In the northeast corner of the USA, sandwiched between Canada, New York State, and the Atlantic Ocean, lies New England, home of some of the oldest American archetypes: the white church steeple presiding over a tidy village green, the self-sufficient farmstead, the swimming hole beneath a covered bridge, the salt-sprayed fishing village tucked against a rock-bound coast.
These were just everyday sights for New Englanders until 19th-century Currier & Ives prints and 20th-century Norman Rockwell illustrations introduced them to people who had never set foot in the region. Despite the passage of time, the lush, pastoral visions still exist today and provide a picturesque backdrop for the mixture of walks and driving tours in this guide.
The remote, seaswept coast of Maine
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History
As you travel throughout the region’s six states, there is plenty to remind you why it is called New England. Many of the town and city names were adopted from across the Atlantic by 17th-century British settlers. It is here that you find some of America’s oldest and most illustrious seats of learning – Harvard, Yale, and Brown – all with campuses modeled on old English universities. Even after political ties with Britain were broken, ideas from the Old World – such as the abolition of slavery and the technology of the Industrial Revolution – found fertile ground here in the 19th century, bringing New England great wealth.
The coming of the railroads also stoked a fledgling tourism industry along the coast and in the mountains, where the wealthy built palatial summer homes and grand hotels. After World War II, tourism in New England became diffused and democratized, especially when entrepreneurs began stringing rope tows, and later, chair lifts, along the sides of mountains that were destined to become ski resorts. National parks and state forests were set up to protect the most precious pieces of the environment for all to enjoy.
New England has four distinct seasons. The first snow generally falls in November and continues intermittently through March. Spring, (better known as mud season), can be fleeting and is characterized by crisp, clear days and chilly evenings, often dampened with snow melt. The humidity often turns hot and heavy from June to September, but ocean breezes cool things down along the coast. Fall in New England is glorious, and the bright red, gold, and orange foliage carpeting the rolling hills and mountains in mid-October justly famous.
Vibrant fall colours
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Getting around the States
This guide zones in on specially selected key attractions in each state and organizes the suggested itineraries – none lasting more than three days – accordingly. The routes start with walks in Boston and neighboring Cambridge, the most likely access point for the vast majority of visitors. Proceeding in a roughly clockwise direction from Boston, several, if not all, of the routes can be linked up, time permitting, to enable visitors to construct anything from a long weekend in one state to a full month’s vacation throughout all of New England. The Points to Note box at the start of each route gives details on how to link with other routes.
Cradle of Liberty
Massachusetts (www.mass.gov), the most populous of the New England sextet, is known as the Cradle of Liberty; it was here that the War of Independence kicked off in 1775. The state continues to live up to its history of liberalism and free thought; this was the first state in the US to legalize same-sex marriages.
There are 183 National Historic Landmarks in Massachusetts. You can view many of these in Boston – the most European of American cities – on day trips to Lexington and Concord (route 3) and out to Salem and Cape Ann (route 4), where the trappings of the wealth that flooded into the region in the subsequent centuries can be assessed.
Going further back, the days of the Pilgrim Fathers can be experienced on a trip down Massachusetts’s South Shore and out to the hooked tip of Cape Cod (route 5), dotted with picturesque villages and sweeping ocean vistas. Continue to follow in the footsteps of those earlier adventurers by heading inland to explore Pioneer Valley and the verdant Berkshire Hills (route 6).
The Ocean State
Neighboring Massachusetts to the south is Rhode Island (www.ri.gov). Growing out of the Providence Plantations colony established in 1636 by Roger Williams, a clergyman disillusioned with Massachusetts Bay’s theocratic government, the diminutive state was the first of the 13 colonies to cut its ties with Britain.
Rhode Islanders are seldom more than 30 minutes’ drive from the water in the Ocean State. Riverside Providence (route 7), the state capital, has recently emerged from the shadow of Boston as one of New England’s most interesting and design-driven cities. Down the coast, chichi Newport (route 8) continues to be a summer haven for the rich, although these days, for the price of admission, anyone is free to traipse through the town’s jaw-dropping collection of 19th-century mansions.
Covered bridge in Vermont
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The Constitution State
Taking its name from a Mohegan (a Native American tribe) word meaning ‘place of the long tidal river’, Connecticut’s proximity to New York often means it gets overlooked as a part of New England. However, Connecticut (www.ct.gov) is home to the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Hartford Courant, just one of many reminders of the state’s long history of European settlement.
