Beyond Borders - Mapping Maine and the Northeast Boundary

Maine’s international border was the most bitterly contested segment, and an excellent visual orientation appears in Stephen J. Hornsby’s “Negotiating the International Boundary,” which should be consulted along with additional related plates in the Historical Atlas of Maine. Areas of the northeastern border with a less dense colonial presence to the west, from the northwesternmost head of the Connecticut River, through the Great Lakes, and the eastern border’s terminus at Lake of the Woods (the intersection of modern-day Ontario, Minnesota, and Manitoba) were negotiated with broader strokes.

The Treaty of Paris (1783) caused the most prolix problems in establishing the border, and subsequent US-British treaties gradually tried to make sense of its language starting with the Jay Treaty (1794). This authorized the St. Croix Commission of 1796-98 that established which of the rivers that flowed into Passamaquoddy Bay was actually the St. Croix intended in 1783. It also agreed upon the interior source (or headwaters) of the St. Croix as the western end of the Chiputneticook Lakes, which would be the starting point for vexing questions about the interior route for decades to come. A color engraving of the 1817 monument to mark the source of the St. Croix, based on a sketch by British surveyor Joseph Bouchette of Montreal, includes an iron ring on a tree, placed by surveyors to identify the location in 1797.

The border work of the 1790s, skillfully assessed by David Demeritt, included the dramatic rediscovery of the remains of the French settlement of 1604 on Bone Island (modern-day St. Croix Island) and Robert Pagan deposition. This relied on information shared by Passamaquoddy knowledge keepers. This is outstandingly documented in the map of the interior canoe route between the St. John (Wolostoq) and Penobscot rivers that Chief Francis Joseph Neptune shared with Pagan on birch bark as well as Pagan’s letter to Ward Chipman about his meetings with First Nation people [insert links: mmn map https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/6883; pagan letter https://www.mainememory.net/media/pdf/9383.pdf, and link to access digitization of coll. 26, box i, folder 19 in full]. The Passamaquoddy Homeland had been dramatically disrupted when loyalist refugees, including commission officials like Pagan, established the town of St. Andrews on an important Passamaquoddy site in 1783. Neptune and other tribal members who participated in the border work of the 1790s worked diplomatically to protect their territory from increasing colonization, as also highlighted by the Passamaquoddy treaty with Massachusetts in 1794, an essential legal precedent for the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act of 1980.

Settling other issues, especially those in Article 5 that related to the interior border from the source of the St. Croix to the highlands and beyond proved elusive. The geographic range of maps produced in this period, to the east in 1817 and to the west in 1820 arose from the opaque issues at stake as well as interest-driven motives to acquire rich timber lands (on both sides) and to preserve an overland route from New Brunswick to Quebec (for the British). The costs to raise and support the surveying teams in their field efforts were extreme and more than four boxes of the Barclay Collection includes financial records and receipts from 1796 to 1827.

The Treaty of Ghent (1814), which brought the stalemate of the War of 1812 to a close, included four articles that sought to methodically resolve the location of the border through the joint work of US and British commissions. Of the four commissions it authorized, only the one tasked with settling the sovereignty of islands in Passamaquoddy Bay was resolved expeditiously in 1816-17. Pragmatic recognition of settlement on the ground led Moose Island (the location of modern-day Eastport, Maine) to go to the US, while loyalist homesteads on Deer, Campobello and Grand Manan led them to be recognized as British.