First Meetings at Boothbay: The Abenaki and the English on the Maine Coast

The Abenaki had lived along the rocky coast of Boothbay Harbor, in present-day Maine, for centuries when English settlers began arriving in the early 1600s. What followed there — peaceful at first, then violent — shaped relations between the English and Indigenous peoples across the Northeast.

From trade to war

These episodes reached far beyond Boothbay. How the English dealt with the Abenaki, for example, shaped how colonial officials treated Indigenous groups in Massachusetts in the late 1600s.

Digging for the story

In 2023, the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program awarded the Trustees of Dartmouth College a Preservation Planning Grant of $149,858 for archeological investigations around Boothbay. Using new technology, Dartmouth's researchers are to map the sites on Damariscove and at Pemaquid in full and recover artifacts showing the scale and character of the conflicts between the English and Indigenous people — and how much they mattered in shaping early America.

Preservation Planning Grants are the program's broadest grants, supporting the care of battlefields and other sites of armed conflict on American soil. It also gives Battlefield Land Acquisition, Restoration and Interpretation grants, supporting community-led stewardship by states, tribes and localities.

Sources

Based on "First Meetings: Unearthing the Beginnings of Abenaki-English Contact in Maine's Boothbay," American Battlefield Protection Program, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.