Zoning in Coos County, New Hampshire: The Unincorporated Places

Why Coos County -- and only Coos County -- actually zones land

This project's New Hampshire state hub is emphatic that zoning is a town function under RSA Chapter 674, and that is true almost everywhere in the state. The exception is built into state law itself: RSA 28:7-b, "Planning and Zoning in Unincorporated Towns and Unorganized Places," gives a county's commissioners the same planning, zoning, and subdivision-regulation powers a town's own boards would otherwise exercise, applied to unincorporated towns and unorganized places within that county, following RSA Chapters 672-677 to the extent practical. Coos County is where this actually matters at scale: it contains 23 separate unincorporated places -- townships, gores, grants, and purchases dating to the state's original colonial-era land grants -- with no town government, no elected board of selectmen, and no local zoning board of their own.

Those 23 places include Atkinson and Gilmanton Academy Grant, Bean's Grant, Bean's Purchase, Cambridge, Chandler's Purchase, Cutt's Grant, Dix's Grant, Dixville, Erving's Grant, Green's Grant, Hadley's Purchase, Kilkenny, Low and Burbank Grant, Martin's Location, Millsfield, Odell, Pinkham's Grant, Sargent's Purchase, Second College Grant, Success, Thompson and Meserve's Purchase, and Wentworth's Location. Most have tiny or zero year-round population -- Dix's Grant recorded a population of zero at the 2020 Census, and Millsfield recorded 25 -- but that doesn't mean the land is unregulated. It means Coos County itself, not a town, is the regulatory authority.

The county's own zoning ordinance: what's confirmed, and what to verify directly

Coos County administers a published Zoning Ordinance for Coos County Unincorporated Places, most recently amended December 13, 2024 (an earlier version was amended March 18, 2024), through its own county Planning Board. The ordinance's confirmed structure divides land into Management Districts -- areas suited to forest management or agricultural use where no approved plans for additional development exist -- and Development Districts, covering areas that already show patterns of residential, recreational, commercial, or industrial use. Within that framework, the Planning Board grants Conditional Use Permits for specific uses the ordinance identifies, following its own evidentiary standards and review criteria.

What this page does not do is guess at numbers it could not independently confirm. Specific minimum lot sizes, exact setback distances, which particular one of the 23 places falls into a Management versus a Development District, and current permit fees are not stated here, because a direct read of the ordinance's full text was not possible this pass. Treat those specifics as a direct-verification item with the Coos County Planning Board, not something to infer from this summary or from a general New Hampshire zoning ordinance template -- county-administered unincorporated-place zoning does not necessarily mirror a typical town ordinance's format.

How this differs from every other New Hampshire county

A handful of other New Hampshire counties touch this same statute in a much smaller way -- Carroll County's Hale's Location, for instance, is a single unincorporated township where the county commissioners serve as the de facto board of selectmen, but it has nowhere near the scale or the dedicated published zoning ordinance Coos County maintains. Coos County's 23 unincorporated places, taken together, cover a genuinely large share of the county's total land area in its northern reaches, which is why this is a first-order due-diligence question for land in that part of the county rather than a historical footnote. Before treating any Coos County parcel as a routine "call the town" zoning question, confirm whether it sits inside an organized town or one of these 23 places -- the answer determines whether the applicable zoning authority is a town office or the county Planning Board itself.

A live case study: The Balsams Grand Resort in Dixville

Dixville -- the unincorporated township that contains Dixville Notch and the historic Balsams Grand Resort -- is one of the 23 places this ordinance governs, and the Balsams' long-running redevelopment shows the county's zoning authority actually operating in practice rather than sitting on paper. The Coos County Planning Board granted the project's Planned Unit approvals, and after a December 18, 2024 hearing, extended them a further five years to January 18, 2030 (co-terminous with earlier May 2024 extensions covering the project's Lake Gloriette House and Hampshire-Dix House components) -- the kind of concrete permitting decision that, everywhere else in New Hampshire, a town's own planning board would make instead of a county.

The county's involvement goes beyond zoning and planning approvals, too. At a March 2023 special meeting of the Coos County Delegation, the three-member Coos County Commission approved a financing plan for the project structured around a tax assessment district issuing $35 million in bonds to private buyers -- part of a first-phase redevelopment (a roughly 400-room Lake Gloriette House hotel and convention center) whose total cost, adjusted for inflation, now exceeds $300 million. That assessment-district financing role is a separate legal mechanism from the RSA 28:7-b zoning authority described above, but it underscores the same broader point: in Coos County's unincorporated places, county government -- not a town -- is genuinely the level of government making these decisions, for a project of a scale most New Hampshire towns would rarely see.

What to actually check on a parcel in a Coos County unincorporated place

1. Confirm the parcel's location against the current list of Coos County's 23 unincorporated places before assuming an organized town's zoning office is the right contact.
2. Contact the Coos County Planning Board directly for the current zoning ordinance text, the district (Management or Development) that applies to the specific parcel, and any dimensional standards or Conditional Use Permit requirements that apply.
3. Do not assume a Development District designation matches an existing structure's current legal use, or that a Management District designation forecloses all future development -- confirm both directly rather than inferring from the district's general description.
4. As everywhere in New Hampshire, separately confirm NHDES subdivision approval status for any lot under 5 acres and treat septic design as a state NHDES process handled by a state-permitted designer, independent of the county zoning question.
5. If the parcel is near the Connecticut Lakes Headwaters Tract in northern Coos County, also check whether it falls within or adjoins that tract's state-held conservation easement, a separate restriction from county zoning.