George Cleeve and the Founding of Falmouth Neck
Near Portland, Maine
The eastern foot of Portland's peninsula, where Fore Street begins its climb toward Munjoy Hill, is where this city began. In sixteen thirty-three, a trader and adventurer named George Cleeve sailed around the cape with his partner Richard Tucker and built the peninsula's first English house near this spot. They had settled first at Spurwink in Cape Elizabeth, loaded everything they owned into a boat, and simply started over on a narrow strip of land jutting into Casco Bay.
Cleeve was not a gentle man, and his early years in Maine were defined as much by legal feuds as by fishing and fur trading. But he was persistent. In sixteen thirty-seven he secured a grant from the colonial proprietor Sir Ferdinando Gorges for fifteen hundred acres across Portland Neck, the land that would become downtown Portland. The settlement went through a series of names: Machegonne, Casco, Falmouth. It would not become Portland until seventeen eighty-six, when the residents petitioned to rename it after the English coastal city with which they felt kinship.
For the first several decades, this was a precarious place. English settlers and Wabanaki communities clashed repeatedly during the colonial wars of the late sixteen hundreds. The settlement was burned and abandoned twice, first during King Philip's War in sixteen seventy-six, and again in a raid in sixteen ninety that left the peninsula nearly empty. It was only in the early seventeen hundreds, after yet another rebuilding, that Portland began to grow in a sustained way, fed by the cod fishery, the timber trade, and the extraordinary natural harbor that Casco Bay provided.
Every city has a founding moment, and Portland's is less a ceremony than a stubborn act of return, again and again, to this particular stretch of waterfront.
