District of Maine - Maine Colonial History

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.