As we glided to a stop in Warren, a little Grafton County town ringed by the White Mountains, my cousin Don gazed in awe at the town green. Whoa, is that…? he asked as he whipped out his camera.
Yes, he beheld a genuine rocket.
That would be a decommissioned (and presumably disarmed) Redstone rocket standing tall in the center of town, a hunk of our mid-20th century arsenal proudly emblazoned “USA” and pointing skyward.
The relic of the Cold War and the early space program – Redstones were modified to launch our country’s first Earth satellite as well as the first two American astronauts – was a gift to the town from one of its native sons, who clearly thought big when picking a souvenir from his time in the service.
Henry “Ted” Asselin managed to get permission from both the U.S. Defense Support Agency and the Warren Board of Selectmen, then forked over big dough to have the obsolete but still impressive weapon hauled north from Huntsville, Ala., and installed. It was dedicated by no less a personage than the late Gov. Warren Peterson on July 4, 1971.
So of course it’s on our New Hampshire Grand Tour for visitors. My cousins – who had seen plenty of boring old cannons perched on town greens in their travels – were impressed. Pictures were taken. And we all decided it was a good reminder, even in these cranky days, that we should still reach for the stars.
I ask you: In what other state would someone come up with such an inspired, goofy idea as that rocket as municipal lawn decoration? And in what other place could he pull it off, with the cheerful complicity of large and small governments?
Alas, we discovered, all of Warren’s dreamers’ ideas aren’t so successful. On the way out of town we saw a forlorn vacant building overgrown with bramble bushes. A bit of online sleuthing identified it as the one-time home of the Morse Museum, a collection of African carvings and unusual weapons as well as a menagerie of stuffed exotic animals – lions, hyenas and antelopes among them – amassed in the early day of the last century by shoe store magnate and avid hunter Ira H. Morse and his son, Philip.
It also housed a dandy collection of shoes – appropriate enough for a shoe store guy – including a princess’s silver sandals and (grimly) red sneakers from a girl lost in the White Mountains.
Even if the Morse Museum went bust, the Granite State is chockablock full of other unusual places well worth a visit. And it’s the perfect time of year to hit the road. Farm stands burst with a bounty of end-of-season produce, while autumnal piles of pumpkin and gourds, bales of hay, scarecrows and cornstalks decorate everything that isn’t moving.
Here are a few options from Atlas Obscura for those who want to poke into New Hampshire’s odd corners.
Want another eccentric museum? Try the Libby Museum in Wolfeboro, tagged in Atlas Obscura’s list of Granite State eccentricities as the century-old collection of a local dentist, Henry Libby, with a lot of money and a zest for collecting “pretty much everything, including natural, anthropological and historical wonders worth studying for science, cataloging for posterity, and displaying under glass for the general public.” Apparently that includes a pair of mummy hands.
These old collectors were not squeamish people. And, in the days before the federal income tax, rich Americans delighted in roaming the globe and bringing boatsful of foreign plunder to impress and teach less financially favored folks.
How about the atlas’s category of “Catacombs, Crypts and Cemeteries”? In Moultonborough, you can visit the grave of Claude Rains, the actor famed for playing The Invisible Man, who ultimately retired to nearby Sandwich. And Henniker is the final resting place of “Ocean-Born Mary,” who according to legend was born on a ship carrying settlers from Ireland. When it was boarded by pirates, the pirate captain told the babe’s terrified parents that he would spare the infant’s life if she were named after his own mother, Mary.
Well, it’s a nice story. And it’s always fun to visit Henniker.
How about a Betty and Barney Hill tribute driving tour? Their story is an often-rehashed bit of New Hampshire lore. Although the atlas meanly puts the Hills’ story into its category of “Hoaxes and Pseudoscience,” keeping the tale alive has become a cottage industry in our state.
It was late on Sept. 19, 1961. Betty and Barney Hill of Portsmouth were on their way home from a vacation trip to Montreal when, on Route 3, they were tailed by a spaceship and, eventually, stopped by aliens who kidnapped, examined and eventually released them.
Theirs was the first widely circulated alien abduction tale, and is still the best known. In time, it became a best-selling book, The Interrupted Journey, and inspired a TV movie, “The UFO Incident,” starring James Earl Jones. Eventually it “was subjected to a brutal debunking by famous intellectual Carl Sagan,” according to the atlas.
You can visit four Betty and Barney sites in a driving tour of our fair state.
Two are in Lincoln – an actual state historical marker where the abduction occurred and a “more enthusiastic memorial” (as the atlas calls it) at a nearby gas station and Notch Express convenience store. On the store siding is a large painting – labeled “First Close Encounter of the Third Kind” – of a skinny, big-headed alien on a spooky forest road. And the store’s interior is a museum of Betty, Barney and alien artifacts and souvenirs, including bright green inflatable aliens and key chains.
A Yelp reviewer had one word: “Speechless.”
The Greenwood Cemetery off North Road in Kingston, where Betty and Barney’s remains are interred is the third pilgrimage stop.
Finally, you can pay a visit to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, where the Betty and Barney Hill archive resides. It includes, the atlas tells us, letters, journals, transcripts of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions, newspaper clippings, artwork and even “the dress Betty Hill wore, a swatch of which had been cut off and sent for analysis of (the) pink powdery substance she found on it.” No word on what the analysts found.
When you think about it, UNH – home of a controversial million-dollar scoreboard and an even more controversial custom-made dining hall table seating 16 and sporting decorative spoons, recycled metal railings, LED lights and a $17,570 price tag, more than a year’s tuition – seems, somehow, to be a fitting repository for the Betty and Barney archives.
See? These are only a few examples of what’s out there. Our state is a virtual cornucopia of weird, wonderful stuff. So hit the road!
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)