Province of New Hampshire

The Province of New Hampshire was an English colony and later a British province in New England. It corresponds to the territory between the Merrimack and Piscataqua rivers on the eastern coast of North America. It was named after the English county of Hampshire in southern England by Captain John Mason in 1629, its first named proprietor. In 1776, the province established an independent state and government, the State of New Hampshire, and joined with twelve other colonies to form the United States.

The English first settled New Hampshire in the 1620s, and the province consisted for many years of a small number of communities along the seacoast, Piscataqua River, and Great Bay. These villages were primarily settled by the Puritans during their migration to New England, though New Hampshire was often a destination of Puritan dissenters from Massachusetts. In 1641 the communities were organized under the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, until Charles II issued a colonial charter for the province and appointed John Cutt as President of New Hampshire in 1679. After a brief period as a separate province, the territory was absorbed into the Dominion of New England in 1686. Following the collapse of the unpopular dominion, on October 7, 1691, New Hampshire was again separated from Massachusetts and organized as an English crown colony. Its charter was enacted on May 14, 1692, during the coregency of William and Mary, the joint monarchs of England, Scotland, and Ireland.