John Smith (explorer)
John Smith was an English soldier, colonial governor, Admiral of New England, author. He played an important role in the establishment of the Jamestown colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in the early 17th century. Smith was a leader of the Virginia Colony based at Jamestown between September 1608 and August 1609, led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, during which he became the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area, he explored and mapped the coast of New England. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, his friend Mózes Székely; when Jamestown was established in 1607, Smith trained the first settlers to farm and work, thus saving the colony from early devastation. He publicly stated "He that will not work, shall not eat", equivalent to the 2nd Thessalonians 3:10 in the Bible. Harsh weather, lack of food and water, the surrounding swampy wilderness, attacks from local Indians destroyed the colony.
With Smith's leadership, Jamestown survived and flourished. Smith was forced to return to England after being injured by an accidental explosion of gunpowder in a canoe. Smith's books and maps were important in encouraging and supporting English colonization of the New World, he gave the name New England to the region, now the Northeastern United States and noted: "Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land... If he have nothing but his hands, he may... by industries grow rich." Smith died in London in 1631. The exact birth date of John Smith is unclear, he was baptized on 6 January 1580 at Willoughby, near Alford, where his parents rented a farm from Lord Willoughby. He claimed descent from the ancient Smith family of Cuerdley and was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth from 1592 to 1595. After his father died, Smith set off to sea, he served as a mercenary in the army of Henry IV of France against the Spaniards, fighting for Dutch independence from King Philip II of Spain.
He set off for the Mediterranean. There he engaged in both trade and piracy, fought against the Ottoman Turks in the Long Turkish War. Smith was promoted to a cavalry captain while fighting for the Austrian Habsburgs in Hungary in the campaign of Michael the Brave in 1600 and 1601. After the death of Michael the Brave, he fought for Radu Șerban in Wallachia against Ottoman vassal Ieremia Movilă. Smith is reputed to have killed and beheaded three Ottoman challengers in single-combat duels, for which he was knighted by the Prince of Transylvania and given a horse and a coat of arms showing three Turks' heads. However, in 1602, he was wounded in a skirmish with the Crimean Tatars and sold as a slave; as Smith describes it: "we all sold for slaves, like beasts in a market". Smith claimed that his master, a Turkish nobleman, sent him as a gift to his Greek mistress in Constantinople, who fell in love with Smith, he was taken to the Crimea, where he escaped from Ottoman lands into Muscovy on to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before traveling through Europe and North Africa, returning to England in 1604.
In 1606, Smith became involved with the Virginia Company of London's plan to colonize Virginia for profit. The expedition set sail in three small ships, the Discovery, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, on 20 December 1606, his page was a 12-year-old boy named Samuel Collier. During the voyage, Smith was charged with mutiny, Captain Christopher Newport had planned to execute him; these events happened when the expedition stopped in the Canary Islands for resupply of water and provisions. Smith was under arrest for most of the trip. However, upon first landing at what is now Cape Henry on 26 April 1607, unsealed orders from the Virginia Company designated Smith as one of the leaders of the new colony, thus sparing Smith from the gallows. By the summer of 1607, the English colonists were still living in temporary housing; the search for a suitable site ended on 14 May 1607 when Captain Edward Maria Wingfield, president of the council, chose the Jamestown site as the location for the colony. After the four-month ocean trip, their food stores were sufficient only for each to have a cup or two of grain-meal per day.
Due to swampy conditions and widespread disease, someone died every day. By September, more than 60 of the 104 brought by Newport were dead; the men may well have died from poor nutrition. In early January 1608, nearly 100 new settlers arrived with Captain Newport on the First Supply, through carelessness the village was set on fire; that winter the James River froze over, the settlers were forced to live in the burnt ruins. During this time, they wasted much of the three months that Newport and his crew were in port loading their ships with iron pyrite. Food supplies ran low, although the Native Americans brought some food, Smith wrote that "more than half of us died". In 1608, Smith spent that summer exploring Chesapeake Bay waterways and produced a map, of great value to Virginia explorers for more than a century. In October 1608, Newport brought a second shipment of supplies along with 70 new settlers, including the first women; some German and Slovak craftsmen arrived, but they brought no food supplies.
