News from Maine’s Island and Coastal Communities volume 36, № 5
published by the island institute
Future, past collide at Beaches Conference
n
n july 2022 n free circulation: 50,000
workingwaterfront.com
MENDING TIME—
Archaeology reveals how colonies shaped coast By Tom Groening
M
ore than 400 years after the Plymouth colony was established, historians are still unraveling what the New England coast looked like, before and after. One fresh understanding of that history, which came from examining the colonial impact on New Hampshire’s Great Bay, shed light on the region’s ecosystems today. The presentation was one of several in which the past and present collided at the Beaches Conference on June 10 at Berwick Academy in Berwick, an everyother-year symposium jointly hosted by Maine and New Hampshire Sea Grant. Some 180 attended. Paul and Denise Pouliot, members of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook native people, along with the University of New Hampshire’s Meghan Howey, described their study of the English settlement of Great Bay, which lies several miles upriver from the mouth of the Piscataqua. The settler colonial period of 1600-1750, they said, “ushered in radical societal and ecological transformation that continues to shape the landscape today.”
Fishermen repair nets on a pier in Portland on June 4. The public was welcomed onto the city’s piers during an annual “Walk the Working Waterfront” event aimed at promoting awareness of the activity there. PHOTO: MICHELE STAPLETON
They began by working to understand how the native people lived and supported themselves in the estuary before the English arrived. Rather than concluding that settlers chose the locations where the first European houses were built, the research suggests the English evicted the native people from those prime locations. They even seized native garden plots.
“Colonists came to this place because they saw the indigenous settlements and knew they could live there,” Howey said. Among the findings archaeological digs have revealed is a buried rock they described as marked by an “oil slick.” Some of the material there was dated to 1300. Howey said speculation is that the rock, still continued on page 6
Reviving Portland’s unsung historical heroes Walking tour highlights the stories others miss By Stephanie Bouchard
O
n the morning of Oct. 18, 1775, a British naval fleet anchored in Portland Harbor began bombarding what was then known as Falmouth, Mass. The bludgeoning
of Portland lasted all day followed by more insult to injury when the British sailors swarmed the ruined community of about 2,000 residents to set fire to any buildings still standing. One of the buildings miraculously not in splinters was Old Jerusalem,
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the wood-built (1740) predecessor of black and women’s history, was part of the granite-built (1825) First Parish Maine Conservation Voters’ (MCV) church on Congress Street. Guarding Lunch and Learn series. the church/meeting house Murphy, who refers was an enslaved black to himself as a “public man from Gorham named historian” because his Mayberry. When he saw academic training is not Because of a British sailor getting in history but in commuMayberry’s ready to burn the building, nity planning, fell in love actions, Old Mayberry seized the sailor with history when he was and turned him over to Jerusalem was in elementary school in local leaders in Portland. Scarborough. Two teachers Because of Mayberry’s one of the few in particular—Sylvia actions, Old Jerusalem Tapley in middle school structures in was one of the few strucand John Lewis in high Portland not tures in Portland not school—inspired him to obliterated by the time the look “beyond the narrative” obliterated… British naval fleet left the presented in textbooks for city. Unfortunately, not the people who often do much else is known about not get their due, he said in Mayberry, said Dugan Murphy, owner a phone interview after the webinar. and tour guide of Portland by the Foot. Telling the stories of those who are Murphy shared this story and several unacknowledged even though their others during a webinar in May. The contributions were significant is the webinar, about exploring Portland’s continued on page 2