Plymouth Company (Kennebec Proprietors) Records, 1625-1824

The Plymouth Company, also known as the Kennebeck Purchase Company, Kennebec Proprietors or The Proprietors of the Kennebeck Purchase from the late Colony of New Plymouth, organized in 1749, and was one of a number of proprietor groups operating in the District of Maine decades before the American Revolution. Conflicting land grants, competing companies-such the Pejepbscot Company- established towns and land squatters presented issue as the company laid claim to a roughly 1,500 square mile region on either side of the Kennebec River. “In 1629 the Council [of Plymouth] made a grant to the Colony of Plymouth, of a tract on the Kennebeck, extending 15 miles from the river on each side. This tract was transferred, in 1661, to Antipas Boies, Edward Tyng, Thomas Brattle, and John Winslow. Their descendants and assigns afterwards associated under the name of the Kennebeck Company…The ambiguities and obscurities as to the limits, usual in the grants of this council, produced long, expensive, and severe contests between claimants under this grant, and those on its boarders”1 “The Kennebeck Purchase Company came into being in 1749, when an association of Boston merchant-speculators revived interest in an old Pilgrim grant on the Kennebec River in Maine. Organizing as ‘The Proprietors of the Kennebeck Purchase from the late Colony of New-Plymouth’ they preceded to develop their tract during the twenty-five years preceding the Revolution… As the American Revolution approached…Incorporations of towns began to lead to the establishment of self-government in many places. This, combined with democratizing aspects of the Revolution and increasing lawlessness, began to erode proprietary control….No longer a secure investment opportunity nor an impetus to frontier expansion, the Kennebeck Purchase Company began to fade into the background and was finally dissolved in 1816”.2