evening my name is glenn brooks and secretary of the new gloucester historical society and welcome to tonight's program before i turn the program over to our speakers i wanted to mention some upcoming events that the society will be sponsoring and one has to do with malika island where sponsoring a field trip to the main city you see him augusta to see their when virtually around the clock but especially on the first saturday of every month and the next one is november third nine to noon seven new items have been donated sphere than i have and she can explain that when she gets to it and then states malika island which today is under the auspices of the maine coast heritage trust well it's a pleasure to be here and i've got to say when i first moved to new gloucester years ago one of the very first things i did exploring around pine land before libra had come into the scene was find t cemetery that some of the original residents of malaga island were buried and i really had no idea what it was like kids and i would poke around and and so then it was such a cool thing years later to be working for an organization that acquired the property and it was my job to take care of it and it was a wonderful connection to make so so as lenny said amanda and i are here for maine coast heritage trust it's a statewide land trust that works with land trusts all over maine helps them form helps them with projects tries to get  large scale funding that they can use state funding and federal funding and most of the work that we do where we actually own and steward land or take care of conservation easements is along the coast and and this is a map that is kind of hard to see because the scale is so small but much of the green along there projects that we have we have worked on currently maine coast heritage trust own about one hundred  forty properties in and we can see we steward about two hundred close to two hundred fifty conservation easements and and we're continually doing work along the coast and one thing that has happened over the last decade is that we are getting more and more involved in the history of the properties that we own obviously there's a rich history to almost any piece of land in maine and  was really the first property that we acquired and then we're more drawn into the history because it's so compelling and so many people are interested in it then we had originally thought we would be so  so the island we acquired the island in two thousand and one and we when we first acquired it it was really because it was an undeveloped coastal island and that's a big part of the work we do is to try to protect coastal island so that we can protect traditional access and and we and it was one of a few islands in cas bay that we have worked on well boat island is another one that we this island we own we've owned for about the same time period actually it's out in casco bay open to the public and when it went up for sale we acquired it largely to protect the public access component of the island and this similar to many properties we only done management plan for and we steward it and amanda is is our regional steward for southern maine so so she's the one that makes sure that this island is maintained that invasive species are controlled and and that the public can go here the campsites are clean et etc this island also has pretty cool history prehistoric as well as historic history and it's one that we haven't really developed the history you know written history for but it's certainly on our l along all along the coast so this is an example of one of the properties where we've we've we hold a conservation is meant and again it's it's coastal areas marshes and upland and islands and this is this is in brunswick close by so so with malaga island when we first found out it was for sale we were attracted to it again because it was a undeveloped island that didn't and he sold it to us for the price that he bought it for how many years sixteen years earlier so we were we were very fortunate and we knew a little bit about the history we had read some of the articles because certainly  in the ninety's there were a number of people who started doing some research and writing articles there were some in the island institute publications and dave barry  and deborah to brule were writers who were very interested in the island but we didn't know whole lot more and what we knew is that lobsterman store their traps there and we wanted to be able to be sure that practice could continue and and we want to be sure it didn't get developed this was a sign that was on it when we first purchased the island it had been put up by a person who actually was connected with with the phipps berg historical society and been really interested in in the island in the history of it so so we almost immediately got pulled in to this more tax of the story of malaga island we had made hamilton made hamilton called me within a month of us acquiring the island and asked if he could finally go out and do archaeological work there the previous owner had not allowed him to do that so he had gone just around the edges and picked up pipes down buttons and stuff but he couldn't get on the island to do the work he wanted to do so that first year in two thousand and two he started bringing students out and and over the next several years between two thousand and two and two thousand and eight did several digs had a field school out there every june and and they really learned a lot about this island and and turned up a lot of misconceptions and misinformation that had been written about in previous previous articles and we are really lucky to have had that work done all this period of time also during that period of time the main historic preservation commission became involved the end he was very very interested in in the history of the island and in particular there were folks from both and double a c p and main freedom trail who really wanted there to be some acknowledgement of how the people of malaga island work had been treated so badly mistreated and they were always pushing for a real public knowledge meant on the part of the governor to say something and apologize and so that was an underlying theme and so it was put on  two thousand and eight we had a big celebration out there and there were