9781422286159

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Northern New England: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont

English colonies were both soon aban- doned, however. French colonization in present-day Canada proved much more successful. Meanwhile, English colonists gained a foothold in what is today Massachusetts. Both France and England would lay claim to Maine. In 1622, two Englishmen—Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason—received a large land grant. It included all territory between the Merrimack River (in present-day southern New Hampshire and north- eastern Massachusetts) and the Kennebec River. The two eventually split the land, with Mason taking ter- ritory in today’s New Hampshire and Gorges keeping the territory in Maine. Charles I, England’s king, reaf- firmed Gorges’s claim to the Province of Maine with a royal charter issued in 1639. Yet the province attracted rela- tively few settlers. Gorges died in 1647. Five years later, the growing Massachusetts Bay Colony annexed (took over) Maine. In 1677, Massachusetts formally bought the

range is 55ºF to 76ºF (13ºC to 24ºC). July temperatures in Portland are sim- ilarly pleasant, with an average low of 59ºF (15ºC) and an average high of 79ºF (26ºC). History Native people first migrated to what is today Maine around 9500 BCE . By the 1600s, when Europeans first began colonizing the region, various tribes occupied Maine. They included the Abenaki, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot. All of them spoke a form of Algonquian . Sailing for the king of France, the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazano explored Maine’s coast in 1524. But eight decades would pass before the first European efforts to establish a colony in the region. In 1604, a French group under the lead- ership of a nobleman named Pierre Dugua built a settlement on St. Croix Island, near the mouth of the St. Croix River. Three years later, about 100 Englishmen founded the Popham Colony near the mouth of the Kennebec River. The French and