823. Concord, Merrimack County (NH03)

A good night’s sleep had prepared me and the fellowship for the hard New Hampshire morning. [NB: it was not hard.] I had expected something more historical as courthouses go. Every courthouse in the Northeast seemed either really old or really new. Of course, that was not always the case because architectural revival styles are a thing, so I was bamboozled by several courthouses that, while echoing antiquity, were not nearly as old as I might have thought. Here, I was reverse bamboozled. I originally thought it was built in the early twentieth century, but it was completed in 1857. Learning that it had been remodeled in 1907 and further renovated in 1981 made me feel vindicated, but that didn’t really matter, anyway. The courthouse could never be the center of political gravity here. Not when it was so close to …

… the New Hampshire State House. The Granite State did not disappoint from that perspective. Its capitol building was resplendent in granite and gold. It did immediately raise a question, though. Why did Baltimore get granite for the Pride of Baltimore monument from Texas, so far away, instead of from up the road (or more likely, a canal) in New Hampshire? It didn’t really matter for our purposes. The statehouse was the answer to our needs, cache-wise.

Across the street, we got a Virtual at a statue. I’d tell you who the statue was dedicated to, but that’s pretty integral to claiming the Virtual. Suffice it to say that, after learning who he was and reading his Wikipedia entry, he is legit on the short list of most interesting historical figures I’ve ever stumbled across, even more so than Merrimack County’s celebrated son, Daniel Webster. And the statehouse itself was home to an EarthCache dedicated to (get ready to have your minds blown, folks) granite! And with that, we were off again, pointed even more northeast than we already were, to…