Called Majabigwaduce by Tarrantine Abenaki Indians, Castine is one of the oldest towns in New England, predating the Plymouth Colony by seven years.

Its commanding position at the mouth of the Penobscot River estuary, a lucrative source of furs and timber, as well as a major transportation route into the interior, made the peninsula occupied by the present-day town of Castine of particular interest to European Colonialization in the 17th century.

There is evidence that de La Tour immediately challenged the English action by re-establishing his trading post in the wake of Argall's raid.

[16] In 1667, after the Treaty of Breda brought peace, French authorities dispatched the Baron Jean-Vincent de Saint-Castin to take command of Pentagouêt.

[3] During the Franco-Dutch War (1674), Pentagouët and other Acadian ports were captured by the Dutch captain Jurriaen Aernoutsz who arrived from New Amsterdam, renaming Acadia, New Holland.

In response, Saint-Castin led an Abenaki war party to raid the English settlement at Pemaquid (present-day Bristol, Maine) in August 1689.

[20] At the end of the French and Indian War, which secured English title to North America, the unoccupied lands along the Maine coast were opened to settlement by Massachusetts colonists.

Though the fur trade was long dead, the region's abundant fisheries and timber attracted entrepreneurs, and the attention of the British government, which was always on the lookout for store to supply its growing navy.

[9] In early July 1779, nearly three years after the American Patriots had declared independence from Britain, a British naval and military force under the command of General Francis McLean sailed into Castine's commodious harbor, landed troops, and established the colony New Ireland.

The military expedition consisted of a fleet of 19 armed vessels and 24 transports, carrying 344 guns, under Dudley Saltonstall, and a land force of about 1,200 men, under General Solomon Lovell, seconded by Gen. Peleg Wadsworth.

Although badly outnumbered, British soldiers of the 74th Regiment of Foot (Argyle Highlanders), managed to repel American attacks for nearly three weeks.

The failed Penobscot Expedition, which cost the revolutionaries $8 million and 43 ships, proved to be the greatest American naval defeat until Pearl Harbor in 1941.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, many American Loyalists in the area migrated eastward to the Canadian Maritimes, some towing their houses behind their boats.

[9] In 1762, the Provincial General Court granted the land designated as Township Number Three, commonly known as Majorbigwaduce or Majabigwaduce, to a group of proprietors.

During the War of 1812, from his base in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August and September 1814, Sir John Coape Sherbrooke sent a naval force and 500 British troops to conquer Maine and (again) establish the colony of New Ireland.

With the growth of the postwar economy, the town became a prosperous place: the seat of Hancock County and a center for shipbuilding and coastal trading.

During this period of growth and prosperity, many of the handsome Federal and Greek Revival style mansions that still grace the village's streets were constructed.

[9] By the 1870s, Castine's quaint old architecture and cool summer air attracted "rusticators"—well-to-do urban families seeking rest and recreation.

Its charms also drew activists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose writings romanticized its past.

[8] In the 1930s, the Great Depression and the automobile killed off the hotel trade, the steamship lines that had linked coastal towns and islands, and the local fishing industry.

Established in 1941 to train merchant seamen, by the 1980s the academy offered a range of courses in engineering, management, transportation, and nautical and ocean science.

Its campus, once the home of the Eastern State Normal School, features a library (available to the public) and extensive athletic facilities.

Castine has a number of historic sites and parks (including the ruins of British earthworks at Fort George), a deep water harbor (with tie-ups for small boats beyond the current of the Penobscot and Bagaduce rivers), a non-exclusive club offering golf, tennis and yachting facilities, restaurants, and four churches (Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Congregational and Unitarian Universalist).

In addition, the town has a public library, an historical society, and the Wilson Museum, an institution featuring exhibits of anthropological, natural and local artifacts.

Castine's streets are lined with Federal, Greek Revival, Cape Cod and other antique style houses, and shaded by large elms which are replaced with disease-resistant strains when they succumb.