The Cogswell Family

Set into the rocks at Pemaquid Point is a bronze plaque marking the place where one family’s American story began nearly four centuries ago. On August 14, 1635, John Cogswell and his family, from Westbury Leigh in Wiltshire, England, first set foot in America near this site. They had crossed the Atlantic aboard the Angel Gabriel, carrying with them their belongings and plans for a new life in New England.

They had barely arrived when disaster struck. The following day, August 15, a violent storm swept across the New England coast. The Angel Gabriel, anchored at Pemaquid, was wrecked in the storm. The hurricane is now remembered as the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, one of the earliest major hurricanes described in the historical records of colonial New England. The Cogswell family survived, but the ship that had carried them across the Atlantic was lost. Some accounts of the family story describe possessions being recovered from the wreckage, including a trunk belonging to John Cogswell that reportedly floated ashore.

The Cogswells eventually traveled south and settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where they established their new home and became part of the growing English settlement there. Generations of descendants followed. More than 350 years later, those descendants returned to Pemaquid Point to mark the place where their family’s American story had begun. On September 28, 1991, the Cogswell Family Association dedicated this plaque in their memory.

I find something especially meaningful about its placement. It isn’t inside a museum or protected behind glass. It is attached directly to the rock at Pemaquid Point, overlooking the same rugged coastline where the family arrived in 1635. We had come here to see the lighthouse and the Maine coast. Instead, this small plaque introduced us to a family whose first day in America was followed almost immediately by catastrophe, and whose story continued despite it.