New Hampshire is a small state with a long memory. Its story runs from the Abenaki homelands and the first European fishing and trading settlements of the 1620s, through colonial towns and the Revolution, into the mill cities and railroads that powered the 19th century, and on to the mountains, lakes, and Main Streets that define the Granite State today. This is an overview; each chapter below follows one thread in more depth.
Europeans established some of their earliest New Hampshire settlements around 1623, near the coast at present-day Rye and Dover. For decades the province was tied to neighboring Massachusetts before King Charles II made New Hampshire a separate royal province in 1679. In January 1776 New Hampshire became the first of the colonies to set up an independent government with its own constitution, and in 1788 it cast the decisive ninth vote to ratify the United States Constitution — the vote that put the Constitution into effect.
The 1800s remade the state. Rivers like the Merrimack turned the wheels of textile mills, and Manchester's Amoskeag Manufacturing Company grew into one of the largest textile complexes in the world. Railroads connected mill towns and opened the White Mountains and Lakes Region to a new tourism economy of grand hotels and summer visitors. The 20th century brought hard turns — the Amoskeag mills closed in 1935 — but also reinvention, as old millyards filled with new industries.
Today the 603 is known for its town-meeting tradition of local government, its lack of a general sales tax or broad income tax on wages, its outdoor identity from Mount Washington to the seacoast, and a small-business culture that fills the same Main Streets and millyards the textile workers once walked. In Manchester, the Amoskeag millyard now houses advanced manufacturing and biofabrication work. The story of New Hampshire is still being written — town by town, business by business.
Use the chapters below to go deeper, then explore the towns and local businesses that carry the story forward.