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Alone, at the edge of a traffic
island blanketed with frozen snow, sits a rock
bearing a plaque. Situated opposite the
entrance
to the Mount Sunapee Ski Area it has
long
witnessed the change of seasons. It has stood
for more than thirty years, unnoticed by most
motorists who hastened by, preoccupied with
their own destinations. If one were to find a
convenient place to stop and walk close enough
to the marker to read the inscription, one would
discover a memorial to The Province Road placed
by the Daughters of Colonial Wars in 1960. It
reads: "The Province Road 1769 - Military Road
1754 - Scout Path 1743 - Penacook Trail.”
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Of what significance was this road
that someone thought it important enough to
erect a plaque in its memory with tantalizing
hints of its history? Where did it go and more
challenging, what is left of it now? There are a
few clues to be found along small stretches
of area roads bearing the name Province Road,
Old Province Road, or West Province Road, the
latter being adjacent to the access road to the
Mt. Sunapee ski area. Following the access,
said to be a remnant of the original Province
Road, one can find a double chairlift bearing
the name, Province Double Chairlift, whose route
roughly follows the direction of the Province
Road. Beyond that however, one must rely on maps
so old that many of the town names and boundaries
are not as we know them today.
Imagine the land, which was to
become the State of New Hampshire as it might
have been 300 years ago, before early settlers
had made significant advances into the interior
countryside. A vast forested land, inhabited
mainly by Native Americans who lived mostly
along lakeshores and the two major waterways in
the area, the Connecticut and the Merrimack
Rivers, it was un-chartered country, devoid of
roads. The Native Peoples concerned themselves
with hunting, fishing, foraging and planting
crops with little need to explore further unless
their food supply became depleted. Initially,
the only significant movement seems to have come
from the occasional Iroquois raiders who would
travel from Lake Champlain, southward and then
east to the Merrimack River to invade the
Penacooks, thereby establishing a trail, which
later became a scout path.
At the beginning of the 18th century,
Portsmouth, a thriving seaport, was established
as the provincial capital of the region and the
growing population began moving further inland.
About the same time, trading posts had
begun to develop along the Connecticut River
Valley, the furthermost of which was Number 4,
located where the center of Charlestown is
now situated. The need for settlements at the
western limits of the province to “communicate”
with the so-called Metropolis, as Portsmouth
was then termed, became increasingly necessary.
In December, 1742, Governor Benning Wentworth,
recognizing this growing need for a road between
the Connecticut River and the Merrimack,
employed a surveying crew to begin laying out a
route. Frequently deterred by Indian attacks,
little was accomplished until about 1759, when
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Commander in Chief of His
Majesty’s Forces in North America, commanded
some of his men to make a survey and mark trees
in preparation for establishment of a road
leading east from Charlestown, Number 4, to
“Pennycook” on the Merrimack River.
The military
men, already familiar with the established
scouting path, followed its line. Eventually, a
road was established which, according to an
early map and various town records, traveled from
Charlestown eastward through the towns of
Acworth, Lempster, Unity and Goshen, a town
formed in 1791 from sections of Newport and
Sunapee. It then continued onward through Saville
(Sunapee), around the southern end of Lake
Sunapee through Fishersfield (Newbury), Perry
(Sutton), Almsbury (Warner) . . . terminating in
Boscawen.
Records show that the old scouting trail
officially became Province Road around the years
of 1768-1772 and was so-named because it was the
result of the actions of Governor John
Wentworth and the provincial legislature, the
only carriage road in western New Hampshire
built through such a process.
This article consists of
excerpts from “The Province Road” (SooNipi,
Winter, 1999)
by Jane White, and printed with permission from SooNipi Magazine,
which shares the history of the
region and
tells of its special people and places in four
publications a year.
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