Lebanon, NH
A small Ivy League college on the Vermont border in Hanover, New Hampshire — founded 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock under a royal charter from King George III, originally intended to educate Native American boys (very few attended; the school quickly pivoted to colonial English students). The ninth-oldest U.S. institution of higher education, the smallest in the Ivy League (about 4,500 undergraduates). The Dartmouth Green — a 7-acre quadrangle bordered by the historic Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth Hall (1791 original, reconstructed 1906 and again 1935), and the Hopkins Center for the Arts — is the geographic and ceremonial center of the campus and town simultaneously. Daniel Webster (Class of 1801) defended the college's independence before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), establishing the contract-clause protection for private corporations against state interference — one of the most important cases in U.S. constitutional history. Other Dartmouth alumni: poet Robert Frost (briefly, 1892, before transferring), surgeon C. Everett Koop, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and journalist Mindy Kaling. The Hood Museum of Art holds one of the oldest college-museum collections in the U.S.
A Georgian Revival mansion in Manchester, Vermont, completed in 1905 as the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln — Abraham and Mary Lincoln's eldest son and only child to survive to adulthood. Robert had served as Secretary of War under Garfield and Arthur, U.S. Ambassador to the UK under Benjamin Harrison, and president of the Pullman Company. The Lincoln family lived at Hildene until 1975, when Mary Lincoln Beckwith — Abraham Lincoln's last direct descendant — died there. The 412-acre estate sits on a bluff with a 100-mile view down the Vermont Valley to the Green Mountains. Inside the house: one of Lincoln's three surviving stovepipe hats (verified provenance), the family's 1908 Aeolian pipe organ (still played), the original 1908 furniture and family photographs. Robert Todd Lincoln has the strange distinction of being at or near the scene of three presidential assassinations — his father's in 1865, James Garfield's in 1881 (he arrived moments after the shooting at Sixth Street Station), and William McKinley's in 1901 (he was an invited guest at the Pan-American Exposition). After the third he reportedly stopped accepting invitations from sitting presidents.
Off Route 100 in Waterbury, Vermont — the original headquarters factory of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Holdings, founded in 1978 by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in a renovated Burlington gas station with a $5 ice-cream-making correspondence course from Penn State. The Waterbury plant opened 1985 as their main production facility and remains operational today. The half-hour factory tour shows the actual production line through observation windows (which flavor depends on the day's schedule), tells the company's history (the 2000 sale to Unilever for $326 million, the founders' subsequent activism, the strict 5-to-1 highest-to-lowest pay ratio they negotiated as a sale condition), and ends with a sample of the current flavor in the moo-decorated tasting room. The Flavor Graveyard outside the factory has actual stone headstones for every retired flavor (over 350 buried) — Wavy Gravy, Sugar Plum, Vermonty Python, and others — with epitaphs. Vermont's 100-mile Route 100 corridor through the Green Mountains is the state's primary scenic byway; Stowe Mountain Resort is 14 miles north, the Trapp Family Lodge (Sound of Music) is in Stowe, and the Cabot Creamery is east in Cabot.
On the east side of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, in a curvy white Streamline Moderne building that does not match anything else around it, is the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire. The building itself is the exhibit's center of gravity. It is the 1937 terminal of Grenier Field — built by the Works Progress Administration at a total cost of $549,758, replacing a 1931 brick shack, and serving as the airport's main passenger terminal through the years when Glenn Miller's USO C-47 flew through here, when Grenier Field ferried 9,000 B-17s and B-24s to Europe, and into the early Cold War. The building was retired in 1961 when the new Ammon Terminal opened. It served as the general aviation building for another thirty-four years. In 1995, with the major expansion underway, it was slated for demolition. The New Hampshire Aviation Historical Society, the City of Manchester, the FAA, and the Town of Londonderry agreed to save it instead. The society raised $1.1 million. In 2004, the building was lifted onto a transport rig and moved across two active runways in the middle of the night — runway 6-24 was closed for one hour for the first crossing, then runway 17-35 closed for an hour for the second. By dawn the building was sitting at its new address at 27 Navigator Road on the east side of the field. It opened as a museum in 2005. The Slusser Aviation Learning Center, a hangar-shaped wing built behind the original structure in 2011 with a million-dollar gift from Eugene and Ann Slusser, doubled the museum's size. Inside: New Hampshire's aviation history from the air mail era — including 2nd Lt. Jean Donat Grenier himself — through Grenier Field's North Atlantic ferry mission, Pease Air Force Base, and the modern Manchester airport. The museum's parking lot is the closest the public can get to active Runway 17-35. It is free, open to 8 p.m. daily, and arguably the best airliner-watching spot in northern New England.