As the fisherman’s skiff slices through the calm harbor waters off Phippsburg toward a nearby island, Gerald Talbot scans the rocky cliffs ahead for any vestige of Maine’s African-American history.

Moments later, the 69-year-old black activist reaches the shore and begins retracing timeworn footsteps to a path that winds through Malaga Island’s 41 wooded acres. Barely a trace remains of the decaying lean-tos or ramshackle cabins that were once home to as many as 50 black, white and biracial people who occupied the island for two generations.

The buildings were razed in 1912 by order of Maine’s governor who annexed the disputed island as state property and evicted its inhabitants. In the years leading up to the relocation, newspapers of the day regularly castigated the settlement in weekly installments with headlines such as “Malaga, the Home of Southern Negro Blood.” The squatters on the island were described as “lazy and shiftless” uneducated paupers who lived in immoral squalor in their sanctuary by the sea. So complete was the state’s effort to eradicate the islanders that even the dead were exhumed and reburied 40 miles inland.

“I guess they wanted to make sure that nobody was coming back and that this community disappeared without a trace,” observed Talbot, a past president of the Maine chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Maine’s first black state legislator. “It looks like they did a good job.”

Now, 89 years after the forced relocation of the island’s inhabitants, Talbot and others question whether the state had any greater right to the island than those who once called it home. When the New England African American Historical and Genealogical Society holds its annual meeting in Portland this fall, Talbot hopes the organization will officially request that Maine officials investigate the sequence of events that prompted the state’s actions. In addition to the call for new state scrutiny of the legal grounds for the eviction, Talbot said Maine officials must acknowledge the injustices committed against the state’s black, white and biracial residents.

“I have no doubts that what happened on Malaga Island was racially motivated and legally questionable,” said Talbot, a Bangor native who is co-writing a book on black history in Maine. “We want a state investigation to uncover the true reasons that Maine’s government took such a heavy-handed approach toward its own people. Maine residents and the descendants of those from Malaga Island are owed an apology from the governor for what was done.”

When a formal demand for an apology is delivered, Gov. Angus S. King said he will honor the request. The governor, who lives only a half-hour from Phippsburg, is well aware of Malaga’s troubled past.

“It’s one of those chapters of history that you’re not very proud of and none of us really fully understand what the motivations were at the time, but it’s not a happy moment at all in the state’s history,” he said. “It is something that the state should regret and we should apologize, even though it’s hard to apologize for something that happened nearly 90 years ago. There doesn’t seem to be any justification for what happened there.”

Good intentions?

Maine historians tend to agree with King. But whether the paper trail at the state archives will lead to anything more revealing than an accounting ledger remains to be seen. Published accounts from 1912 depict the state’s actions as benevolent, an effort to save the poverty-stricken inhabitants from themselves and to relieve the surrounding communities from the expenses associated with their care.

William David Barry, an archivist for the Maine Historical Society, and John Mosher, an archeologist for the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, have spent years researching the enclave’s sad history. Barry was among the first writers in modern times to shed new light on the island’s inhabitants in a 1980 article for Down East magazine titled, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island.”

Mosher endured brushes with poison ivy and ravenous mosquitoes in an attempt to uncover evidence of the settlement. He eventually located the rough stone foundation of a home believed to have been owned by James McKenny on the island’s northern tip near the mouth of the New Meadows River. Acknowledging there is some truth to the theory that state officials really believed they were improving the lot of the island’s poor souls during the 1912 eviction, Mosher also contends it is just as likely that politics were involved.

Unsettled and remote, many of Maine’s coastal islands were largely ignored by the mainland population until the early 20th century when well-heeled families from Boston and New York sought escape from the urban summer heat by constructing mansions and opulent resorts in places like Bar Harbor and Grindstone Neck. In 1911, according to Barry, the state claimed to have located the rightful heirs of the property and purchased Malaga Island for $400. Today, Talbot and others wonder whether the state’s acquisition had more to do with rampant land speculation at the turn of the century than public welfare.

“Like the reporter in Watergate said, ‘follow the money,'” said Mosher, who supports Talbot’s demand for a state apology. “I can’t imagine by anybody’s standards that this is anything but a debacle. Although it was typical of the time, if this happened today, the governor would be impeached – if not shot.”

Families adrift

Relying on early historical records, Barry believes Malaga Island’s first residents were the children of Benjamin Darling, a freed slave who married Sarah Proverbs, a white woman. In 1794, Darling purchased a chunk of land near Malaga that was originally called Horse Island. Known today as Harbor Island, Darling later sold the property. Barry thinks Darling’s two sons and their combined families of 14 children probably moved to Malaga shortly after the sale of Horse Island.

In the ensuing years, Malaga was perceived as a sort of Bowery-by-the-bay used as a source of refuge by petty criminals, salty sailors who jumped ship, and drifting immigrants in search of a new life. Working as fishermen, mainland laborers and struggling gardeners, they eked out a subsistence lifestyle in the summer and prayed for the best during the winter. According to Dorothy Simpson’s 1987 book, “The Maine Islands,” intermarriage was as common on Malaga as “no marriage” and either status was acceptable by the islanders for child rearing.

“After a time, there was a large percentage of mentally retarded and physically unfit islanders,” Simpson wrote.

As the island’s population grew, so did its demand for public assistance for the poor. In 1903, the Maine Legislature was asked to determine whether Malaga was actually located in Phippsburg or the neighboring community of Harpswell after both towns objected to the costs of providing services and financial aid to the island residents. When Phippsburg was deemed to be the lawful owner of the island, the town had the Legislature’s action repealed. The state then assumed responsibility for islanders who, according to Barry, went from receiving subsidies of something less than $50 in 1902 to $1,170 in 1910.

Talbot suspects the state was as eager to rid itself of financial obligations to Malaga Island as it was to acquire the land for future speculation. According to Barry, some of the islanders were taken in by family members on the mainland. Others drifted from town to town where they were frequently unwelcome. Those who were classified as mentally incompetent were sent to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, known later as the Pineland Center, in New Gloucester. They stayed there for the rest of their lives.

Today, Malaga Island is owned by a Freeport developer and is on the market. Aside from the remnants of an old foundation, this rocky nub of land reveals no clues to its past. To find those, one must drive to a New Gloucester cemetery where the remains of the island’s dead were reburied. Some of the markers carry only the names of the deceased and a date, “Nov. 1912.”

The curious date and absence of information seemed like a mystery to Elaine Gallant, an employee of Pineland until the state facility closed in 1996. She noticed the graves when she visited the cemetery after learning it was a potter’s field for Pineland residents who died while in state care. Gallant initially surmised that the graves must be those of the sorry victims of a shipwreck or some other disaster from November 1912.

When she ultimately discovered that the inscription referred to the month and year that the islanders’ bodies had been reburied, she raised enough money to erect a granite monument. The simple stone depicts a small rowboat and a brief explanation of how Malaga Island’s residents came to their final resting place.

“It seemed like the very least that they deserved,” she said.