Indigenous people inhabited the Connecticut River Valley for some 10,000 years. It is believed that for several thousand years they gathered here at the Great Falls on the Connecticut to harvest migrating salmon and shad. Their villages and burial grounds were set out here on the banks of the Connecticut in present-day Vermont and New Hampshire. Bedrock below the Vilas Bridge over the Great Falls retain stone carvings known as petroglyphs that are are believed to have been created by the Abenaki at least 300 years ago.

The Rockingham Meeting House, constructed between 1787 and 1801, is a National Historic Landmark. It is the oldest public building in Vermont that still exists in a condition close to its original state. It served as both a place of worship and the town hall until 1869, and was then abandoned for several decades. In 1906 the building was restored to its present state, one of the earliest historic preservation projects in Vermont, leaving intact its king-post timber framing, finely detailed woodwork, and its “pig pen” box pews.

The meeting house today is owned by the town of Rockingham and is open to the public daily from Memorial Day through Columbus Day, with skilled docents on hand to offer additional information about the architecture and history of the building. The meeting house is also the site of an annual pilgrimage in August, part of the town’s “Old Home Days” celebrations. It’s also available as a venue for weddings, celebrations and funerals,* with seating capacity for up to 200 people.

 The adjacent cemetery, which contains more than 1,000 graves, is a treasure trove of information about the lives and deaths of the town’s early settlers, and includes some of the finest gravestone art found in New England. It continues in use today.

 To learn more about the history of the Rockingham Meeting House, read The Old Meeting House and First Church in Rockingham, Vermont by Lyman S. Hayes and William D. Hayes. Originally published in 1915, the volume was reprinted by the town in 2017 and is available for sale at the Village Square Booksellers.

Rockingham was chartered in 1753 by Benning Wentworth, the Colonial Governor sitting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The first European settlers struggled to establish homesteads in the area during the first half of the 1700s, when the land was still occupied by the native Abenaki.

After the conclusion of the French & Indian War, in 1763, settlement began in earnest. The Rockingham Meeting House, constructed 1789-1801, was erected in roughly the geographic center of the town.

Until about 1825, the now-quiet hamlet near the Meeting House was the principal village of the Town and the Town Offices were located there, along with stores and the Post Office. The settlement surrounded the small hill where the Meeting House was located. A fire in 1909 destroyed the stores and post office in old Rockingham, though the Meeting House was spared.

Rockingham’s current land use pattern of small villages and hamlets, surrounded by rural areas, reflects the layout established in the 1700s by those first settlers. Our Villages (Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Cambridgeport, and Bartonsville) evolved at key transportation points and where water power could be harnessed. Soon they eclipsed the old town center. By the mid 1800s much of the original forest was cleared to make way for farm and grazing land. The 1800s also saw the growth of industry and improvements in technology, power generation, and transportation systems, which significantly enlivened the villages’ economies.

The requirements of manufacturing have changed tremendously since that time. In recent decades Rockingham has invested heavily in creating the infrastructure that now accommodates a thriving modern industrial park along Route 5, north of Bellows Falls.

In the rural areas agricultural fields and pastures are usually found in the valleys—off Pleasant Valley Road, Rockingham Hill Road, Parker Hill Road and Brockways Mill Road, as well as along the Williams and Saxtons Rivers. The unique challenges of farming in Vermont—short growing season, difficult terrain and rocky soils, combined with changing national agricultural and socio-economic patterns, led to a gradual phasing out of many large farms during the 1900s. Nonetheless, recent trends towards diversified and value-added agricultural enterprises, along with a strengthening consumer incentive to buy organic, humanely raised and local, are revitalizing the local agricultural economy.

To read more of the history of Rockingham, consult the two Town History books:
History of the Town of Rockingham 1753-1907, by Lyman Simpson Hayes, published by the Town, 1907.
History of the Town of Rockingham, 1907-1957, by Frances Stockwell Lovell and Everett C. Lovell, published by the Town, 1958.