As Arend Thibodeau toured the former Caswell Air Force Station during the summer of 2024, he had an epiphany. The Maine author and Navy veteran was at the site doing research for a book on Cold War military installations in Aroostook County when he realized how intertwined the state’s military infrastructure was, even at its northernmost reaches.
“I realized that the radar station in Caswell sent data to the radar facility in Topsham, and they worked together with Charleston,” said Thibodeau, who lives in Harmony. “I realized how connected everything was.”
So Thibodeau visited the Charleston Air Force Station, and he visited the station in Topsham. Then the Kennebec Arsenal, and Dow Air Force Base in Bangor, Houlton Army Air Force Base and Brunswick Naval Air Station — where he was once briefly stationed decades ago.
In total, Thibodeau traveled to and photographed more than a dozen former military sites across the state. The goal? To capture Maine’s place in the U.S. defense structure from the War of 1812 to the Cold War, and what remains of those installations today.
The result is his fifth book: “Maine’s Military Might: Memories of Military Infrastructure in the Pine Tree State,” which was published on Nov. 28. It’s a companion to Thibodeau’s book on Aroostook County, dubbed “The Aroostook Arms Race” released via the publisher America Through Time in May.
The book combines his passion for urban exploration and a love of military history, packing an understanding of more than 200 years of infrastructure into 96 pages.
“What got me into it [was] that sense of adventure,” Thibodeau said. “Going to lost places that people have forgotten about and then digging up the history on them and realizing that really key eventful things happen and people are just kind of forgetting about them.”
That was what drew Thibodeau to Jug Handle Hill in West Bath, where the military erected a 120-foot-tall antenna in 1955 as part of a radar that was the primary sensor for an experimental air defense system that would become the nation’s first.
The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system launched in 1958 in the wake of the successful trials utilizing data from the West Bath site. It was the first large-scale coordination of networked computers and real-time data processing and is a direct precursor to the internet.
“If it wasn’t for Maine, there might not be the SAGE system and there might not be the internet,” Thibodeau said.
The Caswell, Charleston and Topsham Air Force stations were all a part of the SAGE network, which the military took out of service in 1984 in favor of new technology.
Other portions of the book reflect on how Maine’s location on the Atlantic Ocean and as the closest state on the East Coast to the Soviet Union during the Cold War made it strategically key in the defense of the U.S.
Thibodeau writes about the nuclear weapons once housed at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone and the use of Houlton Army Air Force Base’s proximity to Canada to circumvent the Neutrality Act by towing planes across the border with tractors to support the Allies in the early stages of World War II.
On the other end of the state, he looks at Casco Bay, which was an important defense position under the threat of siege after the British set fire to Washington D.C. in 1814, and later a crucial naval base during the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War.
Each military installation discussed in the book ends with a passage about the state it’s in today. Some, like Fort Gorges in Casco Bay, have been preserved, some have been redeveloped, many have razed or long-abandoned.
That was part of Thibodeau’s impetus to write the book, to shed more light on sites key to Maine’s military history that have been neglected.
“The general population just doesn’t think about it, they kind of disregard it,” Thibodeau said. “They don’t realize how important the military was to Maine.”
Thibodeau specifically cited the Kennebec Arsenal, which historians have called the nation’s best and most complete example of an early nineteenth-century military arsenal, and the Arch Hangar at Loring Air Force Base as examples of key military facilities in the state whose histories should be kept alive.
The Augusta arsenal was purchased by an out-of-state developer in 2007 with plans to turn parts of its campus into housing and shops. That never came to fruition. The State of Maine sued the developer in 2013 for neglect and the Augusta City Council deemed its buildings dangerous in 2022.
The monolithic Arch Hangar is one of two of its kind in the U.S. A global aerospace company that retrofits large aircraft moved into the hangar this summer.
“We can’t just go around and preserve every single building that we’ve ever built,” Thibodeau said. “I’m not saying they need to be preserved as a historical monument or as a historical museum… use them as a modern facility, but preserve the history that comes with them.”
