Moultonborough, NH

Moultonborough was chartered on November 17, 1763 by Governor Benning Wentworth to 62 grantees led by Colonel Jonathan Moulton of Hampton. At least 16 of them were Moultons, so the name was never in doubt. The town was incorporated in 1777, and Long Island, the lake's largest island community, was annexed in 1799. Long before any of that, this shore was Abenaki territory, and Route 109 into town follows one of their major trails up from the seacoast.

Jonathan Moulton is the town's great character. Legend says he presented Governor Wentworth with a 1,400-pound ox and asked in return only for "a small gore of land," walking away with the roughly 27,000-acre Moultonborough Addition in 1765. The annexation is documented history; the ox is the story New Hampshire has told about it ever since, along with the state's best-known deal-with-the-devil legend, also starring Moulton.

The Old Country Store at Moultonborough Corner traces its roots to 1781, when George Freese bought the land from Jonathan Moulton himself. It has been a tavern, trading post, stage stop, town meeting hall, and the post office for over a century, and it is still selling penny candy as one of the oldest stores in the country.

The resort era arrived with Ossipee Park on Red Hill in 1879, followed by Gilded Age estates like Kona Farm. The grandest of all came in 1913 and 1914, when shoe magnate Thomas Gustave Plant built Lucknow, his 16-room Arts and Crafts mansion high in the Ossipee Mountains. Plant lost his fortune, but his castle opened to the public in 1959 as Castle in the Clouds, and it remains the Lakes Region's most famous house. Down at the shore, Lee's Mills hosts the nation's oldest and largest annual steamboat meet, a living link to the lake's steam era.