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New France

How Samuel de Champlain Started a War

Among his many accomplishments, which include founding Quebec City and mapping New France, Samuel de Champlain started a war.

Born into a family of mariners in 1567, Champlain began exploring North America in 1603 with his uncle, Francois Grave DuPont. Five years later, Champlain received the assignment to establish a colony in Canada.

Inauthentic depiction of Champlain, by Théophile Hamel

In the process, Champlain started a war with the Mohawks, part of the Iroquois Five Nations. By doing so he unintentionally drew the French into armed conflict with the Iroquois Five Nations. And he undermined French efforts to colonize New France.

New France

At the beginning of the 17th century, the French kingdom wanted to become an empire. After seeing the success of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, the French monarchy sought to plant roots in the Americas.

French navigators had begun exploring eastern Canada in the previous century. But those expeditions comprised small groups of men seeking to establish trading relationships with the Native Nations.

To make the most of the nascent fur trade, the French monarchy decided to begin building permanent settlements in Canada. They called the territory New France. To try and save the Crown money, they granted a prominent trader named Pierre Dugua de Mons a monopoly over the Canadian fur trade. In 1608, de Mons assigned Samuel de Champlain the task of establishing a colony and extending France’s trading network.

Champlain Arrives

Arriving in Canada in 1609, Champlain found a land in the midst of increasing turmoil. Over the past century, European diseases had preceded the French colonizers.

Suffering staggering population losses of 50 percent or more, Indigenous societies were gripped by despair and population crisis.

“The advent of Europeans in the Northeast in the early sixteenth century quickly upset the existing equilibrium and transformed it into a world of disease, division, violence, and death,” wrote historian Georges E. Sioui.

Map of New France by Samuel de Champlain, 1612.

The Mourning Wars

The Iroquoian peoples of the Northeast sought to rebuild their populations by adopting outsiders into their society. They often brought newcomers in as captives from battle — a phenomenon known as a Mourning War.

Forcing captured adoptees to abandon their old identities and take up new ones to fill a void in their new society could be rather violent. But the Mourning Wars served their purpose of stabilizing Indigenous societies.

After Europeans and their pathogens arrived, however, the Mourning Wars grew in frequency, scale and violence.

Iroquoian raiders attacked other nations in the Great Lakes, Canada, New York and New England. They made it as far east as the Abenaki, whose homelands stretched across Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.

Champlain hinted at the increased warfare the country had seen. On a journey from Quebec to Mohawk territory, Champlain “saw four beautiful islands… which, like the Iroquois river, were formerly inhabited by Indians: but have been abandoned, since they have been at war with one another.”

The March to Lake Champlain

In the early stages of their Canadian colonization, the French aligned themselves with the Wendat, an Iroqouian people living in what is now southern Ontario. They also allied with several Algonquian peoples, such as the Montaignais.

Champlain hoped to use these alliances to expand France’s fur trading networks. Reflecting back on these alliances in 1619, Champlain wrote: “I came to the conclusion that it was very necessary to assist them, both to engage them the more to love us, and also to provide the means of furthering my enterprises and explorations [fur trading] which apparently could only be carried out with their help.”

To strengthen New France’s bond with these nations, Champlain agreed to accompany them on a raid on the Mohawk Nation. So he and nine other French soldiers joined a group of Wendat, Montagnais and other Algonqian warriors into Mohawk lands, which stretched from eastern New York into western Vermont.

The company tried their best to conceal their movements by traveling from Quebec to the Mohawk lands at night. Despite their attempts at stealth, Mohawk scouts kept track of their movements. A Jesuit chronicler of Champlain’s exploits later noted the Iroquois always had “sentinels upon the routes of their enemies.”

Finally, 200 Mohawk soldiers confronted the group on the shores of Lake Champlain.

The Shot Heard ‘Round New France

The two war bands now stood within earshot of one another. They exchanged insults and built fortifications. Seeing how their enemies had “barricaded themselves well” farther down Lake Champlain’s shore, the French and their Native allies agreed to postpone the fight until the next day.

The next day, the two forces came out to meet each other. According to Champlain, he led the charge, marching toward the Iroquois line until he was within some 30 yards of the enemy.

Champlain then claimed he drew his firearm and took aim at the Iroquoian leaders. “With this shot,” Champlain wrote, “two fell to the ground and one of their companions was wounded who died thereof a little later.”

While Champlain’s recounting of the event tells some truths, he was most likely exaggerating his role as a leader. The Jesuit Relations, a collection of letters written by French missionaries, temper Champlain’s telling of the battle.

According to the Jesuit Relations, Champlain had wanted to advance” toward the men perceived as the leaders of the Mohawk contingent. His Native allies, or “Kebec savages” as the Jesuits put it, prevented him. They told him to “withdraw behind our first rank, and when we are ready, thou shalt advance.”

No matter where Champlain stood when he fired his arquebus, however, he does seem to have killed several Mohawk warriors.

The Implications

Whether or not the Mohawk men Champlain killed occupied an important political role in their villages, by taking their lives Champlain started a war.

The hostile Iroquoian relations with New France also indirectly fanned the flames of the Mourning Wars. The Iroquois continued to lose population as they increasingly engaged in armed conflict with Europeans.

As a result, the Iroquois carried out more raids against their Native foes, hoping to capture enemies to balance out the loss of life. By the 1660s, contemporary European sources claimed that some two-thirds of the Iroquois population were foreigners adopted into Five Nations society.

Due to these raids, by the late 17th-century, Iroquois holdings ranged from New England’s western frontier to the Ohio River Valley.

