A home by the lake: Chocorua's summer cottage history

TAMWORTH — I don’t know about you, but whenever I drive on Route 16 through scenic Chocorua, I think about the mansions — sorry, I mean the “summer cottages,” as Tamworth historian George Cleveland will be quick to tell you — that are hidden back among the trees on the eastern side of the highway. I have always thought there must be quite a story lurking in there. Turns out I was right.

In the mid-19th century, the summer elite “discovered” lovely bucolic Tamworth, of which Chocorua is a part. According to Conway Public Library Henney History Room curator Bob Cottrell, who is the former director of the Remick Country Doctor Museum and Farm in Tamworth, the well-heeled business leaders of Boston, New York and Chicago began buying up farmland that had been abandoned following the Civil War, when farmers discovered the fertile soil of the Midwest and moved on.