Maine
Maine home of Frances Perkins, first female Cabinet member, seeks national monument designation
The Frances Perkins Homestead as seen from River Road in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
The Newcastle home of Frances Perkins – a chief architect of Social Security and other programs that helped transform the country during the Great Depression – soon could become Maine’s second national monument.
The nonprofit Frances Perkins Center is asking President Biden to declare Perkins’ longtime family home on River Road in Newcastle a national monument, to be run by the National Park Service. It would become Maine’s second national monument, along with Katahdin Woods and Waters, which received the designation in 2016.
Officials from the Frances Perkins Center planned to announce the request Thursday during a Zoom news conference, which was scheduled to include U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, Maine Commissioner of Labor Laura Fortman and several others.
Perkins was the first woman to serve in a U.S. president’s Cabinet, as secretary of labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945, and is recognized as the driving force behind such transformational New Deal measures as Social Security, the 40-hour work week, child labor laws and the minimum wage.
A photo at the Frances Perkins Center shows Perkins, in front of the flag, during a meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Cabinet in 1937. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Supporters and people who have worked on the creation of other national monuments say the Perkins site has a good chance of being approved by Biden because he issued an executive order in March directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to identify potential National Park Service sites that would honor women.
Officials at the National Parks Conservation Association, which works with the National Park Service on creating sites, is not aware of any other proposals for new National Park Service locations that would honor women besides this one, said Kristen Brengel, the association’s senior vice president of government affairs.
“There are a couple reasons why this has a really great shot at becoming a national monument, and one is that the president said he’s looking to designate more sites to honor women’s history,” Brengel said from her office in Washington, D.C. “Another is the enthusiasm from the congressional delegation in Maine and the public support there. When you look at (Perkins’) accomplishments, it puts her right up there among people who have had a huge impact on American history and people’s lives today.”
Of the 430 sites run by the National Park Service, about a dozen are dedicated to women’s history or a particular woman, Brengel said. Those include sites dedicated to abolitionist Harriet Tubman, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, former first lady and activist Eleanor Roosevelt, pioneering Black educator and women’s rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, and Maggie Walker, who was born to enslaved parents and became the first woman to own a bank in the United States.
Others are dedicated to more than one woman or movements in women’s history, including Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of women taking over manufacturing jobs to bolster the war effort during World War II.
Brengel said there’s no typical timetable for how long a national monument request might take to get approved. But because Biden’s executive order established his desire to have more sites dedicated to women and his term will end in January, the approval could be “sooner rather than later,” Brengel said.
Though Perkins shied away from publicity and let FDR make the grand public announcements of new programs, historians and researchers in recent years have written about her crucial importance to so many measures aimed at making working people’s lives better.
“If you had a weekend, you can thank Frances Perkins. If you or anyone you ever loved has collected Social Security benefits, you can thank her. If you’re a child who got to go to school instead of to work in a factory, you can thank her,” said Stephanie Dray, a writer who researched Perkins extensively for her historical fiction novel “Becoming Madam Secretary,” which came out in March. “She’s just everywhere around us.”
A NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK
The Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014 and has been run by the nonprofit Frances Perkins Center since 2020, when the organization purchased the property. The center opened in 2009 with a small exhibition space in Damariscotta.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart, the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, stands near a gallery wall of old family photos inside the Perkins family home in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
An exhibition on Perkins’ life in a restored barn is open to the public, as are trails through the 57 acres of fields and forest on the property. The center hopes to open at least some of the 1837 brick farmhouse to visitors next year.
“Our mission is to inspire current and future generations to understand and uphold Perkins’ belief that government’s role is to help provide social justice and economic security for all, and that mission will be met by a national monument designation,” said Giovanna Gray Lockhart, executive director of the Frances Perkins Center. “So many people visit national parks and national monuments. They are the gold standard of learning about American history.”
Generally, a national park contains a variety of natural resources and covers a large area, while national monuments preserve one nationally significant area and are usually smaller, according to the National Park Service website. Lockhart said the Frances Perkins Center hopes to retain a portion of the homestead property as its headquarters, “so that our work continues.”
A sign marks the trailhead at the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Though her parents were from Maine, Perkins grew up largely in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her professional life kept her in New York and Washington, D.C., much of the time. But she came back often, including in the summer, to the farm and homestead in Newcastle, which had been in her family since the 1750s. The Perkins property is on River Road south of the Midcoast town of Damariscotta. She owned the house from 1927 until her death in 1965 at the age of 85 and is buried in Newcastle.
Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1902 and later got a master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University in New York City. She began a career as a social worker and economist in New York, working for the New York Consumers League and the Committee on Safety of the City of New York in the 1910s.
