Since its 1933 opening in Edith Bond Stearns’ barn, the Peterborough Players has helped launch dozens of careers, including film and stage legend James Whittemore, whose final performance was in 2008’s “Our Town.” (Photo courtesy of the Peterborough Players).

TAMWORTH – Francis Cleveland was an accomplished actor in search of steady summer employment when he gathered a group of stage friends one sweltering season, hit the road for his family’s residence in this tiny mountain village, and in the tradition of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, declared “Let’s go put on a show!”

The year was 1931. Times were tight and jobs scarce – stage performers were anything but the exception. For Cleveland, who’d earn Broadway renown during his career as the first ever Stage Manager in the Broadway production of “Our Town” and as Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey,” a fervor for the arts was more than just ingrained, it was as his nephew George puts it today, ‘prenatal.’ As the children of a certain former White House inhabitant and of a lifelong arts patron, Cleveland’s and his sister Alice’s love of entertaining others was an impassioned pursuit.

And so Francis and Alice Cleveland and their band of Broadway friends packed up their props and costumes in pickup trucks, and set about the barns of the North Country and southern Maine, from Plymouth, Tamworth and North Conway to Holderness and Poland Spring, putting on a new show each week and gaining a following that would span generations.

“You would have actors and actresses who over the course of eight weeks would be playing eight different parts in eight different shows,” says George Cleveland. “You could be the footman one week, and the hero the next. It was brutal for the actors, but oh my God, the discipline and experience. And you got to do it in the terminally bucolic village of Tamworth.”

James Whittemore

Eighty years later, the Barnstormers, as they’d become known, continue to entertain thousands each summer, still producing eight shows in eight weeks, and remaining among the nation’s oldest and proudest summer stock theatre traditions. Indeed, to enter the old (albeit winterized and renovated) white grainery on Main Street the Barnstormers have called home since 1935, is to step back in time and to, each week, enter a world of their own making. This summer’s production, for instance, of ‘The Ghost Train’ pays spooky homage to the Barnstormers’ first ever show, using actual train gears placed beneath the floor to recreate the rush of a freightliner screaming through.

“We don’t cut corners,” says longtime artistic director Bob Shea. “We remain very involved in every phase of production, creating every prop, every costume, and every set piece and sound effect onsite. It’s kind of like Boeing, except rather than planes coming down the assembly line, we have plays we’re putting together piece by piece.”

And star by star. Over the last eight decades, the Barnstormers, like so many of its counterparts across the state, has seen its fair share of major players in the summertime, whether it was Joseph Cotton and Katharine Hepburn breezing through while touring with ‘Philadelphia Story’ (Hepburn, not knowing she was in the home of late President Grover Cleveland, would take a look at his portrait in the entryway and famously – and unflatteringly – declare its likeness to President Taft!), or the likes of William Christopher (Father Mulcahy on ‘MASH’), Arlene Francis of ‘What’s My Line?’ fame, or General Hospital’s Emily McLaughlin.

It’s all part of a rich summer tradition that NH Cultural Resources Commissioner Van McLeod says only deepens New Hampshire’s legacy as a quiet, rustic retreat for artists to create some of their finest work – from novelists Willa Cather and Louisa May Alcott to Thornton Wilder, ee cummings, and of course, Robert Frost. And for residents and vacationers alike to, in turn, enjoy it first.

Begun as a theatre troupe that traveled in trucks and played barns throughout the region, Tamworth’s Barnstormers this summer celebrates its 80th anniversary, still producing eight shows in eight weeks, including a revival of its first ever show, “The Ghost Train.” (Photo: David Lazar; images courtesy of The Barnstormers).

“New Hampshire has always been a place of refuge for artists not only in the visual or literary sense, but for those who are performers, as well,” McLeod says. “While we’re often quick to think of the White Mountains School of Art or the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough or the Cornish colony, the town halls and opera houses across the state served as their own venue for some of the nation’s most talented performers to practice their craft in the summertime.”

Indeed, to travel from town to town across New Hampshire is to witness a theatre tradition that dates back more than a century to Vaudeville’s earliest days – one where virtually every town hall and Grange hall was built with a balcony and removable floor seating; where towns like Goreham built its opera house right on the train tracks to accommodate performers and visitors; and Rochester’s featured the state’s only hydraulic orchestra section, capable of lifting an entire audience to view a show.

It is to also witness a summer stock culture that remains as vibrant today as it did nearly 90 years ago when Peterborough’s Mariarden Theatre-in-the-Woods seated 600 and featured up-and-comers like Brian Donlevy, Paul Robeson, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Sugar Hill summer resident Bette Davis. While stages have sporadically sprung up in other states in the decades since, summer stock theatre remains a uniquely New England phenomenon – one which, from its earliest days, capitalized on the region’s status as a cool respite for vacationing city dwellers, and on a deep well of rising and accomplished professional actors anxious for a summer paycheck. In old barns, theatres like the Barnstormers, Whitefield’s Weathervane Theatre, the Peterborough Players and the New London Barn Playhouse found inexpensive (if basic) venues to entertain large audiences, and feature major actors, from “Carousel’s” John Raitt who performed regularly at the Lakes Region Playhouse on Winnipesaukee, to Tony Award winner James Whitmore who began and ended his career with the Peterborough Players.

The Barnstormers

Today, they remain among 21 summer stock stages across New Hampshire (from the Seacoast to the North Country), entertaining more than 800,000 vacationers and locals last year, and in many ways paying tribute to simpler times when a show was a regular part of one’s summer vacation and the computer generating the special effects was a director’s imagination.

The Barnstormers performing

“It’s all about creativity,” says McLeod, who himself founded the Paper Mill Theatre and the North Country Center for the Arts. “It’s easy to be creative when you’ve got a lot of technical gadgetry and million dollar budgets. But in summer stock, where your budgets are certainly anything but, the one criteria by which the audience judges is believability. It really is about telling a story and making it feel real for the people in the seats.”

For nearly as long as the Barnstormers in the White Mountains, the Peterborough Players have been doing just that in the shadow of the Monadnocks, earning a loyal regional following and national recognition as a serious player in summer theatre. Like the Clevelands in Tamworth, Edith Bond Stearns’ decision to launch the Peterborough Players in 1933 came as the child of wealthy summer vacationers who’d fallen in love with the region and were lifelong arts patrons. Stearns’ father had donated the money to build Bond Hall at the MacDowell Colony (where Thornton Wilder famously wrote ‘Our Town’), and when Stearns inherited the family’s 100-plus-acre farm after her mother’s death, it was her friendship with colony co-founder Marian MacDowell that encouraged her not to sell, but to instead open part of the farm as a theatre and proving ground for performers.

The days of a screen covering the entire left side of the theatre to keep bugs out, of horse stalls doubling as dressing rooms, and audience members bringing their own seat cushions and fans on warm summer nights are long gone. In their place is a thoroughly modern, air-conditioned space – though still unabashedly a barn – that has endured because of its connection to the community (locals use the theatre year round, watching the Metropolitan Opera there via satellite in the fall and winter) and ability to attract first-rate performers and directors with quality plays.

“It’s always been an opportunity for performers to gain a tremendous amount of experience in a relatively short amount of time,” says Peterborough Players artistic director Gus Kaikkonen. “Here, they’re able to do the play they’ve always wanted to do and to take part in a quality production outside of New York.”

Over the years it’s a formula that has attracted significant summer talent – actors like William Hurt, Robert Morse, Mary Beth Hurt, NH native and former “NYPD Blue” star Gordon Clapp, and film director Tom Moore – while also serving as a training ground for young actors, actresses and writers. Folks like James Whitmore, a New York native who arrived in Peterborough during the early 1940s in search of experience and summer work. Whitmore would serve in WWII, returning to Peterborough for more roles after being decommissioned. Whitmore was all but penniless in 1947 when he received a Broadway invitation to audition for the role of the Sergeant in “Command Decision.” Stearns, who both believed in Whitmore and in her theatre’s ability to turn out young talent, volunteered to pay for Whitmore’s ticket to New York and to have his roles covered while he was away. Whitmore would win the role and with it a Tony Award, launching a 60-plus year film and stage career that included turns in “Oklahoma,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” and “The Asphalt Jungle” and an Oscar nomination for his performance as Harry Truman in “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” It was Peterborough, however, that always held Whitmore’s heart. When asked in 2008 at age 86 if he’d consider reprising his own turn as the Stage Manager in “Our Town,” Whitmore reportedly said, “As long as I’m taking sustenance, I’ll be there (in Peterborough).” It was to be his last role.

Just as it has since 1933, the New London Barn Playhouse still rents seat cushions for a nickel, revels in its rusticity, and works as a training ground, teaching performers the ins and outs of both acting and stage production. (Photo: David Lazar; images courtesy of the New London Barn Playhouse).

“You ask us how we’ve been able to last – the support of the town has a great deal to do with it,” says the theatre’s managing director Keith Stevens. “Peterborough is a unique place. It isn’t necessarily a summer destination like other towns with thriving summer theatres that draw tourist traffic. But it is a place with a remarkable amount of culture, and where there is a great interest locally in these kinds of institutions.”

An hour north in the quiet Lakes Region retreat of New London, the Barn Playhouse has been generating significant local interest itself since 1933, helping to cultivate the careers of countless young stars and claiming distinction as the state’s oldest continuously operating summer theatre. Like the Peterborough Players and the Barnstormers, the circa-1820 red barn on Main Street here has evolved quite a bit since its early days when actors would have to exit the theatre itself to reenter on the opposite side of the stage (always interesting, laughs the theatre’s chief historian, when there was a downpour outside and a play was set in the desert); or when a power outage one evening forced the theatre to light the stage with the headlights of a vehicle in the barn’s doorway. Which isn’t to say the Barn Playhouse has donned all the quirks of its age, whether it’s renting out seat cushions for a nickel (the same price as in 1933) to support a long-running scholarship fund, or admonishing patrons using the restroom during a 1989 production of “Singin’ in the Rain” not to flush during the second act because it would cut the water pressure onstage.

New London Barn Playhouse performers working

All, of course, pale to the quality productions the Barn Playhouse has churned out over the years and to a roster of talent it has developed as one of the stage industry’s top summer training grounds. Indeed, when visiting Mt. Holyoke College professor Josephine Etter Holmes launched the Barn Playhouse, it was with the intent of “establishing a theatre group presenting dramas of stimulating artistic and literary merit.” The result has been a company that each summer gives college students and recent grads a solid grounding in set, sound and costume design, along with the ability to star in shows – from “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Hello Dolly” to this summer’s “Hairspray” – ordinarily reserved for performers twice their ages, if not more.

Among the interns to emerge from the Barn Playhouse over the years have been Laura Linney, Taye Diggs, and Oscar winner Sandy Dennis, alongside writers Tom Fontana (“Homicide” and “St. Elsewhere”) and Steven Schwartz (“Godspell”). One intern from 2007 is starring on Broadway in “A Little Night Music” with Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta Jones, while another just finished playing Tony in Broadway’s current revival of “West Side Story”.

“Our mission here is really to nurture young artists,” says Barn Playhouse artistic director Carol Dunne, “to give them a break from commercialism and let them experience theatre as it is supposed to be – created with a tremendous amount of imagination, but not necessarily a lot of money. For a lot of us who’ve been in this business a long time and have worked on and off Broadway, we get more excited here in this little theatre than with the multi-million-dollar productions you’ll find in big cities.”

Judging by the reactions of its audiences, the Barn Playhouse continues to excite them, too, filling seats and sustaining the beliefs of many, like George Cleveland, Van McLeod, Keith Stevens and others that summer stock is a Granite State tradition whose curtain is far from closing. “As you look at history, New Hampshire has always been a place that has fostered artistic development and expression,” McLeod says. “As long as there is the imagination, the inspiration, and the desire from the public, it will continue to be.”

Special thanks to Carl Lindblade, Van McLeod, the Peterborough Players, the Barnstormers, and the New London Barn Playhouse for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Posted under Feature

Daddy at the organ—Lori Arsenault’s father Tilmon (or “Tilly” to his shipmates) would pass on to his daughter a lifelong love of music. (Photo courtesy of Lori Arsenault).

