Fort Meductic was not a European construction. The Wolastoqiyik built it before the French arrived, specifically to defend against raids by the Mohawk, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Mohawk, based in present-day New York south of the St. Lawrence River and west of the Hudson, posed a persistent military threat to the peoples of the Saint John River valley. This distinction matters: Fort Meductic is reported to have been the first fortification in Acadia, and it was Indigenous hands that raised it. The palisade and earthworks reflected a people who understood siege warfare from experience, not from European instruction.

French missionaries recognized Meductic's importance early. Father Joseph Aubery re-established a mission there in 1701, and in the years leading up to Father Rale's War, Priest Jean-Baptiste Loyard built the chapel of Saint Jean Baptiste in 1717 to anchor French influence in the village. The bell that hung in the chapel was a gift from King Louis XV -- a small, deliberate gesture of alliance between the French Crown and the Wolastoqey people. The French played the same game on the Kennebec River in Maine, building a church in the Abenaki village of Norridgewock. Both were acts of diplomacy as much as faith, planting crosses where they wanted to plant flags.

Meductic's location made it a fulcrum of colonial conflict. The village sat on the Meductic-Eel River Portage, the overland route connecting the Saint John River watershed to the rivers flowing south into New England. France used this path for military expeditions against the English. The English, in turn, recognized Meductic as a threat -- a population center and supply point that sustained French-allied Indigenous warriors. Alongside the Abenaki village of Norridgewock on the Kennebec and the Penobscot settlement on the Penobscot River, Meductic formed one of three critical Indigenous power centers in the region. Only during King George's War, when the French established the settlement of Saint Anne at present-day Fredericton, did the nearby village of Aukpaque begin to rival Meductic in importance.

The Meductic village and fort site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1924. A federal plaque from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board was placed on a cairn along Fort Meductic Road. But in 1968, the Mactaquac Hydroelectric Dam flooded this stretch of the Saint John River valley, and the location of the former village site has been underwater ever since. Archaeological excavations conducted between 1964 and 1967, before the flooding, documented what they could of the buried remains. A commemorative trilingual plaque -- in Wolastoqey, English, and French -- was unveiled at a nearby overlook in May 2022. The portage route that gave Meductic its reason for existence has been absorbed into the modern road network, but the place the Wolastoqiyik chose, fortified, and defended long before Europeans arrived remains recognized even beneath the waters that now cover it.