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is a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 7,776 at the 2000 census, with an estimated population of 9,081 in 2007. Its rapid growth is largely due to the fact that it is close to two important New Hampshire cities, Manchester and Concord.
Starting as a 1735 grant by Massachusetts Colonial Governor Jonathan Belcher to soldiers in the Canadian wars, this town was named "Beverly-Canada", for the soldiers' hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. It then went through the names "Halestown", "Robiestown", and "Wearestown". In 1764, it was incorporated by Governor Benning Wentworth as "Weare", in honor of Meshech Weare, who served as the town's first clerk.
In 1834, Moses Cartland founded "Clinton Grove Academy", the first Quaker seminary in the state. A cousin of John Greenleaf Whittier, Cartland named the village where the school was located "Clinton Grove", in honor of Dewitt Clinton, chief sponsor of the Erie Canal. The original academy served as a private high school. The complex, which included a classroom building, boarding house, barn and sheds, burned in 1872. Classes were then held in the Quaker meetinghouse across the common until 1874, when a new building was completed. It would serve as the Weare school district from 1877 to 1938.
On September 21, 1938, following several days of heavy rain, a hurricane moving up from the West Indies passed through the center of New England. The additional heavy rains from the hurricane caused the failure of the Deering Reservoir dam, which produced a wall of water that rushed down to the Weare Reservoir dam. Although the dam held, the rushing water broke through the land at the side of the dam, releasing millions of gallons of water in the reservoir. The raging river, completely out of control, washed away everything in its path, leaving parts of Weare devastated. Many active mills were destroyed in the disaster.
In response to the disaster and seasonal flooding, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the long Everett Dam, as part of the Hopkinton-Everett Flood Control Project, which had been authorized by Congress to prevent a recurrence of the devastating floods. The overall project was completed in 1963 at a total cost of $21,400,000. The dam required the village of East Weare to be permanently abandoned, and formed Everett Lake.
In 2005, the town was proposed as the site of the Lost Liberty Hotel, currently a farmhouse owned by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter. The effort to seize Souter's property for the project, in retaliation for a June, 2005 court ruling he supported concerning eminent domain, received international media coverage. However, at the February 4, 2006 deliberative session of the town meeting, a warrant article that would have empowered town officials to take the property was amended by residents in a way that made the March 14, 2006 ballot measure moot. Irrespective of the town warrant vote in March, the seizure for the proposed hotel will not happen.