PORTSMOUTH – Michael DiNola Jr. remembers being summoned to the living room, and even at 9 years old, knowing something was wrong. The living room, after all, was a place reserved for special occasions, and DiNola had been following the news and knew the admiral had already been to the house to meet with his mom.

It was April 1963, and just days before, DiNola Jr. had been with his dad – Michael Sr., “Dinty” to his shipmates – in the garage of their Rye home, carving, sanding, and painting by hand the Indian Head neckerchief slide he’d wear for his Cub Scouts Blue & Gold banquet. A short time later, Michael DiNola Sr. boarded the U.S.S. Thresher in Portsmouth, the pride of the nuclear Navy, as its Lieutenant Commander for sea trials off of Cape Cod.

It was a voyage from which he and his shipmates would never re-emerge.

“I can remember we were driving home from the banquet and mom had shut off the radio,” DiNola Jr. says. “As soon as we pulled into the drive, two neighbors pulled in to let us know the ship had gone missing… All of us had, of course, been paying attention to the story as it was developing, so when my mom pulled us into the living room, we sort of knew what was next. I just remember telling my mother at that point, ‘I’ll take care of you.’ I got a job that summer washing dishes for $1 an hour, and have worked ever since.”

This marker and plaque outside the Albacore Museum in Ports- mouth is one of several memorials nationwide to the men of the U.S.S. Thresher. (Photo: David Lazar).

For the DiNola family, and an entire region whose livelihood centered on the fishing and shipbuilding industries, the loss of the Thresher to the depths of the Atlantic was a tragedy beyond description. In all, 129 men – officers, enlistees, civilians, dads, husbands, brothers, friends – would perish when a suspected leak in a salt water joint shorted out the submarine’s electrical systems and prevented the submarine from resurfacing.

It was the kind of tragedy that wasn’t supposed to happen. Built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the nation’s longest-operating (and arguably its finest) shipyard, the Thresher was the lead ship in a new class of Cold War-era fast attack nuclear submarines, introducing a level of technology, speed, stealth, and comfort never before seen – “the Cadillac of its time,” as one former crewmember described it, “a stainless steel palace, so unbelievably modern compared to the ships other countries had at that point in history.”

“I think if you were to draw a comparison today, you might look at the Challenger,” DiNola Jr. says. “The Thresher was one-of-a-kind, ahead of its time. The dedication of the people in the shipyard was amazing. The engineering that went into it was glorious, pushing the limits of known science and technology. Onboard you had the best and brightest the U.S. had to offer. Every man aboard was the best of the best, all of them dedicated to ensuring the ship was sound.”

The Thresher, seen here during her fitting at Ports- mouth Naval Shipyard, would be the world’s most advanced underwater vessel. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Thresher’s official launch and this past April 10, the 47th anniversary of its sinking. It is an event marked each year by a solemn ceremony near Portsmouth Harbor, one of prayer and reminiscences by family, former crewmen, the former shipyard workers who built, outfitted, and maintained the ship; one punctuated by a family’s tossing of a wreath into the Piscataqua and the scattering of 129 rose petals to signify the lost.

For Hooksett’s Kevin Galeaz, a former sub vet himself who has helped organize the memorials since 1999 as a member of the Thresher Base, United States Submarine Veterans Inc. (http://www.thresherbase.org), they are as much a service for the living as they are a tribute to the fallen. “What these families and that community went through was unbelievably traumatic,” Galeaz says. “And so our mission is to maintain the memory of the Thresher and its crew through the families of those who died and to ensure that future generations always remember.”

Prior to her sinking, The Thresher would set new standards in the Cold War era for technology, comfort and stealth. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

To understand that memory is to understand a culture that for more than two centuries produced some of the U.S. Navy’s finest vessels, shipbuilders, and sailors. Since colonial settlement, NH and Maine forests provided lumber for wooden boat construction – first for British ships, and eventually during the Revolution for the Raleigh, built in 1776 as the first vessel to fly an American flag into battle. Established in 1800, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard would prove an essential cog to powering the U.S. Navy, producing hundreds of ships critical to the nation’s war efforts through the 19th and 20th centuries. The first American submarine – the L-8 – was built in Portsmouth during World War I, with the yard employing more than 25,000 at its peak during World War II and turning out an additional 70 submarines, including a record 4 launched in one day. They were vessels with names like the Finback, which rescued a young pilot named George H.W. Bush in the Pacific; like the Archerfish, which sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano, the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine; and like the Swordfish, the first nuclear-powered sub built at the base in 1957.

The Thresher was to be one of those ships. Launched in July 1960, it heralded a new era in shipbuilding, replacing dated technology and cramped quarters with a level of sophistication, efficiency and spaciousness previously unseen. DiNola Jr. can remember his dad taking him and his younger brother for lunch aboard the ship while docked in Portsmouth and marveling at the gadgetry, while others remembered taking spouses on evening cruises in the waters near the harbor. “There was never trepidation on my dad’s part,” DiNola Jr. says. “I can remember him saying to all of us that the safest place you can be on this earth is in a submarine.”

Thresher patch. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

Indeed for nearly three years, the Thresher lived up to that billing, recording few problems during routine sea trials or shock trials, the latter of which required the equivalent of 20,000 lbs. TNT to be detonated underwater within 180 yards of her 278.5-foot hull. And so it was on April 9, 1963 that DiNola Sr., a career seaman, along with 11 more officers, 91 enlisted men, and six military and civilian technicians set sail for the waters off the Cape Cod coast for a post-overhaul trial, the submarine rescue ship Skylark in tow.

Micheal DiNola, Jr., seen here with a scale model of the Thresher, is work- ing with Washington officials to erect a national memorial in Arlington Cemetery to his father and others lost by the nuclear Navy. (Photo: David Lazar; inset: Official photograph of the U.S. Navy).

The Thresher was about 220 miles east of the Cape at 7:47 am, when she began her descent to test depth, the depth to which a sub can dive and maintain the integrity of its hull (the Navy keeps that actual depth classified, though it is generally believed to be around 1,000 feet). At 7:52, Thresher leveled off at 400 feet and reported back to the Skylark after the crew inspected for leaks and found none. Around an hour or so later, Thresher had reached 1,000 feet and was inching along slowly, descending in slow circles, her transmission quality notably declining.

What exactly happened next remains a matter of educated conjecture. At 9:09, it’s believed that the Thresher probably suffered the failure of a joint in her salt water piping system, springing a leak and shorting out one of her electrical panels. This would have in turn caused a shutdown of the nuclear reactor, with a subsequent loss of propulsion. Under the command of Lt. Commander John Wesley Harvey, it is believed that the ship attempted to blow its ballast tanks in an effort to resurface. Harvey’s transmissions with the Skylark, while garbled, remained remarkably calm. Those ballast tanks, however, were prevented from blowing because the ship’s high-pressure air flasks were plugged with frozen moisture. As the ship’s engine room flooded with water, it likely began a further descent, tail-first. By 9:17, Harvey – barely audible – reported that the Thresher had exceeded test depth. A minute later, at a believed depth of 1,300 to 2,000 feet, the Thresher is believed to have imploded, her remains settling gently some 8,400 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The effect on the surface was devastating. “The impact on the area was huge,” DiNola Jr. recalls. “So many people worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. It was the largest employer in the area, and pretty much everyone knew someone on that boat or who’d worked on it.” DiNola Jr., now 56, can remember the line of neighbors along Cable Road in Rye who passed boxes from one to another to help his family move into a new home across the street from where they once were.

This plaque, now owned by Micheal DiNola, Jr., came from a nearby Kittery, ME, steakhouse which routinely marked the launch of new ships from Portsmouth. (Photo: David Lazar).

Lori Arsenault, whose father Tilmon – or Tilly to his shipmates – was the Thresher’s chief engineman and had taught her how to play the organ and to love music, was 8 at the time of the tragedy. “I don’t know if my (older) brother realized what was happening, but I didn’t. The phone kept ringing… and someone from the Navy was trying to reach my mother, but she was at a PTA meeting with my sister,” Arsenault says. “As soon as she got home, my brother went out to meet her. When I went into the kitchen, my older brother and sister were huddled together with my mother and they were all crying. That is when I knew, and I started crying, too.”

For John C. Riemenschneider, the tragedy hit in a different way. Riemenschneider had been a first class storekeeper aboard the Thresher for its first 34 months at sea before transferring out to another sub, the U.S.S. Jack, just 18 days before the final voyage. Riemenschneider remembers taking a light-hearted $2 bet from his best friend and fellow crewmember Jack Hudson that he wouldn’t be called up for the sea trial. Hudson, of course, never made it back to pay him. “At first, you didn’t believe it happened,” he remembers. “You believed they were on some sort of secret mission… But then the reality sets in. It’s a hard thing to comprehend. To lose that many friends at once, it’s unbelievable. A lot of us lived in Navy housing, and all of a sudden, so many of them are gone. My daughter was six years old at the time, and most of her friends were the children of those seamen. All of a sudden, all of their dads are gone. Personally, I would have to say it was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me, outside the loss of my wife.”

Riemenschneider, now 74 and living in Lebanon, ME, would serve on two more submarines before retiring from the Navy and then work on an additional 18 Trident subs as an engineer with Westinghouse. Like DiNola Jr. and Arsenault, Riemenschneider faithfully attends the memorials each year with his daughter to pay his respect and honor his friends. “That was the only trip that the Thresher made to sea without me,” he says. “I was on that boat for 34 months. You just don’t know… I’m not a particularly religious person, but I pretty much believe that I’m on a train ride, and when God punches my ticket, that’s my time to go… I just try to do the right thing everyday so that when it is my time, I can make sure I’m going to the right place.”

Just as there is no shortage of heartbreak to be found in the story of the Thresher, so, too, there is salvation. For, in the wake of the tragedy came an aggressive set of safety regulations – known as SUBSAFE – that is single-handedly credited with preventing a similar loss in the decades since. Whereas from 1915 to1963, it’s believed that the U.S. Navy lost one sub every 3-5 years due to non-combat causes (some have suggested the Thresher’s fatal flaw had to do with the design specs of the time, which called for brazing joints instead of welding them), the SUBSAFE program, administered by the Navy, has provided maximum reasonable assurance that subs’ hulls will stay watertight, and that they can recover from unanticipated flooding

Thousands lined the streets of Portsmouth in April, 1963 to pay respect to those lost aboard the Thresher. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Galeaz.

“If you want to know why I’m involved, it’s because of the fact that every time we go down, we come back up,” says Galeaz, who served on a ballistic sub from 1975-1982. “It is a miracle and an achievement we directly owe to SUBSAFE and to the men who gave their lives aboard the Thresher. We lost a lot of good guys when that submarine went down. I think all of us are driven by the conviction that we don’t ever want to see it happen again.”

The losses incurred by the Thresher are scattered across the country, as are memorials – from a marble stone at a post office in Eureka, Missouri, to a monument outside the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, CA, to a song by the Kingston Trio, “The Ballad of the Thresher,” and, here in Portsmouth, where a stone memorial and plaque outside the Albacore Museum honors all who were lost. DiNola Jr., meanwhile, is working with officials in Washington to try and erect a memorial to the Thresher and the entire nuclear Navy in Arlington National Cemetery.

“We have to understand the people in the military and their dedication to protecting our rights and our nation, and the sacrifices that go with that,” DiNola says. “We have to understand the dedication of the men working in that shipyard and on that boat to be the best at what they do. The loss of the Thresher was horrific. But what we came away with were ways to make us safer as a nation in the nuclear age.”

The Thresher would carry aboard her 129 officers, enlistees and military and civilian technicians at the time of her sinking near Cape Cod in April 1963. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

And, says Arsenault, who maintains her own online memorial to the crew of the Thresher (www.ussthresher.com), a greater understanding of the costs of war. “I would like people to walk away knowing and feeling tremendous loss, not just for me and my family, and other Thresher families, but for… the influence these kind of men could have had on the world around them,” she says. “These are men who knew how to live in an itty bitty space and get along. Even under tremendous pressure, they knew how to manage themselves with calm…. These men were not daredevils, but skilled and caring of each other, their families and their communities.