ceremonies to call in the spirits of the ancestors and it was a very very moving ceremony that was held there and to dedicate this new site on the main main freedom trail and so this work this archaeological work which made hamilton and rob sanford from us m have  did so well has stopped for now they feel they've done enough and and amanda is going to talk about some of the information that they found and elaborate more on the history of this place which at this point is so unusual as probably many of you know because these people doing this work were able to make the connections between these sites and real people and where they had come from and where they went to afterwards and which is was a little bit unusual for african american sites that are important in black history anywhere in the country so so i'll talk a little bit now about what all of the research has revealed about the island i'm sure a lot of you have heard myths about malaga that it was populated by runaway slaves that they were degenerate and bred what has been the major benefit of the archaeological research is that really revealed the truth about the island what you seeing right now is the north end of the island all the white here is shell mitten that's where most of the activity  activity and fishing activity took place on the island was all of the north then there and makes good sense because with those nice breezes coming it blew most of the bugs away and if you stand there in june you'll know why that's where they settled because the bugs are a lot lot less present up there so when the researchers as jane mentioned began investigating there were artifacts crumbling there still are in fact artifacts crumbling out of the shell every time i go out there you find a little bit of something  looking through those remains is allowed folks to understand what the chronology of events was so the island it's thought was first this is just a few slides that are on exhibit images that are on exhibit at the maine state museum again showing you know people lived here people worked here this is kind of an aside these hooks right here are fish hooks obviously and they indicate specifically that they were doing long line fishing where you have one major long line and then multiple small lines which it's just nice to know these things i guess so and also these artifacts we're able to reconstruct like jane mentioned the individual life histories of these people this house right here actually was part of a ship cabin that was resurrected on the island it belonged to allies a griffon allies a griffin was descended from some of the first people to move to malaga the researchers were able to put together what she did to make a living based on the archaeological remains at her home site and this little inlet here this little beach that her house is on they call button bay because there are so many buttons and through records and family histories and anecdotes and the archaeology they were able to piece together the fact that she took in laundry from the mainland she had nice things she had good china relatively speaking she was actually quite prosperous and the fact that they were able to reconstruct how this woman lived really has helped to dispel a lot of the myths about the people on the island so that's just one kind of need example about about how the archaeology has had some some pretty lasting effects about dispelling myths so again another shot of the north end of the island it's thought that the island was first used in the eight hundred sixty s mostly as a base of operations for fishing people weren't actually living their permanent lee yet they came there because it was available it wasn't settled the first folks to live there were thought to be descendants of a man named benjamin darling have any of you heard the name benjamin darling those of you familiar with malaga so the legend has it that ben darling had been a slave from the west indies who was granted his freedom by his master for saving his life in a shipwreck it's apocryphal there's nothing to substantiate that but that's what you hear benjamin darling was a black man his wife sara proverbs was a white woman their descendants their mixed race descendants were the ones primarily to start living fulltime on malaga island that took place sometime around the eight hundred eighty s and eight hundred ninety s what made malaga different is that the residents weren't all white otherwise it was very similar to other small coastal communities people eked out a living on malaga just like they did other places but they were black they were white they were mixed race they were portuguese there were some native american ancestry said to be so it started to draw some attention it was just a little bit different photos are taken around the turn of the century i think one thousand nine hundred five what's neat is that we know who they are this fellow here is george easton george asian easten was thought to be one of the more highly skilled residents of the island he was a mason and a fine carpenter he also led church services on the island when the weather wasn't good enough to go to the mainland so again a lot of these details have really come to the surface humanizing these people who were so dehumanized so it's the turn of the century there's a lot of muck raker journalism malaga amazingly starts to become a national story first people started reading about it in the papers in portland it made its way to boston and then it became almost a national at least a regional in some cases a national story the shame of maine is one of the terms that you hear a lot about it attracted the attention of missionaries and some missionaries from boston george and cora layne came to malaga and visited and thought oh my gosh these children need education they need to learn to read and write so they went to the state and asked for money to build a school the state didn't allow that to happen so they started teaching classes in the home of one of the islanders georgia mckenney georgia mckenney w the so called king of malaga that was a term that was bestowed upon the best fishermen in a fishing community about that time they actually had a pretty nice home and if you go to the island and see where it was it was a nice cape they had wallpaper they had things on their mostly