Ironclad Defense
During the Spanish-American War
the U.S. Navy did indeed remember Maine.
Perhaps it was all about the name. Surely no one believed that the Spanish navy would attack Portland back in 1898, but since it was the sinking of a warship bearing the name of the Forest City's home state that had ignited the Spanish-American War in April of that year, military commanders were taking no chances. The iron-hulled, two-hundred-foot-long USS Montauk, photographed here by local lensman Carl C. Coffin, dropped anchor off Fort Gorges on May 13, 1898, her seventy-person crew charged with defending Maine's largest city.
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