Newport brought with him a list of counterfeit Virginia Company orders which angered John Smith greatly. He wrote an angry letter in response. One of the orders was to crown the Native American leader Powhatan emperor and give him a fancy bedstead. The
Royal Arms of England
The Royal Arms of England are the arms first adopted in a fixed form at the start of the age of heraldry as personal arms by the Plantagenet kings who ruled England from 1154. In the popular mind they have come to symbolise the nation of England, although according to heraldic usage nations do not bear arms, only persons and corporations do; the blazon of the Arms of Plantagenet is: Gules, three lions passant guardant in pale or armed and langued azure, signifying three identical gold lions with blue tongues and claws, walking past but facing the observer, arranged in a column on a red background. Although the tincture azure of tongue and claws is not cited in many blazons, they are a distinguishing feature of the Arms of England; this coat, designed in the High Middle Ages, has been variously combined with those of the Kings of France, Scotland, a symbol of Ireland, the House of Nassau and the Kingdom of Hanover, according to dynastic and other political changes occurring in England, but has not altered since it took a fixed form in the reign of Richard I, the second Plantagenet king.
Although in England the official blazon refers to "lions", French heralds used the term "leopard" to represent the lion passant guardant, hence the arms of England, no doubt, are more blazoned, "leopards". Without doubt the same animal was intended, but different names were given according to the position. Royal emblems depicting lions were first used by Danish Vikings and Normans. With Plantagenets a formal and consistent English heraldry system emerged at the end of the 12th century; the earliest surviving representation of an escutcheon, or shield, displaying three lions is that on the Great Seal of King Richard I, which displayed one or two lions rampant, but in 1198 was permanently altered to depict three lions passant representing Richard I's principal three positions as King of the English, Duke of the Normans, Duke of the Aquitanians. In 1340, Edward III laid claim to the throne of France, thus adopted the Royal arms of France which he quartered with his paternal arms, the Royal Arms of England.
He placed the French arms in the 4th quarters. This quartering was adjusted and restored intermittently throughout the Middle Ages as the relationship between England and France changed; when the French king altered his arms from semée of fleur-de-lys, to only three, the English quartering followed suit. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland entered a personal union, the arms of England and Scotland were marshalled in what has now become the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, it appears in a similar capacity to represent England in the Arms of Canada and on the Queen's Personal Canadian Flag. The coat of three lions continues to represent England on several coins of the pound sterling, forms the basis of several emblems of English national sports teams and endures as one of the most recognisable national symbols of England; when the Royal Arms are in the format of an heraldic flag, it is variously known as the Royal Banner of England, the Banner of the Royal Arms, the Banner of the King of England, or by the misnomer the Royal Standard of England.
This Royal Banner differs from England's national flag, the St George's Cross, in that it does not represent any particular area or land, but rather symbolises the sovereignty vested in the rulers thereof. The first documented use of royal arms dates from the reign of Richard I. Much antiquarians would retrospectively invented attributed arms for earlier kings, but their reigns pre-dated the systematisation of hereditary English heraldry that only occurred in the second half of the 12th century. Lions may have been used as a badge by members of the Norman dynasty: a late-12th century chronicler reports that in 1128, Henry I of England knighted his son-in-law, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, gave him a gold lion badge; the memorial enamel created to decorate Geoffrey's tomb depicts a blue coat of arms bearing gold lions. His son, Henry II used a lion as his emblem, based on the arms used by his sons and other relatives, he may have used a coat of arms with a single lion or two lions, though no direct testimony of this has been found.
His children experimented with different combinations of lions on their arms. Richard I used a single lion rampant, or two lions affrontés, on his first seal, but used three lions passant in his 1198 Great Seal of England, thus established the lasting design of the Royal Arms of England. In 1177, his brother John had used a seal depicting a shield with two lions passant guardant, but when he succeeded his brother on the English throne he would adopt arms with three lions passant or on a field gules, these were used, unchanged, as the royal arms by him and his successors until 1340. In 1340, following the extinction of the House of Capet, Edward III claimed the French throne. In addition to initiating the Hundred Years' War, Edward III expressed his claim in heraldic form by quartering the royal arms of England with the Arms of France; this quartering continued until 1801, with intervals in 1360–1369 and 1420–1422. Following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the throne of England was inherited by the Scottish House of Stuart, resulting in the Union of the Crowns: the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland wer
Maine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. Maine is the 12th smallest by area, the 9th least populous, the 38th most densely populated of the 50 U. S. states. It is bordered by New Hampshire to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and northwest respectively. Maine is the easternmost state in the contiguous United States, the northernmost state east of the Great Lakes, it is known for its rocky coastline. There is a humid continental climate throughout most of the state, including in coastal areas such as its most populous city of Portland; the capital is Augusta. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples were the only inhabitants of the territory, now Maine. At the time of European arrival in what is now Maine, several Algonquian-speaking peoples inhabited the area; the first European settlement in the area was by the French in 1604 on Saint Croix Island, by Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons.
