Rockingham, Vermont

Rockingham, Vermont was chartered in seventeen fifty-two and named for the Marquess of Rockingham, the British prime minister who pushed for repeal of the Stamp Act, making him briefly popular in the colonies. The town encompasses the village of Bellows Falls, the most commercially significant of its several villages, where a natural falls on the Connecticut River drew canal engineers as early as seventeen ninety-one. The Bellows Falls Canal, completed in eighteen oh two, was among the first canals built in the United States, predating the Erie Canal by two decades.

It let boats bypass the falls and opened the upper Connecticut River to trade. The old canal walls are still visible in the riverbed near downtown Bellows Falls, stone channels cut by hand in a era when the waterway was the highway and Vermont's isolation was the central problem of commerce.