ABSTRACT
In 1976, the United States celebrated its bicentennial and State of Maine historians convened a conference in Portland to discuss their subject. I gave one version of this paper at that meeting. Those persons who had set up the meeting, all from the Maine Historical Society, then set to work to cajole a book out of the speakers. Mine, the title of which is a slight pun on William Cronin’s fine little book, Changes on the Land, was written as an introduction to the whole book. It combines some basic documentary research, analysis of other people’s work, and ruminations on Maine before statehood. This combination of history and geology has provided a dozen or so essays since, most of which appeared in scientific locations. This chapter, “Maine’s Changing Landscape ro 1820,” is chapter one in Charles E. Clark, James S. Leaman, and Karen Bowden, Maine in The Early Republic: From Revolution to Statehood (University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1988) for the Maine Historical Society.
