Compiled by Russell Bastedo
State Curator
1998

Samuel W. Hale (1883-85). Born Fitchburg (MA); Keene manufacturer. In state politics from 1866.

Samuel Hale (1823-1891) attended district school and then the academy in Fitchburg, then joined his brother in trade in Dublin (NH). He married in Dublin (1850), and in 1859 moved to Keene, where he at first manufactured chairs, then shoe pegs, furniture, and woolens. He was a leading force in the building of the Manchester & Keene Railroad, and was a director of two Keene banks. He worked to organize a congregation, and then to build the Second Congregational Church. He was a Master Mason.

Hale cast his first political vote for a Free Soil candidate, and he joined the new Republican Party when the Free Soil, Whig, Know-Nothing, and Anti-Slavery Democrat parties joined together to form the Republican Party. He was elected twice to the state legislature (1866, 1867) and to the Governor's Council (1869, 1870). He was a delegate to the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, and in 1882 he won a bruising fight with Moody Currier for the NH Republican gubernatorial nomination. Hale then defeated his Democrat and Greenback Party opponents.

During Governor Hale's administration the 1883 state legislature chose railroad magnate and financier Austin Pike to succeed U.S. Senator Edward H. Rollins, after consideration of fifty-two candidates and forty-three ballots. Pike was a principal figure in the railroads' efforts to consolidate service and eliminate competition in New Hampshire; during the legislative term the legislature passed the Colby Act (which reduced the obstacles to consolidation), and another act that established that the legislature would choose members of the Railroad Commission which oversaw the railroads. Hale cast a veto against the latter act, but approved a revised version; he also approved the Colby Act after considerable review.

Location: State House, Second Floor
Portrait by U.D. Tenney, 1885; Presented by Gov. Hale