A Brief History of the Pejepscot Region
The region that encompasses Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell borrows its name from the subtribe of the Native American Anasagunticooks who lived here thousands of years ago–the Pejepscot. Though there are several different translations of the word “Pejepscot” (“long, rocky rapids part” and “crooked like a diving snake” are two interpretations) all refer to the Androscoggin River in this region–the major waterway and lifeblood for the communities that sprang up on its banks.
While white visitors had been coming to Maine for years–the Portuguese for the abundant fish in the Gulf of Maine, French explorers like Samuel de Champlain, the English who set up the failed colony at Popham, and possible even the Vikings long before that–the first permanent European settler in the Pejepscot area was Thomas Purchase. Though there is much debate surrounding the year he arrived, sources do agree that Purchase arrived here in the 1620s. Another area of hot debate was where he built his homestead–at least one source says it was near Brunswick’s Water Street, close to the current site of the Captain Daniel Stone Inn.
Purchase had moved onto part of a tract of 1500 acres that would later be granted to him and his brother-in-law George Way in 1632 by the Council of New England. In the following years, other settlers came to the region, causing more and more conflicts with the local Native Americans–with whom, ironically enough, many of these settlers had intended to trade with. After a series of wars between the Native Americans and Europeans, the area finally began to resemble a permanent community in the early 1700s.
To learn more about the region’s early history, see “The Forgotten Founders of Pejepscot: Thomas Purchase & Richard Wharton” by Anna Ridgel, 2005; History of Brunswick, Topsham & Harpswell, Maine by George A. & Henry Warren Wheeler, 1878; and Brunswick, Maine: 250 Years a Town, 1989. The Pejepscot Historical Society has hard copies of all of these sources available to the public in their Research Room.
To learn more about the history of a specific town, click a link below.