Radio Script #1190
Little Talks on Common Things
February 11, 1979
During the thirty years of this program very little has been said about Maine’s largest city, Portland. Today I want to give a bit of historical information about what old timers still call the Forest City.
Its original name was Falmouth, and not until 1786 did its most thickly settled section become the separated town and later city of Portland. That 1786 act of incorporation read: “An act erecting that part of Falmouth called the Neck into a town by the name of Portland. Why was that name selected? Other names suggested were Casco and Falmouthport, but the people chose the name Portland because it not only had a pleasant sound and was distinguishable from other names ending in port like Newburyport or Rockport, but also had historic association with the locality.
The earliest English name given to what later became Bangs Island and the Cape Elizabeth mainland opposite it was Portland, and the main channel between them was Portland Sound, and the headland on which a lighthouse was later built was always called Portland Head. The name, of course, was also associated with a town of the same name in England. As a place for settlement, the area around that excellent harbor attracted people almost as early as did Plymouth, Salem and Boston. In fact, in 1628, two years before the Winthrop colony was started at Boston, Walter Bagnall had cleared land and located a cabin on Richmond Island, a place of 200 acres a mile off the Cape Elizabeth shore.
Even before that, the spacious harbor had been known to British fishing fleets, but not so well as the Pemaquid area at the mouth of the Damariscotta River, because off that shore lay Monhegan Island, one of the first points of land sighted by the fishing fleets of the European nations as they annually crossed the Atlantic.
In 1631 a royal grant was made to Trelawney and Goodyear of Richmond Island and all the area now comprised in the town of Cape Elizabeth and the City of South Portland. To the area they sent from England, as their agent, John Winter. But in 1631 Cleves and Tucker had already made a settlement at the mouth of the Spruance River. In 1632 settlements began on the peninsula called the Neck, the area that now comprises the-older part of the City of Portland, that part where was raised our present governor, Joseph Brennan.
In 1640 arrived the Episcopal clergyman who was to play a conspicuous part in the area’s development. He was Robert Jordan, who not only became the community’s minister, but leading politician, wealthy landowner, and business entrepreneur. In 1718 the people of the Neck and its immediate hinterland became incorporated as the town of Falmouth, taking the name of the English Falmouth in Cornwall, whence had come a number of Maine settlers. As I have said, that named prevailed until 1786. In fact three years before that, when Maine’s first newspaper was published in the town, it was called the Falmouth Gazette. An early settler and land developer on the Neck was George Munjoy, and for him was named that well-known section of Portland called Munjoy Hill.
This program has previously related two occurrences of disaster in Portland. One, while it was still Falmouth, occurred early in the American Revolution when Captain Mowatt turned the guns of his ship on the settlement and then burned the town. The other was the disastrous fire of 1866 that burned more than a hundred houses, stores, schools and churches, and left a thousand people homeless. It was that fire, when my father was five years old, that drove his parents from their home and caused the loss of most of their personal property.
I think I have not, however, told about the town’s first cataclysmic disaster, its destruction by Indians in 1676. When the first settlers had come to the region, they preferred the islands because they were less likely to be attacked by the Red man, but as the Indians became peaceful and willing to trade their furs for inexpensive British goods, mainland settlement seemed safe. When the last quarter of the 17th century began, there were some forty houses on Falmouth Neck.
What the settlers had not foreseen was the coming of King Philip’s War. Starting in Massachusetts, the arousal of the Indians had spread to the usually more peaceful tribes of Maine. On August 2, 1676, a band of Indians fell upon little Falmouth Neck, killed 34 men, women and children, and took many more captive to Canada. The little settlement was left desolate. In April 1678, a treaty was concluded with the Indians, the captives were returned, and way was reopened for rebuilding. That was the very year in which a long-standing dispute was settled. Ferdinando Gorges and George Mason had, in 1631, been given a grant to all the land between the Merrimac and Kennebec rivers. The two made a division, Mason taking the land between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua, a large part of which became New Hampshire, and Gorges taking that between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec called Maine.
