Since 1775
A short history of a long-settled town
New Limerick is one of the older settlements in northern Maine — but it was never a boomtown. It grew the way the whole Aroostook frontier grew: slowly, from farming families, with a lake and a sawmill at the centre of it.
Key dates
Two and a half centuries, condensed
1775
Settled
New Limerick is settled, and for most of the eighteenth century remains a scattering of farms in the northern woods rather than a village.
March 18, 1837
Incorporated
The town is incorporated from New Limerick Plantation — a municipal charter that gave residents a town meeting, a select board and the right to raise money for roads, schools and poor relief.
1830s
“New Limerick”
The name comes from the settlers themselves: families who had relocated from Limerick in York County, in the southern part of the state. Limerick, in turn, was almost certainly named for the Irish city.
1880
“New Limerick lake, commonly known as Nickerson lake”
The name still shifts. An act of the Maine Legislature that year protected landlocked salmon in “New Limerick lake, commonly known as Nickerson lake” — the earliest recorded appearance of the name we use now.
1895
A summer colony on the lake
Nickerson Lake is already a summer destination for Houlton residents, who built homes on its shore. It appears in the nine-volume photogravure collection “Artwork of Aroostook County, Maine,” published in Chicago in 1895.
1910
The electric railway comes north
The Aroostook Valley Railroad begins service — a 1,200-volt DC electric interurban between Presque Isle and Caribou, running on steel rail through the potato country. It will operate until 1996.
1996
End of the line
The Aroostook Valley Railroad ceases operations, closing a chapter that had shaped the towns along the corridor for nearly a century.
Today
Still a farming town
New Limerick counted 574 residents at the 2020 census. The fields are still worked, the lake is still busy in summer, and the town meeting still meets in the spring.
The name
Two Limericks
There is a Limerick in York County, in southern Maine — a small town in the White Mountains foothills whose population passed 3,000 in the 2020 census. Among its early settlers was Dr. Joshua Leavitt, for whom Leavitt Brook in Limerick is named.
It was people from that town who came north. They settled what became New Limerick Plantation and gave the new town a name that pointed home — New Limerick, distinct from the original. Limerick in Maine, in turn, was probably named for Limerick in Ireland, the city on the Shannon.
The name has held for nearly two centuries. It is also a small reminder of how connected northern Maine was to the rest of the state long before the roads were paved.
The water
A lake with two names
Nickerson Lake has been written as “New Limerick Lake” more than once in official documents, and as Nickerson Lake more often. It is shared between New Limerick and Linneus, and it was — and still is — the social centre of both towns.
The Maine Bureau of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife describes its water quality and lake characteristics as ideal for lake trout, though the lake is unusually small for a viable togue fishery. It drains north through Mill Stream to Meduxnekeag Lake, and from there down the Meduxnekeag River past Houlton and across the border into New Brunswick.
That single line of water explains a surprising amount about the region: the mills, the farms, the summer colonies, the canoe race that starts in this town, and the town's position at the top of a watershed that reaches all the way to Canada.
The railroad era
Potatoland and the electric line
Aroostook County became the “Garden of Maine” because of the potato, and the potato became an industry because of the railway. The Aroostook Valley Railroad — the AVR — was an electric interurban, running maroon interurban cars with grey roofs on 1,200 volts of DC power.
Its Articles of Association were approved by the Maine Railroad Commission in 1902, and it opened for service in 1910. At its height it ran six trains a day in each direction — four between Presque Isle and Caribou and two between Presque Isle and New Sweden — with a daily freight train covering the whole route and trains that could stretch to twenty cars in the depth of winter.
It carried the county’s potatoes, its people and its mail for the better part of a century, and it closed in 1996. Its route through the towns of the Aroostook valley shaped where those towns grew — and why, today, the old corridor reads as a line of small settlements along a single road.
Reading the record
The Presque Isle Historical Society, the Mark & Emily Turner Memorial Library and the Maine Memory Network hold a remarkable amount of primary material from the railroad years — timetables, photographs, company archives and the stories of the people who worked it.
If you are researching a specific family, farm or property in this area, the local historical societies and the state’s own archives are the fastest route to a primary source.
Civic life
The annual town meeting
New Limerick runs on the New England town meeting, and it is the clearest piece of living history in the place. Once a year — traditionally in March — residents gather to vote on the warrant, elect selectmen and the MSAD #70 school district director, and argue about the town budget in person.
The polls are typically open for a few hours in the afternoon for the secret ballot, and the remaining warrant articles are taken up in open session in the evening. Watching it is the best introduction to how a small Maine town actually makes decisions.
The warrant usually includes money for roads, snow removal, and the appropriation of state snowmobile registration funds for maintaining the local trails — a line item that tells you a lot about where recreation money goes in this part of Maine.