photo courtesy of nh state archives, photographer unknown
603 informer / what do you know?
Riding the Mud Turtle A local legend lies beneath the water by Marshall Hudson
T
he New Hampshire Mud Turtle is so elusive that few people can honestly claim to have seen it. Its home is in the muddy bottom of the Connecticut River beneath 3 or 4 fathoms of water. It hasn’t been up to the surface in decades. But I’ve seen it. I not only saw the Mud Turtle, I rode it. The Mud Turtle resides in the southwesternmost corner of New Hampshire at the singular pinpoint where New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts collide. At that solitary point, a granite bound exists, curiously named the “Mud Turtle Monument” in a US Supreme Court decision. The odd nickname comes from the pyramid-shaped top of the 12-foot-tall granite monument that sank out of sight when accumulating river mud and silt buried it. As the river waters rose around the granite bound’s up-thrust snout, someone thought it had
32
nhmagazine.com | January/February 2021
a turtlelike appearance, and the unusual moniker for the tristate boundary marker was born. The point now marked by the sunken Mud Turtle monument was first determined on April 6, 1741, by surveyor Richard Hazen, who was tasked with running the state line bounding Massachusetts with New Hampshire and Vermont. Hazen and his survey party blazed the line, setting stakes, marking trees, and erecting piles of stones at certain prominent points. Despite conflicting surveys in 1825 and 1827, Hazen’s line stood as the legal boundary because neither of the later surveys was acceptable to all the states involved. But all three states had concerns about the accuracy of Hazen’s work. To address the conflicts between the surveys, in 1891 the legislative bodies of the three states authorized the appointment of a boundary commission to resolve the
The now-sunken tristate monument known as the Mud Turtle
discrepancies between the 1825 and 1827 surveys and Hazen’s work of 1741. A group of surveyors under the direction of Professor Elihu Quimby of Dartmouth College was assigned the task. Quimby decided to run the state line from the established and accepted northwest corner of Massachusetts eastward, back toward the Connecticut River to where Hazen had marked the corner a century and a half earlier. Quimby’s survey confirmed the location of the tristate corner and, in 1895, the point was marked with a 2-foot-square, 12-foottall granite pyramid, sunk in a bed of rubble masonry 8 feet below river bottom. The initials of the three states were engraved on three sides of the monument. On the fourth side, the date 1895 was engraved. The monument was placed at the low-water mark on the west side of the Connecticut River defining the exact spot where New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts converge. Because of the difficulty in observing the Mud Turtle
