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The Royal Navy built its first ship in the American colonies at Kittery in 1690, and this Piscataqua River city's long association with the sea is celebrated at the Kittery Historical and Naval Museum. Today the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (named for the New Hampshire city across the Piscataqua) is a submarine repair facility. Further north on the Kennebec River, Bath Iron Works has built warships for more than a century (as well as some outstanding yachts, like Cornelius Vanderbilt's J-Boat Ranger).
Maine's strategic significance can also be seen in the more than 20 forts that dot the coast from Kittery to Machias, and well inland along the Kennebec (Augusta's Old Fort Western, where Benedict Arnold gathered his bateaux for the march to Quebec in 1775), and the St. John River (Fort Kent). The largest of these, Fort Knox, at the mouth of the Penobscot River, was built to protect the approaches to Bangor. In the mid-1800s Bangor and neighboring Brewer, although 17 miles from salt water, comprised the largest lumber port in the world!
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