Tiny Sugar Hill is the apex of same-sex households in state of New Hampshire
CONCORD, N.H. — Sugar Hill is the New Hampshire town with the biggest percentage of households with same-sex couples, at 4.29 percent, according to data from the 2020 US Census, which released town-level data for the first time this year.
That puts Sugar Hill — a town of about 652 people — in 22nd place nationally when it comes to places with the highest number of same-sex households per capita, including couples that are married and unmarried.
It’s significantly higher than the national average of 1.7 percent, and more than four times higher than the Northeast as a whole, where same-sex couples made up just 1 percent of households.
The census did not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity.
Sugar Hill’s rank in the state didn’t come as a surprise to Meri Hern, who has been living in the 650-person town in the western White Mountains for more than 50 years.
“We know of quite a few gay people in Sugar Hill,” Hern said. “But, you know, people tend to mind their own business about stuff like that. It’s a pretty accepting town.”
She said many neighbors put up signs that say “Everyone’s welcome,” for Pride month, and that a group of friends took out an ad in the local paper, the Littleton Courier, proclaiming Sugar Hill as a welcoming place for LGBTQ people.
Hern said she’s seen the town change since moving there from Brooklyn, N.Y., in the early 1970s. She was 19 at the time and a self-described hippie — and she said she was in good company, with nearby Franconia College attracting students who were trying to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War.
She said the college drew a lot of people to the area in the 1960s and 1970s, shifting the town’s demographics.
“It was an old Republican area,” she said. “And then all these long-haired, dope-smoking hippies moved in. Hippies married farmers’ daughters, and it changed.”
Franconia College opened in 1963, as a small, experimental liberal arts college that operated out of a former hotel in Franconia.
It closed in 1978, amid declining enrollment and financial difficulties.
The college made headlines in 1968, in a Union Leader article titled “Bare Debauchery at Franconia College” that condemned it as a troubled school where unmarried students were having sex, drinking, and smoking weed. Coverage also pointed to tensions between students and locals.
But Hern remembers people mostly getting along, and she said people who had been affiliated with the school stayed after it closed and became pillars of the town and local leaders.
She and her husband ran an inn for 38 years in town that still appears on Gayandlesbiandirectory.com as a welcoming establishment, even though the business shuttered during the pandemic.
Judy Lodge is another Sugar Hill resident who has lived there for 25 years. She said people move there because of the location. “It’s a quaint, small New England town,” she said. It’s home to Harman’s Cheese Shop & Country Store and Polly’s Pancake Parlor.
Other New Hampshire towns with large percentages of same-sex households were Hancock, where same-sex couples make up 2.85 percent, and Hebron, with 2.32 percent.
With 382 couples, the city of Manchester, which is New Hampshire’s biggest city, had the most married same-sex couples in the state. Another 286 same-sex couples who are unmarried also live in Manchester.
Across the nation, coupled households are still the most common, accounting for 53.2 percent of households, down from nearly 57 percent in 2000.