“There is something in this for every person who has even a tiny seed of love in them,” she continues. “For Thresher families, ours is not a trauma of abuse, hatred, or neglect, but a trauma of love. The good news for everyone to know is that love is forever. On that alone we can rely.”

And thanks to the passion of their families and their supporters, it is a story and a sacrifice none of us will soon forget.

Special thanks to Kevin Galeaz, Michael DiNola Jr., Lori Arsenault, John C. Riemenschneider, and Mary Morin for their assistance and generosity with this story.

Posted under Feature

The original crew of the Mt. Washington Observatory includes (from left) Alex McKenzie, Bob Monahan, Joe Dodge, and Sal Pagliuca. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

PINKHAM NOTCH — Joe Dodge was a young outdoorsman with a marriage to the mountains and an outsize affection for extreme weather when he and three fellow trekkers ascended the carriage trail to the summit of Mt. Washington in pursuit of history, science, and public service. The year was 1932. America was plunged in Depression, and Dodge—who’d cemented a reputation constructing a hut system for hikers across New Hampshire’s North Country—was undaunted by the snowcapped slab of granite that lay ahead. Instead, he believed in the value the notoriously hostile summit held in the field of weather observation and public education. So with little more than borrowed weather instruments and enough food, coal and curiosity to survive the journey, Dodge and his friends Sal Pagliuca, Bob Monahan, and Alex McKenzie scaled the 6,288-foot peak that fall to reopen a tiny weather station last run by the U.S. Army’s Signal Service in the 1880s. They would enter a completely different world up there—and over the course of the coming years, the record books as well.

The stone-walled Tip Top House was lone of two simple hotels that served summit visitors from the 1850s into the 1870s. The Tip Top House still stands today, operated as an historic site by Mount Washington State Park. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

On April 12, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were in the midst of a legendary crime wave, Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” was the #1 movie in America, and in Pinkham Notch, a large ridge of high pressure was barreling across Mt. Washington’s icy summit, violently rattling the windows of the team’s tiny outpost and pushing their instruments to the brink of endurance. By the time it was over, Dodge and his team—subsisting on a $500 grant from the state’s Academy of Science—had recorded wind gusts of 231 mph, the strongest ever observed by humans. “There was no doubt this morning that a super-hurricane, Mt. Washington style, was in full development,” Pagliuca wrote in his logbook. “‘Will they believe it?’ was our first thought. I felt then the responsibility of that startling measurement.” The storm would last just one day, but the legend and Granite State tradition it created live on three quarters of a century later in an institution and landscape like no other—a place that proudly declares itself “home of the world’s worst weather.” The Mt. Washington Observatory has indeed evolved beyond the tiny shack Dodge, his team and five felines occupied in those early years to become a world-class facility, the only permanently-staffed mountaintop observatory in the Western Hemisphere, with a mission based in research, observation, and education. “Joe [Dodge] was always very interested in public education, particularly with respect to Mt. Washington,” says Jack Middleton, a Manchester attorney who served as an observer in 1952 and went on to ask for Dodge’s daughter’s hand in marriage. “It was a spectacular geographic feature, it was home to some incredible weather, and the summit itself is such a unique place. The flora and fauna you find up there are actually replicated in Greenland. You would have to go a long way to find anything like it.”

Sal Pagliuca (left) and Alex McKenzie take advantage of good weather in 1932 to strenghten the guy wires holding the roof anemometer on the Mt. Washington Observator y. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observator y).

In the midst of constantly emerging technology and methods of gathering weather, the summit itself has remained remarkably the same in the 75 years since Joe Dodge’s perfect storm—a subarctic and often unforgiving climate above the clouds, a sort of no-man’s land in the cold season where winds can regularly top 100 mph, snow falls each month of the year, temperatures can fluctuate between 60° F in the summer to -50° F in the dead of winter, and thick rime ice (or wind-blown frozen fog) can coat surfaces at a clip of six inches per hour. Mt. Washington observers—whose measurements of temperature, humidity, and wind speed are routed directly to the National Weather Service— jokingly pride themselves on being called “the world’s worst weather observers” or some of its “highest paid meteorologists.” As such, the summit is a place that has always lent itself to real-world research. The Army Signal Service would, of course, use the summit throughout the 1870s and 1880s to offer forecasts to merchants, ship owners, farmers and others whose livelihoods depended on the weather; while the Air Force would use it some 60 years later—as WWII was closing and the Cold War was escalating —to research the effect of icing on airplane wings in the event of flights into frigid Russian airspace. Advertising companies used the summit’s high winds to test the endurance of their signs; while as early as the 1950s, inventors were bringing contraptions to the top of the mountain to research the conversion of wind into energy communicate on short wave radio at bands that hadn’t been discovered before.

Above the 4,000-foot tree line, Mt. Washington shifts from wooded rusticity to a stark palette of black and white, every surface shrouded in fog, snow and rim ice. (Photo: David Lazar.)

“It has always been a platform, a place for people to do research on what would work in adverse weather conditions,” Middleton says.

The Observatory first occupied by Dodge, Monahan, Pagliuca and MacKenzie dated back to the weather bureau of the U.S. Army’s Signal Service in the 1800s. (Photos courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

It’s also a place where visitors can enjoy views, depending on fog, of more than 90 miles in any direction, from the Atlantic, to the entire Presidential Range, the Monadnocks, and the Adirondacks. First climbed in the 17th century, the summit was named in 1784 for General, not President, George Washington. “So esteemed was he at that time that the highest peak in the colonies was chosen to bear the name of our greatest war hero,” the Observatory’s curator Peter Crane says. “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” And first in tourism. Each spring, summer and fall, more than 250,000 hikers, tourists, and bumper sticker-seeking motorists make the ascent up the Mount Washington Auto Road, the same dramatic, winding ribbon of roadway (built in 1861 as a carriage trail) that brought Dodge’s team and before them, the Signal Corps, to the summit. The ascent is breathtaking, arguably more so in winter, when the road is closed and access is offered through the Observatory’s winter DayTrips and EduTrips via snow tractor—a program that provides an exclusive window into the Observatory’s inner workings and to the region’s most arresting vistas. About 2,000 people reach the summit in the cold season. It is a terrain that above the 4,000-foot tree line transforms from wooded rusticity to a stark palette of black and white, every tree and surface shrouded in snow, fog or rime ice; a terrain that magnifies man’s smallness in the face of nature. At the summit itself, the landscape can border on polar or downright postapocalyptic— from the Cog Railway (Sylvester Marsh’s spectacular 1869 contraption for transporting tourists up the mountainside) to its rebuilt stage office (still chained to the ground), and the Tip Top House (the stone lodge built in 1854 that for many years housed Observatory employees), no structure is spared a burial in rime ice. But for the occasional hiker, tourist, or Marty, the Observatory’s celebrated feline mascot, signs of life are all but nonexistent.

In the winter, the Mt. Washington Observatory offers special DayTrip and EduTrip tours to the summit via snow tractor, led by historians like Peter Crane, an accomplished trekker who’s scaled every 4,000 foot summit in the Presidential Range in every month of the year. (Photos: David Lazar).

“Our education programs really try and connect people with a place that is otherwise incredibly remote,” says the Observatory’s executive director Scot Henley. “For New Englanders and people from abroad, this is that one crazy outlier they see on their weather reports—the 32 degree reading when every other place around it is 72. It gives them the opportunity to experience that one digit on the map, to meet our meteorologists, and to find out for themselves, ‘What exactly can Mother Nature dish out up there?’” In the years since Dodge and his team observed their world record windstorm, Mother Nature has apparently dished out even worse weather elsewhere. This past January, the world learned of a 1996 tropical cyclone off the northeast coast of Australia that reports suggest reached wind speeds of 253 mph. The news, while a blow

Then as now, observers atop Mt. Washington have always experimented with new instruments for measuring weather, including this heated thermometer in 1937. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

to the pride of Granite Staters who’d enjoyed the exclusivity of such an unlikely honor, was tempered, they argue, by the fact that the Australian cyclone was not observed by humans. For retired observers like Goreham’s Guy Gosselin, who scaled the mountain in 1961 and personally endured the ferocity of 184 mph winds, that’s no small distinction. “It is truly an eye-opening experience,” says Gosselin, who retired in 1996 as the Observatory’s executive director. “The weather was awesome in the dictionary sense… it also takes a lot out of you. You’re in a constant battle with wind and temperature. At times, you pretty much have to crawl along. “I don’t think you can leave there without an appreciation for the experience of being in a very unusual climate,” he continues. “It doesn’t make any difference what the weather happens to be whileyou’re up there. It’s always going to be a very different environment… Joe Dodge’s first love was the weather. The Observatory and the work it has been able to accomplish remain a great tribute to him and his vision.” It is a vision—and a view—that, thanks to Dodge and his fellow trekkers, will continue to connect visitors with awe and wonder for generations to come.

Each tourist season, more than 250,000 visitors make the hike or drive to the Mt. Washington summit. In the (winter, those numbers drop to 2,000. The cold season transforms the summit into one part winter wonderland, one part lunar landscape, affording views of up to 90 miles and an experience like no other in New England. Structures, from the stage house of the Cog Railway, to the radio towers of WHOM and WPKQ are buried in rim ice, rendering them all but unrecognizable. (Photos: David Lazar)

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New Hampshire Contributions Historic in Space Exploration

McAuliffe, who taught social studies at Concord High School, won national admiration for her everwoman appeal, infectious enthusiasm, and out- of-the-ordinary field trips with her students. (Photo: David Lazar)

CONCORD – Bob Veilleux looked up at the crisp, cobalt sky and knew something was wrong well before the voice on the loudspeaker confirmed it so.

The date was January 28, 1986, and Veilleux, a popular veteran science instructor at Manchester’s Central High School, was among dozens of educators on hand to view history from the bleachers at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. For Veilleux, the moment was to be especially proud. This, after a national competition named him New Hampshire’s alternate for Concord High School social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe as the first educator to go into space.

Seventy three seconds into the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, Veilleux’s heart and that of the state and nation leapt from its collective chest. “Several of us science people in the audience knew the sequencing wasn’t right – the separation wasn’t supposed to happen that early,” Veilleux says of the eventual explosion that turned the blue morning sky into a cascading umbrella of white and orange. “You saw cheers turn quickly to tears… That’s when the voice came over speaker announcing, ‘There appears to have been a major malfunction.’

“There are tragedies that occur in all of our lifetimes – moments we live with for the rest of our lives,” he continues. “This was certainly one of them.”

Derry’s Alan Shepard caught the world’s attention in 1961 as the first American in space, and ten years later as the oldest man on the moon at age 47. (Photos courtesy of McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center)

Next January will mark a quarter century since the Challenger disaster; 25 years since Americans and Granite Staters of every generation and background united in grief after investing unprecedented hope and emotion in the first private citizen – someone just like one of them –selected for what was billed as “the ultimate field trip.”

For Veilleux, now a part-time educator at the newly expanded McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, January 2011 will be a time for him, fellow educators, and visitors to reflect and pay special tribute to McAuliffe’s memory and legacy.

It will also be a time, they hope, for visitors to see, realize and appreciate one tiny state’s unexpectedly immense role in the history of spaceflight.

With less than a quarter of the population of the Houston metro area alone – dubbed the nation’s Space City because of the Johnson Space Center – New Hampshire residents have never let their state’s small stature keep them from looking to the heavens and thinking big.

From a series of trailblazing astronauts to the region’s only aerospace museum and companies that have changed the way NASA engineers approached exploration of the stars, the Granite State has enjoyed a long and, at times, unlikely connection with the cosmos.

No exploration, of course, can begin without citing McAuliffe’s fellow namesake on the Discovery Center entryway – the first American in space, Derry’s Alan Shepard.

