The New England Region

New England is one of the nine statistical divisions of the US Census Bureau and the smaller of the two that make up the Northeast region. Its six members are Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The other half of the Northeast is the three-state Middle Atlantic division of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. New England is the only Census division whose name people actually use about themselves, which is why its membership is the least disputed of the nine.

States in the New England division

State	Capital	Statehood	2020 population
Massachusetts	Boston	1788	7,029,917
Connecticut	Hartford	1788	3,605,944
New Hampshire	Concord	1788	1,377,529
Maine	Augusta	1820	1,362,359
Rhode Island	Providence	1790	1,097,379
Vermont	Montpelier	1791	643,077

For Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire the statehood year is the year each ratified the Constitution as one of the original thirteen. Rhode Island was the last of the thirteen to ratify, in 1790. Only Boston and Providence are their state's largest city; Augusta, Concord, Montpelier and Hartford are all outranked inside their own states, and Montpelier is the least populous state capital in the country.

Population, area and economic weight

New England counted 15,116,205 residents in the 2020 Census, about 4.6 percent of the national total and the smallest figure of any of the nine divisions. Massachusetts alone holds 7,029,917 of that, roughly 46 percent. Vermont, at 643,077, is the second least populous state in the country after Wyoming. The land totals are just as compressed: the six states cover about 72,000 square miles, under 2 percent of the United States, and Maine accounts for nearly half of it at 35,380 square miles. Rhode Island, at 1,545 square miles, is the smallest state. The division sends 21 members to the House and casts 33 electoral votes, fewer than Florida alone. Its economic weight comes from concentration rather than size: Boston's Kendall Square biotech cluster, the university and teaching-hospital complex around it, and the insurance industry that has been headquartered in Hartford since the nineteenth century.

The geography that holds the region together

Every acre of New England was scraped by the Laurentide ice sheet, and that single fact explains the region's thin stony soil, its field walls built from the stones, its thousands of small lakes and its harbors. Cape Cod is a terminal moraine left where the ice stopped. Maine's coast is a drowned rocky shoreline, deeply indented, while the shore south of Boston runs to sand. The uplands are the northern Appalachians: the White Mountains in New Hampshire, where Mount Washington reaches 6,288 feet and recorded a surface wind gust of 231 miles per hour on April 12, 1934; the Green Mountains down the spine of Vermont; the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Mount Katahdin in Maine, 5,269 feet, is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. The Connecticut River is the region's main artery, running about 410 miles from near the Quebec border to Long Island Sound and separating Vermont from New Hampshire along the way. The Merrimack, Kennebec, Penobscot and Housatonic all drop steeply enough to have powered mills. Narragansett Bay cuts most of the way through Rhode Island.

How the region was settled

The Plymouth colony landed in 1620 and the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony followed in 1630, bringing a Puritan settlement pattern built around compact towns rather than scattered plantations. That is why New England governs itself through towns instead of counties to this day. Connecticut abolished county government in 1960, and in 2022 the Census Bureau approved nine planning regions as Connecticut's county equivalents for statistics. Four of the six states were among the original thirteen colonies. Vermont was an independent republic from 1777 until it entered the Union in 1791 as the fourteenth state, and Maine was governed as part of Massachusetts until the Missouri Compromise admitted it separately in 1820. Harvard was founded in 1636, the oldest institution of higher education in the country, followed by Yale in 1701, Brown in 1764 and Dartmouth in 1769. Industry arrived early: Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island began water-powered cotton spinning in 1793, and Lowell was laid out in the 1820s as a purpose-built mill city.

What New England is known for

Whaling out of New Bedford and Nantucket, then textiles, then the shift to education, medicine and finance. Maine lands the great majority of the American lobster catch. Vermont produces about half of the country's maple syrup. Massachusetts is the second largest cranberry producer after Wisconsin. Electric Boat has built submarines at Groton, Connecticut for the Navy for over a century. Seven presidents were born in the division: four in Massachusetts, two in Vermont and one in New Hampshire.

Where the boundary is argued

Nobody disputes which six states are in New England. The arguments are about the edges. Southwestern Connecticut, and Fairfield County in particular, sits inside the New York commuting orbit and reads more like the Middle Atlantic than like Boston, which is why Connecticut turns up in Tri-State groupings that the Census would never produce. At the other end, the Acadian communities of the Saint John Valley in northern Aroostook County, Maine face Quebec and New Brunswick. There is also a persistent mix-up between New England the Census division and the Northeast the Census region: the Northeast is nine states, New England is six of them, and a table labeled Northeast always includes New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

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