Alstead, New Hampshire One Place Study

Location: Alstead, Cheshire, New Hampshire, United States
Surnames/tags: One_Place_Studies New_Hampshire Cheshire_County

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Contents 1 Alstead, New Hampshire One Place Study 1.1 Name 1.2 Geography 1.3 History 1.4 Population 1.5 Notables 1.6 Cemeteries 1.6.1 John Slade Cemetery 2 Genealogical Resources 2.1 Census 2.2 Books 3 Sources

Alstead, New Hampshire One Place Study

• Official Website
• Wikidata: Item Q2306403, en:Wikipedia
• WikiTree Profiles that link here

Name

New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth (1696-1770) chose the name of Alstead to honor Johann Friedrich Alsted, the author of a 1639 Encyclopedia that Wentworth had used while a student at Harvard University.

Geography

Continent: North America

Country: United States

State/Province: New Hampshire

County: Cheshire

GPS Coordinates: 43.148889, -72.360556

Elevation: varies

History

• 1752: A charter for the area that later became Alstead was granted to 51 potential settlers by the His Majesty's Provincial Governor for New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, with the name of Newton. The chartered area was not settled, however, because of fears of attacks from the Native American population.
• 1763: Governor Wentworth granted Samuel Chase and 69 other men a charter for the town of Alstead. Settlers begin moving into the town, mostly around the heights at Alstead Center.
• 1793: Elisha Kingsbury builds a paper mill on the Cold River. The mill has a number of changes of ownership and is rebuilt twice after fires, until 1880 when a third fire destroys it. The section of Alstead surrounding the mill is known as Paper Mill Village for more than half a century, and becomes the center of settlement for the town.

• The author of the 1992 history of Alstead describes the period between 1820 and the American Civil War as "one of growth and activity as the number of shops and industries continued to grow, even while farms on the outskirts of the city were being given up. ... People had clustered together in three bustling communities connected by an improving network of roads, leading past mills, stores, blacksmith shops. wheelwrights, foundries, and a number of smaller workshops, some of them present from the early days."^[1] Those three communities were Alstead Center, the original center of settlement of the town, located today on the high ground at the intersection of New Hampshire Route 12A and Hill Road; East Alstead, on the shores of Lake Warren; and Paper Mill Village, now known as the Village of Alstead, on the banks of the Cold River and today the town's commercial center.
• A number of men from Alstead served in the Union Army during the American Civil Wars, including 12 in the 18th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment.

Population

• 1790: 1,111
• 1800: 1,666
• 1810: 1,694
• 1820: 1,611
• 1830: 1,552
• 1840: 1,454
• 1850: 1,425
• 1860: 1,318
• 1870: 1,213
• 1880: 1,037
• 1890: 870
• 1900: 799
• 1910: 711
• 1920: 672
• 1930: 616
• 1940: 683
• 1950: 851
• 1960: 843
• 1970: 1,185
• 1980: 1,461
• 1990: 1,721
• 2000: 1,944
• 2010: 1,937
• 2020: 1,864

Notables

• Sarah Hall Boardman
• John Graves Shedd
• Asa Wentworth Jr.

Cemeteries

John Slade Cemetery

The John Slade Cemetery dates from 1776. A brief history of the cemetery and transcriptions of the gravestones that were visible there in 1910 is included in the 1910 Slade family genealogy.^[2]

Genealogical Resources

• FamilySearch Alstead Genealogy Resources
• rootsweb New Hampshire Genealogy page for Alstead
• Abstracts of some marriage records from Cheshire County from the New Hampshire Sentinel
• ^[3]. Inscriptions from the Slade and Rust Cemeteries, located near the Alstead-Walpole town line.

Census

• 1790 Census of Cheshire County
• 1800 Census
• 1810 Census
• 1820 Census
• 1830 Census
• 1840 Census
• 1850 Census
• 1860 Census
• 1870 Census. Note that this census record for Alstead has an unusually high number of variant spellings and other errors, which confound indexes and can mislead researchers.
• 1880 Census
• 1890 Census of Union Veterans of the Civil War
• 1900 Census
• 1910 Census
• 1920 Census
• 1930 Census
• 1940 Census
• 1950 Census

Books

• Child, Hamilton, Gazeteer of Cheshire County, N. H., 1736-1885, "Gazeteer of Towns: Alstead" (Syracuse, N. Y., 1885), pages 72ff. A typical mug book from the period, has some valuable information on a few families.
• Frink, Helen H., Alstead Through the Years: 1763-1990 (Alstead, N. H.: Alstead Historical Society, 1992). This is primarily a history, not a genealogy, although there is some information scattered throughout on families. There are numerous errors, especially in dates, which should be confirmed in other sources. Only minimal sources are cited.
• Rawson, Marion Nicholl, New Hampshire Borns a Town (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1942). Nowhere in this book is "the town" named, but it is clearly about Alstead. The book includes a number of stories about some of the more colorful characters in the town's history. No sources are cited.

Sources

1. ↑ Helen H. Frink, Alstead Through the Years: 1763-1990 (Alstead, N. H.: Alstead Historical Society, 1992), page 146
2. ↑ Thomas Bellows Peck, William Slade of Windsor, Conn. and his descendants (Keene, N. H., 1019), pages 159-163
3. ↑ Marion Charlotte Reed, "Gravestone incriptions from two cemeteries in Alstead, N. H.," New England Historical and Genealogical Register (subscription required), volume 117 (1963), pages 92-93