Ossipee Lake

Ossipee Lake is named for the Ossipee people, an Abenaki tribe who lived along its shores for centuries; translations of the name vary. Their presence is still written on the land, most remarkably at the Indian Mound near the lake, an earthen mound roughly eight feet high that remains a recognized Abenaki site. In 1725, during the border wars, Captain John Lovewell built a stockade fort near the lake as a base for his expedition north, on the site of an earlier Abenaki fort.

The mountains standing over the lake are the region's geological showpiece: the Ossipee Range is the eroded ring of a volcano that erupted about 125 million years ago, a nearly perfect circle of hills nine miles across and one of the best-known ring dike formations in North America. Glacial outwash from the last Ice Age laid down the sandy shores and the surrounding pine barrens that make the lake so swimmable.

Summer people found Ossipee Lake in the automobile age. In the 1920s and 30s, Indian Mound Camps, with its cabins, restaurant, and filling station, was one of the busiest tourist stops on the route north, and children's camps followed, including Camp Marist, which has run on the lake's shore since the late 1940s. The lake never built a grand hotel row, and its fans consider that its best feature: warm water, sandy bottom, mountain views, no fuss.