Freedom, NH

Freedom earned its name the honest way. The town began as the northern part of Effingham, settled in the late 1700s largely by families arriving from Maine, whose ways never quite meshed with the seacoast-descended Effingham establishment. In 1831 the north end incorporated separately as North Effingham, and in 1832 it renamed itself Freedom, chosen to commemorate, in so many words, freedom from Effingham. The name-change legislation passed under the leadership of a rising young legislator named Franklin Pierce, later the 14th President.

Through the 1800s Freedom lived on water power from the Ossipee River, its mills turning out lumber and bobbins for the textile factories downstream, and on the farms around the village. The village center that grew up in those years, with its white houses, church, and store, is the one you see today, one of the least-changed in the Lakes Region.

Freedom is also one of only a handful of New Hampshire towns still celebrating a full Old Home Week, the homecoming tradition Governor Frank Rollins started statewide in 1899 to call the children of the hill farms back home. Freedom has kept it going for well over a century, a whole week each August of parades, suppers, and reunions. The Freedom Historical Society, founded in 1965 and housed in the historic Allard House, keeps the records.