from their friends in boston well meaning friends and they actually built a really nice school this is a picture of the school here it was up on a breezy part of the island and this is another one of these apocryphal stories but what i've been told is that the reason they put it there was because it was the only place that had soil deep enough to put a flagpole so i think you can see the flagpole right  there so despite the efforts of the missionaries there were a lot of forces brewing in the background that really started to get the gears turning that would really change the lives forever not just of malibu residents but their descendants about that time tourism in maine was on the rise this is the beginning of you know folks coming up from boston to new york to get away from the cars in the crowds and rusticating and join the coast of maine there was a steamshi line actually it's kind of hard to see i've outlined it in yellow but there was a steamship line that went relatively near to malaga island up the new meadows river the house that i mentioned before of george and solomon mckinney would have been visible if you turned around and look behind you you also would have seen all of the not as nice houses some of which were in fact tar paper covered you know what you might call a shack on the island and this was an eyesore this was kind of you know our dirty secret that we had this this community you know quote half breeds living on the coast of maine in plain sight of these decent people who had come to get away so this is happening in the background what's also happening at about this time is the decline of shipbuilding post civil war the economy's not doing all that well maine's economic heyday was over and fishing was declining cod stocks were starting to get depleted the economy was not good now there was a fairly large black population in maine at that time large relatively speaking and they were there they weren't runaway slaves necessarily they were free blacks they had come to the north and they were largely working in maritime trades because it was a job and an able bodied person was  find they were some of the first to lose their jobs so early on there was economically driven discrimination so there were a lot of reasons why there was a lot of attention on malaga island as as an  to do with malaga they petitioned the state to have malaga made part of harps well fought back hopes well didn't want it either nobody wanted to claim responsibility for malaga island the state ultimately ruled that in fact malaga was part of  spurred and that really started to draw the attention of higher level state bureaucrats the governor visited the island in one thousand eleven were fast forwarding a little bit here the governor visited the island in one thousand eleven and despite all of the work of the missionaries to build a school he declared it an eyesore july of that year he issued orders for all of the residents of the island to pack up and leave by july of the following year they fishel date was july first  twelve there were forces driving this that were much bigger than any one man's short comings morally so what's sad and very  this to new gloucester is we know what happened to a lot of these people and i'll tell just a couple stories about a couple of families who were evicted jake marks jake marks on the census jake marx was a black man his descendants who survived and made it out of what was then the panel school for the feebleminded claimed he was native american we don't really know he was not phenotypically white and his family could not find any place to go most of them in one thousand and eleven after in orders were issued were actually relocated forcibly to the panel school for the feeble minded i think eight of the family were relocated and most of them died there this is his grave site that's right down the  road others packed up their houses and floated them operate down the river they were built on shell middens they weren't built on foundations some of them were floated there in the first place so everybody else pretty much packed up and left and took what they could with  some of the houses and i've heard so much apocryphal stories i wish i knew all of it was true or not but somebody told me that one of the houses on the mainland right across the harbor or channel was in fact the remains of one of the houses that was floated off  island and was there until a couple of years ago so people packed up and left they left what was then their garbage behind and that's what has enabled us to go back and figure out who was doing what where this is john and roselle essent i mentioned johnny said before not a bad place they think these two boys are trip belong to the trip family what you can't see in this photograph and the one of the reasons why you should go to the ex at the maine state museum when you see this picture close up close up this little boy is sticking his tongue out at the camera just like any little boy would do just making a nasty face so they packed up and they left it's like please this is a close up of one of the members of the trip family this is another family that like the marks is met a fairly sad ending they could not make a home on the mainland they could not phenotypically pass for white they were chased from place to place and the story goes that i forget the parents names the mother fell ill they were basically living on a houseboat the mother fell ill during a storm her husband rode to get a doctor and by the time he returned she had passed away and her children were all around her the trip family those who survived relocated to hartford connecticut we've actually been in touch with the descendants his brother this is lenny tripp supposedly his brother's daughter is now in her eighty's and she came up this past may to the museum opening and has been on the island now which is pretty amazing when you think about the relatively short generational time from this little boy getting kicked off of his home and losing his mother to this woman coming up and viewing her family's ancestry so probably i don't know if it's the greatest atrocity because there are so many but something that i feel is the most dehumanizing is that and this is where it really comes back to new gloucester is that they dug up the bodies buried on the