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The Siege of Scarborough and Maine’s Long War

In 1676, the colonial settlers in Scarborough, Maine, had abandoned the town after fierce fighting with a small army of Indians. That set the stage for the siege of Scarborough the following year.

King Philip’s War had been raging since 1675. Maine — the war’s northern theater — had so few settlers the fighting was on a relatively small scale.

West Point, Prout’s Neck by Winslow Homer (owned by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.)

The government in Massachusetts had banned weapons sales to the natives. The natives had generally allied with the French, who encouraged them to harass the English settlements along the Maine coast. Some tried to negotiate a peace between the English and the Maine natives, and the tribes were not of one mind about whether to fight or make a treaty.

Around the mouth of the Saco River, one Wabanaki leader, Mogg Heigon, had gathered a force of perhaps 100 men and some 30 ships. Mogg, who had friendly relations with the English settlers, had been slow to support the war. Nevertheless, by the fall of 1676 his army had successfully harassed the fishermen and farmers until many abandoned the area. In October of 1676, Mogg’s men surrounded the small garrison at Scarborough’s Black Point.

The Surrender of Scarborough

Henry Jocelyn led the English settlers at Black Point. Mogg and Jocelyn knew each other, and Mogg spoke English. Mogg offered Jocelyn a deal. If the colonists would surrender, they could leave peacefully.

It’s not clear why Mogg made the generous offer. It may have been simple decency. Or he may have had some reason to suspect taking the garrison by force would be more challenging than it appeared. It may simply have been that he was accustomed to friendly dealings with the settlers and the negotiation came naturally.

Jocelyn accepted the offer, and Scarborough was left completely in Indian control. Having driven off the settlers in much of the Maine coast, however, the Wabanaki were not nearly numerous enough to protect their lands. In 1677, a group of the settlers came out of hiding and returned to Scarborough, along with a larger military force that included Bartholomew Tippen, most likely a sergeant.

The return of the colonists provoked Mogg to action. He returned to Scarborough with his small army. He sealed off the garrison and lay siege to it. But the colonists inside were better armed in 1677 than they had been in 1676. They were not considering retreat. After three days, during which the Indian’s siege had inflicted only a few casualties, Tippen shot and killed Mogg.

After the Siege of Scarborough

The loss of their leader prompted the Wabanaki to abandon the siege. It also cleared the way for another leader to emerge among the natives, Squando. In retaliation for the death of Mogg, Indians returned to the Black Point garrison and again attacked about a month later. This time they were cleverer, drawing roughly 100 of the settlers outside. The fight killed the colonists’ military leaders and decimated the settlement.

Site of Black Point Fort

According to legend, Squando had become an ardent foe of the English when settlers drowned his son. True or not, his elevation weakened any chance for a peaceful settlement of the disputes. King Philip’s War would continue in Maine until 1678 when it ended by treaty.

But it hardly ended the fighting between the persistent English colonists and the Indians (aided by the French). A new garrison was established at Black Point in 1681, near what was then known as Great Pond. The tug of war with the Native Americans would continue for more than 20 years, and in 1703 a group of Indians attacked and killed a group of settlers at the Black Point garrison, inspiring the name the pond has today – Massacre Pond.

Mogg’s name, meanwhile, was immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, Mogg Megone, which was also turned into a film. Its story line bears little relation to actual history.

This story about the Siege of Scarborough was updated in 2022.

Image of Black Point Fort By John Stanton via FortWiki, CC By-SA 3.0.

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Margaret Rule and the ‘Smutty’ Cotton Mather

In September of 1693, just after the Salem witchcraft hysteria, a Boston girl, Margaret Rule, convinced the town that demons possessed her. It very nearly restarted the witch hysteria.

Rule belonged to the Rev. Cotton Mather’s North End church in Boston. Mather, instrumental in instigating the Salem witch trials, believed in the power of spirits. When he learned of Margaret Rule’s afflictions, he went to visit.

