A frontier of colonial land grants and indigenous resistance

Wars & Conflicts · Published 17 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Before it was a hub for mountain tourism and technology, Conway was a contested wilderness. Its origins are rooted in the displacement of the Pequawket people and a strict 18th-century colonial mandate that forced settlers to transform the forest into farmland within just five years.

Long before European settlement, the region was inhabited by the Pequawket Indians, an Algonquian Abenaki tribe. They lived in wigwams sheltered within stockades and sustained themselves through fishing, hunting, and farming along the Saco River. By 1642, explorer Darby Field reported a community known as "Pigwacket" stretching from present-day Conway toward Maine.

The transition to colonial rule was marked by conflict and disease. Foreign-introduced smallpox caused a major decline in the Pequawket population. During Dummer's War in May 1725, John Lovewell headed 36 Dunstable, Massachusetts residents into a fight against the tribe. While specific casualties are unrecorded, the battle forced the Pequawket to withdraw from the area entirely.

Sixty-five men were commissioned by Benning Wentworth, the colonial Governor, in 1765 to found "Conway," which he titled after Henry Seymour Conway. The charter imposed a rigorous land-use requirement: to secure their holdings, settlers were mandated to plant 5 acres of crops for every fifty acres they received. This agricultural transformation had to be completed within a five-year window.

The town's early infrastructure was modest; the first roads appeared in 1766, and construction on the first meetinghouse at Redstone remained unfinished for years, usable only during summer visits. It wasn't until the mid-19th century that the region's identity shifted toward the "romantic beauties" of the White Mountains, attracting artists like Asher B. Durand and Benjamin Champney.

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