The story of Malaga Island is a forgotten chapter is Maines’s history. The 41-acre island located at the mouth of the New Meadows river, and just two miles off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine, was once inhabited by a fishing community of black, white and mix-raced people.
The yellow journalism of the moment described the community as “degenerates” “peculiar” and the island “disgusting.” The discourse surrounding the community reflected the confluence of the racist eugenics movement in the United States, the Maine as “Vacationland” campaign, (as the towns along Maine’s coasts were becoming summer destinations), and economic retribution.
Not wanting such a stain on the state, the then governor, Frederick Plaisted drafted a declaration to have the more than 45 inhabitants forced off the island. Some of the homes were moved off the island by residents, some were leveled, the one-room schoolhouse was removed, and the graves were exhumed and the bodies reburied in a mass grave inland. Many of the children were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded (now the plush Pineland Farms) in New Gloucester.
Today the island sits abandoned. In 2010, after years of petitioning by citizens of the State of Maine, former Governor Baldacci issued a formal apology to the descendants in a ceremony on the island. In 2012, the Maine State Library exhibited Malaga Island: Fragmented Lives. And in 2017, the current governor, Paul LePage, acknowledged the horrific event and placed a commemorative marker at the Pineland Farms grave-site.