The catalyst of re-envisioning Eastport is the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, founded in 2002 by director Hugh French. Its mission has been in acquiring and presenting wide-ranging collections of artworks and historical documents reflecting the coastal region, as well as educational and preservation efforts that include eight significant buildings in the town – four of them in the downtown district – and guest artists residencies each summer.
The leadership is rounded out by French’s wife, Kristin McKinlay, who is director of exhibitions and the StudioWorks residency program, and by Jennifer Dolanski, Artsipelago/program specialist, plus eight trustees, only one of them living in Eastport. The others reside in places like Boston and New York City.
There are also concerts in its 1818 church that housed the Free Will Baptists, plus other events at its 1828/1829 Seaman’s Church, which housed the Congregationalists.
Oh, yes, every New Year’s Eve there’s the maple-leaf drop at 11 pm Eastern – midnight for our Canadian neighbors – followed by the giant sardine an hour later. Both the maple leaf and sardine were commissioned creations.
I suppose TIMA was inspired in part by the Island Institute, founded in 1983 to help Maine islands from Portland to Acadia tackle pressing environmental and socio-economic issues. The Rockland-based organization’s impressive publications include the annual magazine, Island Journal, as well as data analyses to guide public policy. Its focus is on sustainable livelihoods and communities in changing times that include rising sea levels, bringing together marginalized communities, and economic survival.
The heart of the enterprise is in a former bank on Water Street downtown.
In contrast, for now, TIMA’s focus seems to be more on art and architecture, principally – especially the small downtown on the National Register of Historic Places.
In essence, it’s building a future rooted in the past but not stuck there. It’s really the way every art moves, too, no matter how revolutionary some of the leaps may seem.
Renovation of the former Masonic lodge downtown is designed to house additional exhibition space and perhaps mixed use upstairs.
I do have to wonder whether TIMA has taken on too much. The restorations appear to have stalled, perhaps before Covid set in, and both of the churches need significant repair, inside and out. The institute has, all the same, helped distinguish Eastport as a fine arts center in a visually stimulating setting in Maine, an identity that may attract new residents in a time of national population change.
Frankly, it was one of the things that lured me here, as well as my wife and elder daughter.
One awareness I’ve gained living in New England is that when you’re out on the water – say in a sailboat, fishing boat, whale watch, or ferry – the geography fits together quite differently than it does on the land.
For example, where I now live in Maine, it’s only four miles or so from our downtown to the one just south of us. That is, if you’re just looking, going by water, or a bird. To drive, though, you have to head north and loop around Cobscook Bay, a distance of 38 miles and about 46 minutes. At least it has no traffic lights.
The water perspective is especially important in understanding the dynamics of early Dover, centered as it was at Hilton Point and Dover Neck between the Piscataqua River and Great Bay. For example, the heart of the town of Kittery was in today’s Eliot, just a mile away by water but 18 miles by land. And today’s Kittery was ten miles downstream or even longer by land.
Hilton Point was just to the left of the “cat” in Piscataqua, while the Shapleigh Kittery House was just to the cat’s right. Getting there by land, though, means going all the way up to the Salmon Falls River. Even finding a map like this of the watershed can be a challenge. Usually, it’s divided by the state line that runs up the river.
Oyster River, or today’s Durham, was only four to eight miles to the west, depending whether you were stopping at wharves along the way or going all the way to the Lamprey River’s falls and the landing.
A trip by boat between Eliot/Kittery and Oyster River/Dover was – and still is – no big deal.
In fact, by water they were closer to Hilton Point than was the village at Cochecho Falls, today’s downtown Dover.
For perspective, I’ve read that a man on the Isles of Shoals thought nothing of rowing ten miles – six of them on the open ocean – for an evening in Portsmouth and then ten miles back in the dark.
In comparison, the relocation of families from Eliot/Kittery to Oyster River becomes much more sensible than a land-based movement would suggest, and much less puzzlingly.
Also, the boundary between New Hampshire and Maine largely dissolves. The watershed becomes the defining perspective.
In terms of understanding history, “Piscataqua” can mean not just the original settlement at Hilton Point but also the expansion across both sides up and down the river. That seems to be the case when Portsmouth, Kittery, and New Castle all claim a 1623 founding.
One of the more disquieting things my examination of early Dover and New England stirred up for me is an awareness of a prevalent expression of white supremacy.
It starts out as fear, expressed in the emphasis on fortifications. The Plymouth settlers, for instance, spent much of their first year on building palisades rather than farming, which led to a nearly disastrous shortage of food through the winter. The defenses were apparently intended against Native raiders more than the Spanish, French, Dutch, or pirates.
