Warren, New Hampshire - Only Town with a Redstone Rocket

A photo of the Only Town with a Redstone Rocket that stands in Warren, NH in a public park. Taken on a trip east a week ago. [R Pelfrey, 09/19/2005]

I live in Springfield MA, and every summer I go with my family to the white mountains in North Conway, NH for a hiking trip. We usuallly go straight up 91 and get on the kangabangus highway. Last summer, on our way home, we decided to take some backroads for a scenery We went through about a dozen anonymous small towns before we came upon the rocket. In the middle of this small town, in front of what looked like a town hall, was a gigantic missile standing upright. Around the missile was a marble wall with the story of the rocket inscribed in it. It said something about a former resident working with rockets and convincing some government agency to donate an unused rocket to the town. It was very strange because everything in the town was falling apart exept for this clean freshly painted real military missile. [Joe Fogarty, 02/27/1998]

[RA: We have another report on file of an Atlas Redstone Rocket further north, in the town square of Stratford, NH, 5 mi. N of Groveton on Hwy 3. Jan. 2001: Casey Bisson, a Warren resident, reports that "Stratford doesn't have a rocket in their town square. The missile in Warren is a Redstone intermediate range ballistic missile. However, NASA used the Redstone and Mercury capsules to launch Al Shepard and Gus Grissom into suborbital space as the US's first two astronauts. Warren's Redstone doesn't have a Mercury capsule, but NH does lay claim to being the birth state of Al Shepard. Al Shepard, however, was born near the seacoast, far from Warren. Leaving NH after high school, Shepard never returned. All that aside, I'm told that Warren is the only town or city in the country to have a Redstone missile on display (though some military installations and NASA do have them)." ]