photo by stillman rogers
603 NAVIGATOR / OUR TOWN
A mural at Apotheca
Go to Town in Goffstown There’s quite a bit going on in this small town BY BARBARA RADCLIFFE ROGERS
T
he rise of Portsmouth as a major seaport and the prosperity of New Hampshire’s Seacoast Region in Colonial times was largely due to the Royal Navy’s insatiable need for ship masts. Vast forests of tall white pines grew within easy reach, where they could be cut and hauled to the port, many over routes that are still called Mast Road. Mast Roads in Dover, Merrimack and Manchester are reminders of New Hampshire’s Colonial importance, as is Gofftown’s Mast Street (now Route 114), a route carved beside the Piscataquog River in the 1750s and formally laid out in 1761. The area was covered in timber that was valuable for both masts and for building growing towns, and lumbering was the area’s main occupation when Goffstown was chartered by Gov. Wentworth in 1761. Land here was first granted in 1734 as Nar-
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ragansett No. 4 by the Massachusetts Colonial governor, as the area was still under dispute between the two colonies. But most of the grantees found the area to be poor farmland and moved back to Massachusetts. In 1748, it was regranted by New Hampshire Royal Governor Benning Wentworth to a new group of settlers, including Col. John Goffe, for whom the town was named when it was incorporated in 1761. The early settlement was in the approximate center of the grant, a village known today as Grasmere. Then in 1766, a bridge was built where Mast Road crossed the Piscataquog River, and this became the nucleus for the small West Village. Near the bridge was a falls that soon powered a grist mill and saw mill; by 1794 a hotel had opened and in 1810 Capt. John Smith opened a store. A carding and fulling mill followed at the
falls, and by 1820 there were 20 sawmills, plus grain and textile mills. The settlement was big enough for the residents to build their own meetinghouse in 1840, which was replaced in 1845 by the stately white Congregational Church that sits beside the town hall today. The arrival of the New Hampshire Central Railroad in 1850 cemented West Village, where two of its depots were located, as the commercial and social center of Goffstown. Fueled by railroad access for shipping materials and finished goods, local industry flourished, and many of the distinguished buildings that make up the Goffstown Main Street Historic District can trace their origins to this period of increasing prosperity. The Gothic Revival St. Matthew’s Episcopal