The first English settlement was the short-lived Popham Colony, established by the Plymouth Company in 1607. A number of English settlements were established along the coast of Maine in the 1620s, although the rugged climate and conflict with the local peoples caused many to fail over the years; as Maine entered the 18th century, only a half dozen European settlements had survived. Loyalist and Patriot forces contended for Maine's territory during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. During the War of 1812, the largely-undefended eastern region of Maine was occupied by British forces, but returned to the United States after the war following major defeats in New York and Louisiana, as part of a peace treaty, to include dedicated land on the Michigan peninsula for Native American peoples. Maine was part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1820, when it voted to secede from Massachusetts to become a separate state. On March 15, 1820, under the Missouri Compromise, it was admitted to the Union as the 23rd state.
There is no definitive explanation for the origin of the name "Maine", but the most origin is that the name was given by early explorers after the former province of Maine in France. Whatever the origin, the name was fixed for English settlers in 1665 when the English King's Commissioners ordered that the "Province of Maine" be entered from on in official records; the state legislature in 2001 adopted a resolution establishing Franco-American Day, which stated that the state was named after the former French province of Maine. Other theories mention earlier places with similar names, or claim it is a nautical reference to the mainland. Attempts to uncover the history of the name of Maine began with James Sullivan's 1795 "History of the District of Maine", he made the unsubstantiated claim that the Province of Maine was a compliment to the queen of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, who once "owned" the Province of Maine in France. This was quoted by Maine historians until the 1845 biography of that queen by Agnes Strickland established that she had no connection to the province.
A new theory, put forward by Carol B. Smith Fisher in 2002, is that Sir Ferdinando Gorges chose the name in 1622 to honor the village where his ancestors first lived in England, rather than the province in France. "MAINE" appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 in reference to the county of Dorset, today Broadmayne, just southeast of Dorchester. The view held among British place name scholars is that Mayne in Dorset is Brythonic, corresponding to modern Welsh "maen", plural "main" or "meini"; some early spellings are: MAINE 1086, MEINE 1200, MEINES 1204, MAYNE 1236. Today the village is known as Broadmayne, primitive Welsh or Brythonic, "main" meaning rock or stone, considered a reference to the many large sarsen stones still present around Little Mayne farm, half a mile northeast of Broadmayne village; the first known record of the name appears in an August 10, 1622 land charter to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, English Royal Navy veterans, who were granted a large tract in present-day Maine that Mason and Gorges "intend to name the Province of Maine".
Mason had served with the Royal Navy in the Orkney Islands, where the chief island is called Mainland, a possible name derivation for these English sailors. In 1623, the English naval captain Christopher Levett, exploring the New England coast, wrote: "The first place I set my foote upon in New England was the Isle of Shoals, being Ilands in the sea, above two Leagues from the Mayne." Several tracts along the coast of New England were referred to as Main or Maine. A reconfirmed and enhanced April 3, 1639, from England's King Charles I, gave Sir Ferdinando Gorges increased powers over his new province and stated that it "shall forever hereafter, be called and named the PROVINCE OR COUNTIE OF MAINE, not by any other name or names whatsoever..." Maine is the only U. S. state whose name has one syllable. The original inhabitants of the territory, now Maine were Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki peoples, including the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Kennebec. During the King Philip's War, many of these peoples would merge in one form or another to become the Wabanaki Confederacy, aiding the Wampanoag of Massachusetts & the Mahican of New York.
