New Hampshire

In the early 1600's, French and English explorers visited the area of New Hampshire but no one tried to hang out for a while until 1623 when English colonists arrived at what is now Dover. In the early years, the big business was along the seacoast: fishermen, whalers, maybe even pirates (Blackbeard is rumored to have buried a treasure at the offshore Isles of Shoals). By the time of the American Revolution, there were essentially two classes of people in the colony: wealthy merchants on one side and mariners, day laborers, indentured servants and slaves on the other.

New Hampshire was the first colony to declare its independence but the Revolutionary War almost passed the state by. There was only one engagement fought in New Hampshire, on December 14 and 15, 1774 at Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth Harbor. The rebels took a lot of gunpowder and weaponry that were used later on in the siege of Boston.

As much as the American History courses I slept through in my public school career went on at length about the Declaration of Independence happening on July 4, 1776, New Hampshire had declared its independence from England the previous January, which made New Hampshire the first post-colonial nation-state in the New World. The Congress of New Hampshire met in Exeter on January 5, 1776 and ratified the first state constitution in what was to become the United States of America, six months before the famous Declaration of Independence was made public.