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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.

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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1852
Franklin Pierce elected U.S. president
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1852
Franklin Pierce elected U.S. president
Franklin Pierce was a very important man in New Hampshire politics. He led the Democratic Party in the state and served New Hampshire as both a congressman and a senator. In November 1852, he was elected president of the United States, the only president to come from New Hampshire...
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1853
Amos Tuck founds the Republican Party
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1853
Amos Tuck founds the Republican Party
In 1853, a man from New Hampshire named Amos Tuck got a bunch of his friends together in Exeter and decided to form a new political party called the Republicans. The Republican Party stood against slavery in America. They challenged the Democratic Party for state and national offices...
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1861–1865
Civil War
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1861–1865
Civil War
By 1860, many Americans had become angry over slavery. In the South, slavery had become part of a cherished way of life in which African-American slaves were forced to work for their white masters. In the North, where slavery had been outlawed, people began to argue that slavery was wrong and that African-Americans should be free...
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1863
The Battle of Gettysburg
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1863
The Battle of Gettysburg
Thousands of soldiers from New Hampshire fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, when the North (the Union) fought against the South (the Confederacy). The biggest battle of the war was the Battle of Gettysburg, fought on July 1-3, 1863, which the Union won...
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1867
Alaska becomes a U.S. territory
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1867
Alaska becomes a U.S. territory
Alaska did not become a U.S. territory until 1867. Before that, it was part of Russia. Russia had once had colonies all down the west coast through what is now Canada, Washington, Oregon, and even parts of California. Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million...
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1869
Transcontinental railroad
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1869
Transcontinental railroad
Railroads were built all over America in the mid-1800s, but the most important railroad was the transcontinental railroad. It linked the eastern portion of the United States with the western portion. No longer did people have to make the dangerous and long trip across the continent on foot or by wagon, which could take months...
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1869
Cog Railway opens
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1869
Cog Railway opens
An inventor named Sylvester Marsh loved the views from the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast. But he thought there must be an easier way to get to the top than climbing up 6,000 feet. He developed a special kind of train, called a cog railway, that could climb such a steep terrain...
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1870
Marilla Ricker tries to vote
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1870
Marilla Ricker tries to vote
Women in New Hampshire—and throughout America—were not allowed to vote for many years. In 1870, a New Hampshire woman named Marilla Ricker tried to vote in her hometown of Dover. She was denied, but she kept turning in her votes in town elections for the rest of her life even if town officials refused to count them...
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1872
Skiing comes to New Hampshire
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1872
Skiing comes to New Hampshire
Lots of people from Scandinavian countries moved to New Hampshire in the 1800s to work in the timber industry in the White Mountains. They brought with them many traditions from the countries they came from, including cross-country skiing...
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