Eastport — The Least-Populous City in Maine, With a Working Deepwater Port

What Actually Makes This Market Different

Eastport sits on the southeastern portion of Moose Island, connected to the mainland town of Perry by a causeway carrying State Route 190 -- roughly 7 miles from US Route 1 to downtown. The city's total area is 12.34 square miles, but only 3.63 of that is land; the rest, 8.71 square miles, is water, a genuinely water-dominated municipality even by Maine coastal standards. It faces Canadian territory directly across Passamaquoddy Bay -- Deer Island and Campobello Island, New Brunswick, are both visible from Eastport's own waterfront. The city was first incorporated as a town on February 24, 1798 by the Massachusetts General Court (Maine was still part of Massachusetts), reportedly named for being "the easternmost port in the United States" at the time.

The genuinely unusual fact at the center of this market's identity: Eastport was re-incorporated as a city in March 1893, during -- not after -- its sardine-canning-driven economic peak, when it was briefly, legitimately a city-sized place. By 1833 it had reportedly been the second-largest trading port in the entire United States, behind only New York City. Population peaked at 5,311 in 1900, seven years after the city charter. It has been declining ever since: 1,640 in 2000, 1,331 in 2010, 1,288 in the 2020 Census -- roughly three-quarters smaller than its peak. Maine has no standard mechanism for a city to revert to town government, so Eastport kept its 1893 city charter through more than a century of population loss, and today runs on a city-council/city-manager government (current city manager: Brian Schuth) at a population most Maine towns this size would govern by select board. It is, quite literally, Maine's least-populous incorporated city.

The sardine-canning boom that built that 1893 city charter was genuinely large: by 1886, thirteen separate sardine factories operated in Eastport, running day and night in-season, producing roughly 5,000 cases a week and employing on the order of 800 workers. One firm, the Seacoast Canning Company, is credited in National Register documentation with having run "the world's largest sardine cannery company" at its peak. The bust was equally dramatic and specific: the industry collapsed in the early 20th century, and the city itself filed for bankruptcy in 1937 -- a real, citable piece of civic history most small Maine coastal towns cannot claim. A direct thread survives from that era into a still-operating business today: Raye's Mustard, founded in 1900 specifically to supply mustard to Eastport's two dozen or so sardine canneries, is now in its fourth generation of family ownership and operates as the last remaining traditional stone-ground mustard mill in North America, grinding on the same roughly 125-year-old stones.

Downtown Eastport is not simply "old" -- it is a specific, dated rebuild. An 1886 fire destroyed much of the commercial district, and the reconstruction that followed, led substantially by architect Henry Black starting in early 1887, produced the Eastport Historic District: 29 contributing structures along Water Street, listed on the National Register in 1982 and enlarged in 2016, predominantly Italianate brick-and-wood commercial buildings from a single, tight construction window (26 built in 1887 itself). That single-era intactness is a real point of distinction from towns whose historic districts accumulated over multiple centuries.

The Port of Eastport is a genuine, currently operating economic feature most small Maine coastal towns simply do not have. The Eastport Port Authority (established 1977) markets the facility as "the deepest natural seaport in the continental United States," able to handle vessels up to roughly 900 feet. The Estes Head cargo terminal is operated today by Logistec Terminals, handling bulk, breakbulk, project cargo, wind-turbine components, steel, forest products, and containers, following a roughly $10 million recent expansion. The port's infrastructure took a real, dramatic hit on December 4, 2014, when its 52-year-old breakwater catastrophically failed -- a pilot boat sank, a schooner was dismasted and severely damaged -- triggering a $10-15 million rebuild using concrete-filled pilings. Separately, and much more recently, Eastport's cruise-ship business has grown fast: from 8 ships and roughly 7,000 passengers in 2024 to a projected 23 ships and roughly 55,000 passengers in 2025, per Bangor Daily News reporting that frames some of this growth as a direct beneficiary of Bar Harbor's own separate cruise-limitation politics. Port Authority director Chris Gardner has been explicit about limits: "We're not a multiple-cruise-ships-a-day port, and we will never be" -- capping visits at one ship at a time and roughly 4,450 passengers per call.

The tides that make the ice-free port possible are themselves a defining local fact: roughly 20 to 25-plus feet twice daily, among the largest tidal ranges in North America, part of the same Bay of Fundy system responsible for Canada's famously extreme tides further up the bay. That tidal exchange, combined with local underwater topography, produces the Old Sow whirlpool between Moose Island and Deer Island, New Brunswick -- measured at roughly 250 feet across and widely described as the largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere, one of only five such globally significant tidal whirlpools on Earth. Multiple current tour operators run Old Sow-viewing trips from the Eastport waterfront.

Eastport also genuinely punches above its population weight culturally. The Eastport Arts Center, grown from an eight-artist gallery founded roughly 30-plus years ago into a 17,000-plus-square-foot renovated 19th-century church with a 106-seat theater, hosts more than 1,000 hours of programming a year -- theater, concerts, film, a Mermaid Festival, a Poetry Gala. The Tides Institute & Museum of Art, at 43 Water Street, is a real, currently operating contemporary-art institution and artist-residency host in the heart of the historic district. And every summer, Eastport hosts what regional press and Maine's own U.S. Senate delegation have repeatedly called the state's largest Fourth of July celebration -- a real, citable claim, though no independently audited attendance figure is stated here.