Sugar Hill, New Hampshire

Sugar Hill got its name the honest way: from the sugar maples that blanketed its hillsides. Settlers arrived here in the late seventeen hundreds, clearing farms on the western slopes of the White Mountains near Franconia Notch.

In the eighteen eighties, after rail service reached nearby Lisbon, the town transformed into a fashionable Victorian resort, drawing artists and wealthy families from Boston and beyond. The Sunset Hill House, built in eighteen eighty, could host three hundred fifty guests at once. For generations Sugar Hill stayed politically part of Lisbon. It did not become its own incorporated town until nineteen sixty-two, making it one of the youngest municipalities in New Hampshire, a place that took two centuries to decide it wanted to stand alone.