Radio Script #1227

Little Talks on Common Things
January 27, 1980

One of the most scenic as well as historic parts of Maine is the area that surrounds Penobscot Bay. So today let us take a look at the region historically. When Williams published the first comprehensive history of Maine in 1832, he had this to say: “The whole eastern section of Maine remained an unbroken wilderness until after 1750. French colonies had indeed made previous settlements on Mount Desert Island and at Bagaduce, the present Castine, but these had been temporary, the people having been totally dispersed by the Indian wars. In 1750 the whole coast from the Gorges River eastward to the St. Croix, was unmarked by a single habitation. Into the primeval forest that surrounds the shores of Penobscot Bay no European had ever penetrated. No surveyor’s chain had ever entered the area. The boundaries of official grants to the land were only on paper, and were based on guesswork as to exact location.”

So far as we know from any written account, the first Englishman to see Penobscot Bay was George Weymouth in 160? The account of whose voyage is found in the chronicles of James Rosier, who accompanied Weymouth on that exploration. Rosier’s long account of the lands around the bay impressed the British public who was eager to learn about possibilities of settlement in the new world. Rosier says a party went ashore from the ship and footed their way several miles into the interior, then returned to the ship. Here are Rosier’s words: “We passed over very good ground, pleasant and fertile, fit for pasture and for about three miles from the shore very little wood, and that mostly occasional oaks, such as stand in our pastures in England, and they were great-trees, fit for any use. They and other trees are, near to shore not thick, and can be easily cleared away to make available land. Even as it is now, with even clearing the brush, it would feed cattle for a number of years. Growing in the soil are numerous herbs. Grass is lush and heavy, and in it are strawberries much bigger than ours in England. Farther inland the trees are taller and closer together, and stretch into unknown depths of forest. We saw hundreds of pines that would provide masts for our ships for centuries. Out of the hills issue numerous streams of fine water.”

Farther in the same account Rosier wrote: “Our captain has discovered a great river navigable into the mainland for about 40 miles. We went up the stream about 25 miles. We found several good harbors for ships, more than are afforded in all of England. We found the river at its mouth more than a mile wide, and some distance upstream as much as half a mile. Nowhere did we find a depth of less than five fathoms, and more often as much as ten fathoms. Our river Thames in England is a valued treasure, but here is a mighty river backed by arable land behind which are unlimited numbers of trees of various kinds, making the river tremendously more valuable than our Thames.”

Despite Rosier’s glowing account, settlers did not come quickly to Penobscot Bay. In fact 150 years elapsed before there was any permanent settlement. As we have already said, the reason was fear of the Indians, who, especially after the outbreak of King Philip’s War of 1675, made the whole region uninhabitable for whites. When the Massachusetts government saw how valuable, for protection of settlers, had been the erection of Forts Western and Halifax at Augusta and Winslow on the Kennebec, they were more willing to heed the pleas for similar protection of the scattered settlers in the Penobscot region. So, in 1759, they erected a fort at Stockton Springs on the Penobscot River, and named it for the then governor Pownall.

It was built much like Fort Halifax – an area surrounded by a spiked palisade, with blockhouses at the corners, and inside buildings to house both officers and men. Settlers were encouraged to build cabins nearby and be ready to take refuge in the fort in case of Indian attack. The Massachusetts government maintained a force at Fort Pownall until after the Revolution. It was not the prevailing sect of Massachusetts Congregationalists that took advantage of Fort Pownall, but their effective Boston competition the Episcopalians. Near the fort on the Penobscot was erected in 1760 a small Episcopal chapel. Clustered closely around the fort were most of the settlers’ cabins.

An extensive campaign to secure settlers came as a result of the Waldo Patent. It had first been called the Muscongus Patent, granted by the Court of Plantation in England, on behalf of the King, to John Beauchamp and Thomas Leverett in 1629. It was a huge tract of 1,000 square miles between the Kennebec and the Penobscot, centering at Muscongus Bay at the head of which is now the town of Waldoboro. No permanent settlers were at once established, but the proprietors enjoyed benefits from the region’s fisheries for many years. All fishing fleets coming to the Muscongus region from England were controlled by the Beauchamp and Leverett interests.

On the death of Beauchamp (who, by the way, never came to America), Leverett became the sole proprietor. He did come to this country in 1633 and was appointed Governor of Massachusetts Bay, and it was his son, John Leverett who took active interest in the family’s Maine lands. He formed a company of ten proprietors, soon augmented by, ten others, so that for some time the owners of the patent were called the Twenty Proprietors. Among those twenty was Jonathan Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Boston. Gradually he and other members of the Waldo family bought the interests of other proprietors until Waldo owned 100,000 acres, on which they established two plantations, Thomaston and Warren, and placed on them the first permanent settlers. The Waldos built blockhouses, but further settlement was retarded as it was elsewhere in Maine, by the Indian wars. After the wars had ended by 1730, settlement was rapidly resumed.

