Malaga Island
Malaga Island is a former settlement in Phippsburg, Maine, listed on the National Register of Historic Places (2023). Former community and preserve commemorating a racially motivated eviction. It sits in the archive under dark history and abandoned settlements. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. The site is open to visitors.
Public preserve reached by water. Stay on established trails; no camping, fires or artifact removal. Moorings are private.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Malaga Island haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Malaga Island is the community Maine erased — the forty-acre island at the mouth of the New Meadows River where a mixed-race settlement of Black, white, Native, and Portuguese fishing families lived from the 1860s until the state threw them off in 1912. They were descended from Benjamin Darling, a freed slave who bought the neighboring island in 1794; they fished, did laundry for the mainland, and sent their children to a schoolhouse the missionaries said was as good as any.
The eviction was eugenics with a deed. The press called them 'half-breed' and 'shiftless'; the state said they were an impediment to the resort coast; and in June 1912 the sheriff delivered the writ — leave in thirty days and take your houses with you. Eight residents were committed to the Maine School for the Feebleminded. The schoolhouse was barged to another island, the houses were moved or burned, and the cemetery was exhumed — the state dug up the graves.
Maine apologized in 2010, and the island is a preserve now. The file keeps Malaga: Darling's settlement, the fifty-year community, the 1912 eviction, and the island where the state tried to delete a people and failed to delete the story.
Malaga Island is the archive's eviction file — the mixed community, the eugenics campaign, and the graves the state dug up.
Why this file matters
Malaga Island is the archive's eviction file — the Darling settlement, the 1912 state removal, and the apology a century later.
An island erased by decree keeps its story — the file's suggestion being that Malaga's hold is the erasure itself: the community that fit no category, the government that removed it, and the exhumed graves that made it undeniable.
Malaga Island is a 41-acre (170,000 m2) island at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine, United States. It was the site of an interracial community from the American Civil War until 1911, when the residents were forcibly evicted from the island. It is now an uninhabited reserve owned and managed by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. Public daytime access is permitted.
Malaga IslandDocumented history
Maine forcibly removed the island's mixed-race fishing community in 1912. MCHT acquired the island in 2001; it joined the National Register in 2023. A documented history gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that spine. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. 'Malaga Island Preserve' documents the entry. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.
Verified historyMaine Coast Heritage Trust
Sources on file
- 01Malaga Island PreserveMaine Coast Heritage Trust · official site · A2
Field notes & open questions
Included for documented displacement history, not paranormal speculation. Source links descendant alliance and archaeology resources for later enrichment.