During high school a good friend of mine and I would go, from time to time, to the state of Maine. Some trips to see his grandfather and others to visit colleges that we were thinking of attending after graduating from high school. Every time that we would go up there I would look at maps of Maine from our map book to try and plot the roads that we would take, since this was before the day that everyone had access to GPS technology. One day I noticed something strange when I was looking at some of the map sections close to the Canadian border, there were not many towns, in fact much of northern Maine was just divided into numbered grids.
In areas of southern Maine and other states in New England the areas of nothingness (that is no human population) would typically be incorporated with some town or another. So you would have a town like Petersham, MA with nearly seventy square miles of land with all of one thousand people in a small town center type area. Rather than take a similar approach, either because of the remoteness of some of these areas or a simple lack of people, Maine decided to make numbered grids. The only practical use of these grids is for land identification purposes especially for the logging industry, since as you may imagine, northern Maine has a lot of trees.
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