Afterwards, many of these people were driven from their natural territories, but most of the tribes of Maine continued, until the American Revolution
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore was an English politician and coloniser. He achieved domestic political success as a member of parliament and Secretary of State under King James I, he lost much of his political power after his support for a failed marriage alliance between Prince Charles and the Spanish House of Habsburg royal family. Rather than continue in politics, he resigned all of his political offices in 1625 except for his position on the Privy Council and declared his Catholicism publicly, he was created Baron Baltimore in the Irish peerage upon his resignation. Baltimore Manor was located in Ireland. Calvert took an interest in the British colonisation of the Americas, at first for commercial reasons and to create a refuge for persecuted English Catholics, he became the proprietor of Avalon, the first sustained English settlement on the southeastern peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. Discouraged by its cold and sometimes inhospitable climate and the sufferings of the settlers, he looked for a more suitable spot further south and sought a new royal charter to settle the region, which would become the state of Maryland.
Calvert died five weeks before the new Charter was sealed, leaving the settlement of the Maryland colony to his son Cecil. His second son Leonard Calvert was the first colonial governor of the Province of Maryland. Little is known of the ancestry of the Yorkshire branch of the Calverts. At George Calvert's knighting, it was claimed that his family came from Flanders. Calvert's father, was a country gentleman who had achieved some prominence as a tenant of Lord Wharton, was wealthy enough to marry a "gentlewoman" of a noble line, Alicia or Alice Crossland, he established his family near Catterick in Yorkshire. George Calvert was born at Kiplin in late 1579, his mother Alicia/Alice died on 28 November 1587. His father married Grace Crossland, Alicia's first cousin. In 1569, Sir Thomas Gargrave had described Richmond as a territory where all gentlemen were "evil in religion", by which he meant predominately Roman Catholic. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, continuing the changes wrought earlier in the century by her father King Henry VIII which made the monarch the supreme authority of the Christian Church in England, continuing the Protestant Reformation from the continent of Europe, with the political and temporal separation from the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope/Papacy in Rome, the Royal Government exerted authority over the matters of religious faith and the Church.
Acts mandating compulsory religious uniformity were enacted by Parliament and enforced through penal laws. The Acts of Supremacy and the Uniformity Act of 1559 included an oath of allegiance to the Queen and an implicit denial of the Pope's authority over the English Church; this oath was required of any subject who wished to hold high office, attend university, or take advantage of opportunities controlled by the state. The Calvert household suffered the intrusion of the Elizabethan-era religious laws. From the year of George's birth onward, his father, Leonard Calvert, was subjected to repeated harassment by the Yorkshire authorities, who in 1580 extracted a promise of conformity from him, compelling his attendance at the Church of England services. In 1592, when George was twelve, the authorities denounced one of his tutors for teaching "from a popish primer" and instructed Leonard and Grace to send George and his brother Christopher to a Protestant tutor and, if necessary, to present the children before the commission "once a month to see how they perfect in learning".
As a result, the boys were sent to a Protestant tutor called Fowberry at Bilton. The senior Calvert had to give a "bond of conformity". In 1593, records show that Grace Calvert was committed to the custody of a "pursuivant", an official responsible for identifying and persecuting Catholics, in 1604 she was described as the "wife of Leonard Calvert of Kipling, non-communicant at Easter last". George Calvert went up to Trinity College at Oxford University, matriculating in 1593/94, where he studied foreign languages and received a bachelor's degree in 1597; as the oath of allegiance was compulsory after the age of sixteen, he would certainly have pledged conformity while at Oxford. The same pattern of conformity, whether pretended or sincere, continued through Calvert's early life. After Oxford, he moved in 1598 to London, where he studied municipal law at Lincoln's Inn for three years. In November 1604 he married Anne Mynne in a Protestant, Church of England ceremony at St Peter's, Middlesex, where his address was registered as St Martin in the Fields.
