Joseph Blanchard

Who was Joseph Blanchard?

Joseph Blanchard was born in Dunstable, New Hampshire on February 11, 1704 to Capt. Joseph Blanchard and his wife Abiah Hassell. In 1724 he joined the New Hampshire Militia as a lieutenant and served in Capt. Eleazer Tyng's Company. On September 26, 1728 he married Rebecca Hubbard of Groton, Massachusetts. They would have 12 children, including Jonathan Blanchard, a New Hampshire delegate to the Congress of the Confederation in 1784.

Joseph Blanchard would serve as town selectman, a surveyor for the state of New Hampshire, Counsellor of the State by mandamus from the Crown, and Judge of the Superior Court of New Hampshire. At the start of the French and Indian War Joseph Blanchard was already a colonel in the militia, and in 1754 he ordered Capt. John Goffe along with a company of men to patrol the upper reaches of the Merrimack River valley. In 1755 Joseph Blanchard was appointed as Colonel of the New Hampshire Provincial Regiment sent to serve under Sir William Johnson in an attack on Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Along the march they built Fort Wentworth at Northumberland, New Hampshire on the Connecticut River. The regiment was at Fort Edward and fought at the Battle of Lake George. The regiment returned home in December of 1755. Col. Joseph Blanchard died on April 7, 1758. In 1761 a new more accurate map of New Hampshire that Joseph Blanchard had prepard in connection with Samuel Langdon was published.