<\/p>\n
The first development of our Kennebec area came through the enterprise of the Pilgrim Fathers. As early as the spring of 1621, when Gov. Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, founded only the previous December, sent a shallop to Pemaquid, the Pilgrims began to learn about possibilities along the Maine Coast. But, finding previous royal grants conflicting with coastal possibilities, they turned their attention to the Kennebec River. Learning that a trading post somewhere above Merrymeeting Bay would give them a chance to trade for Indian furs before the Indians, bringing their trapped products down the river could reach other posts, the Plymouth Colony applied for and in 1629 was granted land from Merrymeeting Bay to Skowhegan that became known as the Kennebec Patent. With the land went exclusive rights to the Indian trade.<\/p>\n
In 1625, even before the Kennebec Grant of 1629, Bradford had sent two newly built shallops loaded with corn. They laid a covering over the deck to keep the corn dry. Edward Winslow, later Bradford’s successor as Plymouth governor, captained the expedition.<\/p>\n
The shallops came down the Maine coast, then up the Kennebec, through Merrymeeting Bay, to Swan Island, where they found an Indian village, and were peacefully received. They went on to the head of tide at what is now Augusta. There, just below the rapids they encountered another Indian settlement. Getting a friendly reception, they unloaded the corn, for which the Indians traded beaver and other skins. The boats returned to Plymouth with 700 pounds of furs.<\/p>\n
The Pilgrims were hard pressed by their creditors in England, the merchants who had loaned the money to furnish the Mayflower expedition in 1620. These Pilgrims sent to England what few products they could get – furs picked up near Plymouth and clapboards they were able to make after they had set up a sawmill. Meanwhile they sent, about once a year, a representation to England to stall off the persistent creditors.<\/p>\n
The best of those representatives was William Allerton, who in 1629 obtained from the Crown the Kennebec Grant I have just referred to.<\/p>\n
At Augusta, then called Cushnoc, the Pilgrims set up their Kennebec trading post. It was on the east side of the Kennebec just below the rapids. In spring and summer the Indians on that part of the Kennebec fished for shad and salmon on the river, gathered berries, and raised some corn and pumpkins. In fall and winter they trapped for furs. In the spring they returned with skins, the most numerous and most valuable of which were beaver. Before the Pilgrims set up the post at Cushnoc, the Indians had to go farther down the river to Arrowsic and Georgetown to find English buyers.<\/p>\n
By 1629 the Indians never raised enough corn to last through the winter, so Plymouth corn was one article eagerly accepted from the whites. But the supplies at the post were by no means limited to food. There were blankets, shirts, coats, hatchets, and knives, and especially beads, which the Indians highly prized. Many of these things were imported directly from England, but the Pilgrims got some of them from the fishing fleets that came annually to Monhegan and Pemaquid. At one time, Bradford bought half of all the goods in a trading post on Monhegan Island. It included the cargo of a wrecked French vessel.<\/p>\n
The Indians also readily sold their furs for wampum, which the Pilgrims got from the tribes of southern New England. Wampum was white and purple beads made from shells chipped into small, round pieces, then polished and pierced for stringing. The Indians at first used them as decorations in the form of necklaces and bracelets, as well as fringe of belts. Already, when the Cushnoc post was set up, wampum had become among the Maine Abnakis a medium of exchange, and the Pilgrims found it very useful in buying furs.<\/p>\n
The first master of the Cushnoc trading post had nearly lost his life before he saw the New World. He was John Howland, a young man of 22, who had been knocked overboard from the Mayflower by a swinging boom. He managed to grab the topsail yards and hang on until he was dragged by a boat-hook back on to the ship. Howland spent the winter of 1629-30 alone at the Kennebec trading post, and in later years he never had more than two companions, always men. During the entire occupancy of that trading post, there was no white woman at the place.<\/p>\n
In the 1630’s there was no other post in New England where trade in Indian furs was so profitable as at Cushnoc. Between 1630 and 1635 the Pilgrims shipped to England 12,500 pounds of beaver and 3,000 pounds of otter furs. In fact, beaver became so plentiful that it vied with wampum as a kind of currency. It became common to value other articles in so many pounds of beaver, making those furs of the same use for monetary units as the British shillings and pence.<\/p>\n
It was Maine furs that enabled the Pilgrims to pay in full their debts to the British merchants. For more than 30 years trade on the Kennebec continued, with the headquarters at the Cushnoc post. But the boom could not last. As the Indians gained a wider acquaintance with traders, and especially when French traders competed with the British, the Kennebec natives began to understand something of the true value of the exported furs. No longer were they satisfied with a string of cheap beads or a quart of corn for a prime beaver skin. The distance from Plymouth to Augusta became more and more a hardship factor in the trade. So the Cushnoc post was abandoned, and in 1661 the Plymouth Colony sold its Kennebec lands to four merchants of Massachusetts Bay.<\/p>\n
