Tag: Skowhegan, Maine

SKOWHEGAN, Maine — "I am delighted that you have arrived,” the late Margaret Chase Smith wrote in a letter to an infant Janet Mills in 1948. Wednesday, nearly 71 years later, Mills arrived in Augusta to become Maine’s 75th governor, and the first female to hold this office in the state. The inauguration of Janet Mills is prompting a lot of people to compare her to another Maine politician, Margaret Chase Smith, who was in the midst of breaking the gender barrier in politics when she wrote that letter to Mills just after Mills was born. "Just about a week after Janet is born, Margaret is already making this prophecy that [Mills] has a lot to live up to,” said David Richards, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan. “70 years later, she’s gone on to live up to that." "I just think that letter is so remarkable,” said Richards. According to Richards, there's a long connection between the Smith and Mills families which began even before Mills began her career, through a friendship Smith shared with Mills' father, Peter. “This idea of firsts, that Janet Mills is the first female governor of the state of Maine and Margaret Chase Smith had a lot of firsts as a female, running and serving in office over the years,” said Richards. Both women have served as trailblazers for females in politics and for their own political parties. She was on to something with that letter at least, all those years ago.