The History and Afterlife of Malaga Island

Malaga Island is a small island on the coast of Maine, south of Bath in Casco Bay. It was an obscure place, and then in 1908-1912 it was briefly a rather famous place, and now it is a famous place again for the opposite reason.

Sources differ on when the Malaga Island community got started. Some accounts say the first modern resident was Benjamin Darling, a freedman from the West Indies who bought Horse Island nearby in 1794, and whose descendants seem to have lived all around the area. Other accounts say the community was founded by Henry Griffin after the Civil War. But whenever it got started, by 1880 the island was home to 27 people; by 1900 the population and grown to 40. Most were black, but one family, that of Scotts-Irish fisherman James McKenney, was white. The islanders were poor, but, most observers say, not much poorer than their neighbors. They fished, dug for clams, gathered berries, and raised small gardens in soil made from sand, dung and compost. A few worked off island.

Photographs like this one certainly don't make them look especially impoverished; their houses and clothes seem pretty normal for rural Maine. According to the archaeologists who have lately been poking around the site, they had the same sort of stuff as their neighbors.

But some of them were poor enough that they sometimes applied to their town for relief; poor relief; like most other governmental functions, was in Maine the job of the township. Some citizens of the town of Phippsburg resented this. Bad enough, they thought, that black people insisted on living in their town, but that they wanted relief was intolerable. 

The 1890s were a tough economic time in Maine. The traditional industries of wooden shipbuilding and fishing declined, and not much had come along to fill those places. Phippsburg started a long campaign to prove that Malaga Island had never really been part of their township, and therefore that they were not responsible for its inhabitants. In 1905 they succeeded, and the state had to take direct control of the island. 

As I said, this was a rough economic time for Maine, but there was one bright spot: tourism. People from New York and Boston began flocking to the Maine coast every summer. The islands around Casco Bay were scenic enough, and the local authorities were trying to drum up vacation business. They decided that the unsightly poverty of Malaga Island was an impediment to economic development.

Eason Family in Fron of their House

And then the do-gooders got involved. This was at the height of the Progressive movement, and I am retelling this story mostly to ask some questions about the whole business of making other people's lives better. Public health experts from Boston and New York looked at the people living on Malaga Island and saw a sad situation: dirt, ignorance, illiteracy, substandard housing, unmarried couples raising children out of wedlock.

They associated these problems with isolation. This was the same era when we got the stereotype of inbred hillybilly clans in isolated mountain hollows, for which Progressives suggested the same remedies they would be suggesting for Malaga Island: forcibly ending their isolation by public schooling, public health, and other state measures, if necessary driving them out of their tiny "inbred" communities and out into the world. (I have never seen any evidence that mountain communities were particularly inbred in 1900.)

This was also the height of the American Eugenics movement, and some people thought the root of the problems on Malaga Island was in the mixing of races. At this time people began describing the inhabitants, previously considered just plain black under the one-drop standard, as "mixed race." 

In response to all of this a group of progressive Christians founded the Malaga Island Settlement Association to bring aid to the island. In 1909 they constructed a school on the island. The teacher, Evelyn Woodman, was on the one hand committed to helping her students, but on the other had a habit of asking for help by decrying how bad their situation was. This turned out to be a dangerous approach.

In 1911 the governor of Maine made a much publicized visit to the island, "calling attention" to the problems there. A reporter for the Boston Transcript covered the visit in a story titled, "Ignorance, Shiftlessness, Filth, and Heathenism—A Shameful Disgrace That Should Be Looked After at Once." By "heathenism" he meant, first, that the inhabitants didn't regularly go to church, and, second, that some of the couples were not legally married.

(If you ever wondered why leftists of the 60s and 70s defended unwed motherhood so loudly, it's because attacking unmarried parents was an old theme in America, and taking their children away in the name of cleanliness, order, child welfare, and Christian morality used to be routine.)

