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Things change when you go through Franconia Notch, or Crawford Notch, or
Pinkham Notch and enter the region of New Hampshire long known as the North
Country—the true North Country. There has been a lot of foolish debate over
the years as to just where “the north country” is, with some of the more
geographically challenged souls envisioning it as North Conway, or even Lake
Winnipesaukee. The late Governor Sherman Adams had it right: “That region of
New Hampshire lying to the north of its great notches.” One thing about
Sherman Adams, he didn’t mince words.
All but the most obtuse can’t help but notice the changes, tangible and
intangible, that occur between north and south. Come north through the notches
and the weather is often apt to change. The trees are different. The soils are
different. The lay of the land changes, gradually becoming a jumble of
odd-flowing drainages and helter-skelter mountains and ridges. The people are
different and so are their accents, tending to become sharper the further
north you go. Here you can still do business on a handshake. People leave
their keys in their cars and their front doors unlocked. Car thefts are
unusual enough to make the front page. A burglary in an occupied dwelling is
virtually unheard of.
The North Country is more like a chunk of Labrador, or maybe Alaska, than the
rest of New England. The region is more than 90 percent forested. Its million
and a half acres are home to moose, deer, bears, coyotes (lots and lots of
coyotes, much bigger than their Western cousins, more like brush wolves), not
to mention bald eagles, Peregrine falcons, wild turkeys, pine martens, foxes
and fishers. Partridge (ruffed grouse) and rabbits (snowshoe hare) abound.
Ducks and geese make their seasonal pilgrimages along the Connecticut River
flyway. Historians know that wolves and cougars once roamed here. Modern
lovers of the woods, some of them at least, will tell you that the cougars are
back and have been for some time, and the occasional wolf may be visiting too.
Two great river systems drain the territory, the Connecticut flowing from the
western side down into Long Island Sound, and the Androscoggin from the east
into the Gulf of Maine. These rivers, now great recreational assets, once
carried billions of logs from the most remote corners of the deep woods to the
mills in Berlin and Mount Tom. Evidence of a way of life evinced in Robert
Pike’s “Tall Trees, Tough Men” and “Spiked Boots” can still be seen in the
form of old boom-piers and driving dams and, some say, in the slight swagger,
quick wit and firm handshake of the hard-working people getting the wood out
today.
Visitors traveling north along Route 16 or Route 3, will see pine give way to
the tall pointed tips of spruce and fir, the oak yield to beech, birch and
maple. Sandy soils are left behind as the land turns to glacial gravel and
fine loam. Abundant rocks and huge boulders attest to the retreat of the last
glacier 12,000 years ago. A discerning eye (or a knowledge of history) can
make out the remnants of a chain of volcanoes stretching down through the
region, from Megantic, Quebec, down to Georgia. The area has one of the most
interesting geological pasts on the continent. Geologists from far and wide
come here to study its history. Copper was once mined here.
Summer visitors
still pan for gold.
“Abenaki” means “Dawn Land,” and the Abenaki, “People of the Dawn,” dominated
northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, fighting off periodic forays by the
Mohawks to the west. An offshoot tribe of the Abenaki, the Coashaukees,
inhabited the upper Connecticut River valley above the Fifteen Mile Falls
along broad, flat stretches called the Cohasse Intervales. Hence, the name
“Coös” for Coös County, pronounced like “cooperate.” The Coashaukees moved
with the seasons over a broad territory, ranging from the northern end of Lake
Champlain to villages along the St. Lawrence to fishing sites in western and
southwestern Maine. The Connecticut Lakes in what is now New Hampshire’s
northernmost town of Pittsburg were a favorite late-summer resort and fall
hunting territory.
Due to the lack of written records, an absence of a pottery industry and the
effect on artifacts by the region’s highly acidic soils, little remains today
to remind people of the region’s rich Indian past. There are abundant
arrowheads, and a smattering of stone axes, net anchors and wood-working
tools. Here and there a dugout canoe survives. But the main legacy is in
the form of place names—Umbagog, Monadnock, Bungy, Siwooganock, Mollidgewock,
Magalloway.
No one knows for sure when the first Europeans set foot in the territory north
of the notches. In all likelihood, Jesuit “Black Robes” were among the first,
as the Catholic hierarchy in New France sent missionaries out from Quebec City
to try to counter the Protestant settlements creeping northeast from Plymouth
and Boston. Perhaps, some day, an ambitious historian will begin the long
search through Jesuit archives to glean the facts for this fascinating tale.
There are also reports of a journal kept by two adventurers and trappers who
came up the Fifteen Mile Falls in the 1600s and were the first whites to
explore the Upper Cohasse Intervales, another avenue for some historical
sleuthing.
Some settlement occurred in northern New Hampshire in the early 1700s, but the
clearing of land for farms and the organization of towns didn’t really take
off until the long French and Indian Wars came to an end around 1760. Some of
the key participants in the waning years of that conflict, Rogers’ Rangers,
made their harrowing escape down through northwestern New Hampshire after
their destructive raid on the
St. Lawrence Indian village of St., Francis in 1759.
Veterans of that compelling retreat down through an unchartered wilderness
told friends and relatives tales of the North Country’s rich, broad meadows,
abundant game and fertile soils. There was an almost instant influx of
settlers northward along the upper Connecticut River. Uncertainty during the
Revolutionary War slowed this process a bit, but it began with new vigor after
independence. The War of 1812 brought a resurgence of hostilities along the
fringe of the settlements, temporarily slowing the tide of new inhabitants.
By the time of the Civil War farming had taken a firm foothold, with
successive generations of farm families spreading out from the easiest-tilled,
most desirable land in the valleys onto the rocky hillsides and beyond, a wave
of agronomy that culminated in some of the most inhospitable places imaginable
coming under hoof and plow. Today, barely visible remnants of foundations and
stone walls, deep in the woods, bear testimony to this stubborn struggle to
subdue and use the land.
As a new millennium begins, the North Country remains, in many ways, much as
it was a century or more ago. Its people still talk a little faster and step
along a little quicker. It is a region of extreme tolerance for diverse
lifestyles and points of view. To be called a character is a high honor.
Residents revel in Mud Season and scoff at a foot-deep snowstorm. Most of the
land is privately owned and virtually all of it is unposted, open for use and
enjoyment by the public at large. The air and the water are clean and the
region remains a place of great beauty. The less government, the best
government remains the ethic of land. It is, many will tell you, the last
great free place.
—John D. Harrigan, Fall, 2000
(Written for the Coös County Democrat's web site)
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