Children absent in plantation Kingsbury unique in Maine, census says

KINGSBURY PLANTATION – There’s not much of a market for rap music or baggy jeans in this tiny community at the edge of northern Maine’s forest.

New census figures show Kingsbury, which is 12 miles east of Bingham in Piscataquis County, is the only settled Maine municipality with no children.

But without electrical or telephone service, Kingsbury Plantation might not be the ideal place for kids anyway.

Lois Worcester, who serves as clerk, tax collector, treasurer, welfare director, registrar of voters and health officer among other posts in Kingsbury, said the U.S. Census Bureau is a little off on its figures for 2000.

While the census shows nine full-time residents of Kingsbury, Worcester contends the true number is 13.

“The last school-aged children lived here in the early 1990s,” Worcester said.

There also may be no children inhabiting Glenwood Plantation, south of Houlton. But census workers couldn’t find anybody to ask when they visited the Aroostook County plantation for the 2000 census.

Glenwood’s population is listed as zero, but people in the area claim to have seen a person or two there recently.

Plantations stem from Colonial times and were designed as a form of government for growing communities in wild lands that were not yet large enough to incorporate as towns.

Plantations rely on town meetings to set annual budgets and decide other local issues. Kingsbury’s town meetings are held in Worcester’s kitchen.

Jenis Robinson, first assessor and school bus driver in Pleasant Ridge Plantation, west of Bingham in Somerset County, said plantations are the place for those with a desire for real rural living.

“There’s nothing much to worry about except black flies,” Robinson said. Pleasant Ridge’s population slipped from 91 to 83 between 1990 and 2000, but the number of children was halved to a mere dozen.