New Castle is also home to a United States Coast Guard station, as well as the historic Wentworth by the Sea hotel.

[5]: 594–6 Beginning on June 11, 1682, Great Island experienced a supernatural event—a lithobolia, or "Stone-Throwing Devil", recorded in a 1698 London pamphlet by Richard Chamberlain.

On a Sunday night at about 10 o'clock, the tavern home of George Walton, an early settler and planter, was showered with stones thrown "by an invisible hand".

Windows were smashed, and the spit in the fireplace leapt into the air, then came down with its point stuck in the back log.

Cotton Mather took an interest in the phenomenon, reporting that: The "Stone-Throwing Devil" created quite a sensation on Great Island.

Hundreds of stones mysteriously rained down on George Walton's tavern, as well as onto him and others in the area over the entire summer.

Prominent Boston minister Increase Mather described the strange events in his book Illustrious Providences.

[7]: xiii, 4–5, 7–12 George Walton, who was in a property boundary dispute with his neighbor, accused her of witchcraft.

Regardless of what caused Walton and his inn to be the victim of a months-long rain of stones, it was the first major outbreak of apparent witchcraft in America.

Within a few years, accusations of witchcraft would occur in other New England towns, culminating in the famous witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts.

On the afternoon of December 14, 1774, colonists arrived aboard gundalows (sailing barges) and raided the fort.

Severely outnumbered, Captain John Cochran and the fort's five soldiers surrendered, whereupon the rebels loaded onto a boat 100 barrels of gunpowder.

The boat was floated up the Piscataqua River and the powder offloaded for transport to inland towns, including Durham, where the ammunition was stored in the cellar of the Congregational church.

After early financial difficulties, the establishment was purchased and elaborately refurbished in Second Empire style by Portsmouth alemaker and hotelier Frank Jones.