In 1675, John Johnson received a tavern keeper's license and lived and ran a tavern at the junction of the roads from Portsmouth, Exeter, and Hampton, at today's 480 Portsmouth Avenue, becoming the first of many licensed on the site. The building later housed Greenland's first post office, established in 1820, when tavern owner Nahaniel Marshall became the town's first postmaster. In 1824, Marquis de Lafayette stopped at the tavern during a tour of New England. A road built between Newburyport and Portsmouth and named after Lafayette later diverted traffic from Greenland and made the tavern unprofitable. Greenland was one of the earliest settlements in New Hampshire and was originally a parish of Portsmouth, then called Strawbery Banke. In 1640, Captain Francis Champernowne moved from Strawbery Banke and settled near present-day Portsmouth Country Club, about 1.3 miles north, naming his farm Greenland. His extensive lands included many farms, one of which is now the town of Mudbury, named for Champernowne's ancestral home in Devon, England. Residents of Greenland were granted a separate parish in 1706, the town was incorporated in 1721, and it annexed parts of Stratham in 1805 and 1847.