In 1964, Jane Sewall bought the abandoned Maine island she had dreamed of since childhood; 22 years later, she gave it away to keep it wild forever

On the Maine coast, landownership often ended in one of three ways: passing the property down, selling it, or developing it. But that was not what Jane Sewall had in mind when she bought an abandoned island off South Bristol, Maine. Sewall, who had dreamed of the island since childhood, bought the land in 1964 and, between 1983 and 1986, gave away the entire property in two donations so nothing would be left in her name to sell.

A childhood memory that turned into a deed

Witch Island is the island’s official name, though it sounds ominous. The name “Witch Island” is listed in the Geographic Names Information System maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, an official source for place names in America. Although it was not associated with witches then, the island already appealed to one child. Jane Sewall's family spent their summers in South Bristol, right opposite the island, and when she was seven, she paddled her boat around the island's coast to admire the hardwood trees and flowers there. Sewall held onto that childhood memory for many years. In the 1960s, when the island became available for purchase after years of abandonment, she acquired it on June 6, 1964.


Buying it was the easy part

Owning the island meant doing some cleanup. The summer house had been vandalized long before Sewall took possession of the island and was too damaged to restore, so she knocked it down and built a small cottage on the south end. What Sewall built was not a monument but a boundary. She lived quietly on the island, but firmly pushed back when people treated it as public property. In a letter published in a Maine newspaper in 1965, she explained precisely the type of guests she wanted on her island: those who would come to admire the birds and flowers, not those who would leave unattended fires or trample the vegetation. Eventually she placed a sign at the beaches reading simply "No fires."

The tax law that forced her hand

Holding wild land is one thing. Keeping it protected under changing state policy was another matter. Sewall enrolled the island in Maine's Tree Growth Tax Program, a state incentive administered by the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry that lowers property taxes for landowners who manage their forestland for continuous tree growth rather than development. That worked until the state changed its rules for smaller parcels and required forestry management work to keep the tax benefit.

Sewall was not going to cut any trees on her land. She could not afford to do the required forestry work, because the revaluation would raise the land’s taxable value from about $15,600 to $168,000 in a year. So Sewall began giving the land away. In October 1983, she transferred the western third of Witch Island to Maine Coast Heritage Trust. This has worked statewide to conserve Maine's coastal lands and islands since 1970, permanently protecting that portion from any future development.

A gift timed to outlast a deadline

Sewall completed what she had begun three years later, in October 1986, when she transferred the remaining two-thirds of Witch Island to the Maine Audubon Society to maintain as a wildlife sanctuary. The deadline mattered: after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was signed into law that October, new alternative minimum tax rules meant the untaxed appreciation on a donated property would become a taxable preference item for gifts made starting in 1987. The deadline was real, but her reasons for giving the island away ran deeper than the tax code. In Sewall's own words, she had been looking for an institution that would take care of her island "forever and ever." She said she was grateful to Maine Audubon for turning it into a sanctuary she could still visit.

What happened to the island after Sewall

Maine Audubon cared for Witch Island for 23 years before the Damariscotta River Association took over stewardship in 2009. Ten years later, the association merged with the Pemaquid Watershed Association to form Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust. As of its most recent published materials, Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust, the accredited land trust that has managed the property since the 2019 merger, describes Witch Island as uninhabited and accessible only for day use, with about half a mile of trails within coastal spruce forest and a kayak access point on the northern shore. Its island education program also brings fifth- and sixth-graders from South Bristol School to spend part of a week there every other year, running science lessons on the same shoreline a seven-year-old Jane Sewall once explored by boat. Her cottage, now empty, still stands in the island's southern cove, the only structure left on land she chose, twice, to give away.