Malaga Island on a bright spring morning might be the most beautiful place in all of New England.

Its history, though, couldn’t be uglier.

Slightly more than 100 years ago, the state of Maine evicted from the island the mixed-race community of about 45 souls. Most of the islanders were deemed feeble-minded and forced into institutions. When the government boys were done clearing out the living, they went back to Malaga and dug up their dead. They flung the bones into boxes and buried them somewhere else.

The story of Malaga Island makes you want to weep for the people treated so poorly and then (until recently) forgotten.

“This was their home,” says Amanda Devine. “They loved it and they were made to leave it. There were horrible things said about the people who lived on Malaga Island. It was blatant garbage.”

Devine, of Maine Coast Heritage Trust, is the island caretaker. She’s about as likable as any person you will meet. She’s bright and funny and even a little bit of a wisenheimer, if you happen to be caught riding backward in a canoe.

But when she gets to talking about the history of Malaga, you hear the hiss of anger there —  anger and maybe a little bit of shame that hardworking Maine people were treated so shabbily.

Devine recently talked about that history before 90 Lewiston High School students who come in waves of 30 to visit the island, off the coast of Phippsburg. She is standing in a small clearing near the northern tip, a spot that might have been Malaga’s cemetery before the bodies were yanked from their graves and relocated.

“To me,” Devine says in that vaguely seething way, “that is the final sand to the eye. The nail in the coffin.”

The story of Malaga is history, but the racism and intolerance that motivated it is not.

Diane Kew teaches at Lewiston High School, where racial tension has been high for more than a decade. It drew attention when waves of Somali immigrants began coming to Lewiston, but there were problems before that. Problems with bigotry and unfair treatment.

Sound familiar? It did to Kew and some of her students, as well.

For Kew, it started when she read “Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy,” a work of fiction based on the situation at Malaga.

“I thought, huh,” Kew says. “I want to know more about this story.”

She learned that Malaga was a real place. Her students read the book and they were curious, as well. Some had never been to the ocean, let alone on a rocky Maine island. For six months, Kew and her colleagues planned the trip and rounded up 90 students to come along.

It’s history, yes. It’s education, certainly. But it’s also hard to ignore the racial issues that were evident in 1912 and evident now.

“Lewiston has been fraught with difficulties,” Kew said. “My students can relate to this, certainly.”

Those students are boys and girls, black and white, Somali and Lewiston natives. They visited the Maine State Museum first — which recently hosted a retrospective exhibit of the island —  and then boated over to Malaga Island to see the real thing: the former sites of Malaga homes and wells and the one-room schoolhouse up on the hill.

These were teenagers on a field trip, but don’t cut them short: Most of them recognized the unhappy parallels between Malaga Island of 1912 and Lewiston High School a hundred years later.

“We’re one of the most racially diverse schools in the state, if not the most diverse,” said a freshman named Nate. “We have to deal with these issues on a daily basis.”

Nate is a tall kid who wears a Lewiston High baseball cap. When he hurls a rock into the water (all teenagers do that. It’s like a law) it travels halfway to Bear Island, which looms over Malaga.

You wonder if wild-eyed kids like Nate are really interested in the educational side of the trip. It becomes apparent rather quickly that they are.

“Tell me what you know about the people Malaga,” Devine says as she leads them across a spongy area to their next stop. “Shout it right out. I want to hear what you already know.”

And after a few awkward seconds, they do start shouting.

“They were poor,” says one.

“They were racially mixed,” says another.

“They had their own school,” chimes in a shy blond girl.

Two or three kids say, all at once as if they’d rehearsed it: “They were kicked off the island.”

The students knew what they were coming to see. Reading about it gave them the facts. Visiting Malaga made it real.

“I thought it was a lot more interesting hearing about it while we’re on the island,” said Nate. “To me, it’s much more personal than learning about it in a classroom.”

It’s enough to make you believe that this field trip was a good idea. But even good ideas need a few breaks here and there.

In 2001, the MCHT bought Malaga Island from a man who sold it at a bargain price because he wanted the island to be preserved. He wanted to keep developers away and he wanted local fishermen to continue using the island.

“But for this generous landowner,” says Rich Knox, communications director at MCHT, “there would be houses out here. There would be no archeology, no education. If it wasn’t for land conservation, you wouldn’t have these kinds of places.”

In the shadow of Malaga Island is Anna’s Water’s Edge Restaurant at Sebasco Wharf. At Anna’s, people can sit and eat lunch while looking at the storied island just across the way. The restaurant promotes the educational angle. Local fishermen volunteer to ferry people back and forth.

A hundred years ago, Malaga was the site of cruelty. You might even call it evil. Today, the opposite seems to be at work as the locals and the people of MCHT team up to preserve and share the history.

Somehow, that seems more authentic, more from the heart, than the 2010 apology to the descendants of Malaga from then-Gov. John Baldacci.

