Portsmouth's Colonial Port & Isles of Shoals

A 10-acre outdoor history museum on the original 1623 settlement site of Portsmouth, with 40 restored buildings representing every period from the colonial era to World War II. Unlike Colonial Williamsburg, Strawbery Banke preserves the physical layering of a working neighborhood — a 1940s victory garden next to a 1790s merchant's house, a 1950s diner next to a Revolutionary-era tavern. The Shapiro House, furnished to 1919, is the only museum recreation of a Russian-Jewish immigrant household in New England.

The six-block commercial core of colonial Portsmouth survives intact from the 18th century — the Moffatt-Ladd House (1763), the Warner House (1716), and the John Paul Jones House (1758) are all open for tours and concentrated within walking distance on Market, Daniel, and Chapel streets. Portsmouth's colonial wealth is visible in the scale of the Georgian brick mansions, built when the Piscataqua mast trade supplied the British Royal Navy.

A cocktail bar and restaurant in Portsmouth's Prescott Park neighborhood, serving New England ingredients through a serious cocktail program and a small plates menu. The bar's house shrubs and bitters are made from local herbs; the raw bar features New Hampshire's Wallis Sands oysters alongside the classic Wellfleet selection.

A 95-acre island 10 miles offshore reachable by a 50-minute ferry from Portsmouth, with a Victorian-era conference center that has operated since 1897. The Shoals provided the setting for Celia Thaxter's 1873 painting retreat — Childe Hassam produced 400 paintings of the islands — and for the 1873 murders that became the subject of Anita Shreve's novel The Weight of Water. The island has no cars; the ferry schedule provides 4 hours ashore.

The Exeter Inn is a colonial revival building from 1932 on the Phillips Exeter Academy campus, with a restaurant that serves contemporary New England cuisine. Phillips Exeter — the most academically selective boarding school in the US — has occupied the town center since 1781; the academy's Louis Kahn library (1971) and the Frederick Hale gymnasium are architecturally significant.

The most overlooked Revolutionary-era site in New England: the Ladd-Gilman House in Exeter was the state treasury of New Hampshire during the Revolution and housed the colony's copy of the Declaration of Independence. The museum presents two significant documents — a draft of the US Constitution and a rare broadside printing of the Declaration — in the original colonial rooms.