Cushing, Maine

• 1. Introduction

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  Cushing, Maine sits on a finger of land pressed between two rivers, where a painting made in 1948 pulled the whole world's gaze toward one weathered farmhouse. Andrew Wyeth captured that house in Christina's World, and the image traveled far enough to inspire a horror video game series and a Hollywood film. Yet the town that holds the Olson House is a place most listeners have never thought about. How did a remote coastal settlement in Knox County become home to one of the most recognized canvases in American art? And what shaped the community that grew up around those rivers long before any painter arrived? The answers reach back to a brigadier general, a stone fort, a fall of a distant city, and a statesman whose name was borrowed to give the town its identity.

• 2. A General's Gamble

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  Brigadier-General Samuel Waldo needed settlers. His land claim, part of the Waldo Patent, stretched across both sides of the St. George River, and he was willing to offer a hundred acres to any household that would come. He recruited Scots and Irish immigrants directly from Ireland, and the first permanent settlers arrived in 1733. The tract was known at the time as the Lower Plantation of St. Georges. Waldo's offer was generous, but the ground proved dangerous. French and Indian War attacks repeatedly drove people away, making habitation a persistent struggle. In 1753, Captain Benjamin Burton built a stone blockhouse in the area to protect those who remained. That fortification, known as Burton's Fort, stood as the most visible sign that this was frontier territory where survival was not guaranteed. Hostilities finally lifted in 1759, when the Fall of Quebec ended French military power in the region and made the banks of the St. George River a safer place to put down roots.

• 3. Town, Name, and Boundary

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  On the 28th of January 1789, the town was formally incorporated and given the name Cushing, honoring Thomas Cushing, a statesman who had served as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. The naming tied this small Maine community to a figure from the broader political world of the young republic. The town's geography was still being drawn. On the 7th of February 1803, the town of St. George was set off and incorporated as a separate municipality. Cushing settled into its present shape, a stretch of land totaling just over 26 square miles, of which roughly 19 square miles is land and nearly 7 square miles is water. The town includes Gay Island and is situated on Muscongus Bay, with the Meduncook River marking its western edge and the St. George River running along its eastern boundary. Maine State Route 97 serves the town, and its neighbors are Friendship to the west, Warren and Thomaston to the north, and South Thomaston and St. George to the east across the river.

• 4. The Olson House and Its Afterlife

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  In 1948, Andrew Wyeth painted the Olson House in his work Christina's World, a painting that became one of the most recognized images in twentieth-century American art. The canvas's reach extended well beyond gallery walls. Dahlia Gillespie's house in the horror video game series Silent Hill was modeled on it, and the farmer's house in the 1978 film Days of Heaven drew direct inspiration from the same image. Wyeth himself was among the notable people associated with Cushing, and his connection to the town gave the Olson House a cultural weight that outlasted its original occupants. The building is now operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum of Rockland, preserving it as a site where art history and Maine landscape remain inseparable. Cushing also counts among its notable residents the librarian Raymond Cazallis Davis, the artist Peter Halley, the writer Elisabeth Ogilvie, and the US congressman Edward Robinson.

• 5. Who Lives Here

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  At the 2010 census, Cushing had 1,534 residents distributed across 642 households, with a median age of 44 years. The town spreads across four villages: North Cushing, Cushing, South Cushing, and Pleasant Point. A decade later, the 2020 census recorded a population of 1,502, a slight decline. The 2000 census offers a picture of the town's ancestry: 28.3 percent of residents then claimed English heritage, followed by Irish at 9.1 percent, German at 7.9 percent, Finnish at 5.9 percent, French at 5.2 percent, and Scottish at 5.1 percent. Those Scots and Irish roots trace directly back to Samuel Waldo's original recruitment in the 1730s. By 2000, the median household income stood at $40,598, and the per capita income was $20,264. The population density at the 2010 census was 79.7 people per square mile, a figure that underlines just how much open land surrounds the households that cluster along the rivers and bay. Regional School Unit 13 serves the community, with Cushing Community School covering grades kindergarten through five.