MarlowHistoricalSociety.org

[Loisanne Foster]

We had determined that our town's Original Proprietors, to whom the town had been granted by N.H. Governor Benning Wentworth, were men of means, mainly from Lyme, CT and the surrounding towns. We know that only three of them came here to live, Nehemiah Royce, Samuel Gustin, and one other, although, no doubt, several came to view the land they had been granted.

Bob Nichols, who has been researching these original Grantees, has learned that not all of them were from Connecticut. Several are from New Hampshire. For instance, Richard Wiberd, a member of the N.H. Governor's Council of the time, signed on to fourteen different townships, including Marlow. Theodore Atkinson, whose name is affixed the the end as witness and who claims 500 acres of Marlow as his, was a N.H. official. A number of the Connecticut men, such as a Captain Seldon, were members of the Connecticut Legislature, Nichols has learned. It's clear that being included in the Marlow Grant was a political favor and that these men never intended to leave their comfortable circumstances for the New Hampshire frontier. Within the next several years, nearly all of them sold their Marlow holdings to wealthy merchants, mostly from the Lyme, Connecticut area. As they say, the rest is history.