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.

Posted under Feature

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.

Posted under Feature

Hannes and Herbert Schneider photographed on Mt. Cranmore in 1948. (Photo courtesy of Herbert Schneider)

Herbert Schneider was a teen living in Nazi-occupied Austria when his mother woke him and his sister Herta one cold winter night and told them they would be going on a long journey.

Weeks later, Schneider disembarked a train called the Eastern Slope Express with his family in North Conway, the snow-capped vista of Mt. Cranmore ahead of them as they breathed in the cold, crisp air, and walked under a canopy of ski poles held aloft by local schoolchildren.

For Schneider, whose father Hannes was the world’s then greatest skier, the image was more than a fanciful welcome. It was freedom.

For North Conway, it was the dawn of a new era both in its history and in modern American skiing.

February marks the 70th anniversary of the Schneider family’s arrival in North Conway – a sort of skiing version of the singing Von Trapp family – and in turn, this small village’s rise from quaint White Mountains getaway to one of the nation’s premier winter sports epicenters.

It is a rise as much about geography as it is about old-fashioned American ingenuity, entrepreneurship and risk-taking. It is also a story of heroism and triumph over genuine evil at a time when so much of the world was at darkness’s doorstep; a story largely written by two of North Conway’s most prominent citizens and benefactors of the early 20th century – Carroll Reed and Harvey Gibson.

“In North Conway, you had that rare instance where a handful of extraordinary people all happened to live in the same place at the same time and worked together to do something great,” says longtime resident and historian Carl Lindblade.

Reed, of course, would make his name as one of the nation’s mail-order catalog and ski shop pioneers. But in 1934, he was a young entrepreneur recovering in the hospital from a painful ski accident on Mt. Washington, when he realized the area’s potential as a ski resort and its great need for a ski school as a means of bringing new visitors.

The Eastern Slope Ski Club (so named for the eastern slope of Mt. Washington) in 1935 raised $200 to send four members over to the Alpine region of Austria. There, in the tiny storybook village of St. Anton, a new brand of recreational skiing invented by an instructor named Hannes Schneider was gaining worldwide attention for dramatically reducing downhill times.

The ski club members returned months later with a fellow instructor of Schneider’s, Benno Rybizka, whom Reed would hire to head up his newly opened school in Jackson, just up the road from North Conway. The school was an early success, drawing both visitors and visibility to Jackson as a skiing destination.

When the Swiss refused to share their chairlift technology, Harvey Gibson contracted local mechanic George Morton to devise his own method for transporting skiers to the top of Mt. Cranmore. Morton invented the modern-day skimobile, pictured here in 1946. (Photo courtesy of Herbert Schneider)

It also drew the attention of North Conway native Harvey Gibson, then a prominent New York banker and U.S. diplomat, who was none too pleased to see his young stepdaughter leaving North Conway for Jackson when she wanted to go skiing – such is the friendly rivalry in these parts. While Gibson’s work as president of Manufacturer’s Trust Bank largely kept him away from the Granite State, he remained heavily involved and invested in his hometown’s cultural and economic future, from traveling to Canada to bring in manufacturing jobs, to building homes in town for the Swiss orchestra he’d hosted one year in the World’s Fair down in New York.

Gibson had big dreams for North Conway. In the mid- to late 1930s, Gibson began purchasing land on Mt. Cranmore (opposite Mt. Washington) and developing it for skiing, and approached Reed about buying his school and bringing it to North Conway. Reed would accept, and also agree to open his own Saks Fifth Avenue subsidiary ski shop in the hotel Gibson had just bought on Main Street and renamed the Eastern Slope Inn. It wouldn’t end there. Gibson brought in future Commerce Secretary, Presidential candidate and diplomat Averill Harriman, who’d founded the Sun Valley resort in Utah, to consult. And, when the Swiss government refused to share its chairlift technology, Gibson contracted a local mechanic, George Morton, and sent him cross-country to other ski areas to devise his own system for transporting skiers to the top of Cranmore. He returned to North Conway with the blueprints for the first modern-day skimobile.