Born in 1923 to a prominent banking family on East Derry Road, Shepard had grown up inspired by the adventure and daring of Charles Lindbergh – the first to cross the Atlantic by air – and a desire to one day pilot his own aircraft and make history. “Nothing could stop Alan from flight,” says Richard Holmes, Director of the Derry Heritage Museum, where an entire room chock-a-block with photos, street signs, dolls, documents, literature and life-size cutouts is dedicated to Shepard. “He just had this sense of adventure from the time he was young, whether it was kite flying or sailing on Beaver Lake. He had a newspaper route just so he

(Photos courtesy of McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center)

could save money for a bicycle to ride over to Grenier Field.”

At Grenier Field in Manchester, Shepard would earn money sweeping floors, so he could pay the pilots there for flying lessons. He’d go on to serve his country during WWII aboard a naval destroyer and earn his pilot’s wings in 1947, flying several tours from aircraft carriers. Twelve years later, Shepard was among the nation’s top 110 test pilots invited by the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration to join the space program. On May 5, 1961, as church bells rang and fire sirens sounded down Broadway in Derry to mark the occasion, Shepard launched into orbit, helming the Freedom 7 mission.

“It was a huge thing,” Holmes says. “America in 1961 was space crazy. We had this competition with the Russians, and there was just this feeling that communism would take over because they were the first in space. But Alan turned out better than Yuri Gagarin… He even made the cover of Archie Comics – if that’s not success, I don’t know what is!”

Indeed, to visit Derry today is to see a witness shrine to its favorite son, from the stretch of I-93 that passes Derry,

dedicated in 1963 as the Alan Shepard Highway, to the Pinkerton Academy high school football team – the Astros – and the state legislature’s eventual decision to proclaim Derry the state’s official ‘Space Town.’ “There’s a certain pride in a small town like ours of letting the world know that we exist,” Holmes says. “This was an incredibly important moment for us as a community.”

Derry Heritage Museum Director Rick Holmes dedicated special room at the museum to Alan Shepard’s historic accomplishments. (Photo: David Lazar)

In the years after his first historic flight, Shepard would overcome Meniere’s Disease, a debilitating condition afflicting the inner ear, before walking on the moon for the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 at age 47, the oldest man to do so. While he spent much of his remaining years in Houston, locals say Shepard’s true home never changed, evidenced by his frequent flights into Grenier Field to visit his mother and his practice of tipping his wings as he flew over Derry.

Twenty five years after Shepard’s inaugural orbit, another New Hampshire resident, Concord’s Christa Auliffe, would make history of her own, winning a national competition among 11,500 teachers to become the first educator in space. McAuliffe’s feat came at a time when public support for funding the space program was in decline, and NASA needed a way both to humanize and spark new interest in its efforts. McAuliffe – who’d herself grown up watching John Glenn’s historic flight and dreamed of going to space – would do just that, with her everywoman appeal, unflagging enthusiasm, easy smile, and penchant for out-of-the-ordinary field trips with her students. “Just having me fly is a very clear message that space is accessible,” she would say. “You’re taking an everyday, ordinary person on board the space shuttle and flying her. It means something because we are teachers, and teachers are approachable people.”

Concord High School social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe helped revive national enthusiasm for NASA, before her tragic death in the Challenger disaster in 1986. (Photos courtesy of McAuliffe- Shepard Discovery Center)

“For her to make the selection from tiny New Hampshire was a huge deal,” says Dave McDonald, educational director at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. “One thing that keeps coming through is that she was a super educator. She was a person who just loved people, and people loved her back. Her thing was that she was just an ordinary citizen – and of course, she was anything but ordinary – and that she was taking the ‘ultimate field trip.’”

McAuliffe was selected in July 1985, and soon underwent a battery of training in Houston to prepare for the Challenger mission. From the Challenger, McAuliffe, one of seven astronauts aboard the mission, was to conduct several lesson plans for her class and thousands of others across the nation via satellite. “The hope for NASA was to get the average person interested in space, and Christa’s natural charisma managed to generate tremendous appeal both nationally and internationally,” Veilleux recalls.

Veilleux, an astronomy teacher who’d developed a close collegial relationship with McAuliffe in the months leading to the launch, was sitting behind her family the morning of January 28, 1986. Investigators in the months and years following the disaster would determine that a faulty O-ring – a piece of rubber designed to prevent leaks – failed in the frigid air that morning. “That shuttle should have never taken off that morning,” Veilleux says. “It was way too cold outside.” Veilleux watched as shock turned to intense grief – a feeling echoed in classrooms and millions of households – as much of the world witnessed the event live on television.

(Photo courtesy of McAuliffe- Shepard Discovery Center)

“The mood up here in New Hampshire when we returned was utter disbelief,” he recalls. “There was so much pride in Christa being the teacher to represent all of us. There was an incredible amount of hurt. The city and the state seemed to just shudder and hold it in.” On the Thursday morning after the disaster, a memorial service was held in front of the State House, where

Veilleux read a prepared message from teachers. McAuliffe’s remains would be laid to rest in Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord. In the years following the Challenger tragedy, her name would grace some 40 schools around the world, while every year since 1986, the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Nashua has devoted itself to the use of technology in all aspects of education.

In Concord, meanwhile, what began in 1990 as the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium dramatically grew last year with a 33,000-square-foot, $15-million expansion to become the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. Today, the center features the only interactive, hands-on exhibition of its kind in the world on black holes. “The Discovery Center is the perfect memorial to honor Christa, because it has, in fact, become New Hampshire’s premier field trip destination,” McDonald says. “If there is something we want children to leave with, it is a little more insight about each of these American heroes… We also want them to leave feeling good about their home state. Christa and Alan were extraordinary firsts in our history, and should be points of proper pride for New Hampshire.”

Built as a lasting memorial to her work, the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord was expanded last year to become New England’s only aerospace science center. (Photo: David Lazar)

As, he adds, should several other notable New Hampshire residents whose encounters with the stars are chronicled at the center – astronauts like Manchester’s Lee Morin, a medical doctor and Captain in the U.S. Navy, who in 2002 embarked on the 13th Shuttle mission to the International Space Station; astronauts like Hanover’s Jay Buckey, Pelham’s Rick Linnehan, and Portsmouth’s Rick Searfoss, who in 1998 took part in NASA’s 16-day Neurolab mission to study the effects of gravity-loss on the brain and nervous system – a mission informally known as “the New Hampshire flight.”

“To say we had three people from a tiny state with just 1.5 million people was quite a feat,” says Buckey, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School who served as a payload specialist aboard Neurolab. “I think it’s safe to say we had the highest per capita representation for one state on one flight. All of us had very different connections to New Hampshire. And all of us were extremely honored to represent our home state.”

Searfoss, an aeronautical engineer who logged more than 39 days in space, has since retired from NASA service, while Linnehan, a veterinarian, continues to serve, having now logged more than 59 days in space, including six spacewalks. Buckey, who returned to medicine, helps to lead the Discovery Center’s public education efforts, including an annual statewide astronomy bowl.

Just as Granite State residents have taken giant leaps for mankind, so too have several of its companies, whose inventions have enhanced the way NASA engineers approach space travel – companies like Keene’s Timken, whose split ball bearings are now used on the space shuttle’s main engine; like BAE systems of Nashua which created the computers for the Mars Rover in 2004; and like Hanover’s Creare, Inc. which created the cryocooler for the Hubbell space telescope in 2002.

And then there’s Shepard himself, whose time spent training for his inaugural spaceflight yielded an unlikely invention. Often locked in a capsule for several hours on end without the ability to exit, duty was not the only thing that called for Shepard. Nature did, as well. And so was invented the modern diaper,

Pelham’s Rick Linnehan, Portsmouth’s Rick Searfoss, and Hanover’s Jay Buckey with NH-shaped maple candies aboard NASA’s 1998 Neurolab mission, believed to be the largest concentration from one state ever on one spaceflight. (Photo courtesy of Jay Buckey)

which replaced the standard cotton filling with a polymer called sodium polyacrylate – a crystal that could absorb up to 300 times its weight in water. It’s a feat Veilleux demonstrates almost daily to schoolchildren, filling up one plastic cup with water, another with crystals, combining the two, and then suspending the mixed product upside down over one brave volunteer’s head. The head remains dry, since the water has become a gelled solid.

“It’s funny to see all of the New Hampshire connections,” Veilleux says. “Even the one true scientist who went to the moon and the last man to walk on it, Harrison Schmitt – I had an opportunity to meet him and found out tha

t his grandparents…. were from Claremont!

“Each of these things gives you a little bit of pride to be from this state,” he continues. “We may be small in some ways, but we’re mighty in a lot of others. There’s a lot of Yankee spirit up here, and people aren’t afraid of taking chances, rolling up their sleeves, and doing big things.”

Thanks to McAuliffe’s and Shepard’s sacrifices and the education efforts still under way, it is a legacy likely to last a very long time.

Special thanks to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, the Derry Heritage Museum, and Dr. Jay Buckey for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Retired science teacher Bob Veilleux, a part- time educator at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, was chosen as McAuliffe’s NH alternate for the ill-fated 1986 Challenger flight. (Photo: David Lazar)

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NH’s short-lived Indian Stream Republic was an experiment in democracy

PITTSBURG – Richard Blanchard was a young dad still adjusting to his duties as a newly deputized sheriff in the Great North Woods when he awoke one crisp October morning in 1835 to a rap on his farmhouse door and a warrant for his arrest.

The men waiting outside had come from just across the Canadian border in the town of Hereford, an act of retaliation for Blanchard’s arrest late that summer of a Canadian man who’d owed debts to a nearby general store. While that same Canadian—who’d managed to escape following an ambush on Blanchard’s deputies—watched on, Blanchard finished his chores, bid his wife and children farewell, and took just enough time for word of his arrest to trickle out before heading off into the autumn woods with his captors.

Signs announcing Pittsburg as the site of the Indian Stream Republic are among the first things visitors see as they drive into town, and among the last remaining reminders of the tiny democracy. (Photo: David Lazar)

For Blanchard the events of the next 24 hours in the surrounding, unforgiving patchwork of lakes and tree-lined hills would make for the ride of his life. They would also mark the beginning of the end of one of New Hampshire’s and the nation’s more interesting historical footnotes—a shortlived experiment in democracy known as the Indian Stream Republic.

So-named for the Connecticut River tributary that formed its southeastern border, the Indian Stream Republic was a nation within a nation—an independent state that resulted from, of all things, a surveying slipup, as British and American negotiators in 1783 scrambled to draw up a truce to the Revolutionary War and draw firm borders dividing U.S. and British territories. The 1783 Treaty of Paris would define this particular section along the Canadian-U.S. border as coming at the “northwesternmost headwaters” of the Connecticut River. There was just one problem: those headwaters had any number of tributaries, from Indian Stream to Perry and Hall streams, making that northwesternmost point a debate among settlers and local leaders on both sides who sought to claim the land as their own.

(Photo: David Lazar)

The result was a nearly 300-square-mile patch of remote, rugged and pristine wilderness, an undefined area atop New Hampshire roughly the size of New York City’s five boroughs and whose population density even today (at 3.1 people per square mile) is dwarfed by the world’s least densely populated nation, Mongolia. For 40-plus years after the Treaty of Paris, the Indian Stream territory existed as a sort of legal no-man’s-land, a place where Canadian and U.S. authorities had little if any jurisdiction or taxing power and where new settlers—including a handful of debtors seeking escape from obligation—arrived each year with little more on their backs than an axe, a few sacks of provisions and the hope of finding new opportunity in the virgin forest.

“Like the Gold Rush where people left everything they had on the east coast for the chance at something better, people came here with nothing but the want and wish of better living,” says lifelong Pittsburg resident Roy Amey, a descendant of one of the Indian Stream Republic’s first leaders, John Haynes. “For a time, it was very hard. One summer, there was actually four or five feet of snow. There was no food, no grain, their animals starved. Overall, it was a pretty bleak outlook when these folks moved up here. I think when you look around today, though, we did all right.”