His children, including his eldest son and heir Cecil, born in the winter of 1605–06, were all baptised in the Church of England. When Anne died on 8 August 1622, she was buried at Calvert's local Protestant parish church, St Martin-in-the-Fields. Calvert had a total of thirteen children: Cecil, who succeeded his father as the 2nd Baron Baltimore, Anne, Dorothy, Grace, George, Henry and Philip. Calvert named his son "Cecilius" for Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, spymaster to Queen Elizabeth, whom Calvert had met during an ex
Coat of arms
A coat of arms is a heraldic visual design on an escutcheon, surcoat, or tabard. The coat of arms on an escutcheon forms the central element of the full heraldic achievement which in its whole consists of shield, supporters and motto. A coat of arms is traditionally unique to an individual person, state, organization or corporation; the Roll of Arms is a collection of many coats of arms, since the early Modern Age centuries it has been a source of information for public showing and tracing the membership of a noble family, therefore its genealogy across time. The ancient Greek hoplites used individual insignia on their shields; the ancient Romans used similar insignia on their shields. Heraldic designs came into general use among western nobility in the 12th century. Systematic, heritable heraldry had developed by the beginning of the 13th century. Who had a right to use arms, by law or social convention, varied to some degree between countries. Early heraldic designs were personal. Arms become hereditary by the end of the 12th century, in England by King Richard I during the Third Crusade.
Burgher arms are used in Northern Italy in the second half of the 13th century, in the Holy Roman Empire by the mid 14th century. In the late medieval period, use of arms spread to the clergy, to towns as civic identifiers, to royally chartered organizations such as universities and trading companies; the arts of vexillology and heraldry are related. The term coat of arms itself in origin refers to the surcoat with heraldic designs worn by combattants in the knightly tournament, in Old French cote a armer; the sense is transferred to the heraldic design itself in the mid-14th century. Despite no widespread regulation, heraldry has remained consistent across Europe, where tradition alone has governed the design and use of arms; some nations, like England and Scotland, still maintain the same heraldic authorities which have traditionally granted and regulated arms for centuries and continue to do so in the present day. In England, for example, the granting of arms has been controlled by the College of Arms.
Unlike seals and other general emblems, heraldic "achievements" have a formal description called a blazon, which uses vocabulary that allows for consistency in heraldic depictions. In the present day, coats of arms are still in use by a variety of institutions and individuals: for example, many European cities and universities have guidelines on how their coats of arms may be used, protect their use as trademarks. Many societies exist that aid in the design and registration of personal arms. Heraldry has been compared to modern corporate logos; the French system of heraldry influenced the British and Western European systems. Much of the terminology and classifications are taken from it. However, with the fall of the French monarchy there is not a Fons Honorum to enforce heraldic law; the French Republics that followed have either affirmed pre-existing titles and honors or vigorously opposed noble privilege. Coats of arms are considered an intellectual property of municipal body. Assumed arms are considered valid unless they can be proved in court to copy that of an earlier holder.
In the heraldic traditions of England and Scotland, an individual, rather than a family, had a coat of arms. In those traditions coats of arms are legal property transmitted from father to son. Undifferenced arms are used only by one person at any given time. Other descendants of the original bearer could bear the ancestral arms only with some difference: a colour change or the addition of a distinguishing charge. One such charge is the label, which in British usage is now always the mark of an heir apparent or an heir presumptive; because of their importance in identification in seals on legal documents, the use of arms was regulated. This has been carried out by heralds and the study of coats of arms is therefore called "heraldry". In time, the use of arms spread from military entities to educational institutes, other establishments. In Scotland, the Lord Lyon King of Arms has criminal jurisdiction to control the use of arms. In England, Northern Ireland and Wales the use of arms is a matter of civil law and regulated by the College of Arms and the High Court of Chivalry.
In reference to a dispute over the exercise of authority over the Officers of Arms in England, Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey, Lord Privy Seal, declared on 16 June 1673 that the powers of the Earl Marshal were "to order and determine all matters touching arms, ensigns of nobility and chivalry. It was further declared that no patents of arms or any ensigns of nobility should be granted and no augmentation, alteration, or addition should be made to arms without the consent of the Earl Marshal. In Ireland the usage and granting of coats of arms was regulated by the Ulster King of Arms from the office's creation in 1552. After Irish independence in 1922 the office was still working out of Dublin Castle; the last Ulster King of Arm
Kennebec River
The Kennebec River is a 170-mile-long river within the U. S. state of Maine. It rises in Moosehead Lake in west-central Maine; the East and West Outlets join at Indian Pond and the river flows southward from Harris Station Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam in the state. It is joined at The Forks by the Dead River called the West Branch continues south past the cities of Madison, Skowhegan and the state capital Augusta. At Richmond, it flows into Merrymeeting Bay, a 16-mile-long freshwater tidal bay into which flow the Androscoggin River and five smaller rivers; the Kennebec runs past the shipbuilding center of Bath to the Gulf of Maine in the Atlantic Ocean. Ocean tides affect the river height as far north as Waterville. Tributaries of the Kennebec River include the Carrabassett River, Sandy River, Sebasticook River. Segments of the East Coast Greenway run along the Kennebec; the name "Kennebec" comes from the Eastern Abenaki /kínipekʷ/, meaning "large body of still water, large bay". The Abenaki village of Norridgewock was located on the Kennebec in the 1600s.
