Norridgewock

An Abenaki village on the Kennebec, caught between two empires

Norridgewock was the name of both a village and a band of the Abenaki, the "People of the Dawn," who held the interior of Maine along the Kennebec River. The name is an English corruption of Nanrantsouak, "people of the still water between the rapids." Their principal village stood on a plateau inside a broad bend of the Kennebec, opposite the mouth of the Sandy River, in what is now Madison. A surveyor's account of 1716 describes a square fort with a nine-foot palisade, 160 feet on each side, a gate in the middle of every wall, two streets crossing at a great cross in the centre, and 26 log cabins. Fields of maize, beans, pumpkins and squash spread around it, and twice a year the people went down to the coast for fish, seals, clams and seabirds.

The village sat on contested ground. France claimed the Kennebec as the western edge of Acadia and a possible invasion route to Quebec; English colonists held deeds from sachems who often believed they had granted only the right to hunt, fish or pass. In 1694 the Jesuit Sébastien Rale arrived and founded a mission and the first school in Maine. He spoke Abenaki fluently, converted most of the village, and built a bark chapel, then in 1720 a log church 60 feet long, decorated with pictures, where forty Abenaki boys served as acolytes. The English were convinced he was urging the Abenaki to war, and the village's warriors did fight them; its sagamore Bomazeen helped lead the 1694 raid on Oyster River in New Hampshire. In 1705 an English force burned the abandoned village and the chapel.

The end came in Dummer's War. At about three in the afternoon on 23 August 1724, some 80 militiamen under Captain Jeremiah Moulton, with three Mohawks, fell on Norridgewock. Bomazeen was shot crossing the river at a place still called Bomazeen Rips; Chief Mogg was killed fighting from a cabin; Rale died too. The raiders carried the scalps of Rale and more than twenty others to Boston for the bounty, and survivors such as the chief Wowurna left for Canada.

A monument to Rale was set up at Old Point in 1833, and the Old Point site went on the National Register in 1973. Archaeologists have since identified three areas tied to Norridgewock, at Old Point, Tracy Farm and an older flood-prone site, and in 1993 they were designated together as the Norridgewock Archaeological District, a National Historic Landmark. John Greenleaf Whittier set his 1836 poem Mogg Megone in the village.