Every place has stories that hide in plain sight — the ones nobody tells until something jogs them loose. Maine has more than its share. This month, in the middle of putting together the July Monthly Connection, we kept running into a few of them: a summer that never showed up, a lake that doesn’t ask for attention, land quietly disappearing, and a philosophy we don’t talk about enough. They don’t have much in common on the surface. But taken together, they say something about how this state actually works. You can get the latest edition right here – July Monthly Connection.
Start with the strangest one.
In July of 1816, a hard frost formed across Maine. Farmers watched corn they’d planted in May freeze solid. Bangor got snow. In Hallowell, ice formed thick enough on the ponds that numbed birds could be picked up by hand. Nobody knew why — the leading theories ranged from witchcraft to newly invented lightning rods draining the heat from the earth. Nobody guessed a volcano, which is exactly what it was: Mount Tambora, on the other side of the world, still the most powerful eruption in 1,300 years.
The hardship that followed pushed Maine toward something it had been circling for years — separation from Massachusetts, which it finally got in 1820. A cold, strange summer helped make Maine a state.
We spent time at China Lake this July — one of those communities that doesn’t try very hard to get your attention, and somehow gets it anyway. It’s the kind of place that rewards people who actually slow down enough to notice it.
We also looked at the pressures facing Maine farmland — the land quietly disappearing to development, the stakes for food security, and what it means for the future of agriculture here. It’s not a dramatic headline. It’s a slow one, which is exactly why it’s easy to miss.
And we spent some time explaining something we believe strongly at Maine Home Connection: there’s no velvet rope here. No separate “luxury division,” no different level of service depending on the size of the driveway. We call it No Velvet Rope, and it’s less a marketing line than a description of how we’ve always worked.
The Latest Housing Statistics
On the market side, the numbers are in, too — mortgage rates just finished a three-and-a-half-year round trip, landing almost exactly where they started back in January 2023, after a detour up to nearly 8% along the way. Sometimes the market, like the weather, takes the long way home.
All of it — the lake, the farmland, the frost, the numbers — is in this month’s Monthly Connection. Some of it you’ll recognize. Some of it, like 1816, might surprise you.
More Monthly Connection
If this is your first issue, or you’re curious what you missed, past editions of the Monthly Connection are archived on our website.
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About the Author: Michael