John and Emma Rule of Saco, Maine, had been forced south to Boston because of the fighting between colonists and Indians in the north. Mather believed them a sober and honest family. But their daughter Margaret had an uneasy relationship with an older woman in their North End neighborhood. In September the older woman scolded Margaret. The woman had previously been accused of casting spells, but the Rules chose not to make any public accusation against her.

Witchcraft

The Witch No. 1, lithograph, J.E. Baker.

Margaret grew ill, experiencing fits and falling into a trance. She was feverish and seemingly delusional. Demons tormented her, she said, probably summoned through witchcraft.

Margaret could identify several women among her tormentors. Rule was bedridden and a group of friends stayed with her constantly, praying. The visitors reported some sort of demon, roughly the size of a rat, would occasionally brush against them. One group of visitors swore that while they were with Margaret, she levitated, hovering over her bed.

Margaret Rule Overheats

On September 13, Margaret had attracted the usual crowd at her bedside. The room grew overheated. Margaret fainted, and Mather fanned her with his hat. Margaret had begun to sense information via her spiritual connections, and she correctly predicted the near drowning of a local boy. Cotton Mather had grown irritated that 17 pages of a sermon had been misplaced, and Rule told him that the spirits had told her demons had taken it, but that it would be returned.

In the community, some believed Margaret an oracle, and they wanted to question her more about her visions. Mather stepped in and forbade it. He advised Margaret to stay quiet, fast and pray. She then revealed the names of the people she thought tormented her. She even suggested that Mather might be a witch.

Cotton Mather

For his part, Mather avoided calling Margaret Rule’s illness a case of witchcraft. He probably believed the visions Rule saw were demons. However, he did caution that she might just have delusions.

On September 19, Mather visited Margaret Rule once again. She still felt sick, but she felt she was getting the upper hand in expelling the demons.

Robert Calef Tells a Story

Robert Calef, a Boston cloth merchant, grew weary of the popular obsession with witches. He believed the Mathers, Cotton and his father Increase, and others were dangerously whipping up public hysteria to gain attention for themselves. So he decided to write his own account of the Margaret Rule affair.

In Calef’s retelling (published as More Wonders of the Invisible World), the scene at Margaret Rule’s bedside becomes rather more tawdry. In Calef’s version of events, Margaret Rule looks more like an attention-starved young woman. And the Mathers come off as more manipulative. And, Calef included a shocking detail. He hints that the Mathers put their hands on Margaret when she didn’t have proper covering while she lay in bed. Calef then sent his manuscript to Mather to seek comment. Cotton Mather fired off a letter:

“A false representation it is that I rubbed Rule’s stomach, her breast not being covered,” Mather objected. “You cannot but know how much this representation has contributed to make people believe a smutty thing of me.”

While Calef suggested Mather hoped to whip up another round of witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts, Mather defended himself. He pointed out that he used all his influence with Rule to stop her from naming anyone as a witch.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Willey Family Tragedy Starts White Mountain Tourism

When the Samuel Willey family moved to Crawford Notch in 1825, they unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that turned the White Mountains into a tourist attraction.

The mountains were a desolate wilderness in the decades after the American Revolution. Nonetheless, Willey took his wife, five children and two hired men to live in a small, remote house in the mountains. Called the Old Notch House, it had been built in 1793.

During his first year, Samuel Willey and his two hired hands expanded the house. It stood in the shadow of a mountain now called Mt. Willey.

The men turned it into an inn for travelers along the deserted notch road.

Willey Family Tragedy

In June 1826 a heavy rain terrified the Willey family when it caused a landslide across the Saco River. Sam Willey decided to build a stone shelter above the house. He thought the family could find safety there in case of another landslide.

On Aug. 28, 1826, a violent rainstorm caused a mudslide on the mountainside. The Willey family and the two hired men took refuge in the stone shelter. The landslide killed all nine of them, but it missed the house they’d fled. A ledge above the house spared it from destruction.

