Sandwich, NH

Sandwich was chartered on October 25, 1763 by Governor Benning Wentworth and named for John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, the same earl the lunch is named for. A year later the grantees complained that their tract was "so loaded with inaccessible mountains and shelves of rocks as to be uninhabitable," and Wentworth obligingly added more land, the 1764 Sandwich Addition, making it one of the largest towns in the state. The first settlers, the Beede family among them, arrived in 1767 and seeded an early Quaker community.

In 1801 the town hand-built Sandwich Notch Road through the mountains with oxen and horses, a shortcut between the Pemigewasset valley and the seacoast routes. At its height the Notch supported 30 to 40 families on rugged hill farms, plus sawmills, schoolhouses, and a still. By 1860 only eight families remained, and today the cellar holes and stone walls along the road are one of New England's most evocative abandoned communities. The town as a whole peaked at 2,743 people in 1830, then quietly emptied for decades.

What Sandwich did next shaped New Hampshire culture. In 1926 Mrs. J. Randolph Coolidge opened Sandwich Home Industries in Center Sandwich, a shop selling locally made rugs and handicrafts to support the rural economy. It became a founding member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen in 1932, with Mary Coolidge as its first president, and the League's Center Sandwich gallery still traces its lineage straight back to that shop.

And every October since the 1880s, when area farmers first showed off 184 yoke of oxen at market days, the town has thrown the Sandwich Fair, one of New Hampshire's best-loved agricultural fairs, drawing tens of thousands to a village of 1,400 without losing an ounce of its character.