New Hampshire

A fishing and timber colony that spent a century being administered by Massachusetts and has defined itself against outside authority ever since. Settlement began in the 1620s at Portsmouth and Dover as commercial ventures rather than religious ones, which distinguishes it from the rest of New England, and Massachusetts absorbed the towns in 1641. It was made a separate royal province in 1679, then shared a governor with Massachusetts again until 1741. The white pines of its interior were reserved by the Crown for Royal Navy masts and marked with the broad arrow, and resistance to that reservation - the Pine Tree Riot of 1772 - was among the earliest colonial defiance of imperial law. New Hampshire declared independence six months before the Declaration and adopted the first state constitution, in January 1776. It was the ninth state to ratify the federal Constitution, the vote that actually put it into effect. Textile mills at Manchester, powered by the Merrimack, made the Amoskeag company the largest cotton mill complex in the world by 1900. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference was held at a hotel in the White Mountains. The state has held the first presidential primary since 1920. Its motto is Live Free or Die. Concord is the capital and Manchester the largest city. Mount Washington recorded one of the highest surface wind speeds ever measured. The state has only about twenty-nine kilometres of coastline. It has no general sales tax and no income tax on wages. The Old Man of the Mountain, its emblem, collapsed in 2003.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history