Granite and the Bones of New Hampshire

They call it the Granite State, and the name is not metaphorical. Drive anywhere in New Hampshire and you will see it: gray ledge splitting through the hillside, boulders the size of automobiles left behind where the glaciers dropped them, stone walls built by farmers clearing fields for the third or fourth time after each frost heave pushed new rocks to the surface. New Hampshire is what happens when a billion-year-old granitic basement gets scraped by ice and then left in the sun.

The granite here formed deep in the earth roughly three hundred million years ago, when the ancestral Atlantic Ocean was closing and the colliding plates squeezed magma up into the crust. The magma cooled slowly, crystallizing into the coarse-grained rock you can see in roadcuts all over the state: quartz and feldspar and mica locked together, hard enough to outlast almost everything. Glaciers two miles thick came and went at least four times over the past two million years, bulldozing the overlying softer rock and leaving the granite exposed.

The retreating ice also left behind the landscape's other great feature: the lakes. New Hampshire holds over a thousand lakes and ponds. Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest, covers about seventy square miles in the center of the state, its shoreline so irregular, carved by the same glacial action that scoured the granite ridges, that it has over two hundred and forty islands.

The name is Abenaki, with older translations that include "the smile of the great spirit"; more recent scholarship reads it as "the land that surrounds the lake." The state's quarrying industry was once substantial. Concord granite, a pale gray stone with a fine grain, paved the streets of New York and Boston and cut the front steps of courthouses across New England.

The quarries have mostly closed, but the stone remains. In New Hampshire, the bedrock is never far below the surface.