In the summer of 1676, New England Indians, with a good deal encouragement from the French, attempted to drive the English settlers from their hard-won farms. That summer, all over the Maine coast there were swift, fierce raids. Falmouth lost thirty-four of its inhabitants, killed or captured, and the survivors fled, some of them to Cushing’s Island. When peace was restored in 1678, Governor Thomas Danforth ordered the settlers to regroup more compactly as a defensive measure and to build a fort at the foot of present India Street. In 1689 the Indians attacked again and were driven off, but returned the following spring, captured Fort Loyall after siege of four days and nights, and began a bloody massacre. After this series of raids there were no white settlers in Maine east of Wells. In 1692 Governor Sir William Phips at last succeeded in burying Falmouth’s dead.
Falmouth was, as Portland’s nineteenth-century historian William Willis described it, "a perfect blank, a thoroughfare for the savage and resort for beasts of prey." Gradually, however, intrepid settlers began to try their luck once more—some of them for the third time. By 1715 there was one family, three years later twenty, and by the end of 1726 the Reverend Samuel Smith reported that there were over fifty, though he observed that like most frontier communities, the settlers were quite a mixed lot, ranging from some new settlers from Cape Ann in Massachusetts who seemed like "very good sort of men" to another who was "a pretty troublesome spark." He was soon joined by his brothers-in-law, "no better than he," and eventually the whole lot of rascals were "warned out of town."
Falmouth was becoming something of a boom town. It exported fish lumber, and with the arrival of Thomas Westbrook, the Royal Mast Agent, in 1727, became a vital source of masts for the Royal Navy. That same year the New England Weekly Journal reported that "Captain Farles in one of the mast ships now lies in Casco Bay, who we hear is not a little pleas’d with the peculiar Commodiousness of that Fine Harbor to carry on the said Business." Between 1768 and 1772, for example, Falmouth shipped no fewer than 1,046 masts, each averaging over three tons. However, it was the trade which once again brought disaster to Falmouth in the fall of 1775.
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