(Maine) | Broadside encouraging settlement of public lands in the District of Maine, 1818

(Maine)

Public Lands in the District of Maine for Settlement. Land Office, 2nd March, 1818. Dedham [Massachusetts]: A. D. Alleyme, 1818

Letterpress broadside (approximately 375 x 265 mm). Signed in type by Land Office Commissioners Edward H. Robbins, Lothrop Lewis, and Joseph Lee; very worn and stained with minor loss, pasted down on board obscuring endorsement on the verso.

Issued while the District of Maine was still part of Massachusetts, this scarce broadside was part of a larger effort to promote settlement of the vast expanses of public lands in the District. The Land Commissioners here urge “industrious and moral husbandmen, who are destitute of Farms, to notice the proposals of a beneficent government to improve their conditions in life, and open to them a certain opportunity to increase of property and means of happiness, founded on a solid basis, by a donation of one hundred acres of good land to every actual settler. Hear ye that are not deaf! go and see you who are not blind!”

A postscript orders that “The Selectmen of the respective towns are requested to deposit one of these advertisements with the town clerk, to be retained for inspection of the inhabitants; and give publicity to the others, by reading at a public meeting, and posting up at the most suitable places, as to them may be most convenient; as there is reason to believe, that our notification of the 9th of July, 1817, published in most of the Newspapers, in August and September last, did not come to the knowledge of one fourth of the people of the State—a circumstance greatly to be regretted and injurious to many individuals.”

After several abortive efforts, Maine formally secessed from Massachusetts and gained admission to the Union as the twenty-third state on 15 March 1820, as part of the Missouri Compromise.