Limestone, ME

Limestone is an Aroostook County town whose modern geography was reshaped by Loring Air Force Base. Mark Trafton settled the community in 1849, and Limestone incorporated in 1869; the 2020 census counted 1,526 residents. The Air Force opened Loring in 1952 and closed it in 1994, leaving a large military landscape that became the Loring Commerce Centre. The former base now hosts aviation, industrial, and business activity, with its runway and aviation facilities still visible across the town.

That reuse sits alongside the Aroostook National Wildlife Refuge, whose lands were transferred from the base in 1998, and the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. MSSM was established after the base closure and occupies a campus that includes former school buildings and a residential dormitory. Loring Job Corps Center and the surviving military infrastructure add other daily destinations. Limestone’s town life is tied to a sequence of reinvention: nineteenth-century settlement, a military air base, and present-day education, aviation, conservation, and workforce programs sharing the same northern Maine landscape.