Maine's Name: a French Queen's Province or "the Main"?

Maine’s name may honor a French province that belonged to an English queen, or it may come from what fishermen called the coast: “the Main.” The old books give both answers, and Maine’s 1832 historian thought it was a little of each.

Gannett’s two answers

Henry Gannett, whose 1905 U.S. Geological Survey book traced place names all over the country, didn’t pick one. Maine, he says, is “said to be named for the private estate of Henrietta Maria, in Maine, a province of France.” Henrietta Maria, who married King Charles I of England, was “a French Princess and a Catholic,” as William D. Williamson puts it. She arrived in May 1625, he says.

Then Gannett gives the other version, “according to another authority.” The fishermen of the islands along the coast called the mainland “the main,” and “in some early documents it was spelled Mayn.”

What “the Main” meant

Williamson, whose two-volume History of the State of Maine came out in 1832, explains why the coast got that label. “By reason of the great number of Islands in this quarter,” he writes, “the shores, or coast, were frequently called ‘the Main.’”

He backs it up with examples from early English writings. Captain John Smith, who was on the islands in 1614, wrote that the Indians wanted one of his men to go “to the Meyne.” Another early account said Weymouth first anchored at an island, though it looked like “some high land of the Mayne.” And a 1635 grant to John Mason mentions “a tract of land upon the Mayn.” Williamson sums it up: “This expression, ‘the Main,’ is common in old authors.”

A queen’s province

The name became official in 1639. On April 3 of that year, Williamson says, Sir Ferdinando Gorges got a charter from King Charles I for land along the coast from the Piscataqua River to the Sagadahock and the Kennebec. Williamson calls it a charter with “more extensive powers and privileges, than were ever granted by the crown to any other individual.” Its name was the Province of Maine.

Why that name? Here’s Williamson’s answer, and it’s the heart of the story. The name “Maine,” he writes, “though one by which this section of country was at that time frequently called, was chosen, probably, in compliment to the queen, who had inherited a province of the same name in France.”

So he gives the name two reasons at once. People already called the coast “the Main,” and Gorges could flatter the queen with it, too. “For this double reason,” Williamson says, it was better than the old name. That old name was New Somersetshire, which Gorges had used for his part of the coast a few years before, after Somerset in England, where he lived.

So which is it?

Neither book proves it, and you won’t find the answer in the charter’s own words, at least not in what Williamson quotes. Gannett gives both versions without choosing. Williamson leans toward both, but he says “probably.” For the queen, his footnote just points to an earlier Maine historian, James Sullivan, not to anything Gorges or the king wrote. Gannett and Williamson don’t even describe the queen’s link to Maine in the same way. One says “private estate,” the other says she “inherited a province.” That’s why we mark this one as disputed.

What Williamson does pin down is the charter. In his telling, the Province of Maine dates from Gorges’s grant of 1639, though people were already using the name. Earlier still, old voyagers had their own name for the region, “Mavooshen,” Williamson says.

From province to state

For a long time, Maine was the District of Maine, part of Massachusetts. In January 1820, Governor John Brooks of Massachusetts told his legislature that March 15 would “terminate forever, the political unity of Massachusetts proper and the District of Maine.” Its admission had been tied up in Congress with Missouri’s until the first of March. Then, Williamson writes in his second volume, an act passed on March 3 made Maine “one of the United States of America” from March 15. The old name came along unchanged. So when you say “Maine,” you may be naming a French province, or a fisherman’s word for the coast, or both at once.

Sources & further reading

• William D. Williamson, The History of the State of Maine, vol. 1 (Hallowell, 1832), pp. 9, 231, 256, 272, 275, 277. Maine “was called Mavoshen or Mavooshen, by ancient voyagers and writers” (p. 9, note); the marriage of Charles I with “Henrietta Maria, a French Princess and a Catholic,” who arrived “in May, 1625” (p. 231); part of the coast assigned to Gorges and “named New Somersetshire” (p. 256); Gorges’s charter from Charles I, dated “April 3, 1639,” from the Piscataqua to the Sagadahock and Kennebec (p. 272); “more extensive powers and privileges, than were ever granted by the crown to any other individual” (p. 275); “The provincial name of Maine, though one by which this section of country was at that time frequently called, was chosen, probably, in compliment to the queen, who had inherited a province of the same name in France. For this double reason, it was a name preferable to the old one, taken from the county of Somerset, in which the patentee had his residence and perhaps his birth”; note: “By reason of the great number of Islands in this quarter, the shores, or coast, were frequently called ‘the Main’”; Smith, “to the Meyne”; Weymouth, “some high land of the Mayne”; Mason’s patent of 1635, “a tract of land upon the Mayn”; “This expression, ‘the Main,’ is common in old authors”; the note on the queen points to “Sullivan” (p. 277).
• William D. Williamson, The History of the State of Maine, vol. 2 (Hallowell, 1832), pp. 674–675. Governor Brooks, in his January 1820 message (pp. 674–675): the 15th of March “will terminate forever, the political unity of Massachusetts proper and the District of Maine”; the admission of Maine and Missouri joined in one bill until “the first of March”; on the 3d, “an act was passed, by which Maine was declared to be, from and after the 15th of that month, one of the United States of America.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 196. “Said to be named for the private estate of Henrietta Maria, in Maine, a province of France; or, according to another authority, so called because the fishermen of the islands along the coast referred to the mainland as the main, and in some early documents it was spelled Mayn.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Maine’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779787).