Fort George

By 1673, the English had established a commercial fishing operation at Pejepscot Falls in Brunswick, catching some forty barrels of salmon and ninety kegs of sturgeon in just three weeks. To protect the lives and livelihoods of the settlers in that vicinity, Governor Andros erected the first fortification on the Androscoggin—“Fort Andross”—at Brunswick in 1688. It was from here that Colonel Benjamin Church and other Massachusetts soldiers set out upriver in 1690 to “visit the enemy, French and Indians at their headquarters at Ameras-cogen, Pejepscot or any other [place] . . . killing, destroying and utterly rooting out the enemy.” Church made it as far as the Indian stockade at Laurel Hill (Auburn), where, finding only a few old men and some women, he destroyed the camp along with its stores of grain and fish, and returned to the coast without accomplishing his goal. Fort Andross was replaced by the more substantially-built Fort George, shown here, in 1715.