Settlement and Establishment

Settlement and Establishment, 1750-1790

The push toward European development of the upper Connecticut River Valley began in the 1750s, in the midst of England’s struggle against the French for dominance in the colonies. King George’s War ended in 1748 and the Seven Years’ War would begin in 1754. It was in the midst of these wars that colonial focus shifted from the seacoast to the upper Connecticut River Valley. Conflicts between French, English, and Native Americans seemed to culminate in the Connecticut River Valley corridor. The French and Native Americans traveled south from Canada and the English west from Portsmouth and Boston. As the River Valley was more traversed, it became a crossroad of international interaction and the epicenter of western New Hampshire growth. By the late eighteenth century, the upper Connecticut River Valley became a sort of paradox: on one hand, it was a frontier society based on the agricultural goods that it produced for urban centers; on the other hand, its newfound resources and accessibility allowed it to become a place that generated culture and supported commercial endeavors, much like an urban development.

Royal Governor Benning Wentworth was in power at the time of the French and Indian wars. The Wentworth family was well known for its investment in the lumber industry in New Hampshire and they greatly supported the acquisition of land in the Connecticut River Valley for additional sources of lumber. It was of no surprise that Governor Benning Wentworth found the shifted focus to the River Valley to be beneficial. Logging in the plentiful, untamed forest at the western edges of New Hampshire meant economic growth in all other parts of New Hampshire. Lumber allowed manufacturers in Portsmouth to continue building ships for the British Royal Navy, an industry that had been thriving since the mid-seventeenth century. This in turn brought skilled laborers, revenue, and the need to expand areas of habitation for an increasing population. If New Hampshire was able to secure the land surrounding that great western river from the French, the natural resources upon which the colony relied would be secured as well. Thus, the lumber industry that developed along the Connecticut River was indispensible to the growth of the colony of New Hampshire.

White Pine had once been abundant nearer to the seacoast. It had been routinely sought out for the shipbuilding construction industries in Portsmouth since its earliest days of settlement. Thus, its numbers had diminished after nearly a century and a half of use. In the mid-eighteenth century, White Pine was in higher demand than ever before. Its long, lean form, smooth trunk, and durable wood was ideal for making planks with which to build houses; and White Pine trees which had been unaffected by human contact grew to a height of 150 or 200 feet, perfect for ship masts.[1]

Aside from the seacoast, where sources of the White Pine had been exhausted, the far western side of New Hampshire was the best location for “mast pine” operations because the proximity to the Connecticut River provided loggers with an easy and cheap way to transport timber to market.[2] From the woods along the Connecticut, woodsmen merely had to hitch a team of oxen to felled wood and drag or sled it to the banks of the river where it would be shipped directly to a port city. The first example of this type of operation occurred in 1733, when a company working for the British Royal Navy shipped “an entire shipload’s worth of timbers down the river to Saybrook, Connecticut, where they could be loaded on a ship for transport across the Atlantic.”[3] This flotilla of shipbuilding material was shipped from the approximate location of present-day Hanover, New Hampshire, a distance of nearly 200 miles, and seems to have created the standard operating procedure for timber collection along the Connecticut River throughout the next century. Although demand for White Pine was what initially drove the western expansion of New Hampshire territory, it was the relative convenience of living and conducting business along the Connecticut River that encouraged the subsequent development of the western part of the State.

In the 1760s, the forts that had been established by the General Court of Massachusetts earlier in the century were granted New Hampshire township by Governor Wentworth, despite the ongoing scuffle over the ownership of the territory. Forts No. 1, 2, 3, and 4 became Chesterfield, Westmoreland, Walpole, and Charlestown. These small fortified towns became anchors of European civilization in a seemingly isolated frontier society. As the backwoods community of the western territory grew in the following decades, communication between the seacoast and the people of the upper Connecticut River Valley was strained. The river provided direct transportation, communication, and trade from western New Hampshire to the cities of Springfield, Hartford, and Boston, but within New Hampshire a lack of maintained roads and standardized communication prevented such crossover between the seacoast and Connecticut River Valley.[4] In addition, the differences in population, industry, and environment of the two most developed parts of the state meant that “the coastal area of New Hampshire shared little in heritage or economic interest with the western part of the state.”[5] However, the connections to urban markets and industries provided by the Connecticut River allowed settlers in the River Valley to have access to the greater culture of the European mercantilist society. Not only were Connecticut River Valley people able to unite with other New England colonies, but they were able to trade with British, French, Dutch, and Spanish merchants; easily plotting them on the map of international exchange.

