Littleton, NH: A Small Town Worth Discovering in 2026

Littleton, New Hampshire never made the cut on Yankee Magazine’s 25 best small towns list. Bonnie Bogle Farrer, who grew up on Main Street there, thinks that’s a mistake worth correcting.

Her letter to Yankee Magazine makes a hard case. From her childhood home, she could see the snow-capped summit of Mount Washington on clear days. The Ammonoosuc River ran through the center of town just below Main Street, cold and quick the way northern New Hampshire rivers are. On weekends, she skied Cannon. A neighbor up the street, Gordi Eaton, went on to become a well-known Olympic skier. That’s not a bad argument for a town’s character.

She’s right about Cannon.

The mountain sits about 15 miles southwest of Littleton on Route 18 in Franconia Notch, and it’s the kind of ski area that rewards people who actually want to ski rather than stand in lift lines at a resort village. The Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway, one of the first passenger tramways in North America, still runs to the summit at 4,080 feet. The vertical drop is 2,180 feet, and the upper mountain trails can hold hard-packed snow well into April. Anyone who grew up skiing there on weekends developed a certain tolerance for cold and a preference for terrain that doesn’t hold your hand.

Littleton itself sits along the Ammonoosuc in Grafton County, population just under 6,000. It’s the kind of town that anchors a region without making noise about it. The Ammonoosuc River, a tributary of the Connecticut, drops fast through this stretch of the North Country. Trout fishing holds up well into early summer.

The other letters in Yankee’s recent mailbag show something different but connected: the particular loyalty New England inspires in people who didn’t even grow up here. Mary Livingston, of Langdon, New Hampshire, moved to the region in 1977 at 26 and subscribed to Yankee almost immediately. She’s been reading it for nearly 50 years. She credits writers Edie Clark and Ben Hewitt with helping her understand what she’d moved into. “I especially came to understand and appreciate our home here through the lovely writing of Edie Clark and Ben Hewitt,” she said.

She’s less enthusiastic about changes to the magazine’s format. Smaller trim size. Paper quality down. Letters to the editor moved online. “What has happened?” she asked directly, and the question doesn’t sound rhetorical.

A third reader raised the same concerns about the redesign, saying she’d welcome a subscription price increase to maintain quality. It’s a sentiment that comes up whenever a regional institution trims itself down.

That tension, between financial reality and reader expectation, is familiar to anyone who covers this region. Small-town newspapers, local magazines, community radio stations: they all navigate the same pressure. Yankee has published since 1935, which means it has outlasted a lot of predictions.

But Farrer’s letter stays with me more than the format complaints. She’s in Bakersfield, California now, and she’s still thinking about the view of Mount Washington from Main Street, still thinking about the Ammonoosuc, still thinking about Cannon on a snowy weekend. That’s what a good small town does. It doesn’t let you go, even when you’re 3,000 miles away.