Laconia, NH

Laconia's story starts thousands of years before Laconia. At the lake's outlet, where Weirs Beach is today, stood Aquadoctan, one of the largest known Native villages in New Hampshire. The Winnipesaukee band of the Abenaki built wooden fishing weirs across the channel to catch migrating shad, and those weirs gave The Weirs its name. In 1652 a Massachusetts Bay survey party carved Endicott Rock at the channel to mark the colony's claimed northern boundary; the boulder still stands at Weirs Beach, one of the oldest public monuments in New England.

The modern city grew from Meredith Bridge, a mill village on the Winnipesaukee River. The Belknap Mill, built in 1823 and now celebrated as the oldest unaltered brick textile mill in the country, knitted socks through the Civil War and both World Wars. The railroad arrived in 1848, and that same year Charles Ranlet started building freight cars here; his shop grew into the Laconia Car Company, which employed about a thousand people building railroad and streetcars by 1912. The town of Laconia was incorporated in 1855, taking its name from the old 1629 Laconia Company land grant, and became a city in 1893.

Then came the motorcycles. Riders first gathered at Weirs Beach for a "Gypsy Tour" in 1916, and the gathering grew into Laconia Motorcycle Week, now billed as America's oldest motorcycle rally. Every June the city's population multiplies, a tradition that has survived more than a century, including the infamous 1965 riot that nearly ended it.

Weirs Beach itself had a gilded age of grand hotels, most of which burned in the great fire of 1924, and a steamboat age before that: the Lady of the Lake was launched from Lakeport in 1849 and ruled the lake for decades. Today the boardwalk, the arcades, and the M/S Mount Washington's dock carry that resort tradition on, while downtown Laconia has traded textile mills for breweries and restaurants.