Orono, ME

Orono is a river town wearing a college gown. Named for Joseph Orono, the Penobscot chief who sided with the Revolution, it sits on the Penobscot River where Marsh Island divides the waters — and directly upstream lies Indian Island, seat of the Penobscot Nation, whose presence on this river reaches back thousands of years and whose basketry, language work and drum groups remain part of the valley's living culture.

The town's centre of gravity is the University of Maine, the state's land-grant flagship, founded in 1865, whose campus on the island farmland now teaches some twelve thousand students. Its most famous alumnus haunts American bookshelves: Stephen King graduated in 1970, wrote his first novels in the area, and Maine's mill towns and pointed firs populate his fiction. The university is also the region's concert-giver: the Collins Center for the Arts, the campus's 1,400-seat hall, presents the touring orchestras, opera and dance that reach central Maine, alongside the Bangor Symphony — one of the country's oldest community orchestras — from the small city ten minutes downstream. Around it all stands the North Woods fact of Maine: black bears as mascots and occasionally as visitors, canoes on the river, and winter as a season of honour.