Vacationland
Vintage Maine postcard. Photo: Flickr.
Whether it’s a lobster, a chickadee, or the stylings of a pine tree, Mainers have strong feelings about their license plates. That’s as true today as it was in the mid-1930s when the state legislature voted to add “Vacationland” to the bottom of plates.
For many people then and now, “Vacationland” conjures up visions of fishing, hunting, boating, relaxing by the lake or on a beach, and that’s the way the state has been marketed since the 1800s. As more people bought cars, naturally it made sense to advertise the state as a recreational paradise far and wide on license plates. But there were objections to making every Mainer’s private vehicle a mobile advertisement. One legislator called the addition of the slogan “asinine” and one resident said his Chevrolet “blushed” when he screwed on his plates in 1936. Another said it was an imposition to pay to advertise the state as a summer resort.
Despite these and other such arguments, the slogan stayed on the plates. Today, it is the country’s longest-running state license plate slogan and an instantly recognizable shorthand for Maine.
