Keene, NH

Keene presides over the Monadnock region of New Hampshire, and its geography is its character: the town square opens onto a Main Street so generous that locals long claimed it the widest paved main street in the world, and on the horizon stands Mount Monadnock — the bare-topped peak beloved of Emerson and Thoreau, said to be among the most-climbed mountains on earth. The white-steepled church at the head of the square completes one of New England's textbook townscapes.

Keene's civic imagination runs to the seasonal: its Pumpkin Festival famously set world records by lining the square with tens of thousands of carved, candle-lit jack-o'-lanterns stacked on scaffolding towers — small-city ambition at its most cheerfully absurd. Cultural life rests on two institutions: Keene State College, the liberal-arts campus whose arts centre serves the region, and the archive's documented stage, the Colonial Theatre — a 1924 vaudeville and picture house on Main Street, restored and expanded as the Monadnock region's performing-arts home, where touring orchestras, opera and film share the boards as they have for a century. With covered bridges in the surrounding hills and one of the country's prettiest commons at its heart, Keene is New Hampshire's temperament made visible: plain, sturdy and quietly theatrical once a year.