These Puritans were not the kind of men, with their selfish views, best calculated to extend civilization; they received with disfavor and imprecations the hardy Irish Presbyterians who arrived in Boston in 1736. These Englishmen always treated the emigrants from Ireland in a way calculated to discourage further Irish emigration, but this did not deter these hardy men, who, however, found the inhospitable and cold interior preferable to the section where the influence of Puritanism had established itself and left the darkest record of intolerance to be found in the history of this country.
Irish in considerable numbers had landed eighteen years before, but the continuing antipathy, which had ever existed in these English Puritans against the “Wild Irishmen,” as they termed them, were renewed on the arrival of the men in 1736 who were destined to bring civilization into New Hampshire.
In the summer of 1718 five ships, with a hundred or more emigrant families, came over from Ireland to Boston; some of them found their way to Worcester and thence to Palmer, Pelham, Coleraine and other towns in Massachusetts; a large number, under the lead of the Rev. John Morehead, founded the Federal Street Church in Boston, and one ship with some twenty families, sailing for the Merrimac late in the autumn, was driven into Casco Bay, and was frozen in for the winter at the place, which soon afterwards became the town of Portland; their provisions giving out, they suffered some hardships, but found relief among the inhabitants there.
A few families settled in that vicinity; the rest, in the spring of 1719, sailed up the Merrimac to Haverhill, and thence proceeded to that high and beautiful region of country that was called Nutfield, because it abounded in nuts; and there they determined to locate their grant of twelve miles square of land.
This grant had been made by Gov. Samuel Shute, then governor of both provinces, upon a petition signed in Ireland, March 26, 1718, by 217 persons, all but seven signing “in a fair, legible hand,” before they set out on their voyage. These sixteen first settlers and their families that had thus arrived, on the 22d day of April, 1719, had come over in company with their pastor, the Rev. James McGregor, most of them from his parish of Aghadowey, six miles south of Coleraine in the County of Londonderry, Ireland. Among them were Samuel Allison, James Gregg, James McKean, John Mitchell, John Morrison, Thomas Steele and John Stuart. They were soon joined by a large number of their compatriots, the lands were divided out to a long list of grantees, and in 1722 the town was incorporated by New Hampshire authority by the name of Londonderry.
In 1736, seventeen years later, another ship, with emigrants from Ireland, landed at Boston. These families passed the winter at Lexington, and in the next summer settled at Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and other towns in that vicinity. Among them were the names Cunningham, Ferguson, McNee, Little, Robbe, Scott, Smith, Stuart, Swan, White and Wilson.
From these two colonies southern New Hampshire was first settled.
At the time when Londonderry, New Hampshire, was founded, descendants of the English Puritans from Massachusetts had settled along the Merrimac River as far north as the old town of Dunstable. Bitter jealousies existed between the two sorts of people. At first it was said the Puritans hardly knew what to make of the newcomers; they called them the “Wild Irish.” When they started up the Merrimac in boats, and one boat was upset in the rapids, a Puritan poet wrote:
“They soon began to scream and bawl,
As out they tumbled one and all,