In 1605 Samuel de Champlain navigated the coast of what is now Maine, charting the land and rivers of what was called "La Nouvelle France", "L'Acadie" or "La Cadie" including the Kennebec as far up as Bath, as well as the St. Croix, Penobscot rivers The English Popham Colony was founded on the Kennebec in 1607; the settler built the Virginia of Sagadahoc, the first oceangoing vessel built in the New World by English-speaking shipwrights. Hundreds of wooden and steel vessels have since been launched on the Kennebec in Bath, the so-called "City of Ships", including the Wyoming, one of the largest wooden schooners built. Following the War of 1812, Bath and the rest of the country experienced a lengthy period of expansion of international trade and therefore of maritime fleets. Many of those ships were built in Bath. In 1854, at the peak of this boom period, at least nineteen major firms were building ships in Bath; the sole remaining shipyard is the Bath Iron Works, owned by General Dynamics, one of the few yards still building warships for the United States Navy.
The USCGC Kennebec was named after this river. An English trading post, was established on the Kennebec in 1628; the Kennebec River was an early trade corridor to interior Maine from the Atlantic coast. Ocean ships could navigate upstream to Augusta; the cities of Bath, Gardiner and Augusta, the towns of Woolwich and Randolph developed adjacent to that transportation corridor. The river upstream of Augusta became an important transportation corridor for log driving to bring wooden logs and pulpwood from interior forests to sawmills and paper mills built to use water power where the city of Waterville and the towns of Winslow, Norridgewock, Madison and Bingham developed; the Maine Central Railroad and U. S. Route 201 were constructed following the river through these towns and cities. England's 1710 conquest of Acadia brought mainland Nova Scotia under English control, but New France still claimed present-day New Brunswick and present-day Maine east of the Kennebec River. To secure its claim, New France established Catholic missions in the three largest native villages in the region: one on the Kennebec River.
Continued encroachments led to Kennebec Abenaki warriors taking up arms in what Yankee historians sometimes refer to as Father Rale's War. A Yankee militia raid on the Abenaki Indian mission village at Norridgewock in August 1724 dealt the Abenaki resistance a crippling blow; as many as 40 inhabitants were killed, including children, as well Sebastien Rasle. The 67-year old Jesuit priest was scalped, as were 26 of the Abenaki, slaughtered. Having plundered and torched the tribal village, the Yankee raiders destroyed the surrounding corn fields and obtained bounty for the scalps; some Abenaki survivors returned to the Upper Kennebec, but others were welcomed by their Penobscot allies or found permanent refuge in Abenaki mission villages in French Canada. 1,110 American Revolutionary War soldiers followed this route during Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec in 1775. During the War of 1812, near the Kennebec River, the Battle of Hampden was fought in Maine. In 1814, Frederic Tudor began to establish markets in the West Indies and the southern United States for ice.
In 1826, Rufus Page built the first large ice house near Gardiner to supply Tudor. The ice was harvested by others who were inactive due to the winter weather; the ice was cut by hand, floated to an ice house on the bank, stored until spring. Packed in sawdust, it was loaded aboard ships and sent south; the Kennebec River before the construction of Edwards Dam was important as a spawning ground for Atlantic fish. In 1837, the Edwards Dam was built across the Kennebec River, just shy of the limit of tidal influence. Made of timber and concrete, it extended 917 feet across 25 feet high, its reservoir stretched 17 miles upstream, covered 1,143 acres. In 1999, the dam was removed. On April 1, 1987, over 6 feet of melting snow and 4 to 6 inches of rain in the mountains forced the river to flood its banks. By April 2, 1987, the river had crested at 34.1 ft above the normal 13 ft flood stage, meaning the river rose 21 ft. At the flood's peak, the flow topped out at an estimated 194,000 cubic feet per second.