Ultimately, the increased range and violence of the Mourning Wars destroyed the sovereignty of several Native Nations. The Wendat and Abenaki diaspora spread in several directions.

The Iroquois Five Nations survived the Mourning Wars and became the strongest Native Nation of the Northeast. But the demographic upheaval of the 17th-century left them unable to defend their sovereignty in the 18th.

In 1609, the French-Canadian population spread from northern Maine to the interior of Ontario and Quebec. However, it was sparse at best. Since Champlain started a war that continued into the 18^th century, it made it harder to convince French subjects to settle in New France.

Additionally, it led the Iroquois Five Nations to make alliances with the Dutch in New York and the British in New England.

Iroquois trading with Europeans, 1722

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.

This story updated in 2023.

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Saint-Castin, the French Baron Who Drove the English From Maine

A 13-year-old son of a French baron named Jean-Vincent d’Abaddie de Saint-Castin arrives in Maine in 1665 to quell the Iroquois and conquer North America. Brutal colonial wars will soon pull Saint-Castin into the fighting among the Dutch, the French, the English and the Abenaki.

To outsiders, Saint-Castin’s allegiances may seem to veer between the French and the English, but he remains steadfast in his loyalty to the Abenaki people. He learns their ways and their language, and they adopt him as one of their own. He marries Molly Mathilde, the daughter of an Abenaki chief. And he commands military operations that drive the English from Maine in the latter half of the 17^th century.

Artist William Lowe’s conception of Saint-Castin

Those, at least, are the broad outlines of the life of Jean-Vincent d’Abaddie de Saint-Castin. A descendant of kings and cousin to a Three Musketeer. An Indian sachem. A skillful hunter, a rich fur trader. A bold, hardy, adroit and tenacious guerilla fighter.

To New Englanders, their most dangerous enemy.

Saint-Castin

He was born in France in 1652, the second son and third child of a French baron. His mother was a cousin of Henri d’Aramits, immortalized by Alexander Dumas as Aramis. She was also a direct descendant of Louis VIII.

His mother died of the plague when he was a baby, and his father before he reached his teens. At 13, Saint-Castin joined the French Army—not all that unusual for the younger son of a French nobleman.

Louis XIV

His king, Louis XIV, had dreams of kicking the English out of North America.

In 1665, he sent the 1200 men of Saint-Castin’s regiment, the Carignan Salieres, to eastern Canada. They sailed in seven ships to Quebec City, Saint Castin as an ensign in the company of Hector d’Andigne de Grandfontaine, later governor of New France.

By the time the young nobleman arrived, the French had been coming to Acadia to trade and fish for more than a century.

They got along well with the people who already lived in the land they called the Dawnland. Five peoples of the Dawnland — the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot – had banded together in the Wabanaki Confederacy.

“…[N]ever did the Abenakis consider the French as entertaining expansionistic designs that would have deprived them of their lands and rights, whereas they lived under constant threat of the same from their English neighbors,” wrote historian Paul Chasse.

Great Dying

The Indians exchanged beaver skins with the French for blankets, needles, knives and guns. Eventually they came to depend on those items, especially guns.

But the French and other Europeans also brought plague. Epidemics of smallpox, typhus and influenza hit Maine especially hard. The Great Dying of 1616-1619 killed three-quarters of Maine’s Indians.

The Wabanaki population, estimated at 20,000 (except for Mi’kmaq) before contact with Europeans, fell to about 5,000 around 1620.

As the Indian population declined, the French population increased. When Saint-Castin arrived, French speakers amounted to about 10,000 in New France. However, only about a thousand French people inhabited Acadia, which bordered New England and included Maine, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

But the English population was growing faster than the French. With about 50,000 settlers in New England by the 1670s, they started pushing east. They would claim Maine—Acadia—all the way to the Penobscot River. The French claimed Acadia extended to the Kennebec River. That, of course, meant conflict.

Beaver Wars

But the beaver, not the English, first drew the French into war in North America. Their skins made fine felt hats, a hot fashion item in European capitals.

The thirst for beaver skins, though, had wiped out much of the beaver in North America. The Wabanaki’s enemies to the west, the Iroquois, started to cast covetous eyes on the Wabanaki beaver territory and on fur trading posts in New France. And so the Beaver Wars began.

Iroquois warrior with musket around 1730

The French king sent the Carignan Salieres to Canada to eliminate the Iroquois threat to New France. It is likely, writes Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac, that Saint-Castin took part in a 1666 campaign against the Iroquois.

The campaign succeeded, and in 1667, the French, the Wabanaki and the Iroquois made peace.

Fort Pentagoet

At 18, Ensign Saint-Castin sailed to a tiny coastal fort called Pentagoet with his captain Hector D’Andigne de Grandfontaine. The English had agreed to cede Acadia to the French. Grandfontaine had orders to oversee the transfer and develop the colony as its governor. He made Pentagoet, now Castine, Acadia’s capital.

Fort Pentagoet lay at the mouth of the Penobscot River near an Abenaki village. The great chief of the Abenaki, Madokawando, and his family spent summers there fishing and hunting. When winter arrived, they paddled upstream to their winter home on Indian Island. There a French missionary converted many of them to Catholicism.

Map of the original Fort Pentagoet

Be Fruitful and Multiply

To strengthen New France with more French settlers, Louis XIV made the Carignan Salieres soldiers an offer. He gave them rations, land and money (depending on their rank) if they stayed. He encouraged them to marry, even sending 800 women – ‘the king’s daughters’ – as marriage bait. It was even okay to marry Indian women.

