Talk:List of New England towns

Comment

I am beginning to tidy up this list, before adding Wikilinks. If anyone else joins in to help, pretty much all of these place names were nicked from the UK, so make sure the link you add is to the correct town! -Ladybirdintheuk 10:01, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Keep it simple and on focus

Suggest that this article should remain a simple list. Suggest that all comments about historical status be eliminated from here and added instead to the specific pages (county, town, municipality). While it might be appropriate to add a very brief notation comment about a very recent change in status of a municipality (such as a change that took place since the most recent year 2000 Census for example), adding data about towns which existed in 1918 or 1938, or whether a county contains unorganized territory now or then, is not appropriate here and only begins to clutter up this list. Keep it simply as the list it is titled. Comments? JackME 09:21, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Some comments on this article:

1) This list was created as a companion to the New England town article. Just as that article does not limit itself strictly to towns, but contains a comprehensive discussion of how the entire New England municipal system works, this list was not intended to be limited strictly to towns, but also to include other municpalities in the "town system", like cities and plantations. I was actually even planning to add incorporated boroughs (in CT) and incorporated villages (in VT) in the near future -- not as part of the main list, but in notes following the county lists, similar to the way that unincorporated territory and former towns are currently handled. I will hold off on doing that for the time being.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to include these other municipalities on this list, as long as it is explained that such entities are included, and they are clearly labeled as whatever they are (cities, plantations, etc.). Cities and plantations are really just a variation on the town concept, and I think it’s easier to understand the New England system as a whole, with the town as its basic building block, than to separate out cities, plantations, boroughs, etc., at least at the level of detail provided by the New England town article and by this list (obviously there may be value in having additional articles that focus specifically on certain types of municipalities in each state in more detail).

One of the reasons I originally wrote the New England town article was because, in my experience, many people from outside New England don’t have a good grasp on how the New England system works, or to be more precise, incorrectly assume that it is more similar to systems used elsewhere in the U.S. (the Midwestern township system in particular) than it actually is. For readers approaching this from that point of view, I think it’s important to capture all municipalities, not just towns, because you really need to have an understanding of the “New England town system” as a whole in order to understand what the rest of the municipalities are. It's hard to explain what a plantation is, or why there are so few incorporated boroughs/villages in Connecticut/Vermont than in other states with incorporated boroughs/villages, or that cities and towns in New England are not two fundamentally different types of entities (no matter what Census classifications may imply), if the reader doesn't understand the New England town system in the first place.

When I first put this list up, there was nothing in the introduction acknowledging that some of the entities on the list were not literally called “towns” (although all cities and plantations were always labeled as such in the list itself). To your point, I later had the thought that this might be confusing and should be explicitly called out, and expanded the intro language in an attempt to address this. I thought the original language was fine; to be honest with you, I think your intro language reads very awkwardly, because it seems to bend over backwards to incorporate the idea that "this article is not really what it claims to be" (i.e., it's not really a list of "towns", because it also includes "cities" and "plantations"), which I think is just confusing to the reader. If boroughs and villages are ultimately added to the list, though, this is going to have to be reworked beyond anything that we've had up to this point anyway (maybe to start “This is a List of New England towns and other incorporated municipalities in New England…”.).

2) I think there is some value in noting which counties include unorganized areas in addition to the municipalities that are listed, since these areas give the complete story on each county. This also serves as a tie in to the “non-town areas” section of the New England town article, so the reader can see where such areas exist and how extensive they are. I think there is some value in mentioning former towns as well. I do agree with you that there are limits to how much information of this nature should be included. This is the criteria that I have had in mind for mentioning specific unincorporated entities or former towns. (Note: I have been fleshing out information about unorganized areas and former towns as I work my way through the “Historical U.S. Census Totals” pages. I haven’t done most of Maine yet, since I haven’t finished the “Historical U.S. Census totals” pages for Maine.)

• Indicate whether the amount of unorganized territory in the county is “very small” (e.g., a single gore-sized area or offshore island, almost a technicality that there is any at all), “small” (e.g., an unorganized township or two), or “significant” (e.g., most of the northern and interior counties in Maine).

