The Best 5 Places in New England with a Romantic History

If Einstein was right, and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, it’s not a leap to believe that love—one of the most energetic of human emotions—still pulses in places where romantic events once transpired. So if you find yourself longing to connect with this eternal force, step into these New England settings where hope, passion, and devotion remain mysteriously, movingly present.

The Best 5 Places in New England with a Romantic History

Hearthside

Stephen Hopkins Smith poured a $40,000 lottery windfall and four years of painstaking effort into constructing a fieldstone mansion worthy of the city girl who’d captured his heart. But on a fateful buggy ride after the c. 1810 home was completed, she took one look and pronounced its rural setting intolerable. Step through the door of Rhode Island’s “house that love built,” and you’ll wish this mystery woman had given poor Smith—who never married—a chance.

So much romance lingers in the building’s thoughtful details that Hearthside has attracted a devoted cadre of supporters, who don period costumes for an ever-changing lineup of living history tours and events. Two volunteers who met here were married last fall. Love has triumphed, at last, within these walls. Lincoln, RI. 401-726-0597; hearthsidehouse.org

Lovers Leap State Park

If only Connecticut’s own Romeo and Juliet had been able to text or call. Though the exact details of this oft-embellished 17th-century legend are lost to time, it’s said that Lillinonah, the fetching daughter of Chief Waramaug, fell in love with an Englishman only to grow sick with grief during a prolonged separation. To see where their story would have its tragic ending, stroll across the lacy ironwork bridge built in 1895 over the Housatonic River Gorge and hike to the clifftop nearby. It was here that Lillinonah’s beloved—who returned just after the nick of time—plunged to his death in a futile effort to rescue the maiden, who disappeared in her despair-driven canoe over a now-underwater waterfall. New Milford, CT. 203-312-5023; ct.gov/deep

The Old Manse

It was no ordinary house that welcomed Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne on their wedding night in 1842. The clapboard parsonage that the couple was renting had already witnessed the first battle of the American Revolution and the birth of a literary movement, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature in the room that Nathaniel would use as his study. The Hawthornes, too, would leave their mark on the building that Nathaniel nicknamed “the Old Manse”—albeit by using her diamond ring to etch poetic phrases in the window glass. Sit in a replica of Emerson’s bright green writing-arm Windsor chair, peer through Nathaniel and Sophia’s immortal graffiti, and, if you’re lucky, you may perceive the same “gold light” that enchanted the couple so many years ago. Concord, MA. 978-369-3909; thetrustees.org

“Return to Camelot” at St. Mary’s Church

On September 12, 1953, a grand 19th-century church in Newport hosted the closest thing to a royal wedding New England had ever seen, as a floppy-haired freshman senator from Massachusetts married a debutante photojournalist. Today that historic event—the wedding of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier—is re-created each Tuesday, July through late October, inside the church where it happened.

Music director Cody Mead plays selections from the ceremony on the restored 30,000-part pipe organ, and Father Kris von Maluski pauses a montage of interviews, stills, and intimate footage to interject tales of wedding-dress drama and a sanctuary swarmed by locals after the nuptials. Pew 10 was routinely occupied by JFK and Jackie even after he became president, but it isn’t where you’ll feel the strongest connection to them: Step up to the padded kneeler where the couple knelt, and an obliging von Maluski will snap a cellphone photo. Newport, RI. 401-847-0475; returntocamelot.org

Adams National Historical Park

Stand in the spaces they shared, see the trappings of their everyday lives, and hear words penned during their long separations, and you’ll grasp the depth of John and Abigail Adams’s passionate partnership. On the tours of his Massachusetts birthplace and the homes they shared at both the beginning and end of their marriage, park interpreters tap into the early American power couple’s 1,100-letter exchange to bring their relationship to life. The most heart-tugging scene might be their canopied bed at Peacefield: Upon Abigail’s death there in 1818, our second president reportedly said, “I wish I could lay down beside her and die, too.” Before leaving Quincy, pay your respects at First Parish Church, where John and Abigail rest side by side. Quincy, MA. 617-770-1175; nps.gov/adam