It was our pleasure to have The Red Chair with us at our romantic New Hampshire bed and breakfast this week. This slightly worn, bright red wooden chair is making its way around New England, traveling from inn to inn. It started from its home in Woods Hole at the Woods Hole Inn in July and will return to Woods Hole in mid-December. My job, as host of the chair for 3 days this week, was to take photos of the chair at the inn and in Chesterfield so that people could get an idea of where the chair had been.

My first photo was of the inn sitting in the field in front of the inn sign in the meadow in the front yard to the left of the pond. It was a cold November morning, and the trees and grass were all coated with a thin layer of frost, making the chair stand out even more.

I then moved the chair to the back of the inn, on the blue stone terrace, and snapped this photo. The terrace usually has several wrought iron tables and chairs with umbrellas on it, but the furniture has all been stored in the barn for the winter, so the chair was all alone out there.

We came inside to warm up for a few minutes, and then I packed the chair up into the car and drove 10 minutes up to the Madame Sherri Forest in West Chesterfield. The trails in the forest are beautifully laid out, and circle around the hilly landscape, climbing all the way up to Indian Pond, a beautiful pond hidden at the top of the hill but below the cliffs off the back of Mine Ledge. I carried the chair a short way up the trail, where it forks to the right and opens up so that you can see the ruins of Madame Sherri’s house. I was able to set the chair in the center near the stone staircase and take a nice photo.

I’m always surprised to find things that I don’t know about New Hampshire, even after living here for 25 years! As the image shows, New Hampshire is truly beautiful in the fall as we are known for our fall foliage, and we are enjoying every minute of it!

Here are some New Hampshire facts that I’d like to share with you: New Hampshire was the 9th state in the Union; it gained statehood on June 21, 1788. New Hampshire was the first of the original colonies to declare independence from England. Our house, attached to our Chesterfield NH inn, was built in the early 1780′s. The rest of the inn is not nearly as old, originally built as sheds and barns and dating back to the early 1900′s.

New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live Free or Die”. The motto comes from a statement written by the Revolutionary General John Stark, hero of the Battle of Bennington in Bennington, Vermont. Bennington is about 45 minutes away, across the Green Mountains on Route 9 in Vermont. Those of us who live here like to think of ourselves as independent, which means that we get a lot of visits from political candidates.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens from Cornish, New Hampshire was the first sculptor to design an American coin. You can visit his home, studios and sculpture gardens in Cornish, just an hour’s drive from the inn.

The first capital city of New Hampshire was in Exeter, but the capital was moved to Concord in 1808. The New Hampshire legislature still meets in their original chambers which are the oldest in the country. Concord also has the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, a planetarium named after Christa McAuliffe, the Concord teacher who died during the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

This is simply food for thought to provide our New Hampshire guests places to visit the next time they travel to our state and be sure to stay with us at our New Hampshire luxury inn.