Beyond Borders - Mapping Maine and the Northeast Boundary

For their part, as White New Englanders invested in and settled in early Maine, they mobilized kinship ties that structured colonial business and investing practices. Colonists drew on family wealth in order to invest, and familial bonds undergirded business partnerships. As a result, women necessarily assumed key roles in economic networks. Through marriage, women built connections, solidifying alliances and facilitating the transfer of wealth between families. In addition, daughters as well as sons inherited from their fathers, and widows inherited from their husbands both via their dower rights and additional bequests. Familial bonds and inheritance held particular importance among the sorts of Boston-area elites who founded the Kennebec and Pejepscot Proprietors. Elite Boston women not only stood to own property themselves, but also helped their families preserve dynastic wealth and status across generations.

At the same time, marriage law differently shaped men’s and women’s abilities to own and control land. Like other British colonies, Massachusetts, including the district of Maine, derived its legal system from its mother country. Within this framework, unmarried women possessed the same legal rights as men, including the abilities to independently purchase, own, or sell land. A small number of affluent widows and single women were therefore among those colonists who became landowners. In the 1670s, for instance, Bostonian Rachel Atkins purchased two tracts of land in Maine, one from the Wabanaki and one from an English colonist. For such women, land represented an important source of wealth and, potentially, income.(3)

Once Rachel Atkins married, however, the British legal principle of coverture curtailed her rights. Coverture stipulated that married women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands. While coverture’s consequences were varied and uneven in daily life, its ramifications were clear within property law. Married women could not purchase property, and husbands acquired custodial powers over property that their wives owned prior to marriage. Thus, after Rachel Atkins married James Berry in 1687, she could no longer independently consent to decisions regarding her land. In 1716, James Berry and Rachel Atkins Berry jointly sold the land to the Pejepscot Proprietors. James signed above Rachel on the land deed, exemplifying the intertwining of husbands’ and wives’ economic fortunes through marriage.(4)

Overall, coverture’s limitations on women’s ability to contract meant that women made up a small minority of White landowners in early Maine, both before and after the formation of land companies. Most women landowners were widows who inherited such property from their late husbands. Gendered divisions of economic activity, moreover, meant that women landowners did not participate in companies’ day-to-day decision-making or shareholders’ meetings. Instead, they appeared in the record primarily when land titles required their signatures.(5)

While a small number of White New England women owned property, many others facilitated the settlement of early Maine. As colonists moved to the region both as squatters and titled landholders, wives and daughters helped their families to survive and grow within a rugged and sparsely populated region. Involving extensive physical labor indoors and out-of-doors, women’s daily work included gardening, dairying, food preparation, spinning, weaving, clothes-making, laundry, and childcare. Women also traded with nearby households, and wives assumed financial and legal responsibilities both in their husbands’ absences and within routine divisions of household labor.