That caused bitter conflict. The government of Massachusetts Bay claimed their charter gave them control of the entire area. Various attempts to settle the controversy through British courts, royal councils and Parliament were unsuccessful, but at last, in 1678. Massachusetts purchased from the heirs of Ferdinando Gorges all his interest in Maine lands. Thus, in the very same year, that devastated Falmouth was opened again to settlement, its inhabitants became legal and recognized citizens of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Wary of further Indian trouble, the settlers erected on the waterfront near the foot of later India Street a fort called Fort Loyal, At first, on the Neck, roads were non-existent. Access to areas both to the north and to the south was by ferries across the narrow inlets, but gradually highways were put through, especially across the peninsula and by 1725 a rough road ran lengthwise through it, the origin of the present Congress Street.
The people had reason to fear Indian trouble. In 1689 came the Second Indian War. In a raid, Fort Loyal was captured by French and Indians, and more than twenty inhabitants were killed. Several saved their lives by taking refuge in Mr. Munjoy’s garrison house on the hill. Many simply fled, abandoning their homes.
Not until 1698, just before the dawn of the new century, had settlement been well restored, but they did not feel safe from Indian invasion until 1724, when the Battle of Lovewell’s Pond near Fryeburg and the destruction of the Indian Village at Norridgewock caused the principal western and central Maine tribes to retreat to Canada.
In 1718 the government in Boston set up a committee to promote regular settlement of what was called the Eastern Frontier. In answer to a petition from settlers at Falmouth on Casco Bay, the Committee went to the place, held interviews and reported to the provincial government in these words: “We have determined the spot where the ancient town of Falmouth stood before its destruction, where a fort was built, and where now almost twenty families are established. We regard the Neck as a very agreeable place for settlement of a town, looking on the river, guarded from the sea by adjacent islands, most commodious for fisheries, near several large streams for mills, and adjacent land for husbandry. It may in a little time become a flourishing town. Here there soon should be enough people to incorporate a town. We left with the present inhabitants our advice as to laying out streets and highways and plans for a meetinghouse.”
That plan was accepted and in the same year, 1718, Falmouth was incorporated, the leader of the petitioning settlers being Samuel Moody. As I have indicated in referring to Robert Jordan, the Episcopal minister, religion got an early start in the Portland area. Jordan was not only the all-around prominent citizen that I have earlier described, he was also head of a family so prolific that when my own grandmother was born in that town 138 years ago, the commonest family name in Cape Elizabeth was Jordan. It was said one couldn’t go from the tip of the cape to Knightsville, now the business center of South Portland, without encountering a dozen Jordans.
Jordan’s Episcopalianism did not long prevail in the settlements either on the Cape or the Neck. By 1669 so many of the settlers had come from the Bay Colony or the Pilgrim settlements on Cape Cod that they readily submitted to Boston’s demand that they have an orthodox minister, namely one of the Congregational Puritan persuasion,and in Falmouth all other sects were prohibited.
In 1720 the town voted 55 pounds toward a minister’s support for one year, and gave him the right to keep all contributions from strangers – that is, contributions from visiting worshippers. By virtue of that vote the selectmen secured the services of Jonathan Pierpont – graduate of Harvard in 1714, who served there for two years. The Indian hostilities that ended with the Battle of Lovewell’s Pond then interrupted his work, and the town’s only preaching became an occasional meeting held by a minister from Black Point, now Scarborough.
In 1722 the town meeting voted to erect a meetinghouse 36 by 28 feet, and. 20 feet high. A site was selected at the corner of India and Middle streets and a building was dedicated there in 1725. The most significant event in the early religious life of Portland was when Rev. Thomas Smith became their minister with the opening of the new meetinghouse in 1725. They agreed to pay him 70 pounds a year, equivalent to $233, supply him with fire wood, present him with a cleared lot of three acres on which they would build a parsonage, 40 by 20, by 16 feet, and have nearby another three-acre lot for support of the ministry. He was installed on March 7, 1727, in the presence of orthodox clergymen from Wells, Kittery and York. Historically the importance of Thomas Smith to Portland was not so much his ministry as his keeping of an exhaustive diary filled wth daily experiences through much of 18th century Portland until well after the close of the Revolution.
Our time for this broadcast is now expired, but next week we will1 tell you more about old Portland.
Year: 1979