New Hampshire has a habit of getting lost in the American Revolution. Ask most people to picture the war's opening act and they will see Massachusetts: the lanterns in the Old North Church, the shot heard round the world, the bloody slope of Bunker Hill. The Granite State, in that telling, is a footnote — a place the action passed through on its way somewhere more famous.
Mary Adams would like to correct the record. Adams, a staff member at the New Hampshire Historical Society, brings her program "Redcoats & Rebels: New Hampshire and the American Revolution" to the Gordon-Nash Library at 69 Main Street in New Hampton on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. The talk is presented by the New Hampton Historical Society, made possible by New Hampshire Humanities, and is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
The program arrives at an apt moment. The country is in the middle of its semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of the Revolution — and New Hampshire's own contributions are getting a fresh look. Adams has described the talk as a way to kick off those commemorations by exploring what the state actually did, which turns out to be a great deal more than most residents realize.
Start with the ride everyone thinks they know. Paul Revere's most famous gallop was in April 1775, but his first ride came five months earlier, in December 1774, and it went north to Portsmouth. Revere carried word that the British intended to reinforce Fort William and Mary, the small fort guarding Portsmouth Harbor, and that its stores of gunpowder might be moved out of reach. As the Exeter Historical Society has recounted, Revere rode into Portsmouth on December 13, delivered his warning, and rode back to Boston.
What happened next was, by any measure, an act of war against the Crown. On December 14, 1774, patriots rallied in Portsmouth and several hundred men — the Exeter historian Barbara Rimkunas puts the crowd at roughly 400 — boarded boats, picked up more men from New Castle, and descended on the fort. Its garrison was tiny, about six men under Captain John Cochran, who fired warning shots and refused to surrender. Against those numbers the outcome was never in doubt. Around 100 barrels of gunpowder were hauled out and rowed away. A second raid the following day, December 15, stripped the fort of its cannon and other military stores. That was more than four months before the fighting at Lexington and Concord.
Then there is Bunker Hill. The battle of June 17, 1775, is remembered as a Massachusetts fight, but Adams's program points out that two-thirds of the troops engaged there were from New Hampshire, many of them serving under John Stark, the state's best-known revolutionary commander. New Hampshire men were also in the thick of it at Bennington, and the state's shipyards made it one of the young country's leading centers of shipbuilding.
Perhaps the most striking claim in the program concerns not a battle but a document. In January 1776, New Hampshire's Provincial Congress adopted a constitution — generally recognized as the first written constitution adopted by an American colony — that made no mention of royal authority at all. In effect, New Hampshire declared itself independent of Great Britain six months before the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. The anniversary of that document falls in 2026, the same year as the national semiquincentennial, which gives the New Hampton talk a particular timeliness.
Adams is well suited to tell the story. She has spent her career surrounded by history — as a tour guide in San Francisco, Boston, and, by her own account her favorite, Glacier National Park, and as an interpreter for the National Park Service. At the New Hampshire Historical Society she has developed a range of adult and children's programs, including the popular 603 History Hunts, statewide scavenger hunts staged in 2023 and again in 2026, and she presented the Society's Granite State Stories programs in 2023 and 2024. She also narrates many of the Society's video productions. Beyond the Society, she serves as operations manager for Pursuit of History Weekends, which coordinates curated experiences meant to draw the public deeper into the past. Participants in her Humanities to Go programs have put it simply: "Mary knows her subject and makes it come to life."
The setting is fitting as well. The Gordon-Nash Library has stood in the village center on the south side of Main Street, opposite the New Hampton School, since 1895, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. It is the regular home of the New Hampton Historical Society, which was established in 1945 and mounts about eight monthly programs a year between September and June, drawing on collections that document the town's one-room schools, its farms and industries, its Grange, and the New Hampton School.
Adams's program is one of several she has given around the state; earlier versions have appeared on the New Hampshire Historical Society's own lecture calendar. But the New Hampton appearance is free, requires no registration, and comes with refreshments — an easy Tuesday evening out for anyone curious about the war that, as the program argues, New Hampshire helped start earlier and shape more than its neighbors to the south usually get credit for. More information is available at newhamptonhistory.org.