Blackmouth

The City of Arches, The Free City

Motto: Et sta super omnes nos (And above all we stand)

Blackmouth (US: /'blækmɔːθ/), officially is the most populous city in the state of New Hampshire and one of the oldest cities in the United States. It is the seat of Saul County, although the county government was disbanded in 1975. The city is the heart of the greater Blackmouth metropolitan area, home to an estimated 2.1 million people in 2016.

Blackmouth was founded in 1643 on the southern side of the Black River around the military fort of Harton’s Knobbe. The city prospered as a trading port during the colonial era, fed by influxes of settlers who could not find home among the Puritan-dominated colonies of Massachusetts Bay, including Anglicans, Catholics and Jews. The city was the site of one of the first English-speaking Catholic churches in the Americas and has a large Catholic population even today.

Unlike its southern neighbour of Boston, Blackmouth saw no action during the Revolutionary War but was raided and burned by British forces during the War of 1812. Rebuilding began soon after under the guidance of visionary architect Victor Herbert Crane, following a grand plan intended to capture the zeitgeist of the new America he called ‘The Rebirth’. The city also began to industrialise, the culverting of the rivers and burying the ruins of its colonial past under grand avenues, monumental stonework and new railroads.

The city began to decline in the 20th century as local resources began to run dry and industry moved westward. Lend lease, war production and the Marshall Plan bought a few more decades of life but it was not enough. By the end of the 20th Century, Blackmouth suffered the same problems as New York and Chicago, urban deterioration as heavy industry moves abroad. Swathes of what was once the industrial heart of the city moulders unused, warehouses and docks half empty and rusting into the ground.

Today, Blackmouth is bloodied by unbowed. Hollingworth University remains one of the great institutions of the Ivy League, though nearby Boston still steals away the city’s best and brightest. Tourists come to gawk and stare at the city’s monumental architecture and enjoy the casinos of Dover Island, one of the only locations in New Hampshire that allow commercial gambling. Visitors to Blackmouth should take care, for Blackmouth is also the missing persons capital of the US, with more people going missing there each year than the entire state of Arizona.

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