Say the two names in one breath and they sound like a law firm. Moultonborough and Tuftonboro. Most people use the pair to describe the stretch of road between the towns they are visiting for the summer. Realtors do the same thing, when they’re advising clients on slightly more affordable and tax-friendly alternatives to their summer resort town neighbors.
Here’s what the law firm framing gets wrong. One of these towns has a general store that tallies your check on a brown paper bag. The other has a barbecue place that closes when the pitmaster decides it’s closed. In one, you pop out for a scone. In the other, you build the quiet on purpose and choose when you’re hanging with your neighbors and when you’re traveling to the rest of the lake for a livelier experience. Same shoreline, same weather, same road connecting these two to each other and to the bigger towns on either side of them. Two very different ideas of what an ordinary Tuesday should feel like.
Tuftonboro: The One You Have to Be In On
Search “things to do in Tuftonboro, NH” and you’ll get a Yelp or TripAdvisor list of things to do in Wolfeboro, Meredith, and North Conway. I’m betting the residents of Tuftonboro don’t mind that at all. It’s also a little funny, because there is plenty going on. Its just an IYKYK type of situation.
Tuftonboro feels like a secret. It has a neighborhood called Hidden Valley, so the town isn’t even trying to be subtle. The best proof is Refuge BBQ and Mercantile, some of the best barbecue in the region. They don’t open every day. The menu is closer to a rumor than a promise. The specials run because the pitmaster feels like it, and when they’re out, they’re out. You can drive over with a plan and come home with a different plan. I love this. I also understand that some people would be less thrilled. That split tells you most of what you need to know about Tuftonboro.
The town publishes a calendar, and it reads like a town that entertains itself. Rug hookers and a cribbage group on Tuesdays. A puzzle group on Fridays, a writers’ group on Saturday mornings, dodgeball on Thursday nights. A hikers’ club with guest-night potluck suppers and programs on subjects ranging from Route 66 to historical preservation. A history book group and a readers’ choice book club. Nearly all of it happens at the free library, which tells you where the center of gravity is.
Then there’s Tuesday night. The Country, Bluegrass and Gospel Music Jam at the Old White Church is the best thing I know of in the Lakes Region that no one puts on a list. I grew up in Nashville, so my standards for a room full of people playing this type of music are not low. This room clears them. People dance in the aisles. Drive by around 7 and you’ll see cars jammed along the side of the road. I’ve heard “take me to church” used as a figure of speech plenty of times. In Tuftonboro every Tuesday, it’s directions.
For daily life in town, the answer is Melvin Village, and for coffee, Pier 19 is your best bet. It’s also a good place to grab groceries if you don’t feel like driving, and I hear the hot food is great, though I haven’t tried it myself. What I can report is that I’m savvily marketed to every time I walk in. I own more than one piece of Lake Winni merch that was clearly meant for tourists and that I absolutely had to have.
The water is the same story as the rest. Mirror Lake and Lower Beech Pond are small lakes with communities built around them, where the only people on the water or the beach are your neighbors. Nobody is performing the lake for visitors, because there aren’t any. It isn’t exclusive. Nobody checks your name at a gate. It’s insider, which is different, and you get in by living there long enough to know.
My shorthand for it is the quiet dorm in college. Everyone in that building chose it on purpose. The party was across the quad and the library was a short walk, and they had decided that they wanted life to be calm and friendly and quiet. In Tuftonboro, you build a quiet life in the middle of everything, and everything is reachable whenever you want it.
What Tuftonboro asks of you is flexibility. It will not organize itself around your schedule. If you need the thing you wanted to be there when you arrive, you’ll be driving to another town when you need that thing. I’ll take the unpredictable barbecue and a bluegrass jam that makes your feet stomp any day of the week.
Moultonborough: The Bridge
Moultonborough holds two things at once without strain. Out on the neck are the big lake homes, the ones that look like they’re about to star in a prestige tv series or host a fashion or design shoot. In town are single and multifamily homes on ordinary streets, the housing a place needs if it wants to stay a town and not turn into a view. Balmoral and Suissevale are good examples of seasonal life here: private associations on Winnipesaukee where some houses look like chalets and the streets have quintessential names that evoke Europe. All of the above is Moultonborough, and no one part of it resents the others as far as I can tell.
What makes it feel like itself is how easy it is to pop out and get something. Cup and Crumb for coffee. Eat the scones. They have plenty of gluten free options, so nobody at the table gets left out. El Mariachi is as authentic a Mexican restaurant as you’ll find in New Hampshire, and I say that as someone who has been let down by the competition. Buckey’s is a great self-proclaimed dive bar, and its sign writer makes me laugh at least once a week. And the Old Country Store is a general store that still tallies your check on a brown paper bag and sells penny candy by the pound. That isn’t a bit. It’s how the store works.
Green’s Corner Market has my household’s second favorite gas station pizza. The first remains Jack’s Pizza in Alton, where I drive to pick up slices instead of ordering whole pies from any freestanding pizzeria. I realize that sentence says something. I’m not quite sure what, other than you can be a snob about food (mea culpa) and not be snobby about where you get the good stuff.
When you want something to do, Moultonborough has a few anchors that are worth the trip for their own sake. Castle in the Clouds, the mountainside estate with the long view back over the lake. The Loon Center, if you want to understand why people up here get so protective about one bird. And when the weather turns, The New Woodshed, cozy fine dining that’s a favorite of mine in winter especially. Start with the French onion soup, then indulge in the rack of lamb, maybe with button mushrooms on the side. The wine list is great, and the room and the regulars do the rest.
What Moultonborough asks of you is a tolerance for not being easily summed up. The neck and the in-town streets are different lives in the same town, and if you want a place you can describe in a sentence, this might not be it. I like that it won’t be put into a box.
Where They Sit Between the Neighbors
Meredith and Wolfeboro are both wonderful, and I spend a lot of time helping people find home in both. I’m at Harmony Coffee House in Wolfeboro and Mello Moose in Meredith often enough to have opinions on baristas and breakfast sandwich offerings. Both towns have the foot traffic, the downtown you can point at, the energy you can feel from the sidewalk. That’s real.
These two towns that sit between them have access to that energy without living inside it. Moultonborough sits closer to the Meredith side of things, and Tuftonboro leans toward Wolfeboro. You can have the energy when you want it and leave it behind when you don’t. Neither one is a resort town. There’s no season when the town puts on a costume nor one where it takes it off again. The jam fills a church on a Tuesday in February and on one in July, and The New Woodshed is busiest when the lake is frozen but you should call for a reservation in August, too. What each town is on a weekday in the cold is what it is on a Saturday in summer.
The only thing you really give up, by choosing either one over Wolfeboro or Meredith, is the name. Say “I live in Wolfeboro” and people nod. Say “Tuftonboro” and you may get a pause. I’ve decided the pause is a feature.
Pick Your Tuesday
Don’t start with the town. Start with a Tuesday, the ordinary kind with nothing planned. Do you want the coffee shop, the paper bag, and a short list of things within reach? Or a church full of people dancing in the aisles, cars along the road, and a barbecue place that may or may not have brisket? Neither answer is wrong. They’re two different ways of wanting your days to go.
🍁 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
