The Pennacook and early European settlers first benefited from their relationship as the Pennacook valued allies in their own conflicts with other Native groups. However, the goodwill of early alliances did not last for long. Europeans began arriving in the fifteenth century. As they colonized the area, the lives of the Pennacook were disrupted through conflict, disease, exclusion, and erasure. By the early eighteenth century, most of the Pennacook who called this land home had relocated.

The settlers’ early focus on building dams on the Squamscott River and Exeter River quickly became a problem for the Pennacook as it reduced the population of fish that they relied upon for sustenance. Many of the dams powered sawmills that created sawdust, which polluted streams and made them uninhabitable for life-sustaining fish. The Gilman family played a key role in this process when they built two sawmills, one on each side of the river by 1650. As the Gilmans deforested the land, dammed rivers, and operated sawmills they threatened the Penacook’ livelihood. However strained relations were between the Pennacook and the settlers, it was not until King Phillips War that a more open conflict began. In 1676 a group of Massachusetts soldiers trapped many Indigenous people in New Hampshire, hanging some and enslaving others.  Open conflict continued into the beginning of the 18^th century, with the Gilmans themselves actively involved in leading soldiers in attacks upon Pennacook villages.

The frame of the structure was built of massive sawn horizontal hemlock planks that were mortis-and-tenoned into oak posts on the first floor and dovetailed on the second floor. Throughout the rest of the 1709 structure, one can see several devices including a portcullis, gun ports, and a safe room, which were designed to defend the family from harm during attacks by the Pennacook. However, by the time the house was completed, conflicts with the Pennacook were rare and by the end of the next decade the protective devices in the garrison had no use at all. Its defensive features may have gone unused, but its materials tell a broader story about Indigenous history. The large timbers and the fact that they were mill-sawn, highlight the Gilmans’ actions in destroying both the forests and rivers that had sustained the Pennacook for so long.

The garrison remained unchanged until 1732, when ownership transferred to Peter Gilman, who received the home from his father, John Gilman, Jr. Peter Gilman operated a tavern in the garrison, a business started by his father in 1719. During that time, Gilman owned at least one enslaved person, a man named Titus who perished while collecting water at the river.  Peter was also known as a shopkeeper and may have sold goods from the garrison. By the mid-eighteenth century, Peter Gilman was a highly respected member of the community, having been appointed to the King’s Council during the term of Governor John Wentworth and been a successful proprietor of lucrative businesses. He used his considerable fortune to transform the fortified garrison into a fashionable Georgian style home suitable for his status in Exeter. The interior received elegantly paneled walls and carved mantels, plaster and lath ceilings, and cased beams. The exterior was updated with clapboards, 12-over-12 sash windows, and a reconfigured roofline. A sumptuous Georgian ell with a formal parlor and grand bedchamber were added circa 1770 in anticipation of a gathering of the King’s Council, though such meetings never occurred.

Jane Harvey, Asenath’s sister, inherited the house in 1895. Jane was a schoolteacher who supplemented her income by taking in boarders, including a young girl named Irene Morse. Morse would go on to lead a remarkable life, teaching French and history as a professor in Wyoming from 1890 to 1902 before going to medical school at Tufts College Medical School. The first woman physician in New England to enlist in World War I, she treated soldiers in a specialty hospital for gas victims set up by the Women’s Overseas Hospitals of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She continued this work until she herself was poisoned by gas. Dr. Morse continued to suffer from the effects of her time in the war until she died in 1933 and was buried next to Jane Harvey in Exeter.

Jane Harvey was the first to show the interior of the garrison to visitors. Tours showcased the elegance of the Georgian addition juxtaposed with the defensive features of the garrison structure. Many aspects of the tours were fabrications of Harvey’s imagination, including accounts of violent encounters between the Pennacook people and the residents of Gilman Garrison, and escape tunnels between the basement of the building and the riverbank across the street. So convincing were her stories, that residents who visited the site as school children recalled exploring the tunnels themselves. Later, in 1932 an excavation conducted as part of Historic American Building Survey in Exeter finally discredited the purported tunnels. Regrettably, Harvey’s apocryphal accounts of violence perpetrated by the Pennacook remained uncontested and ultimately became part of the history of the house by the next owners of Gilman Garrison.