New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee

It's a lake with multiple personalities.

New Hampshire's Lake WInnipesaukee and its surrounding shores are a habitat for motorcyclists and loons, a setting for dollhouse-sized tourist cabins and a castle on a mountaintop, a harbor for old money and new, cruising grounds for cigarette boats and a century-old excursion steamer, and a backdrop for white-steepled New England villages and raucous penny arcades.   The big lake collects all the personalities of the Granite State, and reflects them in the water.

Shaped like a Rorschach-test lobster, with a preposterously convoluted 186-mile shoreline, Winnepesaukee sprawls over 72 square miles at an altitude of 504 feet: its name, in the local Native American dialect, means "beautiful water in a high place."  A surveying party from the Massachusetts Bay Colony reached the lake in 1652, while trying to determine the source of the Merrimack River.  These first European discoverers of Winnipesaukee left a record of their expedition on a rock alongside the entrance to Paugus Bay, where the resort community of Weirs Beach stands today.  Known as Endicott Rock, and protected by a granite canopy, it is inscribed with the initials of the surveyors and the name of the Massachusetts governor, John Endicott. 

For more than a century, the Puritan surveyors' chiseled graffiti marked a spot as obscure as any in New England -- it marked, in effect, little more than the place where, since time immemorial, Indians had caught fish in a stone trap, or weir, at the narrows where Paugus Bay begins.  But over on Winnipesaukee's east shore, in 1769, New Hampshire's royal governor John Wentworth chose the town of Wolfeboro as the site for a vacation retreat, giving the then barely-inhabited community justification for its future sobriquet of "oldest summer resort in America."  In those days, the colony's capital was at Portsmouth.  Governor Wentworth must have wanted to get away from the bustling harbor town, so he had a mansion built at Wolfeboro, closer to the shores of what would later be called Lake Wentworth, then lake Winnipesaukee.  The site was then so remote that the governor's men had to hack out a 45-mile road from Portsmouth to reach it (in 1771, they extended the road another 67 miles to Hanover, so Wentworth could attend the first commencement at Dartmouth College).

He didn't get to enjoy the place for long.  The 100-foot-long mansion, two full storeys high with six-foot windows and front door keys weighing a pound and a half each, was hardly finished when the American Revolution made royal governorships an occupation ripe for downsizing.  Wentworth fled New Hampshire, and eventually became governor of Nova Scotia.  The gubernatorial summer retreat burned in 1820; today, in deep woods off a dirt road, its overgrown foundations are a melancholy sight.

At an omnium-gatherum of a collection called the Libby Museum, just north of Wolfeboro, I looked at a display case filled with artifacts dug from that cellar hole and its forlorn surroundings.  There were table utensils and door hardware (but no gargantuan keys), shards of pottery, and a piece of brick stamped with "69," the year it was fired.  

The cellarhole and the rusted cutlery might make Governor Wentworth seem like Ozymandias in a tricorn hat, but he was a pioneer of the local resort scene, and he did set the tone for the more sedate summer style that prevails along Winnepesaukee's east shore.  "There are very few hotels on this side of the lake -- it's nearly all second homes," says Pat Smith, director of the Libby Museum.  "We get visitors who represent the third generation of their families to summer here, and to come to the museum."  They must feel as if they're dropping in to look over a well-remembered old attic full of favorite things -- arrowheads, Indian dugout canoes, stuffed birds and animals, lace that belonged to 19th-century French Empress Eugenie, a moose skeleton, a mummy's hands.  This trove of curiosities was assembled by a local dentist, Dr. Henry Libby, who built the airy, single-story museum in 1912 opposite a lakeshore park.