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From the upper reaches of Mount Megunticook, I gaze out at the islands of Penobscot Bay. Cloaked in a fur of evergreens, some are long and irregular shards of rock; others are as round as gumdrops. Under raked strands of cirrus cloud, the wind scrawls patterns onto the sea. Between the mountain and the North Atlantic lies the postcard-perfect town of Camden, with its thumb-shaped harbor and white church steeples.
The seaward view from the Camden Hills is justly celebrated. It's said to have inspired “Renascence,” a poem by the legendary Mainer Edna St. Vincent Millay in which the speaker gazes out at “three islands in a bay” and hears “The creaking of the tented sky / The ticking of Eternity.” I grew up about an hour's drive inland, and over the past 40 years I've hoofed it up this 1,385-foot mountain dozens of times. Megunticook is arguably the most rewarding easy hike in the state. At the tiered granite overlook near the summit, I take as much comfort in the vast panorama and the Christmassy smell of balsam fir as I would in the arms of an old friend. The Midcoast region, which begins (depending on who you ask) just north of Portland and runs northeast (or “down,” in local parlance) to somewhere around the rural Blue Hill Peninsula, near Bar Harbor, gets fewer crowds than southern Maine. It's less beachy and more Birkenstock-y. The Camden-to-Rockland stretch—the middle of the Midcoast—covers less than 10 miles but combines sea-and-mountain scenery and vibrant town life like nowhere else on the East Coast.
The reverse view, of Camden Hills from Penobscot Bay, is just as astonishing. The many-islanded bay itself is a sailing heaven. Camden, Rockland, and Rockport (the seaside hamlet that lies between them) have long carried a cultural weight that belies their size. In the annals of American landscape painting, Midcoast Maine is right up there with the Hudson River Valley. In addition to sustaining farmers, sea captains, and fisherfolk for centuries, its rugged landscape has also lured generations of artists, not to mention deep-pocketed summer residents, preservationists, and patrons of the arts. Now a fresh group of makers and entrepreneurs have arrived to update the Midcoast lifestyle, aided by remote work and the spending power of “summer folk,” as some old-timers still call the part-timers. I've come to my favorite stretch of coast to experience this gentle reinvention of my native state firsthand.
“In some other towns you see distressed main streets and a struggle to shift to something a little cooler and more eclectic,” says Aaron Britt, publisher of The Midcoast Villager, a community news site and weekly periodical founded last year by combining four historic newspapers. “Camden's ability to avoid that is something a visitor feels, even if they're just in town for the Lobster Festival.”
Britt, whose wife was born in Portland, worked in New York City and San Francisco as an editor and style columnist before moving here five years ago. We chat over fried-haddock sandwiches at the Villager Café, a pine-floored breakfast-and-lunch spot operated by his employer. Its offices are upstairs. I've come to our meeting via the scenic route, through the gently sloping Harbor Park, completed in 1931 by the Olmsted Brothers (sons of the visionary behind New York's Central Park). The summer sailboats haven't arrived yet, but still the scene—brick and clapboard storefronts, the Colonial Revival public library—is absurdly picturesque. There's even a waterfall, where the Megunticook River empties into the harbor over a 250-year-old dam. The river also has a footbridge over it, conveniently located next to an ice-cream stand. Britt has the perfect term for this storybook mash-up of charming features: “the Camden snow globe.”
Colin Page, an artist I meet later that afternoon, looks to the sea for his subjects. A Baltimore native, he moved to Maine after studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York City's Cooper Union, and bought a 28-foot sailboat so that he could reach hard-to-access spots and paint them. Hanging on the wall toward the front of Page Gallery, which he co-owns, is one result of those excursions: a tide pool scene alive with pink granite, purple shadows, and neon surfgrass. But Page admits that he was also drawn to sailing for the same reasons anyone else is: “Being out on the water for a couple hours at the end of the day, just focusing on the sea and what you're doing—there's nothing better.”
Maine's remoteness, harsh winters, and distance from cities and services has always bred self-sufficiency. Midcoasters stay busy mending fishing nets, woodworking, building boats, baking bread, and pickling vegetables, tasks now embraced as avocations by people seeking a slower, more attentive approach to life. Page says he was struck immediately by this ethos when he moved to Maine 20 years ago: “It felt like everyone I met was working with their hands, making something tangible.”
The first people to come with this intentional mindset, arguably, were the “back-to-the-landers” who arrived in droves in the 1960s and '70s. The term only half describes my parents, who raised my brother and me in the country but had desk jobs and weren't exactly hippies. But my dad did tie fishing flies and build wooden canoes; my mom wrote, painted, and raised chickens. When my brother moved back from Manhattan, he promptly enrolled at the Shelter Institute, a renowned house-building school in Woolwich. Camden-Rockland is a learner's dream, with internationally respected schools for photography, cooking, and furniture making.
The Apprenticeshop, a nonprofit wooden-boat-building school in Rockland, is pungent with the smell of sawdust and busy with pounding mallets and whining power routers. Executive director Bella Feracci and her colleague Liz Sullivan show me around the workspace, past boats in various states of construction. There's not a computer in sight; all the patterns are from pencil work. “Building and maintaining a wooden boat is a huge amount of work, but people relish the challenge,” Sullivan says. “It's part of the enjoyment.”
