This Corner of the Country, Closing the Loop on New Hampshire

There is something particular about being the smallest corner of a small region in the largest nation on earth. New Hampshire covers nine thousand three hundred and forty-nine square miles, slightly smaller than Vermont, smaller than many single counties in the western states. You can drive from the Massachusetts line to the Canadian border in under two hours on a clear day.

The entire Atlantic coastline measures just eighteen miles. And yet almost everything that defines the American character ran through this corner at some point: the first resistance to British economic authority, the first written constitution, the ratification that made the republic real, the industrial revolution in its American form, the financial order of the postwar world. The Connecticut River runs the full length of the state's western edge, marking the border with Vermont.

For most of American history it was one of the great commercial highways of the northeast, carrying timber and farm goods south to Long Island Sound. The Merrimack runs north to south through the heart of the state, from the White Mountains to the sea at Newburyport, and it was the Merrimack that powered Amoskeag and made Manchester home to the largest cotton textile plant in the world. The state's unofficial identity has always been compressed into two words.

Live Free or Die. It is a more demanding motto than it first appears. It does not say: live free and prosper.

It does not say: live free and be comfortable. It says that freedom is worth dying for, and that its absence is a form of death. John Stark wrote those words as an old man, long past the age when he could fight for anything.

He was saying what the mountains had always implied: that the landscape here is beautiful and severe, and that endurance is the primary virtue. Drive this state in any direction and you will find the evidence: stone walls in the woods where farms have returned to forest, mill buildings converted by the grandchildren of the workers who built them, summits that will kill you in any season if you are not paying attention. New Hampshire does not soften its edges for visitors.

It never has.