The Maine State Museum recently acquired a sign that hung on the building where the Maine Republican Party was formed in 1854. The sign reads “P.M. STUBBS' OFFICE.” It hung outside the office of Judge Philip M. Stubbs (1805-1876) of Strong, Maine.

Judge Stubbs’s office was the site where members of three political parties joined forces to form the Maine Republican party on August 7, 1854.

Representatives of the three existing parties met in the office to negotiate a political platform for a new party. The parties included the abolitionist wing of the Whig Party, the Free Soil Party, which advocated that all future states would be free states, and a group of Democrats who were in favor of the Maine law that restricted alcohol consumption. The men returned to their separate political party conventions and approved the new platform. 

The three parties then came together under a tent in the Strong town common to hold the first convention of the

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Republican Party in Maine. They nominated candidates for a full Franklin County Republican ticket.

In August 1884, Judge P.M. Stubbs guided a committee of Franklin County Republicans to organize a 30^th anniversary celebration of the Strong convention. Sixteen trains brought over 5,000 people to Strong to hear leading Maine Republicans speak, including Presidential nominee James Blaine and former Vice President Hannibal Hamlin.

While the August 1854 Strong convention represents the birth of the Maine Republican Party, debate began in 1904 over whether it was the first site of the national Republican Party’s formation. Today, the Republican Party recognizes Ripon, Wisconsin, which held a Republican convention in March 1854, as the party’s official birthplace.

The museum purchased the sign from P.M. Stubbs’s great grandson, Robert G. Stubbs Jr. of Hallowell.