603 NAVIGATOR / our town
Bob houses on the ice in Meredith
Magical Meredith
Summer isn’t the only time to visit the lake town By Barbara Radcliffe Rogers / Photos by stillman rogers
W
hen we think of centers for winter sports in New Hampshire, North Conway may come to mind first, but Meredith has as fair a claim. Wrapping around Lake Winnipesaukee’s long Meredith Bay and incorporating more than a dozen islands and islets, the town is plentifully endowed with ice — and ways to play on it. The most apparent to midwinter visitors is ice fishing. A village of colorful little bob houses appears in the bay as soon as the ice is thick enough, and weekends bring a block party atmosphere as people gather to fish and socialize. Each February (the weekend of February 13-14 this year), the Meredith Rotary Club sponsors one of the region’s biggest winter events, the Great Meredith Rotary Ice Fishing Derby. But anyone can enjoy the sport, with ice-fishing tackle, bait and advice from AJ’s Bait & Tackle. NH 16
nhmagazine.com | January/February 2021
Fish and Game offers free ice fishing classes throughout the state. The previous weekend, February 5-7, the snow is shoveled off enough of Lake Winnipesaukee to create seven ice rinks for the annual New England Pond Hockey Classic. Last year, it drew 77 teams to play hockey the way it began, when it was a hometown sport. Childs and Prescott parks in Meredith have ice-skating rinks, and the beach near the boat ramp on Lake Waukewan is a favorite local skating spot. While Winnipesaukee gets all the attention from tourists, the commercial center of Meredith actually lies on a narrow strip of land between two lakes: Meredith Bay on Winnipesaukee and Lake Waukewan. Come back in the summer to find a low-key beach here with free parking. Waukewan Highlands Community Park has trails for cross-country skiing
and snowshoeing, as does Hamlin Recreation and Conservation Area in Meredith Center, if you want outdoor fun off-ice. The idiosyncrasies of Meredith’s boundaries give it a pie-slice wedge into Squam Lake and even bits of the shoreline of Second Neck, in Moultonborough. It also includes Bear Island, the second-largest unbridged in the lake, accessed only by boat. Its name, I learned from an article by Marshall Hudson in this magazine about a year ago, relates to an unfriendly encounter between a team of surveyors and some hungry bears in 1772. It was this article that satisfied my curiosity about St. John’s on-the-Lake, one of the most interesting of New Hampshire’s many summer chapels. Like many of these seasonal churches, St. John’s is built of stone, but unlike the others, its shingled bell tower dwarfs the rest of the building. This tall, square tower has nearly as large a footprint as the single-story stone building and is topped by a roofed observation deck.
