New Hampshire

NEW HAMPSHIRE

NEW HAMPSHIRE is roughly the shape of a fist, with its index finger pointed north. The tip of the finger forms a rough border with Quebec, Canada. Its eastern border is along the western border of Maine. What would be the bottom knuckle of the finger is New Hampshire's seacoast, only eighteen miles long, where the city of Portsmouth is found. The southern border of the state is along the northern border of Massachusetts. New Hampshire's western border is along the eastern border of Vermont. The state is 180 miles north-to-south and 93 miles at its widest, east-to-west, with an area of 9,283 square miles.

The Coastal Lowlands of the southeast were the first part of New Hampshire to be settled, partly because the fishing off the coast was extraordinarily good, attracting fishermen to settle there, and partly because there was good farmland to be found along the rivers that flowed into the sea. Even though farmers were the first to settle the rest of the state, most of New Hampshire's land is rocky and difficult to farm, The Eastern New England Upland is to the west of the Coastal Lowlands, with the north-to-south dividing line between the areas being the Merrimack River Valley, where the capital city Concord is found. Beginning in the middle of New Hampshire and extending northward are mountains, beginning with the White Mountains. The rough terrain of the north is

sparsely populated, mostly by farmers, who work in valleys and along the Androscoggin River.

There are over 40,000 miles of rivers and 1,300 lakes in New Hampshire, making it one of the wettest states in the Union, and earning the state the sobriquet "Mother of Rivers." Its border with Vermont is traced by the Connecticut River; both sides of the river belong to New Hampshire, which therefore bears most of the responsibility for building bridges over it. Much of the early colonial history of the state focuses on the Piscataqua River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean and offered a trading route into the dense woods of ancient New Hampshire. The Merrimack River begins in the White Mountains and flows south through New Hampshire and into Massachusetts. In the southeastern foothills of the White Mountains is the Lakes Region, which includes New Hampshire's largest lake, Lake Winnipesaukee, which covers seventy-two square miles and contains 274 islands.

An imposing sight in the White Mountains is Mount Washington, which at 6,288 feet is the tallest point in New Hampshire. New Hampshire's average temperature in July is 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The winters in New Hampshire can be bitter, with the average temperature in January being 19 degrees.

Prehistory

At about 9000 b.c., a people known as Paleo-Indians occupied New Hampshire. They are hard to study in New Hampshire because they apparently lived by the sea, and the ocean level in their time was 150 feet lower than it is now, meaning many of their villages, if they had any, are now likely underwater. Around 7000 b.c. people known as Archaic Indians began to replace the Paleo-Indians. By then, New Hampshire had become very heavily forested with hundreds of different species of trees. The Archaic Indians consisted of many different cultural groups. In New Hampshire, they were nomadic, probably migrating from place to place according to the seasons, avoiding New Hampshire's very cold winters.

Around 2000 b.c., Native Americans began settling New Hampshire with small villages. From 2000 b.c. to a.d. 1000, they adopted the bow and arrow for hunting, developed sophisticated fishing techniques, and introduced agriculture. Near the end of the period, maize was introduced from the west. It is possible but unlikely that Vikings visited New Hampshire around a.d. 1004, even though there are tourist attractions in the state that claim otherwise. Before the coming of Europeans in the 1600s, the Native Americans of the New Hampshire area were divided into two cultural groups: to the north were the Abenakis, and to the south were the Pennacooks. These subdivided into seven important subgroups: the Ossipees in the north, near the Androscoggin River; the Coosucs in the west near the Connecticut River; the Winnipesaukees in the White Mountains south of the Coosucs; the Nashuas in the south, living also in what is now northern Massachusetts; the Pennacooks, who lived in the southeast and along the Merrimack River; and the Piscataquas, who lived in the southeast in the region where the city of Dover was established.

Colonial Era

Martin Pring, twenty-three years old from Bristol, England, was the first recorded European to lead an expedition to present-day New Hampshire. In 1603, his ship anchored in a bay, and he traced inland some of the Piscataqua River. In 1614, John Smith passed by along the coast during a mapping expedition and recorded the area as very heavily wooded with great mountains to the west, and he reported very favorably on what he saw. At the time, there were about 5,000 Native Americans in New Hampshire. From then on, their population declined.