• For NH and VT, list all unincorporated townships (such entities in NH and VT invariably were given proper names at the time they were created, and these names are often fairly well-known). If they were once incorporated as towns, state this. For ME, only list unincorporated townships if they were once incorporated as towns or organized as plantations (some Maine counties have dozens of unincorporated townships, which would make it impractical to list them all; those that are not former towns or plantations are often only identified by grid designations and even where names exist these names are sometimes obscure).

• Do not list gores, grants, purchases, locations, etc. Exception: if the unorganized territory in a particular county consists solely of one such entity, mention it by name.

• For entities that are not listed by name, briefly describe how many such entities there are in the county.

• Mention former towns that have ceased to exist since 1900 or so (I hadn’t really settled an exact date to use, but not any further back than that. I think the oldest one currently mentioned is Hyde Park, MA, which was annexed by Boston in 1912).

• Don’t mention former incorporated boroughs or former incorporated villages.

• Don’t mention past name or title changes (e.g., plantation to town, town to city) for any municipalities that are still in existence.

The list was originally based on the 2000 Census, so it included Madrid, ME and Centerville, ME. I think you had left a note in one of your edit summaries a while back about removing them from the list – I agree with you on this; they’ve both been disincorporated for a few years now, so they don’t really belong on the main list. As I was going through Maine, I was planning to take Madrid and Centerville off the county lists and just address them in the note at the end of each county list where unorganized territory is discussed.

3) I notice that you recently went through the list and changed some (but not all) of the plantations in Maine from “X (plantation)” to “X Plantation”. It may be that the official name of “X (plantation)” is “X Plantation”, but along the same lines, the official name of “Y (city)” is probably “City of Y”, and the official name of “Z” is probably “Town of Z”. I think the list is a lot cleaner if all municipalities are simply listed by proper name, with the title (“(plantation)”, “(city)”, etc.) shown in parentheses only where it is something other than "town" (or where there is a need to distinguish a town from another municipality with the same name). I wouldn’t be inclined to treat plantations differently from towns and cities in this respect. I also think we should keep all of the plantations on the same format rather than having some of them one way and some another.

4) I saw the comments you left on Talk:New England town on the number of municipalities in Maine. Since there's some overlap with this page, I'll include a couple of comments on that topic here:

• I think I have Baring counted as town when it should be a plantation. My numbers indicate 2 cities, 40 towns, and 2 plantations in Washington County, but looking at the list, I see 2 cities, 39 towns, and 3 plantations. I’ll check my overall numbers (including cities and plantations as well as towns) for other counties and post any differences from yours on Talk:New England town. In looking over my materials, I notice that the Census has Baring as a plantation in 2000, a town in 1990, a plantation in 1980, and as its own UT in 1970. I think I originally used the 1990 Census as the basis for developing my count of municipalities in each county, so that’s probably why I had Baring counted as a town. The 1990 Census materials make no mention or acknowledgement of Baring’s status having changed from plantation to town. As for changing back after 1990, the Census’ web site shows Baring changing from town to plantation effective 1/1/90. However, that nice round date makes me a little suspicious as to whether Baring actually changed from a town to a plantation on that date, or if this is just a correction of a previous Census error (see http://www.census.gov/popest/geographic/boundary_changes/geo3.php. Note the mention of Frye Island changing from a city to town, which I believe is also a correction and not a change – I remember seeing Frye Island listed as a city in Census materials and wondering why on earth the island landowners/residents would have set up a city form of government for a community with no year-round residents. I’ve never seen any other evidence that it was ever a city, though; as far as I know, Frye Island has been a town right from the start). Do you know whether Baring was actually incorporated as a town for a time in 1980s and 1990s, then went back to being a plantation? Some notes that I have from a database that used to be up on the Maine state archives web site shows that Baring was organized as a plantation in 1961, so listing it as a UT in 1970 may also be wrong on the Census’ part.

• When I originally put this list up, I had Lakeville, ME as a town. Someone (I don’t remember exactly when or who) later changed it to a plantation. I notice that you had changed it back to a town. I also have it as a town, but wasn’t certain that there hadn’t been a recent change. (The person who made the initial change might have had Lakeville confused with Lake View.)

