In 1607, the same year as Jamestown, 120 English settlers built the first English settlement in New England at Maine's Kennebec River. Almost no one remembers it.
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In August of 1607, two ships — the Gift of God and the Mary and John — dropped anchor at the mouth of the Kennebec River on the Maine coast. One hundred and twenty English colonists came ashore, led by George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert, and began constructing Fort St. George: a fourteen-building compound with a chapel, storehouse, and earthen defensive walls. This was the Popham Colony, and it predates Plymouth Rock by thirteen years.
The history of American settlement is almost universally taught as beginning in 1620, in Massachusetts. But the first English attempt at permanent settlement in New England happened here, on a rocky peninsula in what is now Phippsburg, Maine — and it was abandoned after fourteen months, which is perhaps why it disappeared from the curriculum.
A Winter That Broke Them
The colony failed for the most Maine reason possible: the winter. The settlers who survived the crossing from England were unprepared for what January on the Kennebec felt like. George Popham died that February. Raleigh Gilbert received word that his brother had died and returned to England to claim his inheritance. Without their leaders, the remaining colonists made the only rational decision: build a ship and go home.
The ship they built was the Virginia — a 30-ton pinnace constructed entirely from Maine timber, the first English vessel ever built in the Americas. It was seaworthy enough to carry the survivors back across the Atlantic. The Virginia sailed again several times afterward. The colony it came from is a footnote.
What Remains
Fort Popham State Historic Site stands near the site of the original colony, though the fort you see there today is a Civil War-era granite fortification, not the 1607 original. Archaeological excavations in the 1990s and 2000s revealed the outlines of Fort St. George beneath a farmer's field — the chapel, the storehouse, the outline of walls that held against that first Maine winter for fourteen months.
The Maine that Popham's colonists encountered — the cold, the tides, the timber, the particular quality of light on the Kennebec — is recognizable in the Maine of today. The river hasn't changed. The winters haven't changed. What changed is that subsequent generations figured out how to stay.