The eventual result of the dual pressures on Malaga Island – the desire to prettify the neighborhood for tourists, and the desire to improve the lives of the inhabitants – was a campaign to somehow get rid of the place. The local leadership backed an ownership claim to the island pressed in court by one of Phippsburg's founding families. In 1912 a judge ruled for the family and affirmed their ownership of the property. They then evicted the 45 inhabitants. The state demolished the buildings and even exhumed all 17 graves, moving them to the mainland. One whole family was committed to the state's School for the Feebleminded. After passing through several private owners, the island was acquired by the Maine Coastal Trust as a wildlife preserve.

Various people declared this to be a great victory for humanity. But then, very quickly, the story was hushed up. Its rapid disappearance makes it look like some folks were ashamed about what had been done. It was certainly shameful, but I mention this to make the point that some people thought so in 1912. Americans were every bit as divided in 1912 as they are now.

So far as people can tell from 2023, the first public complaint about what happened on Malaga Island was made in 1980 by a newspaper reporter who said people refered to it as "a story best left untold." Then nothing for another decade. There were a few notices in the 90s, and then around 2000 people began to take a greater interest, and over the past 20 years there has been a deluge of publications about Malaga Island and the events of 1912. In 2005 a young adult novel about the Malaga Island story was a Newberry Honor Book.

Which is great; this is exactly the sort of historical event I think people ought to reflect on. But, of course, most accounts one sees these days make no attempt to be balanced; in our discourse this is just a crime committed by a racist state, wielding Progressive rhetoric to destroy another black community.

So let me ask this: if we see children being raised by illiterate parents who had no interest in sending them to school, living in shacks without plumbing or electricity, what should we do? What if the parents are mentally retarded? 

This is not a theoretical problem, but happens in America every day. Today most writers seem to think that the authorities were exaggerating the problems on Malaga Island as an excuse to evict the inhabitants, and maybe so; as I said the pictures make it look like a pretty normal place. But that doesn't mean that nobody is America has raised or is raising children in a way you and I would find appalling. It is now fasionable to think that the people from Malaga sent to the School for the Feebleminded were just being oppressed in another way, but the only testimony we have is from the state officials who thought otherwise.

Most accounts of Malaga Island play up the racism angle. It seems to me, though,exactly like what Progrressives did to white folks throughout the mountain South, evicting them from homes designated "substandard" to build dams or national parks or whatever else the Progressives thought the country needed to progress.

This same issues come up in the history of the Scottish Highlands, where the culture of the crofters was destroyed partly because middle class Victorians thought conditions in highland homes were simply intolerable. They come up over the question of Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Who is responsible for children, and their future? Is it just and always the parents, or does the state have a role?

If a way of life looks, to us, horrible and awful and intolerable, should we intervene to save children from growing up that way? 

What if the people are starving, as the Highland crofters did in 1846-1851, requiring millions in aid from city folks? Do people who have asked for assistance on that scale still have a right to go on living as they did?

Yes, there is something cruel and dismissive about the dismantling of Malaga Island. It's a perfect American horror story, set at the intersection of racism, tourism, and real estate speculation. But it seems to me that the whole business of helping other people is often mixed up with assertions of superiority, and that a superior pose can easily be turned into an attack on a people and their way of life. This happened in the Highlands, and on Indian Reservations, and in many other places. It probably still happens. Black intellectual John McWhorter just wrote a whole book aruging that woke anti-racism is an attack on black people, portraying them as weak victims who can't survive wthout white help.

We can, of course, imagine better, less authoritarian ways to help people than evicting them from their homes. But I am not comfortable with foisting all the crimes that have been part of creating the modern world onto racism, classism, and governmental evil. Sometimes, people who really want to help end up doing harm; on the other hand, maybe some ways of living are not very nice, and you can understand why people want to take children away from that sort of world and raise them in a gentler and safer place.

**********

Excellent article by high school student Margo Pedersen.

Good newspaper article.

Historic images of Malaga Island, from the state museum.

Hour long radio show from WMPG and the Salt Institute, A Story Best Left Untold.