A Small Maine Town Was Technically at War with Canada for 174 Years — and Didn't Know It

In the annals of American diplomatic history, there are wars that changed the world, wars that reshaped borders, and wars that defined generations. And then there is Eastport, Maine — a small fishing town on the far northeastern edge of the country that spent 174 years technically at war with its Canadian neighbors without a single person noticing.

No shots were fired. No treaties were signed. No one was particularly upset about it. Mostly because no one knew.

The Trouble at the Border

To understand how a quiet Maine town ended up in a state of undeclared war with New Brunswick, you have to go back to the late 1830s, when the border between the United States and British Canada was a genuinely contested and occasionally heated subject.

The specific flashpoint was a stretch of wilderness in northern Maine and what is now the Canadian province of New Brunswick — a region called Aroostook County. Both the U.S. and Britain claimed it. Timber companies from both sides were moving into the area, cutting trees, and occasionally confronting each other in the woods. By 1838, tensions had escalated to the point where Maine's governor called out the state militia and Congress authorized $10 million and 50,000 troops in case things went sideways.

They mostly didn't. The so-called Aroostook War — sometimes called the Pork and Beans War, because the militias spent more time eating than fighting — was resolved diplomatically in 1842 via the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which established the modern border. Nobody died in combat. The whole thing was, by the standards of 19th-century geopolitics, remarkably civilized.

But out on the coast, in the port town of Eastport, someone had already put pen to paper.

The Ordinance Nobody Repealed

In 1838, at the height of border tensions, Eastport's local government passed a municipal ordinance formally declaring a state of hostility with New Brunswick. The reasoning was straightforward at the time: Eastport sat on Moose Island, directly across the water from Canadian territory, and local officials were not feeling particularly neighborly. The ordinance was a statement of solidarity with the broader Maine position on the border dispute.

Then the dispute ended. The treaty was signed. The militias went home. And the Eastport ordinance sat quietly in the town's records, untouched, unrepealed, and almost entirely forgotten.

For 174 years, the document technically remained in effect. By the letter of local law, Eastport and New Brunswick were at war.

The Discovery

The ordinance was rediscovered in 2012 by a local historian digging through Eastport's municipal archives — the kind of painstaking, unglamorous research that occasionally turns up something genuinely astonishing. When the finding was confirmed and reported, it produced a reaction that can only be described as delighted bewilderment on both sides of the border.

Canadian officials in New Brunswick were reportedly amused. Eastport's town council convened to address what was, technically speaking, an active declaration of hostilities with a friendly neighboring nation. The resolution was swift and the mood was good-humored: the council formally voted to rescind the 1838 ordinance, bringing to an end a war that had lasted a century and three-quarters and produced zero casualties, zero battles, and zero awareness.

Local officials on both sides of the border used the occasion to celebrate the long, peaceful relationship between their communities. There were jokes. There may have been Canadian beer involved.

What It Says About American Legal History

The Eastport story is funny, but it's also a genuine window into the informal, sometimes chaotic nature of early American municipal governance. In the 19th century, small towns operated with enormous autonomy and very little administrative oversight. Ordinances were passed, crises came and went, and the paperwork didn't always catch up.

Legal historians point out that forgotten or obsolete local laws are far more common than most people realize. Across the United States, municipal codes contain provisions that were written for circumstances that no longer exist — laws regulating industries that have vanished, addressing disputes that were settled generations ago, or reflecting social attitudes that are now unrecognizable. Most of these laws are simply never enforced and quietly gather dust. Very few of them involve declarations of war.

The Aroostook War itself is one of history's more underappreciated footnotes — a genuine international standoff that was resolved almost entirely through negotiation, setting a precedent for the peaceful management of U.S.-Canada border disputes that has held, more or less, ever since. The two countries share the longest undefended border in the world, a relationship built on exactly the kind of diplomatic pragmatism that ended the Pork and Beans War before it became anything worse.

Neighbors, Technically at War

What makes the Eastport story stick is the sheer absurdity of the timeline. Generations of Eastport residents were born, lived full lives, and died without knowing their town was legally hostile to the province across the water. Canadian tourists visited Eastport. Eastport residents crossed into New Brunswick. Trade happened. Friendships formed. And the whole time, buried in a filing cabinet somewhere, was a piece of paper saying otherwise.

When the 2012 vote finally closed the books on the conflict, a local official reportedly described it as "the most peaceful war in American history."

Hard to argue with that.