As one of land use types, settlements, whose growth in new cultivated area can reflect the processes of migration, land cultivation and landscape change driven by human activities, and can be a useful source for studying the relationship between human and environment in the past. Based on the toponymy records, the settlement database of Jilin Province has been established, and temporal and spatial changes of settlements in Jilin Province over the past 300 years have been reconstructed in the paper. The results show that the increase of number of settlements occurred in the past 300 years can be recognized into four phases which were slow growth (1644-1735), accelerated growth (1736-1820), high-speed-growth (1821-1949) and slowdown-growth (1950-1990). The expansion of settlements had a process from central plains and tablelands to the western plains and eastern mountains, and the counties which had largest settlement density in every period had located in the central plains and tablelands. Growth of the settlements may be influenced by natural environmental condition, mitigation, garrison, land policy and some other political behaviors made by the government.