At the foot of Munjoy Hill, on Fore Street near India Street, sits a sprawling brick industrial complex called the Portland Co., known better today as the site of the annual flower show. It is one of the most important clusters of buildings not only in Portland, but also in the state of Maine.

In the 1840s, lawyer-entrepreneur John Alfred Poor, mesmerized by the potential of the railroad, conjured a vision of Portland as a thriving railroad mecca.

Poor envisaged “the coast of Maine lined with cities rivaling the cities of the coast of the Baltic.” For him, the Forest City, closer to Europe than Boston, was an obvious destination for Canada’s winter wheat harvest bound by rail for Liverpool, England, Le Havre, France, or Bremen, Germany, but blocked at Montreal by an ice-locked St. Lawrence River.

Poor’s vision captivated Portland’s Judge William Preble, who, with other city businessmen, funded a survey for a viable rail route from Portland north through Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, to the Canadian border.

In 1845, the group successfully lobbied the Maine Legislature to charter the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad. Then, amid blizzard conditions, Poor raced by sleigh along his proposed route to Montreal, convincing the Montreal Board of Trade of the superiority of his proposed route over that of his Boston competitor.

But the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad needed infrastructure; it needed locomotives, freight and passenger cars, and a mill to both build and maintain this rolling stock. In 1846, Poor and his backers incorporated the Portland Co., capitalized at $250,000. For expertise, Poor turned to Philadelphia’s renowned Norris Co., which helped build the brick edifice, and in 1848 produced the plant’s first locomotive.

Together with the Portland Co., the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, which soon became the Grand Trunk Railroad, literally transformed Portland. It ushered Portland into the “Age of Industrialism.”

To more efficiently link the Grand Trunk terminal at the foot of Munjoy Hill, one block from the Portland Co., with the city’s Fore Street port facilities, Portland removed the top of Munjoy Hill, and with the resulting fill covered the existing Fore Street piers.

This engineering tour de force produced a new, 100-foot-wide, 5,993-foot-long Commercial Street, an avenue laced with rails and accommodating the bustling pier and warehouse cityscape familiar to all in the 21st century.

Portland, once a shipbuilding and sugar-refining center, became a thriving rail center and, until 1923, the sole destination for Canadian winter wheat. The Grand Trunk’s extensive operations – its rail yards, elevators and loading apparatus, plus, of course, the Portland Co. – became the city’s main employer.

In 1876 the Portland Co. boasted over 450 employees, many of them Irish immigrants. Writer Edward Elwell that year expostulated about the Portland company’s “vastness.”

“These are the only works for the building of locomotives in the state,” he wrote. “Indeed, no others have so capacious workshops, or are so favorably situated on tide water and the line of a far-reaching railway.”

While the company produced hundreds of locomotives and rail cars, it also produced snowplows, stationary steam engines and boilers. During the Civil War, it supplied the Union Army with heavy cannons. In the 1920s, it manufactured automobiles.

During World War II, the company built turbines for warships and cast 30,000-pound propellers for South Portland-built Liberty Ships. After World War II, the Portland Co. produced giant pulp digesters for the paper industry and equipment for nuclear power plants.

Until 1982, the year the Portland Co. ceased production, the complex remained the city’s singular industrial enterprise. It had helped transform Portland into a transcontinental shipping port with flourishing warehouses, strong banking and commercial sectors and an extensive railroad network that linked the city commercially to Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

The rail network that it serviced made Portland a gateway to other tourist destinations: Camden, Boothbay Harbor, Bar Harbor, the White Mountains. It helped make Portland the city we know and love today.

On a par with Victoria Mansion, the Customs House, Monument and Longfellow squares, and the Old Port, the Portland Co. complex is of immeasurable historical significance to the city. A unique opportunity exists to reuse the complex in a way that both preserves its remarkable history and brings an exciting new chapter to the Portland waterfront.

— Special to the Press Herald