Pemetic

Pemetic, “the sloping land,” is the Wabanaki name for Mount Desert Island, whose rocky mountains rise above the coast of Maine. Shell middens bear witness to thousands of years of Indigenous presence. In 1604 Samuel de Champlain saw its bare summits from the sea and gave the island its French name, the Island of Barren Mountains.

French Jesuits founded the Saint-Sauveur mission on the island in 1613, but an expedition from Virginia under Samuel Argall destroyed it the same year. Three missionaries were killed and others taken prisoner. Much later, in 1760, Abraham Somes and James Richardson established European homesteads on the island. By the early nineteenth century its settlers practised farming, fishing, lumbering and shipbuilding, and grew crops including wheat, rye, maize and potatoes.