Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Portsmouth was founded in sixteen thirty as Strawbery Banke by a group of English settlers lured by the fishing and the massive white pines that grew to the water's edge. Those pines became the Royal Navy's masts, making the town one of the most strategically valuable ports in colonial America. The name changed to Portsmouth around sixteen fifty-three, borrowing from the English harbor city.

In nineteen oh five, the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War, negotiated at the naval shipyard just across the river in Kittery, Maine, at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role. Today Strawbery Banke Museum preserves ten acres of the original settlement, with restored buildings spanning three centuries.