Marca Machine Engineering (MME) represents an amalgamation of extremely talented engineers, designers, programmers, machinists, fabricators, and assemblers. MME, in large part was formerly Knowlton Machine Engineering, a Maine company founded as a general-purpose job shop in 1864 by John Knowlton in order to serve the paper and textile industries of the greater Portland area. During Knowlton’s first 90 years of existence, it innovated and developed a number of machine product lines including cut-off saws, paper embossing machines, and other customized paper processing equipment.

After the Knowlton family sold the business in 1954, the focus shifted to power transition systems where the business quickly became one of the nation’s major suppliers. Through the 1980’s into the 1990’s, the convergence of the company’s continually evolving capabilities and growth and strong financial position, (not to mention an unfortunate major fire) lead to its relocation from X to its current location in Gorham Maine.

Over this time, Knowlton continued to expand not only the diversity of talent within its engineering department but its internal resources through its utilization of state of the art manufacturing equipment. In addition to the acquisition of standard machine tools such as mills, lathes, and two large horizontal boring mills, it also acquired many standard and large sized CNC machine tools. By greatly increased and automated its fabrication capabilities, and constructing an electronics controls assembly room, machine assembly area, and a plastics fabrication and welding area, KME a sole-source manufacturer of entire machine systems but remained at the forefront of manufacturing in New England.

In 2010, Marca Manufacturing acquired KME to further strengthen its position as a leading manufacturer. Marca Manufacturing, through the diversification of its resources in MME’s sister company, Marca Coating Technologies, added additional engineering, designing, and assembly capabilities in the form of its team of global and industry leading PVD vacuum metallization experts. These combined talents and assets have placed MME in a unique position to be a manufacturing leader not only in New England and North America, but globally.