Compiled by Russell Bastedo
State Curator
1998

Governor John Page (1839, 1840, 1841). Page (1787-1865) was born at Haverhill (NH). He quite school at age fifteen (1802) to help his father free the farm from debt.

In 1812 Page built a house on the family farm and married (Hannah Merrill). He served six months' duty (1812-1813) as a lieutenant on the American frontier, at Stewartstown (NH), during the War of 1812, then returned to Haverhill. In 1815 Page was elected a selectman (the first of fourteen consecutive terms), and he was federal tax assessor for the district.

Throughout the 1820s and 1830s Page held a variety of local and state offices, including State Representative (1818-1820, 1835) and Register of Deeds for Grafton County (1827, 1829-1835). Page was a Jackson Democrat, the Democrats controlled state politics, and when U.S. Senator Isaac Hill resigned his U.S. Senate seat in 1835 to run for governor Page campaigned to fill out the year remaining in Hill's term. Page, a member of the Executive Council (1835, 1838), defeated Franklin Pierce on the fifth ballot, and went to Washington. [A year later Pierce defeated Page for a full term in the U.S. Senate. Pierce was a U.S. Senator 1837-1842.]

In 1838 Page was once again a member of the Executive Council, and he campaigned for governor. He won and served three consecutive terms in office. Governor Page supported and secured funds for the first geological survey to be made of the state. He supported an independent U.S. Treasury. He secured funding for the state's blind population, and he helped resolve (in the 1841 Webster-Ashburton Treaty) a serious boundary dispute between Canada and northern Maine. In later years Page supported construction of the Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroad, and he was a founder of the Republican Party in New Hampshire.

Location: State House, Second Floor, Corridor, West Face, Beginning at Room 208
Portrait by A. Tenney, after original by A. Slafter; Presented by a descendent (1873)