• You brought up Indian Reservations – those are currently not addressed on the New England town page, but maybe they should be at least mentioned. It is my understanding that Maine considers the Indian Reservations to be completely independent of any municipality or unorganized township, which makes them a type of “non-town area” as described on that page. I don’t think this is the case with all of the other New England states, however. There is a reservation down around Charlestown, RI which, even though as a practical matter the town asserts little or no authority over it, and the tribe has its own listing in the municipality section of the state web site, is apparently considered to be part of the town of Charlestown for geographic purposes, and is counted as part of the town in the Census. I’m not sure how this works in MA or CT, which IINM also have a few (mostly very small) reservations. This is an area that I really don't know a lot about.

MCT 21:29, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

In the case of CT, its 6 reservations are considered to be part of the town they're in even though they are autonomous of the town government. I am pretty sure the same is true of MA and RI. --Polaron | Talk 04:45, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Just a few comments tonight: Whatever you MCT (as original author) conceived THIS article (List of New England Towns) to be, it is now an article by itself, which is titled and linked as List of New England Towns, therefore I feel it necessary to either eliminate all NON-towns from this listing ( which I am NOT suggesting be done) or clarify that although it's called a list.....Towns, it does include other types of organized municipalities. I don't feel my current simplification edit of the intro to make clear the inclusion of other organized municipalities is a "negative" ie, this list is not what it says, but rather a clarification, simple and to the point. (If I came to a page called List of New England Towns, then began discovering cities and other types in the listings, I would be confused as to why it was called a list of towns......I wouldn't necessarily go reading up on all town governmental structures just to answer the why) I feel you have it linked closely to the other article in your mind, but as I'm trying to point out, it does exists independently.

A few quick hits:

I guess I just don't see why it's so controversial to include cities and towns on a list of New England towns, as long as they are labeled as such, given that in the New England system cities and plantations are nothing more than variations on the town concept, and that they are few in number in relation to the towns themselves (i.e., it isn't like the true "towns" are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of cities and plantations). In Massachusetts, we can't even figure out whether to classify certain municipalities as cities or towns, and in Connecticut, most of the cities are, technically, also towns. In the alternative, if cities and plantations are included, I don't see why something that expresses the idea "This list claims to be a list of New England towns but it really isn't" is an improvement over just saying something to the effect of "This is a list of New England towns and other (similar) municipalities". Hold your thoughts from the above paragraph for a minute, though, especially the part about this being linked to the other article. There may be a simple solution to this, which you touch on below; I'll come back to this in a minute.

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Well, of course it's not controversial to include Towns in a list of New England towns, but why name it a List of New England Towns if it is not limited to that but also includes cities and plantations? (Rhetorical question) Again, you as original author have this article closely linked in your mind to some other focus and obviously to you the town of the title is not literal but euphemistic for municipality. But I came along and am only looking at this article as a List of New England Towns which is what it's called and how I found it. I'm not saying I would remove the cities and plantations, but as far as I know, Wiki Guidelines say that the actual title of the article should appear in the first sentence or two of the article body itself which reaffirms the article title, so I feel a bit of elaboration was needed to acknowledge that it is not JUST a list of New England Towns, but of other types of municipalities as well. And as that bit is now, I don't feel it's emphasizing that the article is not what it claims, only clarifying that it contains other types of municipalities. What if this article was called a List of New England Plantations? Or a List of New England Cities? Can you see what I mean? Your suggestion for the rephrasing as quoted above to include....and other (similar) municipalities.. is fine with me. I've just finished editing 3 separate articles: a List of Maine Cities, a List of Maine Towns, and a List of Maine Plantations because it was of interest to me to know which was which and how many of each type there were, in a ready reference. I didn't want to have to keep sorting that out. Sure they're all Municipalities, but it's interesting to know that there are only 22 cities in Maine, 34 plantations, and 432 towns and which is which. Next I may edit a List of Unorganized Townships in Maine.JackME 05:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. Any thoughts on my suggestion to call this article something else, and to your point make List of New England towns literally a list of towns only? If we do that, what should the article with the current List of New England towns content be called? List of Current and Historical New England Municipalities? Could/should I somehow explicitly tie it to the New England town article?