The Indian Stream Republic comprised a nearly 300-square mile patch of rugged, pristine wilderness, noted for its tree-lined hills and the Connecticut Lakes. (Photo: Raymond Mazalewski)

Indeed, to drive today through the lush and still largely raw forestland and lake country that make up modern day Pittsburg is to witness the handiwork of those early settlers—a hardscrabble lot who made a living clearing trees and building roads, cultivating farms and raising livestock, logging and burning wood for potash fertilizer (the chief industry—in fact, a large overturned iron potash kettle for a time served as the territory’s jail), and constructing schoolhouses and public buildings through volunteer labor. Now, as then, it remains a place of proud self-sufficiency; a place where life can be hard in the cold season, but where neighbors feel a sense of obligation to pitch in and do things themselves as a community rather than having it done for them.

In the decades following the Treaty of Paris, the Indian Stream territory quietly prospered, as more families moved in and settled. Crime was relatively rare and most of the necessities of life were produced at home, with bartering common, payment of debts a matter of honor, and methods of commercial and financial transactions little known. As the 1820s drew to a close, however, local officials both in Canada and New Hampshire—seeking to boost revenue and authority —began to test their limits in the territory. Both would impose taxes on Indian Stream inhabitants, with Canadians going so far as to charge duties on goods brought into the territory and to attempt conscripting residents into the Canadian army. For all of this, the residents—or Streamers as they were known —received little in return.

A surveying slipup by British and U.S. negotiators following the Revolutionary War would leave an area roughly the size of New York City’s five boroughs in limbo. Confusion came from where a small patch of the U.S.-Canadian border was to be. (Images courtesy of the NH Historical Society Library and Wikipedia Commons)

By 1832, with no sign of relief, the 60 or so families living in Indian Stream came to a decision. At a meeting held on July 9 of that year, dozens of Streamers—still in their work clothes—packed the Center School House, demanding change and ultimately approving a declaration of independence and constitution by a 56-3 vote for what was to become one of the world’s tiniest nations. The hope: that such a compact could last until the British and the Americans finally resolved their border dispute over the territory. The constitution for this new, tiny nation atop New Hampshire would look remarkably similar to that of the United States, guaranteeing Streamers the right to self-governance, religious freedom, life, property and happiness. Later amendments guaranteed the right to free speech, election and debate; a swift and fair trial; and protection from double jeopardy, cruel and unusual punishment, and unwarranted searches and seizures. From that meeting also sprung a simple three-branch government, consisting of: an elected five member executive council; a general assembly consisting of all males over 21 years of age with three months residence in the republic, which could overturn a council decision on a 2/3 vote; and a judiciary whose decisions could ultimately be appealed to the executive council.

“If you look at this from a historical standpoint, the people of this territory were working, perhaps subconsciously, within the bounds of precedent set by the American Revolution to declare their independence,” says Jere Daniell, a retired Dartmouth historian who helped author and edit perhaps the most definitive history of the Indian Stream Republic. “And for a while, it worked. It should be noted that this was never intended to be a permanent arrangement.” And it wasn’t. For a little more than three years, the Indian Stream Republic churned as a tiny engine of democracy. Elections for executive council were held regularly each March. By 1835, Indian Stream had 69 families and 414 inhabitants living in relative prosperity, with each head of family possessing 100 acres of land and more than 1,500 acres under cultivation.

Little, however, could stop the winds of unrest building along the Republic’s northern and southern borders, as Canadian and New Hampshire authorities began to tire of an independent nation living in their midst and made concerted attempts to establish jurisdiction within the territory. A fracture would develop within the Republic. Some Streamers—including one of its first councilors, Luther Parker—urged their government to align with New Hampshire and the protection and stability it offered. Others sided with Lower Canada, as chief magistrate from Hereford, Alexander Rea, appeared frequently to try and drum up local support for incorporation into Canada. It would be a series of cross-border raids and arrests in 1835, beginning with Parker’s apprehension for allegedly threatening a Canadian debtor in his general store, and culminating in Blanchard’s, that would spell the Indian Stream Republic’s unceremonious end.

Officers would bring Parker to Canada and then release him from custody almost immediately—the arrest, more than anything, a symbolic attempt by Rea to assert Canadian authority within the Republic’s borders. For Blanchard, the story would be different. For in the time it took him to say goodbye to his family and finish his chores on that crisp October morning, word would spread to friends and later allies in the neighboring NH towns of Colebrook and Stewartstown. A posse of more than a dozen men gathered, tracking Blanchard’s captors down that evening just beyond the Canadian border on horseback, ambushing them and securing the young deputy sheriff’s release. The following day, members of that same posse, fueled by rum and retribution, appeared at Magistrate Rea’s house in Hereford with their own arrest warrants for him and Blanchard’s captors. A street brawl ensued. One overzealous member would split Rea’s straw hat with his saber and another would fire a pistol in his direction, before the mob took the magistrate into custody and brought him back across the border to Canaan, VT.

As the group arrived in Canaan and the effects of the alcohol began to wear off, the men quickly realized the magnitude of what they’d done, having assaulted a magistrate in the exercise of his functions and carried him into captivity in a foreign country. Rea was immediately released back to Canada. A line, however, had been crossed. As word spread in the days following of an insurrection brewing in Indian Stream between pro-Canadian and pro-NH inhabitants and a possible incursion by Canadian forces, NH Governor William Badger decided to disregard ongoing U.S.-British border negotiations and dispatch the 24th regiment of the state’s militia into the Indian Stream Republic to restore order.

So fell the curtain on one of the world’s tiniest democracies, as Streamers, seeking the protection NH offered, ceded authority to the state. Five years later, Indian Stream would be incorporated as Pittsburg, today New England’s largest town in land area. In 1842, the British, seeking to rid themselves of any more headaches along the disputed border, would give up millions of acres of territory—including Pittsburg—to U.S. negotiators in the Ashburton Treaty.

How history judges the Indian Stream Republic rests in the eyes of each storyteller. For some, like bestselling author Jeffrey Lent, who used Indian Stream as the setting for his 2002 landmark novel Lost Nation, it is a fable of man’s imperfection. “I think it is ultimately a story of a people who are urged to change something and take authority into their own hands, in the hopes of achieving societal order,” says Lent, who recently moved with his family to Pittsburg to film the motion picture version of Lost Nation. “It is a story of great aspirations and potential. It is also a story of human failing. Not failure in a negative sense, but as with so much of human experience, a situation that, despite best intentions and efforts, was altered by uncontrollable events.”

Author Jeffrey Lent (left) and film producer Chris Alexander are now in production of Lent’s Indian Stream-based novel, Lost Nation. The pair hopes to use the film to launch an annual Coos Film Festival and movie studio in nearby Colebrook. (Photo: David Lazar)

As for Roy Amey, who has committed much of his life to preserving Pittsburg history, he just wants to make sure the story continues to be told. “I think it goes to show what people can accomplish when they are left alone because they know they have to do it themselves,” he says. “They didn’t need a big government. They got off the trail by the Connecticut and all they had were the woods. And for a time, they made it work. “The legacy question I can’t answer,” Amey continues. “But I do think everyone needs to know where Pittsburg came from. When Lost Nation came out, it opened the eyes of the whole town. People came from far and wide to learn more about it… Someone’s got to keep talking about it and reading it and making sure the younger people coming along know about it, too. Because this is a major part of who we are.”

Thanks to Lent and veteran film producer Chris Alexander, it is a story that will live on through the silver screen, and may indeed stretch far beyond, as the pair enters serious talks to launch an annual Coos Film Festival at the Balsams in nearby Dixville Notch and a movie studio in Colebrook. “We’re not just coming in to shoot a movie, we’re coming in to build a new template or model for industry in the North Country,” Alexander says. “We believe there’s an entire population up here of people with the interest, the knowledge, and the talent to make a contribution and really help to rebuild this region.” And, in the process, keep an important piece of history alive for future generations.

Special thanks to Jeffrey Lent, Chris Alexander, Roy Amey, Jere Daniell, the Balsams, the NH State Archives and the NH Historical Society Library for their generosity and assistance with this story.

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Notable Noyes Academy students included Alexander Crummell, credited with helping inspire the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and Henry Highland Garnet, below, the first black minister to preach before the U.S. House of Representatives. (Photos courtesy of the Canaan Historical Society).

CANAAN – Alexander Crummell was a determined 15-year-old fresh out of secondary school in New York with dreams of a free and prosperous future when he arrived on Canaan Street atop a stagecoach one icy January evening.

The year was 1835, and Crummell, the son of a former slave and one of 13 boys of African American descent to arrive in Canaan that winter, was about to take part in a brave new experiment. There in tiny Canaan, in the snowy shade of birches and the outsize shadow of Cardigan Mountain, the nation’s first integrated, co-ed college prep school had been built – a small, whitewash clapboard structure erected by town leaders and abolitionists and held together with hope and a belief that the path to freedom and equality came through education.

The dream, known as Noyes Academy, would last all of eight months. Eight months, before a mob, aided by oxen and fueled by rum, lingering racist sentiment and an incendiary series of newspaper editorials, tore the school from its foundation and drug it back down Canaan Street to the town swamp.

For folks around here, the short life of Noyes Academy – named for local farmer and co-founder Samuel Noyes – is one that inspires any number of emotions. Sadness, to be sure, for the way it all came to end. But pride and hope as well, for the path it helped pave on the road to abolition, the willingness of Canaan residents to open their homes and hearts and take a chance, and for the extraordinary individuals and lives that emerged from Noyes Academy after those few short months.

“It was a sad ending to what should have been a proud beginning for Canaan,” says Donna Zani-Dunkerton, Canaan’s town historian and the great-great-great granddaughter of Noyes Academy co-founder Nathaniel Currier. “It’s also an extraordinary story that more people should know, and an important part of our national development.”

In the weeks after the destruction of Noyes Academy, cofounder Nathaniel Currier attempted, unsuccessfully, to reopen the school on the second floor of his home which still stands on Canaan Street (Photo courtesy of the Canaan Historical Society; Photo: David Lazar).

To walk up Canaan Street today is to witness a place that time has barely touched. While the clip-clop of horses and stagecoaches have long since been replaced by the crush of cars on the lawn by Canaan Street Lake on a sunny afternoon, much of the tree-canopied drive remains a window into life as it was more than a century-and-a-half ago – and into the timeline that unfolded one sweltering August afternoon.

There are the homes of Nathaniel Currier, a shopkeeper, abolitionist and host along the Underground Railroad; and George Kimball, also an abolitionist and Dartmouth-educated lawyer who bought the red clapboard colonial on Prospect Hill to house Noyes’ black male students alongside his own family. There is the old Canaan Street graveyard, with its cascade of crooked, weathered headstones bearing the names of those who dared to launch the experiment – names like Dr. Timothy Tilton, the town magistrate, whose stone simply reads, “The Slave’s Friend.” Across the street there is the Old North Church, where folks of both colors came to pray each Sunday, albeit in separate quarters, and where former Noyes students would come back to speak many years later. Finally, next door to the church is a small shaded patch of overgrowth and weeds – a perfect lot size for a house. Or a small school. For 174 summers since that sweltering day in August, the lot next to the Old North Church has sat bare, conspicuous in its emptiness, like a page torn from a scrapbook.

In 1835, the vacant lot on Canaan Street was anything but. For 40-plus teenage students, black and white, the lot was brimming with life and hope and potential. For the school’s founders – a collection of prominent abolitionists including some from as far away as New York, Boston and Portland, ME – Noyes Academy was a bold step forward, a statement in wood and paint and glass of opportunity through academic achievement.

Funded by the New England Anti-Slavery Society for $15,000 and with an English and classical curriculum competitive with top schools, founders chose Canaan to launch their academy for its perceived openness to the concept and for its closeness to Hanover and Dartmouth. Though not all Noyes graduates were expected to attend Dartmouth, the two seemed an ideal match: Dartmouth president Nathan Lord had been a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and was the only New England administrator willing to admit black students and not embrace the colonizationalist stance of educating blacks only to then mandate their deportation to the new African colony of Liberia.

The Kimball Boarding House, shown here in 1835 and in present day, is the only remaining structure of the Noyes Academy campus. Canaan town officials are negotiating to preserve it as a monument to the school and prevent it from being torn down. (Photo courtesy of the Canaan Historical Society; Photo: David Lazar).