The state is bisected by the mighty Connecticut River, while its south edge raggedly borders the Long Island Sound. Along the latter you will find the kitsch maritime shops of Mystic, the naval base of New London, and the academic haunts of New Haven (route 9).
Burlington’s waterfront
Discover New England
Don’t leave New England without…
Indulging in ‘chowda’. New England long Atlantic coastline provides lots of fresh fish and seafood, especially clams, which overflow the creamy rich chowder the region is famous for. Go all the way and order it served in a bread bowl. For more information, click here.
Watching the whales. Humpback, finback, right, and minke whales enjoy the rich feeding grounds of New England, making it a prime spot for beholding their aquatic majesty on watching tours, particularly from Cape Cod. For more information, click here.
Peeping the leaves. New England unveils its true colors every autumn in an astonishing glow of reds, golds, and oranges, particularly in the heavily forested areas of northern New England. For more information, click here.
Walking the Marginal Way in Ogunquit. Seventeen miles (27km) up the coast from Portsmouth (for more information, click here), New England’s most dramatic and romantic seaside promenade stretches 1.25 miles (2km) along the bluffs, coves, and inlets of Ogunquit. Crashing waves included.
Rooting for the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Whether you support Boston’s love-em-or-hate-em team, a trip to century-old Fenway Park is a step back to the glory days of baseball and a glimpse of New England’s beating heart. For more information, click here.
Exploring the mansions of Newport. The aristocracy of the guilded age endowed Newport, Rhode Island with some of the finest manors in the country, most of which are open for tours and vicarious dreams. .
Taking to the slopes. The mountains of New England, particularly in Vermont and New Hampshire, are home to some of the country’s best skiing. All levels are welcomed and catered to. Off-season, hikers replace ski bums on the trails and peaks. For more information, click here.
Cycling the Burlington Bike Path. Along Lake Champlain, the ‘west coast’ of New England, one of the region’s best bike paths runs 14 miles (22.5km) from Burlington to the Islands. Bikes are available on site to rent. For more information, click here.
Sip suds at craft breweries. Since Boston’s own Samuel Adams launched the craft brew revolution in 1985, New England has remained at the sudsy edge of beer production. Indeed, Vermont has the most breweries per capita in the country. For more information, click here.
Time travel to Days of Yore. New England’s maritime and pilgrim past are kept alive at period parks throughout the region, most notably at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. For more information, click here.
Mountains and forests
It is in the next two states that the natural beauty of New England really starts to come to the fore. Sparsely populated Vermont (www.vermont.gov) may be landlocked, but it is notable for vast Lake Champlain, running down half of the state’s west border. Overlooking the lake is Vermont’s largest city, Burlington (route 11), one of the most laid-back of New England’s urban centers. To get there, you pass through the lush Green Mountains (route 10), starting in the arty town of Brattleboro and heading towards peaks that are home to some of New England’s top ski resorts.
The modern history of New Hampshire (www.nh.gov) is almost as old as that of Massachusetts, with the first English settlements in Portsmouth (route 14) dating back to 1623. You will begin to understand why it is known as the Granite State when you head inland to tour the magnificent White Mountains (route 13), rugged peaks that rise up over 3,000ft (915m). At the foot of the mountains lies the equally majestic Lakes Region (route 12).
North by Down East
Last, but by no means least, there is Maine (www.maine.gov), the largest of the New England states. Many visitors barely scratch the surface of what the Pine Tree State has to offer, sticking mainly to the 60-mile (96km) stretch of coast south of Portland. Here the towns of York, Ogunquit, Wells, and Kennebunkport all enjoy fine beaches.
But it is north of Portland (route 15) that Maine’s character asserts itself most clearly, along the ragged coastline to the far-flung Down East redoubts of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park (route 16). With more time on your hands, you could really go off the beaten track to some of the unspoiled islands that flake off from the shoreline like thousands of rocky, pine-tree-clad crumbs.
A literary tradition
One the best ways to gain an insight into the New England frame of mind is to read a book by one of its native writers. In the 19th century, authors centered in Boston and Concord created the first important movement in American literature. In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson published his philosophical essay Nature, while in the following years Emerson’s neighbor, Henry David Thoreau, chronicled his relationship with the natural world and his sojourn in a hand-built cabin on the shores of Walden Pond (for more information, click here).
Nathaniel Hawthorne brought a psychological dimension to the American novel, casting a sharp eye on Puritan New England in The Scarlet Letter (1850), while Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville used his knowledge of the New Bedford whaling industry as background for Moby-Dick (1851).
