What’s Brunswick’s story? How do we understand this place? We know it, don’t we, as a place where people have come to live, work, raise families and play for decades, for centuries, for millennia. It’s a good place, one of the best.
We tell stories of the places we settle in various ways. We write books. We put up historical markers. We establish museums. We write history articles in our newspapers. It’s good to know our story and to tell it to one another.
In places we recognize as significant for our story we also create parks – parks like the ones at Bunker Hill or Gettysburg or Seneca Falls or Ground Zero. Some of them are heroic or joyous places; some are sad places. Some are both. They all help to tell our story, and it’s important we tell our story and tell it well. It’s not just about the past. Knowing our story helps us make the future what we truly want it to be. The stories – it’s never just one story — gather us into a community.
So how does Brunswick tell its story, especially the beginning? There’s a website for the town government that tells some of the story. We have a history center that tells even more of the story. There are a few historical markers around the town. And right at the end of Maine Street, just before you cross the river to Topsham, there’s a small, town park. That park seems to tell the very beginning of the story because it’s called the 250th Anniversary Park. It was established in 1989, 250 years after the town of Brunswick was incorporated as a town in 1739. That’s the beginning, right? Or so it seems: that’s how we are telling the story today.
But that’s a falsehood. 1739 is not when people first began coming here to live, work, raise families and play together. Our real story as a place began well before 1739. In truth, the first humans came here at least 9000 years ago. They gathered food at the edge of Maquoit Bay. They hunted in the woods along the stream banks like Bunganuc Brook and Mere Brook. They came in large numbers when the salmon swam back up the Androscoggin from the ocean to spawn upriver. These Native Americans, a group of the Abenaki, came especially to the lower falls of the Androscoggin because there the fishing was particularly good.
When European settlers began arriving in the 16th Century, they too came to Maquoit Bay and to the lower falls of the Androscoggin. At first there were peaceful relations with the Abenaki, but as more European settlers arrived there was conflict. The new settlers built a broad road, 12 rods wide (that’s about 66 yards across) from the Bay to the falls. Why so wide? To make it easier to defend. (Today, we call that Maquoit Avenue and Maine Street.) In 1715 these European settlers built Fort George at the lower falls. That fort clearly communicated “keep away” to the indigenous people who had lived here for centuries. It said, “this is now our land.”
After nearly a century of conflict between the Abenaki and the newly arrived European settlers, the Native Americans were driven inland. And in 1739 the government of Massachusetts established Brunswick as a town. The town was incorporated when the Native Americans had been decimated. But we’re mistaken if we think that’s when Brunswick began.
That moment, the incorporation of a town of European settlers, is what’s memorialized today by the park near the lower falls. The incorporation of the town is one story. Far more important, however, are stories about the encounters between the Abenaki and the Europeans. It’s about their conflict and how that ended. These are stories we should tell at the park by the lower falls – particularly at that place.
Where in Brunswick do we tell the story of the Abenaki? Where do we tell the story of their being pushed inland by these newly arrived Europeans? Today, we tell it nowhere. Not on the town website. Not at the history center. Barely at all in any historical markers. And we falsely tell the story of the lower falls by calling the park the 250th Anniversary Park.
Calling it by that name erases the Abenaki from our story. It erases their lives here over many centuries, and it erases their presence among us today. The town should choose a new name for that park, one that tells a fuller, more honest story about who we are as a community.
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