Plymouth: First Teacher's College in New Hampshire

Plymouth sits where the Baker River meets the Pemigewasset, granted in seventeen sixty-three. The Abenaki had a village here before Captain Thomas Baker burned it in seventeen twelve during one of the colonial frontier wars, and the town's river still carries his name.

Plymouth's lasting contribution to New Hampshire was educational. In eighteen seventy-one the state opened the Plymouth Normal School here, the state's first teachers' college. It passed through several incarnations over the following century and became Plymouth State University in two thousand three. That thread of teacher preparation has run continuously through Plymouth for more than one hundred fifty years, making this Grafton County town disproportionately influential on public education across the state.