In the end, about 450 French soldiers – including Saint-Castin – stayed.

Saint-Castin found the wilderness and the Abenaki to his liking, and he adopted many of their ways. He also formed a friendship with Madokawando.

But the 30 or so soldiers at Fort Pentagoet struggled. The government of New France paid little attention to its wilderness outpost, leaving it to fend for itself. To survive, Grandfontaine had to trade with the English who came by sea. But French officials forbade commercial ties with the English. Soon they replaced Grandfontaine with an army officer named Jacques de Chambly.

Anglo-Dutch War

In 1674, a raid on Fort Pentagoet became a turning point in Saint-Castin’s life. The French and the English allied against the Dutch and fought them largely at sea. But by 1674 the war drew to a close. The Dutch settled with the English, but not with the French.

Historical marker commemorating the Dutch attack.

And so Capt. Jurriaen Aernoutsz, commander of a Dutch privateer the Flying Horse, viewed Pentagoet as fair game. He sailed into Penobscot Bay in August with a fighting force of 110 men. They easily overtook the French soldiers at Fort Pentagoet and captured them – along with the commander, Chambly. Then they turned the fort’s own guns on its walls and leveled them.

Accounts differ as to what happened to Saint-Castin. Did the Dutch take him to Boston? Did he somehow escape? Or did the Dutch send him to Quebec City?

Whatever the case, Saint-Castin traveled to French headquarters in Quebec City with a ransom note for Chambly.

The obscure young Army officer gave the note to Louis de Frontenac, governor general of New France. De Frontenac apparently recognized Saint-Castin’s talents. He gave him a bill of exchange for the ransom, and the mission that would put him in the history books. Saint-Castin was to urge the Wabanaki to join the French.

Governor Frontenac performing a tribal dance with Indian allies

Return of Saint-Castin

Saint-Castin returned to the ruined fort at Pentagoet. But instead of rebuilding fortifications he built a house and a lead-shot workshop amidst some 30 Indian wigwams.

On the surface, he seemed to have shed his responsibilities as a French officer, according to Salagnac. He migrated with the Indians to their winter home upriver. He enjoyed the company of Indian women – perhaps too much, according to gossip that made its way to the Jesuit missionaries and the leaders of New France. But he remained a staunch Catholic.

Meanwhile, he proved an astute businessman and his trading started to make him rich. Then around 1675, Saint-Castin’s older brother died childless, making him Baron Saint-Castin at the age of 22.

Rather than returning to France, however, he stayed in Acadia with the Wabanaki.

And sometime before 1678 he married Madokawando’s daughter Pidianske. She had converted to Catholicism, and took the Christian name Marie-Mathilde, nicknamed Molly Mathilde.

According to historian Bunny McBride, Madokawando wanted his daughter to marry Saint-Castin because it assured at least some French support to the Wabanaki.

Molly Mathilde

McBride, in her book Women of the Dawnland, tells the story of Molly Mathilde. She didn’t want to marry Saint-Castin, though she’d known him for most of her life. But when she turned 15, her mother told her she had to marry him.

Molly Mathilde said no. The man had hair all over his face and arms, and sometimes he dressed in strange colored wigs and boots with spurs. He smelled funny, too.

Her mother had no sympathy for her. She had been told to marry Madokawando, and she did. For her people. Molly Mathilde would have to do the same.

Saint-Castin first married her in the Indian way, but in 1684 a French Jesuit priest married them in a Catholic ceremony at Pentagoet.

“Romance may not have been the inspiration behind Molly Mathilde’s marriage to St. Castin, but the mutual cares of a shared life gradually inspired love,” wrote McBride. “Among the French, people commented that the baron had surrendered his former habits and that he often spoke of his commitment to his wife.”

Together, they had five children who survived infancy.

King Philip’s War

In June 1675, King Philip’s War broke out in southern New England. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Indian refugees from the war came to Acadia to urge retribution.

King Philip’s War (illustration)

The Wabanaki didn’t need much persuading. English authorities tried to order them to give up their guns so they wouldn’t rise join King Philip’s uprising. But even before the English tried to take their guns, they had cheated them, sold them rum and let their livestock trample through their cornfields.

Then in the summer of 1675, three sailors killed the infant son of a chief named Squando by throwing him into the Saco River. The sailors wanted to see if Indians could dog paddle at birth.

That outrage caused Saco and Androscoggin Indians to begin guerilla warfare against English settlements in the Casco Bay region. They killed about 80 settlers and burned down their houses and mills.

Madokawando stayed out of it until August 1676 when Abenaki, Mi’kmaq and refugees from King Philip’s War laid waste to English settlements along the Kennebec. They defeated the English in hand-to-hand combat at the trading post at Arrowsic, then a few weeks later killed seven on Peak’s Island in Casco Bay.

Military Counselor

There is little mention of Saint-Castin’s role in all of the fighting. But historian Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac concludes he advised Madokawando.

“One may reasonably suppose that Saint-Castin began to exercise his talents as a military counselor on the occasion of this war,” wrote Salagnac.

“… Madokawando was the sole great chief of the Penobscots; he had his lieutenants who were in command of the warriors, led expeditions, and parleyed with the enemy when truces were made,” wrote Salagnac. “But it was known everywhere that nothing was done without his son-in-law’s advice, and that the latter had only to express a wish for it to be instantly complied with.”

