How boundary disputes shaped early Maine coastal towns
The property lines in a coastal Maine town do not look like the lines in an Ohio county, and the reason is that Maine was divided up before anyone had a system for doing it.
Ohio was surveyed on a grid by federal surveyors and sold in rectangles. Maine was granted in pieces by a succession of English authorities, then by Massachusetts, to companies and individuals whose claims overlapped from the beginning.
I have spent twenty-odd years with the resulting documents and I would describe the situation as a mess that never got fully cleaned up.
Where the confusion starts
Seventeenth century English grants described enormous territories in vague terms, sometimes by reference to rivers whose names were not fixed and whose courses were not known.
Two grants could cover the same ground. Both grantees could then sell parcels to settlers in good faith. Both sets of settlers arrive with paper they believe is valid, and neither of them is lying.
Add the Massachusetts claim to Maine, which lasted until statehood in 1820, and a period of active conflict in which settlements were destroyed and records lost, and you have the raw material for two centuries of litigation.
How it shows up on the ground
Metes and bounds descriptions. A deed that runs from a marked pine tree to a pile of stones, thence north by east so many rods to the shore.
Trees die. Stone piles get moved for a wall. Magnetic north shifts, and a bearing recorded in 1790 does not point where the same bearing points now.
Town lines that follow no logic. If you look at a map of coastal Maine and wonder why a town boundary takes a sudden jog inland, the answer is usually a compromise between two claims settled by a committee in a particular year.
Long narrow lots running back from the water. Frontage was the valuable thing, so parcels were divided to give many owners a piece of shore, and you get lots several times longer than they are wide.
Intertidal land, which in Maine is unusual. Under a colonial ordinance the owner's title generally runs to the low water mark rather than the high water mark, which is not how most states handle it, and it produces disputes about public access that are still live.
What this means if you are researching
Do not assume the town line was where it is now. Records for a property may sit in a neighbouring town's books, or in a town that no longer exists, or in a plantation that was later absorbed.
Check the registry of deeds for the county, and check whether county boundaries changed. Maine counties were created and subdivided over a long period and a deed from 1805 may be in a registry you would not think to look at.
Look for proprietors' records. Before a town was incorporated, the proprietors of the grant kept their own records of lot divisions and who got what. Where these survive they are the most valuable document for early land history, and they are frequently held by a local historical society rather than by a government office.
Plans and surveys are often filed separately from deeds, and people miss them entirely.
The practical modern consequence
Title work in coastal Maine is genuinely harder than in most of the country, and surveyors here spend real time reading eighteenth century deeds.
Disputes over a few feet of shore frontage still go to court, and they turn on documents that a researcher can go and read.
I had a pair of neighbours in here for the better part of a year, separately, each looking for the same boundary. They were both polite about it. Neither found anything conclusive, because the original description referenced a tree.
Where to look
County registries of deeds, many with indexes online. The Maine State Archives for state level records and for the Massachusetts period. Town clerk offices for town meeting records, which record boundary perambulations.
And ask your local historical society what uncatalogued material they hold. The answer is usually more than the catalogue suggests.
