NHNew Hampshire Fun Facts

New Hampshire seats 400 representatives in its state House for a population of about 1.4 million, roughly one lawmaker for every 3,500 residents, and the job pays $100 a year plus mileage. It is the largest state legislature in the country and one of the largest elected chambers in the English speaking world, which means an ordinary resident has a real chance of knowing their representative personally.

Facts most people get wrong

• New Hampshire is not tax free. There is no general sales tax and no tax on wages, and the interest and dividends tax, the last income style levy, was phased out and ended after 2024. Property taxes carry the load instead and rank among the highest in the nation.
• It is not landlocked. About 18 miles of Atlantic shoreline run between Seabrook and Portsmouth, the shortest ocean coast of any coastal state.
• Live Free or Die was not shouted at the British. General John Stark wrote the line in 1809, in a letter declining to attend a reunion of Bennington veterans because of poor health. The state adopted it as the official motto in 1945.
• The Old Man of the Mountain is gone. The granite profile in Franconia Notch collapsed on May 3, 2003. It still appears on the state quarter issued in 2000 and on highway signs.
• New Hampshire holds the first primary, not the first contest. Iowa's caucuses come earlier. State law directs the Secretary of State to schedule the primary at least seven days before any similar election, which is why the date shifts whenever another state moves up.
• Mount Washington no longer holds the world wind record. The 231 mph gust of April 12, 1934 stood until 1996, when a 253 mph gust was measured on Barrow Island, Australia during Cyclone Olivia. The 1934 reading is still the strongest recorded at a staffed surface station.

Records and firsts

• First colony to declare independence. New Hampshire adopted its own constitution in January 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence.
• The ratification that mattered. Its vote on June 21, 1788 was the ninth approval of the US Constitution, the one that met the threshold and put the document into effect.
• First presidential primary in the country, held since 1920, with a direct vote for candidates rather than only for delegates added in 1952.
• Bretton Woods, July 1944. Delegates from 44 nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel and created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
• First modern state lottery. New Hampshire launched its sweepstakes in 1964, restarting a practice no American state had run for decades.
• First tax supported free public library in the United States opened in Peterborough in 1833.

Geography that surprises

• Mount Washington, 6,288 feet, is the highest peak in the Northeast and sits where major storm tracks converge, which is why its weather is far harsher than the elevation suggests. A cog railway has climbed it since 1869, the first mountain climbing cog railway built anywhere.
• An 18 mile coast and a Canadian border. The state has the shortest ocean frontage of any coastal state and also touches Quebec at its northern tip.
• Pittsburg covers about 291 square miles, more land than the city of Chicago, and it is the largest town by area in the state.
• That same corner was briefly its own country. From 1832 to 1835 settlers caught between American and British claims ran the Indian Stream Republic, with its own constitution and militia.
• The shape is a wedge, wide along the Massachusetts line and pinched to a point at Canada, which is why the drive from Nashua to the border feels far longer than a small state should allow.

Where the name comes from

Captain John Mason received the land grant in 1629 and named it New Hampshire for Hampshire, the English county where he had lived and worked. Mason never saw the territory. He died in 1635 without crossing the Atlantic, and his heirs spent generations litigating the claim. The echo carried further than the name alone: Portsmouth, the state's oldest settlement and its only seaport, shares its name with the naval city on the Hampshire coast. The Granite State nickname came later, from the quarries at Concord and Milford that shipped building stone across the country, and from a reputation for thrift as hard as the rock.

Bordering states

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