Boscawen, New Hampshire

For twenty-seven years this place was called Contoocook Plantation, taking its name from the Abenaki river running through it. Then in seventeen sixty, Governor Benning Wentworth renamed it Boscawen, honoring British Admiral Edward Boscawen, whose fleet had stormed the French fortress at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, just two years before.

The town holds another striking marker: on an island in the Merrimack River, a bronze statue erected in eighteen seventy-four commemorates Hannah Dustin, who in sixteen ninety-seven escaped Abenaki captivity here after a night raid on Haverhill, Massachusetts. The statue was the first statue in the United States honoring an American woman, though Dustin's story remains deeply contested today.