For more than three centuries, the preface to this guide begins, people have been coming to New Hampshire. The Plymouth Pilgrims had been in the country only three years when another group found the mouth of the Piscataqua River and became the first dwellers in what would, a century and a half later, take the name New Hampshire. Others pushed inland along the Merrimack, and by 1800 much of the state’s workable land had been settled. Then a different kind of visitor began to arrive — not to settle, but to enjoy the beauty of the place in summer, drawn by the majesty of the mountains and the charm of the lakes.
By the time the Federal Writers’ Project staff sat down to their work in the late 1930s, the seasons had widened again: visitors were coming by the hundreds of thousands, and in growing numbers through winter as well, for skiing and the other cold-weather sports. State director Charles Ernest White framed the volume as an attempt to portray the qualities that had drawn people to New Hampshire for so long. A staff of about fifty spent months on the great variety of subjects to be covered; authorities across the state served on advisory committees and, in some cases, supplied the material themselves.
White reached back for his patron saints to two early travelers who had managed without such a book: Darby Field, the state’s first mountain climber, who in 1642 had no guide to keep him from mistaking a low sea of clouds for an endless northern lake, and John Josselyn, who in 1672 wrote of hills daunting and terrible, thick with woods. New Hampshire, White observed, had wanted a guidebook of detailed information for a very long time.
The book answers that want generously. Its general background opens with Cornelius Weygandt’s essay “The Merriest of the Puritans,” then surveys the state’s natural setting, geology, wildlife, and resources before turning to the Indians, history, government, industry, agriculture, education, religion, architecture, literature, the arts, and folklore. Main Street and Village Green profiles the cities and larger towns — Concord, Portsmouth, Manchester, Hanover, Keene, and the rest — each with its own walking tour.
The guide’s distinctive spine is its tours, titled, with characteristic wit, “High Roads and Low Roads.” Seventeen numbered routes and their branches give a mile-by-mile description of the state’s highways, from the seacoast up the Daniel Webster and Presidential Highways into the notches, and they include such period curiosities as steamer trips across Lake Winnipesaukee aboard the Mount Washington and the mailboat Marshal Foch. A full section is given over to the White Mountains, and another to sports and recreation, down to the named ski trails. A chronology, a reading list, and an index complete a book that finally gave the Granite State the detailed guide it had lacked since Darby Field’s day.