A Short History of Hanover

The Bridge at Four Corners

William Barstow was here by 1649, in a rough shelter near the North River close to what is now Four Corners, and he built the first bridge to span the river. He kept it, in the words of the record, in repair sufficient for the transportation of passengers, horses and cattle, until 1668. The historian Jedediah Dwelley called it the first to span an important stream in the Colony. The bridge on Washington Street today is the fourth on that site, and the town has put plaques on both ends of it.

Six Names on One Map

Ask someone where in Hanover they live and you may not get an address. You may get North Hanover, or Four Corners, or West Hanover, or Hanover Center, or South Hanover, or Assinippi. Those are not neighborhoods in the modern sense. They are the settlements the town grew out of, each built around water power or a crossroads: Luddam’s Ford and the dam on the Indian Head River made South Hanover, the Drinkwater River made West Hanover, the Third Herring Brook made Assinippi, and Long Water Brook made North Hanover. Each one had its own district school, its own general store and later its own post office.

Ships, Tacks and Rubber

The shipyards were on the banks of the North River, and the ones at Four Corners became the best known. The ship Grand Turk was built at Thomas Barstow’s Two Oaks yard here. Near the smaller streams, early mills ground corn, sawed lumber and forged iron, and later the same water turned tack factories. At the end of the 1800s the Clapp Rubber Mill and the shoe factories employed many of the men who had been farmers, and in the first part of the 20th century National Fireworks was the largest employer in West Hanover. Hanover sent its men to the Revolution in 1776, and Colonel John Bailey, who served with Washington, is the one the town still names.

2009: The Town Rewrote Its Own Government

Here is the piece of Hanover history that most directly affects you. At the May 2009 Annual Town Meeting the town voted to ask the Legislature for a Town Manager form of government, and the Legislature enacted it as Chapter 67 of the Acts of 2009. The act created the office of Town Manager, gave it the appointment of every non-elected department head, and abolished the town administrator’s post outright once the manager took up the job. It also took the authority of a 1930 special act that had created elected water commissioners and handed that to the manager too, keeping only the water rates with the Select Board. The town has amended the act three times since, at the Town Meetings of 2013, 2018 and 2022.

The trade was deliberate: a professional administrator accountable to a board you do elect. Whether it was the right trade is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because an act adopted by a vote of the town can be amended the same way. Hanover has done it three times already.

The History the Town Keeps Itself

The Hanover Historical Society holds the town’s archives and museum in the Stetson House at 514 Hanover Street, the same address the town gives its own Historical Commission. The commission works on the town’s historic places, and it is one of the bodies that can apply to the Community Preservation Committee for money to restore what it protects. Town Meeting votes those applications one at a time, which means the preservation of Hanover’s history is itself decided in the room where every registered voter can stand up.