Later, Puritans required palisades around their houses of worship as well, as happened at Dover’s second meetinghouse, and ordered that all men carry arms, which were lined up against the wall during public assemblies such as religious services.
~*~
THE PREMISE OF WHITE SUPREMACY COMES THROUGH CLEARLY embedded in descriptions of the Indigenous as savages or pagans and is intensified in the resolution of legal conflicts in an unjust system of jurisprudence. Natives always came out on the losing end, with no means of appeal.
Especially telling is the reaction to the killing of John Stone and seven of his crew in 1634 in retaliation for his kidnapping and murder of the Pequot sachem Tatobem. Even though Stone had previously been banned from Boston for drunkenness, adultery, and piracy, and news of his death brought outright joy to some residents in the city, officials demanded the Natives turn over the warriors responsible to face trial. The Pequot, however, refused, even after paying atonement.
Simmering tensions erupted in 1636 after the killing of trader John Oldham and several of his crew on a journey to Block Island, Rhode Island. Even though Oldham was a troublemaker banished from the Plymouth colony, his death caused sermons across Massachusetts and prompted military action that quickly escalated into war.
Telling of the implicit racism is Roger Williams’ line of congratulation to John Winthrop in 1637 for disposing of “another drove of Adam’s degenerate seed.”
Natives being hunted down and captured.
~*~
BY 1638, MOST OF THE PEQUOT had been massacred or sold into slavery in Bermuda or the West Indies. An estimated 1,500 warriors had died in battle or been hunted down. And what followed was a landgrab by the colonists.
Military leader John Underhill, responsible for the massacre of Pequot women and children fleeing their burning village, then came to Dover, where he was briefly governor of the upper province, meaning Dover.
Bluntly? From the colonists’ perspective, a bad white man was worth more than a noble Native.
~*~
SLAVERY WAS PART OF NEW ENGLAND from the beginning.
When David Thomson settled at Pannaway in 1623, he had a Native as a slave, presented to him by an Indian leader. Yes, there was slaveholding among the Indigenous, too.
And whites could be enslaved as well, as was seen in threats to sell Quaker children in the late 1650s.
A key turn in the emergence of Merrymount in 1625 was the sale of some of the project’s indentured English male servants to Virginia and the impending sale of more to the tobacco estates, where death within a year was likely. Thomas Morton used the situation to rally the remainder to resist and stay put, leading to his libertine colony south of today’s Boston.
The origins of African slaves in New England are murky, but Pequots were exported so that they could not escape and return to their families or be freed in retaliatory raids. Instead, they were exchanged for Blacks, who could be held at less risk.
Natives labored in Barbados and the West Indies after being exchanged for Africans as slaves.
In 1637, during the Pequot War, the first American-built slave ship, the Desire, was constructed in Marblehead, Massachusetts, outfitted with leg irons and bars, and armed. She set sail to the British West Indies carrying Boston rum, dried fish, and captive Pequots, and returned seven months later with tobacco, cotton, salt, and enslaved Africans from the Caribbean plantations.
Thomson’s friend Samuel Maverick bought two Blacks as slaves in 1638. Another prominent slaveholder was John Winthrop.
In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties document included a formal recognition of slaveholding.
~*~
UP TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, despite opposition, some Quakers held slaves, and Dover was not exempt. Up to ten were manumitted, likely with the equivalent of a year’s wages. There’s more on this in my book.
The three Quaker women who come to Dover in 1662 and 1663 are tormented principally by Major Richard Waldron. He and his brother William arrived from a staunchly Puritan family in Warwickshire in 1635, and after returning to England to marry a woman against her family’s wishes, Richard returns to Dover. History does not record her name, only his second wife’s. In 1642 he buys up rights around the dramatic waterfalls of the Cochecho River about five miles north of Hilton Point.
In building mills there and establishing a village, Richard consolidates power and wealth. He has, for one thing, obtained a monopoly on fur trade with the Natives and, for another, rises to head the colony’s militia, a politically powerful position. In addition, he serves 22 years as a deputy of the General Court of Massachusetts, its assembly, seven of them as its Speaker. He votes to impose the anti-Quaker acts of 1656 and 1657.
Richard Waldron was influential in the passage of the anti-Quaker Cart and Whip act and other punishments.
