[3] Rindge is home to Franklin Pierce University, the Cathedral of the Pines and part of Annett State Forest.

Archeological evidence from nearby Swanzey indicates that the region was inhabited as much as 11,000 years ago (coinciding with the end of the last glacial period).

As much as half of the Western Abenakis were victims of a wave of epidemics that coincided with the arrival of Europeans in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

In the eighteenth century, Massachusetts granted unappropriated land to veterans of Sir William Phipps' 1690 expedition against French-held Canada as compensation for services.

Granted in 1736 by Governor Jonathan Belcher to soldiers from Rowley, Massachusetts, Rindge was first known as "Rowley-Canada".

[4] But the Masonian proprietors were making competing claims to the area, and in 1740 commissioners of the Crown decided that the boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire lay south of Rowley-Canada.

[6] Captain Abel Platts is credited as being Rindge's first temporary settler, arriving in 1738 to take possession of his family's land grant.

[7] But disputes about the grants, combined with the outbreak in 1744 of King George's War, made it untenable to remain in Rindge, so early settlers abandoned it.

[9][10] Rindge's highest point is on its eastern border, on the lower slopes of Pratt Mountain, where the elevation reaches 1,505 feet (459 m) above sea level.