Hayward"s New England Gazetteer contains descriptions of nearly 10,000 places-counties, towns, villages, rivers, bays, streams, islands, and so forth-scattered among this six-state region. The descriptions are full or spare, by design. However, at a minimum, the descriptions include, in the case of communities, the date of the locality"s founding or incorporation, precise location, population and principal industry in 1837, and something about the history; or, with respect to bodies of water, they include its source and terminus, the region traversed by it, uses to which settlers have put it, and sometimes a historical anecdote that occurred there.