She married New York economist Paul C. Wilson in 1913 and had one child, daughter Susanna, in 1916. Wilson suffered from mental illness and was institutionalized frequently during their marriage. He died in 1952.
SECRETARY OF LABOR
Perkins worked on various labor-related boards and commissions before being appointed New York state industrial commissioner in 1929 by Roosevelt, who was then New York’s governor. She became Roosevelt’s secretary of labor when he became president.
At first, she didn’t want the job in Washington, said Derek Leebaert, who wrote about Perkins in his 2023 book “Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made.” She told FDR she’d accept only if he accepted her list of conditions, which included proposing and pushing through measures that would champion labor rights and women’s issues in a variety of ways, including Social Security and a minimum wage.
“She knew exactly what she wanted to accomplish and became the point person on all these things we know today, like Social Security or the 40-hour work week,” Leebaert said. “She saw an opportunity to get these things done, and she was extraordinarily successful.”
Lily Hayden-Hunt works on cataloging Frances Perkins’ books at the center in Newcastle. Hayden-Hunt is one of two interns from Mount Holyoke, Perkins’ alma mater. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Lockhart said many of Perkins’ views about work and the rights of working people were forged during the time she spent on her family’s Maine homestead – a farm that, for a time, had a brick-making operation.
“I think that helped shape her character and led her to believe that, if you’re working hard your entire life and you become unable to work, there should be some mechanism to help you,” said Lockhart.
Pingree, a Democrat representing Maine’s 1st Congressional District, is a ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the Department of the Interior, including the National Park Service.
A spokesperson for Pingree said in an email this week that the congresswoman is supporting the effort to create a national monument at Perkins’ home because “she was a trailblazer, the first female presidential cabinet member, the mother of the modern labor movement, and a pioneering advocate for social justice, economic security and labor rights. This monument would celebrate this special piece of Maine’s and the United States’ history.”
In a news release about Thursday’s announcement, more than a dozen other current and former Maine elected officials were quoted as supporting the proposal, including U.S. Sen. Angus King, Gov. Janet Mills, Maine Senate President Troy Jackson and Maine House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross.
Coincidentally, the Roosevelt summer compound, preserved as Roosevelt Campobello International Park, is about a four-hour drive up the coast, just over the Canadian border from Lubec, and also is open to the public.
A Massachusetts photographer was seriously injured when he was stabbed during a wedding reception last month in Raymond, Maine.
Donald Halsing, 26, was hospitalized for five days after the stabbing on May 23. NBC affiliate News Center Maine reported that 26-year-old Andrew Manderson was arrested and charged with elevated aggravated assault.
Still recovering, Halsing told NBC10 Boston the attack came out of nowhere — one moment, he was snapping photos on the dance floor, while the next, he was searching for help as blood spilled onto his camera.
“I was sitting there in that chair thinking, ‘There’s a real possibility I could die here,’” Halsing said. “Immediately, I put my hand on my chest here to try and stop the bleeding, get some pressure on it, and started yelling for help.”
Halsing was working at the reception at the Kingsley Pine Campgrounds. He took his last photo at 9:01 p.m., minutes before the stabbing.
“One of the wedding guests came up to me and started asking questions about our business,” he said.
Halsing said it was nothing out of the ordinary, and he tried to explain his photography business to the inquiring guest through the pulse of the DJ booth and celebrating guests.
“I thought he was going to reach in his back pocket for his phone, and instead, he didn’t pull out his phone — he pulled out a pocket knife and stabbed me,” he said.
Manderson, who faced a judge days later, is a cousin of the bride.
“There was this look in his eyes that he wasn’t quite all there,” Halsing said.
Halsing’s fiancée, Ashley Wall, was feet away as he struggled to stay awake. She has been his photography partner for eight years since they met at Framingham State University, and she was helping him work the wedding.
“People who were around me, they asked, ‘What can we do to help you? What do you need?’ And I said, ‘Please go check on Ashley. Please go check on my fiancée,’” he recalled.
Halsing spent five days in the hospital suffering from two lacerations to his liver, ultimately developing a blood clot in his left leg. But the road to recovery exceeds his physical wounds as he contemplates his mental state when he resumes photography next year.
“I’m also worried about what lingering effects there might be,” he said. “If we get out on the dance floor and I start remembering what happened, I don’t know how I’m going to react.”
Halsing still doesn’t know why he was attacked.
Manderson was released on $50,000 bail and is due back in court in October.
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This story will be updated.
The Maine Department of Transportation is moving to slash up to $400 million in projects from its agenda, a shocking and abrupt cutback that is rattling the state’s construction industry at the start of building season.
Roughly $50 million across six pavement projects have already been delayed, according to a memo exclusively obtained by the Bangor Daily News. The agency plans to cut or delay another $150 million in bridge, highway, intersection and multimodal projects later this month. A further $200 million or more in cuts are planned in the next three-year work plan.
