In-Home Drug Testing Searsport, ME

Local Area Info: Searsport, Maine

Searsport is an incorporated town and deep water seaport located at the confluence of the Penobscot River estuary and the Penobscot Bay immediately SE of Sears Island and Cape Jellison in Waldo County, Maine, United States. The population was 2,615 at the 2010 census. Searsport includes the village of North Searsport. The town is known as "the home of the famous sea captains" and the "Antique Capital of Maine".

Searsport was settled in the 1760s and incorporated on February 13, 1845 from portions of Prospect and Belfast. In 1747, when fire destroyed the Province House in Boston, General Samuel Waldo advocated, unsuccessfully, that the capital of Massachusetts be moved to Searsport, which was part of the Waldo Patent he purchased about 1720. It was named after David Sears of Boston after he agreed to grant a large sum of money towards the town's founding. Searsport is noted for its rich maritime history. During the 19th-century the port had 17 shipyards and built 200 ships, while supplying fully one-tenth of the nation's merchant marine deep water captains. The Penobscot Marine Museum faithfully recalls this heritage.

Searsport is Maine's second largest deep water port and is ideally located from the point of view of railroad, wood products and other development interests. Indeed, the town became the Penobscot Bay shipping terminus for the Northern Maine Seaport Railroad, a line opened in 1905 by the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, which sent potatoes, timber and other products from here by boat, and loaded coal for use by its locomotives, without having to arrange rates with the Maine Central Railroad. Searsport harbor is an excellent sheltered anchorage covering an area of roughly 2 by 3 miles (3 by 5km) with a controlling depth of 40 feet (12 m) at mean low water and an average tidal fluctuation of 10 feet (3.0 m). The railroad pier is 800 feet (240 m) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide with belt conveyors to handle bagged cargo to and from four warehouses. Tracks running along either side of the pier can hold 24 railcars on the west side and twelve cars on the east side. Sprague pier is 614 feet (187 m) long with an adjacent berth 850-foot (260 m) long. Berths adjacent to the piers are dredged to a mean low water depth of 32 feet (9.8 m), and are connected to a turning basin by channels 500 feet (150 m) wide. The Searsport railway yard can hold 700 cars. The port facilities at Searsport were a preferred loading point for ammunition during World War II;