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TOPOGRAPHICAL PREFACE.    45

TOPOGRAPHICAL PREFACE.

In this portion of our work, we have intended to give as minute
and accurate descriptions of all the towns and cities in the State
of New-Hampshire, as our limited space would permit. Business,
in a manufacturing country like ours, is constantly changing.
New firms are being established, buildings are being burned down,
and new ones erected, continually—consequently there may be some
errors that cannot be avoided.

Perhaps the readers may find passages that will be of no interest
to them: hut fifty or one hundred years hence, it may be of vast
importance to those living at that date. Many portions of Dr.
Belknap’s History of New-Hampshire, are far more valuable to the
inhabitants of to-day, than to the people who lived in the day of
his writing. A country like ours, in its embryo state, is making
history for the future, every day.

But in the main, it is written for the general benefit of the peo-
ple living in the State in this generation, to develop the resources
of the various sections of the State, ignorance of which, has had a
tendency to deplete our population and injure the State. Massa-
chusetts counts her various histories by the hundred volumes,
while New-Hampshire, with a life as long, within three years,
has less than ten.

We have personally visited all the cities and large towns in the
State and learned their present standing and business, while, as to
the smaller ones, we have co-operated with some of the officers of
the town, to give us the general information required. The Town
Clerks in eight or ten small towns have refused or neglected to
answer our inquiries, after being written to two or three times. In
these few cases we have had the manuscript of the census of 1870,