A simple email to the Lincolnville Historical Society a few months ago woke us up. “Why doesn’t the LHS focus on the Indigenous people?” it said, or something to that effect.

Why not indeed? Local history (and Lincolnville is not alone in this approach) has traditionally started with the first settler, the white guy and his intrepid wife, the southern New Englanders originally from, mainly, England. Who was the first permanent settler we debate among ourselves, who the first white child born here?

We looked at the first U.S. census, 1790 it was, and noted all the names still represented here. And if a name has disappeared, chances are their DNA hasn’t. When women married, their original or maiden names are lost, but not their genetics. Lincolnville is rich in those long histories of early families, the settlers who turned these 39 square miles of boggy, rocky, hilly land into homesteads and pastures, hayfields, lime quarries, and sawmills.

But hold on.

They weren’t the first by thousands of years. Not the first people to call this home.

And that wasn’t news to the LHS either. Tucked away in the drawers of a storage cabinet in the second floor Schoolhouse Museum are artifacts archaeologist Harbour Mitchell discovered at a site near Ducktrap. Coming upon the remains of a midden or pre-historic trash pit on the shore which was rapidly eroding, he’d figured that the land above it was probably a good place to dig.

With permission from landowners and working “under the gun” on sites that were being developed, he dug a number of test pits, one-meter square holes, near that midden.

Both he and I are fuzzy about the year, but it was likely thirty years ago. The only role I had in his work was to offer to store the stone tools, flakes, faunal remains (shell and bones) and ceramic sherds that he found in the series of test pits he dug along the shore.

When that simple question was posed – “tell us about the early people” – a committee came together to see what we had in our collection. Harbour, who has more recently been working on historical archaeology such as Camden’s Conway house site and now at an early Waldoboro settlement, agreed to help us organize his long-ago work at Ducktrap. For the past several months he’s worked with Cyrene Slegona and Jane Bernier every Friday morning, sorting through those drawers and categorizing what had become a playground for mice.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much damage they could do to these bits and pieces of our earliest residents’ lives other than gnaw at the wooden drawers. But they’d left behind enough poop for the three workers to label it a hazardous site requiring disposable gloves. The trio were working in lousy conditions too, since because of the ongoing work on the building, the museum had no lights or heat. But bundled up in winter jackets and huddled close to the windows for light, they got it done.

Last Friday morning Harbour presented a workshop on the materials and tools found in the Ducktrap collection. His over-riding theme was that the people who used these tools weren’t “primitive”. Their intelligence in solving the problems of food and shelter was obvious, as they worked with what they had: stone, ceramics, and wood/fiber.

The coastal peoples who left behind these artifacts were mariners. The dug-out canoes they built were sea-going ships, capable of holding up to 20 men, paddling as far as Monhegan where they harpooned 1,000- pound swordfish.

Think about that.

A dug-out was a sophisticated craft, made from a tree cut down with stone axes, the enormous trunk, shaped and gouged with stone tools the people had made. The harpoons were cleverly made to separate from their shaft, embedded in the animal – fish or seal – but with a line for the man to work, exhausting the critter until it could be secured. And then getting it back to shore.

The earliest people, Paleoindians, arrived in Maine soon after the glacier retreated between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago. The land was tundra then, treeless, cold. Woolly mammoths roamed. Throwing weapons were devised, something like the harpoons, since you wouldn’t want to get too close to an elephant.

Bits of pottery found at the Ducktrap site show impressions made with a cord-wrapped stick, apparently decorative. Pots were made with coils, just like the ones we all made in kindergarten, then smoothed to solidify the walls. Harbour told how a broken piece shows the structure of built-up coils of clay.

By the way, who were these people? Indians of course, the clumsy, inaccurate and misleading word that those of us over a certain age grew up with. Much as we stumble over pronouns like “they, them, theirs” for he or she, language can be a stumbling block as we all move into a more inclusive world. According to the Worldbank :

“Indigenous Peoples are distinct social and cultural groups that share collective ancestral ties to the lands and natural resources where they live, occupy or from which they have been displaced. The land and natural resources on which they depend are inextricably linked to their identities, cultures, livelihoods, as well as their physical and spiritual well-being.”

The geology of our coast is intrinsic to understanding these first settlers of our town, though of course, the boundaries are ours, not theirs. 25,000 years ago, the Laurentide ice sheet covered the whole state with at least 1.5 miles of ice, pushing the earth’s crust downward over 500 feet. It reached all the way out to the Georges Bank, 60 miles out from Cape Cod. When the edges of the ice sheet began to retreat the land remained depressed for a time, and low areas of Maine were flooded around 17,000 years ago. Then, with the weight of the ice gone, the earth’s crust began to rebound and the ocean bottom emerged.

