Prohibition history
Prohibition in Maine.
Maine was already dry when national Prohibition arrived — statewide prohibition took effect here in 1851, 69 years before the 18th Amendment did. Today we list 7 speakeasies and hidden bars in Maine.
Prohibition in Maine, in order
| 1851 | Statewide prohibition takes effect in Maine. |
|---|---|
| 1917–19 | Congress passes the 18th Amendment and sends it to the states. |
| 16 January 1919 | The amendment is ratified nationally. Maine ratified it. |
| 17 January 1920 | National Prohibition begins. |
| 7 April 1933 | The Cullen–Harrison Act legalises 3.2% beer. |
| 5 December 1933 | The 21st Amendment repeals Prohibition. |
What Prohibition looked like here
By the time the federal ban arrived, Maine had been legally dry for 69 years, and the illegal trade had already had a generation to organise. That is the pattern across the early-dry states: 1920 was less a rupture than an escalation, and the blind pigs that federal agents found were often businesses with a decade of practice at not being found.
It also meant the state had its own enforcement machinery, its own case law and its own smuggling routes before the Volstead Act existed. Where the supply came from — a neighbouring wet state, a port, a border, a still in the hills — is the single best predictor of what the 1920s looked like locally.
The first dry state, seventy years early
Maine banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol in 1851 under a law drafted by Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland — the first statewide prohibition in the United States, and the model for a dozen imitations across the North within five years.
It did not go smoothly. The Portland Rum Riot of 1855 — a crowd outside a cache of liquor the city itself had bought, a volley from the militia, one man dead — ended with Dow out of office and the law repealed the following year. Prohibition returned to Maine in 1858 and was written into the state constitution in 1884, where it stayed until 1934.
By 1920, in other words, Maine had been arguing about this for seventy years and had a long coastline, which the rum-running trade used accordingly.
What Maine’s own newspapers printed
Very little of Maine’s 1920s press has been digitised in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive, so we have no newspaper evidence to show you for this state yet. That is a gap in the archive, not a finding about Maine.
We re-run this search as the archive grows. If you know of a digitised Maine title from the period, we would like to hear about it.
Where to drink in Maine now
We currently list 7 speakeasies and hidden bars in Maine. The densest are Portland (2), South Portland (1), Waterville (1), Rockland (1), Old Town (1). Those are present-day licensed bars — nothing on this site is illegal, and a modern hidden bar is a design decision rather than a legal necessity.
A handful of rooms in most states genuinely date to the period and can show it. Far more claim to. Where a venue’s page makes a historical claim, we label it Documented, Reported, Legend or Venue marketing, and we do not promote marketing into history because it makes a better paragraph.
Where they are in Maine
Listings cluster where the building stock and the licensing both allow it. These are the Maine cities and towns with the most in the directory today.
| Portland | 2 listed |
|---|---|
| South Portland | 1 listed |
| Waterville | 1 listed |
| Rockland | 1 listed |
| Old Town | 1 listed |
The documented buildings in Maine
1 of our Maine listings sit on property recorded on the National Register of Historic Places. That is a federal nomination document with a reference number, written by somebody who had to show their working — a very different kind of evidence from a bar saying its building has a past.
It does not make the bar historic. It makes the building documented, which is the most we can honestly claim and more than most directories claim at all.
| the Speakeasy | Strand Theatre, Rockland · NRHP ref. 04001284 |
|---|
Where this state fits
We group Maine with the Northeast for editorial purposes — regions tuned to drinking culture and Prohibition history rather than to Census divisions, because those are the lines that actually explain what happened. Its neighbours here: Massachusetts · New Hampshire · Rhode Island · Connecticut · Vermont.
The parts of the national story that bear most directly on Maine: Blind pigs and blind tigers · Canadian whisky and the northern border · Rum running and Rum Row.
How to read these pages
Each state chronology sets the local dates against the national ones, because Prohibition was never one story. Thirty-three states had already banned liquor before the federal government did; two refused to ratify the amendment at all; and repeal in 1933 handed the question straight back to the states, which is why American liquor law is still fifty systems rather than one.
The newspaper evidence is drawn from Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s archive of digitised American newspapers. It is public domain, it is free, and we link to the scanned page rather than quoting it, so you can check us.