Radio Script #789

Little Talks on Common Script

January 5, 1969

We have had much to say on this program about the lands included in the famous Kennebec Purchase of 1750, a large area 15 miles on each side of the Kennebec from Merrymeeting Bay to the falls at Norridgewock. Today I want to tell more about land titles in Maine.

The earliest recorded grant of land in what is now the State of Maine was not a British grant at all. It was a patent granted by Louis XIV of France to Monsieur de la Mothe Cadillac in 1603 of 500.000 acres in what are now the mainland towns of Sullivan, Ellsworth, Hancock and all of Mt. Desert Island. That grant was confirmed by the Massachusetts General Court as late as 1787.

Many Indian deeds were conveyed to individuals and companies, causing numerous conflicting claims. One was confirmed as late as 1820, the very year when Maine became a separate state. That was a vast tract of 540,000 acres, including all of the Pejepscot lands up the Androscoggin as far as Minot and Leeds. The confirmation also included territory east of Damariscotta.

The first British grant in the New World was made by James I in 1606. and from it resulted the settlement at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620. To distinguish between the two colonies, the same king in 1620 granted a charter to the Council of Plymouth in England. conveying to them all lands in North America between the 40th and the 48th parallels of latitude. That immense tract extended from Philadelphia to the Bay Chaleur just south of the Gaspe peninsula.

In 1621 the Council of Plymouth in England granted to Ferdinando Gorges and George Mason all lands between the Merrimac and the Kennebec. Gorges took the portion that became Maine; Mason the part that became New Hampshire. Other grants issued by the Plymouth Council conflicted with the Gorges grant. One such was 46,000 acres in Biddeford. Saco and Scarborough. A million acres east and north of Cape Porpoise was called the Province of Lygonia.

I have already told more than once on this program how in 1629 the Colony of New Plymouth obtained what we came to know as the Kennebec Grant, and how in 1661 they sold it to four men, from whose heirs the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase bought it in 1750. That was the tract along the Kennebec River from Merrymeeting Bay to Norridgewock.

About the same time as the Kennebec Grant to the Plymouth Colony, in 1629, the Council granted to Beauchamp andLevett a tract thirty miles square between Penobscot Bay and the Muscongus River. That tract extended to the north line of what is now the towns of Hampden, Newbury, Dixmont and Troy. The area was later acquired by General Waldo and became known as the Waldo Purchase. In it was established, by German immigrants encouraged by the General, the old German town of Broad Bay, now Waldoboro. Much of the huge tract later became the property of George Washington’s artilleryman and first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, through his marriage into the Waldo family. It was the Waldo wealth that enabled Gen. Knox to build his mansion called Montpelier at Thomaston, an exact replica of which is now a much-visited historical museum.

Another council grant was of 12,000 acres at Pemaquid in 1631, with an offer of 100 acres for each settler secured by the grantees. So large did that tract become through subsequent grants and purchases that in 1771 the heirs of the original grantees claimed 80,000 acres in Bristol, Newcastle and Nobleboro.

The early council grants thus extended from the Piscataqua at Kittery to Penobscot Bay and up the Kennebec into what is now Somerset County. While those council grants were being parceled out. Gorges was making his own grants. sometimes of exactly the same land. When there was added to those conflicting claims the settlement of squatters who had no valid claim at all. but who later could show that they had made definite improvements on their lots. thus increasing their value, confusion was even worse confounded.

In 1677 the Province of Massachusetts bought the entire Gorges claim for 1,250 pounds. By 1690 the General Court became acutely aware of numerous conflicting claims. It took many years to settle the disputes, but by the time when Maine became a state. they were pretty well ironed out, although Robert Hallowell Gardiner had such trouble with squatters that a brief period of violence near Augusta became known as the Malta War.

Between 1690 and 1783 all Massachusetts grants in Maine totaled 1,305,000 acres. In the twenty years between 1763 and 1783 Massachusetts conveyed several large grants in their Maine counties of York, Cumberland and Oxford. The two dates were fixed by important events: the Treaty of Paris, that ended the French and Indian Wars in 1763 and made North America permanently Anglo-Saxon territory; and the treaty that ended the American Revolution in 1783.

Now a few words about the Indian lands. At the close of the Revolution only two tribes were left in Maine, the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy. All others of the once great Abnaki Nation had long since disappeared or had retreated to Canada. In 1783 the two remaining tribes numbered all together not more than 600 people. In 1786 the Penobscot Indians received payment for release of their claim on the west side of the Penobscot up as far as Mattawamkeag, reserving for themselves the islands in the river above Old Town. This sale, called the Penobscot Purchase, is referred to in the Massachusetts grant of land in Argyle and Alton, in 1815, to the institution that later became Colby College. In 1818 another sale by the Penobscot tribe added six townships to white-owned lands.

