Warner, New Hampshire: Five Names Before It Stuck

The town of Warner, about nineteen miles northwest of Concord, went by five different names before anyone decided to keep one. Massachusetts Governor Jonathan Belcher granted the land in seventeen thirty-five to petitioners from Amesbury, Massachusetts, and they called it New Amesbury. The Masonian Proprietors regranted it in seventeen forty-nine under the name Jennesstown. Settlers came, built a sawmill, then abandoned everything when the French and Indian War swept through.

After the war the place was resettled and called Waterloo, then Ryetown. When the New Hampshire legislature finally incorporated the town on September third, seventeen seventy-four, it chose to honor Jonathan Warner, a Portsmouth merchant and member of the Royal Council closely allied with Governor John Wentworth. The name stuck. Today Warner is a small working town of about three thousand, best known for its annual Fall Foliage Festival.