^{This page is part of © FOTW Flags Of The World website}

Waldoboro, Maine (U.S.)

Lincoln County

image by Dave Martucci, 26 July 2010

Description of the flag

See also:

Description of the flag

The flag for Waldoboro consists of centered town seal on white background with gold trimming. Waldoboro, located in Lincoln County, with just 5,000 residents, consists of 71 square miles [184 square kilometres] of land area.
Thanks to Mike Ducharme, IT Coordinator, for original digital photo.

The logo in the middle of the flag is the Town logo.
William S Post, Town Manager

John Johnson, 26 July 2010

Waldoboro, formerly Broad Bay Plantation, was settled in the early-1740s by Germans lured by the (mostly false) promises of the 'Hereditary Lord of Broad Bay' Samuel Waldo, later Colonel of the 3rd Massachusetts Regiment which participated in the first capture of the fortress of Louisbourg from the French in 1745. Waldo ordered all of the German settlers of the plantation to join up or get out. Every one of them, taking their whole families, went and for nearly two years, the plantation was deserted.

There is a famous flag incident related to that event and the 3rd Mass.: Waldo was given the task of surrounding the Royal Battery, situated on the shore opposite the main fortress, so that the Royal Navy could bombard the battery and attempt to reduce or capture it. On sighting the movement of the Provincial force landing nearby, the garrison of the Royal Battery promptly struck their flag, cut off the halyards so no other flag could be raised, spiked their cannon and removed to the main fortress. When the 3rd Mass. showed up, the battery was empty. They occupied it happily until someone remembered the scheduled bombardment. Not having any flag, a young German was ordered to shimmy up the flag pole and nail his red coat to the top of the pole as a signal not to fire on the battery. It worked. You can read more about the Waldonians adventure at Louisbourg in "The History of Old Broad Bay" by Jasper Stahl which was published in the 1950s if my memory serves me correctly.

A remnant of what is likely the regimental color of the 3rd Mass. is in the New York Historical Society collection.

The ship on the Waldoboro seal is the five masted Schooner 'Governor Ames' launched in 1888 at the Leavitt-Storer Shipyard for a cost of $75,000, a huge sum in those days. It was then the largest cargo ship in the world and the first five-masted schooner ever built. The Storer family still owns the site and they run a lumber yard there now. In the 1820s, Waldoboro was briefly the second-largest ship building port in the United States, although to look at the dinky Medomak River now makes one wonder how. The 'Governor Ames' as with other big ships, had to be launched sideways because the river was not wide enough.
Dave Martucci, 27 July 2010