It caused about $100 million in damage, flooding 2,100 homes, destroying 215, and
Chesapeake Bay
The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary in the U. S. states of Virginia. The Bay is located in the Mid-Atlantic region and is separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the Delmarva Peninsula with its mouth located between Cape Henry and Cape Charles. With its northern portion in Maryland and the southern part in Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay is a important feature for the ecology and economy of those two states, as well as others. More than 150 major rivers and streams flow into the Bay's 64,299-square-mile drainage basin, which covers parts of six states and all of Washington, D. C; the Bay is 200 miles long from its northern headwaters in the Susquehanna River to its outlet in the Atlantic Ocean. It is 2.8 miles wide at 30 miles at its widest. Total shoreline including tributaries is 11,684 miles, circumnavigating a surface area of 4,479 square miles. Average depth is 21 feet; the Bay is spanned twice, in Maryland by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from Sandy Point to Kent Island and in Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel connecting Virginia Beach to Cape Charles.
Known for both its beauty and bounty, the Bay has become "emptier", with fewer crabs and watermen in past years. Recent restoration efforts begun in the 1990s have been ongoing and show potential for growth of the native oyster population; the health of the Chesapeake Bay improved in 2015, marking three years of gains over the past four years, according to a new report by the University of Maryland. The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village "at a big river", it is the seventh oldest surviving English place-name in the United States, first applied as "Chesepiook" by explorers heading north from the Roanoke Colony into a Chesapeake tributary in 1585 or 1586. The name may refer to the Chesapeake people or the Chesepian, a Native American tribe who inhabited the area now known as South Hampton Roads in the U. S. state of Virginia. They occupied an area, now the Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach areas. In 2005, Algonquian linguist Blair Rudes "helped to dispel one of the area's most held beliefs: that'Chesapeake' means something like'great shellfish bay.'
It does not, Rudes said. The name might have meant something like'great water,' or it might have just referred to a village location at the Bay's mouth." In addition, the name is always prefixed by "the" in usage by local residents: "The Chesapeake", "The Chesapeake Bay" and "The Bay". The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary to the North Atlantic, lying between the Delmarva Peninsula to the east and the North American mainland to the west, it is the ria, or drowned valley, of the Susquehanna River, meaning that it was the alluvial plain where the river flowed when the sea level was lower. It is not a fjord, because the Laurentide Ice Sheet never reached as far south as the northernmost point on the Bay. North of Baltimore, the western shore borders the hilly Piedmont region of Maryland; the large rivers entering the Bay from the west have broad mouths and are extensions of the main ria for miles up the course of each river. The Bay's geology, its present form, its location were created by a bolide impact event at the end of the Eocene, forming the Chesapeake Bay impact crater and the Susquehanna River valley much later.
The Bay was formed starting about 10,000 years ago when rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age flooded the Susquehanna River valley. Parts of the Bay the Calvert County, coastline, are lined by cliffs composed of deposits from receding waters millions of years ago; these cliffs known as Calvert Cliffs, are famous for their fossils fossilized shark teeth, which are found washed up on the beaches next to the cliffs. Scientists' Cliffs is a beach community in Calvert County named for the desire to create a retreat for scientists when the community was founded in 1935. Much of the Bay is shallow. At the point where the Susquehanna River flows into the Bay, the average depth is 30 feet, although this soon diminishes to an average of 10 feet southeast of the city of Havre de Grace, Maryland, to about 35 feet just north of Annapolis. On average, the depth of the Bay is 21 feet, including tributaries; because the Bay is an estuary, it has salt water and brackish water. Brackish water has three salinity zones: oligohaline and polyhaline.
The freshwater zone runs from the mouth of the Susquehanna River to north Baltimore. The oligohaline zone has little salt. Salinity varies from 0.5 ppt to 10 ppt, freshwater species can survive there. The north end of the oligohaline zone is north Baltimore and the south end is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge; the mesohaline zone has a medium amount of salt and runs from the Bay Bridge to the mouth of the Rappahannock River. Salinity there ranges from 10.7 ppt to 18 ppt. The polyhaline zone is the saltiest zone, some of the water can be as salty as sea water, it runs from the mouth of the Rappahannock River to the mouth of the Bay. The salinity ranges from 18.7 ppt to 36 ppt. The climate of the area surrounding the Bay i
