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Six Places That Appear on the Back of a Quarter

From 1999 through 2008, the 50 State Quarter program released commemorative quarters with unique designs for each state. Half of all Americans collected them at least casually, making it the most successful commemorative coin program ever.

The U.S. mint released five each year, one quarter every 10 weeks. They came out in the same order that the states ratified the Constitution. In New England, that order meant Connecticut went first, then Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine.

Rules governed the choice of design. No live person, no state flag and no head-and-shoulder image of a dead person.

Each New England state responded with an image that you can visit today.

Here, then, are the six New England places that appear on the backs of quarters.

Charter Oak Tree

Connecticut State Quarter

King Charles II in 1662 granted Connecticut a charter that allowed it to elect some of its own officials and make some of its own rules.

Charles’ successor, James II tried to combine the New England colonies with New York under a single Crown-appointed official, Edmund Andros. It didn’t go well.

The Charter Oak by Charles DeWolf Brownell, 1857

In 1687, Andros and 60 soldiers met with the leaders of the Connecticut Colony in Hartford and heatedly insisted they turn over the charter. The colonists just as heatedly refused to give him the document, which lay on a table before them.

According to legend, something — a gust of wind, perhaps — blew out the candles that lit the meetinghouse. In the confusion, the charter disappeared. Someone hid it in the hollow of a large white oak tree, where the king’s men couldn’t find it.

The oak, of course, became the revered Charter Oak and a symbol of American independence. Already more than 300 years old in 1687, the Charter Oak fell to a violent storm on Aug. 21, 1856.

The Dominion of New England fell well before that. Andros dissolved the colonial governments, including Connecticut’s even without the charter. Two years later in 1689 Massachusetts colonists sent Andros packing. James II lost power, the charter came out of hiding and the colonies reverted to their previous form of government.

The Charter Oak still exists – as chairs in the Old Connecticut Statehouse and as artifacts currently on display at the Connecticut Historical Society.

On the corner of Charter Oak Avenue and Charter Oak Place stands a column with a globe and a descendant of the original tree. There may be as many as 100 such trees, as people had collected acorns before it fell. The Simsbury Historical Society, for example, planted a descendant of the Charter Oak in 1976 to commemorate the nation’s bicentennial.

A portrait of the Charter Oak, framed in wood from the tree itself, hangs in the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse

Maine State Quarter

Maine chose to honor its maritime heritage with an image of a windjammer sailing by Pemaquid Point Lighthouse on the back of its quarter.

President John Quincy Adams in 1827 commissioned Pemaquid Point Light in Bristol, Maine, about 60 miles north of Portland. The original lighthouse didn’t last long as builders mixed saltwater with the mortar mix. It had to be replaced in 1835, and the contract specified the use of fresh water in construction.

A storied lighthouse keeper, Marcus Hanna

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse

, once staffed the lighthouse. He was the only person to ever receive a Medal of Honor for bravery during the Civil War and a Gold Lifesaving Medal for saving a life off Cape Elizabeth.

Today, the Bristol Parks and Recreation Department owns and operates the outbuildings surrounding the lighthouse as Pemaquid Point Lighthouse Park.

The vessel on the quarter is the Victory Chimes, a rare three-masted schooner. Moored in Rockland, Maine, the Victory Chimes sails up and down the coast on windjammer excursions.

Minute Man National Park

Massachusetts State Quarter

Massachusetts honors its historic role in the American Revolution by putting a famous statue of the Minute Man. The monument depicts a farmer who dropped his plow to fight at North Bridge in Concord, Mass., on April 19, 1775.

Today the statue stands guard at The Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, where 500 militiamen defeated three companies of British troops.

The Minute Man

In 1873 an unknown, 23-year-old college dropout was given the commission to create a monument to the Minute Man.

The 100^th anniversary of the shot heard ‘round the world was approaching, and the citizens of Concord wanted to honor the farmers and tradesmen who battled professional British soldiers.

