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By DAVID R. PROPER

Keene’s 250th anniversary is actually more of a “confirmation” than a birthday rite.

This community’s conception may be said to have occurred April 20, 1733, when the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony approved legislation opening certain “ungranted lands” to settlement, including a tract on the Ashuelot River above Northfield, Mass.

Or, perhaps inception took place June 26, 1734, when prospective settlers, or “proprietors,” met at a Concord, Mass., tavern to post bonds of five pounds each and draw lots for property rights as surveyed and mapped by Bay Colony engineers the previous fall.

“Labor pains” of the new settlement must have been felt on June 27, 1734, at Ephraim Jones’ tavern in Concord, when the “proprietors” met to organize themselves into a community.

The first town meeting held in Keene opened briefly on Sept. 18, 1734. None of the initial six “citizens” present had visited the place, and had to be guided through the wilderness above Northfield by Ebenezer Alexander.

As soon as the party reached the township late in the evening, they opened their meeting and immediately adjourned to the next day. It was probably one of the shortest municipal assemblies on record.

Upper Ashuelot, as the settlement soon came to be known, was at the extreme northern point of the frontier in the Connecticut Valley; the nearest neighboring community was Northfield, 20 miles away. New Hampshire settlements to the east were almost beyond communication, nor did New Hampshire authorities acknowledge their western neighbors for many years.

Settlers of Upper Ashuelot were almost all Massachusetts people, who supposed they were coming into another part of their mother colony. Upon permanent settlement in 1736, they established governmental functions, took action with regard to highways and the width of their principal street, built a fort, established a church and cemetery, and offered inducements to attract a gristmill and blacksmith to their village.

They had erected a meetinghouse and hired a minister by 1740, when they voted “to make such grant or grants of land to such person or persons as they shall think deserve the same for hazarding their lives and estates by living here to bring forward the settling of the place.”

In 1740, a royal decree from London settled the disputed New Hampshire-Massachusetts boundary and created New Hampshire as an independent province with Benning Wentworth as governor.

The fact that Upper Ashuelot was New Hampshire territory came as a shock. The disgruntled inhabitants addressed a humble petition to the king, asking that their town be included within the borders of Massachusetts, but to no avail.

They need not have feared a new authority, as it was several years before New Hampshire paid any attention, official or otherwise, to the Connecticut River settlements under its jurisdiction.

Before application to Portsmouth to legitimize their land titles and the town’s validity could be made, Upper Ashuelot suffered the agony of frontier warfare, climaxed by an attack on their fort in 1746, the death and captivity of several citizens and evacuation of the settlement altogether.

When inhabitants were able to return about 1750, they resumed contact with Portsmouth, seeking legal recognition as a chartered township. Their efforts were finally successful on April 11, 1753.  That’s the date being observed this month.

In granting a charter, Gov. Wentworth reserved the right to name the settlement. The name Keene was chosen out of gratitude to and admiration for Sir Benjamin Keene who, when British minister to Spain, had used his influence, although unsuccessfully, to help Wentworth obtain payment for timber shipped to Cadiz.

Wentworth also renamed numerous other communities to which he granted charters before he was replaced as royal governor in 1766.

Among provisions of the charter was permission to open a weekly market when the settlement numbered 50 families. The settlers were required to cultivate at least 5 acres within five years and to continue the clearing and improvement of the place, but the crown reserved the pine trees for royal naval masts on penalty of loss of the grant.

A rental fee of one ear of Indian corn for 10 years and after that one shilling for every 100 acres was levied on the settlers. Besides land for himself, Wentworth set aside land for support of the minister and the English church as glebe land.

The original document, carefully preserved for 250 years by town and city, remains if not Keene’s “birth certificate,” certainly the community’s validation and proof of maturity.

David R. Proper is a member of the Historical Society of Cheshire County. His column on Monadnock Region history appears every Tuesday in The Sentinel.

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