At the time of those first Paleoindians’ arrival the ocean level was about 180 feet lower than today. Islesboro was just a low hill; the shoreline was miles beyond that. Georges Bank was an island. With the Bank as a barrier the whole Gulf of Maine was more of an inland sea, somewhat protected from the battering of the open ocean. Paddling out to Monhegan in those times seems more do-able.

But by 3000 years ago, sea had risen to its present level. Islesboro was an island, Georges a shallow bank on the edge of the Continental Shelf, and incidentally, a rich fishing ground.

Maine definitely has a complicated geologic history. Even looking at the shore in the context of the historic era, say about the 1700s when we have written testimony in the form of maps and documents, we’re learning (rather re-learning) of the work our immediate ancestors did.

For instance, in 1793 there was a road from Belfast to Thomaston, right close to the shore. Remnants of that road show up on old maps, though it’s hard to make that work looking at the rocky precipice along much of that length. It even lived in the memory of certain old-timers. Erosion, the same forces that destroyed most of the middens along the shore (Wally and I noticed on near the Whales Tooth Pub many years ago, but it’s gone now) most likely wore away evidence of the shore road long ago.

Corelyn Senn, who is in the process of recreating a map and narrative of Lincolnville Beach’s harbor system, is also on the trail of this forgotten road.

This is how we do local history. With the work of experts like Harbour, the curiosity and tenacity of a Corelyn (though I can’t think of another one just like her!), along with the sometimes-tedious job of scanning and transcribing old documents and diaries – Connie Parker, Kim Clark, Karin Womer, Cheryl Wienges to name a few. And the years and years of work by cousins Isabel Morse Maresh and Jackie Young Watts to tell of those first white families whose toil made this a town. And just to lighten it all up a bit, Rosey Gerry’s long memory of the way it used to be through story-telling, leading tours along forgotten roads, and generally making us laugh.

This town has a complex history. And it started with an unnamed, unnumbered group of people figuring out how to live on a coast stripped nearly bare by the retreating glacier.

Library Plant Sale

The library is offering colorful geraniums and a selection of trees and shrubs by preorder as part of its May plant sale. The order deadline is May 11.

The beautiful geraniums from Evergreen Valley Farm in Searsmont will come in a choice of red, white or pink. The plants will be in 4-inch pots for $5 each.

Choices of trees, all raised at Crystal Lake Farm and Nursery in the town of Washington, include red oak, yellow birch, tulip poplar, honey locust and katsura tree (the only nonnative). Native shrubs from the farm include black chokeberry, pagoda dogwood, silky dogwood, gray dogwood and common witch hazel. These will all come as two-to-four-inch bare root stock at a cost of $10 each.

Plant pickup will be Saturday, May 21 at the library's big in-person plant sale from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. On that day shoppers will find a wonderful variety of hardy perennials raised in the library gardens, including bachelor buttons, bearded iris, lilacs, bush honeysuckle, beebalm, garden phlox, evening primrose and more; spectacular daylilies originally from Barth’s farm and grown for many years in a local home garden; and annual flowers and vegetable seedlings.  

All proceeds from this sale will benefit the library. For more information and to preorder geraniums, trees and shrubs, please email us or call 706-3896.

School

Here are some dates to mark down for parents, grandparents and friends of LCS music students:

May 10 – Middle School Band and Chorus – 6:30 p.m

May 19 – 5 th Grade Band – 6:30 p.m.

May 23 – K-2 Concert – 2 p.m.

May 26 – Grade 3-4 Concert – 2 p.m.

Help support our PTO at the Flatbread Fundraiser, Tuesday, May 4, 4-10 p.m. at American Flatbreak Company, 399 Commercial Street (Route 1), Rockport. A portion of all pizza sales, both eat-in and carry-out will go to the LCS-PTO.

Check out the Lynx for numerous offerings of programs and projects for families and kids.

Soup Cafe 

Note that there will not be Soup Cafe on the first Thursday of each month, but on all the other Thursdays it will be at noon at the Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road.

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In the Garden at Last!

Finally, the soil is warm enough to plunge hands into, though the wind can be chilly. Someone said, “Maine doesn’t do spring well.” But the first row of peas is in, along with the spinach. Bit by bit our dooryard is getting cleaned up. Better Homes and Gardens it will never be, but then, never boring!