Those figures were outlined by Transportation Commissioner Dale Doughty in the May 18 memo to Gov. Janet Mills that has since circulated widely in the transportation sector, which has been getting drip-by-drip details on the wide scope of the cuts over the past three weeks.
It comes at the beginning of the state’s relatively narrow construction season. Companies have hired workers and ordered materials for projects they expected to begin this summer. The severity of the transportation budget problems was not raised to lawmakers during the 2026 legislative session.
Kelly Flagg, executive director of the Associated General Contractors of Maine, called the shortfall “deeply troubling” in a statement.
“We stand ready to work with policymakers, stakeholders, and industry partners to identify both immediate and long-term solutions,” Flagg said. “Maine cannot afford to fall further behind.”
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The cuts stem from a structural funding gap of at least $130 million in the state’s current work plan, according to Doughty’s memo. Losses are magnified because state money from the gas tax and other revenue sources is matched by federal funds. Lawmakers have long grappled with politically difficult long-term problems with the state’s transportation budget.
A Mills spokesperson said Wednesday morning that the administration was working on a response to questions from the BDN. The department says it needs roughly $240 million more in state capital funding annually to maintain the existing system, and that anything less than $200 million will erode it over time.
Doughty’s memo the only near-term solution is a series of bonds beginning as soon as possible. Lawmakers would have to return to Augusta to authorize that if one is going to appear on the November ballot.
The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Michael Capeci is the former chairman of the Bangor GOP.
Let’s be honest about Maine’s current state.
For many families, the cost of living has become unsustainable. Housing is out of reach for many young people. Energy bills keep rising. Many small businesses are struggling under taxes and regulations that make it harder to grow. Rural hospitals are under strain and despite years of increased state spending, the results are not showing up in people’s daily lives.
Concurrently, Maine continues to lose young workers to other states. That is not a statistic, it is a warning sign.
To me, the question in this Republican primary for governor is not about slogans. It is whether we continue with a political approach that has failed to reverse these trends, or whether we nominate someone with new ideas. I think that someone is Owen McCarthy.
Owen is not a political insider. He is an entrepreneur from Patten, a small town where opportunity is not assumed, it is built. He grew up in a working-class family, became the first in his family to graduate from college graduating from the University of Maine, and founded MedRhythms, a healthcare technology company focused on neurological treatment.
He didn’t just talk about opportunity. He built it. That distinction matters, because Maine’s problem is not a lack of debate it is a lack of results. We have seen the trajectory: higher costs, slower growth, and a steady outmigration of young workers. I believe Owen McCarthy represents a break from that pattern.
His Maine 2040 plan focuses on creating 50,000 new jobs in sectors where Maine has real advantages — maritime and defense, advanced forest products, and life sciences. These are export-driven industries tied directly to Maine’s workforce, geography, and institutions. What sets Owen apart is not only what he proposes, but how he approaches governing.
He prioritizes modernizing permitting so projects do not stall. He supports using technology to reduce costs and increase efficiency. He focuses on making it easier to build, hire, and expand in Maine.
That same practical mindset extends to healthcare. Expanding telehealth, strengthening EMS systems, improving provider flexibility, and shifting toward earlier intervention are not abstract reforms. They are system upgrades designed to improve access while controlling costs.
Maine voters consistently respond to competence. They reward candidates who understand problems and present plans to solve them. I believe they are tired of rhetoric that does not translate into results, and skeptical of politics that prioritizes messaging over execution.
Owen’s approach is grounded in solving the issues that shape daily life — affordability, healthcare access, job creation, and government efficiency. That is not just policy positioning. It is a governing model that speaks directly to voters.
Some will point to his lack of political experience. But I believe Maine’s core problems are not the result of insufficient political experience; they are the result of policies that have failed to deliver measurable improvement. Experience inside a broken system, by itself, is not a solution.
If Republicans want to win, this primary must be taken seriously. From my perspective, it is not about choosing a nominee for governor who can energize the base. It is about selecting someone who can compete in a broader electorate that is frustrated and looking for change.
That requires a candidate who can speak beyond the base, not by abandoning principles, but by demonstrating competence and a credible plan to address Maine’s challenges. I believe Owen McCarthy offers that combination. He represents a shift away from managed decline and toward economic execution.
This is not just another primary. It is a decision about whether Republicans position themselves to win Maine or whether they remain trapped in a cycle of repeating the same strategies and expecting different outcomes.
If Republicans want to compete for Maine’s future, they cannot afford to nominate a candidate who only motivates part of the electorate. They need someone who expands it.
I believe Owen McCarthy is that candidate.
And if the goal is to win Maine, then the choice should be unmistakable
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