The controversy as it was waged was a reaction from the views with which the Pilgrims had long been regarded for their devotion under trial and for the pluck of their constancy in first making English homes on this part of the continent. Maine writers like George Folsom and William Willis had never questioned such established claims, but had reasserted them. The leading spirit in this revocation of judgment was Mr. John A. Poor, of Portland. This gentleman, having done much to increase the material interests of his native State, entered with pertinacity into a process of rendering, as he claimed, the position of Maine in history more conspicuous. This required the aggrandizement of the fame of Sir Ferdinando Gorges; and he began his missionary work with a vindication of Gorges’ claims to be considered the father of English colonization in America. It was no new idea, for George Folsom had done Gorges justice in his _Discourse_ in 1846. Mr. Poor’s lecture was printed, and was subsequently appended to the _Popham Memorial_. To emphasize this claim, he secured the naming of a new fort in Portland Harbor after Sir Ferdinando in 1860; and in 1862, when the General Government built a fortification on the old peninsula of Sabino, his efforts caused it to be named Fort Popham, and his zeal planned and directed a commemorative service in August of that year on the spot, when a tablet recounting the claims of which he was the champion was placed near its walls. The address which he then delivered, which showed the intemperance, if not the perversity, of an iconoclast, and which appeared with other papers and addresses more or less pronounced in the same way in a _Popham Memorial_, opened the controversy. See also _Historical Magazine_, Jan. 1863, and Sept. 1866, and Mr. C. W. Tuttle’s account of Mr. Poor’s agency in a “Memorial of J. A. Poor,” in the _N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._, Oct. 1872. The committee charged with the preparation of the _Memorial_ unwisely omitted a counter speech of the late J. Wingate Thornton, on “The Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges,” which was accordingly printed in the _Congregational Quarterly_, April, 1863, and separately, and is examined favorably by Abner C. Goodell in the _Essex Institute Collections_, Aug. 1863, p. 175. A similar unfavorable estimate of Popham’s colonists had been taken by R. H. Gardiner in the _Maine Historical Collections_, ii. 269; v. 226.