Dover is not his only residence – at least three of his children are born in Boston and he has ships on the sea. He’s also the magistrate who imposes the Cart and Whip sentence on the Quaker women who come to Dover – in effect, a death sentence if constables in towns down the road follow through on his order. Even his wife is appalled by his cruelty.
He’s also the mastermind behind the invitation to the Natives to participate in a mock war game and festivities in 1676. After the 20 armed Natives fire their weapons, they are surrounded and arrested, along with 350 or more, mostly women and children. Seven or eight of the leaders are sent to Boston and executed. The rest are sold into slavery in the Barbados or West Indies.
Major Richard Waldron masterminded the sham war game that led to the captivity of local Natives who came in peace.
The Natives do not forget Waldron’s deceit and cunning. Knowing they cannot trust the English, they form an alliance with France. Many of them convert to Catholicism under French priests.
In 1689, they take their revenge, attacking and burning garrisons at Cochecho village, killing 23 and taking 29 captive to Canada. Quakers are not spared. Waldron, however, is singled out for torture and death.
The early morning raid is the beginning of devastating violence large and small across northern New England that does not end until the end of the French and Indian Wars in 1763.
Every family in Dover would suffer losses. They were far from the only ones.
Major Waldron was singled out in revenge.
Behind the scenes, an ominous shift in the settlement’s character had been occurring, centered on Waldron. The sixth son of a well-off Puritan family, he was “immensely able, forceful, and ambitious,” arriving with his oldest brother in 1635, when he was barely twenty. In 1637, he returned to England, married a young gentlewoman despite her parents’ opposition, and brought her to Dover. Her name and dates are unknown. He then married Anne Scammon and had eleven children.
By 1642, he had accumulated the rights to land around the falls in today’s downtown Dover and erected his first sawmill. Emerging as the town’s central figure, he eventually controlled much of the Native trade and amassed large land holdings. In pressing for Dover to submit to Massachusetts jurisdiction, Waldron placed himself in opposition to Thomas Roberts, who then lost office when the Dover province was subsumed by the Massachusetts Bay colony.
Waldron, in contrast, became a deputy to the Massachusetts General Court, or legislature, in 1654, where he served for the next twenty-two years, seven of them as its general speaker, one of the most powerful political posts in New England. How much time was he spending in Boston during this period, and how much in Dover? At least three of his children – Elnathon, Esther, and Mary – were born in Boston.
Brother William also held public office and eventually purchased a part of the Shrewsbury Patent in today’s town of Stratham. He was, according to Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, “a good clerk and a subtle man,” one who “had an inclination toward drink and contention,” which leaves me wondering about Richard as well. While crossing a small river at Kennebunk on his way back from Saco, Maine, in 1646, William drowned. Whatever his skills as a public official, his business dealings left him in debt to many creditors. Like the Hilton brothers, we have a case where the younger brother fared more successfully than his elder.
After his death, another brother, George, showed up in Dover after 1650, when he was a chandler in London. From 1659 through 1677, he was taxed as a resident of Dover. His domestic life, however, was strained. In June 1661, he was in court for being absent from his wife, and again in the fall of 1662, when she was reported dead twelve months. In June 1680, he petitioned the court to be rid of his son, “who instead of holding me hath rather destroyed me and what I had in drinking.” Impoverished, elderly, and nearly blind, he appealed for a guardian. Mrs. Richard Waldron took him in until her husband’s return.
Richard, on the other hand, flourished, not just in politics. He traded widely, as is seen in the death in Algiers around 1669 of his son, Paul, “probably on board one of his father’s vessels.” Another son, Timothy, died while a student at Harvard. Daughter Esther died on the Isle of Jersey. Quite simply, his family wasn’t stuck on the banks of the Cochecho or Piscataqua rivers.
The Cochecho Falls and the village that grew up around them were part of Richard Waldron’s power base.
As Jere Daniell observed, “By the 1670s the portion of Dover known as Cochecho had become something like Waldron’s personal fiefdom, and citizens in the other areas of settlement rarely challenged his social authority.”
A man like that had to have enemies and a capacity for revenge.
From everything I’ve seen, he was quite unlike Nicholas Shapleigh just across the river.
My initial visits to eastern Maine back in the early 1990s shocked me with the prevalent poverty. I thought I was in West Virginia. A harsh reality is often overlooked between the picturesque coast and the wilderness adventures in the north.
That awareness has been amplified after moving Downeast. Many rural homes are surrounded by debris, everything from boat hulls that will never sail again to earthmoving equipment that has gone to rust to a row of cars that would otherwise qualify as a junkyard.
