New Hampshire's Five-Town Rock

The Four-Corners Monument in southwest America marks where four different states meet at one spot, and is a popular tourist destination. That's great and all, but if we're talking strictly a numbers game then we have a spot here in New Hampshire that's got it beat by 25%. It is our Five-Town Rock, and it marks the spot where Alton, Barnstead, Farmington, New Durham, and Strafford all meet at a point.

First thing to know about the Five-Town Rock is that this is not a tourist destination. You're not going to find any monuments here, there's no plaque pointing to which towns are in which direction, in fact there aren't even any trails leading to it. There is just a single rock a half-mile deep in the woods, carved with letters and dates that span back over 200 years. Finding this rock had been creeping up our to-do list for a while now, and on a recent Sunday afternoon it finally found itself at the top.

Sometimes the universe signals to us that we're going to have a good adventure, even before that adventure begins. Today was one of those days. Our parking spot turned out to be right in front of an old cemetery, and if you know my wife Tina then you know that the only thing better than an old cemetery to her, would be an old cemetery next door to a Ben & Jerry's.

There weren't any ice-cream stands next to this graveyard, but we did spot a couple of foundations, and it got us wondering whether the former inhabitants of one were now the current inhabitants of the other.

Once we got moving we realized that, for several reasons, winter is the best time to make this hike. Three reasons, to be exact. That's the number of streams we had to cross during the next half hour, which was made easy by the fact that each of them was frozen over.

Upon reviewing my pictures though, "easy" might have been too strong of a word for it - I've seen people crossing the Grand Canyon glasswalk with more confidence than Tina showed crossing this layer of ice.

But even with these challenges, and even though there were no trails to speak of, it was still a relaxing and enjoyable hike.

The rock was said to lie at the intersection of two stone walls. We encountered several along the way, but most wandered off in the wrong direction so we resisted the temptation to follow them and stayed the course.

Eventually we found a wall that didn't disappear sideways into the woods, and right where it cornered with a second one we spotted the rock. Footprints showed we were't the first people to make this journey since last snowfall, and to highlight another reason why this trip is best done in the winter, those helpful folks did a great job of rubbing snow into the the rock and making the carvings legible. In addition to the dates we found several initials which we thought might refer to which town that part was facing, but none seemed to match up or make any sense.

So rather than put too much thought into deciphering it, I just stood on the rock and made bad jokes about how tired I was from visiting five different towns in a matter of seconds. Tina laughed, but I'm pretty sure it was of the 'at me' variety, not the 'with me'.

If you're anything like our daughter Madison, by this point you might be shaking your head and wondering, did I just read an entire story about a rock? You did, kind of ... but no, you really didn't. What you read was a story about two people spending an afternoon in the woods, getting some exercise, escaping the hustle of everyday life, finding a piece of history, and having a few laughs along the way.

It was just disguised as a story about a rock.

Other rocks we like:
Boise Rock
Madison Boulder
Frog Rock