Maine.info's website has started hosting The Daily Maine Fact on their front page (formerly posted daily by AroundMaine.com). They don't have an archive, which is sad for folks like me, but every now and then I remember to look at it. Earlier this month, the fact-of-the-day was about letter writing in the early history of Maine.The first letter ever sent from Maine went to King James I of England in 1607. It was dispatched on this date by George Popham, founder of a short-lived colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Popham ran to excess in praising both his monarch and the natural resources of the new land, which he claimed included nutmeg and cinnamon. (Source: Maine: A Literary Chronicle, W. Storrs Lee, editor. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968)The Maine Historical Society has extensive collections of Maine-related letters for those interested in digging further. Many of the documents are beginning to appear on the Maine Memory Network website, www.mainememory.net, as they are scanned and transcribed to make them more accessible to researchers. The Maine Memory collection is remarkable in that it collects documents from a wide variety of sources and makes them fully available in a number of formats for history sleuths.
Image shown is of King James I, in a letter (ha ha ha). Image source: http://www.kentarchives.org.uk/
1 comment:
Hi there! I ran across your page because I was looking for some interesting things about letter writing. (I run a letter writing web site.) Thanks for posting this interesting epistolary tidbit!
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