History of Canaan

• On July 9, 1761 His Excellency Benning Wentworth first issued the first charter for the Town of Canaan. Legend has it that the first settlers, John Scofield, his wife and four children, made it their home in December 1766.

• Arthur Walworth has contributed excerpts from the diaries of his great-grandfather, James J. Walworth, who was born on South Road in Canaan in 1809. His great-grandfather lived in Canaan for the first 20 years of his life, and we have the J. J. Walworth diary entries for the last year before he moved to Boston in 1829.

• The Canaan Union Academy was established after the closing of Noyes Academy. The Catalogue for the 1839 school year lists many names familiar from Noyes Academy. The school closed after several years and was reopened in 1853, after "enlarging and refitting the Academy Building". The 1853 Canaan Union Academy Catalogue lists 65 male and 45 female students.

• The Gazetteer of Grafton County, N. H. was published in 1886. It was one of many county gazetteers that were published in the period, and like most it contains historical descriptions of each town. The Canaan chapter includes descriptions of businesses and some genealogy as well as town history. A town map is included and some of the residences are keyed to it.

• The New Hampshire Patriot published an article, The Canaan And Cardigan. A Delightful Resort, and a Grand Old Mountain, on July 15, 1886. The delightful resort that it describes is the newly opened Jerusalem Spring House, and the grand old mountain is, of course, Mount Cardigan.

• Despite some historical inaccuracies, A New England Hill Town — 1800–1850, by Amos Noyes Currier, provides an interesting sketch of life in Canaan during the first half of the 19th century. It was written in 1895.

• The book length History of Canaan, N. H. is a wonderful telling of the history of the town and its people, published in 1910 by William Allen Wallace. Reprints are available in hardcover from the Canaan Historical Society. Buy a copy and enjoy the heft of a good book to read as you sit by the fire. To order a copy, call Donna Zani-Dunkerton, the Society’s Historian and Corresponding Secretary, at (603) 523-7960.

• A scanned copy of most of the History of Canaan, N. H. is available online. It can be seen at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~townsend/HoC/

• Historian Ned Smith prepared Canaan Bicentennial 1761 - 1961 for the Town's 200^th anniversary. This wonderful resource adds information about the terrible train accident in September 1907, the fire that destroyed most of Canaan Village in June 1923, and the hurricane of September 1938, as well as recapturing the years described in Wallace's History. This is a large pdf file which may take a while to download.

• Insight Magazine published a nice short History of Canaan in its Spring 1983 issue. It was written by Margo Moran (now Margo Taussig Pinkerton), a descendant of one of the town’s earliest settlers and a town resident at the time. She now lives in North Carolina but returns to the home of her ancestors several times a year. She teaches photo workshops here and overseas under the name Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures.
• The area that is now downtown Canaan was developed as Canaan Village when the railroad came through town in 1847.

• Photographs document events during the last century.

• Take the Canaan Street Historical Walking Tour to learn about the many historic locations in Canaan’s Historic District.

• Canaan has many discontinued roads, that the Town voted to make subject to gates and bars in the early and mid 1900's.

• A graph of Canaan population records shows our population history.