Founders circulated advertisements in anti-slavery newspapers throughout the region and went on recruiting trips to find students from as far away as New York. Tuition would be $12 per year and board $1.25 per week. The student roll included names like Crummell – whose father, the former slave, had launched the nation’s first black newspaper – and Henry Highland Garnet, a fellow New Yorker and aspiring theologian. Among the white students arriving in Canaan that winter were Richard Rust, a former Phillips Andover student asked to leave that prestigious academy for starting an anti-slavery club inspired by British abolitionist William Wilberforce.

The town of Canaan’s decision to allow the school came on a convincing 36-14 town wide vote. In Canaan, the school’s black students – most of whom had endured difficult travels without lodging or food in the icy winter to arrive – had found a place where people willingly opened their homes and supper tables to them. Underneath, however, tensions steadily simmered. The nation’s progression toward equal rights and abolition was a slow journey, and New Hampshire in the 1830s still relied on the antebellum South for much of its economic livelihood. Elsewhere across the region, a pair of Anti-Slavery Society attempts to set up black colleges in New Haven and Canterbury, CT, had been quashed, and the infamous Nat Turner Rebellion against slave owners in Southampton, VA, failed leading to the deaths of 60 white men, women and children.

“The years between 1830 and 1835 were a lightning bolt for martyrdom,” says Dr. Russell Irvine, a retired Sociology of Education professor at Georgia State University authoring his own book on the history of black education. “Emotions over the race issue were whipped to fever pitch levels. There was a significant battle over schools – namely how and where blacks were to be educated. And for a short period, Canaan, New Hampshire was at the center of that storm.”

Shortly after Noyes Academy opened in March 1835, editorials began to circulate in statewide newspapers warning of mixed relationships in Canaan, the prospect of white children serving black people in local restaurants, and the town being overrun by “vagrants.” The hysteria reached a head on July 4 when a mob, led by a local clergyman and attorney – and responding in part to a fiery speech a Noyes student had delivered in Plymouth chastising Christian America for its support of slavery – arrived at the academy intending to tear it down. The group was turned back that day by Dr. Tilton, the town magistrate, who threatened from the school’s window to take down the name of each mob member and have them arrested.

On August 10, however, the group would return, not to be deterred. According to the town’s official history, an estimated 500 men gathered at the school’s entrance, some from as far away as Plymouth, with some 95 oxen. As the mercury reached a reported 116 degrees and cicadas buzzed in the background, the men affixed chains to the school and the oxen pulled it off its skids. Students and faculty of Noyes Academy would huddle that afternoon in the Kimball House, as members of the mob – drunk on rum stolen from Nathaniel Currier’s general store – reportedly fired cannons and guns into the homes of abolitionists and those friendly to the school. In all, the process would take more than a day, as chains snapped and man and beast wore down in the heat, before the academy – dilapidated and splintered – was dragged up the road to the town common and to its final resting place by Canaan Street Lake. There would be attempts in the weeks after to reopen Noyes Academy from the second floor of Currier’s store, but most of the students had scattered by then and the town never regained the stomach for it.

The Old North Church, where students of both colors came to pray on Sundays, still stands next to the former Noyes Academy site, which has remained vacant since August 10, 1835. (Photo: David Lazar).

Today, the Kimball House is all that remains of the Noyes Academy campus – a weathered expanse of peeling red paint and missing shingles that sits on the present day campus of the Cardigan Mountain School. For many in town, however, it is a monument to courage worthy of local and national recognition. Negotiations between the Canaan Historical Society and the school are under way to keep the house from being torn down and allow it to stand as a tribute to one community’s valiant attempt to change the face of American education – a project the town will likely need $200,000 in private donations to accomplish.

“It is the last physical connection in our community to this important chapter in American history,” says Chuck Townsend, a State Representative from Canaan helping to spearhead the preservation effort. “It is a piece of a very remarkable story which needs to be told. For us to throw it away would be a sad loss for all of us. I want people to be able to walk by the Kimball House and understand that this is where the students stayed and studied at the first integrated academy in the country. It’s something we should be able to do.”

In the meantime, Townsend and others point to the school’s other lasting legacy: the extraordinary lives many of its students went on to lead – students like Garnet, who met his wife Julia Williams in those short months at Noyes, and went on to become an active abolitionist, an accomplished pastor, the U.S. Minister to Liberia, a college president, and the first black minister to deliver a sermon before the U.S. House of Representatives; students like Rust, who went on to found the nation’s first college dedicated to the education of former slaves, Wilberforce University, and helped establish as many as 14 colleges for black teachers in the South.

Shortly after the destruction of Noyes Academy, Townsend, and Dan Billin for their assistance and generosity with this story. depicted in local artist Mikel Wells’ 1999 portrait “Moo’ving Days,” a near identical replica, the Canaan Academy, was built as an all-white school. Today it houses the town’s historical museum. (Photo: David Lazar).

And students like Crummell, who went on to study at Queen College in Cambridge, England, and work 20 years in Liberia, performing ministerial, academic and missionary work, and authoring two books on religion and Africa. In 1873, Crummell would return to America to become rector of St. Luke’s Church in Washington, DC, and later found the American Negro Academy, an organization of black intellectuals credited with spawning the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In 1895, he returned to the Old North Church to deliver a speech.

“It was at Canaan,” Crummell said, “that I was first brought into relation with the large generosity and noble Christian sentiments of a section of the Anglo-Saxon race which then was striving to show oblivious of race distinction and give living illustration of ‘the brotherhood of man.’”

It is a living illustration folks in Canaan hope to preserve and pass forward as a living document to future generations – an illustration Zani-Dunkerton’s own daughter Sara, now a 6^th grade teacher at Indian River School, incorporates each year into her history curriculum through artwork, reports, tours of the site, and efforts to preserve the Kimball House.

“I’m always teaching my students to stand up for themselves and speak up for what they believe in,” Dunkerton says. “Frederick Douglass would say that ‘education is the pathway to freedom.’ I think this is an incredible story for these students to learn, not only at the local level, but at the national level.”

Thanks to the work of Dunkerton and others, it is a story that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

Special thanks to Donna Zani-Dunkerton, Sara Dunkerton, Russell Irvine, Chuck Townsend, and Dan Billin for their assistance and generosity with this story.

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DIXVILLE NOTCH – Steve Barba was a long-haired grad student working the summer as a bartender at the Balsams, when a world-famous burger broker arrived at the historic White Mountains resort to make a special introduction.

It was August 1968, a month after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago had erupted in chaos, but Ray Kroc – who just a few years earlier had purchased the rights to a blossoming fast-food chain from Manchester natives Dick and Mac McDonald – was determined to nominate a new “candidate” for President.

In Dixville Notch and the castle-like Balsams, he’d found the perfect setting. Just eight years before, Dixville had won the right to call itself the first-in-the-nation polling place for Presidential elections. For about one hour every four years, this tiny mountain community would become the center of the political universe, as the town’s two dozen or so registered voters descended on the Balsams at exactly midnight on election day to cast their ballots (the very first election in 1960 went to Richard Nixon 9-0).

More than 700 delegates from 44 countries descended on the Mount Washington Resort in July 1944 to save the world’s financial system from collapsing after WWII. (Photo: David Lazar; photo courtesy of the Mount Washington Resort).

The symbolism wasn’t lost on Kroc. Nor was New Hampshire’s significance as the home state of the McDonald brothers as he chose the location for that year’s regional managers’ convention.

“He spared no expense staging the event like a political rally,” Barba recalls. “He was a showman. There were flags and straw hats and placards, vests and political regalia. It was something to see.”

Barba, who’d go on to manage the Balsams for more than 30 years, recalls Kroc chatting him up at the bar, taking a look at his long hair, and asking if he could round up some friends to pose as pretend-protesters to crash the convention and ultimately be escorted out by a security guard. Barba would happily play the role.

That summer’s regional managers’ convention will be remembered for Kroc’s introducing a new organizational president for the McDonald’s chain, but more importantly for using the Balsams’ one-of-a-kind location to officially launch another national “candidate” – one whose name was “Big Mac” and promised a pickle in every bite.

The Balsams in secluded Dixville Notch has hosted the first-in-the-nation vote in every Presidential election since 1960. Richard Nixon would win that first contest 9-0. Town clerk Rick Erwin, who collects the balllots at exactly midnight each election day, compares the experience to walking into the Boston Garden. (Photo: David Lazar)

A waist-expanding international icon was born that summer in Dixville Notch. For the Balsams, it was another colorful story to add to an already storied legacy. For New Hampshire, it was another example of one of its famed grand hotels playing host to world history.

“New Hampshire is a state that has always been scenically attractive and secluded,” says Bryant Tolles, Professor Emeritus of History and Art History at the University of Delaware and author of numerous books on New England’s grand resorts. “But it’s also had the advantage of being well-located and reachable from major areas like Boston and New York. Because of this, people over history have looked at this state as a place both to escape and… to hold some very major events.”

And, on many occasions, to change the world.

From the earliest days of rail travel, New Hampshire’s hotels and resorts have been among its most enduring and eye-catching attractions. From the ocean views and salt air of the Seacoast to the cool, back-to-nature seclusion of the Lakes Region and the North Country and Great North Woods, the promise of privacy, pristine landscapes, and accessibility drew tens of thousands each summer seeking safe haven from the pressures, heat and public exposure of city life. Between 1870 and 1920, historians have estimated that upwards of 400 hotels went up around the Granite State, with some 28 grand resorts (each full-service and holding between 175 and 225 rooms) in the White Mountains alone – the largest concentration of resort hotels in New England. Most were aided by a lumber industry that built and owned many of the state’s rail lines and offered convenient routes of access. And by a client roster that routinely read like a Who’s Who of national leaders, entertainers, athletes and business tycoons.

These hotels came to be as historic as they were prolific. From the mountain getaway of Bethlehem, where a cluster of grand resorts hosted families with names like Roosevelt and Kennedy, served as a sort of second Catskills for Hasidic Jewish families, and helped launch musical careers like Harry Belafonte’s… to North Conway’s Eastern Slope Inn which helped usher in the arrival of North American downhill skiing in the 1930s, the hotel tradition in New Hampshire spans time and geography. It was from owner Walter James Dunfey’s office at Manchester’s Carpenter Hotel that a young John F. Kennedy launched his 1960 Presidential campaign… while the Balsams – long a palatial retreat for writers, politicians and celebrities; a place even floated as a possible United Nations location in the 1940s and where Standard Oil once kept duplicates of all its documents in case New York was ever attacked – has hosted nearly every president or presidential wannabe since winning first-in-the-nation status in 1960.

To cross the threshold into the Balsams’ famed ballot room, with its wood-paneled walls bearing the photos of victorious “visitors” almost like medals, is to enter a museum-like space, at once hallowed and – typical to New Hampshire – unpretentious.

“Walking into that room every four years is what’s what it’s like, I imagine, for a Boston Celtic to walk into the Garden and see all of those banners hanging up there in the rafters,” says Dixville Notch town clerk Rick Erwin, who also plays drums in the Balsams’ dining room band – an ensemble that once included John Phillip Sousa. “There’s a great deal of history and tradition here, and we take it very seriously. It is sort of a microcosm of the American way.”

The Balsams remains one of just four Granite State grand resorts still standing and carrying on the proud tradition – the vast majority having long ago fallen prey either to Mother Nature (most were built entirely of wood, with lax fire regulations) or tough economics. Bretton Woods’ Mount Washington Resort, Whitefield’s Mountain View Grand, and New Castle’s Wentworth by the Sea round out the list of stately structures still in operation. All were built to resemble majestic ocean liners on land, with their opulent common areas, lavish gardens, grand dining halls and ballrooms, promenade decks, and emphasis on personal service. And thanks to ongoing restoration and renovation, all remain Gilded Age jewels distinct in both setting and experience.

While each has gained an international following, two in particular have been the improbable center of the world at one point in their histories, credited with helping to end one world war and preventing another one from ever starting.

