On July 1st, 1912, George Pease took a short boat ride over to Malaga Island, just off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Pease landed the boat then probably stood on the shell-covered beach at the north end of the island. What he found may have surprised him.

Pease went to Malaga that day as an agent of the state of Maine. It was his job to carry out the final steps of a state-sponsored eviction. Pease was there to clean out the island - to make sure everyone who lived there was gone and to burn down their houses. But there was no one there. Malaga was empty.

Malaga is a small island, about 40 acres. It's covered with tall pine and spruce trees, the shores are rocky - it's really a "textbook" Maine island. No one lives on Malaga today but, in 1912, there was a village of about 45 people. A few of the families had lived on the island for decades raising children and scraping a living from the ocean. Malaga was home.
The settlement was poor and families struggled - like most fishing communities on the Maine coast one hundred years ago. What made Malaga different was the people. Black, white, and mixed-race families lived on the island. And that set them apart. Far apart.

Newspapers headlines screamed about the island's "immoral" and "shiftless" population. Many residents of Phippsburg considered the islanders a blight and wanted them disbursed. Even the governor of Maine got involved in the uproar over the settlement.

In the end, the state forced the islanders to leave.
First, the state committed eight people to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. Then, they evicted the remaining islanders giving them a month to go. On the July 1st, 1912 eviction deadline, George Pease found a vacant island - no people, no houses to burn down – they took their homes with them.

The islanders left two things behind. On Malaga's highest point was a school. Back in the woods was the island graveyard. The state moved the school to another island. Then they dug up the graveyard. They reburied seventeen bodies in the cemetery at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded.

The Malaga community was erased.

Few people have talked publicly about Malaga over the last hundred years. Many in Phippsburg would rather forget the incident -- the eviction lingers darkly in the town's history.

And, descendants of the evicted islanders have largely remained silent, too. The local stigma of mixed-blood and "feeblemindedness" attached to the island and descendents is still present - even today. In fact, some say Malaga is a story best left untold.
This is that story.