The financial and political heartland of New Hampshire is the Merrimack Valley , which - first by water and now by road - has always been the main thoroughfare north to the White Mountains and Québec. None of its towns is of any great interest to tourists, though all are pleasant enough, and equipped with relatively inexpensive motels.

The southernmost (and New Hampshire's second-biggest) town on the river, Nashua , was rated by Money magazine in 1997 as the number one place to live in America. Plenty of its citizens still choose to work in Boston, though Massachusetts no longer allows employees to escape state taxes by living across the border in New Hampshire. MANCHESTER , like its namesake in England, was a major nineteenth-century cotton producer. Although its massive Amoskeag Mills closed in the 1930s, it remains the largest city in the state, and is now notable mainly for the glassware, furniture and paintings in the Currier Gallery of Art at 201 Myrtle Way (Mon, Wed, Thurs, Sat & Sun 11am-5pm, Fri 9am-11pm; free). The focal point of CONCORD is the gold dome of the State House, the seat of New Hampshire's state legislature; despite its small size it has 424 members, making it the fourth largest such body in the world (after the parliaments of the United States, Britain and India). Local schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, a victim of the Challenger shuttle tragedy, is commemorated by a planetarium, at 3 Institute Drive, off the I-93, exit 15E (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm, open until 10pm on Friday Skywatch nights; tel 603/271-7831).

Fifteen miles north of Concord on Hwy-106, Canterbury Shaker Village (May-Oct daily 10am-5pm; April, Nov & Dec, Sat & Sun 10am-5pm; $10) was the sixth Shaker community to be founded by Ann Lee in the 1780s, numbering 300-strong by 1860. Ninety-minute tours show Shaker crafts and techniques - such as box-making - and the attached Creamery restaurant serves Shaker food from April through December. South of Concord, outside Derry on Hwy-28, the Robert Frost Farm (summer daily 10am-5pm; rest of year Sat & Sun 10am-5pm; $3) has been evocatively restored to its condition when New England's poet laureate lived here from 1900 to 1911. Displays in the barn discuss his work, and a half-mile "poetry nature trail" leads past the sites that inspired many of his best-known poems.

Merrimack Valley

• Merrimack Valley

New Hampshire cities


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