An apology is better than nothing, of course. Baldacci also visited the island, the first governor to do so since Frederick Plaisted, who ordered the eviction.

Better than nothing, certainly. Yet, still … so many wrongs.

Before the island people (both living and dead) were booted from their home and shipped to a school for the feeble, they were smeared – by Maine lawmakers and by the press.

“There was a lot of myth about the island,” Devine says. “They were feeble and degenerate. They had horns and they ate their children. It was utter hogwash.”

It was too late to help the people of Malaga in 1912, but do you know who came to the rescue? The archaeologists, that’s who.

After the MCHT took over Malaga, they descended on it with shovels and spades and sifting trays. They discovered what the people of Malaga were really like and they spread the word.

“The archaeologists,” Devine said, “really dispelled a lot of those myths.”

According to Knox, when the conservation group took over the island, they didn’t know a lot of that history. They didn’t realize the 41-acre stretch of land had so much to say.

“We had no idea,” Knox says, “that it was such a big deal.”

Idiots? Feeble-minded? The people of Malaga had a school that was so highly regarded, at least one mainland family paid tuition to send their kids there. The islanders farmed and fished.

Eliza Griffin, Malaga’s biggest wage earner, did all that and also took in laundry, leaving behind a hundred buttons or so to be found by archaeologists.

The residents might be thriving there still if not for the intolerance and avarice back on the mainland. There, uptight Mainers foresaw the island as a potential tourist stop. The sight of blacks and whites intermingling and doing low chores didn’t jibe with that vision.

“The easiest solution, as far as anyone in a suit in Augusta was concerned, was to wipe them off the island,” Devine tells the group of students. “The people who lived here could do nothing about it.”

Soon after, that group of kids is being hauled away in a rubbery raft, bound for the bigger boat that will bring them back to Anna’s. As they leave, another group arrives and Devine goes through her spiel again.

Don’t talk over me, she tells them, and be respectful of the island. She is very clear on that latter point. She doesn’t want the Malaga people (there are descendants who occasionally visit the island) to be further disrespected.

“I really think of this as their island,” Devine says. “That’s the way I feel.”

And who’s going to argue with her? Certainly not me (Devine was my ride over). My wife and I climbed into a canoe with her and made the roughly ten minute paddle from Anna’s. Almost immediately, the first thing you notice is what isn’t there rather than what is.

No roar of traffic. No car horns or chirping cell phones. Just the sweet sounds of birds and the almost mystical rhythms of the ocean lapping against the rocks of Malaga. The air is scented with lilac, the salty aroma of the sea itself and a rich bouquet of things I can’t place because I don’t visit the islands of Maine nearly enough.

If you can put the nastiness of Malaga’s history out of your mind a minute, it’s an enchanting place. You feel like you’ve just paddled into a postcard. Every turn is a photo opportunity and inner peace is almost guaranteed.

The kicker is that you can never put that history aside for long. You know what they say: The minute you do that, history has a way of repeating itself, and nobody wants that.

If you stand on the dock at Anna’s and look out on the island, you see pristine wilderness. But use your imagination a little bit and you can almost see what it would look like with lavish homes, built-in pools, maybe a Starbucks on the northern tip.

Malaga and its history was saved by a good-hearted landowner and the people of MCHT. You wonder if it will still be pristine after the passage of another 100 years.

If Richard Knox has his say, the island will look the same then as it does now.

“We’re going to take care of it,” he says, “for as long as we can.”

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Some of the kids visiting Malaga Island on May 28 were seeing the coast for the first time. Most had never been on an island before and a boat? Entirely new.

Diane Kew, an LHS teacher who helped make the Malaga trip possible, managed to get 90 students boated over to the island. Whether she can continue doing so with future classes remains to be seen.

“This year’s trip,” Kew says, “was only possible because of a Lewiston Education Fund grant we received. However, given all of the public and private organizations involved – Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Maine Maritime Museum, Maine State Museum, Sebasco Wharf, Fish ‘N Trips, and NorthEast Charters – I am hoping that we can figure out a way to make this a replicable event. This is particularly important for our students given the fact that not only were many of these freshman on an island for the first time, but so many were also on a boat for the first time too!

“Since all of the organizations I mentioned have such capable and amazing people involved,” Kew says, “I am hoping that we can figure out how to do this again…and again and again!”

Located in Casco Bay, at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Phippsburg, the 41-acre island was the site of an interracial community from the mid-1850s until 1912 when Maine forcibly evicted all residents.

The island was recently the topic of a retrospective exhibit at the Maine State Museum titled “Malaga Island: Fragmented Lives.”

Visitors can tour the island by landing at the beach on the northern shore, then walking a nearly one-mile long loop trail through the island’s forested interior. A spur trail leads to scenic ledges at the south end of the island, which afford a panoramic view of eastern Casco Bay.

For more information, including a map of the island, go to: www.mcht.org/preserves/malaga-island.shtml