The forced eviction of the mixed-race residents of Malaga Island in 1912 and its aftermath will be the subject of a Feb. 12 forum in Portland, sponsored by the Portland Branch of the NAACP.
Malaga, today a densely wooded oasis in the New Meadows River off Phippsburg’s shore, is now owned by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. The forced exile of its residents in 1912 was so thorough that even their dead were removed. Only the shell middens contain evidence of the people who lived there.
The NAACP is sponsoring the forum as part of its Black History Month activities. The event is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. at the University of Southern Maine’s Gerald E. Talbot Lecture Hall in Luther Bonney Hall.
Nathan Hamilton, associate professor of archaeology at USM, will lead the event and present his team’s discoveries, including artifact samples, from the first archaeological dig on Malaga last summer.
John Mosher of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission wrote the only in-depth study of Malaga in 1991 as his USM master’s thesis. He will address social, racial, and other issues that led to the community’s public notoriety and banishment.
Other speakers include NAACP Portland Branch president Rachel Talbot-Ross and Jane Arbuckle, stewardship director for Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
Talbot-Ross is leading the NAACP’s Freedom Trail initiative to mark the paths of significant people and events in black history. At a similar forum at Rockland’s Public Library in October she stressed, “It’s important that people know the facts about [this community] and what the state did to them. It’s a story about racism, classicism, capitalism, eugenics. . . and it’s a story about a mixed-race settlement that survived there for 55 years.” She added, “It’s a story that needs to be taught in Maine schools.”
A sub-part of the NAACP’s Freedom Trail goals is to produce education material about Malaga for schools.
Arbuckle will discuss MCHT’s efforts to develop a management plan that will not only protect the island’s natural resources, but meet the wide-ranging needs of stakeholders, including the local community and the lobstermen who store traps on Malaga, as well as a growing number of schools, tourists, and other groups that want access.
“The island’s important to a lot of people for various reasons,” she explains. “We want to work with the local communities and other stakeholders to get as much input as possible as we put together this plan.”
Hamilton’s archaeology team has unearthed 25,000 objects from Malaga’s shell middens (WWF Oct. 2006). The artifacts provide evidence that the island supported a fishing-based working community like those on other Casco Bay islands.
Malaga’s 45-member population was comprised of white, black and mixed-race families of European, West Indian, African, and Native American descent. Similar enclaves existed in coastal fishing villages in Phippsburg, Harpswell, Brunswick and other towns.
State lawmakers assumed custody in 1905 and the islanders became wards of the state. In 1911, Gov. Frederick Plaisted and government officials sponsored the abduction and institutionalization of one family at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded in Pownal, now called Pineland Center, and orchestrated the eviction of remaining islanders by July 1, 1912. q
For more information about the event call 253-5074.