Of all the resources at Gibson’s disposal at that time, however, perhaps the most priceless was the one that came and left every day – a resource neighboring Jackson and most other towns in the region did not have.

The Schneiders, in February 1939, arrived in North Conway with Harvey Gibson to an elaborate welcome ceremony. Sadly, Herbert’s mother passed away from a long illness only a few months later. (Photo from Harvey Dow Gibson’s autobiography.

“Harvey Gibson understood the significance of the railroad and its importance to White Mountains tourism,” says North Conway native Richard Mori.

He also understood the importance of the iconic yellow-domed North Conway train station’s position directly facing Mt. Cranmore and its proximity, less than a mile from the slopes. So began the Eastern Slope Express, the so-called Snow Trains, which would soon deliver thousands of skiers and fresh-air seekers each day directly from Boston and New York.

Now, with the resort, slopes, and infrastructure in place, Gibson and Reed needed one last thing to help market North Conway to the rest of the world: a salesman with a big name.

Gibson had first heard about Hannes Schneider during the skier’s 1936 tour of the U.S., when he demonstrated his newly Arlberg Method of skiing (named for the region of Austria) before sold-out exhibitions at Madison Square Garden and the Boston Garden.  Schneider had established himself as the world’s greatest skier, with a string of national championships and records, and his renowned school at St. Anton.

“It is not a stretch to say that Hannes Schneider was the Tiger Woods of his day,” says Lindblade. “He was the best in the world at what he did, and singlehandedly helped bring skiing to the consciousness of millions. Imagine Costa Rica taking in Tiger Woods as a star to revolutionize golf down there. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen in America.”

Gibson wanted to bring Schneider to the United States to head up his resort at Cranmore. But while Schneider, who’d helped train the Austro-Hungarian military for mountain combat in WWI, had acquired a world following, he had also acquired some powerful enemies.

As the winds of war swept across Western Europe and Adolph Hitler’s government annexed Austria and began the practice of restricting entry to only those with money, Schneider saw his business directly affected. While not a vocal critic of Hitler’s regime, Schneider’s refusal to openly praise the Third Reich and his firing of a Nazi staff member for incompetence soon landed him in a local newspaper and led to his arrest in 1938.

Schneider served more than a year in captivity, narrowly escaping a concentration camp thanks to the outrage of western media and the intervention of a German doctor and ski enthusiast with ties to the Reich who’d offered to keep him under house arrest. Still, he was forbidden from re-entering Austria either to teach, ski or to be with his wife and children. The Nazi government wanted him to remain in Germany and to teach there.

Now in his late 80s, Herbert Schneider still holds his father’s passion for skiing and deep connection to Mt. Cranmore’s slopes (Photo: David Lazar)

How exactly Gibson secured Schneider’s freedom to this day remains a mystery. Gibson is deliberately vague in his autobiography about the exchange, only speaking of “an arrangement” with his friend Dr. Jhalmar Schacht, then-president of the Reichsbank. Some suggest that Gibson’s bank, Manufacturers Trust, held German gold in its basement vaults and had threatened to freeze it if the Reich did not release Schneider. Others, meantime, say that Gibson used his powerful post-WWI post as Chairman of the American Committee for the Short Term Creditors of Germany to extend the grace period on loans to the cash-strapped country.

If one thing is certain, it is that Herbert Schneider still holds Gibson in a reverence reserved for popes and presidents, referring to him even posthumously as “Mr. Gibson.”

After that middle-of-the-night wake-up call from his mother, Herbert and his family left Austria under cover of darkness before reuniting with his father and boarding the Queen Mary for New York. Herbert, now in his late 80s, vividly remembers Gibson welcoming them on the docks – this man they’d never before met and who’d taken a chance on them – and bringing his family to a hotel room in a luxury high-rise. None of them at that point spoke English.

“We came from a place where there were no buildings taller than four stories, and no more than four or five cars in any given place, and now all this,” he recalls, his eyes twinkling.

