The Stone Fort at Boothbay

During the American Revolution, the coast of Maine was exposed and contested. British naval vessels patrolled these waters, raiding towns for supplies and threatening the fishing communities that lined the shore. To protect themselves, the people of the Boothbay region built a stone fort and barracks on this site, and soldiers stationed here kept watch over the town and its harbor.

Maine in the seventeen seventies was still part of Massachusetts, a distant province that often had to fend for itself. Local militias and improvised defenses like this one were the real fabric of Revolutionary-era security along hundreds of miles of coastline. The fort is long gone, but the marker left here acknowledges what the soldiers who stood at this post understood: that independence was defended not only at Bunker Hill and Yorktown, but on cold granite shores like these.