The Willey Family House

Rescuers found unmade beds, clothes strewn about and an open Bible on a table in the house, and they concluded the family had left in a panic. They found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey, two of their daughters and the two hired hands. But they never found the bodies of the other three children.

News of the Willey family tragedy spread through newspapers and Theodore Dwight’s guidebook, The Northern Traveler. The intact Willey family house began to attract tourists. Then it began to attract artists and writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story about the Willey family tragedy, called The Ambitious Guest.

White Mountain Tourism

Others exploited the tragedy as well. A mountain guide named Ethan Crawford, who grew up in the notch, built an inn. He called it the Notch House, and his brother Thomas ran it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau stayed at the inn.

Eventually the Crawford family gave their name to the mountain pass, previously called the White Mountain Notch.

Samuel Willey’s brother, the Rev. Benjamin Willey, charged for guided tours of the Willey family house. In 1845, a tourism entrepreneur named Horace Fabyan turned the Willey house into a 50-room hotel.

John Frederick Kensett

Thomas Cole, member of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

No painting did more for White Mountain tourism, though, than John Frederick Kensett’s Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway in 1851.

willey-family-kensett-painting-mount-washington

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway

Kensett’s image became the single most effective mid-nineteenth-century advertisement for the scenic charms of the White Mountains and of North Conway in particular, wrote Barbara J. MacAdam as the Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of America Art at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College.

An engraver made a copy of the painting, which was sold to 13,000 subscribers of the American Art Union. Artists copied the painting, and Currier & Ives turned the engraving into a lithograph in 1860. It surpassed images of the Willey family house as the best known landscape view of the era.

Kensett’s other landscape paintings achieved great popularity, partly because he painted newly fashionable resorts like Newport, R.I.

Another Tragedy

Born in Cheshire, Conn., Kensett followed his father into the engraving trade, but tired of it and turned to painting. He bought land on an island off Darien, Conn., and called it Contentment. In 1872 his own life ended in tragedy, when he jumped into the Long Island Sound to save the life of a friend’s wife. Not only did he fail to save her, he caught pneumonia and died a month later.

The Willey family house is now an interpretive center within Crawford Notch State Park.

This story about the Willey family was updated in 2023.

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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 2023.

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

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The Oldest Bank in Each New England State

The oldest bank in a state isn’t necessarily the first one chartered. Banks have had their difficulties over the years and many failed or were swallowed up by other banks.

Bank of America, for example, started out as the Providence Bank in Rhode Island in 1791. It became the Industrial National Bank in the 1950s, morphed into Fleet Financial Group in the 1990s, bought Shawmut and BankBoston, and then was acquired by the Bank of America in 2004.

Here, then, are brief histories of the oldest bank in each New England state. If you know of other old banks with interesting histories, please include them in the comments section.

Liberty Bank

Historic Main Street district in Middletown, Conn.

In 1844, a young merchant from Old Saybrook named Frederick Sheffield rode his horse to Middletown, Conn., and deposited $8 in the Liberty Bank. Six months later he deposited another $18.

That $26 grew to more than $32,000 in 1994, when Sheffield’s descendants closed the account. It was the oldest individually owned savings account in America.

Liberty Bank was founded in 1825 as a mutual savings bank to help the poor and working class become thrifty. The bank’s headquarters complex includes its original location at Samuel Southmayd’s pharmacy on the corner of Main and Williams Streets in Middletown. They are part of the Main Street Historic District, and they include the former post office built in 1916, the Middletown Savings Bank built in 1928 and the Old Banking House Block built in 1796 and 1815.

Since 2000, Liberty Bank merged with several other smaller banks and is now the third largest as well as the oldest bank in Connecticut, with 56 branches and about 700 employees. It introduced a checking account to offer rebates of other banks’ ATM surcharges and built an affordable housing complex in Norwich, Uncas Condominiums.

Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution

Maine’s oldest bank, Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution was founded in 1827 as a social good, a way to encourage low-income people to save money.

The Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution was chartered during a flurry of charters for savings institutions along the East Coast. The first was founded in Boston in 1816, and within three years savings banks were incorporated in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Hartford, Providence and Salem, Mass.

Today it has eight branches along the coast of Southern Maine, employs about 200 people and has assets of about $900 million.

State Street Bank and Trust

An early incarnation of the State Street Bank

Massachusetts Gov. John Hancock in 1792 signed the first charter for Union Bank, the forerunner of the State Street Bank and Trust Co. It was the third bank in Boston, located at the corner of State and Exchange streets. Its first president was Hancock’s lieutenant governor, Moses Gill.

The bank was tied to Boston’s shipping industry, and has always celebrated the city’s maritime history. The bank’s offices featured ship models, prints, harpoons and figureheads, and published about two dozen monographs about Boston’s shipping past.

The monographs, wrote one collector, “hold a unique place in Boston publishing history for a number of reasons, including their high level of scholarship, the elegant printing and presentation of the volumes, the very many rare photographs and illustrations first published therein, and the magnanimity of the great financial institution which made them available to the public.”

The bank’s interior was described as looking like a New England merchant’s counting house of the late 18^th century, including the period furniture.

In 1924, Massachusetts Investors Trust chose State Street Bank as custodian of the country’s first mutual fund. The importance of that development wouldn’t become clear until years later.

In the 1970s, State Street decided to move away from retail banking and commercial lending, and into the high-tech world of processing asset management, global custody, 401(k), retirement plan accounting, and trusteeship of debt securities

A series of mergers and moves resulted in the bank’s current structure. Today it is a subsidiary of the State Street Corporation, the third largest asset manager in the world with $2.45 trillion under management. State Street Corporation is responsible for the custody and administration of 11 percent of the world’s assets. It is the oldest bank in Massachusetts and the second oldest bank in the country next to the Bank of New York, founded eight years earlier.

Bank of New Hampshire

Bank of New Hampshire in Laconia, N.H.

In 1832, the Meredith Bridge Savings Bank in Laconia received its first deposit: $10.50. Its charter had been signed by Franklin Pierce the previous year. Thirty-eight years later it would change its name to the Laconia Savings Bank, and so it would remain until 2012, when it became the Bank of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire’s oldest bank was founded as a mutual savings bank, owned by its depositors, and it has remained that way ever since. In 1994, the bank began acquiring other banks, and today has 24 branches throughout the state.

The Bank of New Hampshire boasts of its support for such nonprofit organizations as the Laconia Public Library, Lakes Region Childcare, the Bedford Public Library and the Children’s Museum of Portsmouth. It has $1.5 billion of assets under management.

Washington Trust Company

Historic downtown Westerly, R.I.

The Washington Trust Company was chartered by the Rhode Island legislature in 1800 to furnish loans and savings options for residents of the Westerly area. More importantly, it also had responsibility for issuing bank notes. The federal government at the time did not issue currency as we know it today, and paper notes were from time to time in short supply. This made bank currency essential to a functioning economy.

Named for President Washington, the Washington Trust Company was known as Washington Bank. It became the first bank in the nation to issue currency that bore Washington’s portrait — a full 69 years before federal currency would bear his likeness. It was just the third bank chartered in Rhode Island history.

In the earliest days of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the bank insisted that its reliance on the values of Yankee thrift and frugality made it so sound that it had no need of FDIC insurance. Congress eventually forced all banks to participate in the insurance system, regardless of the health of their balance sheets.

National Bank of Middlebury

The State of Vermont chartered the National Bank of Middlebury in 1831. It operated out of the Middlebury Hotel until 1845 when it opened its first building. The bank became a federally chartered bank in 1865.

In 1885 the bank suffered a setback when an investment in the National Bank of St. Albans failed. The National Bank of Middlebury was among a group of banks that were shareholders who were asked to contribute funds to make good the deposits and debts of the St. Albans institution. The banks sued to escape liability, maintaining that they were not responsible for losses beyond their own investments. In 1888, however, the courts ruled that the National Bank of Middlebury, in addition to the others, must contribute to paying the St. Albans bank’s debts. Middlebury was ordered to pay $19,642 in the case.