I just want to affirm that although with an article named: List of New England Towns, I feel it is necessary to clarify that the listing also includes Cities and Plantations, I am NOT arguing that those other types should be removed from the page. As long as the clarification within the first sentence is there, I have no problem with the article remaining as named. The extension of your suggestion to strip the existing page of cities and plantations (and villages or what all else exists in the other New England States) so that it becomes specifically a listing of ONLY towns, carries with it (in my mind) a need to create other pages listing those other types, i.e., a List of New England Cities, a List of New England Plantations, etc. And then what would the page you envisioned as a companion page to the main article be called? A list of New England Town-like Municipalities? I guess it would depend on just how much "other" information you plan to add to this current listing. Because if your conception is that eventually all several hundred of these places names have a line or two of detail or trivia appended to them, then it will be a big article/page and so maybe should be re-thought as to format.

From the discussion upthread and from the "this page is not really what it claims to be" wording that you had used for the introductory sentence, I had been under the impression that, at least ideally, you did not want the cities and plantations to appear on this page. In any event, whether the cities and plantations go or not, you clearly don't think the historical info should be here, and I assume you wouldn't be too supportive of adding info on incorporated boroughs and villages, as I had been planning to do.

Let me boil it down to this: I am more concerned about the information that I would like to present being on *some* page than that the page in question be called "List of New England towns". Do you have any objection to my moving the current content to a page that is called something different, referencing both that page and List of New England towns on the main New England town page, and then you can set up List of New England towns in any way you want? MCT 17:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Without having checked the other states I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that a good portion, if not the majority, of the various municipalities, especially cities and towns, already have a page of their own, which the listing pages (for Maine) link too. So maybe that's part of the issue with your article and your listing too. If you have trivia and history, maybe you should be adding those bits of information directly to the municipality's page, instead of to the listing/link page. If every page does not yet have an "historic" section, there's no reason I can see why each shouldn't.JackME 21:57, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not listing historical info for municipalities that already appear in the list (or really going into any great historical detail for *any* muncipality, current or former), I'm just mentioning municipalities that no longer exist, with a disincorporation date so the reader can see how long ago they ceased to exist. If a town no longer exists and thus does not appear on the list of current municipalities, I want to alert the reader to the fact that such a town once existed, and provide a link to its wikipedia page. If the list sticks strictly to current municipalities, how is the reader supposed to know that were once additional towns, whose articles they should be seeking out if they want complete historical coverage of the municpalities in a given county? Again, to go back to my earlier comments, if you strongly believe that this should not be presented on a page called List of New England towns, then let's just call the page that has it something else. MCT 17:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Along the same lines, I've had some vague plans to create a new article that would expand the information that is currently in the "Statistics and Superlatives" section of the main New England town article, but have no idea what to call it. (I don't think it would be appropriate to add much to that section of the main article, beyond what is already there.)MCT 23:03, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

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I'd advise caution in writing such an extensive article, and basing some of your data on the 1990 census.

The county-by-county municipality counts that I have started out as a list developed from the 1990 Census, by counting how many municpalities of each type there were in each county. The reason I used the 1990 Census to develop it is because I originally developed this list so long ago that the 1990 Census was the most recent Census available (that's how long I've been playing around with this topic). I had updated the list since then whenever I found out about a change, but had apparently missed Baring and Wallagrass, probably in part because the classifications shown in the 1990 Census look like they were wrong in the first place (i.e., there was no "change", the information was just wrong at its starting point), because the two errors cancelled each other out (so there was no obvious sign of an error in the overall totals) and, given that there usually aren't massive changes in municipality counts in any of the New England states, it was easier to update the counts I had than to start all over again. If you find any other information in either article that purports to be current but that you believe to be based on 1990 data, feel free to flag and/or correct it.

Are you writing a history article? Or a contemporary encyclopedic entry?

I'm interested in both the contemporary and the historical. At least with regard to the New England town article itself, it's a contemporary encyclopedic entry that also discusses a bit of the history (again, hold that thought from the first paragraph).

And I'd add that same caution to incorporating so much out-of-date historical status. I think it's overreaching the scope of one article. A person wants to look at a List of New England Towns to find or see some contemporary current places. The historical, and the trivial, while very interesting belongs in a separate article or clearly defined sub-section of the main article, and not in the Listing of New England towns. Maybe a separate listing of historical towns and town changes. It's too much to put everything into one article and one listing.

