Bristol, ME: What Nobody Tells You

This Bristol Is Not England, Rhode Island, Connecticut, or Tennessee

Bristol is one of the most reused town names in the English-speaking world, and the Maine version gets swept into search results meant for its namesakes constantly. This is the Town of Bristol, Lincoln County, Maine, incorporated in 1765 and named directly for Bristol, England, which really is its namesake, not a coincidence. It has nothing to do with Bristol, Rhode Island, a larger, separate coastal town on Narragansett Bay with its own history and its own research file at this site. It has nothing to do with Bristol, Connecticut, home of ESPN's headquarters, and during research for this page a Connecticut TV station's story about local power outages surfaced mixed in with Maine storm coverage purely because both towns share a name; it was excluded here as the false positive it was. It has nothing to do with Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, the twin cities built around the NASCAR speedway, nor with Bristol, New Hampshire, nor with Bristol Borough, Pennsylvania. None of those places' prices, taxes, weather, or news belong on this page, and any source that blends them in is not describing this town.

Even within Maine, Bristol should not be confused with South Bristol, a separate, smaller adjoining town across the Damariscotta River with its own shoreland zoning ordinance and its own tax collector. South Bristol's Route 129 swing bridge and its own lobster wharves belong to South Bristol, not to this page, and Route 129 out of this Bristol actually leads toward South Bristol rather than toward Pemaquid Point. The road that reaches the lighthouse is Route 130, running south from Damariscotta through Bristol Mills, Pemaquid, and New Harbor. Mixing up 129 and 130 is a genuinely easy way to end up in the wrong town.

The Town's Own Population Count Does Not Agree With Itself

Ask two reasonably reliable sources for Bristol's 2020 Census population and they will not match. Wikipedia's own population-history table lists 2,834. WorldPopulationReview cites 2,845 for the same 2020 Census. The eleven-person gap almost certainly comes from different vintage snapshots of the same underlying release rather than a real dispute, but neither figure should be presented as more authoritative than the other without checking data.census.gov directly, which this research pass did not do. The 2010 Census figure is more consistently cited at 2,755, giving a firmer historical anchor even where the current count is soft.

More recent estimates diverge further and should be read as directional rather than precise: WorldPopulationReview's 2026 projection is 2,969, describing a peak of roughly 2,917 around 2021 followed by essentially flat growth into 2026; maine-demographics.com separately cites 2,917 as a 2024 figure; Point2Homes cites a lower, likely stale 2,500. The honest summary is that Bristol has roughly 2,800 to 2,950 year-round residents, essentially flat to slightly growing over the past decade, not a single precise headcount. What every source does agree on is that the town is aging: median age was 54.1 in the 2010 Census, and current estimates put it at 61.0 to 61.4, with Point2Homes citing 41.4% of residents age 65 or older.

Median Income Estimates Differ by Roughly Seven Thousand Dollars

Current median household income is another figure with two plausible but conflicting estimates. maine-demographics.com cites $100,750. Point2Homes cites $93,794, described as up 6.7% year over year. Both are reasonable American Community Survey-derived estimates, and neither could be cross-verified against a Census Bureau ACS table directly in this research pass, so the fair statement is roughly $90,000 to $100,000, attributed to both sources rather than collapsed into one confident number. An older figure that still surfaces on some aggregator pages, a $38,400 median household income from the 2000 Census, is badly stale and should never be presented as a current figure; it describes a town, and an economy, from a quarter-century ago.

The Home Price Is Now Confirmed. The Mill Rate Still Is Not.

An earlier version of this page reported no verified home price for Bristol, ME. That has been independently re-checked and corrected: Zillow's Bristol, ME 04564 page now lists a typical home value of $572,980, up 0.5% over the past year, per its own "Updated on 6/30/2026" timestamp, re-confirmed via fresh fetch on 2026-07-31. Zillow's own page still carries a caveat worth repeating: it notes that specific data for this location is not always available and the figure shown may reflect the surrounding area rather than an exact Bristol-only sample. Redfin still does not appear to maintain a dedicated Bristol, ME market page comparable to the one it runs for nearby Boothbay Harbor; searches for a Bristol housing page instead returned Redfin's pages for Bristol, New York, Bristol, New Hampshire, Bristol, Rhode Island, and Bristol, Wisconsin, another instance of the name-collision problem working against this specific town's data.

