New Hampshire

For thousands of years, a natural rock formation on Cannon Mountain looked exactly like an old man's face. Forty feet tall, perched 1,200 feet above a lake in Franconia Notch, it became the most famous symbol in New Hampshire.

The Abenaki called it "Stone Face." It appeared on the state quarter, license plates, and highway signs. Then on the night of May 3, 2003, it collapsed.

Nobody saw it happen. Hikers found it gone the next morning. The image is still on the license plates today.

Abenaki and other western Algonquian peoples lived across this region for thousands of years. European settlers arrived in 1623, and the English named it New Hampshire after the county of Hampshire back home.

New Hampshire picked a fight with the British before almost anyone else. In December 1774, four months before Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere rode from Boston to Portsmouth to warn that British ships were coming for the gunpowder at Fort William and Mary.

Four hundred colonists stormed the fort, overpowered six soldiers, and hauled away 98 kegs of powder. That stolen gunpowder later supplied New Hampshire troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In January 1776, New Hampshire became the first colony to set up its own independent government, six months before the Declaration of Independence. The state's motto comes from Revolutionary War General John Stark, who wrote in 1809: "Live free or die."

New Hampshire cast the ninth and deciding vote to approve the U.S. Constitution in 1788, making it the law of the land. The state has held the first presidential primary every four years since 1920, a tradition it fiercely protects by law.

You can ride the Mount Washington Cog Railway, the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway (built in 1869), to the summit of the Northeast's highest peak at 6,288 feet. Walk through the Flume Gorge in Franconia Notch, where 90-foot granite walls tower over boardwalks and waterfalls.

Drive the Kancamagus Highway through the White Mountains, and explore the historic port of Portsmouth, where the Revolution started four months early.