The history of the area comprising the U.S. state of Maine spans thousands of years, measured from the earliest human settlement, or approximately two hundred, measured from the advent of U.S. statehood in 1820. The present article will concentrate on the period of European contact and after.
Etymology
The origin of the name Maine is unclear. One theory is that it was named after the French province of Maine. Another is that it derives from a practical nautical term, "the main" or "Main Land", "Meyne" or "Mainland", which served to distinguish the bulk of the state from its numerous islands. Whatever the origin, the name was fixed for English settlers in 1665 when the English King's Commissioners ordered that the "Province of Maine" be entered from then on in official records. The state legislature in 2001 adopted a resolution establishing Franco-American Day, which stated that the state was named after the former French province of Maine.
Other theories mention earlier places with similar names or claim it is a nautical reference to the mainland. Captain John Smith, in his "Description of New England" (1614) laments the lack of exploration: "Thus you may see, of this 2000. miles more then halfe is yet vnknowne to any purpose: no not so much as the borders of the Sea are yet certainly discouered. As for the goodnes and true substances of the Land, wee are for most part yet altogether ignorant of them, vnlesse it bee those parts about the Bay of Chisapeack and Sagadahock: but onely here and there wee touched or haue seene a little the edges of those large dominions, which doe stretch themselues into the Maine, God doth know how many thousand miles;" Note that his description of the mainland of North America is "the Maine". The word "main" was a frequent shorthand for the word "mainland" (as in "The Spanish Main").
The first known record of the name appears in an August 10, 1622, land charter to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, English Royal Navy veterans, who were granted a large tract in present-day Maine that Mason and Gorges "intend to name the Province of Maine". Mason had served with the Royal Navy in the Orkney Islands, where the chief island is called Mainland, a possible name derivation for these English sailors. In 1623, the English naval captain Christopher Levett, exploring the New England coast, wrote: "The first place I set my foote upon in New England was the Isle of Shoals, being Ilands in the sea, above two Leagues from the Mayne." Initially, several tracts along the coast of New England were referred to as Main or Maine (cf. the Spanish Main). A reconfirmed and enhanced April 3, 1639, charter, from England's King CharlesI, gave Sir Ferdinando Gorges increased powers over his new province and stated that it "shall forever hereafter, be called and named the PROVINCE OR COUNTIE OF MAINE, and not by any other name or names whatsoever..." Maine is the only U.S. state whose name has only one syllable.
Attempts to uncover the history of the name of Maine began with James Sullivan's 1795 "History of the District of Maine." He made the unsubstantiated claim that the Province of Maine was a compliment to the queen of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, who once "owned" the Province of Maine in France. Maine historians quoted this until the 1845 biography of that queen by Agnes Strickland established that she had no connection to the province; further, King Charles I married Henrietta Maria in 1625, three years after the name Maine first appeared on the charter. A new theory put forward by Carol B. Smith Fisher in 2002 postulated that Sir Ferdinando Gorges chose the name in 1622 to honor the village where his ancestors first lived in England, rather than the province in France. "MAINE" appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 in reference to the county of Dorset, which is today Broadmayne, just southeast of Dorchester.
The view generally held among British place name scholars is that Mayne in Dorset is Brythonic, corresponding to modern Welsh "maen", plural "main" or "meini". Some early spellings are: MAINE 1086, MEINE 1200, MEINES 1204, MAYNE 1236. Today the village is known as Broadmayne, which is primitive Welsh or Brythonic, "main" meaning rock or stone, considered a reference to the many large sarsen stones still present around Little Mayne farm, half a mile northeast of Broadmayne village.correspondence to Carol B. Smith Fisher, April 26, 2002, from Hywel Wyn Owen, Director and Professor of the Place-Name Research Center, University of Wales Bangor
Pre-European history The earliest culture known to have inhabited Maine, from roughly 3000 BC to 1000 BC, were the Red Paint People, a maritime group known for elaborate burials using red ochre. They were followed by the Susquehanna culture, the first to use pottery.
By the time of European discovery, the inhabitants of Maine were the Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki peoples, including the Abenaki, Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscots.
Colonial period
There are many stories of Norsemen exploring as far south as Maine, but there is currently no documented evidence for that. In 1497 John Cabot made the first of two documented voyages to explore the New World on behalf of Henry VII of England and it's very likely on one of the voyages reached as far south as the coast of Maine. Cabot's expeditions were based out of the port of Bristol, England, and Bristol merchant William Weston followed up on Cabot's efforts in 1499. Cabot's crews reported (as written in a letter to the Duke of Milan in 1497): "The Sea there is swarming with fish which can be taken not only with the net but in baskets with a stone, so that it sinks in the water." In fact, English fishermen had already been sailing to Iceland for cod fishing, and after Weston's return there is anecdotal evidence that Europeans from England to Portugal regularly fished the northeast waters, including the Gulf of Maine, immediately afterwards.
