Popham Colony, The English Effort That Almost Held

In the summer of sixteen oh seven, two English ships dropped anchor at the mouth of the Kennebec River, on a low sandy point called Sabino Head. They had crossed the Atlantic in roughly eleven weeks, carrying one hundred twenty men commissioned by the Plymouth Company of Virginia to establish England's first permanent settlement in North America. They built a fort, they built a storehouse, they built a church. Then, in the winter that followed, they built something that no English colonist had ever built in the New World before: a sailing ship.

The colony was named Popham, after its president, George Popham, who was already old when the expedition sailed and died that first winter, in February of sixteen oh eight. The men who survived the winter were led by Raleigh Gilbert, a young man who had never intended to stay long. The pinnace they constructed, a vessel roughly fifty feet long and capable of ocean crossing, was named the Virginia. It was the first English ship built in America.

Here is what makes Popham remarkable in the national story: it was founded the same year as Jamestown. Both were planted in sixteen oh seven by different wings of the same Virginia Company charter. Jamestown, in present-day Virginia, barely survived its first years through disease and starvation. Popham was abandoned in the autumn of sixteen oh eight, when Gilbert received news that his brother had died and that he had inherited the family estate. The colony was not destroyed by attack or starvation. It was abandoned by choice, by a man who decided England mattered more than Maine.

The Virginia, the pinnace built at Popham, sailed back to England fully laden. English promoters pointed to it as proof that Maine's timber was suited for shipbuilding. They were right. Two centuries later, Maine would be the most productive shipbuilding region in North America. The colony that chose to leave planted a seed the state spent the next two hundred years growing.