Qualla: Saint Croix Island

Saint Croix Island: Introduction

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0. By the eighteenth century, locals had started calling it Bone Island. Erosion along the banks of this 6.5-acre speck in the St. Croix River had begun exposing graves -- the remains of Frenchmen who had died here during the winter of 1604-1605, their bones surfacing like a rebuke to the ambitions that had brought them across the Atlantic. Saint Croix Island sits near the mouth of the river that now forms the border between Maine and New Brunswick, a place the Passamaquoddy people knew as Muttoneguis and had used for centuries to store food safely away from mainland animals. In June 1604, the French nobleman Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, chose this island as the site for a colony in the territory France called l'Acadie. Samuel de Champlain sailed with the expedition and mapped every detail. What followed was a winter so devastating that it reshaped the entire trajectory of French colonization in North America.

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Image: Quintin Soloviev | CC BY 4.0

Saint Croix Island: The Worst Winter in New France

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS, Public domain. Dugua's expedition arrived in the summer of 1604 with 79 men, authorized by King Henry IV of France to establish a permanent settlement. The island seemed promising -- defensible, accessible by water, positioned at the junction of river and bay. They built houses, a chapel, a sto...

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Image: NPS | Public domain

Saint Croix Island: Neutral Ground, Contested Border

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 3.0. Saint Croix Island's location made it a pawn in centuries of territorial disputes. During the War of 1812, it served as neutral territory between warring nations, earning the nickname Neutral Island. The more fundamental question -- which country owned it -- was settled in 1797 w...

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Image: Magicpiano | CC BY-SA 3.0

Saint Croix Island: An International Historic Site

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD, CC BY-SA 4.0. The United States Congress designated Saint Croix Island a National Monument in 1949, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In 1984, Congress gave it the distinctive title of International Historic Site -- a designation unique in both the American...

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Image: Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD | CC BY-SA 4.0

Saint Croix Island: What the Island Remembers

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS, Public domain. Saint Croix Island is uninhabited today, and deliberately so. The archaeological remains beneath its soil -- foundations, graves, artifacts from the 1604 settlement and from centuries of Passamaquoddy use before that -- are too fragile for foot traffic and too important to risk. ...

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Image: NPS | Public domain