In 1622, the king granted Captain John Mason of England ownership of much of the land in present-day New Hampshire. It was he, in honor of his homeland Hampshire, who gave the name "New Hampshire" to his large tracts of land. In 1622, he and Sir Ferdinando Gorges founded the Company of Laconia, which was intended to support colonization and development of Mason's holdings.

Mason and Gorges planned missions to the new lands carefully, using good ships, well provisioned with what people would need to survive in New Hampshire's climate. This planning helped make the New Hampshire colonies among the most successful in the 1600s. On 16 April 1623, David Thomson led one such mission, settling two sites near the sea. These early sites attracted fishermen because of the bountiful fishing waters in the nearby ocean, and they became very prosperous by selling salted cod to Europeans. They got along well with the local Native Americans, mostly Piscataquas and Penna-cooks, who liked trading with the new settlers and who hoped the settlers would be good allies against what seemed like imminent invasions from warlike tribes to the west and south. The Native Americans were soon struck down by the measles and other imported diseases.

In the 1630s, John Wheelwright and his followers fled the Massachusetts colony because of religious persecution by the Congregationalist Church. He founded Exeter, which in 1641 had about 1,000 people living in or near the town. His hopes for freedom of religion were not immediately realized. In 1641, the towns of New Hampshire asked for protection from Massachusetts. Among the results was the introduction of slavery in 1645. Another result was religious persecution: In the 1660s, men were hanged and women stripped bareback and whipped for being Quakers. Religious laws were burdensome and sometimes downright irrational, such as the laws that forbade rest but forbade working on Sunday.

From 1684 to 1688, Kings Charles II and James II tried to force all the New England colonies into one large province, something the colonists resented. In 1679, monarchs William and Mary declared New Hampshire a royal province. By then, Portsmouth was becoming an important site for building ships, and the tall pines of New Hampshire were being shipped to England for use on English warships.

New Hampshire was fortunate in its royal governors. In December 1717, the king appointed John Wentworth the elder to be "lieutenant governor" in charge of New Hampshire, but serving under the governor of Massachusetts. The previous lieutenant governor, George Vaughn, had been ignoring orders from Massachusetts governor Samuel Shute. Wentworth proved to be a good diplomat, easing tensions while slowly separating the administration of New Hampshire from that of Massachusetts. In 1717, a large group of Scots Irish from northern Ireland came to New Hampshire. A careful, intelligent planner, Went-worth had hoped to establish a series of settlements in the interior of his colony, and the Scots Irish proved a welcome beginning of new settlers; in 1722, they dubbed their community Londonderry.

In 1740, the king of England settled disputes over New Hampshire's borders, awarding it twenty-eight town-ships claimed by Massachusetts and establishing the colony's western border to the west of the Connecticut River. John Wentworth had died in 1730, but in 1741, his son Benning Wentworth was made governor. He was one of the most contradictory and fascinating people in New Hampshire's history. He was self-indulgent, always cut himself in on any moneymaking proposal, lived lavishly in a house that perpetually expanded, and threw many parties for playing games and eating feasts. At the same time, he was a brilliant planner. He created a policy for not only establishing new townships but also for making sure they were all equal politically and in size. He oversaw the creation of sixty-seven new towns. In 1767, he was driven out of office because as a royal governor, he had supported the much loathed stamp tax.

His nephew, John Wentworth, known as "Long John," then became the governor. He loved New Hampshire. All his life, he referred to it as home. Among the wise choices he made was the establishment of three well-trained and supplied regiments of New Hampshire militia, a prudent precaution against the possibility of Native American raids from out of state. When in 1774 the colony's assembly met to consider independence, Wentworth tried to disband it—a right he had as royal governor. The assembly moved to a tavern and held its meeting anyway. Wentworth soon had to flee to Boston. On 17 June 1775, at the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually Breed's Hill), the regiments Wentworth had made sure were ready for war put themselves to use, for they formed the majority of Americans who defended the hill against British regulars, helping prove that Americans could stand up to England's best. Of the 911 New Hampshire volunteers, 107 were killed or wounded.

Live Free or Die

In 1776, the population of New Hampshire was 82,000 and increasing. Its growing industrialization was already causing problems: Its numerous sawmills had so polluted its rivers that the native salmon had gone extinct. The number of slaves was peaking at 626, soon to decline. On 5 January 1776, New Hampshire recorded two American firsts when the Fifth Provincial Congress of New Hampshire met. It was the first state to declare independence from England; it was also the first state to write its own constitution.