New Hampshire’s famous Reverend Jeremy Belknap—a naturalist, surveyor, historian, and man of the church—was raised as a contemporary to the expansion of New Hampshire industry and western settlement. At the height of Jeremy Belknap’s life, development of the Connecticut River Valley had just begun to pick up speed. As a child in the 1750s, western New Hampshire would have perceived a great mysterious wilderness, populated with only surveyors, woodsmen, travelers to Canada, and the natives that threatened the inhabitants of the forts at Charlestown, Walpole, Chesterfield, and Westmoreland.[6] Having traveled throughout much of New Hampshire as a young man, Belknap probably encountered the harsh lifestyle of these men of the wilderness. Here he describes their daily fare: “Men who are concerned in travelling, hunting, cutting timber, making roads, and other employments in the forest are inured to hardships….Their food, when thus employed, is salt pork or beef, with potatoes and bread of Indian corn; and their best drink is water mixed with ginger.”[7] These hardworking men were certainly used to living a life without privilege of fresh foods and conveniences of society; but as the timber industry grew and thrived along the Connecticut River, it became necessary to improve the availability of cultural and mercantile resources to support the settlements that began to spread and develop as a result of the industry. Men who had left their wives and children at the seacoast in search of employment in the 1750s now found that they could purchase land in the budding townships along the river. If they moved their families across the colony, built a permanent residence, and began to cultivate their own crops, life would be simpler and wages would stretch farther. The river’s ancient freshets were ideal land to transform for agriculture, and with the abundance of natural resources and wildlife, as well as the added insurance of fortifications to protect against violent French and Indian attacks trickling down from Canada, the upper Connecticut River Valley became a prime destination for New Hampshire’s cultural and economic expansion.

Life for new settlers in the Connecticut River Valley was challenging in many ways. They worked to support themselves financially, and were essentially cut off from the kind of refined goods that were in abundance along the Atlantic seaboard. Settlers had to depend on their land and their own handiwork to provide any food, clothing, furniture, or household commodity that was needed. Some of the townships that had been established before the explosion of settlement along the Connecticut River in the 1760s had been able to keep up with the increase in population and economy. Sawmills, gristmills, and other conveniences were constructed to ease the workload of new settlers. Without such amenities to aid them, there was no way to efficiently clear one’s land and have enough time to begin planting crops for the coming months—short of hiring a team of men to do the work. The majority of settlers in western New Hampshire did not possess the funds required to hire laborers to clear their land.   Besides, without a masting contract with the British Royal Navy, any White Pine timber cleared from private land was illegally felled. All “mast pines” belonged to the King of England according to the White Pine Act of 1691. Those who had a contract to sell to the Royal Navy shipped timber downstream to the nearest city. Those who did not have a contract floated their timber to the nearest sawmill, where it could be used locally, or sold to the Royal Navy by the owner of the sawmill, who most likely held a contract.[8] During the reign of Governor Benning Wentworth, a sort of salutary neglect allowed settlers to clear their land and sell timber as they liked. After the installation of his nephew, Governor John Wentworth II in 1767, a stricter policy on White Pine poaching was put into place. It lasted until the Revolutionary War.[9]

Despite the difficulties of merely clearing the land of trees, even more work had to be done in order to prepare it for farming by pulling stumps, cutting back shrubs, burning underbrush, and plowing the cleared land. In another description of life along the Connecticut River, Jeremy Belknap writes:

“Those persons, who attend chiefly to husbandry, are the most thriving and substantial. Those who make the getting of lumber their personal business, generally work hard for little profit. This kind of employment interferes too much with husbandry. The best season for sawing logs is the spring, when rivers are high; this is also the time for ploughing and planting. He who works in the sawmill at that time, must buy his bread and clothing, and the hay for his cattle, with his lumber; and he generally anticipates the profit of his labor.”[10]

The full process of clearing enough land to keep livestock, plant crops to supply humans and animals with food for the winter, and build a permanent homestead (including house, barn, and outbuildings) would have taken years to accomplish, especially if the head of household was employed in a seasonal position such as logging.

