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Ellsworth is a city in and the county seat of Hancock County, Maine, United States. The 2020 Census determined it had a population of 8,399. Named after United States Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth, it contains historic buildings and other points of interest, and is close to Acadia National Park.

History

According to the history of the Passamaquoddy Indians, the Ellsworth area was originally inhabited by members of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes: "Both groups speak closely related Algonquian languages, although anthropologists generally group the Passamaquoddies linguistically with the Maliseets and the Penobscots with the Abenakis." [https://web.archive.org/web/20070501114844/http://www.passamaquoddy.com/history.htm]

George J. Varney, in the 'Hancock County, Maine' section of his Gazetteer of the State of Maine , published in Boston in 1886, wrote:

:"The first European who made definite mention of the Penobscot Bay and river, which wash its western side, was Thevet, a French explorer, in 1556. Martin Pring and Captain Weymouth, the English explorers, sailed along its shores in 1603 and 1605, and DeMonts, the Frenchman, explored some portions of the coast in 1604 and 1605. There is a tradition that Rosier, the historian of Weymouth's expedition, explored Deer Island thoroughfare, making a halt at the bold promontory in Brooksville, known as Cape Rosier. They found the county occupied by a tribe of Indians, who with those on Passamaquoddy waters, were noted for their long journeys in canoes whence the general name for these Indians, Etechmins. DeMonts claimed the country in the name of the King of France in the true Catholic style, setting up a cross and calling the country "Acadie." By this name it continued to be known until the capture of Quebec by General James Wolfe in 1759. When Weymouth came in 1605, he also claimed the country in the name of his King, James I of England. Thus the two leading powers of Europe became adverse claimants of the soil of Hancock County, and the wars these claims occasioned kept the county an almost unbroken wilderness during the provincial history of Maine."

It is likely that the French who founded a colony at Somes Sound on Mount Desert Island in 1613, under the patronage of Madame de Guercheville, explored the Ellsworth area and what is now the watershed of the Union River. Varney believes that there were French settlements of some kind or another as close to Ellsworth as Trenton, Oak Point, Newbury Neck and Surry.

The Ellsworth area was disputed between the English and the French throughout the 17th century and well into the 18th century, occasioning intermittent warfare which was known to the English as the French and Indian Wars. Native American inhabitants may have converted to Roman Catholicism and fought with the French against the British until the fall of Quebec City to the British in 1759. After the 1763 signing of the Treaty of Paris by the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Portugal, Ellsworth became part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The modern history of Ellsworth begins with the settlement of the Union River area around 1763 by a party of English led by entrepreneurs Benjamin Milliken and Benjamin Joy, from present-day southern Maine and New Hampshire, who intended to build dams and sawmills to exploit the area's timber and water power. They applied for grants offered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to encourage settlement of the Hancock County area. Historian Albert H. Davis in his History of Ellsworth, Maine , published in Lewiston, Maine, in 1927, relates what is known of this early expedition and points to the northern end of the present Water Street, just to the south of the present bridge across the Union River, as the site of the earlier crude buildings erected by the pioneers.

George J. Varney describes the process of land grants by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

:"The first grants of land in the county were six townships, each six miles square, between the rivers Penobscot and Union (then known as the Donaqua), which were granted to David Marsh et al., by the General Court of Massachusetts, upon conditions, one of which was that they should settle each township with 60 Protestant families within six years. These grants were No. 1, Bucksport 2, Orland 3, Penobscot 4, Sedgwick 5, Blue Hill and 6, Surry. Six other townships east of the Union River were granted on the same terms three of which are in this county, viz.: No. 1, Trenton, granted to Eben Thorndike, et al.