Portsmouth became a major naval manufacturer with the building of three warships, including the Ranger, which John Paul Jones commanded. The seaport also outfitted hundreds of privateers, privately owned merchant ships remade into warships with permission to raid, capture, or sink British ships. The privateers were successful enough to make many investors rich. Although New Hampshire was not the site of a single major battle, it was the site of bloody fighting. Native Americans from Canada were encouraged to raid New Hampshire settlements; they would kill anyone, although they sometimes took captives to be sold into slavery. Many of the soldiers of New Hampshire were skilled woodsmen and wise in the ways of guerrilla warfare, and they often drove off the invaders. In 1777, the British planned to drive through Vermont to the sea to divide the northern colonies in two. On 16 August 1777, American forces commanded by General John Stark fought the British force at the border of New York and Vermont, near Bennington, where the Americans won, taking hundreds of British soldiers prisoner. Thirty-two years later, veterans of the battle met, but John Stark was too sick to attend; instead, he sent them a message: "Live Free or Die."

The 1775 constitution was awkward and sometimes unclear. It took until 1 July 1784, after the end of the Revolutionary War, for a more permanent constitution to be adopted. As of 2002, it was still in effect. It was prefaced by thirty-eight articles that formed New Hampshire's bill of rights. When the Articles of Confederation proved to be inadequate for America's needs, in 1787, an American constitutional convention was held, with New Hampshire sending Nicholas Gilman and John Langdon as its representatives. In Concord, in June 1888, a convention on the proposed Constitution of the United States was held. The people of New Hampshire were not about to be rushed into anything and had taken their time considering the proposal. On 21 June 1788, voting fifty-seven to forty-seven, the delegates made New Hampshire the ninth state to ratify the Constitution; the agreement had been that if nine states ratified the Constitution, then it would officially be America's governing document.

Age of the Spindle

In 1800, the population of New Hampshire was 183,858. There were eight slaves in the state then. In 1819, New Hampshire outlawed slavery and abolished debtors' prison. In 1830, the legislature declared that any adult male could vote. There were 800 to 900 African Americans in the state at the time. The Democrats gained almost absolute control over New Hampshire politics in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century, a grip they would maintain until tripping over the issue of slavery.

In the early 1800s, canals had been built around the Amoskeag waterfalls on the Merrimack River, allowing barges to travel between Concord, and Boston. Beside those falls, four local farmers built a mill. It had eighty-five spindles for the spinning of cloth. In 1822, financier Samuel Slater was brought in to help with expansion. By 1835, there were nineteen investors, and the mill was called the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. The investors who had made textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, the models of enlightened industrial development also invested in the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, buying land and laying out a model city, Manchester. From 1838 to 1846, the city grew from 500 to 10,000 in population. Amoskeag Manufacturing Company would become one of the world's industrial giants, making miles of cloth each day.

Meanwhile, prominent New Hampshire politician John Parker Hale had undergone a significant transformation. He was a stalwart Democrat; in 1835, when meeting with an abolitionist minister, he had taken the party line that slaves were merely beasts shaped like humans. While representing New Hampshire in the United States House of Representatives, he had held to his party's position. Yet, through contemplation, he changed his mind. In January 1845, he proposed legislation limiting slavery in the proposed new state of Texas. For this, the Democrats ousted him from their party. He managed to be elected to the Senate as an independent, and in 1853, he joined with dissident Democrats and some Whigs to help form the Republican Party, which called for the ending of slavery. This marked a great shift in New Hampshire politics, as over the next decade New Hampshirites joined the Republican Party, giving it a hold on local politics that it still had not lost by the 2000s.

Although New Hampshire contributed troops to the Civil War (1861–1865), major battles were not fought there. The state contributed much of the cloth used for Union uniforms and some of the munitions. The federal shipyard in Portsmouth contributed warships. In 1853, New Hampshire had passed laws restricting child labor, and throughout the nineteenth century the state passed laws further restricting child labor, and limiting hours and days industrial laborers could be required to work. In 1849, Amoskeag Manufacturing Company began manufacturing locomotives, and in 1869, the first railroad that could climb steep grades was built on Washington Mountain. It was a "cog railroad," meaning one that had a center rail that was gripped by a cogwheel attached under the center of a locomotive. In 1859, Amoskeag Manufacturing Company began producing fire engines. In 1870, farming was declining in the state, and in response the legislature created a Board of Agriculture to help farmers.