Any hope of a truce ended with an act of shocking English treachery on Sept. 7, 1676. Four hundred Indians — including Abenaki and some of King Philip’s former warriors — paid a visit to a New Hampshire strongman, Richard Waldron, at his invitation. They would hold a mock battle with the local militia in Dover, N.H.

Instead, the militia captured those who had fought with Philip — half the Indians — and sent them to Boston. There, seven or eight were tried and hanged. The English sold the rest into slavery.

In retribution, the Wabanaki went on a rampage, terrorizing and destroying 60 miles of English settlements along the coast.

Finally in 1678 the two sides agreed to another truce in which the English would pay the Indians in corn for the use of their land.

The English in Boston couldn’t understand why the Abenaki in the north seemed more tenacious and defiant than King Philip’s warriors in the south, according to Salagnac. Eventually they learned of the French soldier who had masterminded the attacks on their settlements – Saint-Castin.

Uneasy Peace

Saint-Castin and his growing family prospered in the interregnum before the next war. An indication of his wealth was discovered in 1840, when a farmer named Stephen Grindle dug up treasure believed buried by Saint-Castin’s daughter. Found six miles north of Saint-Castin’s home, it included somewhere between 500 and 2,000 coins from France, Spain, England, Massachusetts, Portugal and Holland.

The Saint-Castin Hoard

A French priest named Louis-Pierre Thury persuaded Saint-Castin to send his sons to Catholic school in Quebec. Thury would figure prominently in the next war to break out, known as King William’s War, the Second Indian War, the First French and Indian War or even Castin’s War.

In May of 1687 or 1688, Sir Edmond Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, made a big mistake. He personally led an expedition to Pentagoet to seize Saint-Castin. The baron happened to be away on a military expedition with the French, so Andros and his men ransacked his house and plundered his trading post

In the end, the English had to apologize for Andros’ illegal raid. It did no good, and instead touched off a decade of warfare. The English had continued to cheat the Indians and reneged on their agreement to pay Indians corn for the use of their land.

Saint-Castin’s War

So Saint-Castin and Thury orchestrated a series of raids on English settlements. When it all ended, the French and Indians wiped most of the English settlements off the map of Acadia. From 1689 to 1713, there wasn’t a single English home north of Wells.

On June 28, 1689, the Wabanaki and Pennacook wreaked revenge on Richard Waldron for his treachery during King Philip’s War. In a surprise attack known as the Cocheco Massacre, they killed 29 people in Dover, N.H., captured 28 and tortured Waldron to death. Then they left Dover in smoldering ruins.

Attack on Richard Waldron.

Saint-Castin that summer then launched half a dozen attacks on English settlements as far south as Andover, Mass. He led a Wabanaki attack on Fort Charles in Pemaquid, now Bristol, the northernmost English settlement in Acadia. They burned down the fort and killed 200 English soldiers and settlers.

In September, 200 Indians attacked the English on Peaks Island, but Capt. Benjamin Church drove them away after suffering heavy casualties.

The raids continued in 1690, starting with massacres in Schenectady, N.Y. and Salmon Falls, N.H. Saint-Castin led an assault on the fort at Falmouth in May, killing 30 and capturing 100.

Sporadic guerilla warfare continued, with one of the most dramatic attacks on York in February 1692. Called the Candlemas Massacre, it ended with 50 dead and 100 captured.

Gruesome Murders

Exhausted and starving, the Indians sued for peace in 1693, but the English wouldn’t negotiate. The war dragged on for another four years, though it may not have deserved the term, according to historian John Grenier.

“It had devolved into a string of gruesome murders that terrorized New England,” he wrote.

Pierre Lemoyne di’Iberville

In 1696, Saint-Castin and Thury led an Abenaki force with the French naval commander Pierre leMoyne d’Iberville against a newly rebuilt English fort at Pemaquid. After a short siege, the fort fell, and the English abandoned the Kennebec.

Finally, the Wabanaki made peace with the English in 1699. The Indians had driven nearly all of them out of Acadia.

Saint Castin had helped the Wabanaki survive, but at a cost. The bloody and gruesome war had intensified English hatred of Indians, and in 1703 another long war – Queen Anne’s war—broke out.

Return to France

But by then Saint-Castin had left for France, intending to return to Molly-Mathilde and their children. French officials had accused him of treason because he and the Wabanaki had traded with the English. He crossed the Atlantic in 1701 to defend himself against the charges, as well as to claim his inheritance.

In France Saint-Castin had a sister, Marie, and her rapacious lawyer husband, Jean de Labaig. Labaig wanted the baronetcy and the estate that went with it for himself. He had also gotten wind of the rumors about Saint-Castin’s libertine ways before – and even during – his marriage.

Labaig used those rumors to put legal obstacles in Saint-Castin’s way.

The church of Saint-Castin in Bearn, France.

Saint-Castin cleared himself of the charges of treason, but spent years fighting Labaig. Finally by 1707 he won his legal battle, gaining the family castle in Bearn and the title of baron.

Shortly thereafter, he died in France. Molly-Mathilde continued to live in Acadia until her death.

The Rest of the Saint-Castins

Saint-Castin’s oldest son, Bernard-Anselm, led the Wabanaki against the English during Queen Anne’s War. When that conflict ended, he sailed with his wife and three daughters to the Saint-Castin estate in France. Bernard-Anselm died in 1721.

Castine, Maine, was named after Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. His descendants, who include Charles Shay, occasionally visit the Witherle Memorial Library in town.

