Resourceful People, Creative Arts, and Devotion to Community
By members of the Blue Hill Historical Society, Blue Hill Public Library and the Jonathan Fisher House
The First Years
European settlement at Blue Hill began in the spring of 1762 when Joseph Wood and John Roundy sailed "downeast" from the Boston colony to a sheltering bay at the foot of the blue hill. Armed with a grant issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, they chose a site on Mill Island well known to Maine's Native Americans for thousands of years. Research at a burial ground on Mill Island where Roundy and Wood first landed indicate that the native American presence here dated back to almost 4000 years before they arrived.
Dedication of monument to Blue Hill's founders, 1910
Blue Hill Historical Society
The first European settlers, among them the Osgoods, Parkers, Peters, Holts, Candages, Hinckleys and Hortons, brought with them from Beverly and Andover the character traits of self-reliance, strong work ethic, and love of autonomy, as well as affinities for baked beans, apple pie, and annual town meetings inherited from long ago ancestors on England's eastern shore.
Blue Hill's settlers were at the forefront of a land rush in the 1760s along the coast between Castine and Calais. The population of colonial America was doubling with each generation. The French and Indian wars were winding down. Maine’s Native Americans, the Abenakis, had been decimated by European disease.
The original charter of Blue Hill stipulated that shares of land were to be set aside for a school, for Harvard College, for a church and for a learned protestant minister and his family. The journals of the first settled minister, Jonathan Fisher, are a valuable insight into the early days of Blue Hill life. On June 21, 1814, Fisher writes “About 100 hands collected & assisted in raising my house, with plank sides, which went up well & no person was materially hurt. After raising partook of a bountiful supper & after supper had pleasant singing.”
Not everyone found land to his liking in Blue Hill. In 1764, Jonathan Darling, a veteran of the Battle of Louisbourg, complained that the resident committee assigned him “a lot that is nothing but a mountain of rocks and not worth a sixpence.”