They decided to award the commission to Daniel Chester French, who had never executed a full-size statue. They had their reasons: His father was well-connected in town, and he had taken art lessons from Louisa May Alcott’s little sister, who vouched for his talent. French, of course, went on to design many famous works, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Old Man of the Mountain

New Hampshire State Quarter

Alas, New Hampshire just can’t let go of the Old Man of the Mountain, though the mountain did. He tumbled to the ground on May 3, 2003, but his image still appears on license plates, state highway signs and the New Hampshire state quarter.

The Old Man of the Mountain, back in the day

Before the Old Man went to his forever home, he was a series of five granite ledges hanging 1,200 feet above the floor of Franconia Notch. He measured 40 feet high from forehead to chin, and over the years he was held together by chains and patched up with cement, plastic, steel rods and turnbuckles.

At least he was already on the quarter when the U.S. Mint released it on Aug. 7, 2000.

For nearly 200 years, the Old Man of the Mountain attracted tourists and served as a proud symbol of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire native Daniel Webster perhaps best expressed what the Old Man meant to the state:

[U]p in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.

Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge

Rhode Island State Quarter

Watery Rhode Island chose to put the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge, New England’s longest suspension bridge, on the back of its quarter. Since 1969 it has connected Newport with Jamestown. Today it costs 16 quarters to cross.

The Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge

On a clear day, you can see the bridge from Gay Head Light in Martha’s Vineyard, the top floors of Providence’s tallest buildings and the parking lot of Stone Hill Marketplace in Johnston, R.I., 23 miles away.

Claiborne Pell served 36 years in the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island, and sponsored the bill to grant financial aid to college students in the form of Pell grants.

The quarter also depicts a vintage sailboat, as Rhode Island is nicknamed the sailing capital of the world. The nation’s smallest state, it has 400 miles of coastline and 100 beaches.

Camels Hump Mountain

Vermont State Quarter

Maple sugar is to Vermont as sailing is to Rhode Island. Well, maybe skiing is a more appropriate analogy, but Vermont went with maple sugaring on the back of its quarter.

The back of the quarter also features the Camels Hump Mountain in northern Vermont. It’s one of the tallest mountains in Vermont, and its distinctive profile makes it Vermont’s most recognized mountain.

Camels Hump, one of a dozen of Vermont’s National Natural Landmarks

The Camels Hump has had no less than a dozen names since Samuel de Champlain sailed down the lake that bears his name. De Champlain called it ‘Le Lion Couchant,’ meaning ‘the Resting Lion.’ Ira Allen called it the ‘Camel’s Rump.’ The Abenaki Indians called it ‘tahwahbodeay wadso.’

A forest preserve encloses the mountain, the summit of which philanthropist Joseph Battell donated to the state in 1905. By 1912, the Green Mountain Club built a trail between the mountain and Sterling Pond. Today the trail is a high point on the Long Trail system. The Green Mountain Club now pays a caretaker to make sure hikers respect the mountain’s fragile alpine tundra.

Images: Claiborne Pell Bridge By UpstateNYer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7548436; Pemaquid Point Lighthouse (featured image) By Tiger635 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31174599′ Pemaquid Point Lighthouse By WestportWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21041474

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How To Talk With a New Hampshire Accent

Woe to the presidential wannabe who doesn’t study the New Hampshire accent before entering the First in the Nation Presidential Primary (and don’t suggest it isn’t the first). He or she will instantly lose credibility if they claim happiness at coming back to Con-cord.

It’s KON-k’d.

If you can’t find Concord, don’t ask the locals. You’ll never figure out what they’re telling you. You will, however, find Concord south of the Kancamangus, where all the leaf peepers go in the fall, and north of Manchester. You shouldn’t say “ManchVegas,” by the way, but you can say “The Kanc.” It’s a highway.

The local accent and nomenclature do take some getting used to. Here’s how.

