[LETTER FROM COÖS COUNTY]
Coös County in the frosty, bumpy, northernmost spit of New Hampshire could hardly feel more remote, and yet every four years, for one festive, honky-tonk evening, it finds itself smack-dab in the middle of the political universe.
Thanks to quirks in the Granite State’s voting laws—themselves the product of a unique brand of Yankee pragmatism—certain small towns here are allowed to open the polls at midnight on election day and close them, naturally, when all ballots have been submitted. In effect, this means the first presidential votes are cast, and counted, in a few tiny, snow-crusted mountain hamlets.
Historically, the ‘first vote’ has been of a point of pride, a civic tradition, a draw for national media outlets and even presidential candidates, who see these locales as symbolically important even though they’ve rarely been bellwethers in recent times. And for the last 55 years, the center of attention has been a tired, but grand, 215-room hotel called The Balsams that sustains the petite township of Dixville. There, in a tall white-and-red clapboard building, hordes of reporters have gathered once every fours years since 1960, amid much pomp and pageantry, to see who will eke out the slightest of early leads.
But due to a string of questionable business decisions and economic shifts, The Balsams has closed, its future is shaky, and Dixville is dying. That’s creating a void that other first-vote towns in New Hampshire’s North Country are eager to fill, a novel happening in a culturally rugged region with a serious libertarian streak.
“It’s a matter of free enterprise, civic free enterprise,” says Jeff Woodburn, the state senator for Coös County. “Whatever small towns can get 100 percent turnout at midnight are welcome to step up. The first question is whether they can round up all their votes, and the second is if they can attract the media.”
Mr. Woodburn, as well as many Granite Staters, hopes that at least one town here can answer both those questions in the affirmative, as a festive first vote has come to be as much a New Hampshire tradition as timbering, shipbuilding, and maple sugaring.The practice started way back in 1948 in Hart’s Location, a town of 41 residents hard up against the White Mountains. Millsfield, which then had a population of 19, followed in ’52, and Dixville came on to the scene in 1960, shortly after Neil Tillotson, a rubber manufacturing entrepreneur, bought The Balsams.
Soon thereafter, the residents of Hart’s Location lost interest in midnight voting, and national attention shifted to Dixville, as the paparazzi stuffed the hotel’s walnut-paneled, patriot-themed Ballot Room. This continued through 2012, shortly after The Balsams shuttered.
Recent investments have the potential to breathe life back into the place, but its future remains uncertain, and that uncertainty is creating an opportunity for hamlets like Millsfield, three miles south. In that village of 29 persons, where early voting has been the norm since 1952, the townspeople are eager to create a new Balsams experience, even if they won’t admit it. (“We’re not trying to replace Dixville,” Wayne Urso, the sole selectman, told me repeatedly.)
On a January day, I visited that small town on rural, rolling Route 26. To say it’s “out there” would be the severest of understatements. Drive an hour past the Appalachian ridge, into deep, dark, frost-stunted softwood forest on a road that seems carved from permafrost, and you get to the metropolis of Errol (population: 298). Drive several miles further, and Millsfield emerges, but if you blink, you might miss it.
There are several discontinuous structures—a large farm owned by the Swett family, a few sagging clapboard homes and several trailers—tucked into a long, attractive valley, pocked with high camps and the vestiges of heavy logging. The only realtor in the area is called “Northern Edge.” The regional school has 14 pupils in nine grades. To get groceries, you’ll have to drive an hour and a half to Lancaster, N.H., and to choose from a healthy selection of semi-automatic shotguns, you’ll have to drive five minutes, down to L.L. Cote’s emporium.
Just before I arrived at Selectman Urso’s house, the power in town went out, which was a problem as the temperature was -11 degrees Fahrenheit. “Thank god we have a generator,” he said, with a laugh.
After a short pick-up ride across the street and a hundred yards north, we arrived at Log Haven, a blue-collar bar-restaurant that serves snowmobilers and sportsmen, almost exclusively. There, we met its owner, Roland Proulx, a middle-aged man with a smooth, wet, North Woods accent. Come November 2016, this restaurant will host a midnight vote, and, if Millsfield has its way, a sizeable throng of reporters.
Log Haven is large for the North Country—maybe 150 seats—and rustic in a pleasant, simple way. The tables and furniture are stock items. The architecture boasts a few shellacked-pine posts and beams, and a long, marble-topped bar. Mr. Proulx points across the room to an elevated stage, not more than 10 by 15 feet, backed by a poster for Narragansett Tallboys. That’s where the votes will be cast. On the other side of the restaurant, behind a wooden barrier topped with decorative birdhouses, will be the press.
According to Mr. Urso, there could be as many as 23 voters, significantly more than the 10 Dixville had in 2012. “But I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I say that because we’ve got some people coming and going. Like Joanne’s son, across the street. Sometimes, he lives with her; sometimes he doesn’t.”
He went on to say that the impetus to create a camera-friendly first vote here came largely from New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who wanted to ensure that a town up north would fill the void created by Dixville’s potential demise. But even with the secretary’s implicit blessing, Urso concedes that Millsfield isn’t the only possible host, even if it is perhaps the most gung-ho.
The towns of Ellsworth and Hart’s Location revived their participation in the first vote in the 1990s, and the latter has even drawn a reporter or two from the Associated Press in recent elections. Ed Butler, the owner of the historic Notchland Inn, which hosted Hart’s Location’s voting until a few years ago, wrote in an e-mail that the town plans to continue their midnight tradition.
Moreover, Dixville itself isn’t necessarily done for. In 2014, a well-known ski resort developer from western Maine named Les Otten bought into The Balsams after a disastrous ownership by two local businessmen. His dream for the place entails a massive ski area with 23 lifts including an aerial tramway and greatly expanded hotel facilities.
Scott Tranchmontagne, Mr. Otten’s spokesperson, said that the project could likely be completed by November 2016, but Urso doubted it given the hotel’s current condition, and Thomas Tillotson, whose father owned the hotel from 1960 to 2001, pointed out that the project isn’t officially scheduled to be completed until later that winter.
Plus, the very concept of putting shovel to dirt is far from a done deal: watershed issues and buffer regulations at a nearby windfarm have created legal problems, and Tillotson put the chance of the permits going through at 60 percent.
So, one way or another, Millsfield could very well get a lively, media-frenzied first vote. If that happens, many reporters could be trading in the elegant rusticity of the Balsam’s Ballot Room for the rough-hewn charm of Log Haven come 2016, and maybe come 2020 and 2024, too.
As for the winner come election night in Millsfield, the town is, in Woodburn’s words, “extremely conservative, more so than Dixville.”
At Log Haven, Proulx similarly described the town as “solidly Republican,” though its residents “try to vote their minds and their hearts.”
To that, Urso added, “What I can say is that that unlike New York or Philadelphia or some of these bigger places, we have no dead people voting here. We know them all.”
Image credits: Gram Slattery/HPR