some maine parcel history (1)

The complex history of Maine's land records mosaic reaches back more than 400 years. Of course there are no lines on the map - there is no map - before European 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 1629 by King Charles I tothe 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.  After a century of violence and suppression of the remnant Indigenous populations,  the grant was revived and the proprietors incorporated in 1749.  Active promotion of settlement began shortly thereafter. One hundred acre parcels were offered to settlers as incentive to recruit domestically and in Europe.  Land was broken out in longlots with frontage on the river and extending east or west orthogonal to the rivercourse. By the early 1760s the company had settled at least eleven townships.

An overview of some specifics of this evolving grant area (1719) is available from Maine Memory Network: