Portland’s early twentieth-century waterfront had quite a different face than it had fifty years before. Prominent at its eastern end was the Grand Trunk complex of towering grain elevators, busy wharves and the red-roofed Grand Trunk Station with its clock tower, Until the outbteak of World War One, many immigrants passed through the Port of Portland, most of them headed for Canada, and House Island, at the south end of the harbor, was known as "northern New England’s miniature Ellis Island." In the peak year of 1913, over twenty-six thousand aliens passed through Portland. Within a few years the Grand Trunk carried Canadian troops headed overseas to France. It must be remembered, however, that the transatlantic passenger service was dominated by British steamship lines.

However there was extensive steamboat service, both to other Maine ports such as Bar Harbor and eastward to St. John and Yarmouth. Other lines, later consolidated into the Eastern Steamship Lines, connected with Boston and New York. John B. Coyle, who became an honorary member of the Society in 1890, was the last of the Coyle family to take an active part in steamboat management.

Toward the western end of things stood the imposing coal pocket of Randall and McAllister, founded during the Civil War, and still in business today as an oil dealer. The first shipment of anthracite coal arrived in Portland in 1830, in a hogshead, so the story goes. In the early years of the century about two million tons of coal came into Portland annually, much of it in the big multi-masted schooners of the Palmer Fleet and others. Photographs taken from the Eastern Promenade of storm-bound shipping in the harbor around 1900 show many of these schooners waiting it out. However, a group photograph of Palmer captains, taken around 1909 (apparently after a Fourth of July celebration, judging from the American flags), shows but one Marine Society member, Captain Harry L. Bowen of the five-masted Jane Palmer, who was admitted in 1913. By the 1890s steam colliers were beginning to cut into the schooner traffic. The war gave schooners a temporary lease on life, but the postwar slump, which began in 1920, caused freights to fall dramatically. Some big schooners which had made only one voyage were laid up, sometimes permanently. In 1925 the six-masted Edward J. Lawrence, apparently with a cargo of lime, burned off Fish Point, and at the beginning of World War Two the four-masted Maude M. Morey and Zebedee E. Cliff were scuttled in Portland Harbor as an anti-submarine measure.

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Note: The Portland Marine Society - A Bicentenial History - has been published on the Portland Marine Society pages with permission from Captain John K. Moulton.