JUST IN: Few minutes ago Maine Flight 1105 Crashes in Northwestern New Mexico, Harley-Davidson Facility Da…Joe Hall, an associate professor of history at Bates whose course offerings include Native American history broadly and also specifically — that of the Indigenous people of Maine — got a call for help in early August. His expertise was needed to correct, or deepen, the record about how two Maine landmarks came to be.
Both stories covered the history of places as they related to European settlers. And that caused concern for members of a group Hall belongs to, the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project, which has been working to record the history of the Brunswick area as home to Indigenous people.
Concerned that the stories recounted history within a vacuum, leaving out the stories of the Wabanaki people, they asked Hall to write to the papers’ editors to provide more context.
Two stories about the development of Brunswick had just appeared in the Portland Press Herald and Times Record, intriguing pieces explaining how a Brunswick swamp had been developed into a lush town green in the early 19th century, and why one of the town’s other claims to local fame, its broad Maine Street, is so majestically wide (according to the author, to create a buffer “in case of an ambush”).
Hall, the volunteer historian of the group, quickly wrote two responses and within days of the first story (the one about the Brunswick Mall, as the town green is known), his guest column, “A deeper layer to origins of Brunswick’s Mall,” appeared on the papers’ sites. (His second response, about the origins of Maine Street, has not yet run.)
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