ON DISPLAY
Items that may have been used to build the Virginia and other artifacts from Popham Colony are on display this summer at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath.
The museum's exhibit, which opened Friday and runs through Oct. 15, tells the story of the short-lived English settlement founded at the mouth of the Kennebec River 400 years ago.
On display are pieces of weapons and armor, glass bottles and 17th-century English pottery.
A piece of the wooden post that supported the colonists' storehouse is also part of the exhibit.
It was the discovery of this post that confirmed the colonists had settled on Sabino Head, several miles downriver from the site of the museum.
AT THE LIBRARY
The Portland Public Library suggests these books about the Popham Colony and the Virginia:
"Kennebec: Cradle of Americans," by Robert Peter Tristram Coffin.
"Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present," edited by Richard W. Judd
"The Life and Achievements of Sir John Popham, 1531-1607: Leading to the Establishment of the First English Colony in New England," by Douglas Walthew Rice
"Sabino: Popham Colony Reader, 1602--2003," edited by Andrew J.Wahll.
The library's Portland Room also has nine historical articles, printed between 1863 and 1929, that are available for on-site review. For details on those books, go to http://tinyurl.com/3bj7m4
Staff Writer
PHIPPSBURG — It will be 400 years ago in August that 125 men sailed up the mouth of the Kennebec River on two ships, the Gift of God and the Mary and John, and chose a wooded point on the river's western shore to establish the second English colony in America.
Three days later, according to the expedition's chroniclers, these men started building a ship.
History has not been generous to the Popham colonists. When mentioned at all in the annals of early America, their short-lived settlement is usually a footnote in larger works on its better-known sister colony in Jamestown, Va. Yet in the 14 months they lived beside the Kennebec, the Popham settlers accomplished something no other group of their countrymen had done on what is now the continental United States -- they built a ship, the Virginia.
This squat, wooden vessel -- which is known to have crossed the Atlantic at least twice -- stands at the beginning of a long line of ships built on the Maine coast over the past four centuries, a legacy that spans from the Popham colonists' simple craft to the U.S. Navy destroyer christened at Bath Iron Works last week.
The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram will be exploring this legacy in a summer-long series of articles.
Shipbuilding is one of Maine's original and defining industries, deeply embedded in the state's history and still flourishing today. In earlier centuries, sailors delivered cargo all over the world in Maine-built ships. Today, it is largely through ships and finely built boats that the world knows Maine.
But for all the glory of the industry, nothing exists to commemorate the ship that launched it all.
GROUP WON'T BE DETERRED
That fact inspired a group of volunteers to embark on a 10-year quest to build a replica of the Virginia, sending them deep into the historical record to try to design a ship for which no detailed plans survive.
In some ways, this group's ambitions and struggles are reminiscent of the Popham colonists' own mission.
Where the Popham expedition sailed west to a little-known land, members of the nonprofit have crossed the Atlantic in the other direction. They pored over centuries-old documents in London and Spain to try to reconstruct what the colony's shipwrights might have built.
Like the colonists, members of Maine's First Ship have also had difficulty mustering sufficient resources to keep their venture afloat. The group had aimed to start building this summer, but postponed these plans after falling short of raising the $900,000 needed to begin construction.
Unlike the colonists, though, the committed amateurs who make up Maine's First Ship say they have no intentions of quitting.
"I'm convinced we will build the vessel," said Bud Warren, president of Maine's First Ship's board of directors.
Warren, a retired high school English teacher and Bath Iron Works employee, says there's a reason for his optimism. Almost every Maine resident he's ever explained the project to has recognized its significance, he says.
"They stand a little taller when they realize the extent to which they were a part of American history," he said.
Maine's First Ship traces its beginnings to a gathering of Phippsburg residents around Jane Stevens' kitchen table. Stevens, the 86-year-old matriarch of the nonprofit group, lives in a home pinched between a granite ledge and Atkins Bay near the mouth of the Kennebec. A Maine's First Ship placard sits in her window, and a copy of a historical map of the Popham Colony rests on her piano.
Like many members of the nonprofit group, she can claim a personal connection to Popham's history. Her house is one of several within the bounds of Fort St. George, a star-shaped rampart that surrounded the colony.
It was at Stevens' table that the group's original members met 10 years ago to outline their plans for reconstructing the Virginia, an idea that originated with Phippsburg resident...
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