Following disputed rights over the northeast coasts between Spain and England the next documented Europeans to explore the coast of Maine were by Giovanni da Verrazzano under the French flag in 1524, and then the Portuguese explorer Estêvão Gomes, in service of the Spanish Empire, in 1525. They mapped the coastline (including the Penobscot River) but did not settle, though Verrazzano's efforts added a French claim to the area. The first European settlement in the area was made on St. Croix Island in 1604 by a French party that included Samuel de Champlain and Mathieu da Costa. The French named the area Acadia. French and English settlers would contest central Maine until the 1750s (when the French were defeated in the French and Indian War). The French developed and maintained strong relations with the local Indian tribes through Catholic missionaries.
English colonists sponsored by the Plymouth Company founded a settlement in Maine in 1607 (the Popham Colony at Phippsburg), but it was abandoned the following year. A French trading post was established at present-day Castine in 1613 by Claude de Saint-Étienne de la Tour, and may represent the first permanent European settlement in New England. The Plymouth Colony, established on the shores of Cape Cod Bay in 1620, set up a competing trading post at Penobscot Bay in the 1620s.
The territory between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers was first called the Province of Maine in a 1622 land patent granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason. The two split the territory along the Piscataqua River in a 1629 pact that resulted in the Province of New Hampshire being formed by Mason in the south and New Somersetshire being created by Gorges to the north, in what is now southwestern Maine. The present Somerset County in Maine preserves this early nomenclature.
One of the first English attempts to settle the Maine coast was by Christopher Levett, an agent for Gorges and a member of the Plymouth Council for New England. After securing a royal grant for of land on the site of present-day Portland, Maine, Levett built a stone house and left a group of settlers behind when he returned to England in 1623 to drum up support for his settlement, which he called "York" after the city in England of his birth. Originally called Machigonne by the local Abenaki, later settlers named it Falmouth and it is known today as Portland.Maine: A Guide 'Down East,' Federal Writers' Project, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1937 Levett's settlement, like the Popham Colony also failed, and the settlers Levett left behind were never heard from again. Levett did sail back across the Atlantic to meet with Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop at Salem in 1630, but died on the return voyage without ever returning to his settlement.
The New Somersetshire colony was small, and in 1639 Gorges received a second patent, from Charles I, covering the same territory as Gorges' 1629 settlement with Mason. Gorges' second effort resulted in the establishment of more settlements along the coast of southern Maine, and along the Piscataqua River, with a formal government under his distant relation, Thomas Gorges. A dispute about the bounds of a 1630 land grant led in 1643 to the short-lived formation of Lygonia on territory that encompassed a large area of the Gorges grant (modern Portland, Scarborough and Saco).
The 1629 Charter of Massachusetts Bay set the northern sea-to-sea boundary three miles north of the northernmost part of the Merrimack River. After the parliamentary victory in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and installation of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, a 1652 survey by the Massachusetts reported the source of the Merrimack as Lake Winnipesaukee, and set the boundary at three miles north of 43°40′12″N (which would put it at 43°43′12″N). Surveyors reckoned on the Maine coast this corresponded to Upper Clapboard Island in Casco Bay, just north of modern-day Portland, Maine. This meant Massachusetts' patent encompassed all the English colonial settlements in the Mason's lands (New Hampshire), and both Lygonia and Gorges' lands (western Maine, which ended around modern-day Bath, Maine). The Parliamentarian, Puritan colony of Massachusetts sent commissioners to the Anglican, Royalist colonies to enforce jurisdiction. Opponents were arrested and jailed until the leader of the resistance, Edward Godfrey, capitulated.
Both Gorges' Province of Maine and Lygonia had been absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1658. The Massachusetts claim would be overturned in 1676, but Massachusetts again asserted control by purchasing the territorial claims of the Gorges' heirs.
In 1669, the Territory of Sagadahock, between the Kennebec and St. Croix rivers (what is now eastern Maine) was granted by Charles II to his brother James, Duke of York. Under the terms of this grant, all the territory from the Saint Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean was constituted as Cornwall County, and was governed as part of the duke's proprietary Province of New York. At times, this territory was claimed by New France as part of Acadia.
In 1674, the Dutch briefly conquered Acadia, renaming the colony New Holland.
In 1686 James, now king, established the Dominion of New England. This political entity eventually combined all of the English colonial territories from Delaware Bay to the St. Croix River. The dominion collapsed in 1689, and a new patent was issued by William III of England and Mary II of England in 1691. This became effective in 1692 when the territory between the Piscataqua and the St. Croix (all of modern Maine) became part of the new Province of Massachusetts Bay as Yorkshire, a name which survives in present-day York County.
Eastern border wars