New Hampshire – Portsmouth, White Mountains & Shakers

New Hampshire’s story is usually told through granite peaks, colonial wharves and Shaker meetinghouses — yet its deepest history belongs to the Abenaki, the Algonquian-speaking peoples who knew the region as the Dawnland long before Europeans arrived. Archaeological evidence places the first inhabitants near present-day Keene roughly 13,000 years ago, living in villages along rivers and lakes. By the seventeenth century these communities included the Cowasuck, Ossipee, Penacook, Pigwacke, Sokoki and Winnipesaukee, whose related dialects of the Abenaki language bound them into a shared cultural world. Their descendants’ experience — epidemic disease, land dispossession, a punitive 1713 treaty and a continuing struggle for recognition — is inseparable from the state’s colonial and revolutionary history. This chronicle follows that Indigenous thread alongside the better-known milestones that shaped New Hampshire.

The Abenaki of the Dawnland

The name Abenaki is commonly translated as “people of the dawnland,” a reference to the eastern horizon where the sun first strikes the Northeast. It describes a confederation of closely related bands rather than a single centralized nation. Villages were positioned for seasonal access to fish, game, fertile river intervals and the coastal estuaries around the Piscataqua. Leadership was distributed among sachems and councils, and kinship networks stretched across what are now Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Quebec — a border-spanning geography later ignored by colonial mapmakers.

Contact, Epidemic and Displacement

Norse voyagers may have reached the region centuries earlier, but the first recorded European visitor was the English mariner Martin Pring, who sailed up the Piscataqua River in June 1603. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain followed in 1605, and in 1614 Captain John Smith charted New England, labeling the area “North Virginia.”

When settlers arrived in the early seventeenth century, Native people generally lived peacefully alongside their new neighbors — but the relationship was never equal. Colonists frequently stole from Indigenous communities and captured and sold Native people into slavery. Far more devastating were the pathogens carried across the Atlantic: smallpox epidemics from 1615 to 1620 and again in 1633 are estimated to have killed 80 to 90 percent of New Hampshire’s Native population. As English villages multiplied, many survivors migrated north, with a large share resettling in the Canadian mission community of St. Francis, Quebec. By the end of the century, many remaining Indigenous people had been absorbed into settler society, often through marriage.

Settlement, Province and the Treaty of Portsmouth

In 1623 the English merchant John Mason received a land grant and dispatched mariners to establish fishing and trading bases, naming the territory after his home county of Hampshire. The Scotsman David Thompson built a short-lived settlement at Odiorne’s Point, while the London fish merchants Edward and William Hilton founded the first permanent settlement at Dover. By 1630 Mason had helped establish Portsmouth, later the state capital. New Hampshire was named a royal province in 1679, absorbed into the Massachusetts colony from 1698 to 1741, then governed again as a British province.

During Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), a British-French contest over New England territory, Native communities allied with the French. At the war’s close they surrendered to the British under the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth, signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Its harsh provisions on land ownership, trade and commerce, and submission to British law curtailed the remaining Indigenous population’s rights and freedoms. Diplomacy in the Northeast had long relied on wampum belts used in treaty diplomacy — shell-bead records whose meanings were reinterpreted, and frequently ignored, by colonial officials. British control was consolidated further in 1763, when France’s defeat in the French and Indian War ended the contest for the territory; students of that conflict should read how Native nations shaped the fight for North America and the Proclamation of 1763, which attempted to restrain colonial expansion into Native homelands. Settlers poured in during the 1760s, the greatest decade of growth in the colony’s history.

Today there are no federally or state-recognized tribes in New Hampshire, although several Abenaki groups continue to seek recognition.

A State of Firsts in the Revolution

On December 13, 1774, four months before his ride to Lexington, Paul Revere traveled fifty-five miles from Boston to Portsmouth to warn that Fort William and Mary was about to be seized by British troops. Roughly 400 townspeople raided the garrison’s gunpowder and lowered the fort’s British flag — among the first acts of rebellion. In 1776 New Hampshire became the first colony to establish its own constitutional government, effectively declaring independence. New Hampshire troops were said to make up nearly all the colonial force at Bunker Hill and fought decisively at Bennington in 1777. On June 21, 1788, the state became the ninth and deciding state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. John Langdon served as the first president of the Senate, and Portsmouth’s Samuel Shelburne became the first U.S. attorney general in 1789.

