Chief Polin and the Presumpscot River
Near Portland, Maine
The river you are near once carried salmon, shad, and alewives in numbers that fed the Abenaki people for generations. Then, English settlers built mill dams across the Presumpscot, and the fish could no longer climb upstream. An Abenaki leader named Polin refused to let it pass quietly.
He traveled all the way to Boston to argue his case before the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, demanding that openings be cut in the dams so the fish could return. The help he was promised never truly came. In seventeen fifty-six, Chief Polin was killed during the fighting that followed.
For generations his stand went unmarked. More recently, the people of Westbrook raised a stone here to honor him and the first people of this river.