How It Started

The New Hampshire accent started with the English colonists who first arrived in North America. They brought with them speech patterns from Elizabethan London and part rural speech from Yorkshire and Lancashire.

That evolved into the New Hampshire accent, as well as the Boston accent, the Providence accent, the Northern, Eastern and Western New England accent — and so forth. The local accents come with local slang, though you’ll hear the word ‘wicked’ (as in ‘wicked pissah’) throughout New England. In fact, you’ll hear it a lot.

As late as the Great Depression, people in Seabrook, N.H., still spoke much the same way their forebears did hundreds of years earlier.

In 1938, the Federal Writers Project WPA Guide to New Hampshire described Seabrook as, “a village, Old World in appearance and atmosphere, set in the midst of sand-dunes, with cocks of salt hay scattered over them, an unchanged landscape of three centuries ago.”

“A section of the town of Seabrook speaks a language strangely reminiscent of rural England, and at times suggestive of the Yorkshire dialect,” concluded the federal writers.

Where leaf peepers go, probably Up Above

New Hampshire Accent

The New Hampshire accent shares characteristics of Massachusetts, Maine and sometimes Vermont accents. It’s less pronounced in the southern tier of the state because of all the Massholes who moved there.

The Old Man of the Mountain

Of the four states, New Hampshire is uniquely allergic to the letter “r.” “It is only in New Hampshire where vocalized /r/ falls to very low levels,” wrote linguist William Labov.

Words don’t end in “r” but in “ah.” ‘New Hampshire’ is actually pronounced N’Hampshah. You put your socks in a draw.

New Hampshire has a key line of demarcation: Franconia Notch. The Old Man of the Mountain – known simply as the ‘Old Man’ – used to live there until he collapsed in 2003. If you live north of the Notch (called a “pass” or a “gap” elsewhere), you live “Up Above.” You say people who live south of the Notch come from “Down Below.”

R-lessness and Ahs

Words that end in ‘r’ but are preceded by an “e,” “i” or “o” get a “y” inserted. So it’s “theyah,” not “there” and “deeyah,” not “dear.”

To confuse matters, words that originally end in ‘ah’ are pronounced “r.” “Linda” becomes “Linder” and ‘idea’ becomes “idear.” Americer is north of Cuber, which is south of Florider. So many snowbirds go to Florider that John Durkin, a candidate from Franklin, N.H., campaigned for U.S. Senate theyah back in the 1970s.

The broad “a” is another feature of the New Hampshire accent. You can hear it in words like aunt, father, laugh, half and can’t.

It’s also typically heard in “ar” words like car. So “Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd” is how a New Hampshire native would tell you where to deposit your vehicle in Cambridge, Mass.

New Hampshire has its own unique words, shared with other Eastern and Northern New Englanders. A soda is a soft drink and a brook is a creek. A sneaker is an athletic shoe that used to be made in Berlin (pronounced BER-lin) before the factory moved to Chiner.

You don’t go to the basement in New Hampshire. You go ‘down cellar.’ Aluminum foil is tin foil. A rubber band is an elastic. A drinking fountain is a bubbler.

You can fish for hornpout in New Hampshire during mud season, but you probably want to stay indoors during black fly season. You can also fish in the wintertime if you have a bobhouse to take onto the ice. Hamburg is what you eat on a bulkie roll with a side of French fries and a frappe.

Lower Molars

Audiobook narrator Matt Haynes studied the accent in case he had to narrate a book with a character from New Hampshire. He found some further refinements based on the sound going toward the lower molars. (In Maine they go to the higher molars.)

‘Or’ becomes ‘ou,’ so ‘ignore’ becomes ‘ignou.’
‘Er’ becomes ‘eh,’ so ‘world’ becomes ‘wehld.’
‘S’ becomes almost an ‘sh;’ so ‘it looks like rain’ becomes ‘it looksh like rain.’
Final vowels tend to be deadened, so ‘–ing’ become ‘-in.’