A couple of days later, the Schneiders and Gibson boarded the Eastern Slope Express for North Conway. The journey would bring them to the foot of Mt. Cranmore and the archway of raised ski poles as all of Conway had come to the town square to greet their newest neighbors.

“Father turned to me as we looked out and said, ‘It isn’t St. Anton, but we’re going to love it here,’” Schneider says. They then walked the roughly quarter-mile to the tree-shaded, green-shuttered white colonial Gibson had bought them on Grove Street – the house they’ve lived in ever since.

“We were going to put our best foot forward,” he says.

They did. For the next two decades, North Conway was a national leader in winter sports, hosting international competitions, welcoming Presidents and foreign leaders, and serving as one of the Northeast’s premier resort centers. Hannes Schneider, for his part, brought over protégés from St. Anton, world-class skiers like Toni Matt and Otto Tschol. They learned English through tutors and by watching Hollywood films at the town’s movie theater. The resort and school were at one point so popular that Herbert recalls giving as many as 800 lessons in a single day.

Statues of Hannes Schneider now stand at the foot of Mt. Cranmore, in his native village of St. Anton in Austria, and in Japan, where he is celebrated for introducing skiing to millions. (Photo: David Lazar)

“In St. Anton, Hannes Schneider had collected what was essentially a bunch of peasants, friends of his, and helped give them professions. Those men, in turn, went around the world and created ski areas of their own,” says Jeff Leich, president of the New England Ski Museum in Franconia. “So you had these two constellations – small groups of exceptional people who came together in North Conway.”

While Hannes, Gibson and Reed helped develop Cranmore into a world-class destination, Herbert went on to serve his new homeland in WWII, traveling to Colorado to help train the U.S. Army’s elite 10th Mountain Division, and later fighting as a soldier on skis in the European theater. This division and its trainers – many from Austria – are to this day credited with helping establish Colorado as the nation’s winter sports capital.

After 16 years as North Conway’s ski ambassador, Hannes Schneider passed away in April 1955, never having left his hometown for a more lucrative opportunity or forsaking his loyalty to Harvey Gibson. His son would run the family business for decades after, and today, statues of Hannes stand at the foot of Mt. Cranmore, in St. Anton, and in Japan, where he is revered as the man who introduced skiing to millions.

Skiing has, of course, long since given way to shopping as North Conway’s leading pastime and revenue generator, with hundreds of tax-free outlets and billboards lining both sides of Route 16. As one local puts it, “Packages arrive via UPS and leave by SUV.” Still, the town retains its unique character, its history (the train station now hosts the Conway Scenic Railroad) and its ski heritage, with hundreds still tackling Mt. Cranmore’s snowy slopes on a given winter day, and schoolchildren learning to ski as part of standard physical education.

For Herbert Schneider, it is home. It is freedom.

“It is a special place,” he says, flipping through photos of his father gliding, as if winged, above Cranmore’s fresh powder.

Seventy years after taking in that first cold breath, the air is no less free for him. And North Conway is no less of a miracle.

Special thanks to Herbert Schneider, Carl Lindblade, Mark Butterfield, Evelyn Woodbury, Jeff Leich, and Richard Mori for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Posted under Feature

Gov. Hugh Gallen rose from a Civilian Conservation Corps worker in the 1940s to the state’s highest job.. (Portrait from the NH State House.)

Hugh Gallen was a teen struggling to land his first paycheck when he arrived in the North Country in the early 1940s to take a Civilian Conservation Corps job building roads and campsites around Mount Kearsarge.

Three decades later, Gallen had built one of New Hampshire’s top auto dealerships and arrived in Concord, first as a state representative from Littleton and then as governor.

While Gallen’s rags-to-riches rise is one of state politics’ more improbable success stories, it is also a fitting reminder of how the Granite State governorship is among the nation’s most attainable – and among its most unique.

With this month’s inauguration of Governor Lynch to a third consecutive two-year term, Concord’s corner office will have hosted 90 occupants over its 232-year history – the most of any state.

