This was originally published Oct. 9, 2024
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They may have ceased classes decades ago in some cases, but these long-closed Maine colleges had impacts that can still be felt across the state — in education, religion, the arts and in their home communities. In eastern Maine in particular, small colleges had an outsize influence on those towns and cities, in both population and cultural impact.
Here are three eastern Maine colleges that have legacies that can still be seen, long after they closed.
Ricker College, Houlton
The northernmost private post-secondary institution in Maine was for many years Ricker College in Houlton, a four-year liberal arts college that began life as a high school in 1848. By the 1930s, it had become a junior college, before becoming a fully accredited college in the 1940s.
Though the school was always small, with enrollment generally under 300 students, like any college, it had a lively group of students engaged in academics, sports and extracurricular activities. Many were actively involved in life in Aroostook County, from participating in the potato harvest to skiing at nearby mountains.
When the college was near bankruptcy in the early 1970s, it asked the city of Houlton and county officials to help it stay open, which both declined to do. Ricker finally closed for good in 1978. Several buildings from the campus still stand today, including a number that are now apartment complexes or private residences.
Northern Conservatory of Music, Bangor
Few may know that for more than 40 years, downtown Bangor had a music conservatory founded by the Bangor Symphony Orchestra — the only such conservatory north of Boston.
The Northern Conservatory of Music was housed at Symphony House — today known as the Isaac Farrar Mansion at the corner of Union and 2nd streets — which was purchased by the symphony in 1929. Soon after, the symphony formally founded a music school for post-secondary students wishing to continue their musical training, and eventually began granting bachelor of music degrees in 1951. It generally had between 50 and 100 students, mostly from Maine.
In the early 1970s the school faced a financial shortfall, as well as requirements for accreditation that would require major renovations and expansions to the Union Street building. In May of 1972, it closed permanently — though its legacy lived on in the hundreds of performers and music educators it trained, many of whom went on to teach at schools across the state.
In 1983, two Bangor music instructors started the similarly-named Northern Conservatory of Music and the Performing Arts, a nonprofit that in the 1990s attempted to open a magnet high school for the performing arts in the former Freese’s building, now the site of the Maine Discovery Museum. By 2000, the school had folded. Symphony House is now owned by the Bangor Region YMCA.
Bangor Theological Seminary
The Bangor Theological Seminary in 1814 was the third college founded in Maine, after Bowdoin College in 1794 and Colby College in 1813. And until it closed permanently in 2013, one year shy of its 200th anniversary, it was the only graduate school of religion in northern New England, and the third oldest seminary in the country.
For its first five years, the seminary held classes in the former Hampden Academy on Main Road in Hampden, before moving to its longtime Bangor campus between Hammond and Union streets in 1819. There, it trained generations of Protestant spiritual leaders, mostly in the Congregational and United Church of Christ churches. In the 1990s, it began offering classes in Portland and in Hanover, New Hampshire, and in 2005, the Bangor campus closed and the school moved to Husson University. Facing declining enrollment, the seminary closed in 2013.
The seminary’s most famous alumnus is Joshua Chamberlain, the Civil War general and hero of the Battle of Gettysburg. When the school moved to Husson, the campus was sold, and is now home to the Bangor Masonic Center, a daycare and a dyslexia center. The BTS Center, a nonprofit that aims to carry on the spiritual legacy of the seminary, was founded in Portland in 2013.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the year Ricker College closed. It also misidentified a building on its former campus.