It sounds the root of the problem is that I had intended this article to be a companion to the New England town article, and you feel that an article titled "List of New England towns" shouldn't be that. Is the answer simply to split this into two different but overlapping articles, one called "List of New England towns" that is nothing but a contemporary list of New England towns (no cities, no plantations, no boroughs, no incorporated villages, no mention of former towns beyond perhaps notes on a few that have disincorporated recently), intended for someone who just wants a list of towns; and 2) one called something else (maybe "List of New England municipalities" or something like that) that has all of the above features and serves as the "companion page" to New England town that I had intended (although I think both of these hypothetical articles should be linked from New England town, with an explanation of what each is). We could copy all the text on the existing page, move it to the new name, and make that the "companion" page; and edit what is currently under the "List of New England towns" name to make it into the "just a list" page.

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Two points: first, THIS article (List of New England Towns) is already quite lengthy, in fact I think I got a system warning about its current length when editing it suggesting the article might need splitting. Soooo......adding comments about historical changes, interesting trivia, and so forth will only further lengthen this article. Being a list of ALL New England municipalities is already a lot of information. Second point, yes, I feel that a listing of contemporary towns (and/or other types of municipalities) is wanted and useful, and should exist independently in a clean simple straight-forward way, without historical comments or other fascinating trivia. (I DO find that interesting, and enjoy learning that sort of information but I think it needs to be kept separate.) JackME 05:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

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As to the Plantations and their names. I am in process of changing them all to their actual name of XXX Plantation. It is not a fair comparison to say that is equivalent to renaming pages to The City of Boston, or The Town of New Gloucester. In fact (though I can't cite you a source for this off hand), Boston's name is likely simply Boston, though certainly in elaborate formal declarations, and rituals it is likely to be presented with the flourish of The City of.... An example, Oklahoma City is the name of that municipality. It is not the City of Oklahoma. Kansas City, Bordentown, etc. In the case of plantations, the word plantation IS part of the name as well as a descriptive of the type. I have no problem (though I think it unnecessary) to a presentation such as Coplin Plantation (plantation) , just as Boston (city), if maintaining that type delineation suits you better. But leaving off the word Plantation in the majority of instances, effectively renames the municipality. There is no Nashville in Maine, there is a Nashville Plantation, etc.

Do people refer to plantations as "X Plantation" in everyday speech, use "X Plantation, ME" in mailing addresses, etc?

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Yes, most definitely the citizens of Maine living in Plantaions and in neighboring municipalities do refer to "X Plantation", which was my point in renaming the pages and links. That's what I meant about Nashville Plantation (as an example); there is NO Nashville, but there is a Nashville Plantation in common reference. With very few exceptions most of the 34 plantations are known and spoken of as "X Plantation". Also, most, again with few exceptions require at least the abbreviation "Plt." in the mailing address. JackME 05:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I did a little poking around on Maine's state web site and came across the following page: http://www.maine.gov/local/search.php?show_towns=true. A few observations on this:

• The page lists all plantations as "X Plt.", even though it does not show titles for cities and towns (As an aside, I thought it was interesting that the URL of the page contains the phrase "show_towns=true", but it lists not only towns, but cities and plantations as well, and doesn't even do anything to distinguish the cities from the towns).

• If you click on the names of each plantation and go to its page, most of the pages start off with something to the effect of "X is a plantation", not "X Plantation is...". I counted six that were the latter; all of the others were the former. (Two of the six in the form "X Plantation" are plantations which share their name with a town, for which reason it may have been desirable to refer to them that way regardless of whether it is "correct"; indeed, the article for Rangeley Plantation refers to the neighboring town of the same name as the "Town of Rangeley". People in the Baltimore area sometimes refer to the city of Baltimore as "Baltimore City" and I've heard the towns and cities in Vermont with common names refered to as "Barre City", "Rutland Town", but I wouldn't say that "Baltimore City", "Barre City" and "Rutland Town" are their names, or that it would be "wrong" to show them as "Baltimore", "Barre" and "Rutland" on a list if it was made clear which entity you meant.)

