Maine town learns the high price of prosperity : A Main Street filled with factory outlets has brought profits--and a loss of identity.

In the last year, this small town on Route 1 has replaced Acadia National Park as the top tourist attraction in Maine, drawing armies of visitors who descend on Main Street in chartered buses, recreational vehicles and cars bearing license plates from states a day’s drive away.

Few of the visitors ever get to the lovely harbor south of town that the 7,000 residents consider the spiritual heart of Freeport. Fewer still seem interested in discovering Freeport’s history--the papers separating Maine from the state of Massachusetts were signed here at the Jameson Tavern in 1820--and even the steamed lobsters and expanses of wilderness you hear so much about in Maine don’t get top billing with the tourists.

They come instead, 4 million strong a year, to shop.

What makes all this interesting is that rather than being cloistered in some forlorn mall out by the interstate, as has happened elsewhere in the country, Freeport’s 125 factory outlets have taken over Main Street. The Victorian homes, the hardware stores and banks and grocery stores, the apartment buildings that used to house workers from the factories, even the old jail--today each bears the name of some well-known national retailer. And business is booming.

On the surface, this sounds like the realization of a dream for every small, fading town in America. There are jobs for everyone who wants to work. The valuation of the town’s tax base has soared. There’s not a boarded-up storefront in sight, nor a clapboard that needs a speck of paint. Sure, there’s a McDonald’s, but it’s archless and located in a fine old home with wallpaper, moldings and a fireplace.

But the transformation of Freeport from a weary shoe-factory town to a spiffy shoppers’ paradise has not come without trauma or concern on the part of the citizenry.

Who really benefits by all this, they ask, as hordes of strangers troop by with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cones in one hand and packages from Dansk, Cole-Haan, Banana Republic or The Gap in the other.

“It all happened so quickly that people haven’t come to grips with the implications yet, but they know this really isn’t their town any more,” said Jean O’Brien, a longtime resident and a potter. “At first, people talked about leaving Freeport. In the end, they’ve stayed, but most don’t go into the town any more.”

Curiously, Freeport’s revival happened by accident. Back in 1982, just as the Town Council was devising a plan to spruce up the deteriorating commercial area, a teen-ager broke into Leighton’s Five and Dime on Main Street one night and, to cover up his burglary, set fire to the place.

When Edgar Leighton surveyed the burned-out building and decided to find a new location, his landlord sold the property to a Boston developer, who remodeled it and leased it to the Dansk Co. as a factory outlet for its kitchenware.

Other manufacturers soon followed, and today only one local merchant from the pre-outlet days, Rich Derosier, remains on Main Street. His sandwich and convenience shop has been in the family since 1904.

The biggest attraction on Main Street remains L.L. Bean, the outdoors-merchandise store, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Leon Leonwood Bean, who died in 1967 at the age of 94, built the company’s reputation on the maxim: “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they’ll always come back for more.”

With L.L. Bean as the anchor, Freeport generated $238 million in taxable retail sales last year. It attracted 1.4 million more visitors than Acadia National Park, Maine’s longstanding top tourist draw, and provided the town with a big cushion as the rest of the state struggled with recession.

But the town has paid a price for prosperity. On a busy weekend, traffic clogs Route 1 through Freeport. Residential property taxes have tripled. Low-priced and moderate-priced housing has all but disappeared. And because the town’s tax base has soared, the state, which gets all the sales taxes generated on Main Street, has cut back on the funds it gives Freeport for school aid.

The prime concern of most residents is that, however tastefully Main Street has been renovated, Freeport has lost its small-town atmosphere and now owes its destiny to out-of-state interests that do not understand the clubbiness of Maine culture.

The local sixth-grade class learned how much had changed when they asked outlet managers one recent Halloween if they could paint witches and goblins on the store windows. The answer came back: “We’ll check with corporate headquarters and let you know.”