This July marks the 65th anniversary of the Bretton Woods International Monetary Conference at the Mount Washington Resort, a nearly month-long series of negotiations that many credit with saving the global financial system after WWII from complete collapse. In the months leading up to D-Day in 1944, Roosevelt and Churchill fully recognized the flaws in the Treaty of Versailles that had closed WWI – a treaty that despite ending the conflict had plunged Germany into further bankruptcy, prompting it to print money, which led to hyperinflation, economic depression and the rise to power of a young Adolph Hitler.

Chosen by Roosevelt, partially at the urging of his friend NH Senator Charles Tobey, the Mount Washington Resort – Joseph Stickney’s turn-of-the-century masterpiece, with its breathtaking backdrop and trademark scarlet towers built to resemble the funnels of a steamship – offered something few venues could: a setting that offered both privacy and accessibility by train for the conference’s 730 delegates, most of whom were sailing into Boston or Portsmouth. It also offered a staff of some 750-800 to tend to every need, electricity (Thomas Edison had toasted the resort at its 1902 opening), a bowling alley, indoor swimming pool, polo grounds, a 9-hole golf course, the best clay tennis courts on the east coast, and even an onsite stockbroker.

In August 1905, Wentworth By The Sea became the center of the wold, the neutral site chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt to resolve the Russo- Japanese War. Diplomats from Russia—pictured on Wentworth’s front portico—and Japan would negotiate for a month, reaching an improbable agreement at the 11th hour. The meeting would lead to a Nobel Peace Prize for Roosevelt. (Photo: David Lazar; Photo courtesy of Portsmouth Peace Treaty Forum/Portsmouth Athenaeum)

The only problem: at the time the hotel was chosen in spring of 1944, it was a complete shambles, having recently switched owners and fallen into disrepair. Over the course of two months, the federal government sent in hundreds of workers to bring in new furniture and slap a fresh coat of white paint on virtually every surface, creating an atmosphere that was more upscale barracks than luxury retreat for the talks. Led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Britain’s Lord John Maynard Keynes, the Bretton Woods conference accomplished four goals: it stabilized the price of gold at $35 per ounce, set the dollar as the world’s reserve currency (replacing the British sterling), and established the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as lending institutions for postwar reconstruction.

Today, perhaps the most enduring reminder of the Bretton Woods talks can be found in the hotel’s ornate Gold Room, where the signing table still remains, unadorned and unmoved. Several decades after the conference, a German counsel would famously visit the Mount Washington Resort, look into the Gold Room and weep, “This is the place that saved Europe.”

“Here you had a situation where this hotel that was in disrepair was bought one month before a massive conference where the eyes of the world would be on New Hampshire,” says historian and UNH hospitality professor Carl Lindblade. “And they got her done, and hosted a landmark event. It’s a wonderful story and just so typical of New Hampshire’s can-do attitude.”

While perhaps not as dramatic as the Gold Room, a lone magnolia tree on the front lawn of Wentworth by the Sea stands as maybe that resort’s most lasting memento for its role ending a conflict some have labeled World War Zero – the Russo-Japanese War. Nearly 40 years before Bretton Woods, another President Roosevelt had chosen Wentworth – the posh seaside retreat made popular by long-time owner Frank Jones – as a neutral setting to negotiate a truce after hundreds of thousands had died on land and at sea fighting for influence over Korea and China.

In August 1905, the entire city of Portsmouth, selected for its naval yard, strong immigrant population, and relative seclusion, proudly lined the streets to greet Japanese and Russian delegates with a lavish parade, their hometown thrust onto the world stage. Over the next month, delegates would travel by boat from Wentworth (which had donated the space at no cost) to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for tense talks over territory, rail lines, and fishing rights.

When discussions, however, broke down over the issue of postwar reparations and the concession of the Sakhalin Islands to Japan, some feared both sides would abandon the table. Roosevelt – who’d spent the entire conference in New York, so as not to meddle – urged delegates to press on and focus on other points. Residents throughout Portsmouth, who’d intently followed the story in the local newspaper, were equally invested in the conference’s success. Their solution: to keep both sides from leaving by treating delegates over the next several days to a series of personal tours, cocktail hours and dinner parties in their own homes, all designed to defuse tension and showcase life and freedom in America. It apparently worked. To this day, many believe it was the extended stay that led Japanese chief diplomat Baron Jutaro Komura and Russian diplomat Sergius Witte to break away one afternoon for a private walk through Wentworth’s lush rose garden – a walk that helped break the impasse and enabled both sides to reach agreement.

Across from that garden stands the magnolia tree – now more than a century old – believed to be a gift of gratitude from the Japanese government. For his part, President Roosevelt would go on to receive a Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for orchestrating the talks. It’s an honor locals like to say is also shared by their hometown and their extraordinary hotel.

“New Hampshire, itself, has always been a politically astute culture, a place where individuals can have a great deal of influence in the political process,” says Wentworth spokeswoman and historian Stephanie Seacord. “The Portsmouth Peace Treaty really drove home the point that anyone can make a difference if they choose to. And the people of New Hampshire did, by attending the parades, and hosting the dinner parties and making these delegates truly feel at ease.”

More than a century later, folks of all backgrounds continue to clamor to New Hampshire’s hotels and resorts for that same feeling of ease – a sense of grandeur, history, and hospitality has shown no sign of fading.

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Willa Cather was a young, unproven author from the plains of Nebraska when a close friend and fellow writer, Sarah Orne Jewett, told her she needed to find a place in which to contemplate and write.

So in the summer of 1917, Cather arrived at the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey with little more than a pen, paper and the surrounding mountains and farmland from which to draw inspiration. She’d set up a tent in a nearby field and each summer over the next two-plus decades, surrounded by a soft breeze and the scent of lilacs, return to author some of the nation’s finest works about the American immigrant experience, including “My Antonia” and “Death Comes to the Archbishop.” Another book, “One of Ours,” would be inspired by the WWI diary of a local doctor named Frederick Sweeney.

Today, the Shattuck Inn is no longer, but Cather’s works have endured, as has New Hampshire’s legacy as a wellspring of some of America’s most beautiful and memorable writing.

“It’s something in the water…and in the mountains and the beaches and the foliage,” says Mary Russell, director of the Center for the Book at the NH State Library. “The beauty up here is so inspiring for artists and writers. I think part of it is that we are not a hurry-up kind of a place, but a sit-by-the-lake-and-watch-the-loons kind of a place where writers can just enjoy their surroundings without the pressures of the outside world.

“For Willa Cather,” she continues, “Jaffrey proved to be a place where she could reflect and create, and it has proven to be the case around the state with so many other authors.”

From “Little Women” scribe Louisa May Alcott’s “Under the Lilacs” (1878), inspired by her summers in Walpole and the abundance there of the lavender blossom, to countless Robert Frost poems stirred by the landscapes, forests and stonewalls of Franconia and beyond, the list of world-class writers who’ve made New Hampshire their home is as historic as it is varied.

It is a list – and tradition – that shows little sign of ceasing, at least if the young authors featured on these pages have something to say about it. This issue marks the culmination of the NH Troubadour’s fourth grade poetry challenge. Each month, the Troubadour reaches more than 15,000 fourth graders across the state in conjunction with the NH history curriculum. Dozens of classes took part in the challenge, chronicling what makes their home state and communities special to them.  The quality and originality of entries was first-rate. It also wasn’t surprising.

“This is a state that has traditionally placed great value in reading and literacy,” says Prof. David Watters, director of UNH’s Center for New England Culture. “You go from town to town, and the libraries in each of them are amazing. So are the teachers. They are the ones nurturing those writing skills. As a professor, I see students from around the state coming in each year who are well-read and can write surprisingly well. At the heart of it is the fact that behind each of these kids are great teachers and great families.”

And some great role models. Chalk it up to the Granite State’s trademark independent spirit, its lush landscapes, distinct seasons and opportunities for solitude, or its tradition of small-town friendliness and transparency, New Hampshire’s cast of literary legends – and rich subject matter – has always dwarfed the state’s limited geography.

From Celia Thaxter’s Seacoast poetry inspired by life along the Isles of Shoals, to ee cummings’ poem, “i am a little church,” based on the Madison Community Church near his Silver Lake summer farm, the state’s abundant nature and understated beauty have always stirred writers’ hearts and imaginations.

As have its people. Thornton Wilder’s enduring classic “Our Town” was inspired by his 1937 stay at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough and his talks with locals in surrounding villages about personal stories and tragedies; while Grace Metalius, in writing her 1956 melodrama “Peyton Place,” drew from real life characters she met in Gilford, Gilmanton, Laconia and Gilmanton Iron Works.

“New Hampshire is one of those places that has always had a little of everything for writers,” says Kathy Wurtz, director of the NH Writers Project in Manchester. “It’s in the communities; it’s in the history; it’s in the sheer landscapes and the independent mindset. It really seems to epitomize in every way the America our founding fathers had envisioned. Writers tend to have an independent, outside-the-box streak. I think this environment only helps to inspire and nurture that creativity.”

If the poetry featured on these pages from these talented fourth graders is any indication, that creativity will continue to develop for a long time to come.

Special thanks to the Center for the Book at the NH State Library, the NH Writers Project, Prof. David Watters for their assistance and generosity with this story.

Read our student poetry contest winners

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Moultonborough’s Allan Gavan, pictured above and below spent seven-and-a-half months in a Nazi prison camp. He has dedicated himself to preserving the memory of fallen NH POWs. (Photos courtesy of Allan Gavan and the NH State Veterans Cemetery)

MOULTONBOROUGH – Allan Gavan was a fresh-faced teenager, barely out of basic training, a nature counselor at a Boy Scout camp, when his unit shipped out to Europe in the summer of 1944. His was the first boat to leave the U.S. after D-Day.

And he was among the last to return.

Two months after landing at Cherbourg, France, Gavan’s life would change forever. Just west of Paris, on a grassy hill beneath a sun-drenched blue sky, Gavan’s unit had come under heavy German artillery fire. Two days later, trapped in a foxhole with no food or means of escape, he was taken prisoner.

The next seven and a half months are not something Gavan, 84, talks about all that often.

“Every story is unique, but mine is probably as commonplace as you’ll get,” he says.

It is a story of human endurance often put to its limits; of blackened boxcar journeys from camp to camp, hard labor and dysentery in Germany’s Black Forest; of squalid conditions and servicemen cramped three to a bunk and stacked like cordwood on narrow, lice-infested planks; of worried parents tortured by the mystery of their son’s whereabouts and well-being; of forced work, patching up Munich rail lines after Allied bomb raids; of a white flag hung outside the camp by fleeing Nazi commanders and a liberation by General George Patton.

It is the story of more than 700 New Hampshire servicemen over the last century – all with a unique story to tell, all with a common bond. Today, an estimated 85 or so ex-prisoners of war still live in the Granite State, having survived confinement in far-flung conflicts, from WWII’s European and Pacific theaters to Korea and Vietnam. Each month, about 40 of them meet in a secluded back room of the Manchester VA hospital to share experiences, challenges and a connection that spans generations.

They are folks like Ralph Lavoie, a gunner whose B-17 bomber was shot down by the Germans in December, 1943 and came within inches of losing his life following an escape attempt from Austria’s infamous Stalag 17B prison camp. Lavoie would watch a fellow prisoner be gunned down by his captors before sustaining gunshot wounds, himself, to both legs, his shoulder, neck, ribs and cheek.

In 1975, shortly after moving to Rindge, Lavoie began posting ads on the Veterans page of the Union Leader each week to track down fellow ex-POWs and establish a support network. The responses were overwhelming and with work, in 1977, the state’s lone chapter of American Ex-Prisoners of War was born. They’ve been coming ever since – some arriving in wheelchairs, some with limps, some with booming voices and others who speak in hoarse whispers; some with handshakes that can still crack knuckles and cut off circulation, others whose grip long ago left them; some who are active and anxious to share recollections and others who sit quietly and are content to listen.