Adding further luster to New England’s literary reputation in the mid-19th century were Louisa May Alcott (also a Concord resident), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (whose home is preserved in Harvard, for more information, click here), and Mark Twain, who settled in Hartford, Connecticut. Toward the end of the 19th-century, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton took up residence in a grand house in Lenox (for more information, click here).
Federal-style architecture in Massachusetts
Kindra Clineff
Population
Around 14.44 million people live in New England, about three quarters of them based in and around the biggest cities, such as Boston, Providence, and Hartford, in the southern states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, respectively. This leaves much of the rest of the region with a low population density and a traditional rural character and attitude, in sharp contrast to the more multicultural urban centers toward the coast.
Nearly 15 million people call New England home. Over 22 percent of them are under the age of 18; 13 percent are over 65. Of these, the majority are Caucasian (83 percent), far outnumbering the next largest groups – Hispanic, African-American, and Asian-American. Native Americans and Oceanic peoples largely complete the head-count. Nearly 2 percent describe themselves as multi-racial. Massachusetts has the largest population: over 6.5 million residents; Vermont has only 625,000.
Of the European-originated population, English dominance has been superseded by those of Irish, French/French Canadian, and Italian descent. The centers of population break down along ethnic lines. Boston has a large Irish and Italian population which is more numerous now than those who trace their lineage to the city’s British roots. Rhode Island has strong Italian connections, but Providence boasts a large Portuguese neighborhood. Northern Vermont and New Hampshire have a strong French influence due to its proximity to Quebec.
Boston’s skyline as viewed across the Inner Harbour
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Politics, religion and economics
Long known for its liberalism, New England is the heartland of the Democratic Party. However, three of the region’s states (Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts) have Republican governors.
Spiritually, the original Pilgrims would be displeased, at best, by the region’s religious affiliations. Given the influx of Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Hispanic immigrants, it’s no surprise that 36 percent of New Englanders are Catholic, with another 32 percent identifying themselves as Christian. But 25 percent claim no religious affiliation of any kind, one of the highest levels in the country, perhaps in keeping with the region’s liberal politics.
As in the past, New England’s prime industries revolve around specialized foods (the region is famous for its lobsters, chowder, cranberries, and maple syrup) and manufacturing, particularly electronic equipment. While this last sector took a hit during the last economic downturn, the region’s tourism industry remains buoyant.
Top tips for visiting New England
Before you go. For more travel information on New England, go to www.visitnewengland.com, or check out the tourism websites of each of the states.
Dress in layers. The weather of New England changes often, ranging from wet, heavy, hot humidity in the summer to frigid bone-cracking cold in the winter, and everything in between. Dressing in layers allows greater adaptation.
Invest in footwear. Even if there’s not several feet of snow on the ground in the winter, or an almost equal amount of mud in spring, New England can still challenge the feet in its often rugged countryside. Tough, quality footwear is therefore essential.
Carry bug spray. Outside of Boston, much of New England is wet and rural. That means any walk in the woods can quickly turn to torture without mosquito repellent. Also check yourself and pets for ticks after any walk in the woods.
Book early for fall. October is peak foliage and tourist season in New England, making accommodation very hard to find if not booked up to six months in advance.
Bring a car. The only city with a major public transport system in New England is Boston. A few railways do connect all six states, but without a car, exploration becomes a serious challenge.
Go off-highway. Well-maintained highways offer fast, easy routes through the states, but far more vintage charm lies along the old routes, which snake along rivers and valleys through Colonial towns and villages, albeit at a much slower pace.
Eat and drink locally. Although it’s easy to find major restaurant chains throughout New England, the region prides itself on fresh, locally sourced meals, which are never far away, along with some of the world’s best breweries.
Refresh your history. New England, particularly the Boston area, is replete with major historical sights pertaining to the founding of the United States, from Plymouth Rock to Bunker Hill. This is the place to bring those history lessons to life.
Catch a bus. On Saturday and Sunday from mid-April to early May and then daily until mid-October, the Liberty Ride (tel: 781-862-0500) tour bus travels between Lexington and Concord visiting the key historic sites. It’s a 90-minute continuous loop guided tour, and you can hop on and off as you please within a 48-hour period.
Stay off the Cape on summer holidays. Cape Cod is indeed a beauty, but torturous to reach around any major holiday in the summer, when the one major road, Route 6, grinds almost to a halt with traffic.
Pack paper maps. Although cellphone coverage remains strong in and around New England’s urban centers, more rural areas, particularly mountainous ones, can severely weaken, and even kill, signals. So be sure to bring back-up.