t be allowed to
stand good, that all this vast estate I have been naming should be
purchased for a poor L250 and that a desperate debt, too, as Col. Allen
thought. He pretends to a great part of this province as far Westward as
Cape St. Ann, which is said to take in 17 of the best towns in this
province next to Boston, the best improved land, and, (I think Col.
Allen told me) 8 or 900,000 acres of their land. If Col. Allen shall at
any time go about to make a forcible entry on these lands he pretends to
(for, to be sure, the people will never turn tenants to him willingly)
the present occupants will resist him by any force he shall bring and
the Province will be put to a combustion and what may be the course I
dread to think."...[11]

But the persistent Allen did not establish his claim. Several times he
lost in the litigation, the last time in 1715. His death was followed by
his son's death; and after sixty years of fierce animosities and
litigation, the whole contention was allowed to lapse. Says Lodge: "His
heirs were minors who did not push the controversy, and the claim soon
sank out of sight to the great relief of the New Hampshire people, whose
right to their homes had so long been in question."[12]

Similarly, another area, the entirety of what is now the State of Maine,
went to the individual ownership of Sir Fernandino Gorges, the same who
had betrayed Essex to Queen Elizabeth and who had received rich rewards
for his treachery.[13] The domain descended to his grandson, Fernando
Gorges, who, on March 13, 1677, sold it by deed to John Usher, a Boston
merchant, for L1,250. The ominous dissatisfaction of the New Hampshire
and other settlers with the monopolization of land was not slighted by
the English government; at the very time Usher bought Maine the
government was on the point of doing the same thing and opening the land
for settlement. Usher at once gave a deed of the province to the
governor and company of Massachusetts, of which colony and later, State,
it remained a part until its creation as a State in 1820.[14]

These were two notable instances of vast land grants which reverted to
the people. In most of the colonies the popular outcry for free access
to the land was not so effective. In Pennsylvania, after the government
was restored to Penn, and in part of New Jersey conditions were more
favorable to the settlers. In those colonies corrupt usurpations of the
land were comparatively few, although th