Maine

Maine wasn't its own state until 1820. For nearly 200 years, it belonged to Massachusetts.

Congress finally split it off as the 23rd state through a deal called the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state to keep things even in the Senate.

The Wabanaki peoples, including the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet, had lived across this land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. French explorers settled St. Croix Island in 1604, and the English founded the Popham Colony in 1607, the same year as Jamestown.

The Popham settlers lasted only 14 months, but they built the first English ocean-going ship in the Americas before they left.

Maine jumped into the Revolution early. In June 1775, a group of lumberjacks and fishermen in the small coastal town of Machias armed themselves with pitchforks, axes, and muskets, chased down a British warship called the Margaretta, and captured it.

It was the first naval battle of the American Revolution.

Mainers fought hard against slavery. A writer named Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book called "Uncle Tom's Cabin" while living in Brunswick in 1852. It showed readers how terrible slavery really was, and it changed the way millions of Americans thought about it.

During the Civil War, about 73,000 Maine men joined the Union Army. A college professor named Joshua Chamberlain led the 20th Maine in a daring charge at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, helping hold a key position that could have lost the battle.

Hike the rocky trails at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, where mountains meet the Atlantic Ocean. Eat lobster pulled fresh from the harbor in Bar Harbor or Portland.

In Machias, the Burnham Tavern still stands from 1770, the same building where those lumberjacks planned their attack on the British warship.