• On the individual pages, if the name of the plantations was mentioned again, in many cases it is stated as just "X", not "X Plantation". There are examples of the latter, however. A lot of the articles don't mention the name of the plantation again, though, so there may not be enough of a samlpe to draw a clear conclusion from this.

• In the mailing addresses, "X Plt." outweighs "X" by a wide margin. There are several of examples of "X", however; and once again, many plantations don't use their name in their mailing address at all, which limits the usefulness of this method in reaching any definitive conclusions.

I have no doubt that the form "X Plantation" exists, and will take your word that for at least some plantations this is the standard way for locals to refer to them. Based on the above, though, I'm still a bit skeptical that this rule is as universal as you've suggested, or that it is simply "wrong" to refer to a plantation in the form "X" (plantation) in the context of a list of this type. The method by which the above pages -- on the State of Maine's web site -- refer to all but a handful of the plantations ("X is a plantation") amounts to pretty much the same thing.MCT 23:03, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Using html coding (...search.php?show_towns=true) as indicative of anything makes for a pretty weak argument for that thing, but as an aside, the folks who wrote the code evidently felt that with 432 to 22 to 34 to 3, using town as the behind the scenes generic piece of code for any municipality would make sense.

I guess they figured that cities and towns are really just variations on and adjuncts of the town concept, so....never mind. MCT 17:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The actual title of the page is: COUNTY, CITY & TOWN SEARCH and then there is the 3 field search box whereby one can pull up only one county and get with it a listing of all municipalities within that county, or go below that to the section called: Cities & Towns and find there the link called: City & Town Index, which takes one to the whole listing of all municipalities (including plantations) listed alphabetically.

That search page on the Maine site gives a title to each municipality's page like so:

Town of Abbot
Abbot is a town in Piscataquis County.......

Town of Machias
Machias is a town in Washington County....

City of Augusta
Augusta, a city in Kennebec County on the Kennebec River.....

City of Waterville
Waterville is a city in Kennebec County....

Plantation of Brighton Plt
Brighton Plantation is a plantation in Somerset County.....

Plantation of Cary Plt
Cary Plantation is a plantation in Aroostook County.....

Plantation of Matinicus Isle Plt
Matinicus is an island plantation in the Gulf of Maine and in Knox County....

Plantation of Monhegan Island Plt
Monhegan is an island plantation in Lincoln County....

Why wouldn't the title for the plantation pages instead be listed like this:

Plantation of Cary; Plantation of Matinicus Isle; etc. 

as they are for the Town of Machias; City of Augusta;, etc. if the name of the municipality didn't include the word plantation? Granted it's a bit stupid and certainly redundant the way it is, but it points out that the full name of the municipality includes the word plantation and the first part is the descriptor of type (City of, Town of, Plantation of). I am a Maine native still living here in Maine, and what I reported is based on real life experience. Just as sometimes you are called by your complete full name, sometimes by just your first name, or just your last name, or only your first and last name, or by a nickname, certainly there are times when folks here in Maine shortcut their references, but in general usage the full name of the plantation is commonly used with some exceptions, such as Monhegan, Matinicus, etc.

I believe the page List of plantations in Maine is accurately showing the six plantations, of Maine's thirty-four, usually known and referred to, without using the word plantation.

If "Plantation" is part of the official name, shouldn't they all be "X Plantation", then? If I can convince enough people in Portland to start calling it "Portland City", does that then become Portland's name, even though Lewiston would still be "Lewiston"? I'm still skeptical of the idea, that, for a list of this type, "it's wrong to say 'X (plantation)'"; but going beyond that, I'm also skeptical of the idea that, again, for a list of this type, "it's wrong to say 'X (plantation)', except for certain plantations where it isn't". (Just to be clear, as stated previously, I have no doubt that the form "X Plantation" exists, I and am not questioning that for at least some plantations this is the standard way locals refer to them. What I am addressing is what and is not approriate for this list.) MCT 17:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I based this on my own knowledge and experience, combined with references where I could find them, and on official Post Office requirements, ie, the zip code, and a cross check to finding that using only the first part of the name, versus the whole name (plantation).

