Monroe, New Hampshire

Monroe, New Hampshire occupies a narrow strip along the Connecticut River opposite Barnet, Vermont, in Grafton County. It was granted in seventeen sixty-two and incorporated in eighteen fifty-four, and through both centuries it stayed small, farming the river-bottom meadows that early settlers called the best soil in this part of New England. Smith Brook, which runs down to the Connecticut, powered the town's first sawmill and gristmill, the kind of early economy that sustained most Connecticut Valley towns before the railroad arrived.

Monroe today has fewer than nine hundred residents. It is the kind of New England town whose entire twentieth century passed without a headline, held together by church, farm, and a loyalty to place that the larger world rarely notices.