In the U.S. state of Maine, a plantation is a type of minor civil division falling between unincorporated area and a town.
Massachusetts used the term "plantation" in colonial times for a community in a pre-town stage of development.
Writing in 1949, author Richard Walden Hale in The Story of Bar Harbor described the formation of a plantation as follows: First came the survey, without which no settlement was legal.
Land so surveyed was divided into 'townships,' which in New England means areas planned for development into full-fledged towns.
... To this day one can go thirty miles northeast of Bar Harbor and find, still unsettled, Township Number Seven, just back of Gouldsboro and Sullivan, and then go twenty miles southeast--in each case as the crow flies--and find Swan's Island Plantation, where to this day there is not enough population for the full complement of town officials.