GARDINER — For 250 years, people have been coming together to worship on the crest of Church Hill in Gardiner. On Saturday, the members of Christ Church Episcopal marked the anniversary with a service on the site of the original church, built in 1771 and destroyed by fire in 1793.

Nearly three dozen people gathered on the site of St. Ann’s,  the original church, which stood next to the location of the current one. They acknowledged that the European settlement in Maine displaced the people of the Wabanaki Confederacy who lived in the Kennebec River Valley.

“We’re trying to do two things,” the Rev. Kerry Mansir said. “We want to celebrate that there has been a worshiping community in this place for 250 years and what that has meant for the Gardiner community, for it to have been one of the first places of worship in the area.”

At the same time, Mansir said, it’s an opportunity to be more honest and thoughtful about what European colonialism meant to the people who already lived in the area.

“It wasn’t ever our job to ‘civilize’ these people,” she said. “The hard thing now is that we’re willing to acknowledge it, but how do we make amends for this history?”

One of the steps Mansir and her congregation are taking is to support legislation that gives the Wabanaki tribes the same rights Native Americans have elsewhere.

Saturday’s service, led by the Rev. Thomas Brown, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine, included an acknowledgment of harms done.

“We acknowledge that settler colonialism and racist violence against indigenous people are not sins of the past, but are ongoing forms of oppression which we must learn to face and dismantle,” reads a church statement. “We give our thanks for the lives of indigenous people of the past, present and future. Native people have not disappeared but are our neighbors today, with thriving lives and traditions. We give thanks for their ongoing stewardship of our lands and resources.”

At Saturday’s celebration, those in attendance could look out over the recently restored St. Ann’s churchyard, where graves have been reunited with markers that had been broken, moved and misplaced over the years.

Last week, two of the project volunteers were at the historic churchyard to complete some final tasks.

On Thursday, William King watched as Dawn Thistle worked to fill cracks on one headstone with epoxy.  The headstone was one of several damaged during a storm on July 6.

The project started after King, who lives in Woolwich, went on a search for his ancestors and their gravesites. In the early 1990s, that brought him to Gardiner and the churchyard of St. Ann’s. When he returned about seven years later, he found many of the headstones scattered on the ground, some of them pulled from their bases. Eventually, they were piled along the churchyard’s eastern boundary.

“We’ve been working at this for seven years,” King said, explaining that during that period, he and volunteers like Henry McIntyre spent a few hours nearly every week figuring out who was still buried in the churchyard (some graves had been moved to the Oak Grove cemetery), and to piece together broken stones.

King’s ancestors Gideon and Dorcas Gardiner are buried in the churchyard. Dorcas is believed to be the first person buried there.

Thistle, the special collections librarian who has since become the assistant director of the Gardiner Public Library, combed the archives for information on the churchyard, following leads to more clues, often with success.

The next project is erecting a sign for the churchyard, Thistle said, as well as placing a historical marker.

As for the church and its members, Mansir said that Christ Church is working with Wabanaki REACH, a group that supports self-determination for the Wabanaki people through education and restorative justice, to hold educational webinars.

“We’re encouraging the people in our community to learn as much as they can,” she said. “You can’t really change anything unless you understand your past.”

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