Phippsburg is a town in Sagadahoc County, Maine, United States, on the west side of the mouth of the Kennebec River.

During its brief existence, colonists built Virginia of Sagadahoc, the first ship in Maine's long history of shipbuilding.

[3] The next British settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River began in 1653; Thomas Atkins, a fisherman, purchased from the sachem Mowhotiwormet, commonly called Chief Robinhood, the southern end of Phippsburg (with the exception of Popham).

The population gradually increased until King Philip's War, when Indians in August 1676 attacked the eastern side of the Kennebec River, massacring and scalping the colonists, or else carrying them into captivity.

[4] Resettlement commenced in 1679 at Newtown, located on the southern end of Arrowsic Island (across the river from present-day Phippsburg Center).

Also in 1716, the Pejepscot Proprietors established a little fishing village called Augusta at the Small Point Harbor area of Phippsburg.

Dr. Oliver Noyes, director of the colony, erected a stone fort 100 feet (30 meters) square to protect it.

In 1717, Governor Samuel Shute held a conference at Georgetown-on-Arrowsic with tribal delegates, who arrived in a flotilla of canoes and encamped on Lee Island.

[5] But in summer of 1723 during Dummer's War, the Norridgewocks and 250 of their Indian allies from Canada, incited by the French missionary Sebastien Rale, attacked the area.

Governor William Dummer's Treaty of 1725 restored peace, and in 1737 an attempt was made to resettle Cape Small Point.

[6] Slow resettlement of the Phippsburg peninsula found ten farms along the Kennebec River by 1751, with five more on the Casco Bay side.

[7] The original petition requested that it be named Dromore after one of the town's oldest sections, but Massachusetts chose instead to honor one of its royal governors, Sir William Phips—actually a native of Woolwich.

[9] During the Gilded Age, Popham Beach developed into a resort area, with steamboats transporting excursionists from Bath.

In 1971, Phippsburg was the site of the discovery of the Spirit Pond runestones, purported evidence of pre-Columbian European exploration of North America, considered widely a hoax by academics.