L.L.Bean/Freeport Timeline

L.L.Bean
1912 Leon Leonwood Bean sells his newly invented Maine Hunting Shoe via mailer.
1937 L.L.Bean tops $1 million in sales.
1951 L.L.Bean retail begins keeping its door open 24/7.
1967 Leon Leonwood Bean dies at ninety-four.
1976 L.L.Bean receives its own zip code: 04033
1988 An outlet opens in North Conway, New Hampshire. The first L.L.Bean store outside Freeport.
1987L.L.Bean debuts new logo of the sun rising over Mount Katahdin.
1992 Bean boots, a modified version of the original hunting shoes, are introduced. L.L.Bean opens a store in Japan.
1995 llbean.com debuts.
2010 Signature line introduced. Online sales exceed those of the catalog.

Freeport
1925 Henry Goldrup turns an abandoned forty-acre tract of sand into the Desert of Maine.
1937 Freeport gets its first traffic light.
1951 Construction of Route I-95 (later re-named I-295) in Freeport begins, offering an alternative to Route 1.
1957 Joan Benoit Samuelson, Freeport resident and 1984 Gold Medal winner in the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon event, is born.
1969 Two hundred acres of coastal land become Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park.
1972 Freeport Shoe Company closes its factory, making it the fifteenth shoe factory to close in Freeport in four years.
1981 Midtown Apartments and Leighton’s Store in the Clark Block are destroyed in a fire. The building was rebuilt as Dansk Factory Outlet, starting Freeport’s transition to shopping mecca.
1984 McDonald’s is forced to compromise with Freeport residents and open its restaurant within an 1850s Greek Revival sea captain’s house.
2009 The 3.6 acre, thirty-store Freeport Village Station opens across 
from L.L.Bean.