To listen to a real New Hampshire accent, click here.

If you want to speak with a Maine accent, click here. For Rhode Island, click here, for Connecticut, click here. And if you want to talk with a Boston accent, click here.

Image of New Hampshire in Autumn By Someone35 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15702944. License plate By Stripey the crab – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16105204.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Betty and Barney Hill Take a Long, Strange Trip from New Hampshire

On Sept. 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill made their way back from Montreal to their home in Portsmouth, N.H., after a vacation.

Driving in a 1957 Chevrolet, the couple were traveling south of Lancaster through the Franconia Notch when they stopped to let their dog take a walk. First Betty and then Barney began watching a strange flying object.

It resembled an enormous pancake, and would descend and hover over them. Spooked by the object, Barney began driving south while Betty kept her eyes on the sky. Both described an unusual buzzing sound and an odd vibration in the car as they continued travelling through the Notch, and then they remembered nothing of the trip until they were passing through Ashland, some 35 miles later.

Stopped Watches

When they arrived at home, the Hills found that their watches had stopped working (they would never work again), they observed unusual markings on the trunk of their car, and the trip had taken them two hours longer than they expected. During this lost time, the Hills would come to believe they had been taken into a space ship for examination.

Betty and Barney Hill holding the 1966 book Interrupted Journey.

The Hills reported the incident to the Air Force, and were interviewed about the experience. The Air Force interviewer concluded the Hills had probably mistaken Jupiter for a flying saucer. Over the next year, the Hills would struggle to recall the events of that night. They would return to the White Mountains to look for the locations where they saw the flying craft.

They tried hypnosis to recover memories of the lost two-hours. Betty had begun dreaming frequently about that night. Through hypnosis recovered memories of a star map that aliens had shown her that she thought described where they had come from.

Barney, under hypnosis, sketched a picture of the alien he remembered seeing.

Barney’s sketch of the alien he remembered.

Betty and Barney Hill Speak

The Hills gradually filled in details of the events of that night, recalling an actual examination by aliens and developing a clearer description of the aliens. They kept their story largely to themselves until 1963, when they shared details of it with members of their church.

In November of 1963 they would tell the story to a group of UFO enthusiasts in Quincy, Mass. And on October of 1965, the story would finally explode. The Boston Traveler published an account of their story drawn from a recording of the Quincy meeting.

Marjorie Fish’s interpretation of Betty Hill’s purported alien star map, with “Sol” (upper right) being the Latin name for the Sun

The Hills would work with author John G. Fuller on a book about their experiences, The Interrupted Journey. Over the years, the Hills stuck to their story. Skeptics would come up with numerous theories about the Hills. Some would argue that they mistook an aircraft warning light at the top of Cannon Mountain for a flying saucer. Others suggested hallucinations.

Aftermath

Barney, a mail carrier, would die in 1969, Betty, a social worker, in 2004. They told their story in books, magazine articles and on television many times. Though many doubted that the Hills had been abducted and examined by aliens, no one suggested that the Hills did not sincerely believe the story they told.

Highway marker on Rte. 3 in Lincoln, N.H., commemorates the abduction.

Today, a roadside marker on the Daniel Webster Highway in Lincoln describes the incident. The marker notes they filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day. ” It notes they did not go public with their story until it was leaked to the Boston Traveler in 1965.

“This is the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States,” it concludes.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Barney Hill sketch By Barney Hill – https://archive.org/details/interruptedjourn00full/page/n166, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67527733. Betty’s star map By Zeta_reticuli.png: en:User:Clementiderivative work: Gregors (talk) 15:46, 22 February 2011 (UTC) – Zeta_reticuli.png, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13654126. Roadside marker By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=108804674. Betty and Barney head shots By John G. Fuller (deceased) /Copyright owned by the University of New Hampshire – http://www.kathleen-marden.com/where-the-debunkers-went-wrong.php, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45536736.

