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Timeline of Events

Mason’s Fun Fact! Did you know that Londonderry, New Hampshire, claims to be home to the first potato planted in North America? See if you can find it on the Timeline!

Timelines help you organize historical events so you can see how they relate to one another. They are usually organized chronologically, which means in date order. The timeline below is separated into two parts: New Hampshire events and events happening elsewhere in America and sometimes the world. An event on one side of the timeline might influence an event on the other side in the same way that New Hampshire is influenced by events in America and the world. You can also see how the Granite State has made a big impact on America. 

NEW HAMPSHIRE EVENTS

U.S. & WORLD EVENTS

Click the Green Button to expand every event on the timeline.

Click the Purple Buttons on the timeline to see all event details in that date range.

1775–1783
American Revolution
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1775–1783
American Revolution
By the 1760s, most of the colonies in North America belonged to England (which was also known as Britain or Great Britain). The British had not paid much attention to America over the years, and the Americans were used to making their own decisions and laws...
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1775
Bunker Hill
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1775
Bunker Hill
The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first major battle of the American Revolution. The British army, which was very well trained, attacked American troops in the hills surrounding Boston. The American troops did not have much experience as soldiers, but they put up a good fight against the British...
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1776
New Hampshire declares independence
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1776
New Hampshire declares independence
On January 4, 1776, New Hampshire became the first British colony to declare its independence from Great Britain. Since New Hampshire was now an independent state, its leaders wrote a new constitution for it, which laid out how the government would function. New Hampshire, therefore, formed the first state government in America...
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1776
Declaration of Independence
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1776
Declaration of Independence
During the American Revolution, the Americans created a congress to pass laws for the colonies and to raise taxes to support the war effort. On July 4, 1776, this congress approved a document called the Declaration of Independence...
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1777
Battle of Bennington
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1777
Battle of Bennington
In the summer of 1777, the British army launched a massive campaign through the Hudson River Valley in New York and Vermont to divide the New England colonies from the rest of America. Fighting between the British and Americans went on all summer, but in the middle of August, New Hampshire’s General John Stark arrived in southern Vermont with a large group of New Hampshire soldiers...
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1779
Freedom Petition
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1779
Freedom Petition
New Hampshire used to have enslaved people. The first enslaved people in America were kidnapped in Africa and brought to the New World where they were sold for their labor. They had to work for their masters without being paid, and they weren't allowed to make their own decisions about their lives. Their children were also enslaved, and their grandchildren and so on. Most enslaved people in America lived in the South, but even colonies in the North, like New Hampshire and Massachusetts, had enslaved people.
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1788
New Hampshire ratifies the U.S. Constitution
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1788
New Hampshire ratifies the U.S. Constitution
When the 13 American colonies declared themselves independent from Britain, they had to form a government for their new country. They had to decide how political power was going to be shared between the states and the federal government and develop a process for passing laws that would govern the new country...
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1789
U.S. Constitution
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1789
U.S. Constitution
After the Americans won the American Revolution, they had to create a new form of government for their new country. It took them several years to figure out which form of government would work best for them. They knew the government would be a democracy, meaning the people would get to vote about how they would be governed...
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1796
Ona Judge flees slavery
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1796
Ona Judge flees slavery
In 1796, an enslaved woman named Ona Judge ran away from her master in the South and came to New Hampshire. Her master was George Washington, the president of the United States. Washington owned many slaves at his plantation in Virginia, and he wasn’t willing to just let Ona go...
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1796
Roads across the state
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1796
Roads across the state
There were no big roads in New Hampshire during the 1700s like the highways we have today. Instead, all the roads in the state were local, linking one village to another. Each town was responsible for building and repairing their own roads, and sometimes the towns didn’t do a great job of it. In the late 1700s, some investors got together and decided to build a nice, big road that would run across the middle of the state, from Portsmouth to Concord...
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1803
First textile mill in New Hampshire
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1803
First textile mill in New Hampshire
The first cotton mill in New Hampshire was built in New Ipswich in 1803. It was a small mill, but it used giant machines, known as looms, to weave cloth, which would normally take a long time to weave by hand. The looms were powered by water...
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1803
Louisiana Purchase
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1803
Louisiana Purchase
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought a huge area of land from the French for $15 million. It doubled the size of America! The Louisiana Purchase included most of the land in what is now the middle of the country and extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean...
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1805
Old Man of the Mountain “discovered”
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1805
Old Man of the Mountain “discovered”
It wasn’t until the early 1800s that people started exploring the White Mountains, which were beautiful but rugged. Men building a road through Franconia Notch in 1805 saw a group of rocks that looked just like a giant head. They called the rock formation the Old Man of the Mountain, and soon tourists came from all over to see the Old Man...
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1809
Live free or die
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1809
Live free or die
New Hampshire’s most famous Revolutionary War soldier, General John Stark, used the term “Live free or die” in 1809. He was writing a letter to some fellow veterans who had organized a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of Stark’s great victory in 1777, the Battle of Bennington...
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1815