Prior to my last posting here, I had thought about looking up all of the plantations on USPS' web site to see how they had them, but I didn't because I figured that you would question the reliability of what USPS shows (and if you had, you would not have been totally off base, as USPS' designations do not always reflect local usage, although they are usually pretty close). For the record, using your list of plantations, I found that 23 are listed in the form "X Plt", 6 are just "X", 4 do not appear to be recognized as postal place names at all, and 1 (Rangeley) appears to share a post office with a neighboring town of the same name, with the postal address listed only in the form "X". While Pleasant Ridge Plantation is listed as "Pleasant Ridge Plt", for some reason looking under "Pleasant Ridge" will also give you a valid result, even though it is not shown as an acceptable alternate under "Pleasant Ridge Plt" (this is not true of the 22 other communities listed in the form of "X Plt"). Conversely, while Grand Lake Stream Plantation is listed as "Grand Lake Stream", for some reason looking under "Grand Lake Stream Plt" will also give you a valid result, even though it is not shown as an acceptable alternate under "Grand Lake Stream" (this is not true of the 5 other plantations listed in the form of "X"). MCT 17:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The post office deems it unacceptable and will not deliver mail to an address which does not include at least PLT in the name, with those six noted exceptions.JackME 21:57, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

They won't deliver mail, or they just don't officially recognize it as an acceptable place name? If you know for a fact that the former is true, that's a bit harsh. In most places, if you have the correct address and Zip Code, and the post office is able to recognize the place name as referring to a community served by that Zip Code (my guess is they probably don't even look at the place name unless the address/Zip Code don't line up), your mail will get delivered. "Queens, NY" is a notable example. MCT 17:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

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As we know, mistakes can be made by anyone, feel free to point out any you find which I've made. I do try to avoid them by a check and re-check of any facts that I add or edit but still things slip through.

Regarding Lakeville and Lake View Plantation, the first is a town the second a plantation. I'm not aware of any status changes, and likely you've hit on it that whomever changed it was confusing the two (may have been myself but I don't recall!)

I don't think it was you. Actually, I just checked and found it in the edit hisory, and it wasn't you, unless you were the anonymous user who edited the page on November 2, 2006. MCT 00:01, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

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Nope, am always logged in as JackMe. JackME 05:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

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Well that's if for me tonight. More tomorrow. JackME 05:32, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Sagadahoc County, ME/Checking In

1) I just changed the language at the end of the Sagadahoc County section back to way it originally read before the changes made on May 5, 2007. I wanted to provide some explanation of why I did this:

The notes on this page addressing unorganized territory and defunct municipalities typically only include very brief and basic information about such entities (essentially noting their existence and possibly providing a date of disincorporation if applicable), with a link to the Wikipedia page for the entity in question, if there is one. The text that was added on May 5 deviated from the usual format and was almost a short narrative about Perkins Township. I don't think we need to include that level of information here. Just as this type of information isn't included for currently active towns (but a link to the town's page is provided for those who want more information), the same should apply to former municipalities mentioned in the notes. (Note: If you look at the archives on this talk page, whether or not unorganized or former municipalities should even be mentioned here at all has been called into question). Anyone who wants to know more about Perkins Township can find it at the link; in fact, the text that was posted on this page parallelled the text in the introduction to the main Perkins Township article.

In addition, the text that was posted here included some information whose veracity is, in my opinion, unclear. The text stated that Perkins had been abandoned in the 1940s. If you check the Census figures on the "Historical U.S. Census Totals" page for Sagadahoc County, they do not support this contention. The first census in which Perkins reported absolutely no population at all was actually 2000; its 1940 population was 5, and its 1950 population was 9. This doesn't prove that the stament about Perkins being abandoned in the 1940s is wrong (e.g., one can imagine a scenario in which there was some event that took place in the '40s that greatly reduced the human presence in Perkins and thus left it more-or-less "abandoned" compared to what had been the case previously), but it certainly calls it into question. Given that I don't think we need to get into that level of detail in the first place, I'd prefer to take this factoid off of this page.

2) There hasn't been much discussion here for a while -- does JackME or anyone else have any thoughts concerning the prior discussion to split or rename this page? MCT 17:16, 11 May 2007 (UTC)