In an agrarian community such as the upper Connecticut River Valley had become, self-sustainability was everything. Each change in season brought a new element of work to the life of a farmer. Spring was the time for plowing fields, planting crops, awaiting the birth of livestock, mending fences, tapping maple trees for syrup, clearing debris after winter storms, and preparing for the growing season. Summer, the few months of the year that comprised northern New England’s short growing season, was a time of strenuous labor and meticulous detail to crops. Without a farmer’s careful attention to his fields and gardens, crops might be choked by weeds, eaten by wildlife, trampled by livestock, or otherwise destroyed by the unpredictable New Hampshire weather. Hay needed to be cut and dried, and vegetables picked, processed and preserved. Autumn brought the ripening of grain, corn, and fruit as well as the slaughter of livestock for the coming winter. [11] All produce needed to be stored or brought to market while the household prepared for the harsh New England winter. Winter was a time to clear land, maintain roads, care for livestock, and tend to business that could not be conducted during the more demanding parts of the year. Aside from these seasonal tasks, there were year-round chores like chopping and stacking wood, cooking meals, caring for livestock, washing and mending clothes, hunting and fishing, and constant maintenance of homes, barns, and outbuildings which had to be accomplished. These chores alone provided the average farming family  with more than enough work to occupy them for a year—but men who doubled as a labor force for a logging company had to do all these things in addition to the work that the White Pine industry required in the winter and spring months.[12]

During the first few years of development, families in the Connecticut River Valley lived very simple lives by tending to their land, livestock, and crops if they were not dually involved in the White Pine industry. Although towns were still relatively isolated from other parts of New Hampshire and southern New England, trade between townships became increasingly common as populations grew. In 1762, Walpole’s original town road was expanded to connect to Charlestown and Westmoreland to allow more local communication and trade.[13] Settlers who relied on agriculture-based income began to match those whose income was in the logging business; eventually agricultural income would eclipse logging altogether as the shipbuilding business slowed during the American Revolution. Corn, rye, oats, wheat, barley, flax, hay, potatoes, turnips, cabbage, onions, white beans, string beans, peas, apples, currants, and pumpkins were staples for the people of the Connecticut River Valley, but not every homesteading family had enough land, time or hands to produce all of these crops in one growing season. [14]  Families raised what crops they could with the resources they had. Any excess produce could be bartered with neighbors or transported to other towns for sale.[15]

In addition to fruits and vegetables, livestock, fish, and household goods were often traded at a local level. All possible household goods were made by members of the family or local craftsmen who had brought tools with them from the seacoast. Millers, carpenters, tailors, tanners, coopers, blacksmiths, butchers, and cabinetmakers had set up shop in most towns during their expansion from wilderness outposts to agricultural societies. Bartering was quite common in Northern New England, especially in rural areas where importation of goods could be difficult. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich outlines this interesting form of local trade in the context of the society of northern New England, “Borrowing was part of the rhythm of life at all social levels. Families not only shared commodities. They shared the work which produced them.”[16] Even as the small settlements of western New Hampshire began to develop into less rural but still isolated towns, borrowing and bartering continued to play a large part in local economy. Local newspapers frequently printed advertisements for the exchange of one commodity for another, such as “New England Rum exchanged for Flax-seed or grain,” while local merchants accepted “all kinds of Country Produce” in lieu of specie.[17] It may be pointed out that in such a geographically isolated region of New England as the Connecticut River Valley, economic exchange was not fast-paced enough to promote the constant circulation of coins. Certainly Spanish silver, Continental dollars, and Federal cents made their way into the area, but they were perhaps prized more as a way to pay taxes or to purchase much finer goods that could not be gotten from local exchange.[18] Still, some merchants made sure to advertise the acceptance of cash as well as produce for the benefit of their less rural patrons.

