Lake Wentworth

For its first century of recorded history this was Smith's Pond, named for an early hunter whose name also survives in the Smith River, its outlet. The renaming to Lake Wentworth began around 1880 to honor Governor John Wentworth, and old habits died hard: USGS maps were still printing "Smith's Pond" into the 1920s.

The honor was earned. John Wentworth, New Hampshire's last royal governor, built his summer estate beside this lake beginning in 1768, a vast plantation with a mansion so large its foundation ran 104 feet. It was the first summer country estate in northern New England, the very thing that lets neighboring Wolfeboro call itself America's oldest summer resort. The Revolution chased Wentworth out in 1775, the mansion burned in 1820, and the ruins are preserved today at the Governor Wentworth Historic Site.

The governor's legacy floats in the middle of the lake too. Stamp Act Island, a 100-acre island he once owned, is named for his role in the Stamp Act era (he helped push for its repeal). When a 76-lot development threatened it in 1977, the Lake Wentworth Association and The Nature Conservancy bought the island outright, and it remains a wild nature preserve, home to nesting loons and one of the lake's best views of nothing but trees.

Stamp Act's neighbor to the north took the opposite path. Triggs Island, the lake's second-largest, was bought by a group of Methodist ministers who organized an association in 1905, built five cottages around the shoreline, banned alcohol, and kept the interior as common land. For years each family had its own car-horn code to honk from the mainland landing so someone would row over and collect them. Justice William O. Douglas summered there and swam the two miles across to Stamp Act Island to conquer a childhood fear of water, a crossing he wrote about in Of Men and Mountains.

Wentworth State Park opened its public beach on the eastern shore in the 1930s, and the lake has held its character ever since: clear water, sandy bottom, and a shoreline that still looks more like the governor's century than ours.