Bellows Falls, a village within the Town of Rockingham, has long served as a river and overland crossroads for commerce and travel by foot, stagecoach, riverboat, train, truck, and automobile. Built with wood, brick, iron, steel, and stone, it preserves a rich legacy of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings that reflect generations of work and aspiration. America’s first canal was dug here and later used to generate electricity, while many buildings still serve their original function and architectural styles such as Greek Revival, Queen Anne, French Second Empire, and Colonial Revival reveal the community’s changing prosperity. The downtown historic district, known as the Square, stands beside the historic canal and includes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings with shops, galleries, restaurants, a barrel-roofed Worcester diner, and a Colonial Revival town hall with theater. The Bellows Falls Neighborhood Historic District contains many restored homes with varied historic styles and front porches. At the Connecticut River falls and gorge, Native American tribes gathered before European settlement to harvest shad and Atlantic salmon, and in 1785 the first bridge spanning the Connecticut River in Vermont was built across the gorge. Native American petroglyphs, possibly 300 to 2,000 years old, remain as a sacred legacy of indigenous communities. Constructed between 1791 and 1802, the Bellows Falls Canal was among the first in America and helped the town grow by providing power for many mills. Its waters were later diverted into sluiceways, and by 1898 canal water was generating electricity; a fish ladder completed in 1982 helped reintroduce salmon to the upper Connecticut River for the first time since the river was first dammed for the canal in the 1790s. The Rockingham Meeting House, erected in 1787 on high ground at the geographic center of the town, served as an important center for religious and civil affairs throughout the 1800s.