Lake Champlain, Vermont

The beauty of Champlain beckons visitors, but it's in the lakeside city of St. Albans that history was made. The center of town looks much as it did on the day in 1864 when Confederate gunmen herded people onto the town green before pillaging homes and robbing banks while children watched from inside the boys' academy.

On the same day in history, a fictional Union veteran named George Amory takes a train to St. Albans. He, too, is searching for the fabled Constitution draft. He ingests the beauty of the Vermont landscape as he tries to forget the horrors of the battlefield. He believes he's left the war behind, but he soon gets caught up in the raid that shocked the nation. Today, the whole town feels a bit like a stage set just waiting for historical actors to enter.

"The endless pine forests of Maine could challenge a man. The stern mountains of New Hampshire ignored him. But Vermont wrapped a man in gentle pastures and verdant hillsides, and those Green Mountains beckoned him like a lover toward the bed of Champlain."

The G.W. Tavern, Washington Depot, Connecticut

Connecticut can be as urban as Hartford, as hardscrabble as Bridgeport, or as upscale as New Canaan or Greenwich. But the Litchfield Hills take you back to another place and a different time. Here you find the New England of memory and imagination, where narrow roads wind past genteel farms and roll through towns that seeam painted onto the landscape.

Washington may not have slept in this town in the Litchfield Hills, but he passed through more than once. So its citizens renamed it for him after the Revolution. The G.W. Tavern feels like it's been here since then, but it opened just 12 years ago in an 1850s Colonial-style house. In the book, Peter Fallon and his travel-writer girlfriend, Evangeline, have lunch here with a character who's a lot shadier than the bright interior of the dining room. All three are following the trail of the lost Constitution, which has led them to the state's quiet northeastern hills. Peter Fallon would tell you the past is still alive in New England, no matter where you look. And we're all the better for it. n

"The Father of his country was everywhere here—in an engraving over the taproom fireplace, in an old inn sign hanging from a beam in the dining room, in prints on the walls, in silhouette on the restroom wallpaper."