Scarborough was settled in 1630, one of the earliest settlements along the New England coast. In the early 1600s, John Stratton had his trading post upon the island off Scarborough's shore which still carries his name. This island also saw many of the other first settlers. In the 1630s, the first settlement at Black Point was the Cammock's grant, upon 1,500 acres; by 1650 there were fifty homes. This grant is now known as Prouts Neck.
The entire region between the Saco River and Spurwink Rive was originally known as Black Point. It is not certain just when the narrow piece of land now known as Pine Point was first called Blew Point and/or Pine Point, but it is said that the spruce trees covering the eastern shore of the Nonesuch River appeared to be black from the ships, and the hardwood on the western shores of the Nonesuch River and the Dunstan River looked blue.
In 1636, Richard Foxwell settled just south of where Mill Creek flows into the Dunstan River; and Henry Watts settled nearby the same year. This was the second settlement.
The third chief settlement was Dunstan in 1651, after Andrew and Arthur Alger purchased more than one thousand acres from Uphannum, the daughter of Wackwarreska, Sagamore of Owascoag County. Owascoag was the Indian name for Scarborough, meaning "place of much grass."
The town was incorporated in 1658 and named for Scarborough, England. It included those lands formerly called Black Point, Blew Point, and Stratton's Island and extended back eight miles from the sea. These boundaries have changed nearly every century.
Scarborough was the birthplace of Maine's first governor, William King. Winslow Homer lived and painted in Prout's Neck, an isolated peninsula which is now home to a bird sanctuary.
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