New Hampshire historical timeline

Origins

The Abenaki and Pennacook peoples lived here long before English settlement began on the coast in the 1620s. The colony took its name from the English county of Hampshire.

Turning points

New Hampshire declared independence from Britain six months before the Declaration of Independence, and in 1788 became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution — the vote that brought it into force.

Influential people

Nineteenth-century wealth came from water: the textile mills on the Merrimack made the state's largest city one of the biggest cotton-milling centres in the world, and they ran until the industry moved south.

Cultural evolution

In 1944 delegates from forty-four nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods and designed the postwar monetary system, the IMF and the World Bank among its results.

Present-day significance

The state has held the first presidential primary in the nation since 1920, and defends the position fiercely. Tourism, technology and the absence of sales and wage taxes carry the modern economy.