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Armchair Guide to NH Leaf Peeping, 1859 Style

When Mother Nature gets out her paintbrush, foliage aficionados flock to New England like seagulls to French fries. Leaf peeping is not a modern development. The leaf peeper has traveled New England’s countryside since well before Peter Pan’s People Professionals began hauling them up here.

Eagle Cliff, Franconia, NH, Jervis McEntee

In the 19th century, people took trains and stagecoaches to ogle at breathtaking scenery. They came less for colorful leaves and more for the sublime beauty of the mountains. Thomas Starr King wrote about it in his 1859 guidebook, The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscapes and Poetry. Travelers, he wrote, not to eat or look at houses. They came “to be introduced to the richest feasts of loveliness and grandeur that are spread by the Summer around the valleys, and to be refreshed by the draperies of verdure, shadow, cloud, and color, that are hung by the Creator around and above the hills.”

By the White Hills, King meant New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Today, people who want to drink in the mountains’ draperies of verdure can, for example, drive Route 16 to North Conway. Or they can take the Kancamagus from Conway to Lincoln. Or I-93 to Plymouth and beyond. Each trip takes several hours.

But back in 1859, it took days to see those richest feasts of loveliness and grandeur.

Leaf Peeping Guide, 1859

Thomas Starr King wrote that the White Hills had two mountain ranges, the Mount Washington and the Franconia. (Actually, there are at least 16.)

Nineteenth-century leaf peepers (or perhaps “verdure visitors”) faced the challenge of wildly inaccurate guidebooks. For example, maps regularly sold in mountain hotels placed Montreal south of Portland. Another guidebook described the Profile (later the Old Man in the Mountain) as a short walk from the Willey House. They are 30 miles apart.

King recommended New Hampshire above other New England destinations. “It confers the most benefit on the mind and taste,” he wrote. The landscape splendor of a noble mountain will benefit the traveler with “a perception and love of the refined grandeur.” Also, chaste sublimity and airy majesty — overlaid with tender and polished bloom.

He described four ways to the two highest mountain ranges in New Hampshire: the valleys of the Saco, the Merrimac River, the Androscoggin River and the tributaries of the Connecticut. You could take a railroad to all of them. And, according to his guidebook, you could reach some point among the highest hills within 24 hours of leaving New York!

Androscoggin Route

The Androscoggin Valley was the quickest way to the White Mountains, wrote King. “This noble river flows by the extreme easterly base of that range, where the forms are the most noble and imposing.” One got there by leaving Boston in the morning by the Boston and Maine or the Eastern Railroad to Portland. At noon, travelers could take the Grand Trunk Railway to the Alpine House in Gorham, N.H., reaching it by 5 pm. Then they could take a stagecoach ride — for 1-1/2 to two hours — seven or eight miles farther to the Glen House.

Glen House offered leaf-peeping opportunities near Mount Washington

King recommended staying a day or two in Gorham to drink in the “wildness and majesty of The Glen” (Mt. Washington, Tuckerman Ravine and the northern Presidential Range).

The Saco Valley

To go by theSaco route, the traveler had first take a train to a “charming sheet of water,” Lake Winnipisoggee (Winnipesaukee). It took about five hours by the Boston and Maine Railroad, connecting with the Cocheco Railroad at Dover, which ended at Alton Bay. Or they could take the Boston, Concord and Montreal railroad to the station at Weir’s (now Weir’s Beach). From those train stations the traveler had to take a steamer to Center Harbor, 30 miles from Alton or 12 miles from Weir’s. Today the traveler can take that trip aboard the Mount Washington, a descendant of the paddle steamer that first plied the charming sheet in 1872.

