Map of Cornish, New Hampshire in 2026

If you’re from Cornish, you’ve crossed the long covered bridge to Windsor, gone to the fair in August, and know your way between Cornish Flat, Cornish Mills, Balloch and Squag City. Those four villages are printed by name on this map, along with the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge, the First Baptist Church of Cornish and the Salmon P. Chase Birthplace.

Cornish is in Sullivan County, on the Connecticut River across from Windsor, Vermont.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey data and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded hills, from the Connecticut River up to a 2,323-foot knob on the long ridge of Croydon Mountain along the eastern line, come from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the roads and the town line come from the Census Bureau, right down to roads like Dingleton Hill Road. The First Baptist Church of Cornish and the Louis Saint Gaudens House and Studio are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records.

Mast Camp and the Admiral

The town was granted in 1763, and part of it was once called Mast Camp, because tall masts were floated down the river and shipped from there. Governor Benning Wentworth incorporated it in 1765 and named it for Sir Samuel Cornish, an admiral of the Royal Navy. It belonged to Cheshire County until the county was split in 1827, and it’s been in Sullivan County since. The town’s oldest surviving church, the First Baptist Church of Cornish, was built in 1803 at Harrington and Parsonage Hill roads and moved in 1818 to Cornish Flat, where it stands at the north end of the green. Its Federal trim, with a fan in the gable and a Palladian window, appears to take its cue from the pattern books of Asher Benjamin, who lived just across the river in Windsor. It’s one of the oldest Baptist churches left in New Hampshire.

Salmon P. Chase was born in Cornish on January 13, 1808, in a house built around 1790 on what’s now Route 12A, about 8 miles north of Claremont. He lived there until he was eight, when his father died and he was sent to relatives in Ohio. He went on to be governor of Ohio, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury during the Civil War, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1864. The house, moved across the street around 1848, is the only known building tied directly to his life. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1975 and is a bed and breakfast today.

The Art Colony

The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens began coming to Cornish in 1885, looking for a studio away from the summer heat of New York City. He bought the property at the urging of his friend Charles Cotesworth Beaman Jr., a New York lawyer who’d made nearby Blow-Me-Down Farm his summer place, and he named it Aspet, after his father’s birthplace in France. He summered there until 1897 and lived there year-round from 1900 until his death in 1907. Other artists followed, among them the painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish, who designed and built his own estate, the Oaks, and the area became the center of the Cornish Art Colony. Aspet is now Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, the only National Park Service site in New Hampshire apart from a stretch of the Appalachian Trail, and it’s had a sculptor in residence since 1969, the oldest continuous artist residency in the National Park Service.

His brother Louis, a sculptor too, and Louis’s wife Annetta, also a sculptor, bought a Shaker meeting building in 1902. It had been designed by Moses Johnson and built in the early 1790s at the Shaker village in Enfield, and they had it taken apart, moved to Dingleton Hill and Whitten roads, and rebuilt as a house and a two-story studio. Annetta and their son Paul also ran a pottery kiln there they called Orchard Kiln. Louis and Annetta lived there until their deaths in the 1950s, and Paul, a potter, after them. The house and studio were listed on the National Register in 1972 and lost to fire in 1980. Writers came to Cornish too, and the author J. D. Salinger lived here from the 1950s until his death in 2010.

Around Town

Bridge Road leads from Route 12A to the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge. Bela Jenks Fletcher of Claremont and James Frederick Tasker of Cornish built it in 1866 for $9,000, a two-span lattice truss about 449 feet long. It was the longest covered bridge still standing in the United States until a longer one opened in Ohio in 2008, and Cornish still has the longest two-span covered bridge in the world. It was a toll bridge until 1943. In 1866 it joined dry Windsor to wet Cornish, so walkers paid 2 cents to cross into New Hampshire and 3 cents to come back. Most of it sits in Cornish, because the state line runs along the river’s low-water mark on the Vermont side.

In Cornish Mills, the Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge carries Root Hill Road over Mill Brook. James Tasker, a local builder, put it up in 1882 for $812, a single 79-foot span, and it’s one of the state’s few surviving 19th-century covered bridges. Down in the southwest corner, Balloch takes its name from the farm of James Balloch, who settled there soon after he came to America in 1790 and married Sarah Chase of the long-standing Cornish Chase family in 1796. The Sullivan County Railroad was built through the farm in 1849, and from the 1890s a small station there shipped the farm’s milk to creameries. Trains still run through every day. The Cornish Town Offices and the Cornish Recreation and Education Area are printed on the map too. In the eastern part of town is a piece of the Blue Mountain Forest Association’s private game preserve, known locally as Corbin Park after its founder, Austin Corbin.

This map of Cornish makes a handsome addition to a living room, office, library or den, and it can even help teach children the geography and history of the river towns. It’s a thoughtful gift for anyone who calls Cornish home, grew up near one of its covered bridges, or has spent a summer afternoon at Saint-Gaudens. Created by KNOWOL in 2026, it’s printed on museum quality archival paper. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Cornish map.

Sources

• Cornish, New Hampshire, Wikipedia
• First Baptist Church of Cornish, Wikipedia
• Salmon P. Chase Birthplace, Wikipedia
• Salmon P. Chase, Wikipedia
• Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, Wikipedia
• Louis St. Gaudens House and Studio, Wikipedia
• Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge, Wikipedia
• Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge, Wikipedia
• Balloch, New Hampshire, Wikipedia