Coos County

Coös County (, with two syllables), frequently spelled Coos County, is a county in the U.S. state of New Hampshire. As of the 2010 census, the population was 33,055, the least of any New Hampshire county. The county seat is Lancaster. The two-syllable pronunciation is sometimes indicated with a dieresis, notably in the Lancaster-based weekly newspaper The Coös County Democrat and on some county-owned vehicles. The county government uses both spellings interchangeably. Coös County is part of the Berlin, NH–VT Micropolitan Statistical Area. It is the only New Hampshire county on the Canada-United States border, south of the province of Quebec, and thus is home to New Hampshire’s only international port of entry, the Pittsburg-Chartierville Border Crossing. Coös County includes the whole of the state’s northern panhandle. Major industries include forestry and tourism, with the once-dominant paper-making industry in sharp decline. The county straddles two of the state’s tourism regions. The southernmost portion of the county is part of the White Mountains Region and is home to Mount Washington. The remainder of the county is known as the Great North Woods Region.