Much of this is owed to the shortness of the term. New Hampshire and Vermont are the only two states with two-year tenures for their executives, versus the usual four years. Prior to 1879, New Hampshire governors served just one-year terms, a quirk which often made serving more a sacrifice than a career, but also kept politicians in greater touch – and check – with their constituents. Mandatory campaign finance limits, enforced to prevent the “time-honored” 19th century tradition of vote-buying, had a similar effect.

“Elections are supposed to be an educational process for both the voters and the candidates,” says NH Secretary of State William Gardner. “You have to open yourself up much more here than in any other place in the country.”

Dr. Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was NH’s last ‘President’ and its first Governor. (Portrait from the NH State House.)

The result has been a list of top executives like few others in the nation. NH governors have included doctors (Josiah Barlett, founder of the NH Medical Society and signer of the Declaration of Independence; David Morrill, Noah Martin, and Robert Blood, who continued to deliver babies while in office), judges (Bartlett, Jeremiah Smith, Levi Woodbury and John King), farmers, businessmen, and a former major league baseball player (Boston Braves catcher Fred Brown).

John Langdon went on to be the first presiding officer of the U.S. Senate and hold the bible upon which George Washington was sworn into office as the nation’s first President. He also oversaw the building of the U.S. Navy’s first ship, the Raleigh, in Portsmouth harbor in 1776 – the ship featured on the state flag. John Winant, meanwhile, went on to become U.S. Ambassador to Britain and the nation’s first Social Security administrator, which is the reason folks born in NH still have the lowest Social Security numbers (beginning in 001, 002, or 003).

Frank Rollins established “Old Home Day” in 1899 as a means of bringing former NH residents who’d fled south for better job prospects back to their old communities, while Francis Murphy established the state’s first broadcast television station, WMUR. Benjamin Pierce’s son, Franklin, meanwhile, went on to become New Hampshire’s only U.S. President.

Gov. John Winant went on to become Ambassador to Britain and the nation’s first Social Security Administrator. (Photo from the book, “NH Notables”)

So much of the history and character of the NH governor’s office can be defined by the Granite State’s fierce sense of independence. Call it libertarianism or healthy skepticism, there is an almost ingrained distrust of power built into New Hampshire’s institutions and populace.

New Hampshire, after all, was the first colony to formally declare its independence from the Crown in 1776, and its three delegates in Philadelphia (Bartlett, Matthew Thornton and William Whipple) the first to sign the Declaration of Independence. This, after the state decided to oust its ‘Royal Governor’ (King George’s veto of this act can be found in the state archives) and eventually elect its own ‘President’ – a title formally changed to governor in 1791 out of deference to Washington’s election.

More than 200 years later, New Hampshire’s independent streak still keeps politicians guessing. It is a place where political fortunes, both local and national, can rise and fall within the span of one long month; where voters from Pelham to Pittsburg demand face time like no other with their leaders, and there is no such thing as fly-over country; and where, because of the government’s limited purse strings, public service trumps patronage.

While NH governors are not term-limited, and most have been elected to multiple one- or two-year terms, it is among the nation’s weakest top offices, constitutionally speaking. With no state income or sales tax, much of the governor’s and the legislature’s financial power is ceded to towns and municipalities across the state and their property taxes. New Hampshire is one of just a few states where the governor must pay for his or her own portrait in the State House.

While most states, meanwhile, have a legislature to keep the governor’s power in check, New Hampshire’s governor faces two sizable checks in both the 424-member NH General Court – the fourth largest legislature in the English-speaking world – and the NH Executive Council.

New Hampshire is one of a handful of states that have an Executive Council, but the only state where the Council not only advises the Governor but can veto almost all of his or her decisions. A mainstay from Colonial times, the five-member Executive Council was initially installed in the 17th century to ensure that then-Royal Governors not veer far from the dictates of the Crown and to report any irregularities back to the King. The institution was upheld in the state’s 1784 constitution, and in the centuries since has served as both a validation and a burr in the saddle of chief executives.

