Long before there was a colony or a state, the land that became New Hampshire was home to Abenaki and other Algonquian-speaking peoples, who lived along its rivers, lakes, and seacoast and moved with the seasons to fish, hunt, and farm. The Merrimack, Connecticut, Piscataqua, and other waterways were travel and trade routes for thousands of years.
European interest began on the coast. Around 1623, English settlers established some of the earliest footholds near the mouth of the Piscataqua River — at Odiorne's Point in present-day Rye and at Hilton's Point in present-day Dover. These early settlements were tied to fishing, fur trading, and timber rather than to a grand colonial plan, and the short, deep coastline and the river systems shaped where people settled and what they traded.
The region took its English name from Captain John Mason, an early proprietor who named his land grant after Hampshire in England. For much of the 1600s the small settlements of the Piscataqua were closely linked to — and often governed alongside — neighboring Massachusetts.