Portland

The Burning of Falmouth: Portland, Maine, and the Revolution That Rose from Ashes

On the morning of October 18, 1775, Lieutenant Henry Mowat of the Royal Navy stood on the quarterdeck of the armed vessel Canceaux and ordered his small squadron to open fire on the town of Falmouth, in what is now Portland, Maine. Mowat had set a deadline of 9 AM for the town's response to his demands; by 9:40, the town appeared to be deserted, so he ran a red flag up the Canceaux's masthead and ordered the fleet to begin firing. For roughly nine hours, a barrage of incendiary shells, cannonballs, and carcasses—hollow iron projectiles packed with pitch and designed to start fires—rained down on one of the most prosperous seaports in northern New England. The bombardment lasted nine hours, during which approximately 3,000 projectiles—one every eleven seconds—were fired at Falmouth.

When the bombardment appeared inadequate, Mowat sent a landing party ashore to set fire to any buildings that had survived. By nightfall, more than four hundred buildings had been destroyed. The historian Donald A. Yerxa, in his detailed study published in the Maine Historical Society Quarterly, documented that the barrage destroyed 414 of the town's 500 buildings. The waterfront, the churches, the town house, the customs house, warehouses full of goods, and block after block of homes lay in smoking ruin. In his report to Admiral Graves, Mowat stated that eleven small vessels were destroyed in the harbor and four were captured, at the cost of one man killed and one wounded on the British side. What had been a thriving commercial hub of perhaps two thousand residents was, in the span of a single autumn day, reduced to a charred skeleton of itself. More than 1,000 people had been left homeless by the raid, including at least 160 families out of an estimated population of 2,500. The destruction of Falmouth was not merely a local catastrophe. It became a pivotal event in the American Revolution, one that hardened colonial resolve, influenced the creation of the Continental Navy, and demonstrated with brutal clarity the price Britain was willing to impose on communities that defied its authority.

To understand why Falmouth was singled out for destruction, one must look to the chain of events that unfolded in the spring and summer of 1775—and indeed to decades of simmering resentment before that. Maine had a unique grievance stemming from the British trade in ships' masts: white pine from Maine was critical to the British navy, and the Admiralty had progressively tightened regulations on cutting pine for lumber, giving control over this lucrative trade to politically connected colonial merchants, a source of deep resentment.

During most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Falmouth and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were the center of the mast trade.

The Tate House in Portland's Stroudwater neighborhood, built in 1755 for Captain George Tate, stands as a physical reminder of this trade: Tate served as the Senior Mast Agent for the British Royal Navy, overseeing the cutting and shipping of white pines from Maine to England.

Like the tax on tea, the Broad Arrow mark—the King's claim slashed onto the tallest pines—came to symbolize the tyranny of the Crown, and reactions to the Broad Arrow policies helped foment revolution in the Province of Maine.

Falmouth's defiance had deep roots. During the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, a mob seized revenue stamps at the Customs House and burned them in a bonfire; the repeal of the Stamp Act in May 1766 was met with public rejoicing.

When Parliament passed the Boston Port Act in 1774, closing Boston's harbor, the muffled bells of Falmouth's First Parish Church tolled from dawn to dusk in protest. The town had been a center of patriot activity in the District of Maine, then part of Massachusetts. Its Committee of Correspondence and Committee of Safety were active and vocal. Among the leading patriots was Brigadier General Jedediah Preble, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a prominent Falmouth resident who helped organize local resistance to British authority. Samuel Freeman, the town clerk and a member of the patriot committee, documented the growing tensions with precision, and his records would later become essential primary sources for understanding these months. Falmouth's harbor, Casco Bay, was one of the finest on the northern coast, and the town's merchant fleet and access to timber made it strategically and economically significant to both sides.

The immediate spark came in May 1775, when a merchant named Ichabod Jones sailed into Falmouth harbor aboard his sloop Unity, accompanied by Mowat's Canceaux, which was providing escort. Jones had come to trade provisions for lumber, but the townspeople, suspicious of his ties to the British and enraged by the recent bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, refused to do business with him. The confrontation escalated. On May 9, a group of local militia under Colonel Samuel Thompson seized Mowat himself while the lieutenant was ashore. It was a daring and somewhat reckless act—taking a Royal Navy officer prisoner was not something done lightly. Mowat was held briefly before being released, reportedly after giving his parole, though accounts of the exact terms differ. On June 26, 1775, the Journal of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress recorded an opinion from a committee appointed to consider Thompson's conduct, concluding that his actions were "friendly to his country and the cause of liberty." The humiliation burned in Mowat's memory.

The British army had been besieged in Boston since the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, supported and supplied by the Royal Navy under the command of Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, who was under Admiralty instruction to suppress the burgeoning rebellion.

The repeated embarrassment of British vessels by colonial privateers, along with provocations like the seizure of the Margaretta at Machias, Maine, and Mowat's brief capture during Thompson's War, pushed Graves toward more aggressive action.

On October 6, Graves issued written orders to Mowat to "chastize" a series of towns—including Marblehead, Salem, Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Falmouth—by burning buildings and destroying shipping.

Mowat left Boston Harbor on October 6 aboard his sixteen-gun hydrographic survey sloop HMS Canceaux in company with the twenty-gun ship Cat, the twelve-gun schooner HMS Halifax, the bomb sloop HMS Spitfire, and the supply ship HMS Symmetry.

His instructions were broad in the number of possible targets, and he opted against attacks on Cape Ann, where the buildings were too widely spaced for naval cannon fire to be effective.

On October 16, he reached the outer parts of Falmouth harbor and anchored; some townspeople recognized the Canceaux and believed there was no danger, but militia members remembered Thompson's War and were more suspicious. The next day was windless, so Mowat kedged the ships into the inner harbor and anchored them near the town.