History of American Women

History of Maine Image: Map of Early Maine The 1622 grant of the Province of Maine is outlined in blue. The Province of New Hampshire is shown in teal, and the colony of Maine is shown in pink. The boundaries of the Massachusetts Bay Company grant are shown in green. The Province of Maine refers to several English colonies of that name that existed in the 17th century along the northeast coast of North America, roughly encompassing portions of the present-day states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Canadian province of Quebec. The province existed through a series of land patents in several incarnations, the last of which was eventually absorbed into the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

One of the Thirteen Original Colonies The Colony of Connecticut included all of the present State of Connecticut and a few townships on the shore of Long Island Sound. The Dutch claimed the territory and erected a fort on the Connecticut River in 1633. A number of Massachusetts traders settled at Windsor in 1633. Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut, was settled in 1635. A great many emigrants came from Massachusetts in 1636, the principal leader being Thomas Hooker. Dutch, Pilgrims and Puritans The people of Massachusetts were not long in casting their eyes westward from their own barren coast to the fertile valley of the Connecticut River. That knowledge had come early to the Dutch, who had planted…

The Year: 1629 One of the New England Colonies, New Hampshire began as a proprietary colony – a colony in which private land owners retained rights that were normally the privilege of the state. King James I provided ships, provisions, and free land – with one important condition, that it always be subject to the English crown. So it remained until the Revolutionary War. Land in the New World was granted to Captain John Mason who lived in Hampshire County, England. In 1623, Mason sent two groups of English settlers to establish a fishing colony in what is now New Hampshire, at the mouth of the Piscataqua River.

The 1630s The Puritans who settled the New England colonies came to America to escape religious persecution in their homeland. Their isolation in the New World, their introversion, the harshness and dangers of their new existence insured that American Puritanism would remain more severe than that which they had left behind. The Puritans believed that they were the Chosen People of God destined to found a New Jerusalem—a New City of God in the wilderness. They interpreted the Bible more literally than their British counterparts, and sought to establish a purified church, which sometimes meant imposing their religious beliefs on unwilling citizens.

The Founding of Boston Image: Ships in Boston Harbor A fleet of 11 ships carrying the residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony landed at Salem and Charlestown in 1630. John Winthrop, aboard the Arabella, landed at North River near Salem on June 12, 1630. Salem was short of food and not able to support another thousand inhabitants. Winthrop decided to locate the colony at Charlestown because of its proximity to the harbor, but the colony did not flourish there, partly due to the lack of good drinking water. Across the Charles River, William Blackstone, a former clergyman, was living an isolated existence as a trapper. Word came to him from his Indian friends of the difficulties his fellow countrymen were…