Students leave after the 12-week program having completed an 11-foot rowboat called a Susan skiff. For the truly ambitious, the school offers nine-month and two-year programs. It also has three-season sailing courses. Starting this summer it is also teaming up with Captain Tyler Waterson, who runs wooden-sailboat trips out of Rockland Harbor, on a twofold experience for visitors: a two-hour cruise aboard Waterson's 21-passenger Morning in Maine, followed by a tour of the shop.
My hosts and I head down the road to visit Waterson and his oak-framed ketch, which is being prepped for the upcoming season. Custom-built in 1970 as a private yacht, the cedar-planked ship lacks the backstory of the antique schooners in Camden-Rockland's windjammer fleet, which include the 154-year-old Lewis R. French, the oldest operating commercial sailing vessel in America. But Morning in Maine is beautiful in a way that only wooden ships can be. “A fiberglass boat will kind of bounce on the water,” Waterson says. “It's jaunty. This will soak up hundreds of pounds of seawater and sit in the water and feel like it's part of the ocean.”
Waterson also offers a six-hour trip that includes a packed lunch of lobster rolls and a hike on 225-acre Monroe Island. We pass a graying couple who pause their work on the boat to say that they've sailed around the world and consider Penobscot Bay one of their top three spots. Waterson describes the secluded intimacy of the bay's glacier-carved coves, some of which are so deep you can almost reach out and touch the barnacled granite walls.
The image lingers with me as I explore the streets of downtown Rockland. Bigger and grittier than Camden, “Rock City” once buzzed with the industrial hum of lime kilns and fish canneries. “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell,” went the old saying. Though it still has a working waterfront, the town is now better known as Maine's art capital.
No artist casts a bigger shadow over the area than Andrew Wyeth, a giant of 20th-century figurative painting. The Pennsylvania native summered and maintained a studio here for more than half a century until his death in 2009. Rockland's Farnsworth Art Museum owns 43 of his works and regularly rolls out new Wyeth shows (sometimes including works by his father, N.C., and his son Jamie, both also notable painters). Down the street, the nine-year-old Center for Maine Contemporary Art, also worth a visit, focuses more on installations and multimedia by 21st-century artists.
I continue on to the excellent secondhand boutique Curator Consignment. When I discovered it several years ago, I was instantly smitten by its selection of L.L.Bean flannels and Irish fisherman sweaters. Most of the clothing is from the 1970s through the present day, but the styles are timeless. The shop, in an old hotel lobby and bar with checkerboard marble floors, also sells womenswear: B Sides jeans, silk slip dresses, linen pajama sets, and Scottish cashmere sweaters. Co-owner Emily Seymour sources, in part, from estate sales, connecting the area's old-money retirees and summer people with an emerging generation of thrifty New Englanders. “COVID changed everything,” she says, by bringing in young new residents, a fresh crowd to buy from and sell to.
It's raining when I stop into the acclaimed bakery The Place for a chocolate croissant on my last morning in town, but the weather suits me fine. It's an excuse to kick back at my hotel, The Norumbega, a Victorian stone-and-shingle mansion whose newly renovated Arts and Crafts interiors have some of the finest carved-wood detailing you'll ever see. The living room has cozy nooks and tiled fireplaces. A few guests have claimed couch spots and tucked away their smartphones. I head upstairs to my book-lined suite, stretch out on a daybed, and crack open a novel, feeling very happy about my choice of inn and this special seaside part of Maine. I think about a conversation I had earlier in the week with Marjory Sweet, a baker, entrepreneur, and native Mainer who returned after years in New Mexico and recently opened Café Grazie in Rockland with Marcy Taubes. Sweet told me that she and Taubes love the access to hiking and proximity to the sea (she keeps a sailboat moored at the Apprenticeshop) and that she was surprised by how active the Rockland community was. Maybe it's the baker in her, but something she said about the area's fundamental recipe has stuck with me: “There's good stuff everywhere—and not too much of it.”
The midcoast mix
The Norumbega
Plush furnishings, intricately carved oak millwork, and a smart mix of traditional and contemporary art bring a welcome blend of warmth and style to this newly renovated 11-room hotel, housed in a turreted Victorian mansion.
Winona's
The short menu at this new restaurant changes every three weeks. When I was there, chef Devin Dearden served pillowy beurre blanc gnocchi with locally sourced ramps and mushrooms.
The Alna Store
Local ingredients fuel an inventive mix of American, Asian, and European influences at this next-gen country restaurant, a surprise 2024 James Beard semifinalist. Go for the excellent confit fried chicken with sweet potato waffles.
Café Grazie
Owners Marcy Taubes and Marjory Sweet, who sell their wares at the Rockland Farmers Market, have opened a brick-and-mortar that serves pasta and seasonal menus with an Italian influence as well as baked goods.
Swans Island Company
This 33-year-old homegrown label's handmade throws and blankets are woven on antique looms about 15 miles north of Camden. Its Camden store also sells bedding and home goods.
Ralston Gallery
Photographer Peter Ralston has documented local people and landscapes for almost 50 years. He sells work by Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, prints, and books out of a historic granite building in the heart of Rockport's harbor village.
Topo: Paper & Post
Swing by this new stationery shop in Camden for maps of Maine's coastline and other gifts and souvenirs by local and regional artists.
18 Central Oyster Bar & Grill
This open-kitchen restaurant overlooking Rockport harbor takes its cocktails as seriously as its seafood. Highlights include Pemaquid oysters, limy peekytoe crab salad, and wood-grilled diver scallops.
D.H.
This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
