Tamworth, NH

Tamworth was chartered on October 14, 1766 by Governor Benning Wentworth and named in honor of Washington Shirley, Viscount Tamworth, a British admiral. The first permanent settlers arrived in 1771. In 1792 the young town ordained its first minister, Rev. Samuel Hidden, atop a giant glacial boulder now called Ordination Rock; he served 46 years and founded the Tamworth Social Library, the fourth library in New Hampshire.

Tamworth has a presidential thread. Grover Cleveland summered at "Intermont" on what is now Cleveland Hill Road in the early 1900s, and in 1931 his youngest son Francis founded the Barnstormers Theatre here with his wife Alice. The troupe originally barnstormed a circuit of lake and mountain towns; in 1935 the Clevelands bought Kimball's Store in the village and converted it into the playhouse still in use, making the Barnstormers the oldest ongoing professional summer theater in the United States.

In the village of Wonalancet, Arthur Walden bred a sled dog named Chinook, born January 17, 1917, who became the foundation sire of America's own sled dog breed. Walden and his Chinooks drove the dog teams on Admiral Byrd's first Antarctic expedition in 1928; Chinook was lost on the ice on his twelfth birthday. New Hampshire named the Chinook its official state dog in 2009, and Route 113A through town is the Chinook Trail.

The town's gentlest legacy might be its doctors. Dr. Edwin Remick began practicing in 1894, his son carried on after him, and between them the two Remicks gave the town 99 unbroken years of medical care, until 1993. Their farm and practice are preserved as the Remick Country Doctor Museum and Farm, the only museum of its kind in New England, still a working farm.