Bates librarian finds Indigenous land grant from 1860s, complicating college’s history

Bates College in Lewiston received 57,000 acres of land from the Maine Legislature in the 1860s, a grant that has gone unrecognized in the college's own published history, according to newly surfaced archival research.

The discovery, made by Sam Howes of the college's Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, traces back to a 1864 act of the Legislature that transferred two townships in northwestern Maine to what was then transitioning from the Maine State Seminary to Bates College. The state land agent delivered the deed in 1865, and Bates sold the property two years later for $23,000, roughly $518,000 in today's dollars.

Until a Portland Press Herald inquiry last week, college administrators were unaware of the grants. The school's own historical accounts have stated instead that it received $15,000 in lieu of land.

Spokeswoman Mary Pols said the college is still learning about the matter. "As we learn more about the land grant and its implications, I don't doubt the college will incorporate it into ongoing conversations on campus about the college's shared history with Maine's Wabanaki Nations," she wrote in an email, pointing to existing initiatives including the Taking Responsibility Learning Group.

Howes first uncovered the 1864 grant several years ago while researching the institution's transition from seminary to college, but the significance did not strike him until last fall. That is when Joe Hall, a Bates professor of colonial North American and Indigenous history, stopped by the archives for an unrelated reason and noticed a map Howes had left out.

"I was shocked," Hall said, when Howes told him it was a map of Bates' land grants.

The two townships sat in territory controlled for centuries by the Maliseet people, known in their own language as Wolastoqey. Osihkiyol "Zeke" Crofton-Macdonald, tribal ambassador for the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, said the Maliseet were not party to most treaties of the era and were generally pushed off their unceded lands along the St. John, or Wolastoq, river without compensation.

The grants to Bates fit a broader pattern. In the colonial and early statehood periods, Massachusetts and, after 1820, Maine distributed large tracts of Wabanaki land to fund private colleges and draw settlers northward. Bowdoin and Colby together received 234,000 acres under similar arrangements. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act, which granted 10.7 million acres in the American West to state university systems, including the University of Maine, and gave rise to the modern land-grant university system.

Bates' timing was shaped by Civil War-era necessity. The college needed money as it expanded beyond its seminary roots, and lawmakers attached conditions to the grant: Bates had to raise $30,000 in matching funds and provide 10 scholarships for children of fallen veterans, with recipients chosen by the governor.

An assessment of the land, recorded in trustee minutes, found it held 10 million board feet of pine, 2 million board feet of spruce and 800,000 board feet of tamarack, then called juniper. In 1867, the college sold the timberland to brothers George and Isaiah Stetson, both prominent Maine businessmen and politicians.

For Hall, the discovery sharpens an understanding he had long held in less specific terms. "It makes more concrete what it is that everybody already knows — which is that Maine is a state that is made from Wabanaki homelands — all of it," he said.

Several Bates students are now working to dig deeper. Juniors Paul Schmitz, Sarah McOsker and Sofia Schaffer researched the land grants for a final project in a four-week intensive on Wabanaki history with Hall this spring. Senior May Fastaia, an anthropology major, is incorporating the work into her thesis.

Schmitz said the specifics matter for what comes next. "Specific history spurs specific action," he said.

Bates does not currently use a standard land acknowledgement, and Hall said he does not necessarily see that as a problem. Acknowledgements, he and others have argued, carry weight only when they lead to sustained relationships and concrete steps.

That work, those involved in the research hope, can now begin on firmer ground.