Hanover was chartered by Governor
Benning Wentworth on July 4, 1761, and in 1765–1766 its first European inhabitants arrived, the majority from
Connecticut. Although the surface is uneven, the town developed into an agricultural community. Dartmouth College was established in 1769 beside the
town common at a village called "the Plain"—an extensive and level tract of land a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the
Connecticut River, and about above it. At one point in its history, the southwest corner of Hanover, site of "The Plain", was known as "Dresden", which in the 1780s joined other disgruntled
New Hampshire towns along the Connecticut River that briefly defected to what was then the independent
Vermont Republic. After various political posturings, however, the towns returned to New Hampshire at the heated insistence of
George Washington. One remnant of this era is that the name "Dresden" is still used in the
Dresden School District, an
interstate school district serving both Hanover and
Norwich, Vermont—the first and one of the few interstate school districts in the nation. The film
Winter Carnival (1939) was shot in Hanover.
Etymology "Hannover" (with a double n, as it was spelled in the 1761 charter and in its German original form as well) was named either after a local parish in
Sprague, Connecticut, or after the German
House of Hanover (which originated in 1635 as a
cadet branch of the House of
Brunswick-Lüneburg when
George, Duke of Brunswick moved to the city of
Hannover) in honor of the reigning British-Hanoverian king,
George III. Today, the original Hannover is the capital and largest city of
Lower Saxony, the second-largest state in
Germany. The name of the German city is thought to derive from the
Low German form of what is "" in German, which translates into "high shore" in English, and describes the high shore of the
Leine river at the site, and at the time, of the first known settlement (near today's street ). While it is likely that the name "Dresden" derived from
Dresden in Germany, it has also been suggested that it could derive directly from the old
Sorbian word
drezg ("forest") or ''Drezd'ane'', for an inhabitant of a forest. ==Geography==