After the banking crisis of 1933, during which Franklin D. Roosevelt closed the nation’s banks, the National Bank of Middlebury reopened and was declared one of the nation’s soundest banks. Today it is the oldest bank in Vermont.

Images: Liberty Bank, By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19384631; Westerly, R.I., By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4422975

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6 Places With a Curse on Them

Curses were a fact of life in colonial America. With limited scientific knowledge, spiritual beliefs reigned supreme. And many believed that a curse was a real way of getting back at someone who did you wrong. Superstitious European settlers made them, and so did Indigenous people.

Here are six places upon which a curse has been cast.

The Curse of Charles Island, Milford, Conn.

Charles Island

Silver Sands State Park today has a beautiful ocean beach for a summer getaway on a hot day, and at low tide it’s fun to walk to Charles Island. But the history of the island has not always been so fun.

Europeans first noted the island in 1614. It was a summer destination for Ansantawae, chief of the local Paugussetts (an Algonquian tribe), which historically controlled vast swaths of land in Connecticut.

Charles Deal would eventually buy the island, giving the land its name. But to the Paugussetts the island had spiritual significance. Local history says that after the Europeans elbowed the tribe off the land, the Paugusetts put a curse on anyone who tried to build on it. And up to today, no structure has survived on the island very long.

The island also received two more curses. One came from the pirate William Kidd, who buried stolen treasure there in 1699. Authorities then dug it up and arrested him. Kidd cursed anyone who took his treasure.

And Charles Island was cursed once more by a group of five sailors who hid gold they had stolen from Mexican emperor Guatmozin. He cursed the thieves who took his gold and the gold, as well.

Saco Curse, Saco, Maine

On the Saco, Benjamin Champney

For years, Mainers wouldn’t go near the Saco River because of an old Native American curse.

The Saco, one of Maine’s largest rivers, starts in the White Mountains and empties into the ocean at Biddeford Pool. The Sokokis people lived near the mouth of the Saco.

In 1631, English colonists began settling a town called Winter Harbor (later Saco) in the Sokokis territory. Under the leadership of a great sachem, Squandro, the Native and the colonist lived side by side in peace.

That peaceful coexistence ended in the summer of 1675, according to legend.

The Sokokis were summering on what is now Factory Island in the river. An English ship anchored in the mouth of the river. Three sailors decided to launch a rowboat and explore the island. There they found Squandro’s wife and infant son in a canoe.

The sailors decided to test a belief that Indian babies were born knowing how to swim. They threw Squandro’s baby into the river.

According to one version of the story, Squandro’s wife dove in and saved the baby, but he died soon afterward. According to another, both wife and child drowned. And ccording to a third, Squandro also lost his unborn baby in the tragedy.

Squandro mourned for three days. Then he issued his curse. He commanded the spirits of the river to take the lives of three white men a year until they left the shores of the Saco. He also vowed revenge on the English. Squandro supposedly persuaded the Androscoggin tribe to attack Winter Harbor in an opening blow of King Philip’s War.

For centuries, Mainers wouldn’t go near the river until three people had died that year.

In 1947, the Maine Sunday Telegram declared the curse broken when no one drowned in the Saco that year.

Curse of the Bridgewater Triangle, Bridgewater, Mass.

Freetown-Fall River State Forest

Bridgewater, Mass., home to Bridgewater State University, is the center of a 200-mile area known as the Bridgewater Triangle.

Students of the paranormal have visited the area for decades looking for UFOs, Bigfoot and other such oddities. Many report unpleasant encounters with spirits, giant snakes and humanoids called pukwudgie. Evidence of ritualistic murders and animal mutilation have been found in Freetown-Fall River State Forest, and ghosts supposedly haunt some Bridgewater State buildings.

The Wampanoag people, prominent in the area, named the large swamp Hockomock, which means “place where spirits dwell.” They used it for hunting game and as a base of operations during King Philip’s War. And they cursed the colonists who took their land.