Here’s an extreme case.
Maybe they thought they could salvage something of value?
I know that everywhere you go, everybody seems to have their nose stuck in their cell phone, oblivious to just about everything going on around them. You know, the bubble people.
Or, where I’m now living, they have those phones up in the air taking pictures so they can look at what’s in front of them later.
Oh, my. What a world.
As a writer, I’m supposed to be active on all platforms as a matter of marketing , but as many others are discovering, those venues rarely lead to book sales or loyal readers. Let’s be honest.
I’ve toyed with some of them, but drifted away, even Twitter.
My primary social medium is here at WordPress, blogging. I know how to manage my posts easily. The Reader feels to me like a real mailbox, with dispatches from around the world – postcards, letters, clippings. As for you?
For that matter, I’ve never quite “got” Facebook. It’s cumbersome to navigate, most of the content feels like gossip cluttered with advertising, and I don’t like having to sign in to see what should be public information for local retailers, schools, or public events.
Still, living in a small town, I’m finding that’s where the local “party line” is, and checking in regularly is essential. I still have qualms about the bigger corporate picture, with its shadowy agendas.
Recently renewing contacts with folks from my ancient past has also had me turning to FB.
What’s surprising me, though, is the gap between those who are active in a social medium and those who are “members” but rarely or even never check in.
It’s not just FB. Even email accounts. I suspect many of my contacts are that way, too. Hello! Anybody there? Did you get my message? When was the last time they posted or commented? Take that as a clue to their presence … or absence.
The numbers, then, might not be nearly as big or influential as they’re boasted.
Meanwhile, I keep falling down these Internet rabbit holes, pursuing arcane information.
Where are you spending your time online? Or even elsewhere?
Cochecho or Piscataqua plantation, for a while Bristol or Bristow, and even Northam, but the one that stuck was Dover.
Just as the names Hilton Point and Dover Point keep bouncing around, for the same place, though the latter has also largely replaced Dover Neck.
Neighboring Strawbery Banke did get renamed Portsmouth, after the harbor town in Devonshire, but Dover was never named for the village with the famed white cliffs in Kent.
No, the inspiration’s better than that.
The name comes through Dover’s second minister, George Burdet, who was more Anglican than Puritan, though apparently not outwardly. The proprietors of the colony at the time, Lord Saye and Lord Brooke, are both staunch Puritans, and the cleric works for them. In fact, he even manages to become the colony’s governor, or agent – a dual role forbidden to ministers in Massachusetts. Some even see him as trying to become a little pope in his power.
In calling the settlement Dover, Burdet pays honor to the anti-Puritan wit and attorney Robert Dover, who created the Cotswold Olympick Games near Cambridge in the heart of the Puritans’ East Anglia.
Meet Robert Dover.
As my upcoming book details, there’s a long list of reasons the neighboring Puritan landlords forbid their servants from attending the pagan festivities. Besides, Dover was likely a secret Roman Catholic while openly ridiculing the Puritans. We can imagine what he would have said of Quakers.
Burdet, however, winds up fleeing Dover amid sexual scandal, only to generate more where he lands in Maine. Yes, the plot keeps thickening.
As for, “Roll over, Dover,” if we put it up for a vote, which inspiration would you chose? The picturesque cliffs or the scoundrel in the pulpit?
Our local radio station is licensed to the high school. Seriously. And it’s as quirky as KHBR-AM 570 in the legendary TV series “Northern Exposure,” even without Chris Stevens as the DJ. Or I’d contend, even more.
The television show never got into young people, for one thing, but there aren’t many in Sunrise County, where the seven public high schools together have about 200 graduates a year, half of them from just two schools. A private academy adds another 100. It’s a long stretch, by the way.
Pointedly, Eastport’s Shead Memorial High has only about a hundred students, down from 300 a few decades earlier, and a faculty of 11, some of whom also teach at the junior high or elementary. The principal serves all three. The school proudly proclaims its emphasis on personalized education, which I applaud. What’s obvious is the incredible student-faculty ratio.
One big challenge is in trying to find ways to lure more of the younger generation into staying put here. Maybe the economic tide is changing in that direction.
In the meantime, the radio station gives them an opportunity to learn production skills. In fact, the station started out as a school club in 1983 and took off from there. Throughout the day, the station’s IDs feature the different kids, however bashfully, and it’s charming.
Much of the programming is a stream of music, a mix of blues, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, and more, I’m assuming streamed from somewhere. Yes, and there are public service announcements as well as the honor rolls and other local touches. Truly. And then the DJs kick in, including some of the kids, with surprisingly sophisticated tastes.