The proprietor who actively promoted the settlements was Jonathan Waldo’s son, Samuel. And when, in subsequent years, inhabitants of the region talked about Mr. Waldo or General Waldo, they always meant Samuel. He had such important European connections that he brought immigrants from Scotland and from Germany. It was the Germans who made greatest impression on the region. To this day Waldoboro and surrounding towns are inhabited by descendants of those immigrants from the Palatinate, and one of Maine’s well known historic sites is the old German church erected early in the 18th century.

It was Samuel Waldo who persuaded the Massachusetts Legislature to erect Fort Pownall at Stockton Springs, making possible extensive settlements east of the Waldo lands on Muscongus Bay, thus bringing people into the area surrounding Penobscot Bay, and up the big river. In connection with the erection of Fort Pownall, Gov. Pownall himself visited the Penobscot region, including an inspection of the old English fort at Castine, then badly dilapidated. He saw the ruins of the old French settlement, but decided,because of its excellent harbor, the place ought to be developed, and became influential in doing something about it, although that something was blocked of completion because of the American Revolution.

After his visit, Gov. Pownall reported to the Legislature: “As the British Crown has secured and fortified the St. John River, the French enemy now has no other outlet to the sea other than through the Penobscot. The lands along that river must be in our possession. As long as the Indians have any claim to the land, the French will control it, for they control the Indians. We must boldly settle and govern that region.”

While on his visit, Gov. Pownall in an impressive ceremony up the Penobscot at Brewer took possession of the region for the Massachusetts government on behalf of the British Crown. That was an important historical act, for after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Pownall’s earlier claim was validated and it enabled Massachusetts to take possession of the eastern lands, not merely to the Penobscot, but on eastward to the St. Croix. While there had been a few scattered settlers at Belfast, they first came in numbers as immigrants from Scotland, and in even larger numbers from Londonderry, N.H. Also, a few newcomers had already lived in Maine, either in the villages at the mouth of the Kennebec or in the vicinity of Pemaquid.

The first settler at Searsport was not immediately impressed. He wrote to a relative back in Boston that he found a roaring sea on one hand and a howling wilderness on the other. He did say that his loneliness was partly compensated by vast quantities of game and unlimited supplies of fish. He referred not only to ocean fish, but to fresh water varieties. He avowed the latter could be pulled in at the rate of one fish a minute at Swan Lake.

That early settler was probably right about the plentitude of fish. As late as 1790, after Searsport had become an incorporated town, the selectmen received complaints from the town poor that they were tired and disgusted by being fed on salmon four times a week. Life was not easy for early settlers. In his memoirs, Ephraim Simpson, one of Searsport’s pioneers, wrote: “We were at first only four families, living in a primeval forest, our habitations only crude log cabins. We had no religious or educational service and each family lived a mile or more from any other, and we had only spotted trees to guide one from one cabin to the next. For the first three years we had no cattle of any kind and no store nearer than Castine. It was to this place also that we had to carry our grain to be ground. We had to carry it on our backs to the shore, then row it by boat to Castine, and get the meal back home the same way.”

The early settlers could not only live off the land and sea, they could also trade with the Indians, so that many a settler became the middle man in the fur trade, getting furs from numerous red men, then selling them to the itinerant fur traders.

Before the end of the 18th century the region around Penobscot Bay profited by the increasing demand for fire wood in Boston and other larger communities. At that time, wood was of course everybody’s principal fuel. As towns around Massachusetts Bay grew in size, wood lands near them were rapidly depleted, and shipping of wood to Boston became increasingly profitable from as far away as Penobscot Bay. Searsport became a major exporter of wood, and to its shores was carted thousands of cords for the Boston market. Belfast was appropriately named for the city in Northern Ireland, because John Mitchell brought to the Maine town many fellow citizens from Belfast in Ulster. Mitchell was a surveyor and in 1758 made a map of the British Provinces in America that was more accurate than any that had previously been available.

It was, however, a group of men in Londonderry, N.H who combined with Mitchell and other Scottish-Irish immigrants to form a proprietorship divided into 51 shares, and purchased from the Waldo heirs a township of land 6 miles square, for which they paid 500 pounds. That payment amounted to about 20 cents an acre. Maine’s land was certainly cheap in those days. That was the beginning of what is now the City of Belfast.

Other towns around the Bay, including Searsport, were settled in much the same way, by groups forming proprietorships and buying land from the Waldo heirs. Many of the proprietors were absentee owners, some of them never even seeing the Maine land. But some did become settlers themselves and they were all busy getting other people to take lots and put up cabins. By the time of the Revolution, the whole bay was spotted with small settlements, and they extended up the river all the way to the falls at Bangor.

And that, in brief, is the story of the beginnings of the now prosperous Maine area around Penobscot Bay.

Year: 1980