I have a friend from The Mitten. Was specifically looking at the ocean so I could get things like crabs and/or lobster, and maybe occasionally go for some of the big fish, though I know not all are in the parts of the ocean I would be by and I know the Great Lakes have to have some big fish of their own. But part of it is trying to avoid the really bad winters. Which really is my biggest concern with the New England area. There is some big differences between places like Connecticut and northern Maine though, so its hard to bunch it all together.
I didn't have a specific criteria of 100k, just usually the cut off between "big" and "small" but I know a lot of that means a lot less in the eastern part of the country.
I'm living in Wyoming and for the most part everyone is in cities because the climate doesn't really allow for the wide spread farming (or anything really) that so many other places do, so having a lot of land doesn't actually let you do too much with it. And in terms of things like hunting camps, well there is so much open space here that you don't need to own a big piece of land to have some place to hunt because there is pretty much nothing as soon as you leave town anyway.
To put it into perspective though, the county I live in is almost exactly the same size as Massachusetts but we have a population of about 45k compared to 6.8m. And our population is in 2 cities close to each other, the rest is pretty much empty.
Which is part of the appeal, but also some of the problem. I can be on the lake in about 20 minutes where I live now, but we're limited to a few types of trout, salmon, and smallmouth bass. Pretty much anything else requires a longer drive, closest Walleye are 3hrs, and things like Pike are even farther.
I'm sure your falls and springs are more pronounced. We get hard freezes late into the spring, a given into mid May but not uncommon into June. And we get them early in the fall, like September, so its really hard on a lot of types of plants. The complete lack of rain also makes it a lot more work to grow things.
It just gets old. I don't have a problem with winter but it just never wants to leave. Going from a few really nice days to snowing the next makes it hard to plan any sort of outdoor activities. But again, the biggest issue seems to be the wind. We loose a lot of potentially nice weather days to wind where its just to windy to want to do anything outside and getting on a boat is just out of the question. Semis are literally blown off the roads at times.
I think it would be a cool to check it out, but not actually wanting to live off the grid. Just a "slower paced" life than what I have now. I'm used to mosquitoes, but yeah, we probably have orders of magnitude fewer around here than those areas. I just know the cold helps reduce some of the bugs. No fist sized cockroaches here.
I do have some relatives in Minnesota that I've visited a few times and I know the mosquitoes and tics and things like that are very common.