First settled as a farming community, Hinsdale received its New Hampshire charter in 1753 and was named for Col. Ebenezer Hinsdale, an early resident who had built a fort and gristmill there in 1742. General Arad Hunt originally owned and farmed nearly two-thirds of the township, and after his death in 1825 large tracts of his land went on the market, opening access to land and water for entrepreneurs. The Ashuelot River soon became the basis of Hinsdale Village's growth into one of the busiest manufacturing centers in the Ashuelot watershed. The upper Hinsdale Dam, later called the McGoldrick Dam, and its power canal began operating in 1828, creating a five-acre pond and sending water through a half-mile canal above the descending river. Pliny Merrill's forge and trip-hammer shop became the first industry to use canal power in 1832, and by 1845 a developed network of canals, branch canals, and flumes supplied manufacturing sites, eventually supporting about 25 companies. By 1869, four major waterpower users formed a Canal Company: the F. W. Tilden Iron Foundry, the J. R. Holman Machine Shop, the G. A. Robertson Company, and the Amidon & Sons woolen mills. By 1900 the canal also powered the W.B. Stacy box factory, the Jennings & Griffin chisel shop, and the Granite State Mowing Machine Company, and when that company joined in 1931 the organization became the Hinsdale Canal Company. The Ashuelot River, which falls nearly a thousand feet over forty miles from Washington, N.H., to the Connecticut River, became one of New Hampshire's most heavily industrialized rivers of its size in the 19th century, generating about 3600 horsepower by 1874. That power drove Hinsdale's economy through woolen manufacturing, toolmaking, mowing machine production, box making, iron founding, and machine shop work. Like manufacturing across much of New England, Hinsdale's industries declined in the 1930s as production became cheaper elsewhere, and after mills closed or stopped relying on waterpower, the canals deteriorated. By 1975 part of the McGoldrick Dam's canal system had been filled and other sections were in disrepair, and eventually time, neglect, and the river's force caused a break in the dam. In 1998 the dam was identified as a barrier to fish migration in the Ashuelot River, and with the owner unwilling to maintain it, the dam was removed. McGoldrick became the first dam removed in New Hampshire specifically to benefit migratory fish, marking the start of a deliberate effort to restore the state's rivers through selective dam removal.