What's The Deal With All The Plantations in Maine?

Maine has 454 towns/cities, 425 townships (unorganized territories), 3 reservations of indigenous Americans, and 34 plantations. Wait, what? A plantation? I was a bit surprised when I moved to Maine to find out that we had plantations. I quickly figured out that it's not remnants of the kind of plantations that you read about in the American South, with huge farms and self-sufficient settlements that relied on the labor of slaves. These Maine Plantations have nothing to do with that.

What Are Maine Plantations?

No other state uses "plantations" as places except for Maine. Think of Maine plantations as having to do with more of a civil type of definition. A plantation in Maine is not a town or village, and it's not one of our "unorganized territories." But it's still pretty unorganized. A Maine plantation is self-governing and provides most of the same services as a town, but unlike a town, does not have the power to make ordinances. It's kind of in no-man's-land (quite literally, in fact, as Maine plantations are all in rural areas). It's interesting that the word "plantation" is usually in the name.

maineanencyclopedia.com

Here are all the Maine Plantations according to Wikipedia. The asterisk is for those plantations that technically are plantations but do not use them in their name.