Pembroke’s Bob Fortnam, pictured with his B-17 unit (front row, second from left) before being shot down in 1943 over Holland and taken prisoner by the Germans, continues to work as a flight instructor and lecture about his POW experience. (Photo courtesy of Bob Fortnam, photo by David Lazar)

“I think it’s so important,” says Sheila Peters, who works in the VA’s pharmacy and doubles as the hospital’s POW coordinator. “Some of these men have been married more than 60 years and never said a word to their wives about their experiences. But they come here, and they’re able to open up… These are men who have returned after giving so much and asked for nothing in return.”

They are men like Wesley Wells, 86, of Hillsborough – sent prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor to defend Bataan and Corregidor from the Japanese – who spent more than three brutal years in prison camps throughout the Philippines and Japan in forced labor and nearly lost both legs. Wells’ wife Irene today serves as the state’s chapter president, each month checking in on members and arranging gatherings. “For the men, this has been an incredible way for them to stay connected, and I think it’s served as a big relief for the women, too,” she says.

They are men like Bob Fortnam, 86, of Pembroke, a retired mechanical engineer, who served 19 months in German camps after the fighter plane he piloted was shot down over Holland in 1943. Fortnam, who still works part-time as a flight instructor and guide at the state’s aviation museum in Manchester, travels regularly around the region speaking to groups about his experience. “I likened all of it to going through the eye of the needle,” he recalls. “One minute, you’re living one life, and then all of a sudden it’s an entirely different reality… I think I was too young to be scared. I didn’t really know any different at the time.”

For Fortnam, Wells, Lavoie and Gavan, service was never an option. It was a matter of duty – and history, too. From the opening musket-fire of the American Revolution, New Hampshire men and women have never shied from service or sacrifice on behalf of their fellow citizens. From Londonderry’s John Stark, whose defiant words, “Live free or die,” turn 200 years old this July, to the courage of soldiers like Keene’s George Dilboy, a Medal of Honor recipient, who in WWI sacrificed himself by charging a German machine gun nest to save his unit, Granite State residents have left a lasting mark on their nation’s legacy of freedom. They’ve included Manchester’s Rene Gagnon, who helped raise the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in 1945; they’ve included Plymouth’s Harl Pease, who won the Medal of Honor posthumously after his B-17 was shot down over the Pacific following a successful and harrowing bombing raid in 1942. Pease was taken prisoner and ultimately beheaded by the Japanese. Today his name and bravery grace the state’s Air Force base in Portsmouth.

Plymouth’s Harl Pease won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor and ultimate sacrifice during a harrowing bombing raid over the Pacific in 1942. Today, his name graces New Hampshire’s Air Force base. (Photo courtesy of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society)

For Gavan, who would return to raise a family and spend a successful career in advertising, history is an important thing. In 2003, he recalls visiting the State Veterans Cemetery in Boscawen for the first time, when he and his now late wife noticed something missing during a stroll around the site’s brick memorial walkway. Amidst the polished granite plaques bearing tribute to fallen soldiers from each branch and conflict, there was no official tribute to POWs who’d died in captivity.

“These were a bunch of guys who did something that deserves to be acknowledged,” Gavan recalls saying. “I can’t think of anything worse than being shot down, captured and then dying in an enemy prison camp. These guys did enough for (this memorial) and then some. They made the ultimate sacrifice.”

For the next four years Gavan would work tirelessly with folks in his Ex-POWs chapter and enlist the assistance of a Boston private investigator and an Iowa internet researcher – both of whom would donate their time – to compile names, build a database, contact next-of-kin and ultimately raise money for a granite marker on the memorial walkway. “I was never much of a joiner,” he says. “But I think when my wife passed away a few years ago, I sort of backed into this group and this project, and it’s kind of kept me focused. It’s been important to me.” In all, Gavan would find the names of 60 men who perished while in captivity during WWII and the Korean War – a small but significant portion of the estimated 1614 New Hampshire servicemen who didn’t return home from those conflicts. An additional 227 would fall in Vietnam, with 10 listed as having perished while POWs or still missing.

At the heart of Gavan’s mission has been the motto that emblazons thousands of POW/MIA flags in public buildings, military installations and cemeteries around the world: “You are not forgotten.” On September 22, 2007, National POW/MIA Recognition Day, a six-foot-wide mahogany granite monument was dedicated in a quiet, shaded area of the Veterans Cemetery’s memorial walkway. With twin plaques bearing the names of fallen POWs from each conflict, the marker features the Ex-POW shield, whose curves at the top portray the two massive U.S. military defeats in WWII: Bataan and the Battle of the Bulge.

This September 22, Gavan and his chapter will place a white daisy on the grave of each POW in the State Veterans Cemetery: a flower known as a forget-me-not. Thanks to their work, folks around the Granite State won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

Special thanks to Allan Gavan, Wesley and Irene Wells, Bob Fortnam, Sheila Peters, the NH State Veterans Council and the NH State Veterans Cemetery for their assistance and generosity with this story.

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Brothers Walter (left) and Jonas Aiken helped usher in a new industrial age with the invention, manufacture and marketing of the automatic knitting machine (Photos courtesy of Richard Candee).

FRANKLIN – By the 1850s, Edison was still years from inventing the light bulb, but one creative design clearly flickered in brothers Walter and Jonas Aiken’s heads as they came home each night from work knitting stockings at the old Franklin Mills Co., with a grand idea and endless determination.

In a small, dusty workshop along the banks of the Pemigewasset, amidst the clatter of tools and clanking of metal, the pair was carrying on a family tradition: tinkering with an already good idea and making it even better. The result would change the way the world worked and help to usher in a new industrial age.

In a rapidly evolving mechanical age where new gadgets and whirligigs for every conceivable need came to life each day, the Aikens were emerging as one of the nation’s most prolific – and successful – families of inventors. Led by patriarch Herrick, a Peterborough native who himself had invented a spiral brush and a machine for splitting leather, generations of Aikens would spend nearly a century practically paving a road to the U.S. Patent Office.

From makeshift showerheads made from perforated tin bowls (you supplied the water and then pulled a string to release it) to a personalized train ticket punch and a specialized set of tools made to sharpen handsaws, the Aikens would produce hundreds of inventions big and small, often fueled more by imagination and old-fashioned Yankee resourcefulness than technology as we know it. Today they are credited in part with inventing the model for the world’s first mountain-climbing train, the Mount Washington Cog Railway in Bretton Woods.

“It was the ideal of its day,” says Richard Candee, Boston University Professor Emeritus of American and New England Studies, who has written and spoken extensively on the Aiken family. “Almost every young guy had a love of mechanics and was sort of hoping to invent that something that would be the next mousetrap, the next light bulb, the next phonograph; that next great idea that would solve a societal need and take off. All it took was one idea.”

Even Abraham Lincoln had gotten into the act, receiving a patent for a device that would lift boats over shoals, an invention that was never manufactured.

The Aiken automatic knitting machine could weave a pair of stockings in just 10 minutes—a feat that previously took your average knitter two days to perform by hand (Photo courtesy of NH Historical Society).

In the case of the Aikens, their idea was taking shape in the small family workshop along the banks of the Pemigewasset. At a time when the growing nation’s needs were more and more dictated by speed and efficiency, the Aikens were figuring out a way to deliver both in the field of textiles. By marrying the knitting machine on which they’d toiled each day at the mill – invented by Englishman John Pepper – with another invention of the day, James Hibbert’s distinctive latch needle, the brothers had created something never before seen: an automatic knitter that could weave a pair of seamless stockings in just 10 minutes. It was a feat that would take your average knitter two entire days to perform by hand.

With its unusual pie shape and inward facing rib of needles, the Aiken automatic knitting machine looked weird. But it more than did its job, knitting up to 400 dozen pairs of stockings each day at facilities like Belknap Mill in Laconia, and evolving to weave everything from socks and stockings to woolens for Civil War and WWI soldiers, headbands, bonnets, meat bags, girdles and even medical implements like internal tubes to hold stents for heart patients.

“The Aikens single-handedly revolutionized the textile industry,” says Belknap Mill Executive Director John Moriarty. “They came up with an idea for mechanizing knitting that had never been tried or executed with the same kind of success… The lace, linens and textiles produced here were shipped all over the world. If you were looking for a comparison, it was very much like what China has become today.”

Workers at Belknap Mill were capable of turning out 400 pairs of stockings per day among other things, thanks to the Aiken machine, helping to make Laconia’s mills alone the textile equivalent of China in the late 19th century (Photo courtesy of the Belknap Mill Society).

The Aikens, to be sure, were among thousands of inventors in their day, succeeding with some ideas and failing with others. Where they stood apart was in their ability not only to invent, but to manufacture (Walter’s specialty) and market (Jonas’s field). Where poorer inventors with lesser resources were often forced to sell their patents to larger manufacturers, the Aikens were also shrewd businessmen, pursuing patents almost by the gross, hiring salespeople across the Northeast and Midwest, winning gold and silver medals for new products at county and industrial fairs, and scaring off would-be copycats through threat of lawsuits.

In all, Candee estimates the Aikens sold up to 3,000 of their industrial knitting machines throughout the 1850s and 60s, and nearly 2,000 others manufactured for domestic use, many finding their way to overseas markets. In doing so, they would join a distinguished list of Granite State inventors and pioneers whose ideas would shape both national and world history.

Chalk it up to the state’s flinty, do-it-yourself independence, its belief in the ability of the individual and communities to solve problems or the tendency of rural culture to inspire imagination, New Hampshire residents have for centuries never shied from forging new paths. New Hampshire, after all, was the first state to draft a Constitution (1776); a state that gave birth to the nation’s first Thanksgiving, thanks to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” writer and Newport resident Sarah Josepha Hale whose letters to President Lincoln in 1863 inspired him to establish the holiday. It was the first state to adopt integrated baseball with the assignment of Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe to the Nashua Dodgers in 1946, and the first to send an American into space (Alan Shepherd of Derry).

The Aikens assisted in the conceptualizing and construction of the Mount Washington Cog Railway, the world’s first mountain-climbing train, with Campton’s Sylvester Marsh. (Photos courtesy of Richard Candee and NH Historial Society.)

New Hampshire inventors, meanwhile, have included Berlin native Earl Silas Tupper, whose Tupperware containers continue to lend new life to leftovers, and Nashua’s Ralph Baer, whose interactive video game console, the Odyssey, would be the precursor to today’s PlayStation and Nintendo Wii. Londonderry’s James Wilson would be America’s first commercial globe maker and Samuel Morey of Orford one of the first inventors in the early 1800s of steam power and the internal combustion engine.

As New Hampshire has grown, so have its technical capacity and the number of patents issued annually. Manchester’s Dean Kamen has established himself as one of America’s foremost inventers and marketers, having produced the first insulin pump for diabetics, the Segway personal transporter, and an annual robotics competition for high-schoolers. Patents sought by Granite State inventors, meanwhile, number in the hundreds each year, and have recently included everything from a stationary baby walker to a roller ski, a soup dispenser pump tip and a fish fighting apparatus for helping to reel in large catches at sea. That’s before you consider all the inventions in the fields of genetics, software and biology.

(Photo courtesy of Richard Candee and NH Historial Society.)

“So much of today’s inventions are things you can’t see,” Candee says. “But the ethic is still the same. We’ve just moved from a wooden culture to a metal culture to, in many cases, a microscopic culture.”

Something Granite State residents can continue to see is the original Aiken machine still on display at Belknap Mill in Laconia, alongside the legacy of a family whose future generations would go on to invent aircraft and soap- and candle-making machinery.

“I think there is something true to the notion of the successful idea being 2 percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration,” says Bob Drake, a filmmaker and Dartmouth visiting scholar whose great-great grandfather was Jonas Aiken. “I think you just marvel at the meticulousness and detail that went into what they did… I mean, pieces like the knitting machine are inspiring as objects alone, but when you think that they did this at a time when they didn’t have all the tools or 200 years of culture that we have today, it’s amazing. These were incredibly patient people and real craftsmen with great energy and passion for what they did.”

It is a passion woven many times over in New Hampshire and national history – one that lives on in the dreams of folks with the will to bring that next great idea to life.

Special thanks to the NH Historical Society, Belknap Mill Society, Richard Candee, Bob Drake and Citizen Publishing for their assistance and generosity with this story.

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