Two inscriptions can be seen on the 1936-era monument and adjacent historical plaques that are situated on the side lawn of Gorham’s Baxter Memorial Library. The west side inscription reads, “Gorham is one of seven townships granted by Gen. Court [Massachusetts Colonial Legislature] in 1732, to the Narragansett Settlers. On a division of the property among the original grantees, this town was assigned to Capt. John Gorham and one hundred nineteen others, and was then called Narragansett, Number 7.” The north side inscription is, “Capt. John Phinney commenced the first settlement in the town May 26, 1736. This event was celebrated May 26, 1836 and May 26, 1886.”

Passers-by who stop by and read the inscriptions might well assume that 1732 and 1736 are the years when Gorham’s history began.

Not mentioned is the fact that countless generations of people lived their lives and died here over several thousands of years prior to the arrival of the English colonists in 1736. These inscriptions also do not explain that the “Narragansett Townships” were awarded to former soldiers who fought in Massachusetts’ war against the Narragansett Tribe of Rhode Island in the late 1600’s, as well as to their descendants.

While the monument’s words might imply that not much significant happened here before 1732, the Presumpscot valley, Saco valley, and Casco Bay areas were the site of increasingly violent conflicts between indigenous people and English settlers from the mid-1600’s to the mid-1700s, mostly involving disputes about essential fishing, hunting, foraging, and agricultural access.

The human history of what we call the “Portland area” can be said to go back thousands of years. While we don’t know all that was happening in this area 1000 years ago, there is quite a bit known about what was going on in south coastal Maine 400 years ago. Before and just after Europeans arrived here, Wabanaki indigenous people (relatives of today’s Penobscot, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Mi’kmaq people) had created extensive settlements.

In those days, human habitations often centered on rivers, bays, and lakes. The Presumpscot River was an important thoroughfare for people who wished to travel back and forth between Sebago Lake and the coast. Numerous Wabanaki settlements were located along the Presumpscot near places where the fishing was particularly good. These places included present-day Mallison Falls, Little Falls, and Gambo Falls. Besides fishing, local indigenous people began growing corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins in the pre-colonial period with seeds that they received by trading with other native peoples who lived further south.

In a 2010 article by Cassandra M. Brooks of the University of Colorado at Boulder about Chief Polin, an 18th-Century Abenaki ‘sagamore’ (leader) of the Presumpscot Wabanki, she wrote, “Polin’s band moved with the seasonal cycles of a dynamic watershed from the mouth of Sobagw (the Atlantic Ocean) at Casco Bay (place of herons) to Wawôbadenik, the White Mountains. Connected by lines of kinship, trails, and tributaries to other bands in the Saco and Presumpscot River watersheds and beyond, their main villages were at the fisheries of Naquamqueak (Mallison Falls), Saccarappa (Westbrook), and Namascongan (Cumberland Falls, Westbrook).”

At a later point in her article regarding the 1730’s-era settlers’ dams blocking fish passage, Brooks states, “the Presumpscot band’s protests are barely remembered. They are almost entirely absent from New England history and from contemporary conversations about the environment. Traveling through the towns of Portland, Falmouth, Westbrook, Windham, and Gorham today, you will see few signs of their indigenous history. Most mappings of the Wabanaki homeland do not even include a group on the Presumpscot.”