Publication Date
10-1-2020
Document Type
Article
First Page
29
Last Page
40
Abstract
African Americans lived in the central Maine townships of Troy and Burnham in the nineteenth century, and a region there is said to contain their abandoned settlement. This is a study of two local narratives about the settlement. Older residents maintain an oral tradition largely based on field evidence, while in-migrants tell a very different story linked to national meanings and events. Using oral histories, documentary research, and archaeological survey work, our research has uncovered much of the story of the African American presence in these towns. While bearers of each narrative tradition feel theirs is an accurate historical account of the place, it appears that the older local narrative is more accurate than the story told by in-migrants. Traditions differ in their factual reliability for historians: the accuracy of a traditional narrative is strongly affected both by the purposes for which it is told, and the rhetorical devices used to achieve those purposes. The author is a retired professor emeritus of anthropology at Unity College. He is interested in historical patterns of land-human interactions (particularly in the northeastern United States), landscape archaeology, and the cultural construction of place in traditional texts. Inquiries are invited at cmarshall@connect.unity.edu. This research was supported in part by an Odiorne grant from the Maine State Archives.
Recommended Citation
Marshall, Christopher. "Two Narratives about a Nineteenth-Century African American Settlement in Rural Maine." Maine History 53, 2 (2020): 29-40. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainehistoryjournal/vol53/iss2/5