Gov. Hugh Gregg in the 1950s established the “Whopper” awards for folks who brought positive attention to NH. (Photo courtesy of the NH Political Library).

The result has been a system of government at once criticized for its perceived obstacles and celebrated as the most accountable and democratically-elected in the country. It has also remained incredibly popular with voters. Only once in 13 Constitutional conventions since 1784 have delegates questioned the Council’s value, and put it up to a public vote – a motion introduced by Franklin Pierce in 1850 that failed 27,910 to 11,299.

Checks and balances aside, the New Hampshire governor remains the state’s top executive, its chief diplomat and agenda-setter, and its cultural figurehead, from Rollins’ introduction of Old Home Day in 1899 to Hugh Gregg’s “Whooper” awards in the 1950s for folks who called “the attention of outsiders to the joy of living, working and playing in this, the best of all states.”

The governor alone also still holds perhaps the most sacred and important authority a chief executive can wield – as commander in chief of the state’s National Guard, having sent men and women into conflict from the time of the French and Indian War to the War on Terror.

As for Hugh Gallen, whose rags-to-riches rise would take him from building roads up in Mt. Kearsarge to signing legislation building roads statewide, his governorship would have its ups and downs, having come during the time of the oil and economic crises of the late 1970s.

Weeks after losing a reelection battle to John Sununu in 1982, Gallen contracted a rare blood disease and passed away suddenly.   He was succeeded in that final month before Sununu’s inauguration by State Senate President Vesta Roy, who became New Hampshire’s first (unelected) female governor.

Gov. John Sununu was the first to have his state portrait include a computer. (Portrait from the NH State House.)

Just as Gallen’s story is laced with tragedy, it also remains an example of what is possible in New Hampshire, and how its governorship is neither a right of blood nor birth, but of hard work, personality and the peerless scrutiny of Granite State voters.

“New Hampshire has always had an independent streak,” Gardner says. “The unique political culture that exists here is reflected in the structure and culture of our state government. A lot of people have tried to change it, but it continues to this day.”

If voters have any say about it, it is a tradition likely to remain for a long time to come.

Special thanks to NH Secretary of State William Gardner, NH State Librarian Michael York, and NH State Archivist Frank Mevers for their assistance and generosity with this story.

Posted under Feature

GREENFIELD – Elizabeth Orton Jones had recently published one of America’s most lasting children’s works when a Nashua industrialist approached her with a very special assignment.

Up on a mountaintop beneath the cover of trees and amidst the chatter of children, the man asked the Mason-based author/illustrator to paint a fairy tale of sorts for a unique audience.

The year was 1952, and the industrialist, Harry Gregg, had just built a center atop Crotched Mountain for severely disabled children to learn how to function in the outside world. The dorms, he said, needed something to make them seem less like a hospital and more like a home for the children living there.

So Jones, whose American retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Riding Hood” would land on countless bookshelves over the coming decades, packed up her paints, her brushes and a healthy dose of imagination and headed up the mountain with friend and fellow author/illustrator Nora Unwin.

Over the coming year, the two would paint a series of elaborate murals for boys and girls, and in the process, make a connection that would last a lifetime.

Crotched Mountain

Jones’ seasonal murals still hang prominently in the halls of Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center. (Photo: David Lazar)

Albert Ouelette arrived at Crotched Mt. at age 6 in a wheelchair. He left 6 months later able to walk on crutches. (Photo: David Lazar)

E.O. Jones painting murals. Jones began painting fairy tale murals for the girls’ dorm at Crotched Mt. in 1952 at the request of founder Harry Gregg. (Photo courtesy of Albert Ouelette).

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” includes images ahead of its time, including this merry chain of patients acting in the Christmas pageant.

To listen to friends and followers, life and work for Jones, even into her 90s, was seldom about more than creating a world for children of all backgrounds and abilities to be precisely what they were: children.