Slavery, Industry and Immigration

The first enslaved Africans were brought to Portsmouth by the British in 1645. Few enslaved people lived in New Hampshire, though up to 700 Black residents lived in the state around the Revolution, some as members of a free society. Slavery was officially abolished in 1857. During the Civil War the state sent 35,000 troops to the Union cause — about 11 percent of its population. Scotch-Irish settlers at Nutfield in April 1719 planted the first potato crops in North America; the settlement became Londonderry and is now Derry. Through the nineteenth century the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company of Manchester, then the country’s largest textile producer, drew French-Canadian workers from Québec and New Brunswick; roughly 900,000 French Canadians came to the United States between 1840 and 1930, and up to 20 percent of the state’s residents still claim French ancestry.

The Shakers of Canterbury

French Camisards and Quakers helped form the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing in New England in 1747. Known as the Shaking Quakers, or simply Shakers, for their ecstatic dancing, they practiced communal ownership of property, did not believe in procreation, and instead adopted or converted outsiders. Their utopian communities pursued a progressive vision of racial and gender equality. The Canterbury Shaker Village, founded in 1792, peaked in the 1850s with 300 residents, more than 100 buildings and 3,000 acres; it became a museum after the last Shaker resident died in 1992.

Landmarks, Symbols and Notable Firsts

The “Old Man in the Mountain,” engraved on the state quarter, was a Franconia Notch rock formation whose five granite ledges formed a profile nearly forty feet from forehead to chin. It collapsed on May 3, 2003. New Hampshire was home to Alan Shepard Jr., the first American astronaut, whose 15-minute Freedom 7 flight launched on May 5, 1961, and to Christa McAuliffe, the Concord teacher who perished aboard the Challenger on January 28, 1986. In July 1944 financiers from 44 countries met at the Mount Washington Hotel for the Bretton Woods conference, creating the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The state hosted the 1905 treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War, chartered the first modern free public library at Peterborough in 1833, and remains one of nine states without a state income tax. Franklin Pierce, president from 1853 to 1857, was born here.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• Deep Indigenous presence: 13,000 years of continuous occupation preceded European contact, centered on riverine and lakeside village life.
• Catastrophic demographic loss: Smallpox epidemics between 1615 and 1633 are estimated to have killed 80 to 90 percent of the Native population.
• Treaty as instrument of dispossession: The 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth restricted land title, trade and legal autonomy even as it formally ended hostilities.
• Diaspora and survival: Migration to St. Francis, Quebec, and intermarriage with settlers reshaped Abenaki communities without erasing them.
• Unfinished recognition: New Hampshire has no federally or state-recognized tribes, and Abenaki groups continue to petition for acknowledgment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which tribes are Indigenous to New Hampshire? The Cowasuck, Ossipee, Penacook, Pigwacke, Sokoki and Winnipesaukee are the bands named in the historical record. Because they spoke related Abenaki dialects, they are collectively described as Abenaki, or “people of the dawnland.”

What did the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth do? Signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it concluded Native participation in Queen Anne’s War on British terms, imposing restrictions on land ownership, trade and commerce, and requiring submission to British law.

How devastating was European disease? Smallpox epidemics from 1615 to 1620 and again in 1633 are estimated to have eliminated 80 to 90 percent of the region’s Native population.

Where did displaced Abenaki people go? Many resettled northward, especially at St. Francis in Quebec, while others remained and gradually intermarried into settler communities.

Does New Hampshire recognize any tribes today? No. There are no federally or state-recognized tribes in New Hampshire, though several Abenaki organizations continue to pursue recognition.

Cultural Legacy and Modern Preservation

Place names, riverways and the persistence of Abenaki families keep the Dawnland visible in a state that rarely teaches its Indigenous chapter. Museums and heritage organizations across northern New England now interpret ash-splint basketry, birchbark work and shell-bead diplomacy as documents of sovereignty rather than curiosities. Recognition remains the central unfinished question — a reminder that New Hampshire’s motto of independence was asserted by colonists on land whose first peoples were still negotiating their own freedom.