| On June 9, 1758, Ebenezer Preble was shot by marauding Indians as he worked on his farm at the north end of Arrowsic Island across the Kennebec River from Bath, Maine. The Indians then went to the farmhouse for the rest of the family. As Henry Thayer wrote in 1904: |
| "They preferred captives to scalps because of the higher price in the French markets of the spoils of war. They strove for entrance and demanded surrender, offering "good quarters." Failing of this, they tried bullets. One account told that Mrs. Preble was putting a featherbed against the door for more effective barricade against the guns. Through crevice or aperture by door or window she was shot dead, falling in the midst of her shrieking children, while grievous wounds were inflicted on two more of the household." |
| After killing Mary Preble,
the Indians took captive the Preble
children and servants and sold them to the French in Canada.
Thayer wrote: "On the way the
captors hailed another party and held aloft on a pole the bunch or
scalps, exulting in the trophies of a successful raid: the
bereaved girls held long in memory the excruciating view of the long,
black hair of their mother, waving as a token of orphanage cruelly
thrust upon them in a moment and their wretched and then hopeless fate
as they were driven into the land of the enemy and the stranger."
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