They’re not the only ones.
The station’s modest tower sprawls over the high school. Here it’s seen from the front.And from the back, by the gym.
The local demographics skewer sharply upward, and volunteers at the station are welcome. In fact, they create much of its most distinctive programming. As I was saying about do-it-yourself participation?
There’s Cracklin’ Jane, with only 78 rpms, a weekly theme, and radio dramas from a golden age, including commercials for brands that no longer exist. And others like Sam’s Caffeine Café, yes, it’s redundant, but mostly acoustic Americana two mornings a week; the Bass Lady’s informed insights into anything with a bass line, Chloe’s folksy Friday afternoon transition; Firedog’s Electric Doghouse, Boldcoasting; and the like.
Well, this is a town filled with eccentrics and geezers. Its low-power radio station reflects that. And to think, it all started as a school club in the ’80s!
I think of it as Radio Free Eastport, broadcasting to the free spirits on and around our islands.
A fair number of the Piscataqua’s early settlers were from prosperous, even well-connected, families.
The question is just what prompted them to relocate to the primitive, even harsh, conditions along the Piscataqua River.
David Thomson, the son of a Scottish minister, has the King’s ear and a debt of gratitude.
The Hiltons are part of an extensive and prosperous fishmonger clan.
Thomas Roberts’ father, by some accounts, becomes a baron. Even if he didn’t, Thomas still becomes a member of the powerful fishmonger guild.
The Hilton brothers weren’t exactly out of the loop, either.
~*~
Powerful? Take Francis Champernowne, a 1640 signer of the Dover Combination, a remarkable document stating the residents’ desire to be freed from being subjected to company-town decisions being made in England. While I see scant evidence that Francis actually resided in today’s Dover, he did have extensive landholdings in New Hampshire, including the current towns of Greenland – named for his Green Land farm – and Madbury, then part of Dover and named after his ancestral home, Modbury, in Devon, England.
His father, Sir Arthur Champernowne, owned at least eight merchant ships or privateers and had fished New England since 1622. In 1635, Sir Arthur financed a settlement under his son, Francis – likely the southern part of Kittery, Maine, which became known as Champernowne’s Island, today’s Cutt’s or Gerrish islands – as well as another on Braveboat Harbor in York. Francis may have also lived at Strawbery Banke (today’s Portsmouth) until 1640.
Sir Walter Raleigh. His nephew was a big settler along the Piscataqua, Did he dress anything like this?
Captain Francis was well-placed. His great-aunt Catherine was the mother of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Ralegh/Raleigh Gilbert, an important explorer and adventurer of the New England and Canadian coastline. Captain Francis was also a “beloved” nephew of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, proprietor of Maine and unofficial godfather of New England itself.
Francis was often at sea, to England and Barbados, especially. During the early part of the English civil war, his Royalist leanings led him to join King Charles I’s fleet under the Earl of Marlborough. Returning to Dover by 1646, he left for the Caribbean in 1649 but returned to Maine in the early 1650s, where he later became a commissioner and justice under Charles II. In April of 1678, he signed the articles of peace with the Abenaki at Casco. He was an ardent Anglican and died in Kittery.
It’s enough to make me think living conditions back in merry old England weren’t that great, either.
~*~
The Waldron family that soon comes to dominate the growth around the Lower Falls, or today’s downtown Dover, came from wealth in Warwickshire, England. William drowns, but brother Richard turns Dover into something of a personal fiefdom while rising to become Speaker of the Assembly once New Hampshire is under Massachusetts rule. He builds the first saw mill and grist mill at the falls, has extensive shipping connections, dominates the fur trade with the native Pennacooks. He didn’t exactly start from scratch.
You’ll be hearing a lot more about him. Man, will you.
Fishing is dangerous, hard work, done in all seasons and kinds of weather. It’s also an inescapable source of livelihood for many families along the Maine coast.
The two stones in the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial in Lubec rise like waves beside each other, one representing fishermen from the Canadian side of the channel and the other, from the American side. Three flags fly over the site – Old Glory, the Maple Leaf, and the Passamaquoddy Nation’s.The inscribed names of those lost since the year 1900 are mesmerizing – women and men, some of the surnames repeated. As people say respectfully, so-and-so has the sea in his blood, and it seems to run in families.Maine granite sculptor Jesse Salisbury created the monument in 2016, and names have been added since.
Jnana's Red Barn 