The Town That Never Was

Great Falls New Hampshire 1877

Do you really know where you live?

That would be a question I would have loved to ask the inhabitants of Somersworth during much of the eighteen hundreds, a time when most actually believed they lived in a town named Great Falls, an erroneous belief.

Spend a day researching the history of Somersworth and you'd be amazed at how many individuals, business's, and trade journals refereed to Somersworth as Great Falls.

We had the Great Falls Manufacturing Company, the Great Falls and Conway Railroad, the Great Falls National Bank, the list could go on and on, but no matter how you cut it Great Falls didn't exist.

The downtown Somersworth you see now isn't the downtown Somersworth prior to 1820. The downtown Somersworth you see now was just a neighborhood on the outskirts of the true Somersworth; a neighborhood nicknamed Great Falls because of its proximity to the waterfalls behind the mill.

Build a mill, employ individuals, and before you know it growth around the epicenter expands.

The blunder first occurred when the post-office was constructed in the Great Falls neighborhood in 1825, the postmaster general mistakenly thinking Great Falls was the name of the town.

For nearly seventy years the place where the compact part of the city of Somersworth is, was called and generally known as Great Falls: nobody ever said they were going to Somersworth. No, they were going to Great Falls; but when it came to changing from town to city government there was a revolt against calling it "City of Great Falls”, because it was Somersworth. The old historic name was restored, and we have city of Somersworth. It was astonishing how quickly the name Great Falls was dropped; it has never been used since 1893. Before that date, probably, half of the inhabitants did not know they lived in Somersworth.