Textile mills in Lowell
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1815
Textile mills in Lowell
The first factories in America opened in the early 1800s when inventors found a way to use water power to make machines work. Machines could work much faster than people, even though people still needed to tend the machines...
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1815
Merrimack River made navigable
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1815
Merrimack River made navigable
The Merrimack River is the largest river in New Hampshire. At a time when it was still difficult and slow to travel on roads, water travel was the fastest way to move goods and people from one place to another. People used rivers almost like they use highways today...
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1816
Carrigain Map completed
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1816
Carrigain Map completed
Maps have always been very important in settling new land and in protecting people’s claims to land they believe they own. There were a few early maps of parts of New Hampshire, but by the early 1800s, people realized they needed a map of the whole state...
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1816–1819
State House built
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1816–1819
State House built
For the first few decades New Hampshire was a state, it didn’t have a state capital. Instead, the state government moved between several towns, including Portsmouth, Exeter, Dover, and Hopkinton. Finally, around 1810, the state government decided to settle in Concord, which was in the center of the state geographically and had a good road system, making it easy for people to travel to and from the new capital...
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1825
The Granite State
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1825
The Granite State
In June 1825, the state government held a big dinner on the State House lawn in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette was a Frenchman who became an American hero during the American Revolution 50 years earlier. He returned to America in 1825 and took a grand tour of all the states to celebrate America’s 50th birthday...
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1825
Erie Canal opens
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1825
Erie Canal opens
It took a long time to get places back in the early 1800s, before there were trains, cars, or airplanes. The fastest way to travel was by water on a boat, but the problem was that many rivers and lakes did not link up with each other. To connect them, people built canals so the boats could travel by water farther...
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1826
Willey slide tragedy
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1826
Willey slide tragedy
In the 1820s, not many people lived in the White Mountains. One family, the Willeys, built a homestead near Crawford Notch. The family included a mother, father, five children, and two hired hands. In August 1826, a huge storm moved through the area and set off a massive landslide in the little valley where the Willeys lived...
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1827
First railroad in America
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1827
First railroad in America
Trains were invented in the early 1800s in England. Powered by steam engines, they offered a way to move people and goods long distances in a much shorter time than traveling by horse and wagons on roads or by boats on water...
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1827
First Concord coach built
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1827
First Concord coach built
A Concord coach is a type of stagecoach that made travel easier and more comfortable for people in the 19th century. The Abbot-Downing Company of Concord became famous for making the best and most luxurious stagecoaches of the century...
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1831
Amoskeag Manufacturing Company founded
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1831
Amoskeag Manufacturing Company founded
With all of the rivers in New Hampshire, the state soon became a center for textile mills, which needed water power from the rivers to work the machinery, like looms, to weave cloth and fabric. Manchester was particularly well-placed for textile mills, as the Merrimack River ran strong in that area, and its water generated a lot of power...
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1838
First railroad in New Hampshire
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1838
First railroad in New Hampshire
The first railroad tracks were laid in New Hampshire in 1838. The tracks ran from Nashua south for 5 miles before crossing the Massachusetts border and continuing on to Boston. Within less than 10 years, the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad had built railroads throughout the southern part of the state...
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1844
First telegraph communication
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1844
First telegraph communication
In the 1840s, a man named Samuel Morse invented a new way for people to communicate with one another. It was called the telegraph, and it used wires to transmit signals between telegraph stations. The signals were a series of long and short sounds that represented different letters of the alphabet...
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1845
Senator Hale speaks out against slavery
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1845
Senator Hale speaks out against slavery
By the middle of the 19th century, more and more people in the North had decided that slavery was a bad thing, but not very many politicians had spoken against slavery. In 1845, John Parker Hale, who was a senator from New Hampshire, publicly declared that slavery was a terrible thing and should be stopped, even in the South where slavery was very popular...
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1845–1851
Irish potato famine
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1845–1851
Irish potato famine
Millions of people who lived in Ireland in the 1800s depended on potatoes more than any other crop to survive. When a disease attacked the potato crop in Ireland in the 1840s and killed almost all of the potatoes, the people of Ireland began to starve...
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1848
Seneca Falls Convention
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1848
Seneca Falls Convention
Women did not always have the same rights as men like they do today. For a long time, they couldn’t even vote. In the middle of the 19th century, many women began to argue that they deserved the same rights as men, but only some men agreed with them...
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1849
California gold rush
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1849
California gold rush
When gold was discovered in California, hundreds of thousands of people traveled there from around the world, thinking they could find a vein of gold and get rich quick. In truth, few people found gold, but lots of people made their fortunes by selling supplies to the miners who came looking for treasure...
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1849
Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery
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1849
Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery
Before 1865, there were slaves in America. Originally from Africa, slaves were people who belonged to someone else. Slaves were forced to work wherever their owners needed them. They often didn’t even get to stay with their own families...
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