Lake Winnipesaukee by William Trost Richards. Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

From Center Harbor, the only way to get to Crawford Notch was to take a stagecoach 62 miles. If one left Boston in the morning, a traveler could eat quickly in Center Harbor and take a stage to Conway through “cool, dark towers and domes that swell along the northwest.” In Conway an excellent hotel awaited the traveler, who could then rest up for some serious leaf peeping the next day.

Conway, however, was still 32 miles from the “desolation and gloom” of Crawford Notch/ Travelers took the morning stage to get there. People who got stuck in Conway because they missed the morning stage could hire a wagon and drive nine miles to Chocorua Lake. There they’d find the “ragged, torn, lonely, and proud-peaked mountain reflects the ravage of its slopes and the vigor of its lines.”

The original Mount Washington, ca. 1920

The Merrimac Route

The Merrimack starts at the Pemigewesset River, which opens the natural avenue to the Franconia Range. Travelers could reach it in a day from Boston. Today they can reach it in two hours via I-93.

Back then, they’d ride the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad or the Boston and Lowell to Plymouth, N.H., arriving by noon. After eating in Plymouth, they’d take a stagecoach to the Flume House or the Profile House, both “excellent” according to King, and arrive by sunset. On a nice day, the ride would afford “various and perpetual delight.”

The Old Man of the Mountain

In 1859. the Old Man of the Mountain was known as The Profile. New Hampshire native Daniel Webster named it with a quote. “Up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men,” he wrote. But the Old Man name hadn’t caught on yet.

That didn’t stop Thomas Starr King from waxing elegiac (and at times incomprehensible) when describing Franconia Notch’s most famous feature. “The best time to see the Profile is about four in the afternoon of a summer day,” he wrote. “Then, standing by the little lake at the base and looking up, one fulfills the appeal of our great transcendental poet in a literal sense in looking at the jutting rocks, and,

through their granite seeming
Sees the smile of reason beaming.”

The Connecticut

Starr lists several ways to reach Franconia Notch for leaf peeping. A traveler could take the train from Plymouth to Littleton, N.H., and then by stage to one of several hotels. Anyone who went to Littleton first could leave Boston in the morning and reach the Profile House before the purple faded from Lafayette Mountain and the Profile’s expression faded out in the twilight.

Another way was to take the Grand Trunk Railroad to Northumberland, N.H., and then the stage nine miles to Lancaster, N.H. One would leave Boston in the morning and arrive around 8 or 9 pm. Starr highly recommended Lancaster, about four or five hours from Franconia Notch. However, he strongly advised taking short drives, presumably in wagons or stagecoaches, in the area around Lancaster.

Boston and Maine locomotive, 1871

He recommended the spectacle from Bray Hill, on the edge of Whitefield, N.H. There, at five in the afternoon, Nature spreads “as gorgeous a feast of color” as New Hampshire can supply.

Proper Leaf Peeping

King advised spending a long time to drink in the beauty of the White Mountains. He also chastised those who rushed through the scenery.

Most people, he wrote, reach Conway first, then hurry through North Conway to Franconia Notch on Day Two. On Day Three they climb Mount Washington. Then on Day Four they go to Franconia for “an equally rapid glimpse of its treasures.”

“A large proportion of the summer travellers in New Hampshire bolt the scenery, as a man, driven by work, bolts his dinner at a restaurant,” he wrote. They may as well be train conductors, he huffed.

The Kancamagus. Don’t rush, now.

The mountains, he wrote, “are tardy in forming intimate acquaintanceships.”

They only show their “aspects of superior majesty” and their “fleeting loveliness of hue” to the calmer eye, he wrote. They reveal themselves “to the man who waits a day or two in order to unthink his city habits, domesticate himself as their guest, and bide their time.”

This story was updated in 2022.

Check out The New Hampshire Historical Society’s on-line exhibit, “Art and Tourism in the White Mountains, 1850-1900.” It features 19^th century paintings in the style of the Hudson River School as well as amateur drawings and watercolors. Images: Kancamagus By Polaron at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17848792.

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