By 1895, the Boston and Maine Railroad, called the "Great Corporation," dominated the economic life of the state and was well known to use gifts to purchase votes in its favor from the legislature. In 1911, Robert Bass became governor and, helped by reform-minded members, he managed to push through the legislature laws extensively restricting child labor, a workers' compensation law, a "pure food" law, and a factory safety and inspection law. He and the legislature also created a commission to regulate public utilities and the railroads, eliminating such favors as free passes for the railroad, ending the Great Corporation's control over state politics.

In the 1920s, New Hampshire began a long shift in its economy. On 13 February 1922, the United Textile Workers struck against the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company over wages and working hours. Amoskeag already paid some of the highest wages in the textile industry and wanted to lower pay to its workers so that its products could compete with those manufactured in southern states where wages were much lower than those paid in New Hampshire. After a very unhappy nine months, the United Textile Workers accepted the terms of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, but the end of Amoskeag was in sight. By World War II (1939–1945), only a few manufacturers of specialty fabrics remained in the state.

During the middle of the twentieth century, New Hampshire's population declined. Once over 1,000,000 people, the population was 606,921 in 1960. The loss of manufacturing companies accounted for much of the exodus, but farms were failing, too. By the mid-1930s, many farms were abandoned, left to decay and yield to grasses, bushes, and trees. The land was not worth enough to sell, and there were too few buyers, anyway. World War II improved the economy; the shipyards at Portsmouth were very busy building submarines. During the 1920s and 1930s, one aspect of the economy picked up markedly: tourism.

Beautiful Land

New Hampshire is a beautiful state. In the 1920s, people from out of state would rent or purchase bungalows near beaches to spend a weekend or a whole summer relaxing. Some farmers rented rooms in their homes to vacationers, a practice that was still continuing at the turn of the twenty-first century. Writers and artists came to the state to enjoy quiet in small towns while pursuing their callings. One such writer, the American author Winston Churchill, even ran for governor in 1912.

After World War II, tourism became ever more important to the state, although it did not entirely stop the diminishing of New Hampshire's population. One effort to keep New Hampshire on people's minds was the beginning of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary in 1952. The primary brought politicians and money to the state. During the 1960s, skiers discovered the slopes of the White Mountains, some of which can support skiing into July. Traditional New Hampshire manufacturing businesses continued to decline in the 1960s, but a new group of employers discovered the state. The state's lack of income tax, its beautiful countryside, and its low crime rate were attractive to professionals. Finance and life insurance companies set up shop in the Granite State (a reference to its rocky terrain). High-technology companies also settled in New Hampshire in the hope that the skilled workers the industry needed would be attracted to a state with wonderful natural beauty. The high-technology companies established themselves in what became known as the "Golden Triangle" formed by Nashua, Manchester, and Portsmouth. By 1970, the state's population had grown to 737,681.

In 1976, the Seabrook nuclear power plant was built in New Hampshire amid protests from people who thought the plant would be dangerous. The plant went into operation in 1990. From 1989 to 1992, New Hampshire experienced a very tough recession, with 50,000 jobs leaving the state, and in 1990, Pease Air Force Base closed. The state's recovery was slow and focused on tourism, fishing, shipbuilding, and high-technology industries. In 1990, the state population was 1,113,915, and grew to almost 1,200,000 by 2000, so the state seemed to be recovering. In 1996, New Hampshire elected its first woman governor, Jeanne Shaheen. By 2000, only 7.7 percent of the people in New Hampshire lived below the federal poverty level, and the state had the third lowest crime rate among America's states.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belknap, Jeremy. The History of New Hampshire. Boston: Belknap and Young, 1792.

Fradin, Dennis B. The New Hampshire Colony. Chicago: Children's Press (Regensteiner), 1988.

Morison, Elizabeth Forbes, and Elting E. Morison. New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Robinson, J. Dennis. "Seacoast NH History." http://www.SeacoastNH.com.

Squires, J. Duane. The Granite State of the United States: A History of New Hampshire from 1623 to the Present. New York: American Historical Company, 1956.

Stein, R. Conrad. New Hampshire. New York: Children's Press, 2000.

Kirk H. Beetz

See also New England .