With thanks to Abaddie de Saint-Castin, Jean-Vincent d’, Baron de Saint Castin by Georges Cerbelaud Salagnac in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Women of the Dawn by Bunny McBride, The d’Abbadies de Castins and the Abenakis of Maine in the Seventeenth Century by Paul Chasse, Steadfast in their ways: New England colonists, Indian wars, and the persistence of culture, 1675-1715, by David Michael Corlett, Saint-Castin: A Legend Revised by Gorham Munson, The Dalhousie Review.

Image: The church of Saint-Castin By France64160 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10769225. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places Renamed Out of Spite

Many New England cities and towns have been renamed over the years. When the European settlers arrived, they usually changed Indian names to those from their home country. And then they sometimes renamed a place again.

The Puritans, for example, first called Boston Trimontaine after the three hills on the peninsula. John Winthrop soon renamed the town Boston after the hometown of several prominent colonists. The new name would fit better, as Bostonians eventually cut down their three hills.

Townspeople, though, sometimes renamed themselves because they didn’t like what the old name represented. Sometimes they didn’t have a choice, as when a new authority arrived and tried to assert his power over a town.

Here, then, are six towns renamed for spite. If you know of any others, please mention them in the comments section.

Pochoug, Conn.

The Patchogue River in Westbrook.

Westbrook, Conn., originally belonged to Saybrook, which came under attack by Indians during the Pequot War. When the Pequot threat ended, about 40 families moved to West Saybrook to an area known by the Indian name of Pochoug. The word meant ‘’place where the river divides,’ and refers to the Patchogue and the Menunketesuck rivers.

In 1810, the town petitioned the General Assembly to rename it Westbrook. The petition noted that ever since the first settlement it had ‘retained the Indian name of Poochague or Poorchague, which name it is believed very few if any, can either spell or pronounce correctly.’ The name was said to be ‘inconvenient to the said inhabitants and to the public.’

Connecticut is full of towns with portmanteau names, and ‘Westbrook’ probably derived from ‘West Saybrook.’ However, we note that Col. Thomas Westbrook had fought Indians during Father Rale’s War.

Gorgeana, Maine

Nubble Light in York, Maine

When King James I in 1620 gave Sir Fernando Gorges a patent to colonize the New World, Gorges thought that included Massachusetts. After all, the king had specified he was to ‘plant, rule, order and govern’ all the land between New France and Virginia.

Gorges, an Anglican and a Royalist, began by financing the settlement of Maine. He hoped to turn it into a series of feudal plantations, and he named one settlement after himself — Gorgeana.

Maine’s neighbor, Puritan Massachusetts, grew in population, wealth and power. Anglican Maine did not. So by 1658, the Puritans from Massachusetts went town by town to persuade what is now Maine to join Massachusetts.

Names carried great importance to the early New England Puritans. And so when Gorgeana agreed to join Massachusetts, the Puritans decided to rename it York. The name York carried a special sting because it was the name of a Royalist city in England that fell to the Puritan Parliament during the English Civil War.

New Glasgow, Mass.

The White Church in Blandford, Mass.

Scots-Irish families first came to Blandford in 1735 and called their settlement ‘New Glasgow.’ They had good reason: The people of Glasgow, Scotland, had promised them a church bell if they named their town after them.

The colonists of Massachusetts Bay only tolerated the Scots-Irish because they provided a useful buffer against hostile Indians on the frontier. In 1741, the settlers petitioned royal Gov. William Shirley for incorporation as the Town of New Glasgow. Shirley instead renamed the town Blandford, supposedly for the ship that had just carried him to Boston.

But what did Shirley have against Glasgow? He probably wasn’t keen to recognize the Scottish city. After all, enraged Glaswegians had recently rioted against a malt tax, driven out the British military and destroyed the home of their parliamentary representative.

Blandford didn’t get its bell.

Adams, N.H.

Jackson, New Hampshire

Nestled in the White Mountains near Maine’s border, Jackson, N.H., was originally named New Madbury after the Seacoast town from which its first settlers came. The town renamed itself Adams in 1800 to honor John Adams, just elected president as a Federalist Party member.

But then two Democratic-Republicans won election — Benjamin Pierce as governor of New Hampshire in 1827 and Andrew Jackson as president in 1829. Rivalry between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans could get fierce. So when Adams, N.H., petitioned the General Court for incorporation as a town in 1829, Pierce brought to bear his influence. Adams was renamed Jackson.

Haversham, R.I.

Westerly, R.I.

In 1684, British authorites sought to assert their control over their colonies in New England. They annulled the colonial charters and combined the colonies into the Dominion of New England. In 1686 they appointed Joseph Dudley, a native of Roxbury, Mass., as president of the Council of New England, which included Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and the Narragansett Country in Rhode Island.

Dudley had a tough time of it. Magistrates and military officers refused to serve and Puritan leaders ignored him. He traveled to Narragansett to establish his authority there, and he renamed Westerly ‘Haversham,’ Kingstown ‘Rochester’ and Greenwich ‘Dedford.’

Sir Edmund Andros took over from Dudley with the added territory of Connecticut and Rhode Island. He didn’t last long, only until 1689, when Bostonians sent him packing. In England, a new king took the throne and restored the colonial governments. Haversham was renamed Westerly.

Sodom, Vt.

Back in the day, quarrying often used to attract rough men who enjoyed women and liquor when they weren’t blasting rock. Sodom, an unincorporated village in the central Vermont town of Calais, was apparently one such place. Sodom had several active quarries, but no church.