island they found the cemetery on the island after the event sion they dug up seventeen grave sites and then reinterred them at the cemetery in five mass graves i think as many as seven children were in one grave site and what's really interesting is that this is all now known and they know exactly who is where because they found the ledger the burial plot ledger in the main state archives just within the past couple of years after nine hundred twelve nobody ever lived on the island again the press all the publicity kind of faded off after the event some of those who could make a living on the mainland settled then there are a number of people descended from the original malaga residen live and still store their traps on malaga island actually some didn't go very far some did go very far and some family lines pretty much died out like the marx's but nobody's ever lived there since which is a little bit ironic because this whole intent was to clear the island of its ice or to develop for summer colonies and to protect the view but no one's ever lived there since there was periodic only after the invention a little bit of press but it pretty much tapered off then in one nine hundred eighty william berry wrote an article in downeast magazine that was sort of the first modern retrospective of what actually happened with it wasn't embraced right off the bat and a lot of people in phipps but particularly didn't want this to come back to life this was just a as they say a story best left untold this was shameful let's forget about it don't talk about it dr hamilton that jane mentioned before was met with a lot of hard stares when he started asking questions in the early and mid eighty's about what happened on malaga island so there was sort of a slow build up of interest and inquiry into what happened there was like jane mentioned early on lobbying efforts to have an official apology and an acknowledgement by the state that was spearheaded by former legislator gerald gerald paul that he was unsuccessful in getting an apology but in two thousand and ten governor baldacci actually returned to the island surrounded by descendants and made a formal apology on behalf of the state of maine so what happened between one nine hundred eighty when bill barry published from malaga residents at first didn't want to talk about it it was verboten parents would threaten their children if they were bad they'd get sent to mal ago mal goes how it's pronounced locally nobody wanted to admit it there's a woman named marnie darling fotr who's  descendant of benjamin darling she grew up in south portland and her whole life nobody in her family would talk about their family's history and if anybody asked if they were severely reprimanded but by humanizing the people who lived in malaga by demonstrating they live just like any other people on the coast and this terrible thing happened to them slowly descendants have come forward and accept it and become proud of their heritage if any of you are on facebook you'll be interested to know that there is a descendants facebook group and the second and third and fourth and fifth cousins and people who've never met in person are connecting and sharing stories and photographs it's a closed group because there are still some living people who just don't want this to be known out of respect for  further their histories that their privacy but there's been a tremendous opening and the fact that the state could come forward almost one hundred years later and apologize i think speaks speaks quite a lot about how far we've come so that brings us up to the present and what we're doing today of course we manage malaga island as a nature preserve but it's so much more than that to commemorate the centennial of the eviction this past year we did a series of tours guided tours led by archaeologist who participated in the day we had close to one hundred participants come visit the island through our guided tours and and see what it's like to be there first hand them and look at the sites where people lived and you can see the  can still see buttons and you can still see signs that people live there there's hops while hops growing on the island which you know they planted so they could brew beer so we've been focusing on trying to trying to improve access to the island because if you don't have a boat you can't get the something that we've been thinking a lot of us how can we get schools to the island every year somebody from a school contacts us and says they want to get their students to malaga so we're wrestling with some access challenges but really trying to make it as excessive all as possible each year between three and four hundred people visit the island on their own largely by kayak and small boat so there's a lot of interest in actually getting there and the maine state museum there exhibit has really spurred more interest and and people visiting the island too so then we've really ramped up our stewardship efforts where once there was a simple sign saying welcome to the malaga island preserve this past year we worked with a graphic designer and i've got a copy here to put up a good informational kiosk so that the people that just stumble upon the island out in their kayaks learn where they are and what happened so i welcome you to take a closer look at this after work we wrap up here so and that brings us up to where we are now i'm not an archaeologist or a researcher but i'd be happy to take any questions and do the best i can to feel them about the specifics of what happened on malaga so  i know his name is peter robert because i see credit to i don't know who he is there's also george and coralie in the missionaries who worked on the island around one nine hundred sixty one nine hundred ten they kept a scrapbook and some of the photographs came from their scrapbook the also were members of the press that came out and took photographs as well during the sort of the height of the muckraker journalism about the island i think many of them are the in care of the mainstay museum they're actually original glass pla are somewhere in the archives i believe you might mention all of the artifacts and what's happened right i'm thank you for bringing that up so about fifty thousand artifacts were excavated between two thousand and two and two thousand and