Meredith, NH

Meredith was among the first towns chartered by the Masonian Proprietors, in 1748. It was called Palmer's Town for the surveyor who laid out much of the land around the lake, then New Salem for the Salem, Massachusetts families among its grantees. The first settlers arrived in 1766, and when the town was incorporated on December 30, 1768 it took its final name, honoring Sir William Meredith, a member of Parliament who had cast one of the few votes against the Stamp Act.

The village owes its shape to water power. In 1809, John Bond Swasey cut a canal from Lake Waukewan under Main Street, dropping about 40 feet to Winnipesaukee, and mills bloomed along it: sawmill, gristmill, shingle mill, tannery. The railroad arrived in 1849 and tied the town to Boston, and in 1855 the busy industrial section at Meredith Bridge split off to become Laconia. The hosiery mill recruited in 1876 became the town's largest employer ever; after it burned in 1889 the site rose again as the Meredith Linen Mills.

Summer people started coming by train in the 1880s and never stopped. One of them changed the town's identity: Annalee Thorndike began selling her felt dolls in 1934 and later worked out of a converted chicken coop on the family's Meredith farm. In the 1950s the state hired her to make dolls promoting New Hampshire tourism, and Annalee Dolls became a household name with Meredith as its hometown.

The waterfront you see today is the mill era reborn. The old cotton mill by the falls, built around 1820 and one of the state's oldest wood-frame industrial buildings, was redeveloped in 1984 into Mill Falls Marketplace, the anchor of modern Meredith and proof that the town has always known what to do with its falls.