According to lore, a local preacher pounded his fist on the pulpit and said, “I am adamant that we change the name of this town!” Citizens in 1905 petitioned the Legislature to change the name, and Sodom was renamed Adamant.

Village boosters say the name was chosen to reflect the hardness of granite. We like the other explanation better, though.

Images: The White Church, Blandford, Mass. By Rhcowles – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31505090; Sodom, Vt. By Erikamit – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39732709. This story was updated in 2022.

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6 Famous Franco-American Writers from New England

Let’s face it, Franco-American writers never receive their due. They tend to get pigeonholed as regional writers, and they can’t take advantage of their differentness the way African or Hispanic writers can.

New England’s Franco-American writers, though, have had a huge impact on literature and philosophy. That, at least, should be obvious from the six Franco-American writers listed here.

1. Jack Kerouac, Franco-American Beat

Jack Kerouac

Born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Mass., on March 12, 1922, he was the son of Franco-American immigrants. Kerouac’s father was a printer who lost his shop in a flood; his mother worked in a shoe factory.

French was his firs language, and he didn’t learn to speak English until he was six. He started writing his masterpiece, On The Road, in French.

He grew up a serious student and a devout Catholic. As a child he was told his family motto was “Love, Work, Suffer.” Before his death at 47 on Oct. 21, 1969, he published more than a dozen books that earned him a devoted following. Critics called him “the voice of his generation,” and On The Road became the bible of the Beat Generation.

2. Jean de Crevecoeur, American Farmer

Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur was born in 1735 in Normandy to the Count and Countess of Crevecoeur.

John Hector St. John

He migrated to New France in North America at the age of 20, serving in the French and Indian War as a surveyor.

He then moved to New York when the French lost to the British, took the name John Hector St. John and married an American woman. St. John subsequently bought a farm in New York State and wrote about life in the American colonies. His book, Letters from an American Farmer, is still in print.

He befriended Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen, who suggested the town of Dunmore, Vt., rename itself St. John in his honor. St. John suggested adding the ‘bury’ to differentiate the town from the one in New Brunswick. He died in France in 1813.

3. The Dark Themes of Robert Cormier

Robert Cormier was born Jan. 15, 1925 in a tight-knit Franco-American community known as French Hill in Leominster, Mass. He spent the rest of his life there. When growing up he looked out his classroom window and saw his house on fire. The nun made him recite a rosary before he could run home.

Cormier graduated from Fitchburg State University and worked for 30 years as a reporter for the Fitchburg Sentinel.

Robert Cormier

He also wrote 13 young adult novels and 100 short stories that made him famous. The New York Times described him as a nice, quiet family man, but he wrote novels with themes so dark that people thought them too disturbing for teenagers.

Lists of the most frequently banned books usually include Cormier’s, The Chocolate War. Novels like I Am the Cheese and We All Fall Down deal with abuse, mental illness, violence, revenge and betrayal.

4, Scandalous Grace Metalious

Grace Metalious led a short tragic life that began in 1924 on the largely Franco-American West Side of Manchester, N.H. Born Grace de Repentigny into a poor family, she married George Metalious, a school teacher in Gilmanton, N.H.

She was a lousy housewife who drank, swore, wore baggy jeans and cheated on her husband. Grace Metalious rocketed to fame with her first novel, Peyton Place.

Grace Metalious

Peyton Place described the hidden seamy side of a small New England town. The critics panned it, but the public loved it – except for Gilmanton, N.H., on which Metalious based the book.

Peyton Place became a staple of American entertainment as a movie, a sequel and a nighttime television soap opera. Fame made Grace Metalious rich and reckless. She burned through millions of dollars and then died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 39.

5. Henry David Thoreau, Franco-American Transcendentalist

Most people know Henry David Thoreau for Walden, his account of his two years, two months and two days living in a simple cabin in the woods. But his essay Civil Disobedience, with its message of nonviolent protest against an unjust government, perhaps had a bigger impact than Walden. It influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

He also wrote more than 20 volumes of poetry, journals, books and essays. His writings about nature inspired the environmental movement.

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., in 1817, to John Thoreau, the son of French Protestant immigrants, and Cynthia Dunbar, of English descent. He never married and often didn’t have a job. When he did, he taught school, surveyed or did odd jobs for Ralph Waldo Emerson.

His influence endures beyond the other members of the Transcendentalist circle that included Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing.

6. Will Durant and His Better Half

Will Durant and his wife Ariel wrote the 11-volume Story of Civilization, one of the most popular works of history and philosophy ever. He was born in North Adams, Mass., to Franco-American parents who came to America as part of the Quebec diaspora. Ariel was born in Ukraine and migrated to the United States at the age of three.

Will studied at Jesuit schools in New Jersey, where he flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. He then met his wife while teaching her at the Ferrer Modern School in New York. He quit his job to marry her when she was 15. She roller skated to their wedding at City Hall.

Will and Ariel Durant

They won the Pulitzer Prize for the 10^th volume of Story of Civilization, and President Gerald Ford awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They died within two weeks of each other in Los Angeles in 1981.

Image: Robert Cormier By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3988962.

This story about Franco-American writers was updated in 2022.

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Six Ways the Little Ice Age Made History

The Little Ice Age changed New England history in ways that historians are only beginning to understand.

Though scientists don’t agree on what caused the Little Ice Age, most agree the climate cooled from the 15th century to the middle of the 19th century, with the greatest intensity between 1550 and 1700. Some scientists peg the coldest period even more narrowly, between 1645 and 1715. During that period the average winter temperatures in North America fell two degrees Celsius.

