Pejepscot
Pejepscot is a historical settlement first occupied by a subset of the Androscoggin Native Americans, known as the Wabanaki. The region encompasses the current towns of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, Maine, in Sagadahoc and Cumberland counties and was first settled by English settlers in.
History
Native Americans
Before the European colonization of the Americas, Pejepscot was inhabited by the Wabanaki Native Americans. The word Pejepscot has its roots in the Wabanaki language and has different translations. This area refers to a specific section of the Androscoggin River, the major waterway and lifeblood for all who inhabited the region.Pejepscot is the current towns of Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, Maine, in Sagadahoc and Cumberland counties.
Colonization
In the year 1620, a charter was granted by King James II of England toforty noblemen, knights, and gentlemen, calling themselves the Plymouth Company. Their territory extended from the fourteenth to the forty-eighth parallel of latitude, and from sea to sea.
Arriving in 1628, the first permanent European settler in Pejepscot was Thomas Purchase from Dorchester, Dorset, England. On June 16, 1632, the Plymouth Company granted a patent to Purchase and his brother in-law George Way for the lands at Pejepscot, in the current towns of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell Maine. Purchase settled at Pejepscot Falls adjacent to the Site of Fort Andross.
In the proceedings of the Plymouth Council in England, the following minutes were entered:
On August 22, 1639, the purchase made a legal agreement with John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts, placing his land under the jurisdiction of that colony. This was a right to jurisdiction only, not to the soil.
On July 7, 1684, after Purchase fled to Boston during King Philip's War, the land was next settled and purchased through Native Americans by Richard Wharton, a Boston merchant, except for a few islands, in 1714. In the Massachusetts General Court, the land was sold to a group of Boston merchants. organized as the Pejepscot Proprietors. They sold land in small lots as a commercial enterprise to establish a settlement.
By 1715, in the Brunswick portion of Pejepscot, there were only thirty to forty residents. The region of Pejepscot kept that name and location until the Massachusetts General Court constituted the three towns.