Lewiston, ME news and local guide

On January 28, 1768, a grant covering the area was made to Moses Little and Jonathan Bagley of the Pejepscot Proprietors, on condition that fifty families settle there before June 1, 1774, and they named the town Lewistown. Paul Hildreth became the first settler in the fall of 1770, and Lewiston was incorporated as a town in 1795. In 1836 local entrepreneurs formed the Androscoggin Falls Dam, Lock and Canal Company to harness the river, and Boston investors followed. Alexander De Witt persuaded the industrialist Benjamin Bates to finance the Lewiston Water Power Company, which built the city's first canal. In the spring of 1850 about 400 Irish men recruited around Boston by the contractor Patrick O'Donnell arrived to dig the canal system, and Bates founded the Bates Manufacturing Company, whose flagship Bates Mill was completed in 1852 and produced textiles for the Union Army in the Civil War. The Bates Mill was Lewiston's largest employer from the 1850s into the late 20th century, drawing Irish, Canadian and European immigrants. Irish laborers also built the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad and lived in neighborhoods called the patches, and by 1854 a quarter of the city's population was Irish, the highest concentration in Maine. Sources Wikipedia: Lewiston, Maine