Rattlesnake Island

The name is not a shape on a map. The Lake Winnipesaukee Historical Society is plain that the island was named for the timber rattlesnakes that lived on it, and Paul Blaisdell's 1975 history preserved firsthand recollections from people who remembered them: snakes from the island displayed during Weirs Reunion Week, boaters watching them bask on the eastern ledges, and lumbermen bitten while working the island. At one point people set the island on fire to be rid of them. It did not work. The snakes went deep into the cracks in the ledges, waited out the burn, and came back out. No confirmed population survives today, though nobody recorded when the last of them went.

The island turns up in the written record early. On February 1, 1788, surveyors resolving the long-running Masonian boundary dispute ran their line from Gilmanton, straight over Rattlesnake Island, and across the lake into Wolfeboro. They used it as a fixed landmark, which tells you the name was already settled more than 225 years ago. By 1871 a painting titled Rattlesnake Island, Winnepiseogee was on offer at a Boston auction house, so the place was being sold as New Hampshire scenery well before anyone summered there.

The virgin pine came off in 1915, which is the era those lumbermen were working. Some of the island's old timber had already gone into a building you can still walk into: the Libby Museum in Wolfeboro, put up between about 1908 and 1912 by local workmen using wood felled on Rattlesnake. The dates do not line up with the 1915 cut, so the museum came from earlier harvesting, but either way a piece of this island is standing on Route 109 today.

The Rattlesnake Island Association owns two mainland parcels in West Alton, and between them they settle the question every island buyer eventually runs into. The Upper lot is at the corner of Route 11 and Rollins Road and includes a locked, gated trailer storage area. The Lower lot is waterfront, on Nowicki Point Road off Rollins Road, and is known as The Landing: a gated community launch ramp and docks used to move members and their guests to and from the island.

Weigh that carefully against other islands, because it is the difference most buyers underestimate. Everywhere else out here, where you leave the car, where you put the boat in, and where the trailer lives are three separate problems you solve yourself, usually through a marina slip that carries an annual cost and often a waiting list. On Rattlesnake they come with membership, on land the association owns.

Power reached the island by submarine cable, with telephone and eventually DSL following, so this is not an off-grid proposition. As anywhere out here, confirm what any individual property actually has before you offer, because it varies camp to camp.

The water off the east side is some of the deepest in the lake. Older Carroll County histories cited soundings past 200 feet, and the Historical Society puts it around 169 feet southeast of the island. The bottom falls away as steeply as the ledges rise, which is worth knowing for docking and for how exposed that side gets when The Broads kick up.