Lebanon: The Upper Valley's Quiet Capital

Lebanon, New Hampshire, chartered in seventeen sixty-one, is the commercial and medical hub of the Upper Valley, the bi-state region straddling the Connecticut River where New Hampshire and Vermont have functioned as a single community for generations. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, one of the largest employers in northern New England, anchors Lebanon's economy alongside Dartmouth College just across the river in Hanover.

The town grew as a manufacturing center in the nineteenth century, with mills along the Mascoma River producing woolen goods and machine tools. The railroad arrived in the eighteen forties and made Lebanon a junction point, boosting its commercial importance over neighboring Hanover.

Lebanon was named for Lebanon, Connecticut, where many of its early settlers had come from. The name stuck, and the town became a city in nineteen fifty-eight.

Today Lebanon is a mid-sized New England city of about fourteen thousand, defined more by its medical campus than by any single historic moment, the kind of place that holds a region together without dominating it.

Downtown centers on Colburn Park, whose historic district joined the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-six, and the Lebanon Opera House sits inside City Hall. Opera North, the region's oldest professional opera company, is based in the city. The medical center, together with Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, forms the largest medical facility between Boston and Burlington, Vermont. The northern end of Shaker Mountain, at sixteen hundred fifty-seven feet, is the city's highest point, and Lebanon Airport offers passenger service to Boston and New York.