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In 1629, the Pilgrims at Plymouth secured a grant of land on both sides of the Kennebec, which enabled them to control the Indian trade of the river, and which later, having been sold by them, was known as the "Kennebec Purchase." A grant of land on the north side of the Saco river, including the site of the present city of Saco, was made by the Great Council in 1630 to Thomas Lewis and Richard Bonighton. Also, in the same year, land on the south side of the Saco, including the site of the present city of Biddeford, was granted to John Oldham and Richard Vines. That also was the date of the Muscongus Patent, granting lands at Muscongus to John Beauchamp and Thomas Leverett, a grant later known as the Waldo Patent. The Lygonia Patent, covering a tract of land forty miles square, extending from Cape Porpoise to the Androscoggin River, bears the same date. The Black Point Grant to Thomas Cammock, a nephew of the Earl of Warwick, was made in 1631. So also in the same year a grant of land on the Pejepscot river was made to Richard Bradshaw; another of land on Cape Elizabeth to Robert Trelawny and Moses Goodyear; another on the east side of the Agamenticus river to Ferdinando Gorges, a grandson of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Walter Norton and others; also two thousand acres at Cape Porpoise to John Stratton; also land at Pemaquid to Robert Aldworth and Gyles Elbridge. In 1632, grants of land on the Pejepscot river were made to George Way and Thomas Purchase.

In 1634, in the final division of the Patent for New England by the great Council, number seven, including the territory between the Piscataqua, and the Kennebec, was assigned to Sir Ferdinando Gorges. In 1636, Gorges leased to George Cleeve and Richard Tucker "a neck of land called Machegonne," now Portland. The royal charter of the Province of Maine to Sir Ferdinando Gorges by Charles II, designed to confirm the allotment made to Gorges in the division of the Patent for New England, was granted in 1639. During the decade and more that followed, affairs were in a disturbed state in the province because of the conflict between the King and Parliament. As the power of the royalist party in England weakened, George Cleeve in 1643, in opposition to the Gorges interest, enlisted the aid of Colonel Alexander Rigby in resuscitating the Lygonia Patent of 1630, and received a commission as Deputy President of the Province of Lygonia. Other interests were pressing. In this unsettled state of affairs civil government of necessity languished, and in 1651 the General Court of the Province of Maine appealed to Parliament for protection.