eight  if anybody is really interested i did bring the catalog which you're welcome to leaf through that shows all manner of things that are beyond my level of comprehension because i'm not an archaeologist and i trust you all to interpret it more than i technically is the owners of the island we were the owners of the artifact collection we're really well equipped to weed whacker poison ivy on islands we're not very well equipped to cure eight hundred year old artifacts and so this past year we transferred them as a gift to the main state museum so they're now all being properly curated i'm sure many of you know metals in particular need to be professionally stabilized or they crumble into nothing so those have all been stabilize think they talk about how the island is covered in violence and there are not any violence out there but but that's the way a lot of people learn about the story and i think that's been a really positive thing and we've that's one thing that has spurred a lot of of children since and classes coming we have over the last decade had a number of classes we help them figure out transportation and they have got taken their kids out there and we have talked quite a bit with a number of folks in the state about whether to try to help develop a curriculum so that it would become a more normal part of a broader range of children's education  descendants being so has a tent to have any association with this was that was really amazing even when we first took ownership people did not want to talk about it if they did they did not want us to write things down  repeat what they said we did not want reporters and we had but then as they were able to come up many of them had never been to the island one time i was there we were we've done a minimal amount of trips every year since we owned it and eight hamilton would usually come but one day we kind of had an open house and some people came up in the boat that we had provided and this woman got off and i greeted her and she told me her name and it was the coolest thing because she said i think i forgot her first name mechanic she was a mechanic and i said your mother was born right there and she just just dissolved you know it was such a powerful thing for her and i think it's a similar experiences for a lot of the people who have been able to go there and then we've also had people coming there some of them just as part of the archaeological team students no family connection but for a black guy from new york to come to this place and realize that there were black folks living in this beautiful place one hundred years ago was just amazing to him he wanted to actually then turn the whole place into a an environmental education center for black kids and build put buildings all over it and so that wasn't going to happen but but it's a pretty wonderful thing the way that it can effect and as i mean all of you would know just bringing out this history in many places makes makes really invaluable connections for our organization it's been wonderful because it has just broadened our outlook on how we should manage steward islands what we need to do to help make connections for people with some of these lands and and so we're trying to do similar things on some of the other places we own that have really  know another comment about and jane you mean you know i mean all kinds of senior moments i can't remember all of you but i wasn't the part of the historical society when  know i think the state finally did sell it to a friend of the governor's and they just never ended up building a house there and then somewhere along the line i forget exactly when in one of the deed transfers there were a few restrictions put on it like there's a limit on the number of houses that can be built there placed at least and frederick placed a yeah yeah but yeah it's interesting that it wasn't ever developed and it was really interesting to us when when we first acquired it and of the first real kind of community meeting we had was with all of the fisherman who stored their traps there in a quite a few more did then than do now and and they were really worried we were going to kick them off again and since then we've learned that i think every one of them now is a descendent alexander mckenney in fact the mckinney  home for the feeble minded right at the time there were eight of them were sent there most of the members of the marx family and it was state land so that was a one reason they would have moved the cemetery there because the state could do that put it on their  benjamin darling on that island that's i think i didn't mention that but he was a legal owner of an island which is something else that when you're talking about means black history is i think startling to some people when they learn that a black man bought an island on the coast of maine  hundred eighty sometime around then so so we're thinking of if you did want to get there we do plan to have maybe three trips out there this coming summer doesn't show up but we created a trail basically around the whole perimeter of the island and it goes through the north and kind of weaves in around where the houses were but then goes down through the woods down to the south and it's a nice a nice little trail it's they're not marked you can if you're looking you can tell because you'll see an area of disturbed vegetation that's a one meter by one meter square but they're not marked and we've thought about over the years putting some kind of marker in the ground so that folks kno you know this was where georgie some live this is where lies a griffin live but we've been worried about that possibly being an attractive nuisance there are people who go out there and scuff around in the shells to see if they can find something and work or leery of that happening more if they were marked so we haven't done it it comes up every now and again if you're having lunch and you get a lobster roll and anna's water's edge restaurant so let's put a canoe in and then if you wanted to go a little further if you go down to bethel point there is a place you can park there and come around if it's a little further not too far and there's a public or a well it's a residence but more or less a public launch further up the new meadows that's about a mile will be about a mile and a half paddle