Charles H. Lagerbom received his BA in History from Kansas State University and MA in History and Archaeology from University of Maine with work on a Revolutionary War truck-house excavated on the Penobscot River. An avid scuba diver, Charles organized underwater video surveys of ship remains in the lakes of Maine as well as the Penobscot Expedition of 1779. He worked in Antarctica with glacial geology research teams from University of Maine Quaternary Institute, now Climate Change Institute. A published author and avid polar, colonial Maine and maritime book collector, Charles has frequently lectured and made presentations on cruise ships and ashore on the history, life, politics and science of the Antarctic as well as Maine colonial and maritime history. He is author of The Fifth Man: The Life of H.R. Bowers (Caedmon of Whitby). Immediate past President of the Antarctican Society, Charles is its current archivist/historian and serves as Membership Chair for the American Polar Society. He is a Social Studies teacher at Belfast Area High School in Belfast, Maine.
In 1782, when the sixteen-gun sloop-of-war HMS Albany was determined to be at the end of her usefulness, nobody seemed truly surprised or sad about it, least of all her commander. The vessel had survived six continuous years of war-time service in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, in addition to a prior life as a merchant vessel. […]
In February 1791, when local Indian trader Joseph Marie Junin was found dead, shot twice in the head in his cabin in what is present-day Bangor, Maine, many thought it a simple robbery and that local Indians were to blame. When Junin’s feckless nephew was arrested and put on trial, some agreed the boy did […]
When war came to down east Maine in the spring of 1775, a rough frontiersman named Andrew Gilman joined the patriot cause. He served with distinction as an Indian interpreter, a courier, and as a lieutenant in command of a group of Penobscot Indians and local settlers in an American ranger force that protected the […]
In the years prior to the American Revolution, plenty of opportunities awaited young Massachusetts men on the down east frontier, especially for those who needed to get out of Boston. This may have been the case for twenty-year-old Francis Archibald III. In 1770, he decided to leave Boston and take up service as a soldier […]
What do an American Revolution prisoner of war accused of being a spy, a first born scion of an established wealthy New England family, and Machias Seal Island, a lonely, wind-swept chunk of rock in the Gulf of Maine all have in common? The American Revolution in Maine has been described as a quasi-civil war […]
In early morning fog on April 15, 1775, just days before the momentous clash at Lexington and Concord, two innocent-looking vessels appeared off Cape Jellison in Penobscot Bay a few hundred yards from Fort Pownal (present-day Stockton Springs, Maine). The fort’s gunner, Jonathan Lowder, looked out upon the waters and saw two schooners. They turned out […]
