New Hampshire Magazine
December 18, 2020
Photo courtesy of NH state archives, photographer unknown
The New Hampshire Mud Turtle is so elusive that few people can honestly claim to have seen it. Its home is in the muddy bottom of the Connecticut River beneath 3 or 4 fathoms of water. It hasn’t been up to the surface in decades. But I’ve seen it. I not only saw the Mud Turtle, I rode it.
The Mud Turtle resides in the southwesternmost corner of New Hampshire at the singular pinpoint where New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts collide. At that solitary point, a granite bound exists, curiously named the “Mud Turtle Monument” in a US Supreme Court decision. The odd nickname comes from the pyramid-shaped top of the 12-foot-tall granite monument that sank out of sight when accumulating river mud and silt buried it. As the river waters rose around the granite bound’s up-thrust snout, someone thought it had a turtlelike appearance, and the unusual moniker for the tristate boun