Exeter’s Town Seal

by Barbara Rimkunas

This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, June 9, 2017.

Some towns put a great deal of thought into designing their town seal. Often, there is a contest with artists and schoolchildren competing to best exemplify the symbol of their town. If you do an online search of town seals, there’s a dizzying array of art. There are towns that attempt to condense their entire history into one small circle. There are also no-nonsense towns that engraved just the facts: name and date of incorporation. Then there’s Exeter, New Hampshire. Our town seal falls into the latter category with Puritan simplicity – although substituting “founded 1638” instead of “incorporated 1638” to cover for the fact that we’ve never actually incorporated ourselves. To illustrate our town – everything that sums up Exeter, New Hampshire – we have a fish.

Perhaps we were late in the game of creating a town seal. It isn’t until 1930 that any public mention of it was made. In that year, the Exeter News-Letter published a facsimile of the seal with the explanation, “Above is a print of Exeter’s official seal. Several years ago a town seal was needed to complete the requirements in legalizing an issue of Exeter bonds, and Mr. Albert N. Dow, a member of the bond committee, promptly designed and had made a stamping die of the seal as here shown.” No contest was held. There was no input from local schoolchildren or a reckoning from the local historical society. Albert Dow just tossed together a seal to authenticate some bonds and other official documents. It then took “several years” to announce the design to the public. Really? Who was Albert Dow, and how did he rate enough to create our town symbol without any input?

Albert N. Dow wasn’t even born in Exeter – he was from Epping. Let that sink in for a minute. In 1874, when Albert was fourteen, his father moved the family to Exeter and built a fine house at 75 Front Street. Young Albert prepped for a career in forestry, graduating from Tuck High School in 1879 intending to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But an illness kept him from M.I.T.; instead he went to business school and tutored students in French, German and Spanish. His father had made his living in the lumber and real estate industry and Albert followed his path, studying forest practices in France, Germany and Switzerland where his abilities at languages certainly helped him along. On his return to Exeter in the early part of the century, he practiced forest management and, like his father, dabbled in real estate. His obituary, published in 1942, adds this: “Mr. Dow built 15 houses in Exeter and the block on Center Street. He was at one time the owner of the point of Great Boars Head at Hampton Beach, and built the present cement breakwater around the point, on the completion of which, Lewis Nudd, a lifelong resident of Hampton, said, “you have saved Boars Head.’” His service in the New Hampshire Guard raised him to the rank of inspector general and according to his daughter Emily; everyone called him “General.” He served as a trustee of the Robinson Female Seminary and Exeter Hospital. He also found time to be vice-president of both the Union Five Cents Savings Bank and the Exeter Banking Company. On top of all these varied vocations and avocations, he served on town committees and boards. This was a man who packed a lot into his 82 years. Is it any wonder that when something as simple as a town seal was needed, he wasn’t going to wait around for a fancy design? No, better to just get the job done and with all the possibilities for a town symbol, including the fairly new bandstand, he chose the lowly alewife.

Dow wasn’t a fish guy. He was a tree guy. But there was limited space, so even though Exeter’s early industry had been lumber, he didn’t attempt to sketch a noble white pine for the seal. Instead, he picked a fish commonly used for fertilizer or bait. It is possible to eat the alewife – a boney relative of the herring, the natives and early Englishmen who came to Exeter certainly used them for food. Each spring, the alewives swim from the salty Atlantic Ocean into the freshwater of the Exeter River to breed. The dependability of the annual run made the falls at the center of town a stable place for settlement. When dams went up and the alewives fellow fish, salmon and shad, couldn’t make it up the falls, somehow the alewife kept coming. As early as 1795, Exeter resident Samuel Tenney was already complaining, “There was formerly, at the falls in this town, an alewife fishery, which afforded an abundant supply of that kind of fish, for the inhabitants of the town and vicinity. But for want of sluices in the dams, by which they might ascend the fresh river, and gain proper places for spawning, they have for many years, almost disappeared.” Somehow, however, they continued to come up river. By the 1920s, there were still enough for fishermen to pull bushels of them out of the river. The salmon, bass and shad rarely pulled this off, but the boney alewife persisted. As explained in 1930, “salmon and bass were also plentiful in the Squamscott, but owing to the damming of Fresh River, these fish come up no longer, but the alewife still makes its annual appearance in great numbers.” It must have been this stubbornness that attracted Dow. The alewife in Exeter is the very embodiment of New England stick-to-it-ivness. Cranky little fish – you belong on Exeter’s town seal – and now that the final dam has been removed, we welcome you back.

Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Her column appears every other Friday and she may be reached at info@exeterhistory.org.

Image: The earliest version of Exeter’s Town Seal, published in the Exeter News-Letter on March 28, 1930, as designed by Albert Dow.