Dover New Hampshire History & Facts

Dover is a city in Strafford County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 32,741 at the 2020 census, making it the largest city in the New Hampshire Seacoast region and the fifth largest municipality in the state. It is the county seat of Strafford County, and home to Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, the Woodman Institute Museum, and the Children's Museum of New Hampshire.

First recorded in its Latinised form of Portus Dubris, the word "Dover" derives from the Brythonic word for "waters" (dwfr in Middle Welsh). The same element is present in the word's French (Douvres) and Modern Welsh (Dofr) forms.

The first known European to explore the region was Martin Pring from Bristol, England, in 1603. In 1623, William and Edward Hilton settled at Pomeroy Cove on Dover Point, making Dover the oldest permanent settlement in New Hampshire, and seventh in the United States. One of the colony's four original townships, it then included Durham, Madbury, Newington, Lee, Somersworth and Rollinsford.

The Hiltons' name survives at Hilton Park on Dover Point (originally known as Hilton Point), where the brothers settled near the confluence of the Bellamy and Piscataqua rivers. They were fishmongers sent from London by the Company of Laconia to establish a colony and fishery on the Piscataqua. In 1631, however, it contained only three houses. William Hilton built a salt works on the property (salt-making was the principal industry in his hometown of Northwich, England). He also served as Deputy to the General Court (the colonial legislature).

In 1633, the plantation was bought by a group of English Puritans who planned to settle in New England, including Viscount Saye and Sele, Baron Brooke and John Pym. They promoted colonization in America, and that year Hilton's Point received numerous immigrants, many from Bristol. They renamed the settlement Bristol. Atop the nearby hill they built a meetinghouse surrounded by an entrenchment, with a jail nearby.

The town was called Dover in 1637 by the new governor, Reverend George Burdett. It was possibly named after Robert Dover, an English lawyer who resisted Puritanism. With the 1639 arrival of Thomas Larkham, however, it was renamed after Northam in Devon, where he had been preacher. But Lord Saye and Sele's group lost interest in their settlements, both here and at Saybrook, Connecticut, when their plan to establish a hereditary aristocracy in the colonies met disfavor in New England. Consequently, the plantation was sold in 1641 to Massachusetts and again named Dover.

Settlers built fortified log houses called garrisons, inspiring Dover's nickname "The Garrison City." The population and business center shifted from Dover Point to Cochecho Falls on the Cochecho River, where its drop of 34 feet (10 m) providing water power for industry (Cochecho means "the rapid foaming water" in the Abenaki language). What is now downtown Dover settlers called Cochecho village.

Famous Peoples From Dover New Hampshire

Kenneth Appel

Kenneth Ira Appel (October 8, 1932 – April 19, 2013) was an American mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.

Appel was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 8, 1932. He grew up in Queens, New York, and was the son of a Jewish couple, Irwin Appel and Lillian Sender Appel. He worked as an actuary for a brief time and then served in the U.S. Army for two years at Fort Benning, Georgia, and in Baumholder, Germany. In 1959, he finished his doctoral program at the University of Michigan, and he also married Carole S. Stein in Philadelphia. The couple moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Appel worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1959 to 1961. His main work at the Institute for Defense Analyses was doing research in cryptography. Toward the end of his life, in 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He died in Dover, New Hampshire, on April 19, 2013, after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer in October 2012.

Kenneth Appel was also the treasurer of the Strafford County Democratic Committee. He played tennis through his early 50s. He was a lifelong stamp collector, a player of the game of Go and a baker of bread. He and Carole had two sons, Andrew W. Appel, a noted computer scientist, and Peter H. Appel, and a daughter, Laurel F. Appel, who died on March 4, 2013. He was also a member of the Dover school board from 2010 until his death.

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