Oakland

Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, Oakland was both a bustling industrial village and a rural farming community. The town was home to busy ax factories, a railway complex built for tourists and trade, an electric power company, a waterfall nearly as high as Niagara Falls, oxen plowing fields, and a Civil War memorial to rival any in the state of Maine. Today, Oakland is a quiet suburban town for most of the year. Its downtown does not draw the shoppers it once did, and its factories and farms can be counted on two hands. Even after two hundred years of change, Oakland continues to rebuild and transform itself for the twenty-first century.