Massachusetts adopted a definite land policy after the Revolution. She established a Committee on Public Lands with a land office in Boston. Attached to the office was a state surveyor, under whose supervision several townships were laid out in lots in Lincoln County during 1783 and 1784. That was succeeded by what was called the Great Lottery of 1786, under which 165,280 acres brought in only $87,000. The lottery was substantially a flop. Hard up for money. General Knox in 1790 sold to William Bingham a million acres on the upper Kennebec. Included in the territory’s 49 townships were 1,128,960 acres, and for many years, instead of calling it the Bingham Purchase. Maine people referred to it as the Million Acres.

As I have said, the unsuccessful lottery got rid of only 165.000 acres. Left over, in the lottery package but not sold, were more than a million acres. So, when Bingham had negotiated for the lottery lands. in addition to his purchase from Knox. Bingham owned more than 2 million acres of Maine land. His down payment was $311.250. The price to be eventually paid was 12~ cents an acre. Bingham expected to sell at 50 cents an acre, but sales were slow to start. Meanwhile Bingham needed money. To get it he interested the firm of Baring Brothers of London, next to the Rothschilds the greatest banking house in England. Alexander Baring bought a half interest in the Bingham lands in 1796 and two of his brothers married Bingham girls. That Baring partner of Bingham’s became the first Lord Ashburton, with whom Daniel Webster negotiated the treaty regarding the boundary dispute between Maine and Canada. Alexander Baring died in 1804, and his lands were gradually sold primarily for lumbering, not for settlement.

Between 1785 and 1812 Massachusetts sold to individuals and groups more than a million acres of Maine land at 20 cents an acre. It also gave outright 80,000 acres to settlers, in allotments of about 100 acres each.

I am sure most of my listeners know that large pieces of land. usually entire townships, were given as endowment to colleges and academies. I have already referred to the township given to Colby College on the west bank of the Penobscot above Old Town. In the years between the end of the Revolution and the outbreak of the War of 1812 Massachusetts gave 550,000 acres to a number of educational institutions.

When Maine became a separate state, she had no money to make purchase of Massachusetts public lands not yet in private hands, but now situated outside control of the Commonwealth in the new state of Maine. It was agreed that Maine and Massachusetts should divide equally those remaining public lands. Thus each state held several hundred thousand acres of wild land north of the Bingham Purchase.

Maine granted a portion of its land for the Aroostook Road. Then it sold a large piece to get $66,000 to build the State House at Augusta in 1828. Just as the mother state had done. Maine continued to make grants to colleges and academies. In 1834 the state gave 200 acres to every resident who had served at least three years in the Revolutionary War.

Ten years after statehood, in 1830, Maine had granted or sold 1,112,000 acres of its public land. Then people awoke to the exploitation that was going on. Speculation in Maine timber lands was then rampant, and it continued so until 1835. The City of Bangor attracted many speculators and outright gamblers with shady get-rich-quick schemes. It was something like the Florida boom of the 1920’s. More than 250,000 acres were sold during the winter of 1833-34. and too many of those acres, on inspection, proved to be beneath the surface of Maine lakes. Other pieces were sold three or four times by the same speculator to different persons.

When the bubble burst, a lot of people lost money. In 1853 Maine purchased the public lands in this state that were still owned by Massachusetts under the original division. That sale handed over to Maine 1,200,000 acres to add to her own remaining public lands. In the thirty years between 1825 and 1855 Maine sold nearly three million acres at an average price of 60 cents an acre, quite an increase over William Bingham’s 12t cents. Between 1860 and 1867, or during the years of the Civil War, a million more acres were disposed of; 700,000 of those acres going as a grant to the European and North American R.R. that was to be built from Bangor to St. John. The legislature reserved for the common school fund the proceeds from 250.000 acres.

In 1820 the estimated area of all wild land in Maine was 8,218,323 acres, half of which went to Massachusetts in the separation agreement. In 1874 there remained 587,000 acres of those public lands. That residue the 1874 legislature voted to sell at public auction. In 1878 the Land Agent was able to report that all the public lands had been dispos~d of. One discerning writer has said, referring to the many accusations of corruption in the disposal: lilt is a mistake to say that the lands were stolen orgiven away for a song. The Bingham Purchase alone, at 12 cents an acre, would today at only 3% compound interest amount to $14.50 an acre, a very fair valuation in the 1960’s for uncut timber in Northern Maine.’1

Year: 1969