Professor Jere Daniell ’55, one of New England’s preeminent historians, tells us that Hanover, home of Dartmouth College, was indeed part of Vermont: not once, but twice. Daniell says that in two different secessions Hanover was one of a number of New Hampshire towns in joining the self-declared state of Vermont. The first secession involved 16 towns along the Connecticut River including Hanover, and lasted several months in the spring and summer of 1778. After Vermont declared its independence in 1777, the residents of those New Hampshire towns opted to remain with their fellow immigrants from Connecticut, who settled in the region in the 1760s. Another factor in the secession, says Daniell, was a dislike for the revolutionary government in New Hampshire. Legislative representation in New Hampshire was based on numbers of residents, and so several towns were grouped together for purposes of representation in the General Court. Vermont, on the other hand, called for representation from each individual town, a structure similar to the government in the settlers’ native Connecticut. The secession fell through and the towns reverted to New Hampshire when Vermont’s leaders, notably Ira and Ethan Allen, grew concerned about the imbalance in representation between the newly expanded eastern side of the state and the western side of the state – where the Allens were based, but which had fewer towns from which representatives to the legislature came.
Daniell tells us that the second secession, in which Hanover was one of more than 50 seceding towns in the fall and winter of 1781-82, came for basically the same reasons as the 1778 secession. In order to attain a balance between representation from the eastern and western sides of the state, Vermont’s leaders annexed a part of New York state, extending south and west to the Hudson River. The effort came to a halt, however, when the leadership of the Continental Congress – in the person of General George Washington – demanded that Vermont’s leadership stop their efforts at expansion if they ever wanted Vermont to be admitted to the union. The towns to the east of the Connecticut River then returned to New Hampshire, establishing the state boundaries that exist today.
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