W/nieficld.
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��several musty doeuments relating to the early affairs of the town, of dates from 1774 to 1802, and in most cases the name is spelled without the plural ending. One of these is a deed from one Stephen Cogan, conveying the " right of huid in townslii[) of White- Jield, so called, being the same I pur- chased of Timothy Nash." This Nash was one of the original gran- tees, only two of whom ever resided in the vicinity ; he settled about 1764 upon the Connecticut, in the present town of Lunenburg, and doubtless knew that the land he was granted, and which he was reconveying, lay in Whitetield without an s.
There were then, we believe, but three towns in all New Hampshire whose titles were not sugiyested by the parties interested, either from the names of older places, or in memory or in honor of individuals or families. Nor is Whitefield the only one that lias borne a miss-spelled title or misinter- pretation. Bretton Woods, now Car- roll, on our southern border, was originally granted to Sir Thos. Went- worth, Bart., and others. The coun- try seat of Sir Thomas was known as "Bretton llall," at Bretton, P:ng- land. Gov. Wentworth designed to name this new wild grant after the English counti'V home of his kinsman, and so called it " Bretton Woods;" but a careless clerk dotted the e, and Britton Woods it became.
" Lloyd Hills," now Bethlehem, is spelled in Willey's Early History of the White Mountains" Lord's Hill, and it was thus known by the first settlers, which may have suggested the present title. The suggestion for the original name of the grant was clearly this. About twenty thousand
��acres of the township were patented to one Joseph Loring, whose wife was a daughter of Rev. Henry Lloyd, at one time a contractor for the royal ^ army. They followed Gov. Went- worth into exile in 177G, being both firm supporters of the King's cause, and were accordingly prosd\-il)ed and banished by the act of 1788. Lloyd died in London in 179G, and Loring in 1789, al«o in fCngland.
The Lorings had one son born to them, in Dorchester, Mass., who took the name of John Wentworth Loring, by the pleasure of the provincial gov- ernor of New Hampshire, and this young scion of the house of Loring would have been the heir presumptive to his father's Lloyd Hills estate had it not been forfeited by acts of dis- loyalty. Thus did Gov. Wentworth think to perpetuate the name of iiis friend l)y a grant of a township to the family, and by the attachment of the family name to the township.
The addition of the plural s to Whitefield was no stranger error than has occurred in that of the spelling of sevei'al otlier towns. The petitioners for those grants, as is well known, were not well versed in orthography, especially of proper nouns, and fre- quently wrote their own individual names with amazing incorrectness. Swansey, in its early records, was sometimes written with an s, and at other times with a 2, when in fact it was named for that old Welsh town Swansea — a greater error by far than an s to Whitefield. Stewartstown was granted to John Stuart and oth- ers of London, and was named Stuarttown, an obvious derivation ; it was first incorporated Stuart, but afterwards changed to its present ren-
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