Strafford County: Named for a Phantom Ancestor

Strafford County, created on April twenty-ninth, seventeen sixty-nine, carries a name chosen under a misapprehension that was never corrected. Colonial administrators named it for William Wentworth, the Second Earl of Strafford, believing him to be an ancestor of New Hampshire's royal governor John Wentworth. He was not.

The two were only distantly related, and William Wentworth had no direct descendants at all. The county was organized at Dover in seventeen seventy-one, and Dover remains the county seat today. Dover itself was first settled in sixteen twenty-three, one of New Hampshire's oldest communities, founded by fishermen and traders who knew it first as Hilton's Point.

Its early economy of shipbuilding and fishing gave way to cotton milling in the early nineteenth century. Strafford County spans from the seacoast hills west toward the Cocheco River valley, covering some of the most continuously inhabited ground in New Hampshire.