William Pickering Weeks (1803 - 1870)
Born at Greenland (NH); died at Canaan (NH).
Lawyer, state legislator.
Portrait by U.D. Tenney, 1876.
Presented to the State, 1876.

Weeks (1803 - 1870) was born at Greenland (NH). He attended Gilmanton (NH) Academy and Dartmouth College (Class of 1826), then read law with Hon. W. A. Hayes and C. N. Cogswell at South Berwick (ME). Weeks was admitted to the York County (ME) Bar in 1829, but he moved to Canaan (NH) in November 1829 and made his law career there.

Weeks was a lifelong Democrat. He served as Postmaster at Canaan for many years, and served as a State Representative (1839, 1840, 1852, 1854) and a State Senator (1848, 1849; President of the Senate, 1849).

In 1854 the State Legislature, controlled by the Democrats, refused to take a firm stand on whether the institution of slavery should be banned from new American territories and states. Weeks was deeply opposed to slavery, and he refused to run for another term in the House of Representatives. He retired from his law practice in 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, and hanged himself from a beam in his barn on January 18, 1870. William A. Wallace, author of the 1910 History of Canaan, tells us (Ibid., p. 331) that Weeks was "a social and genial man and a good story-teller."

Reference: William A. Wallace, The History of Canaan, New Hampshire (1910); Charles H. Bell, The Bench and Bar of New Hampshire (1894).