            Abner Sanger, a young man living in a small settlement outside of present-day Keene, New Hampshire during the 1770s, kept a journal for three decades and recorded the home and local production of linen, shingles, brooms, sled tongues, barrels, shoes, leather, knife handles, chairs, wooden troughs for maple sugaring, vats for tanning hides, carts for haying, pot ash and lye for gunpowder and soap, tallow for candles, yarn, bricks, flour, liquor, clothing, worsted buttons, quilts, and dyes.[19] Some goods, though, could not be manufactured on the homestead or by local specialists, and their high demand merited particular trips to Boston or Hartford. Salt was certainly one of the most important commodities to a family attempting to live off the land, as it was the easiest and cheapest way to preserve a year’s worth of meat, fish, and vegetables. Sugar was also essential in baking and cooking, and could be fermented to produce vinegar, another important preservative. The abundance of maple trees in the Connecticut River Valley allowed settlers to create their own crystalline sugar by boiling down the sweet maple sap each spring, thus decreasing the demand for imported cane sugar.[20] Iron was in high demand in any society, as it could be used for tools, fixtures, and horseshoes; luckily, the nearest source of iron for settlers along the Connecticut River was in Kent, Connecticut, and could be easily transported upriver by cart or river vessel.[21] Although the river and roads would not be fully maintained until the late eighteenth century, they were just wide enough for small shipments of commodities. Abner Sanger records more than one instance of the transport of firearms, but interestingly, this did not seem to be a priority until the rumblings of the American Revolution had spread past southern New Hampshire and into Canada.[22]

In 1766, the first highway connecting the New Hampshire seacoast to the Connecticut River Valley was built, but the only funds for maintenance of the highway came from the towns that it passed through.[23] The distance from the Connecticut River to the seacoast was between 80 and 100 miles, depending on the route one took, and the likelihood of finding the highway wide enough for one horse and rider, let alone a team of oxen to pull a wagon with fine goods imported from the city, was slim. Less essential commodities such as pewter hollowware, prefabricated clothing, brimstone, tobacco, rum, silk, gold, silver, fine furniture, etc. were mentioned in passing, but did not seem to preoccupy the people of the Connecticut River Valley until the early nineteenth century.[24]

Commodities and fine goods that were imported to the Upper Connecticut River Valley during the early years were a testament to the lifestyle of its people. Between the 1750s and post-Revolutionary period, the highest demands for import lay in salt for food preservation, iron tools for logging and farming, and firearms for hunting and self-defense. The small population of most early settlements allowed for borrowing and lending these goods between neighbors, thus decreasing the frequency of their purchase in the area.[25] As the living became easier and family homesteads were established in place of backwoods camps, the comforts of home grew to be in demand in New Hampshire’s rural towns just as much as in its cities. A culture of material comfort emerged during this period. From 1780 and 1790, the number of advertisements for items such as pewter hollowware, brass fixtures for the home, tin ware, fine paper, reading materials, tea and coffee accessories, handkerchiefs, and spices for cooking seem to have greatly increased in local papers.[26] Shops in Walpole and Keene offered not only goods from Boston and New York, but “English and West-India Goods”, an indicator that the consumers of the Connecticut River Valley were reaching out beyond their farms and villages to access goods from other regional and national sources. [27]

The last few decades of the eighteenth century brought great change and vast improvements to the infrastructure of the Connecticut River Valley. Changes in the governance of the colony came with the successful rebellion against English rule in the 1770s. The dynasty of Royal Governors of New Hampshire fell, pushing the influential Wentworth family out of power, and forcing the loyalist Governor John Wentworth II to flee the colony. Volunteers from every region of New Hampshire flocked to Boston to join the colonial militia, including Abner Sanger and his neighbors from the River Valley. Not all of these men saw action in Revolutionary skirmishes, but their recorded presence and awareness of political unrest indicates that the Connecticut River corridor was once again the most effective method of travel and communication during this time.

After the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the newly self-proclaimed United States of America discussed the formation of a national government. Meanwhile, each individual State laid down a governing body to replace the Royal Governor, and a system of government. The General Court, which had existed since early colonial days, remained the principle governing body in New Hampshire. New Hampshire worked to make official the borders of its territory, and in doing so, continued Benning Wentworth’s tradition of granting townships to settlers in the western part of the state. In response to the influx of settlers, the populations of Walpole, Charlestown, and Chesterfield doubled from 1775 to 1790.[28] With this explosion of growth came a new, clearly defined society—a society that was no longer perched on the edge of the wilderness, but which still possessed the rich natural resources for which it had initially been settled, and a society which demanded more income, improvements, and culture than ever before. Since the timber industry had dwindled in the decades since the American Revolution, hogs, oxen, horses, heifers, and sheep, as well as agricultural products such as wheat, rye, corn, barley, butter, and cheese had become the main sources of income for inhabitants of the upper Connecticut River Valley.[29] Local trade was still as strong as ever, but the increased population of the postwar period meant more cultivated land for farming, more production of local goods, and ultimately increased agricultural surplus that could be shipped downriver to city markets in exchange for fine goods.[30]  This ease of access afforded by the river intimately connected the inland population to New England’s urban centers of trade and commerce in ways that had previously only been possible by sea.

