When was portsmouth nh settled

Logging railroads were built into once-inaccessible forests. Other forests sent their logs to mills in Groveton, Berlin, and Massachusetts via log drives down the Connecticut and Androscoggin Rivers. Meanwhile, urban areas around Boston and Portland needed daily shipments of perishable foods. By , New Hampshire's railroad network was largely complete, and farmers near the various rail depots found a ready market for dairy and poultry products, as well as fresh fruit.

Happily for New Hampshire, the same railroads that brought produce to Boston and Portland also brought tourists from those urban centers. New Hampshire's natural splendors attracted artists, poets and writers, scientists, and a host of curious sightseers throughout the s.

By the last quarter of the century, investors were building grand hotels along coastal areas and in the majestic White Mountains. Tourists came from all over the United States and Europe. While some joined in the lavish social life of the hotels, others chose to "rough it" in rustic fishing camps or to build their own summer home, a term which takes in everything from humble cottages to large and elegant estates.

In time, "summer people" began buying up New Hampshire's old hill farms for summer homes. At the beginning of this century, New Hampshire was a leading producer of textiles, machinery, wood products, and paper.

Its manufacturing towns and cities were populated not only by native-born Americans and immigrants from Canada, but also by workers from virtually every European country, giving New Hampshire's population a percentage of foreign-born persons that was above the national average. Meanwhile, as New Hampshire hill farms struggled, tourism was providing some relief for rural areas.

By the end of the First World War, however, New Hampshire's old textile mills were proving to be as uncompetitive as the old hill farms.

Newer cotton mills in the South spelled decline and eventual doom for New Hampshire's mills. Throughout the s and s, New Hampshire's mill towns were as economically depressed as its farm towns, and the growth of the state's population slowed markedly. Manufacturing centers responded by attracting new industries, in particular the manufacture of shoes and electronics, while rural towns took advantage of the growing popularity of the automobile to attract larger numbers of tourists and summer home buyers.

The growing national interest in antiques and handcrafts meant that Americans increasingly wanted to buy a piece of the Granite State and take it home to Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.

Starting in the s, other visitors came to New Hampshire slopes each winter in a demonstration of America's fascination with Alpine skiing. In spite of a brief economic resurgence during the Second World War, the economic trends of the period between the wars continued throughout the late s and the s.

Efforts were made at all levels to encourage growth and attract new businesses to the state. By the s, these efforts had begun to pay off. The urban sprawl of Boston spilled over into southern New Hampshire, aided by the new interstate highway system, encouraged by a favorable tax structure and good living conditions. Here every man may be a master of his own labor and land in a short time.

The sea there is the strangest pond I ever saw. What sport doth yield a more pleasant content and less hurt or charge than angling with a hook, and crossing the sweet air from isle to isle over the silent streams of a calm sea? Thus the settlement of New Hampshire did not happen because those who came here were persecuted out of England.

The occasion, which is one of the great events in the annals of the English people, was one planned with much care and earnestness by the English crown and the English parliament.

Here James the first began a colonization project which not only provided ships and provisions, but free land bestowed with but one important condition, that it remain always subject to English sovereignty. So it remained until the "War of the Revolution. Captain Mason died in , just before his proposed trip to the new country which he never saw.

He had invested more than twenty-two thousand pounds in clearing the land, building houses, and preparing for its defense, - a considerable fortune for those days. By then Dover and Portsmouth had expanded into Hampton and Exeter, and its income from fishing was increased by that from trade in furs and timber. Taking the idea from the English government, a community of "towns" was erected, and this became a "royal province" in with John Cutt as president, with a population intended to be as nearly like England as it could be.

The "royal province" continued until when it came under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts with Joseph Dudley as Governor. Thus it continued until Under King George II New Hampshire returned to its provincial status with a governor of its own, Benning Wentworth, who was its chief magistrate from to With little aid from England, then at war with its old-time enemy, France, the colonists undertook the sieges of Louisbourg, and helped to reduce Crown Point, and in the conquest of Canada.

By the time of the signing of the Peace of Paris in , and the end of the Indian fighting under the Rogers Rangers, the entire north country of New Hampshire was ready to be explored, surveyed, and populated. Governor Wentworth who, as if in anticipation of this opportunity, seems to have been well prepared for it, had arranged the purchase for the sum of fifteen hundred pounds of the unauthenticated claims of Robert Mason, heir of Captain John Mason.

This was done through a group of twelve influential citizens who called themselves the "Masonian Proprietors. Governor Wentworth, with all or most of the Masonian Proprietors as his councilors, then proceeded to grant towns to prospective settlers as equally as possible.

In addition to the thirty-eight towns already granted, more than a hundred others followed after the year These towns contained lots available to more than thirty thousand families, many from the older towns in southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but many from other neighboring states.

Some of these towns were located in Vermont, to be released later by a court order, which made the western shore of the Connecticut River the state boundary line.

While the new towns were occasionally given the names of the leading grantees, not a few of them bore the historic names of English royalty, frequently those of friends and relatives of Governor Wentworth and his own royal family, the Rockinghams, in England. Many of the beneficiaries were soldiers who had fought in the Indian wars, while a few were of Dutch origin, such as might settle from New York in New Hampshire.

The terms of the grants were simple. The Proprietors could convey only the soil, while the political rights and powers of government came from the province. Provision was made that no land should be subject to taxation or assessment until improved by those holding the titles.

Rights were reserved for land for roads, churches and schools, to be built within a definite period of time, for the use of ministers and in many cases for mill-rights.

There was no " Portsmouth ," by that name, at least, until That's when the local citizens decided to toss out the original name of Strawberry Bank and re-brand. But first they had to get permission from the Court of Massachusetts that was, at that time, running the show in New Hampshire.

Here is the exact request, although the spelling has been modernized:. Was it Rye or Portsmouth? But let's back up. The original "owner" of what was to become Portsmouth was Captain John Mason, an ex-soldier from Portsmouth , England. This assumes you accept the notion that a group of Englishmen and a king could give Mason legal title to land in the New World that they did not actually own, but let's not go there.

Mason sent another ex-soldier, Captain Walter Neale, with an advance team to scope out his new property in , the same year Puritan settlers started what was to become Boston and 10 years after the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth.

The first real wave of rag-tag adventurers, indentured servants, and planters who settled into a communal Great House at Strawberry Banke arrived a bit later in Neale wanted to check out a well-known "plantation" set up there in The large fortified house was known as Pannaway. Neale found it virtually abandoned, and his men promptly took control of the property.

The original owners, David and Amais Thomson, had arrived under a separate British patent to set up a fishing operation there seven years before.