FROM Thomaston to Warren, from Rockland to Rockport to Lincolnville, there are deposits of limestone all along the shore, perhaps laid down originally as seashells in a shallow sea. When limestone is burned to eliminate carbon dioxide, what’s left is lime. From prehistoric times, lime has been useful to man as a building material and as fertilizer. Lime from Rockland was used mostly for plastering walls and ceilings and to make mortar for laying brick.
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The first lime kiln in the area was built about 1733, in Thomaston, near the site of the present-day Maine State Prison, to burn limestone for shipment to Boston. By 1828, there were 60 lime kilns in the midcoast area of Maine, and by the Civil War, they were burning more than a million casks of lime a year. Rockland split off from its parent town of Thomaston and became the lime-producing capital of the world.
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It took 30 cords of wood to fire one lime kiln and still more wood to build the casks for shipment. Cordwood came from islands in the bay, from Down East, and from Canada. Farmers became coopers for winter income, cutting birch and alder trees and splitting and bending them for hoops and staves.
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To fetch the cordwood and carry the lime casks to market, mostly for construction in New York City, ships were needed. More than 500 ships were engaged in this trade by mid-century. The countless “kilnwooders” were rough-built vessels, their decks piled high with cords of wood. The ships used to carry lime to market, on the other hand, were carefully constructed, because this cargo had one enormous drawback: if the slightest amount of water reached the lime in the casks, it caught on fire, and the fire often was unquenchable. As W.H. Rowe explains in his Maritime History of Maine, “The master needed a keen sense of smell. The odor of lime being slaked by water was an ominous danger signal… Every crack and crevice through which air might get into the hold and the doors, ports, and smokestack were quickly sealed with plaster made from the lime.
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“Then the craft was headed for the nearest harbor and anchored some distance from the shore and away from other vessels. For at any time she might burst into flames. The schooner was stripped of all movables and the captain and crew sat down to await developments. Sometimes three months would go by before their patience was rewarded and the vessel saved. If, however, the fire could not be smothered, the vessel was towed to some secluded place and scuttled.” The fire problem wasn’t solved until the middle of the 20th century when steel barges replaced the sloops and schooners.
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Technology came to the industry in the last half of the 19th century, with oil or coal-fired, continuous-process “patent kilns.” In 1900, the three largest lime manufacturing firms merged to form the Rockland-Rockport Lime Company. By this time, railroads transported 100,000 tons of limerock a year from the quarries to Rockland’s kilns for burning.
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But within 30 years, the quality of Rockland lime declined and there was price-cutting and new competition. New materials and building methods cut the market for lime: wallboard instead of plaster, concrete instead of brick. The kilns went cold, and the railroads were abandoned. Today the only traces of the whole flourishing industry are a few kilns preserved on the waterfronts of Thomaston and Rockport and white limestone tailings on the shores.