Months after our conversation about how many songs were inspired by our respective states, my Californian friend still sends them to me. All I’ve been able to reply with is “Granite State of Mind“.

This got me wondering: why haven’t New Hampshire’s mountains and forests, rivers and snow and granite, inspired any well-known art since… uhh… since…

Well, it looks like the most famous work about New Hampshire’s natural beauty is “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, even though the poem is not widely known to be set in the state. “Stopping By Woods,” I found out only after doing some research, is actually from Frost’s 1923 Pulitzer-Prize-winning book New Hampshire, a collection of poems about the years at the beginning of the twentieth century that he spent in Derry.

But could it really be that a winter night a hundred years ago was the last time the Granite State’s great outdoors could inspire a really famous piece of art? What did we have then that we don’t have now?

For starters, “the woods” aren’t all “lovely, dark and deep” anymore; although New Hampshire is the second most forested state in the country, the 150-year-trend of regrowth has reversed. Over the last decade I’ve seen almost a hundred houses pop up all over my hometown, making it pretty hard to “stop without a … house near.” And although it snowed quite a bit this winter, a decrease in snowy evenings has been recorded over the last few years.

New Hampshire also includes “Mending Wall”, another of Frost’s better-known poems. The stone wall referred to in the poem still stands, thanks to the Robert Frost Homestead’s status as a National Historic Landmark. But stone walls like it all over New England have been subject to theft, with stones being taken for use in new construction, prompting  a hard-to-enforce update of a 1791 law in 2009.

It’s not hard to believe that New Hampshire recently hired a Florida-based company to come up with a “brand” for the Granite State; we no longer seem to recognize the importance of our woods and frozen lakes, our small farms, or our history. Nor do most of us realize that our state’s beauty has inspired a few of the most famous lines of American poetry, and could inspire many more if we can keep the state beautiful.

Last winter, I did get to experience a little bit of the New Hampshire that Frost describes in “Stopping By Woods.” I was driving through Bear Brook State Park around midnight when it began to snow. Of the forty minute it takes me to drive between Deerfield and Concord, the two or three minutes to pass through the park are the only ones when nothing throws any light but my car. With my headlights illuminating a tiny patch of straight tree trunks and fat snowflakes, I couldn’t help but slow to a crawl.

The woods were lovely, dark and deep, but severely underfunded.