Maine Colonial History
Originally settled in 1607 by the Plymouth Company, the coastal areas of western Maine first became the Province of Maine in a 1622 land patent. These territories were taken over by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1650s, although later legal action in England voided these claims. In 1677, the Province of Maine was sold to Massachusetts for the sum of £1250.
The eastern portion of present-day Maine were first sparsely occupied by French colonists as part of Acadia. The lands between the Kennebec and Saint Croix rivers were also granted to the Duke of York in 1664, who had them administered as Cornwall County, part of his proprietary Province of New York. In 1688 these lands (along with the rest of New York) were subsumed into the Dominion of New England. English and French claims in eastern Maine would be contested, at times violently, until the British conquest of New France in the French and Indian War.
With the creation of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1692, the entirety of what is now Maine became part of that province. Under Massachusetts’ administration, it was first administered as York County, which was subdivided by the creation in 1760 of Cumberland and Lincoln counties.
Read more about this topic: District Of Maine
Famous quotes containing the words maine, colonial and/or history:
“Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northerners are pale for good and all. There’s very little difference between a dead Swede and a young man who’s had a bad night. But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the boat.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)