Since state officials orchestrated the mass eviction of Malaga Island residents in 1912, a certain amount of mystery has surrounded the actual lifeways and histories of the this racially-diverse and much maligned island community.
In June, two professors and several students from the University of Southern Maine’s Department of Geography and Anthropology conducted the first archaeological excavation on Malaga, located near the mouth of the New Meadows River in Phippsburg.
Derisively called “No Man’s Land” and “Skid Row Island” for years before the eviction, Malaga yielded 25,000 objects from only 19 test pits, according to USM Associate Professor of Archaeology Nathan Hamilton, who organized and co-directed the project. “The volume of artifacts is richer than we expected,” he explained during a recent phone interview. “It’s extremely exciting.”
The artifacts offer scientific evidence that belie old newspaper and other accounts that described Malaga’s black, white and bi-racial residents as, among other things, lazy, starving, helpless, ignorant, alcoholic and shiftless — a “blight” on an otherwise “picturesque isle” — and desperately in need of removal.
“This was a working community,” Hamilton emphasized. “They were fully engaged in maritime lifeways. They’re making bait; they’re taking fish and lobster. They’re doing intensive longline and net fishing in dories at the mouth of the New Meadows River. We found very few alcohol and medicinal bottles… Malaga Island looks a lot like any other working community at the turn of the century.”
An archaeology report will be finalized in December and submitted to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, which maintains such data statewide.
Most artifacts, said Hamilton, date from 1880 to 1912.
Lawmakers annexed the island and its 60 citizens became wards of the state in 1905, amid political pressure to remove it and its pauper account from Phippsburg’s jurisdiction.
By 1910, racism, Victorian values and the eugenics movement had intensified on the mainland alongside newspaper stories and gossip that claimed the black islanders were escaped southern slaves or their offspring, and that most were “degenerates,” guilty of illiteracy, incest, extreme poverty, and miscegenation.
Most Malaga families possessed 150-year-old ancestral roots in Maine’s coastal and island communities where inter-racial marriages were not uncommon before the Civil War. Whether some islanders honored or broke state law at the time, which prohibited whites from marrying blacks, Indians and “mulattos,” all of them lived and functioned as family units.
Even though most islanders were fishermen and never received aid, the pauper account grew, as did local economic desires to develop Malaga for the lucrative tourist and summer cottage industries.
Gov. Frederick Plaisted and his Executive Council began organizing the removal of Malaga’s citizens shortly after he took office in 1911.
Eviction notices were served that summer. Before Christmas, members of at least two families were forced into the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, later Pineland Center, in Pownal, where all but two islanders died. A widowed Civil War veteran was sent to the Old Soldiers Home in Augusta; his daughter was ordered into a Portland orphanage.
By July 1, eviction day, Plaisted demanded the razing of any structures left, save the red schoolhouse, and the removal of human remains from Malaga’s cemetery. The Seacoast Mission moved the schoolhouse to Loud’s Island; the dead were reburied at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded.
Tombstones marked “1912” signal their places in the cemetery’s back row.
Severely stigmatized before and after their eviction, islanders took their places in the back row of any community that didn’t run them off, or in the homes or the vacant lots of relatives who continued to accept them.
They and their descendants have remained virtually silent ever since. Only the late Gerald McKenney, grandson of Malaga’s most prominent resident, spoke on the record about Malaga, which was never developed. (Island Journal, 1999)
Maine Coast Heritage Trust owns the island and authorized the excavation.
Panning for Artifacts
A cloudy June morning on Malaga greets seven undergraduate students who enrolled in USM’s summer archaeology field school.
As they return to the squared pits they patiently scraped in the ground, Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy Robert Sanford warns one of them away from a poison ivy bush. The ground-cover version is as abundant as the mosquitoes, ticks, and other wild vegetation that covers nearly every inch of ground.
“When you see this landscape, you can tell how much work was done by the people who lived here,” notes Sanford, who co-directs the course. “People were here to do a job. We’re finding evidence of normal working people living normal working lives.”
Old postcards and photographs of Malaga’s homes, which were used to map the sites for excavation, largely depict shingled houses amid a cultivated landscape rather than the “shacks” and “hovels” often cited in old newspapers.
Along a knoll near the spot where the astoundingly independent Eliza Griffin lived in a salvaged sea captain’s wheelhouse 100 years ago, Sanford points out “a trap graveyard.”
Several generations of wooden lobster traps, different sizes and shapes piled in a heap, contrast sharply against today’s wire-coated traps that are stacked on shore. They not only provide a snapshot of trap evolution during the last century but crystallize the above-ground version of what archaeologists are looking to find below Malaga’s surface.
“Shell middens hold the scientific key to unlocking the lives on Malaga,” Sanford explains.
The middens, comprised chiefly of compacted mollusk shells which act chemically to slow decay, preserve food remnants and other debris of human activity. Located near all types of shorelines worldwide, they are routinely explored for information about human existence over time.
Like gold miners in rivers, students are using wood-framed metal screens to remove fine debris from the material they excavated. They work in pairs, culling what’s left for archaeological gold: remnants of Malaga’s inhabitants.
Undergrads Matthew Rowe and Jillian Lovejoy work at the James McKenney family home site and reel off some of their finds: lots of soft shell clams, lobster, crab and bones from fish, birds, sea duck and pig, as well as fish hooks and ceramics.
McKenney, a well-spoken Phippsburg native, moved to Malaga with his wife and several children around 1870. Regarded as one of the best fishermen in the area, he built the largest home, organized commerce, and served as the community’s leader before and during the eviction. At least two of his married children raised their families on Malaga, as well.
Students Valerie Jones and Seth Klenk work at John and Rosella Eason’s home site and describe similar artifacts that were found at McKenney’s site, with several exceptions: a cow bone and shingling hatchet, pipe stems, thousands of nails, and zero fish hooks.
Eason, a master carpenter and mason, often worked on the mainland and, sometimes addressed as “deacon” or “professor,” he conducted religious services on Malaga. He stopped preaching by March 1912, according to an islander’s letter published in the Bath Independent, as remaining residents were dismantling and moving their homes to the mainland–or, fearing more state abductions, fleeing to any place they could find that winter:
Deacon John Eason has given up preaching and prayer-meeting through the troubles on his mind of leaving his old home and seeing all the old folks go too. And William Griffin and George Marks, after a long search, found nobody would keep them but everyone wanted them to keep out of their way, so these two natives are going to bunk on Hermit Tripp’s little island up the New Meadows River where their minds will be easy. . . .
The team found prehistoric material at one site, confirming the presence of Native Americans within the last 1,000 years, explains Hamilton, but the volume and types of artifacts belonging to Malaga’s last residents sparked several surprises.
They found “nearly 30 species of birds, fish, mammals, and shellfish,” he said. “It looks more like something you’d see in a non-English, native site.” English sites typically “contain cod, chicken, pig, sheep, and cow,” evidence of their reliance on domestically-raised foods.
Among the 4,500 bones they catalogued, “there was a fair amount of pig bone and cow bone. It’s likely that they raised pigs there,” he observes.
Also, islanders “culturally manufactured the surfaces” on which they built homes and pathways atop Malaga’s uneven bedrock. “They were creating land to live on,” he continued. “The Eason site was almost entirely constructed on bedrock” lying beneath the compacted shells.
A wide array of shells and fish bones that were discovered reveal facts about the islanders’ diets, work habits, their “intimate knowledge of their environment and resources,” and the marine ecology and fishing history of the area, he said.
There is much more to learn about the islanders and their environment, cautions Hamilton. “We’ve done such a small amount of work in relation to the middens.”