Dover’s public library has been quite proactive in developing an online presentation of the city’s historical profiles and images. I’ve found those resources to be very useful for fast checks when drafting these posts and related material, for certain.

Its dark-hued historical room upstairs is a treasure chest of local lore, as I discovered decades ago chancing upon Dover’s Quaker family records serialized in the fat volumes of the New Hampshire Genealogical Record, 1903-1909. They’ve since been keyboarded and made available online, if you Google, though I’m still relying on my photocopies.

In time, as a library cardholder, I even had online access to U.S. Census records from home in the wee hours. What a privilege!

If it weren’t for the Covid restrictions and my relocation to far eastern Maine, I’d like still be digging around on the top floor there. I certainly encourage others to do so.

 

The home Isaac Wendell built by 1827 sits across Central Avenue from the Quaker meetinghouse.

I often parked next to it on the side street and admired the bird boxes and woodworking details on the ample barn and house additions.

He’s most noted as the cofounder with John Williams of the Dover Cotton Factory, the forerunner of the big mills downtown, but of interest to my story, he had married Anna Whittier, a close cousin of the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

We can assume Greenleaf was a welcome guest there on his many visits to Dover.

Let me add, the relatively humane working conditions in the mills deteriorated drastically after Williams and Wendell lost control to new investors, leading to the first labor strike by women in America in 1828.

Wendell also shows up in the founding of the Sawyer Mills, which I discussed a week ago, as well as a foundry.

The town’s textile mills don’t get a lot of attention in my book Quaking Dover, in part because I haven’t found a lot of interaction between the emerging industry and the town’s Friends. Indeed, the Quaker Meeting was seriously aging about the same time the thriving mills transformed the town into an industrial power.

Dover’s conventional histories, on the other hand, have good reason to focus on the big brick mills along the Cochecho River, world famous for the quality of their calico and their stunning print designs and execution.

You might be surprised to learn, though, that they were in operation much earlier than the legendary cotton mills at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the mighty Merrimac River.

Largely overlooked, as one Friend reminds me, are the woolen mills on the Bellamy River south of Dover’s downtown and only a few blocks from the Quaker meetinghouse. These operated from 1824 to 1899 and were often innovative, employing up to 600 workers before being sold and continuing till 1954.

They were renowned especially for their flannel and were, at stretch, the largest woolen mills in the Granite State.

Today the mills and their historic housing have emerged as a charming residential district.

While there were some Sawyers in the Meeting, I’ve not yet found any connection to those owning the mills.

Based on the naming of some of their children, those were apparently Methodist.

Statehood for New Hampshire was accompanied by growth in the Merrimac Valley and western side of the state, including Quaker Meetings.

Weare, especially, became a Friends center, with two large meetinghouses in town and another in neighboring Henniker. There was also the Clinton Grove academy.

Much of that growth, however, came from Massachusetts, not Dover, and so it fell outside the focus of my Quaking Dover story. They were even in a different Quarterly Meeting than the one encompassing the communities emanating from Dover.

Just in case anyone was wondering.