The site of Wiscasset has been inhabited for thousands of years, beginning with the Red Paint People, while the Sheepscot River and surrounding forests supported native peoples with abundant marine, animal, bird, and plant life. Europeans first arrived near here in 1607, first to explore and later to settle, and the earliest communities were fishing and trading villages. By 1660, George and John Davie had come from Massachusetts, then including Maine as a district, traveled up the tidal Sheepscot to the high land opposite what is now the Old Jail Museum on Federal Street, and built cabins. In 1666, the first written record, an English deed, documented their purchase of a large tract including present-day Wiscasset from three Native American sagamores. As settlers took more native land and European diseases devastated native tribes, King Philip's War in 1675 began decades of brutal conflict that erased all English settlements north of York for more than 50 years. In 1729, Robert Hooper and his family returned to the river, built a cabin near a great rock on what became Water Street, and started a new settlement that continued to grow. By the mid-18th century, competing land claims were resolved in favor of the Kennebec Proprietors, a group of wealthy Boston investors. Pownalborough was incorporated in 1760 and included present-day Wiscasset, Alna, and Dresden; Wiscasset became the county seat in 1794 and a separate town in 1802. Its name, from Abenaki, has never been satisfactorily translated and has been thought to mean either "confluence of three rivers" or "at the hidden outlet." Wiscasset remained part of Massachusetts until 1820, when Maine became a state through the Missouri Compromise. The small settlement later grew into a town of more than 3,000 people, noted for architecturally significant buildings in New England, early prosperity based on a safe deep-water anchorage that fostered worldwide shipping and commerce, and endurance through the Embargo of 1807 as well as epidemics, wars, depressions, and recessions.