The mill rate remains genuinely unconfirmed. Bristol's own town website, bristolmaine.org, hosts a "Mill Rate History" page by title, but every attempt to fetch that domain during this research returned a robots.txt timeout or an outright disallowed error, despite the site clearly existing and being indexed elsewhere. No current mill rate figure could be verified as a result. A separate mill-rate news item that surfaced in search results turned out to concern Bristol, Connecticut's city budget, another name-collision false lead, correctly excluded rather than mistaken for this town's tax rate. Anyone comparing Bristol's property taxes to a neighboring Maine town should pull the current rate directly from bristolmaine.org's Tax Assessment and Collection pages rather than trust a secondhand figure.

What Belongs to Boothbay Harbor, Rockland, and Camden, Not Bristol

Midcoast Maine's towns sit close enough together that their signature attractions get attributed to the wrong one constantly, and Bristol absorbs more than its share of that confusion because it borders three well-known tourist towns at once. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Boothbay Railway Village, the Boothbay Harbor Footbridge, and Windjammer Days all belong to Boothbay Harbor, just to the west, not to Bristol. The Maine Lobster Festival and ferry service to Vinalhaven and North Haven belong to Rockland, just to the north. The windjammer schooner fleet and the Camden Hills belong to Camden, further up the coast. None of those are Bristol landmarks, and a reader planning a trip around any one of them should be looking at a different town's page than this one.

What Bristol does hold, fully and exclusively, is Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, one of Maine's most photographed towers and the subject appearing on Maine's 2003 entry in the U.S. Mint's 50 State Quarters Program. Boothbay Harbor's own research explicitly excludes the lighthouse from its page precisely so it can belong here in full. Bristol also holds New Harbor, a genuine working lobstering village and the departure point for Hardy Boat Cruises' ferry to Monhegan Island, which is a separate, unrelated service from Boothbay Harbor's own Balmy Days Cruises Monhegan run; the two are different companies on different routes, and neither town holds exclusive claim to Monhegan access.

Two Real, Long-Standing Local Assets This Page Previously Missed

Nobody tells you about C.E. Reilly & Son, and until this correction, neither did this page. It is a genuine, currently-operating grocery store at 2576 Bristol Road in New Harbor, open daily 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., that has served the village since 1928 -- a piece of year-round local infrastructure nearly a century old, not a seasonal tourist business. It is worth knowing about before assuming New Harbor has no grocery option beyond a drive to Damariscotta, though recent customer reviews note an ownership change and mixed reports on selection and service since.

Similarly overlooked was La Verna Preserve, a genuine, roughly 119-acre nature preserve on the Bristol/Round Pond side of the peninsula, managed by the Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust and assembled from parcels acquired between 1965 and 1973. Its La Verna, Ellis, and Tibbitts trails add up to about 2.4 miles through mature forest to nearly a mile of walkable rocky coastline, with dogs, hunting, and winter cross-country skiing and snowshoeing all permitted. Anyone researching Bristol for its outdoor recreation, not just its lighthouse and beach, should know this preserve exists.

Other Real Gaps Worth Naming Instead of Guessing

A few smaller details also remain unconfirmed and are disclosed here rather than smoothed over. Pemaquid Beach Park, the town's actual sandy swimming beach and a monitored site on Maine's official Healthy Beaches water-quality list, has a current-season admission fee and hours that could not be confirmed from a primary town source in this research pass; do not assume it matches the separate $4 day-use fee charged at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse Park, which is a different facility run by the same Bristol Parks and Recreation Department. Fees and hours for Colonial Pemaquid, the state-owned Fort William Henry historic site on Pemaquid Harbor, were likewise not confirmed and were not listed on the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands page checked for this research.

Charter fishing based specifically in Bristol, New Harbor, or Pemaquid also proved thin on verification: Maine's Department of Marine Resources Saltwater For-Hire Fleet listing did not show any vessels homeported in those villages at the time of this research, with the nearest verifiable charter operations based instead in Boothbay Harbor, Bath, and points further south. Pemaquid Marine surfaced in search results as a local marina or boatyard, but a direct fetch of its site was blocked, so its current services are unverified. The Anchor Inn in Round Pond turned up as a longer-standing area dining spot in older magazine coverage but was not independently reconfirmed as currently open. And while the Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission maintains a Sea Level Rise Flood Study covering the Pemaquid Peninsula, no specific flood-zone figures from that study were pulled for this page; anyone weighing a purchase near the water here should request that study, the current mill rate, and current park fees directly from Bristol's own town office rather than rely on any secondhand figure repeated online.