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.
“You have so much to live up to,” writes Smith to a week-old Mills in the letter dated January 7, 1948.
"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."
It's Mills’ birth, and the letter Smith wrote welcoming her into the world, that began a bond between them that would last into Mills' adulthood.
"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.
“Peter Mills was a U.S. attorney and he would've gotten his appointment while Margaret Chase Smith was in the Senate so that would've given them lots of close connections,” added Richards.
Mills has long been compared to Smith, and in many ways, they are a lot alike.
“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. “Margaret really grew up at a time when women didn’t have opportunities. She grew up at a time when women didn’t have the right to vote, and yet she goes on to serve in Congress for over 30 years and run for President of the United States, but there’s another glass ceiling right there that hasn’t been broken.”
Smith was the first woman to serve in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and the first woman from Maine to serve in either.
Mills is Maine's first female governor.
Both women have served as trailblazers for females in politics and for their own political parties.
"Margaret would've been very proud from this standpoint,” said Richards.
She was on to something with that letter at least, all those years ago.