Beyond Borders - Mapping Maine and the Northeast Boundary

Coll. 61 at Maine Historical Society

Acquired by MHS in 1863, the Pejepscot Proprietors papers are an amalgam of official business records of the Pejepscot Proprietors coupled with supplementary records generated by or in relation to company activity along the Androscoggin River. Bound in volumes alongside these original manuscript records are small histories and genealogies gathered and written by John McKeen, historian and one of the founding members of the Maine Historical Society. McKeen was given the records of the Pejepscot Proprietors by the son of the last clerk of the company, Josiah Little, a Bowdoin College classmate. McKeen gifted them to MHS after his death.

The inclusive dates for the collection are circa 1627 to circa 1866, which also pre and postdate the Pejepscot Proprietors dealings (1714‐1814). It includes land deeds, depositions, maps, correspondence, broadsides, proprietor’s meetings records, accounts, land agents, and other documents generated by the business of the company. It also includes municipal records for towns settled by the company, most notably Brunswick, Maine, with warrants and reports.

The collection contains a wide variety of unexpected yet related documents, such as “Indian captivity” depositions; documents pertaining to the Newburyport, Mass privateer Sea Flower; Revolutionary War documents; French spoliation claims for the brig Hope; records of churches founded in towns settled by the Pejepscot Proprietors and histories of their ministers; material pertaining to Indigenous people (from which the name “Pejepscot” is derived); material concerning the voyage of George Weymouth; documents about murdered French Jesuit missionary Father Rasle of Norridgewock; and reports of the Massachusetts and New York Border Commission, 1773 and 1787.