Maine

The territory lying between the Piscataqua and St. Croix Rivers, the present-day boundaries of the state of Maine, was one of the earliest and most contested sites of European settlement in North America. Its original inhabitants were the Wabanaki, who practiced corn-based agriculture in villages from the Saco River westward and subsisted by hunting, fishing, and gathering along the rivers and estuaries farther east. In 1604 a party of French settlers established a short-lived colony on an island at the headwaters of the St. Croix River; three years later the English followed suit with an aborted attempt to establish a settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River. In 1629 the English Crown granted the territory between the Kennebec and the Piscataqua to Sir Ferdinando Gorges as a proprietary colony named the Province of Maine. This territory was annexed by Massachusetts from 1652 to 1658 and renamed York County.

By the late 17th century Maine was divided into three distinctive cultural zones. Along the coast as far east as the Kennebec River was a strip of English settlement, characterized by dispersed farms and town government. Small-scale agriculture in this area was supplemented by lumbering and shipbuilding. Although descendants of the original inhabitants of Gorges’s colony remained, they were increasingly swamped by migrants from Massachusetts, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. In port towns and on the islands dotting the coast were small communities of fishermen plying their trade in the North Atlantic. By the 1670s Maine’s fisheries fell into a prolonged period of decline, failing to keep pace with the better-capitalized fleets of northern Massachusetts. Farther in the interior was a frontier area characterized by conflict and cultural exchange among Wabanaki, French soldiers and missionaries, and English settlers. The English and Wabanaki fought six wars between 1676 and 1763, with the French lending substantial aid and encouragement to the Indians in all but the first. In peacetime there was considerable interaction between the Wabanaki and colonists, chiefly through missionary work and the fur trade. Several French settlers established trading posts in western Acadia and married Native women; the English had less success in bridging the cultural divide between Natives and newcomers.

Further reading: Roger F. Duncan, Coastal Maine: A Maritime History (New York: Norton, 1992); Richard W. Judd, Edwin A. Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman, eds., Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1995).

—Gavin J. Taylor