Malaga Island, Phippsburg

Malaga Island, a fascinating 42-acre island a stone’s throw from Sebasco village, is part of the Maine Freedom Trail, a network of places important to the African diaspora and Black history. The island is tucked into a channel between Bear Island and Phippsburg’s mainland, and can only be reached by boats, including kayaks and canoes. (Malaga is an Abenaki word for cedar. A recent archaeological excavation has found that Native Americans inhabited the land within the last 1,000 years.)

History notes: The ill-fated history of Malaga Island’s mixed-race community, which lived on the island for about 50 years until 1912, is increasingly well-known in Maine, though it took many decades for it to be officially recognized. In 2023, the island was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2010, Gov. Baldacci apologized for the injustices the state committed a century earlier against the island residents.

The Maine Coast Heritage Trust website offers a lot of information about the island, which was first settled in the early 1860s by Henry Griffin, a Black man born free in Maine. He was joined by some of his relatives, as well as the granddaughters and other descendants of Benjamin Darling. Darling was an African man from the West Indies who arrived in Maine in the late 1700s. In 1794, he bought Horse Island (now Harbor Island) a half-mile southeast of Malaga Island, supposedly with a reward for saving a man known as “Captain Darling,” who may have once been his owner. His descendants spread out to live on islands in the New Meadows River and eastern Casco Bay.

Within a few years, the Griffins and Darlings were joined on Malaga by other Black, white, and mixed-race families, who mostly made their living by fishing, just as their ancestors likely had done so for decades. Some also had jobs on the mainland, at resorts and farms. The islanders married—some were interracial couples. The islanders didn’t farm the poor soil on Malaga, but they kept small garden plots near their homes at the northern end of the island. The Heritage Trust writes, “The hardscrabble existence of Malaga’s residents was akin to those in many other coastal Maine fishing communities.”

Following the Civil War, the island community became increasingly threatened by racial prejudice, as ideas like nativism and eugenics became more mainstream across the US. Mainlanders in Phippsburg were put-off by the poor condition of the island homes and thought the sight of them would offend wealthy summer visitors. Some envisioned replacing the little community on Malaga with a prosperous summer colony.

While the original date of Malaga’s settlement is a little less certain, the final year of the community’s presence on the island, 1912, is well known, since that is when the state responded to an eviction order by the heirs of the island’s supposed owner (for whom a deed has never been found and who likely never paid taxes for the land). State officials assessed the inhabitants and their houses, finding that eight were “feeble-minded” and institutionalizing them. The rest were ordered to leave. The state moved quickly to purchase the island for $471 to prevent resettlement (and also exhumed what bodies were buried there, reburying them at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded, now Pineland). The Maine Coast Heritage Trust purchased Malaga Island in 2001 at a discount from its owner.

Trail notes: There is a one-mile loop around the island, with a 0.2-mile spur at the south end to the rocky ledge of the shore. The small public dock is on the west side of the island’s northern tip. (Just a warning: The channel between Malaga and Bear Island to the west of Malaga, is dicey and shallow during low tide.) From the dock, walk up the gangway and you’ll see a trail leading straight into the shrubs and then into woods. Veer right at the first intersection, close to one of the old stone-lined wells, to find the information kiosk just a few feet away. But don’t miss the beach of blindingly white crushed shells (a historic midden) close to the dock!

If you want to check out the scant remains of the Malaga settlement, head left at the kiosk toward the small open meadow at the island’s northern tip. You’ll see numbered stations corresponding to the Heritage Trust’s self-guided tour. In a grassy area, you can see the shallow depression of at least one small former home, a gnarled lilac tree probably planted by an islander, and a stone-lined well. If you continue down the trail clockwise, you’ll enter the forest and pass the site of the schoolhouse on your left. It was dismantled after the eviction. Not much visibly remains of the settlement today, but archaeologists have found around 50,000 artifacts from island digs, including fish bones, ceramics, pipe stems, leather, nails, fishhooks, and coins, all circa 1880 to 1912. They’re kept at the Maine State Museum in Augusta.

The trail is mostly flat, and passes through red spruce and fir forest with beautiful moss floors. It passes huge hunks of exposed bedrock, part of “bedrock ridges extending north-south…with elevations ranging from 40 to 60 feet above sea level.“ There’s a small marsh at the southern end and a couple of brackish ponds. If you follow the spur trail to the southern tip of the island, you can clamber up onto the rugged rocks for a view toward the open ocean.

Directions: The small, well-built dock is on the northwest shore of the island. You can also land on the white shell beach just north of the dock. The nearest public boat launch on the mainland is Holbrook Street Landing in Cundy’s Harbor, in Harpswell, with three parking spaces. Another possible launch is from the southern end of Sawyer Road, at New Meadows Marina in Brunswick, which is farther from the island but has a big parking area. The Maine Coast Heritage Trust also says it owns a 15-foot-wide right-of-way easement on the Phippsburg mainland to provide shore access from Bakers Wharf Road extension, with room for four cars, but I am not exactly sure where this is, though it’s most likely from Baker’s Wharf.