New Hampshire's Name and the English County Mason Called Home

New Hampshire is named for Hampshire, the English county Captain John Mason had called home, and he picked the name himself in a 1629 land grant. The 1629 grant that names it has been printed in full, so you can read the very line where Mason does it.

The man behind the name

John Mason never lived in New Hampshire. He was getting ready to make the trip in 1635, Charles Wesley Tuttle writes, when he fell ill and died that December. Jeremy Belknap, whose History of New-Hampshire first came out in 1784, says Mason “was a merchant of London, but became a sea-officer,” and later governor of Newfoundland. That’s where he got to know America. Back in England, he joined the Council of Plymouth, the group that handed out land in New England, and became its secretary. He was also, Belknap writes, “governor of Portsmouth in Hampshire.”

That last detail matters, because Hampshire is the county his American land would be named for.

The 1629 grant

The paper that did it is dated November 7, 1629. You can find the whole text in Tuttle’s book on Mason, published by the Prince Society in 1887. It’s a grant from the Council of Plymouth to “Captain John Mason,” for land running sixty miles inland from the Piscataqua and the Merrimack rivers, plus the islands within five leagues of the coast.

Then comes the line that matters here. Those lands, the grant says, “the said Captain John Mason, with the Consent of the President and Council, intends to name New-Hampshire.”

Belknap describes the same patent and says it simply: “This tract of land was called New-Hampshire.”

“His old home”

So why Hampshire? Edwin D. Sanborn, a Dartmouth College professor who wrote a state history in 1875, spells it out. Mason took the territory “which he named New Hampshire, in honor of Hampshire or Hants in England, which had been his old home.” Hants is another name for the same county.

Henry Gannett, who traced place names for the U.S. Geological Survey, agrees in one line. New Hampshire, he says, was “named from the county in England.”

One thing “home” doesn’t mean here is birthplace. Tuttle traced Mason to King’s Lynn, in Norfolk. But he also says Mason lived for years in Portsmouth, England’s chief naval station, and named his grant “out of regard to the favor in which he held Hampshire in England, where he had resided many years.”

A neighbor named Maine

Sanborn adds a twist that ties New Hampshire to its neighbor. Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges had held a big grant together, and they “are said to have divided” it. Gorges took the lands east of the Piscataqua, “which he called Maine,” and Mason kept the territory he named New Hampshire. Notice the “said to have.” Sanborn is passing along what others said, not vouching for the split himself. Belknap wasn’t sure there was a deal at all: “If there was an agreement between them to divide the province of Laconia,” he writes, the 1629 patent is hard to explain.

So the next time you cross into New Hampshire, you’re entering a place named after an English county by a man who had been governor of Portsmouth, one of its towns.

Sources & further reading

• Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire, vol. 1, ed. John Farmer (Dover, 1831), editor’s preface and pp. 3, 4, 8. The editor’s preface says the first volume was “published at Philadelphia, in 1784”; the Council of Plymouth’s charter was “the foundation of all the grants that were made of the country of New-England” (p. 3). Mason “was a merchant of London, but became a sea-officer, and, after the peace, governor of Newfoundland, where he acquired a knowledge of America”; a member and then secretary of the council; “being also governor of Portsmouth in Hampshire” (p. 4). On the patent “under the common seal of the council of Plymouth,” from the middle of the Piscataqua to the Merrimack: “This tract of land was called New-Hampshire” (p. 8).
• Edwin D. Sanborn, History of New Hampshire, from Its First Discovery to the Year 1830 (Manchester, 1875), p. 40. “In 1629 Captain Mason procured a new patent from the Council of Plymouth”; “Mason and Gorges are said to have divided their former grant between themselves; Gorges taking the unoccupied lands east of the Piscataqua, which he called Maine, and Mason holding, under his new patent, the territory recently granted, which he named New Hampshire, in honor of Hampshire or Hants in England, which had been his old home.”
• Charles Wesley Tuttle, Capt. John Mason, the Founder of New Hampshire, ed. John Ward Dean (Boston: Prince Society, 1887), pp. 7–8, 21, 29, 183–186. Mason “was born in King’s Lynn” in “the maritime county of Norfolk” (pp. 7–8); “Mason called it New Hampshire, out of regard to the favor in which he held Hampshire in England, where he had resided many years” (p. 21); he “made every preparation to come to New Hampshire” but died “early in December, 1635” (p. 29). The “Grant of New Hampshire. November 7, 1629” (p. 183), in which the lands are those “the said Captain John Mason, with the Consent of the President and Council, intends to name New-Hampshire” (p. 186; spelling modernized from the long s).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 223. “New Hampshire; State of the Union, named from the county in England.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists New Hampshire’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779794).