Scarborough / Higgins Beach — A National Historic Landmark Art Studio, Maine's Largest Salt Marsh, and a Racetrack Reborn as a Town Center

Scarborough: Higgins Beach, Prouts Neck, Pine Point, and Scarborough Marsh

Scarborough, Maine was incorporated on July 14, 1658 by the Massachusetts General Court — Maine was administratively part of Massachusetts until 1820 — and named after Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, the larger and better-known seaside town that remains the original namesake. European settlement here traces back further still, to Thomas Cammock's 1631 land patent of roughly 1,500 acres covering what is now Black Point, today known as Prouts Neck. Scarborough sits in Cumberland County on Route 1 and I-95, about seven miles south of Portland, on the Gulf of Maine and Saco Bay. At 70.63 square miles total — 47.61 to 47.75 square miles of land, depending on the source — Scarborough is a genuinely large town by New England coastal standards, more than double the land area of many neighboring shoreline towns. The 2020 Census counted 22,135 residents, making it the 6th most populous municipality in Maine; the Census Bureau's July 1, 2025 vintage estimate puts the population at 24,547, roughly 11% growth since 2020 and among the faster growth rates of any Maine town. Scarborough is also the headquarters town of Hannaford supermarkets, a real, non-tourism economic anchor that sets it apart from beach towns whose economies run almost entirely on seasonal visitors. The town's named villages include Blue Point, Dunstan, Eight Corners, Higgins Beach, North Scarborough, Oak Hill, Pine Point, Pleasant Hill, Prouts Neck, and West Scarborough — notably, Ferry Beach is not one of them; Ferry Beach State Park sits in neighboring Saco, not Scarborough.

Higgins Beach is a small, specific, named oceanfront village on Scarborough's coast, between Thunder Cove and the Spurwink River estuary. The land was a saltwater farm inherited by Hiram Higgins in the 1870s, later developed into the beach community that carries his name. A landmark still visible at low tide is the wreck of the three-masted schooner Howard W. Middleton, driven ashore in a storm on August 11, 1897. The Higgins Beach Association anchors a genuinely active small-village community calendar — summer concerts, craft shows, July 4th events, and weekly summer beach yoga — and the Higgins Beach Inn is the area's known lodging landmark. The Portland Press Herald's own 2018 "Maine Places to Love" feature called Higgins Beach the town's "most distinctive and desirable" enclave among Scarborough's collection of villages.

Prouts Neck, a coastal peninsula within Scarborough historically known as Black Point before being renamed for Boston merchant Timothy Prout, holds a genuinely significant art-history site: the working studio of painter Winslow Homer, who lived and worked there from 1884 until his death in 1910. The studio — a converted 1884 carriage house moved 100 feet for privacy — was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. The Portland Museum of Art acquired the property on January 31, 2006, restored it to its Homer-era condition while discreetly adding modern utilities, and reopened it to the public in 2012 via guided tour only. Tours currently start and end at the museum's own downtown Portland location at 7 Congress Square — visitors are explicitly told not to drive to the studio itself — and are priced at $75 for non-members, $40 for members, and $25 for students. Prouts Neck itself today is almost completely built out: a mostly seasonal summer colony with private, gated roads, century-old cottages, the residents-only Prouts Neck Country Club (established 1907, 18-hole golf plus tennis), and the Prouts Neck Yacht Club.

Pine Point, at Scarborough's southern end, is the town's working fishing village — home to the Pine Point Fisherman's Co-Op and a commercial fishing pier completed in 2011 to serve the local fleet. Reel Salty Charters, run by Captain Ed Bayley out of 96 King Street, offers inshore trips for striped bass and mackerel and offshore trips for haddock, pollock, cod, and seasonal shark. One important geographic fact: Pine Point Beach is physically the same continuous, roughly four-mile sand strand as neighboring Old Orchard Beach, divided only by a town line rather than any natural break. Pine Point is Scarborough's own quieter, working-village bookend to that shoreline — not the boardwalk, arcade, and amusement-park scene that belongs entirely to Old Orchard Beach. Scarborough Beach State Park, at 418 Black Point Road, is a fourth named public beach in town, known particularly for surfing.

Scarborough Marsh, commonly cited at roughly 3,100 to 3,200 acres depending on the source, is the largest contiguous salt marsh in Maine — state-owned and managed by Maine's Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and drained by four rivers: the Scarborough, Nonesuch, Libby, and Spurwink. Maine Audubon operates the Scarborough Marsh Nature Center at 92 Pine Point Road, seasonally open, offering naturalist-guided canoe tours, a self-guided nature trail, and canoe or kayak rentals running $25 to $55 depending on duration; boating is tide-dependent, and the center advises avoiding the water within an hour of low tide. The Eastern Trail, a multi-use biking, walking, and cross-country ski path, runs through and along the marsh.

The town's biggest current civic story is the redevelopment of Scarborough Downs. The track opened in 1949-50 and ran live horse racing for 70 years before its final races on November 28-30, 2020. Its replacement, known as The Downs, is a 525-acre, $615 million master-planned town center led by M&R Holdings, with a groundbreaking on October 25, 2023 attended by then-Governor Janet Mills — described as Maine's first-ever from-scratch new-build town center. The site already includes Maine's first Costco, with a Market Basket supermarket announced in November 2024 and Allagash Brewing committed to a location in the planned town center. Housing-unit counts at the project are reported as 500 to 622 depending on the source and snapshot date — an actively changing figure that should be re-verified rather than memorized at any single number.