Megunticook — the Penobscot Homeland
Near Camden, Maine
Long before any European settler arrived in Penobscot Bay, the people who lived here knew this stretch of coast by names that described its physical character rather than honoring distant rulers. The Penobscot, one of the peoples of the Wabanaki Confederacy, knew the bays, rivers, and headlands of midcoast Maine in precise and detailed ways built up over thousands of years.
Mount Megunticook, in the Camden Hills, and the river that runs below Camden both carry versions of the same Native name: Megunticook, which sources translate as great swells of the sea or as big mountain harbor. Some accounts link it to the silhouette of the hills as seen from the bay.
The Penobscot used the rivers and coastal waters of midcoast Maine seasonally, fishing for salmon and alewives in the spring runs, gathering shellfish on the flats, and moving inland to hunt in the fall and winter. European settlement pushed them steadily northward and eastward over the course of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. The Penobscot Nation today is federally recognized, with its headquarters on Indian Island in the Penobscot River near Old Town, about fifty miles north of Camden. The mountain and the river still carry their name, and the tribe that named them is still here.
