The District of Maine was a legal designation for what is now the U.S. state of Maine from American independence until the Missouri Compromise on March 4, 1820, after which it gained its independence from Massachusetts and became the 23rd state in the Union. The term "District of Maine" is also used to refer to the United States District Court for the District of Maine, whose jurisdiction includes the entire state of Maine.
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Originally settled in 1607 by the Plymouth Company, the coastal areas of western Maine first became the Province of Maine in a 1622 land patent. These territories were taken over by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1650s, although later legal action in England voided these claims. In 1677, the Province of Maine was sold to Massachusetts for the sum of £1250.
The eastern portion of present-day Maine were first sparsely occupied by French colonists as part of Acadia. The lands between the Kennebec and Saint Croix rivers were also granted to the Duke of York in 1664, who had them administered as Cornwall County, part of his proprietary Province of New York. In 1688 these lands (along with the rest of New York) were subsumed into the Dominion of New England. English and French claims in eastern Maine would be contested, at times violently, until the British conquest of New France in the French and Indian War.
With the creation of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1692, the entirety of what is now Maine became part of that province. Under Massachusetts administration it was first administered as York County, which was subdivided by the creation in 1760 of Cumberland and Lincoln Counties.
As divided by the Continental Congress in 1778, the District of Maine was the northernmost of three districts in Massachusetts, bounded on the west by the Piscataqua River and on the east by the Saint Croix River. By 1820, the time of its statehood, the territory had been further subdivided with the creation of Hancock, Kennebec, Oxford, Penobscot, Somerset and Washington Counties. During the War of 1812 the British conquered a large portion of Maine including everything from the Penobscot River east to the New Brunswick border. The weak response of Massachusetts to this occupation contributed to increased calls in the Maine district for statehood.
Maine became the 23rd state on March 15, 1820, as part of the Missouri Compromise.