Gorham sits where the Androscoggin River turns east toward Maine, with Route 2 and Route 16 meeting at the village and the slopes of Mount Madison on its western edge. This map prints the old depot as the Gorham Historical Society & Railroad Museum, along with the George Washington Noyes House, the Gorham Public Library, the Gorham Town Hall, Gorham High School, Moose Brook State Park, Cascade, Upper Village and Leadmine Ledge.
Gorham is in Coös County, in the White Mountains, with Berlin just to the north.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey data and gave it the look of an old atlas. The terrain around Leadmine Ledge, Cascade and Upper Village comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and it climbs to 3,030 feet on a spur of Mount Madison along the town’s western border. The roads and the town line come from the Census Bureau, right down to Mineral Spring Road. The George Washington Noyes House is on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked it against National Park Service records. Gorham had 2,698 people at the 2020 census, and 1,851 of them lived in the central village.
Shelburne Addition
Governor John Wentworth first chartered this land in 1770 as part of Shelburne, under the name “Shelburne Addition.” Robert Sargent and others settled here about 1802, but for years the place held little more than rocky farms, small logging jobs and a few stores and stables. When it was incorporated in 1836, it had only 150 people. Lot Davis, a resident who had come from Gorham, Maine, suggested the name.
Then the railroad came. The first train of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad, later the Grand Trunk, reached Gorham on July 22, 1851. Halfway between Montreal and the New England seacoast, Gorham grew into a railroad town with a big locomotive yard and repair shops. The trains brought tourists, and hotels opened: the Mount Madison House, the Alpine House, the Gorham House and the Willis House. The railroad’s first depot was in its own White Mountain Station House, on what is now the town common, and from there crowds went on to the Glen House in Pinkham Notch and on to Mount Washington. In 1861 travelers made the first trip up the Mount Washington Carriage Road, advertised as “the first man-made attraction in the United States” and now the Mount Washington Auto Road. The rail freight served local mills, too, run by the Androscoggin’s water power, and the Libby and Peabody lumber companies cut boards and building timber.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Places: Downtown, Cascade, Upper Village, Buck Island, Leadmine Ledge, Mount Hayes, Icegulch Town Forest - Town of Gorham, Gorham Historical Society & Railroad Museum, Moose Brook State Park, Gorham Town Hall, Gorham Public Library, George Washington Noyes House, Edward Fenn School, Gorham High School, Gorham Middle School, Gorham Congregational Church, Holy Family Roman Catholic Church and Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Streets and roads: Main Street, Lancaster Road, Gorham Hill Road, Presidential Highway, Glen Road, Hogan Road, Jimtown Road, Perkins Brook Road, Cascade Flat, Gorham Heights Road, Mineral Spring Road, Spring Road.
More street names, A to Z
Alpine Street, Bangor Street, Crestwood Drive, Evans Street, Fieldstone Road, Heath Road, Libby Street, Mill Street, Promenade Street, Ray Street, Second Street.
The depot and Soldier’s Hill
Logging and the railroads both faded in time. The Grand Trunk built Gorham’s third depot in 1907, with a 400 foot platform, and by 1973 it was set to be torn down. The Gorham Historical Society saved it, and today it’s the society’s headquarters and museum, with locomotives, boxcars and a caboose among its collection. Northeast of the town common, on a rise called Soldier’s Hill above the Androscoggin, the George Washington Noyes House was finished in 1893 for Noyes, a Grand Trunk man who started on the railroad as a laborer and worked his way up to master mechanic. A fire had devastated that part of Gorham in 1879, and his house is one of three built on the hill afterward, all still standing. It’s a Queen Anne house with a three story octagonal turret, a wraparound porch with turned posts and a carriage barn that keeps its original hardware. It was listed on the National Register in 2016.
Moose Brook State Park, on the west side of town, was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression and opened in 1936. It covers 755 acres and is considered an excellent example of CCC design, with cabins and buildings made from the rock and logs found on the site; the original park offices, bathhouse and swimming area are still in use. Moose Brook itself starts in Ice Gulch in Randolph, drops over Peboamauk Fall and runs east through the park to the Androscoggin. Up the river at Cascade, a village shared with Berlin and named for a waterfall in the hills to the east, the Brown Company began building the Cascade Mill in 1904, and Italian and Polish immigrants helped build it and settled around it. In 1988, archaeologists found four prehistoric sites, with the remains of a village and stone tool workshops, along the river below Cascade Dam.
The Peabody River comes down from Pinkham Notch along Route 16 to meet the Androscoggin in Gorham, and the Moose River joins it here as well. Pine Mountain, 2,400 feet, is the small prominent peak inside the town. Upper Village, Buck Island and Leadmine Ledge are printed on the map, and so are the Gorham Public Library, the Gorham Town Hall and Gorham High School. Berlin lies to the north, Success to the northeast, Shelburne to the east and Randolph to the west.
This Gorham map makes a handsome addition to an office, library or den, and it can teach children the geography and history of a railroad town in the mountains. It’s made for anyone who calls Gorham home, and for everyone who has camped at Moose Brook. KNOWOL created it in 2026, and 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 Gorham map.
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