Modes of communication and travel also improved during this time, allowing the passage of ideas to move from place to place just as easily as goods.[31] In 1781 John Balch, a contemporary and neighbor of Abner Sanger, became the first “postrider” in western New Hampshire territory. Previous to Balch’s mail delivery service, letters and parcels were carried by the occasional passerby traveling from one town to the next.[32] Although this method seemed to be effective, it was not particularly efficient or reliable. With a designated postrider, one could ensure that local mail would reach its destination in a definite amount of time.

In addition to roadway communication, waterways were improved when, in 1784, Enoch Hale’s bridge became the first to span any part of the Connecticut River. Built at Walpole, New Hampshire and Bellows Falls, Vermont, the bridge stretched 365 feet from one side of the river to the other. This bridge would be followed by many others, not least of which included the bridge built at Charlestown in 1804. Before the construction of bridges along the Connecticut, ferries were the safest way to cross. However, the difficulty in ferrying was that one had to be granted by the State “exclusive privilege of keeping a ferry,”[33] which often resulted in few ferrymen and high tolls. Further south on the Connecticut, regulations were put in place for the size and appropriate tonnage of river vessels travelling upriver. Saybrook, Connecticut—slightly south of Hartford—had been the traditional place at which ships returning from an Atlantic voyage offloaded their cargo, and from which small watercraft would load these goods to transport upstream to communities in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.[34] These improvements in travel and transport on the Connecticut River helped to make river life safer and more reliable for all those involved.

The number of cultural contributions made to Connecticut River Valley society in the last years of the eighteenth century was infinitely expanded by the addition of trade, communication, infrastructure, education, literature, and art. Yet its identity as an agricultural community never left. It was truly a unique place—neither city nor country, connected commercially but isolated geographically—setting the tone for a new kind of region in New England for years to come.

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[1] Strother E. Roberts, ‘Pines, Profits, and Popular Politics: Responses to the White Pine Acts in the Colonial Connecticut River Valley,’ New England Quarterly, 2010: 73-101.

[2] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 78.

[3] Roberts, ‘Pines, Profits, and Popular Politics,’ 84.

[4] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 61.

[5]Abner Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make: The Journal of Abner Sanger ed. Lois K. Stabler (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Peter E. Randall, 1986), 85.

[6] Henry H. Saunderson, History of Charlestown, New-Hampshire, The Old No 4, Embracing the part borne by its inhabitants in the Indian, French, and Revolutionary Wars, and the Vermont Controversy. Also Genealogies and sketches of families, from its settlement to 1876 (Claremont, New Hampshire: The Claremont Manufacturing Company, 1976), 16.

[7] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 195.

[8] Roberts, ‘Pines, Profits, and Popular Politics,’ 96.

[9] Surveyor General of the King's Woods in North, ‘Province of New Hampshire,’ (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, January 1, 1770).

[10] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 197.

[11] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make.

[12] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II.

[13]George Simon Roberts, Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley (Schenectady, New York: N.Y. Robinson & Adee, 1906), 427.

[14] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make.

[15] David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 20.

[16] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982), 51. Ulrich also addresses this topic in her book The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). She discusses the practices of borrowing and bartering and their deep connection to social relations within early American communities.

[17] The New-Hampshire Recorder, 21 August 1787: 4.

[18] Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 22.

[19] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make.

[20] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 86-87.

[21] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make, 215.

[22] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make.

[23] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 59.

[24] Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods, 16.

[25] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make.

[26] The Farmer's Weekly Museum, 19 September 1794: 4.

[27] The New-Hampshire Recorder, 21 August 1787: 4.

[28] Saunderson, History of Charlestown, New-Hampshire, 714.

[29] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make.

[30] Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol II, 105.

[31] Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods, 125.

[32] Sanger, Very Poor and of a Lo Make, 22.

[33] ‘A Proclamation,’ Exeter, New Hampshire, (January 12, 1782).

[34] ‘Say-Brook Barr Lottery,’ Hartford, Connecticut, (June 5, 1773).