Derry: Where Robert Frost Found His Voice

Derry split off from Londonderry in eighteen twenty-seven, named for the same Ulster city its Scotch-Irish founders had left a century before. But the town's most lasting distinction came in nineteen hundred, when a young poet named Robert Frost moved onto a small farm on the Derry road.

Frost's grandfather had bought the place for him. He stayed eleven years, raising chickens, watching the seasons turn, and writing the poems that would make him famous. Much of the work in his first two books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, was written in Derry. The farm is now a New Hampshire state historic site, and the pastures and stone walls he walked still look much as they did when he wrote Mending Wall right here.