With war in Iraq, sanctions in Syria, bombings in Saudi Arabia, and an uprising in Israel’s occupied territories, you might have second thoughts about relocating to the Middle East these days. Would it make any difference if someone told you Judgment Day was at hand?
It did for some 19th century residents of the Jonesport area. In the summer of 1866, 156 Maine farmers, fishermen and merchants followed the founder of an evangelical church onto a locally built ship and sailed off to Palestine to help prepare the Holy Land for the end of time.
Pastor George Adams and his “loud-voiced” wife had arrived in town four years earlier, telling anyone who would listen that they could help speed the Messiah’s return, by helping develop the Holy Land. He was a persuasive speaker, and pretty soon his new adherents were selling their homes and property and turning the proceeds over to him. They remained loyal even after the Machias Union revealed that Adams was actually an out-of-work actor with a well-documented history of alcoholism and impersonating clergymen back in southern Vermont and western Massachusetts.
Adam had told the settlers that they would settle on a three million-acre grant of land he had acquired, where they would build a model farm. The Bible prophesied that the Jews of the world would gather in Palestine in preparation for Judgment Day and, when they did, the Mainers would sell them crops, land and supplies. As historian Harold Davis later wrote, “There was to be prosperity and salvation for all.”
But on arrival in Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv, Israel), the colonists discovered that Adams had not secured a land grant. They camped out on the beach and in the sheds and outbuildings of the German consul’s garden, surrounded by heaps of lumber, possessions and agricultural tools. While Adams negotiated the purchase of a ten-acre tract near the city, 16 of the Mainers died and many others became gravely ill.
Once the land was secured, the colonists constructed a church and school from their stock of Downeast lumber, surrounding it with 17 “neat square cottages.” Adams, for his part, ensconced himself in the best of the homes with most of the group’s supplies and all of their money and proceeded to drink himself into a stupor.
Things quickly turned disastrous. The crops failed, supplies ran out, and the Ottoman government (which then ruled the region) became hostile. Adams, the New York Herald reported, was “seen lying in the streets of Jaffa in a state of the most degrading, beastly drunkenness.” Most of the colonists were desperate to return home, and even published an open appeal “to philanthropy and common humanity” to help them return to Maine.
Their appeal was not ignored. J. Augustus Johnson, a senior U.S. diplomat in Syria paid $1,250 to ship 16 Mainers home. Fifty-four raised ship passage on their own. Forty more scraped up enough resources to board a steamer headed for Egypt and, as fate would have it, came face-to-face with Mark Twain, who happened to be on board.
The colonists “were miserable…and they lay about the decks seasick all the voyage, which about completed their misery,” Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. “They gave [information] reluctantly and in a very fragmentary condition, for, having been shamefully humbugged by their prophet, they felt humiliated and unhappy.” Fortunately a fellow passenger, Moses Beach of the New York Sun, provided $1,500 to pay their passage on to Maine, sparing them an uncertain future on the docks of Alexandria.
Back in Maine, the settlers’ humiliation continued. “Their reception was cool; there were rude jokes and malicious gossip,” according to Davis, who interviewed the daughter of one of the colonists. “Their children were taunted by schoolmates and looked upon as ‘queer’ [while the] once prosperous settlement of Indian River, home of so many of them, was virtually wiped out, and…has not recovered.”
But a handful of the colonists stayed on in the Holy Land. Nearly a decade later, travelers reported that an elderly Jonesport woman was doing laundry for the guests of one of Jaffa’s hotels, while others worked as tour guides or scrounged out a living in their nearly-abandoned American village. But one Mainer, Rolla Floyd, rose to become the grand master of the Masonic Temple in Jerusalem and one of the region’s best-known guides, showing Ulysses Grant and the Emperor of Austria around Palestine. A visiting Protestant clergyman, Henry Coleman, reported that Floyd spoke Arabic with an “accurate fluency acquired by but few not born in the desert” and was “unquestionably the best informed in biblical history and topography of any man living.”
For their part, the Adamses fled the Promised Land with money stolen from an unwitting English traveler, and vanished into history. Perhaps they were relieved that the Messiah had not showed up to pass judgment on them after all.
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, which will be published in the spring by Viking Press. He lives in Portland and maintains a website at colinwoodard.com.