Londonderry: The Scotch-Irish Planted the First Potato

Londonderry was settled in April seventeen nineteen by a group of Presbyterian families who had sailed from northern Ireland. They were Scots by ancestry but Irish by circumstance, driven out by rising rents, Anglican suppression of their faith, and laws barring Presbyterians from public office. Their minister led them to a tract of wilderness they called Nutfield.

Local tradition holds that they planted the first potato crops in North America here. In seventeen twenty-two the settlement was chartered as Londonderry, named for the city they had left in Ulster. It became the capital of Scotch-Irish culture in New England and a gateway for thousands more settlers flooding into the region. Eventually Derry split off from Londonderry in eighteen twenty-seven, but both towns still carry the echo of that transatlantic crossing.