The NASA Earth Observatory blames diminished solar activity for the Little Ice Age, though scientists offer competing theories.

Historians, on the other hand, agree that the Little Ice Age altered the course of history. It froze rivers and canals in Northern Europe, wiped out cereal production in Iceland and caused famine in France, Norway and Sweden. Colder winters meant denser wood, which contributed to the superior tone of the Stradivarius violin.

Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age brought cool summers and bitterly cold winters to New England. During the Great Snow of 1717, for example, a series of snowstorms buried houses and got search parties lost looking for them.

The Cold Friday of 1810 also belonged to the Little Ice Age. People died in their homes when the temperature suddenly plummeted more than 60 degrees in less than a day. Years later, Henry David Thoreau’s mother remembered how dishes froze as fast as they were washed – right next to the fire.

The Little Ice Age had a huge impact on the development of New England. Here are six ways it made history:

Little Ice Age Causes Mutiny

During the Little Ice Age, George Washington and his army suffered through the cold at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-78. But contemporary observers actually called that winter “unusually mild.”

Washington at Valley Forge

Washington and his troops suffered more in Morristown, N.J., during the Hard Winter of 1779-80. Violent snowstorms battered the Northeast, and both Boston and New York harbors froze over.

The weather made it impossible to bring supplies to the men, many of whom had no coats or shoes and didn’t eat for days at a time. The soldiers finally mutinied in early May, though an officer persuaded them to abandon their rebellion.

Colonization Delayed

Extremely harsh winters during the Little Ice Age destroyed the first colony in what is now Maine and delayed colonization in New England for a good 10 years.

John Smith

A group of English investors called the Plymouth Company chartered the Popham Colony (also known as the Sagadahoc Colony) in coastal Maine. Two ships carrying 120 settlers set sail in May 1607 under the leadership of George Popham.

Popham’s death and the winter of 1607, described as “extreme unseasonable and frostie,” drove the colonists back to England. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, one of the investors, recalled in 1622, “all our former hopes were frozen to death.”

As a result, English interest in colonizing New England disappeared for a decade. Explorer John Smith expressed the view of New England as, “a cold, barren, mountainous, rocky desert.”

The Little Ice Age Drives Out the French

The French failed to colonize, too, on the island of St. Croix in the river that divides Canada from the United States. Seventy-nine men arrived in the summer of 1604 and thought they found a paradise, with warm weather, good soil and plenty of fish and game.

Then it began to snow on October 6, beginning a long and sharply cold winter. Thirty-five men died of a hideous, mysterious disease, probably scurvy. When spring finally arrived, they moved to what is now Annapolis, Nova Scotia.

Had the weather not been so severe, New England might be New France today.

Pequot War

The Pequot War

No one had ever seen anything like the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. It blew down houses and forests and flattened “all the corn to the ground, which never rose more.”

An extremely harsh winter followed the hurricane, which caused the crops to fail. The English settlers coming to New England then competed intensely for corn.

In August of 1636, a group of colonists from Connecticut seized Indian corn. The Pequot counterattack escalated into the Pequot War, argues historian Geoffrey Parker in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.

King Philip’s War

King Philip

Historians argue the Little Ice Age also created the conditions for King Philip’s War 40 years later. The cooler climate reduced crop yield, so the colonists demanded more and more land.

Metacomet, or King Philip, had to surrender some of his land in lieu of a fine levied by the Massachusetts General Court in 1671. Philip forged alliances with other tribes and built forts until he launched his attacks on English settlers in 1675.

Unfortunately for Metacomet, the unusually cold winter of 1675-76 caused many of his people to starve. It also led to one of the Indians’ worst defeats in the war. The swamps that usually protected a Narragansett fort froze during the winter. That allowed Benjamin Church and his men to massacre the inhabitants.

The colonists defeated the Indians. As many as a thousand Indians were sold into slavery, and 5,000 were killed in battle or died of sickness or starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north. Plymouth Colony lost eight percent of its adult male population in the war, and per capita income among the colonists in New England didn’t recover for a century.

Encouraged Migration

In 1816, known as the Year Without a Summer, six inches of snow fell in June and every month of the year had a hard frost.

Temperatures dropped to as low as 40 degrees in July and August. People also called it ‘Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death’ and the ‘Poverty Year.’

The cold, dry weather of 1816 created a craving for the warmer weather and fertile soils out west.

Hundreds and then thousands of New England families gave up their farms, packed their belongings into wagons and joined the throngs traipsing over rivers and mountains to Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley, which includes Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky.

Between 1810 and 1820, Maine lost as many as 15,000 people. Most left after the Year Without a Summer. Sixty Vermont towns lost population during that decade. The population of 60 more Vermont towns stayed the same while the U.S. population grew 32 percent.

Massachusetts gained only 50,000 people from 1810-20, while Ohio gained five times as many. The Massachusetts Legislature tried to hold on to its citizens by passing a homestead act that gave settlers 100 acres of land for $5.

This story about the Little Ice Age was updated in 2022.

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Puritans Name, Shame and Take Over Anglican Maine

In 1652, Massachusetts Puritans decided to bring the English Civil War to North America by taking over Anglican Maine.

The year before, Puritans in England had won the final battle of the English Civil War. They had abolished the bishops, beheaded Charles I, exiled Charles II and put Parliament in control of the government. They also did away with High Anglican practices that smacked of Roman Catholicism.

The Massachusetts Puritans, emboldened by their success in England, sent negotiators to the scattered settlements along Maine’s west coast. One by one, the Maine communities agreed to the Puritan ‘suggestion’ that they join the Bay Colony. The Massachusetts militia may have helped them make up their minds.

