At the Bangor Daily News, we spend most of our time thinking about rural Maine. It’s often easy to get annoyed with how people use that term.
To people from big cities, all of Maine is rural. Just look at The New York Times, which has applied the “rural” moniker to a county seat in Skowhegan, the coastal town of Orland and Etna, which is just outside Bangor on Interstate 95. (I’ll award some credit: It got it right with a 1980 story about poverty in northern Aroostook County.)
That’s a reminder that rurality is in the eye of the beholder. Even the U.S. Census Bureau’s commonly accepted urban-rural rules don’t really work in Maine. It says the only two 100% rural counties here are Piscataquis and Lincoln. No Mainer would compare those areas or call Wiscasset truly rural.
We needed a better definition and set out to solve it as a math problem, settling on a 0-100 grading system for all of Maine’s cities and towns. The more rural, the higher the score you get. Hannaford is at the heart of the BDN’s Rural Maine Index, which mixes where you are in the state with how people generally live there.
Why Hannaford? It has 68 locations here. If you’re 20 miles from one of them, you’re probably in rural Maine. (We also looked at Walmart and Shaw’s stores that are closer to many Mainers.) Other things we graded towns on are population density and proximity to Portland, the state’s largest city and economic center. In places with stores, we looked at hospital distances as proxies for services. We also used commuting data to measure ties between areas.
We say the most rural town in Maine is Topsfield, in a Down East no-man’s land between Houlton and Calais. It is followed by Moose River in the Jackman area and Allagash, the frontier town that functions as the end of the paved road in western Aroostook County.
There is plenty to argue about. For example, the southern pull of the analysis means Bangor is deemed more rural than the Lewiston suburb of Sabattus. Ellsworth’s massive land area and low density makes it more rural than Machias, which is remote but tightly packed.
Our hierarchy isn’t perfect. Play with it and see what you think. We hope it prompts reflection, arguments and feedback.
Methodology
We only looked at Maine cities and towns with more than 180 people in 2024. At first, they were sorted into three tiers: Tier 1 was those with at least one major grocery store and hospital, Tier 2 was those with a major grocery store and no hospitals and Tier 3 was places with neither. (Major grocery stores include Hannaford, Shaws and Walmart; smaller stores were not counted.)
Tier 1 towns were graded mostly on population density, which forms 65% of their score. Straight-line distance to Portland is the remaining 35%. Tier 2 towns were graded 30% on estimated driving distance to the closest hospital, 30% on density and 40% on distance to Portland. Scores were then reduced by 35% for major cities (Portland, Lewiston, Bangor and Augusta), while regional hubs (e.g. Farmington, Waterville) got 20% taken off.
Finally, Tier 3 towns were graded 50% on the estimated driving distance to the closest store, 30% on density and 20% on distance to Portland.
At the end of this process, we considered U.S. Department of Agriculture data on commuting patterns. Scores for the smallest towns with no significant commuting ties to service centers are then weighted more heavily for their distance to stores, while places that are more integrated with cities have their rurality scores discounted.