some maine parcel history (1)

The complex history of Maine's property mosaic reaches back almost 400 years. Of course there are no lines on the map before French and English settlement in the early 1600s, but a lot of interesting stuff happened quickly after that. From Dividing the Land:

Important parts of Maine were covered by a number of early land grants. One of the most comprehensive of these was the royal grant to Ferdinando Gorges in 1639, finally sold by his heirs to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1677. Maine remained under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts until 1820. Before the Gorges grant, however, the Council for New England had made more than two dozen grants that together embraced the whole coast of Maine as far east as the Penobscot River and extended varying distances inland.

One of these two dozen grants was to the Kennebeck Company in 1630 by the Plymouth Colony, extending along both sides of the Kennebec River upstream to the falls at Skowhegan. The original strategy of the grant was as a base for trade in furs and other commodities with Indians. When the grant was revived and the proprietors incorporated in 1749, they began promoting settlement. One hundred acres were offered each settler as underpinning for the efforts to recruit groups in Europe, and land was broken out in longlots with frontage on the river and extending east or west in perpendicular parcels. By the early 1760s the company had settled at least eleven townships.

An overview of this original grant area (1719):


A great collection of associated maps is available at the Maine Historical Society Memory Network.