper mill. As the location was not near existing towns, it became necessary to build one. Millinocket, meaning "the land of many islands" after all the islands in the Penobscot River, was incorporated on March 16, 1901.

Schenck contracted bonded labor, especially stonemasons from Italy. The term "bonded" in this case referred to the fact that the Italians owed for the passage to the U.S. and were in debt as soon as they set foot in this country. Italian masons were largely responsible for constructing the Millinocket mill. Immigrants from Poland, Finland, Lithuania, and Hungary, as well as French Canadians, also came to work on the mill.

Throughout the 20th century, the community prospered. It developed a reputation as a small but successful rural town, mostly due to the paper industry, but also to its proximity to Katahdin, Maine's tallest mountain.