Summer has finally come to New England, and I’m getting ready to pack my bags and head north to the islands of Casco Bay, Maine, for my annual sojourn to “Vacationland.”
I’ll be one of roughly 14 million tourists heading north this year. Maine was not always a popular tourist destination; the state cultivated this image more than a century ago in direct response to economic hardship at the turn of the 20th century, as “a lethargic fishing and shipping industry” sunk its maritime economy.1 While tourism filled a vacuum left by industrial and maritime decline, it also put pressure on the state to market and value its natural beauty in ways that could be packaged and sold to wealthy travelers.
Specifically, Casco Bay’s natural beauty was understood as a core economic resource.2 By the late 19th century, the bay’s many islands functioned as a coherent tourism zone: “Every summer, visitors from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Canada flocked to the state, staying two weeks or a month or — beginning in the 1880s — even all summer.”3 Politicians, state officials, wealthy benefactors, and newspaper reporters debated about the importance of attracting and catering to the demands of summer visitors.4
Part of what drove the demand for this new form of tourism to coastal and rural areas was a moral panic directed at the over-crowded slums and tenements of urban centers—a panic fueled by xenophobia, racism, and classism, callously justified by eugenics and pseudoscience. Maine seized this moment and advertised its scenic riches as an antidote to the ills of society. Thus, the creation of “Vacationland” depended on selective vision: curating a coastal and civic image that erased the impurities of poverty, industrial pollution, and immigrant labor.
This was the precise moment that Malaga Island—a small island near Phippsburg at the mouth of New Meadows River, lying along the northern end of Casco Bay—came under state scrutiny. Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race community of about forty to fifty fishermen, laborers, and their families, initially settled in the 1860s by the descendants of Benjamin Darling.5
Malaga Island residents with missionary, 1909.
Darling, a “freed slave and known to townsmen as ‘sturdy, industrious’ and ‘with many staunch friends,’” purchased nearby Horse Island from the Lithgow family on 6 July 1794, which is known today as Harbor Island.6 He and his family lived on the island until about 1847, when it was sold to Joseph Perry.7 It was likely at this point that several of Darling’s descendants and a group of fisherman began living on Malaga, “an unoccupied island with little but stark beauty to recommend it.”8
In addition to the Darling family, residents of Malaga were largely Irish, Scottish, New England, and Portuguese fishermen and laborers, over time comprising a “confederation of interrelated families struggling to get on in the best way they could…[living] mostly on the produce of small gardens, on fishing, lobstering, clam digging, and selling bait to trawlers.”9 The islanders were largely left to carry out their lives and livelihoods independently. It wasn’t an easy existence, but the community was close-knit, welcoming, and self-sufficient for decades.
By the 1890s, however, with Maine’s tourism industry gaining momentum and eugenics in vogue, rural populations pointed to pockets of poor and marginalized communities—often living on unclaimed islands or wooded lots—as a social and economic problem in need of eradication. Indeed, it was widely believed at the time “that poverty, crime, and mental retardation stemmed directly from ‘retrograde’ families, and that removing such ‘decaying stock’ would improve the moral fiber of society.”10 Malaga Island, with its poor, mixed-race population occupying increasingly valuable coastal real estate, was in the crosshairs of this volatile moment.
Suddenly, this small island became the source of enormous public debate, and sensationalized accounts filled newspapers from Portland and Bath to Boston. As Maine’s maritime economy worsened, so did the economic self-sufficiency of Malaga Islanders. The nearby town of Phippsburg was forced to pay pauper support for island residents, and the “make-do dwellings” were deemed an “embarrassing eyesore” to passing ships now more often carrying tourists than raw goods.11 Phippsburg tried to distance itself from any responsibility, claiming the island belonged to Harpswell, Cumberland County, but in 1903 the legislature ruled Malaga a district of Phippsburg. Just two years later, Phippsburg successfully rid itself of its responsibility for the island, and Malaga became a ward of the state.
Damaging press, economic concerns, and powerful prejudice fomented persistent public opposition to the islanders. After years of targeting the residents of Malaga Island for eviction, “the State of Maine ruled that Malaga Island was owned by the Perry family of Phippsburg”—the same family that had purchased Horse Island from the Darling family back in 1847.12 The Perry family filed papers with the state to have the islanders evicted, and in early 1912, they sold the island to the State of Maine for $400.13 The islanders were forced to vacate by 1 July 1912, and eight of the forty-five residents were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded.14 The evicted residents were given no assistance with resettlement, but “dismantled and removed” their homes on the island themselves.15 Finally, “the state exhumed the cemetery remains on Malaga Island, combining seventeen individuals into five caskets, and moved them to the cemetery at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded.”16
The island was never inhabited again, and today it is a public preserve managed by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
There are various rumors and stories—many insulting and reliant on racial stereotypes—about the origins and fate of Malaga Island and its residents. Finding the truth behind some of these stories has been challenging. However, by immersing myself in the history of this specific place within its context of Maine’s burgeoning tourism industry and the prevalence of pseudoscientific prejudices popularized by the press, I was better able to identify useful record-sets and glean information from the spotty records that do exist.
That will be the topic of Part II of this series, where I will explore some of the records I used to make sense of the Malaga families I researched and the stories they uncovered.
Sources
1. John F. Bauman, Gateway to Vacationland: The Making of Portland, Maine (University of Massachusetts, 2012), 107.
2. Bauman, Gateway to Vacationland, 125.
3. Bauman, Gateway to Vacationland, 132.
4. Bauman, Gateway to Vacationland, 129.
5. Joanna Torow, Kate McBrien, Patricia Pierce Erikson, Malaga Island: Fragmented Lives (Maine State Museum, 2013), 1–3..
6. William David Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” Down East, (Nov 1980), p. 54.
7. Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” p. 54.
8. Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” p. 54.
9. Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” p. 55, 83.
10. Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” p. 55-56.
11. Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” p. 55.
12. Torow, McBrien, Erikson, “Malaga Island,” 1-3.
13. Torow, McBrien, Erikson, “Malaga Island,” 1-3.
14. Torow, McBrien, Erikson, “Malaga Island,” 1-3.
15. Torow, McBrien, Erikson, “Malaga Island,” 1-3.
16. Torow, McBrien, Erikson, “Malaga Island,” 1-3; Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” p. 85.