The new owners did not reestablish the trading post, and it fell into ruin.<\/p>\n
King Philip’s war and the ensuing Indian uprisings made all white men above Merrymeeting Bay leave for safer regions. In a short time the Indians themselves abandoned their Cushnoc settlement although their large village on Swan Island had
\na few left 100 years later when Arnold’s Expedition stopped there in 1775.<\/p>\n
I have several times on this program mentioned ancient Pemaquid. References to it on these broadcasts have in fact been more frequent since Mrs. Helen Camp began her important excavations there half a dozen years ago. Every summer Mrs. Camp uncovers some new find from the 17th century ruins at Pemaquid.<\/p>\n
What I have not previously done is to tell you in any systematic fashion about the four successive forts built at Pemaquid, culminating in the stone fort standing there today, and situated only a few yards from Mrs. Camp’s diggings.<\/p>\n
When Captain John Smith of the Jamestown Colony sailed along the Maine coast in 1614, he found at Pemaquid a few men in crude cabins. They were not year-round settlers, but were from the fishing fleets, staying on shore to care for the drying
\nfish.<\/p>\n
Aldsworth and Elbridge, British traders, soon got a royal grant to the region, and they placed the first permanent settlers at Pemaquid. From the first there was trade with the Indians, but the Red Men were not always friendly. So, in 1630, a protective garrison was built, the first fort at Pemaquid. It was actually a circular blockhouse without windows, with loopholes through which to put the muzzles of muskets. It had no large guns. Around the blockhouse was a high picket fence called the stockade. Between blockhouse and fence was a well, to be used in case of siege. It was all placed on a slight eminence called Fort Rock.<\/p>\n
Since there was at the time no concerted Indian uprising, that first Pemaquid fort was strong enough to keep the Indians at bay, but it was no defense against the pirates that were already beginning to ravage the coast. One of the most notorious of those buccaneers was Dixie Bull, who in 1632 attacked and plundered the little fort and all the nearby settlers.<\/p>\n
A number of years then elapsed with no settler protection at Pemaquid. Then in 1677, Gov. Edmund Andros of Massachusetts Bay ordered the construction of a second wooden fort called Fort Charles. Meanwhile, at what is now Castine, the French baron of that name had set up a trading post and a fort. In 1688, Massachusetts raiders had pillaged the place and Baron Castine took revenge on the fort at Pemaquid. Securing Indian aid, Castine sent ahead three canoes to reconnoiter from the opposite side of the peninsula at Round Pond. They captured three prisoners, from whom they learned that there were about 100 men in Pemaquid fort and village. The Indians, with a handful of French leaders, then stormed the fort in a night attack. At dawn they demanded surrender, but the fort held out until late afternoon, when James Weens the commander gave up. Out he came at the head of 14 men, all that remained in the garrison. With them came a few women and children. They were all allowed to go to Boston in a captured sloop. But all the white people who had not been inside the fort and had not been killed in the fight, were carried by the Indians as captives to the Penobscot.<\/p>\n
In 1692, when Sir William Phips became the Mass. governor, he gave immediate attention to Pemaquid. Himself born in Maine, at Woolwich near the mouth of the Kennebec, Phips was determined to see the restoration of settlements demolished in King Philip’s War, and give them adequate protection. So he ordered built at Pemaquid a stone fort, 700 feet square, with 14 mounted guns. Phips garrisoned it with 60 men. That was Pemaquid’s third fort called Fort William Henry.<\/p>\n
In 1695 that fort, like its predecessors, was successfully attacked, this time by a combination of French ships and land troops of both French and Indians. The fort’s commander, Pasco Chubb boldly cried, “If the sea were covered with French vessels and the land with hostile Indians, I would not surrender.” But surrender he did, and the French possessed the fort.<\/p>\n
The fourth fort at Pemaquid came in 1729. Built under direction of Proprietor David Dunbar, it was called Fort Frederick in honor of the young Prince of Wales. Its usefulness ended with the treaty of Paris in 1763. It was dismantled and its guns
\nwere taken to Boston.<\/p>\n
In 1907 the Maine Legislature appropriated $6,000 to restore the old stone tower of William Phips’ Fort William Henry. That is the structure now known as Pemaquid Fort, visited by several thousand tourists every summer.<\/p>\n
Year: 1974<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1011, Broadcast on April 28, 1974<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1203,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}