Maine History Online

The Massachusetts General Court purchased the Casco Bay region from the heirs of Ferdinand Gorges in 1677. By this time, the province was engulfed in war with the Wabanaki, and the Commonwealth received Maine at bargain prices. After several other English political upheavals, William and Mary granted Massachusetts Bay a new charter in 1691 that included all of Maine.

Massachusetts rule brought some political stability to Maine, and its economy matured under the influence of the fur trade, which expanded after 1600 due to a demand for luxury furs. In 1628, merchants from the Plymouth colony built a trading post at Cushnoc in present-day Augusta, and by 1631 they were operating several stations between Rhode Island and Machias. Other merchants located at Monhegan Island, Pemaquid, Pejepscot, and Richmond Island.

At its peak, the Plymouth traders found the Kennebec trade profitable, but business declined as the competition increased. Companies clashed over territorial claims, dragging Indians into the fray. They sold contraband muskets, shot, and liquor and cheated their Indian clients to boost profits. Attempts to regulate this far-flung frontier were all but futile.

Despite the economic chaos, fur trading sped the process of settlement as hard-pressed merchants diversified into other sources of income. Boston merchants Thomas Clarke and Thomas Lake established a post on Arrowsic Island near the mouth of the Kennebec River, and when rival posts eroded their profits, they began raising cattle and exporting livestock, meat, hides, and hay to Boston, which was becoming an important economic center. Settlers cut timber, built a sawmill, grew crops for food and export, processed fish, and manufactured implements.

These strategies – diversification and agricultural self-sufficiency – encouraged others to clear farms and build gristmills, blacksmith and cooper shops, and boatyards, much of this activity financed by Clarke and Lake. The company also sold land along the river, often at a loss, on the principle that more settlers meant cheaper labor for their various enterprises and more customers for their merchandise.

By the 1650s, the small settler society between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec was beginning to develop a distinctive culture, more diverse, more secular, and more democratic than the Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay to the south.

Maine's government remained weak, partly because of the continuing disputes over land, and partly because occupations like lumbering, fishing, and trading encouraged mobility and rootlessness. Communities – sometimes mere scatterings of farms – sprawled along the coast or rivers in long ribbons, with no town centers and little purchase for those who hoped to control this growing society.

Coastal settlers exported, in addition to fish, furs, and produce, a variety of products like clapboards, pipe-staves, ship timbers, planks, pitch, and turpentine. Their markets were other colonies, the West Indies, and Europe. Small shipyards appeared in the coves, and water-powered mills on the rivers.

Farmers took advantage of coastal salt marshes to expand their herds, and they worked in seasonal trades like fishing, lumbering, milling, seafaring, and trapping. Women stayed closer to home in the kitchen, garden, barnyard, orchard, and milk-house. Some specialized in producing yarn, fabric, dairy products, or crafts, which they traded with neighbors.

French Maine also experienced competing claims to jurisdiction and authority. Following the destruction of St. Saveur and Port-Royal by Samuel Argall in 1613, Acadia, as the easternmost extension of New France was called, was left to a few French traders working out of Indian villages.

Claude de La Tour built a post at Pentagoet (present-day Castine) in 1625 and one at the mouth of the Saint John River. When New Englanders captured Pentagoet in 1626, he returned to France and left his Acadian ventures to his son, Charles.

In 1635 another French merchant, Charles de Menou d'Aulnay, took control of Pentagoet as a result of a treaty between France and England. It was not long before d'Aulnay and La Tour, both energetic and ambitious men, were at loggerheads. Indeed, the story of Acadia in Maine is largely a record of their strife, with territory passing from French to British control and back again.

In the 18th century, Acadia remained mostly under French influence, offering the Abenaki a strategic and commercial counterweight to the much more aggressive English and their Mohawk allies.