Ferdinando Gorges
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Ferdinando Gorges (1565-1647) was an early English colonial entrepreneur in North America and founder of the Province of Maine in 1622.
Gorges was born in Ashton Phillips, Somerset, England. In 1601, he became involved in the Essex Conspiracy and later testified against its leader, Robert Devereux.
In 1605, he helped sponsor the expedition of George Weymouth to the mouth of the Kennebec River along the coast of the present day State of Maine in the United States. In 1607, as a shareholder in the Plymouth Company, he helped the fund the failed Popham Colony, near present-day Phippsburg, Maine. Gorges never set foot in the New World himself.
In 1622, Gorges received a land patent, along with John Mason, from the Plymouth Council for New England for the Province of Maine, the original boundaries of which were between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers. In 1629, he and Mason divided the colony, and Mason's portion south of the Piscataqua River becoming the Province of New Hampshire. Gorges and his nephew established Maine's first court system.
He died a destitute man in 1647. Maine later fell under the control of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.