The Jamestown settlement in the Colony of Virginia was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. It was located on the northeast bank of the James (Powhatan) River about 2.5 mi (4 km) southwest of the center of modern Williamsburg. It was established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 4, 1607 O.S., and was considered permanent after a brief abandonment in 1610. It followed several failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke, established in 1585 on Roanoke Island. Jamestown served as the colonial capital from 1616 until 1699.
Bristol, known from 1632 to 1765 as Pemaquid is a town in Lincoln County, Maine, United States. The population was 2,755 at the 2010 census. A fishing and resort area, Bristol includes the villages of New Harbor, Pemaquid, Round Pond, Bristol Mills and Chamberlain. It includes the Pemaquid Archeological Site, a U.S. National Historic Landmark. During the 17th and early 18th century, New France defined the Kennebec River as the southern boundary of Acadia, which put Bristol within Acadia.
Acadia was a colony of New France in northeastern North America which included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and Maine to the Kennebec River. During much of the 17th and early 18th centuries, Norridgewock on the Kennebec River and Castine at the end of the Penobscot River were the southernmost settlements of Acadia. The French government specified land bordering the Atlantic coast, roughly between the 40th and 46th parallels. It was eventually divided into British colonies. The population of Acadia included the various indigenous First Nations that comprised the Wabanaki Confederacy, the Acadian people and some small Scottish settlements.
King William's War was the North American theater of the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), also known as the War of the Grand Alliance or the War of the League of Augsburg. It was the first of six colonial wars fought between New France and New England along with their respective Native allies before France ceded its remaining mainland territories in North America east of the Mississippi River in 1763.
Fort Western is a former British colonial outpost at the head of navigation on the Kennebec River at modern Augusta, Maine, United States. It was built in 1754 during the French and Indian War, and is now a National Historic Landmark and local historic site owned by the city. Its main building, the only original element of the fort to survive, was restored in 1920 and now depicts its original use as a trading post.
The Popham Colony—also known as the Sagadahoc Colony—was a short-lived English colonial settlement in North America. It was established in 1607 by the proprietary Virginia Company of Plymouth and was located in the present-day town of Phippsburg, Maine, near the mouth of the Kennebec River. It was founded a few months after its more successful rival, the colony at Jamestown. That colony was established on May 4, 1607 by the Virginia Company of London in present-day James City County, Virginia.
Fort de Chartres was a French fortification first built in 1720 on the east bank of the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois. It was used as an administrative center for the province. Due generally to river floods, the fort was rebuilt twice, the last time in limestone in the 1750s in the era of French colonial control over Louisiana and the Illinois Country.
San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park is a Florida State Park in Wakulla County, Florida organized around the historic site of a Spanish colonial fort, which was used by succeeding nations that controlled the area. The Spanish first built wooden buildings and a stockade in the late 17th and early 18th centuries here, which were destroyed by a hurricane.
Norridgewock was the name of both an Indian village and a band of the Abenaki Native Americans/First Nations, an Eastern Algonquian tribe of the United States and Canada. The French of New France called the village Kennebec. The tribe occupied an area in the interior of Maine. During colonial times, this area was territory disputed between British and French colonists, and was set along the claimed western border of Acadia, the western bank of the Kennebec River.
Fort Frederick State Park is a public recreation and historic preservation area on the Potomac River surrounding the restored Fort Frederick, a fortification active in the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). The state park lies south of the town of Big Pool, Maryland. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal runs through the park grounds. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973.
Fort Boonesborough was a frontier fort in Kentucky, founded by Daniel Boone and his men following their crossing of the Kentucky River on April 1, 1775. The settlement they founded, known as Boonesborough, Kentucky, is Kentucky's second oldest European-American settlement. It served as a major frontier outpost during the American Revolutionary War, and survived into the early 19th century before its eventual abandonment. A National Historic Landmark now administered as part of Fort Boonesborough State Park, the site is one of the best-preserved archaeological sites of early westward expansion by British colonists in that period. It is located in Madison County, Kentucky off Kentucky Route 627.
Fort Popham is a Civil War-era coastal defense fortification at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Phippsburg, Maine. It is located in sight of the short-lived Popham Colony and, like the colony, named for George Popham, the colony's leader.
Fort Halifax is a former British colonial outpost on the banks of the Sebasticook River, just above its mouth at the Kennebec River, in Winslow, Maine. Originally built as a wooden palisaded fort in 1754, during the French and Indian War, only a single blockhouse survives. The oldest blockhouse in the United States, it is preserved as Fort Halifax State Historic Site, and is open to the public in the warmer months. The fort guarded Wabanaki canoe routes that reached to the St. Lawrence and Penobscot Valleys via the Chaudière-Kennebec and Sebasticook-Souadabscook rivers. The blockhouse was declared a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1968.
The history of the area comprising the U.S. state of Maine spans thousands of years, measured from the earliest human settlement, or less than two hundred, measured from the advent of U.S. statehood in 1820. The present article will concentrate on the period of European contact and after.
The Charlesfort-Santa Elena Site is an important early colonial archaeological site on Parris Island, South Carolina. It contains the archaeological remains of a French settlement called Charlesfort, settled in 1562 and abandoned the following year, and the later 16th-century Spanish settlement known as Santa Elena. The Spanish remains include a fort built directly on top of the abandoned Charlesfort remains. This fort and other nearby structures have been called, at various times, Fort San Marcos, Fort San Felipe, and have the designated archaeological site identifiers 38BU51 and 38BU162. Because of their remarkable state of preservation, and their importance in understanding early French and Spanish colonial practices, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001. The site is accessible through the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Port Royal, South Carolina.
Fort Kent State Historic Site is a Maine state park in the town of Fort Kent, Maine. Located at the confluence of the Fish and Saint John Rivers, it includes Fort Kent, the only surviving American fortification built during border tensions with neighboring New Brunswick known as the Aroostook War. The park features an original log blockhouse, which is open for visits in the summer. The fort was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1969 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973.
The Cushnoc Archeological Site, also known as Cushnoc or Koussinoc or Coussinoc, is an archaeological site in Augusta, Maine that was the location of a 17th-century trading post operated by English colonists from Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts. The trading post was built in 1628 and lies on the Kennebec River. It is adjacent to Fort Western, an 18th-century stockade fort around which the city of Augusta grew. The site is significant as it provides a window into trading, living, and construction practices in the early period of colonial settlement in New England. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993.
Fort William Henry is located in the village of New Harbor in the town of Bristol, Maine. The fort was, in its time, the largest in New England. The fort was originally built in 1692 but destroyed four years later by New France in the Siege of Pemaquid (1696). A reconstruction was built in 1908. The fort was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 1, 1969. Fort William Henry is now operated as a museum about the fort's history.
Newfoundland Colony was an English and later British colony established in 1610 on the island of the same name off the Atlantic coast of Canada, in what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. That followed decades of sporadic English settlement on the island, which was at first seasonal, rather than permanent. It was made a Crown colony in 1854 and a Dominion in 1907. Its economy collapsed during the Great Depression, and Newfoundland relinquished its dominion status, becoming once again a Crown colony governed by appointees from the Colonial Office in Whitehall in London. American forces occupied much of the colony in World War II, and prosperity returned. In 1949, the colony voted to join Canada as the Province of Newfoundland, but in 2001, its name was officially changed to Newfoundland and Labrador.