“As they were working, I remember they would chat with us,” says Albert Ouellette of Concord. Ouellette was 6 when he checked into Crotched Mountain in 1953 with cerebral palsy that confined him to a wheelchair. He left six months later, able to walk with crutches and braces. “They were like aunts to us. They were very warm and nice. They had an audience of kids, who were fascinated in what they were doing. We would watch the development of the fairy tales they painted by seeing the outlines going up on the wall, and then the colors.”

Today those colors and seasonal images of children at play seem to leap off the wall just as they did a half-century ago, lining a well-traveled corridor at Crotched Mountain and never failing to elicit smiles from students passing by.

Less colorful but perhaps equally poignant, however, is a tiny brown book Jones authored about her experience at Crotched Mountain and staging its first ever Christmas pageant in 1953.

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” never earned Jones the recognition or royalties that “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Prayer for a Child,” or even “Twig” (which later became her nickname) would receive. But, it remains one of her most cherished works – a portrait of how the wonder of the season is able to touch children, regardless of their physical state, and how they, in turn, are able to touch us.

“Sometimes, in real life,” she wrote, “we find this dimension, feel the miracle, and kneel in the place. Sometimes the very ‘least of these my brethren’ can give us the sign, point out to us the Star above.”

In simple, but striking brown-and-white images, Jones gave readers a pageant of snow and angels and mangers and miracles. She offered wheelchairs and braces and crutches and nurses carrying the youngest and most vulnerable.

It was a set of images that few if any children’s authors of that time were willing to portray. In an age when handicapped children were seen as something to be tucked away from society’s view, Jones was adamant that they be brought out in the open – that there was a beauty and innocence and joy just as with any other child. Throughout the book, portraits abound of wheelchairs in the snow against a mountain backdrop, of glittered tin foil stars and the typical nervousness and unexpected laughter that accompany any grammar school production.

Ouellette attended that first Christmas pageant in 1953, an experience he still describes as ‘larger than life,’ not only for its dramatic scenery but for the center’s and its ability to help create a normalized existence for children with disabilities. Once an Easter Seals poster child, Ouellette went on to become a dorm counselor at Crotched Mountain before receiving a master’s degree from Northeastern University and launching a career to help people with disabilities enter and adjust to the workplace.

“It was part of our growth as a society, and how society was willing to provide opportunities for people with disabilities,” says Ouellette, now 62 and semi-retired.

It was also part and parcel of Jones’ seeming fearlessness to push boundaries and ruffle feathers to make every child she encountered feel special.

“She was sort of a kid herself,” says Michelle Scott, a longtime friend and fellow churchgoer. “She valued her own childhood, and really enjoyed being a part of children’s lives. She went with the initial idea of decorating those walls, because they were kind of plain…but I think once she was there, her heart just went out to (the kids).”

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” may have been ahead of its time when published, but it was hardly the first time Jones had courted controversy. Jones’ illustrations of children of all races and nationalities playing together in Rachel Field’s 1944 book “Prayer for a Child” required her fierce advocacy to survive the editor’s knife at a time when the world was at war. Jones ultimately won the Caldecott Medal that year, the award given to the children’s book illustrator with the most striking images. Images of black children and white children together in subsequent books and even the image of a bottle of wine in Little Red Riding Hood’s basket barely escaped censorship – though the latter was changed in future editions to grape juice.

“She had a connection with all children,” says Mason resident Charles Moser, who met Jones as a teen actor in the 1970s at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, where she often wrote scripts and designed costumes.  “She just loved working with children and children loved working with her. She could let things touch her in ways that others may have been too fenced off to do.”

Friends say Jones never lost that touch, performing regular children’s readings at public libraries almost up until her passing in 2005 at the age of 95. Today, her touch can still be felt throughout the area, from the mothers and daughters that line up each day for one-of-a-kind lunches at Pickity Place (the rustic and hidden crimson cottage in Mason that inspired her retelling of  “Little Red Riding Hood”), to the kaleidoscopically-colored children’s furniture she hand-painted that lines the ‘Twig’ room at the Mason Public Library.

