By Ryan Michaels | The Maine Mirror | September 29, 2026

I live in Berwick. South Berwick and North Berwick are right there on the map, close enough that it’s easy to think of them as three neighboring towns that happen to share a name.

But I wanted to know how they got that way.

What I found changed how I look at the place I call home. The three Berwicks were once one town. Before that, the land was part of Kittery.

Here’s the short version:

Kittery → Berwick in 1713 → South Berwick in 1814 → North Berwick in 1831.

If dates and town boundaries aren’t your thing, stay with me. The dates are just guideposts. The story is about the people who lived here, the communities they built, and why the names on an old record may mean something different from the names on today’s map.

The story starts before any of these towns

It would be easy to begin in 1713, when Berwick became a town. But that would leave out the people who were here first.

The Old Berwick Historical Society says the Indigenous people living at Quamphegan, in what is now South Berwick, were most likely Western Abenaki, part of the larger Wabanaki world. It also describes a 1643 land transaction in which Sagamore Rowls reserved Quamphegan for himself and his people.

Some of the names they used survived the boundaries that came later. Quamphegan and Newichawannock are reminders that this place already had a history long before English colonial governments began defining towns.

The rivers help explain why people settled and worked here. The Salmon Falls River connected communities and carried goods. Falls along that river and the Great Works River provided power for mills. By 1713, settlements had developed at Quamphegan, Salmon Falls and Doughty Falls—places associated with today’s South Berwick, Berwick and North Berwick. At the time, all three were within Kittery.

So how did Berwick become its own town?

On June 9, 1713, colonial authorities approved a separate Town of Berwick.

We can read the governmental order today because it was reproduced in Everett S. Stackpole’s Old Kittery and Her Families. The order made the Berwick precinct extending northward from Thompson’s Brook a distinct town.

Here is the part that caught my attention: that Berwick was much bigger than today’s Berwick.

Stackpole wrote that the new town included the land that would become Berwick, South Berwick and North Berwick, along with a small part of present-day Lebanon.

So when we see “Berwick” in an old document, we have to pause. A person recorded as living in Berwick in the 1700s could have lived in any of the three towns we know now.

That one detail makes a lot of local history easier to understand.

One town doesn’t always mean one community

Over time, different parts of the large town developed around different places and kinds of work. The river settlements were tied to transportation, mills and commerce. Elsewhere, farming and lumbering played a larger role.

There were also separate parishes, each with a meetinghouse at the center of community life. Historical sources don’t give exactly the same year for their division. William D. Williamson’s 1832 history of Maine says Berwick was divided into two parishes in 1751. The Old Berwick Historical Society’s bicentennial history describes the North Parish forming in 1754. By the mid-1750s, the town had a North Parish centered around Blackberry Hill and a South Parish associated with Quamphegan.

I don’t want to pretend those sources agree on the exact year. What they do show is that, decades before the town was divided, its communities had begun to develop separate centers of their own.

Was the War of 1812 the reason South Berwick split?

I wondered about that, too. The timing makes it a fair question.

Drawing on Berwick town records, the Old Berwick Historical Society says South Parish residents had already tried twice to form a separate town. Its account also describes disagreement within Berwick over the War of 1812. People whose livelihoods depended on commerce faced different pressures from people in agricultural parts of town, and town meetings voted in support of the war.

That gives us a picture of a town with real differences inside it. It does not prove that the war caused South Berwick to separate. The effort to create a new town had begun before the war.

Then, in 1814, the separation became law.

South Berwick becomes a town

On February 12, 1814, the Massachusetts General Court approved the act incorporating Berwick’s South Parish as the Town of South Berwick.

This is the original law that created the town. It dealt not only with the new name, but also with practical questions: taxes already owed, debts, shared property and the choice of town officers. The Old Berwick Historical Society says South Berwick held its first town meeting on March 14, 1814.

Now there were two towns:

South Berwick | Berwick

Something else worth remembering: Maine was still part of Massachusetts when South Berwick became a town. Maine would not become a state until 1820.

Where was North Berwick?

It was still part of Berwick.

That surprised me when I first laid out the timeline. South Berwick’s separation in 1814 did not create all three towns at once. The area that became North Berwick remained within Berwick for another 17 years.

On March 22, 1831, the Maine Legislature approved the act dividing Berwick and incorporating its easterly part as North Berwick.

At last, the familiar arrangement was there:

South Berwick | Berwick | North Berwick

From Berwick’s separation from Kittery in 1713 to North Berwick’s incorporation in 1831, that change took 118 years.

Even then, the lines kept moving

I used to picture a town boundary as a line someone drew once and left alone. These records show why that picture is too simple.

A historical summary of Berwick’s boundary changes records land moving from Berwick to South Berwick in 1841 and 1881, and from Berwick to North Berwick in 1875. The 1875 Maine law documents the North Berwick transfer. Maine’s 1881 House journal records legislation changing the Berwick–South Berwick line.

The three towns existed, but their borders were still changing.

Why this matters when we read local history

Modern Berwick kept the name of the town established in 1713. I understand why that might make it seem like Berwick alone is the “original” one.

The records tell a fuller story.

Before 1814, the land that became South Berwick was part of Berwick. Before 1831, the land that became North Berwick was, too. Before 1713, the territory that became all three towns was within Kittery.

None of that makes one present-day town more entitled to the history than another. It means the history is shared.

It also gives us a useful question to ask whenever we come across an old deed, family record or story that says someone lived in “Berwick”:

Which Berwick did that place become?

The answer depends on when the record was written.

Three towns, one shared history

Here’s the timeline I’ll remember:

1713: Berwick separates from Kittery.
1814: South Berwick separates from Berwick.
1820: Maine becomes a state.
1831: North Berwick separates from Berwick.

That’s the story of the municipal boundaries. The story of this place reaches further back, to the Wabanaki people who lived along these waterways before any of those towns existed.

I started with a simple question about three names on a map. I came away seeing three communities connected by centuries of shared history—and with a better understanding of how much a place can change while still carrying its past.

References

• Maine Genealogy. “Berwick, York County: Boundary Changes.”
• Maine Legislature. Journal of the House, 1881.
• Maine Legislature. Act incorporating North Berwick, Chapter 164, 1831.
• Maine Legislature. Act transferring land from Berwick to North Berwick, 1875.
• Maine State Archives. “Elections, Statehood, and the Constitution.”
• Massachusetts General Court. Act incorporating South Berwick, Chapter 114, 1814.
• Old Berwick Historical Society. “A Bicentennial History of South Berwick.”
• Old Berwick Historical Society. “South Berwick’s First People.”
• Stackpole, Everett S. Old Kittery and Her Families. 1903.
• Williamson, William D. The History of the State of Maine. 1832.