Antiques.

In character Maine always was and still is a province by itself, distinctive from its neighboring States. The coastwise steamers ... between its river ports and Boston, bring with the salt fish, lobsters, lumber, hay, and potatoes a special breed of rugged, ungainly, stalwart New Englander. ... Indeed, whatever may be left of that famous old New England, some time puritan and always protestant, will be found today more purely and abundantly here in Maine than elsewhere. The types of faces, the habits, and the ideas are much like those I remember in the Massachusetts of thirty years ago. It is the last stronghold of the Puritan.

Robert Herrick, "The State of Maine--'Down East,'" Nation, August 23, 1922

The picturesque New England town of neat clapboard, prim village green, and soaring steeple that is for most Americans a dim memory from Currier and Ives prints is for the inhabitants of Maine a continuing reality. The small town in the United States found its original and classic form in New England, and it was from this seedbed that a multitude of new communities spread across the nation. In 1876, as the country celebrated its centennial, many people found that this traditional New England past looked better than the present. Americans saw their idealized community of older ways and familiar social structure changing, overrun by waves of immigration, noisome industrialization, and mushrooming cities. "The New England that has grown up with the last fifty years is not at all the New England that our fathers knew," Lucy Larcom lamented in her 1889 autobiography A New England Girlhood.

In their search to regain the simple agrarian life, Americans began to treasure colonial relics to show that even if they had lost the present, the past was theirs. These antiques were then incorporated into wooden houses in the New England style--painted white with dark colored shutters--and ...