Crotched Mountain, meantime, has grown from the small hospital for neurological disorders that greeted Albert Ouellette in 1953 to one of the nation’s largest rehabilitation facilities. Today, the center where Jones brought her paints and palette assists more than 2,000 children and adults each year with all disabilities, and provides housing, education, and medical care.

“Every child in the world has a hill, with a top to it,” Jones said as she closed her 1945 Caldecott Award acceptance speech. “Every child – black, white, rich, poor, handicapped, unhandicapped. And singing is what the top of each hill is for. Singing, drawing, thinking, dreaming, sitting in silence…saying a prayer. I should like every child in the world to know that he has a hill, that that hill is his no matter what happens, his and his only, forever.”

Up on a mountaintop, beneath the cover of trees and the softness of snowfall, hundreds of children have found their hill. This month, they will stage their own pageant with singing and drawing and dreaming and laughing, and they may even know how far it is to Bethlehem.

Special thanks to the Crotched Mountain Foundation and Richard Mori of Mori Books in Milford (www.moribooks.com) for their generosity and assistance with this story.

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HOLLIS – In 1948, Harry Truman was President, the number one single was Dinah Shore’s “Buttons and Bows,” and Ken Towne was a teen working the fields with his dad on their Hollis dairy farm when duty came rushing like a rocket from their rural homestead.

“Mother would come roaring out in the fields and shout, ‘There’s a barn on fire and they need you to go!’” he remembers. So Towne and his dad Warren, Hollis’ longtime volunteer fire chief, would jump in the family truck and head for the station to suit up with their neighbors and fellow farmers.

Sixty years and thousands of middle-of-the-night calls, interrupted meals, and cut-short Christmases and school plays later, Towne has never looked back.

“The dedication kind of grows on you,” says Towne. “If dad left, he took me to the fire with him… My work over the years kept me in town, so I was able to help. It just sort of gets in the blood. If you enjoy doing it, you stay with it. If not, you leave.”

Towne, a local truck and backhoe operator, hasn’t. At 79, he remains part of a statewide tradition of volunteer fire service that spans two centuries and today still makes up more than 80 percent of New Hampshire’s 245 departments. Of the estimated 8,000 firefighters statewide, some 6,800 either donate their time entirely or are paid nominally by the hour for each call they answer. They are CEOs and custodians, plumbers, farmers, pastors and doctors. They are college students and senior citizens. They are neighbors.

They are folks like Pembroke’s Hank Munroe, a former president of the state’s college consortium who helped start New Hampshire’s fire training academy in the 1990s, and served as his town’s volunteer chief; like Peterborough’s George Brown, 82, a retired meter reader and pole climber for the power company, who has served his department since 1952 and whose childhood home now serves as the town’s fire museum.

“It just came kind of naturally, I guess,” says Brown, whose father battled blazes for Peterborough in the early 1900s. “It was a way of giving back.”

In New Hampshire, as with the rest of the nation, neighbors have been giving back since the early 1800s, when the first fire chief was a famous Philadelphian named Ben Franklin. Back then, the machines were unwieldy and the technology rudimentary.  Each home would have a leather fire bucket that, in times of emergency, was filled and placed outside the house for the local volunteer force to pick up and pass to one another in a line. A hand-tub would come along a few years later that allowed those with brawn to rope-pull a heavy tank to a fire and manually pump a stream of water about 75 feet. One of those scarlet-red pumpers now sits on display in the old Hollis fire museum.

Towne, of course, isn’t old enough to remember those days. But he is old enough to remember when his department’s ‘state-of-the-art’ machinery consisted of an old 1931 Ford Model A open-air truck and a 1929 Buick; when an air-raid siren took the place of cell phones and pagers, on-call firemen averaged $1.50 an hour, more residents mooed than spoke, and uniforms weren’t made of Kevlar, but cotton and rubber.

“You just put on your rain coat and hat and went out,” Towne says. “In a town of 1,000, when you did have a fire, if you got everybody there and a truck out of the station within 15 minutes, that was good.”

