It is home to the Bath Iron Works and Heritage Days Festival, held annually on the Fourth of July weekend.

Abenaki Indians called the area Sagadahoc, meaning "mouth of big river".

The settlement failed due to harsh weather and lack of leadership, but the colonists built the New World's first oceangoing vessel constructed by English shipwrights, the Virginia of Sagadahoc.

[3] Several industries developed in Bath, including lumber, iron, and brass, with trade in ice and coal.

Since that time, roughly 5,000 vessels have been launched from Bath, which became the nation's fifth largest seaport by the mid-19th century.

[5] The last commercial enterprise to build wooden ships in the city was the Percy & Small Shipyard, whose schooner Wyoming is considered the largest wooden ship in world history,[6] and which was acquired for preservation in 1975 by the Maine Maritime Museum.

[4] During World War II, Bath Iron Works launched one new ship approximately every 17 days.

The shipyard today is a major regional employer, and currently operates as a division of the General Dynamics Corporation.

In the Bath, Maine, anti-Catholic riot of 1854, an Irish Catholic church was burned.

The city is noted for its Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate architecture, including the 1858 Custom House and Post Office designed by Ammi B.

Bath is a sister city to Shariki (now Tsugaru) in Japan, where the locally built full-rigged ship Cheseborough was wrecked in 1889.

[12] The city of Bath includes several nature preserves that are protected by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust.

However, voters are not required to register with a party to vote for their primary winners in the general election.

Bath has a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb) with cold and snowy winters and mild summers.

Precipitation is high the whole year, with a sizeable snow pack usually forming during winter months.

In winter this means that highs around freezing, while lows in the single-digit Fahrenheit range are common.

[23] This is a relatively small number compared to neighboring communities (Phippsburg, for example, has over one hundred),[23] because, from the early 1900s, Bath was densely populated, which left less room for family cemeteries.

[23] It also manages four smaller burials grounds: Dummer Sewall (Dummer and Beacon streets), David Trufant (claimed by author Parker McCobb Reed in 1894 to be the oldest burying ground in Bath;[24] Spring and Middle streets), Pettingill (Riverview Road) and Fairview (on Fairview Lane).