The Puritans then gave new names to some of the Anglican Maine communities – names some of the Mainers didn’t like one bit.

Early map of eastern New Hampshire and the western Maine coast.

East vs. West

Take a look at the place names along the southern Maine coast: Kittery, Wells, Biddeford, Dartmouth and Falmouth. They mirror place names in Southwest England, known as the West Country.

Map of the West Country

Historians compare the region to the American South. In the 17^th century, it had large plantations and a rural population. Its people were more likely to support the Anglican Church than were the Puritans in eastern England.

Now take a look at Massachusetts place names: Boston, Lynn, Ipswich, Yarmouth, Cambridge, Essex. They come from eastern England, or East Anglia.

East Anglia gave names to 63 percent of Massachusetts towns founded before 1660. Most of those had names from towns within 60 miles of Haverhill in the East Anglian county of Suffolk.

That’s because the Puritan elite of Massachusetts came from East Anglia.

Unlike the West Country, East Anglia in the early 17^th century was urban, entrepreneurial and a hotbed of Puritan opposition to the monarchy and its High Anglican practices.

Sir Ferdinando Gorges

Sir Ferdinando Gorges, born around 1565, came from an Anglican family that claimed royal descent. A military man loyal to King James I, for a time he served as governor of Plymouth in the West Country.

Gorges decided to colonize the New World after receiving three captured North American Indians from an English ship captain.

King James I

In 1607 Gorges helped finance the failed Popham Colony in present-day Phippsburg, Maine. The Popham settlers brought with them an Anglican priest, Richard Seymour, brother to Henry VIII’s wife Jane Seymour. Richard Seymour conducted the first Anglican service in America.

In 1620, King James I granted Gorges a patent for ‘planting, ruling, ordering and governing’ the territory between Virginia and New France.

Gorges, as head of the Council for New England, gave himself and his partner John Mason a grant for all lands between the Merrimac and Kennebec rivers.

Mason took New Hampshire, and Gorges took the territory north of the Piscataqua River. He called it New Somersetshire after his own home in England.

Anglican Maine

While Gorges was off fighting the French in 1627, the Massachusetts Bay Company got a royal charter for Massachusetts. Gorges thought Massachusetts belonged to him.

To add insult to injury, the Massachusetts Puritans believed in self-rule. Gorges wanted his territory run by Anglican feudal lords and their deputies.

Gorges tried maneuvering in Parliament to get Massachusetts back. His efforts sparked antagonism between the Anglican, Royalist Gorges and the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, a trickle of Anglicans from the West Country came to fish, farm and trade along the southern Maine coast in places they called Black Point, Blue Point, Stratton’s Island, Spurwink and Casco.

Gorges tried to establish another colony between the Saco and Kennebec Rivers, which he called the province of Lygonia after his mother, Cecily Lygon. Another settlement took Gorges’ own name — Gorgeana.

The settlers in Anglican Maine and Lygonia squabbled over who owned what land. Their disunity didn’t help them when the Massachusetts Puritans came calling.

What’s In A Name?

Since the arrival of the Winthrop fleet in 1630, Massachusetts had steadily grown in size and in wealth. With an organized government, its citizens had the rights of trial by jury and the freehold tenure of land. Freemen elected councils to write bylaws and deputies to attend the General Court, observed historian Hannah Farber.

By 1650, Massachusetts’ rapidly growing population reached 14,000. In contrast, only about a thousand English colonists lived in Maine, and most of them barely scratched out a living.

John Endecott

Massachusetts Gov. John Endecott sent commissioners to their eastern neighbor, where they went from town to town. They suggested to the people of Maine and Lygonia they might have more legal rights and more prosperity if they joined Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans also may have mentioned the size of their militia.

Town by town the Maine settlements voted to join Massachusetts. In 1652, Kittery came to Massachusetts, and the next year Wells, Cape Porpoise and Saco followed. Lygonia caved in 1658 and the Puritans changed its name to Maine.

Names carried great importance to the early New England Puritans. And so when Gorgeana agreed to join Massachusetts, the Puritans renamed it York. Gorges had died by then, but the Puritans undoubtedly didn’t want to honor the Royalist who tried to take away their charter. The name York carried a special sting as it was shared by the Royalist city that fell to Parliament during the just-ended English Civil War.

New Overlords in Anglican Maine

The Massachusetts Puritans also renamed two towns after the last Royalist strongholds to fall to the Puritans in England.

Black Point, Blue Point and Stratton’s Island became Scarborough, which in England had surrendered only a month before the execution of Charles I.

Maine coast in 1623-4

Spurwink and the Casco Bay settlements would be called Falmouth, later renamed Portland. Queen Henrietta and the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II) found safety in Pendennis Castle in Falmouth for five months before it surrendered to the Puritans.

“The Puritans of Massachusetts imposed the names Falmouth and Scarborough in conquest, a reminder to the population of their fate and of their new overlords,” wrote historian Emerson W. Baker in an essay, Formerly Machegonne, Dartmouth, York, Stogummor, Casco and Falmouth: Portland as a Contested Frontier in the Seventeenth Century.

After the monarchy was restored in England, a royal commission came to Maine in 1665 and put the province under royal authority. But it took only three years for the Massachusetts Puritans to retake control of Anglican Maine.

Not until March 15, 1820 would Maine separate from Massachusetts as a result of the Missouri Compromise.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: West Country England, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2530598.

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