Weeks Estate: The Secretary of War's Mountain Retreat

Atop Prospect Mountain above Lancaster, overlooking the Connecticut River valley, a stone and timber country estate belongs to the state of New Hampshire, and it got there through an unusual act of political generosity.

John Wingate Weeks was a Massachusetts Republican who served in Congress from nineteen oh five to nineteen nineteen and then as Secretary of War under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. He built the estate in nineteen twelve as a summer retreat: a sprawling house with a stone observation tower and views across northern New England that stretch for miles on a clear day.

After Weeks died in nineteen twenty-six, his children gave the entire property to New Hampshire. It is now Weeks State Park, one of the best-preserved early twentieth-century country estates in the state. The house contains a small museum about Weeks and his era. Hikers climb to the summit tower for the same views that once gave a Cabinet secretary his Sunday mornings away from Washington. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-five, with the broader park following in twenty twenty-three.