Today, Hollis is a town of about 8,000, and things are dramatically different. The days of an all-volunteer force have given way to the need of having a handful of full-timers in place to always be there when calls come in. The town’s ambulance service, once the domain of an undertaker who’d slap a red light on top of his hearse before running out, now dominates about two-thirds of the department’s calls – a figure almost identical to numbers statewide. Where Hollis averaged about 40 calls per year when Towne started, today it averages more than 1,000.

Education and equipment are light years beyond what they were when Towne started – when Merrimack Deputy Chief Martin Carrier says training often consisted of “arriving at a scene and someone saying, ‘Do what that guy tells you to do,’” and the firefighting philosophy, according to former Hollis chief Don McCoy was to “ride up and put the wet stuff on the red stuff.”

Today’s volunteer firefighter must often meet the same training standards as his or her full-time counterparts – a regimen that means 220 hours of taking in everything from ladders and self-contained breathing apparatus to heightened focuses on safety and science. To become a basic emergency medical worker adds another 125 hours.

The result has been the evolution of a volunteer firefighter unlike anything the state has seen – one trained to respond at a moment’s notice and to handle almost any eventuality or hazard imaginable. It has also meant a dip in recruitment across the state. As the time demands of training and responding have soared and many towns continue to serve as bedroom communities for Massachusetts-based jobs, a lot of folks are taking a pass on the added responsibility.

“It’s a huge number of calls now compared to the past, the time demands are horrendous, and the calls don’t come when you want them to,” says Peterborough’s Jim Grant, who’s volunteered the last 43 years. “You have to be hyper-alert, prepared at the drop of a hat to race to the station and get in a truck – my wife will tell you, I’ve abandoned her at many meals. It is strenuous work, and the burden falls on a handful of dedicated people.”

Volunteer advocates like Merrimack’s Carrier – the state’s representative on the National Volunteer Fire Council – are recognizing this, and working with town and state officials to offer everything from tax incentives to small retirement plans and increased life insurance provisions for all state safety personnel – including volunteers. Since 1981, New Hampshire has lost 16 firefighters in the line of duty, according to the U.S. Fire Safety Administration, most of them volunteers.

“I’ll stick with it as long as I feel I can contribute,” says Towne, who even nearing 80, still jumps into his truck with the same sense of purpose each time the tone goes off. It has become a family tradition, with his son Richard now Hollis’ chief and his granddaughter Hilary a firefighter and emergency medical worker.

“Even at the volunteer level, you make it your life,” says Hilary, 29, who works days as an EMT down in Lawrence, Mass. “You create friendships that you’d never have in any other circumstance. I would do anything for anyone here, and I know that they would do the same. These people become your family… and when the tone goes off, you all come together.”

Special thanks to Jim Grant of Peterborough, Hank Munroe of Pembroke and Martin Carrier of Merrimack for their help with this story.

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Open since 1789, The Madison Church remains the focal point of this small mountain community. (Photo courtesy of The Madison Church)

The poet E.E. Cummings and his wife Marion had finished supper at the Conway Café and were driving back to their Silver Lake summer farm when something stopped them in their tracks.

On the side of Rural Route 113 in Madison, a crowd swelled outside a small, non-descript white church – an old, green-shuttered, clapboard structure no different from any other house of worship in the region. On this evening, however, the tiny church was lit up like Christmas, its tiny bell echoing in the outsize shadow of Mt. Chocorua.

It was VE Day, May 1945, and word was out that World War II had come to an end. A pastor led an ongoing convocation, as residents from Madison and surrounding communities milled in and out to pray and offer thanks.

The image so struck Cummings that he stopped his car and got out. Friends say Cummings had never been the churchgoing type – or much of a fan of organized religion. His writing, however, often showed a reverence for spirituality. Cummings famously discarded capital letters from his poetry, some say out of humility. A rare exception was in reference to God.

Amid the hum of crickets and the idling engine, