It does look kind of like suburbia, but that's a little misleading, since there's no "urb" anywhere nearby. It's more the case that towns like Millinocket are what mid-20th-century suburbs were trying to look like--that whole idea (largely illusory) of recapturing the experience of small-town America for the urban masses moving out of the city centers.

In Millinocket's case, the town's layout is weirdly dense for a rural small town because it was built around a mill rather than farms. The paper company controlled all land distribution within the town limits, and their surveyors laid out the house lots with narrow frontages so that the people who lived there, virtually all of whom were employees, could walk to work in a relatively short time.

By the time the part of town I live in was built just after World War I, ~20 years after the town's founding, automobiles were becoming a Thing and the houses started to space out a little more compared to the oldest neighborhoods, but only a little. We're still packed oddly close together for a little town out in the woods.

As for the town itself, well, it's seen better days--the mill is long gone and nothing much has come along to replace it, economically speaking, so the population has shrunk dramatically over the last decade and skews heavily toward retirees and other fixed-income demographics--but it's not experiencing the same sort of post-industrial blight as, say, the Rust Belt or RoboCop-era Detroit. It's still a pretty quiet, relatively safe place to live, and it is picturesque AF. Natural splendors and all that. I can't see Mount Katahdin from my house because the other houses are in the way, but I don't have to go far to get a sightline on it.

When you live in a place where this is your view on the way back from the dump, it can't be all bad. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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