Canterbury, New Hampshire

Canterbury was granted in seventeen twenty-seven and named for the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, by Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth. The town incorporated in seventeen forty-one, built around timber and farming on Pennacook trading ground.

Then, in seventeen eighty-two, Shaker missionaries arrived from the Mount Lebanon community in New York. Local families, the Whitchers, Wiggins, and Sanborns, converted and donated land. By seventeen ninety-two Canterbury Shaker Village was formally gathered as the seventh Shaker community in America. At its peak in the eighteen fifties it held three hundred souls in one hundred buildings across four thousand acres. The last practicing Shaker living there died in nineteen ninety-two, exactly two hundred years after the village was founded.