Colonial settlers, meanwhile, called it “Devil’s Swamp.” During the 21st century, people claim to have seen pterodactyl-like birds with 12-foot wingspans in the wetland.

One legend holds that a Wampanoag brave lost his wampum belt in the swamp, which caused the paranormal unrest in the area.

The Curse of Chocorua, Chocorua, N.H.

Mount Chocorua

Mount Chocorua has a distinctive rocky peak that towers over a picturesque lake. It’s said to be one of the most photographed mountains in the world.

It’s named after Chocorua, a sachem of a small band of Pequawket Indians. They had belonged to the Penobscot tribe, who lived mostly in Maine. When the Europeans began to settle the White Mountains, the Pequawkets joined with the Penacook confederation, who lived in New Hampshire along the Pemigewasset and Merrimack watersheds and near Great Bay.

One version of the legend goes that around 1720 Chocorua grew friendly with a family named Campbell that lived in Tamworth, N.H. Chocorua trusted them so much he left his son in their care when he had to go away. The son mistakenly ate some poison that the father, Cornelius Campbell, had left for predators. When Cornelius was away, Chocorua returned to find his son had died.

Campbell came home to find his wife and children killed. He suspected Chocorua, and pursued him to the top of the mountain. There Campbell wounded Chocorua with a gunshot. Chocorua then climbed to the highest boulder, raised his arms and shouted his curse:

“May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in the clouds and his words are fire! Lightning blast your crops! Wind and fire destroy your homes! The Evil One breathe death on your cattle! Panthers howl and wolves fatten on your bones!”

Then he leapt from the summit to his death.

Two years later, the body of Cornelius Campbell was found partially eaten by wolves. A plague destroyed the cattle in the area – said to be the victim of Chocorua’s curse.

Clawson’s Curse, Providence, R.I.

North Burial Ground, Providence

Clawson’s Curse derives its name from events that happened in 1661 near the North Burial Ground in Providence, R.I., in a thicket of barberry bushes.

John Clawson and Benjamin Herendeen were among the original white settlers of Providence, called 25 acre men. In early 1661, a local Indian named Waumaion attacked Clawson. He split open Clawson’s chin and chest with a blow from his ax.

Clawson did not blame the attack on the Indian, but rather was convinced that Herendeen had put the man up to the attack with lies about him.

Clawson would die of his wounds, but not before he supposedly placed an odd curse on the Herendeen clan. He wished that their faces would be marred with cleft chins and their lands overrun by barberry bushes.

Clawson was a hired servant to Roger Williams, and Williams oversaw the disposition of his estate following his death. Herendeen family genealogies, meanwhile, note that for several generations members of the family had pronounced cleft chins.

The Curse of Brunswick Springs, Brunswick Springs, Vt.

Brunswick Springs

Ripley’s Believe It or Not in 1984 called Brunswick Springs the Eighth Wonder of the World. From a single fountainhead gush six separate springs, each with a different mineral: iron, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, bromide and arsenic. The Abenaki Indians believed the springs to be a sacred spot with healing powers.

When a soldier was wounded in the French and Indian War, his Abenaki companions brought him to the springs so they could heal him. He recovered and later returned to the springs to bottle the water and sell it. The Abenakis objected to his profiting from the sacred waters. In the fight that followed, the soldier killed an Abenaki man and his baby. The baby’s mother put a curse on anyone who tried to profit from the spring.

Four enterprising businessmen ignored the curse and built successive hotels near the healthful springs. They built the first in 1860 and expanded it in the 1890s, when it burned to the ground. A second hotel collapsed into the river. A third hotel burned before it was finished, then burned again. In 1931, the land around the springs was used as a camp for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Today the land is protected from development as an Abenaki sacred site.

Images: Freetown-Fall River State Forest By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49870009. North Burial Ground By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57258608. Charles Island By Randal J. (RJFerret) – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6010467.

This story last updated in 2021.

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