History

The History of Winslow, Maine

Winslow sits on the peninsula where the Sebasticook River meets the Kennebec River in central Maine. The town grew up around Fort Halifax, built in 1754 by order of the Massachusetts General Court during the French and Indian War. On July 25, 1754, Major General John Winslow arrived with a force of about 600 soldiers to establish the fort, which was named for George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax, the British colonial secretary.

A settlement soon grew under the fort's protection, and in 1771 it was incorporated as a town — one of Maine's older communities, dating to the years when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. The town was named in honor of Major General John Winslow of Marshfield, Massachusetts, who had overseen the fort's construction.

Fort Halifax: The Oldest Blockhouse in the United States

The one surviving blockhouse of Fort Halifax is a National Historic Landmark and the oldest blockhouse in the United States, preserved today as the Fort Halifax State Historic Site. On April 1, 1987, catastrophic flooding on the Kennebec River swept the historic blockhouse downstream — twenty-two of its original hand-hewn logs were later recovered, some as far as forty miles to the south. Using those timbers, the blockhouse was faithfully reconstructed on its original site in 1988, where visitors can still see it today.

Rivers, Mills, and a Growing Community

Winslow's location at the confluence of two rivers shaped its story, from its early days as a frontier outpost to the era of textile and paper mills that powered the Kennebec Valley economy. Today Winslow is a full-service community of roughly 8,000 residents, proud of its heritage and its riverside setting across the Kennebec from Waterville.

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