The lost colony

Part 3

by Ellen Barry

If you were not familiar with the Popham chapter of American history, don't worry. Jeffrey Brain, Popham's new representative in the 20th century, would not have heard of it himself except through a series of flukes. During the summer of 1990, while visiting a friend who had won in a church raffle a week in the small town of Popham Beach, Brain happened to read a small plaque about the colony. Brain was curating an exhibit on colonial excavation, and was surprised to hear that Popham existed at all, much less on a spot now distinguished by a parking lot and two houses.

In fact, the Popham expedition has been more or less blotted out of colonial history, in part because no one had proof that it had existed. As recently as 1907, when locals were preparing to celebrate the tricentennial of Fort St. George's founding, "Plymouth put up a real holler about it," recalls Jane Stevens, 76, whose house is on the site of the original colony.

And Maine historians were equally resentful of their southern neighbors, whose claim to settling New England became a historical truism. In 1862, on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the Popham landing, the keynote speaker described a Puritan blitzkrieg that "endeavored to exterminate every thing that stood in the way of their ambition" and "gloried in extirpating every trace of title granted for others." This spat was most heated in the middle of the 19th century, but some degree of animus has survived to the late 20th.

"People give Plymouth credit that is not due," says Stevens dryly. "Jamestown was the first colony. Plymouth has a way of forgetting that."

The town of Popham Beach is small -- Stevens, asked for a population figure, makes a show of counting on her fingers -- but locals have no difficulty remembering, or sympathizing with, the Popham colonists. "In the winter there's snow up to your gizzard, and the wind blows like hell," says local restaurateur Jack Hayes. "In August, you don't know it, but it's right around the corner." Stevens herself, who sometimes worries about blowing away when she gets out of her car, figures the site of Fort St. George is "the coldest spot south of Greenland."

And even if she didn't hear his ghost moaning under her house every time the wind blows, it's unlikely Stevens would forget George Popham. Since the surfacing of a Michael Popham from England in 1981, Stevens has become an unofficial clearinghouse for Pophams all over the world. In 1984 they descended on the tiny town in two Trailways buses for an impromptu 377th-anniversary celebration, despite Stevens's good-humored fears that the town "would sink." And every year around August 17 -- the day that Fort St. George was founded -- Stevens and her sister Ellen organize "George Popham Day," which begins with a potluck in the library and culminates in a flare-lit parade down the only road in town.

"It's all over in half an hour, but it's pretty," says Stevens. "Things get dull around here," she adds, unnecessarily.

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.