Windham, New Hampshire

Windham's founders were Scots-Irish Presbyterians who arrived in seventeen nineteen as part of the Nutfield Settlement, a cluster of immigrant families that also gave rise to Londonderry and Derry. They came fleeing religious constraints in Ulster and brought with them the cultivation of flax and the skills of linen weaving.

By seventeen forty-one, a portion of that original settlement petitioned Governor Benning Wentworth for a separate charter. He granted it, and the Town of Windham was incorporated across twenty-seven square miles. The name likely honors either Windham in Ireland, nodding to the settlers' homeland, or Sir Charles Wyndham, a member of Parliament and friend of the governor. Either way, the Scots-Irish roots ran deep: this community's formal history has been documented as, simply, a Scotch settlement.