They called it Pemetic — "range of mountains" — and they were right about what mattered. The Wabanaki people camped along the shores of Somes Sound for thousands of years, long before Abraham Somes established the first European village on Mount Desert Island in 1761, long before a summit road climbed Cadillac Mountain, long before four million visitors a year arrived to look out over Frenchman Bay. What the Wabanaki knew — that this island, this sound carved by glaciers, these peaks rising to 1,530 feet at the eastern seaboard's highest point — was worth staying close to, worth naming carefully. The Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor now holds the largest collection of Maine Native American basketry in any museum. The name Pemetic didn't survive on the maps. What survived is harder to erase: the fact of a people who were here first, and are here still.
