Littleton: Named for a Surveyor of the King's Woods

Littleton sits on the Ammonoosuc River, which falls steeply through the town and made it a natural mill site. The territory was first chartered as Chiswick in seventeen sixty-four, then passed through several names before being incorporated as Littleton in seventeen eighty-four, named for Colonel Moses Little, who held the royal post of Surveyor of the King's Woods.

The river powered mills of several kinds, including a grist mill that opened in seventeen ninety-eight and still stands. By the late eighteen hundreds Littleton had become a small but complete mill town in the White Mountains, surrounded by some of the most rugged scenery in the Northeast. Today it is better known as a gateway to Franconia Notch than for its industrial past.