In 1850, about 100 years after Sanbornton was settled, a group of citizens petitioned to form a new town, and after a special town meeting in 1869 and approval by the voters and the governor of N.H., the town of Tilton was formed and named for Charles E. Tilton, its most famous, wealthiest, and generously giving citizen. Although incorporated in 1869, it had long been a thriving village, and an 1814 map of the place, then called Sanbornton Bridge, showed a hotel, nearly twenty homes, three stores, a doctor, a lawyer, and a dozen small mills and craftsmen's shops. Tilton contains many historic sites, including downtown Tilton, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and features eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture such as ornate commercial Victorian buildings, a Gothic Revival church, a Victorian hardware store, and nineteenth-century statuary. At the east end of downtown in the Winnipesaukee River, Island Park was created by Charles Tilton in 1865, once held a Victorian summerhouse and many pieces of nineteenth century statuary, and still retains the cast iron footbridge erected in 1881, a fine example of the rarely used Truesdell truss.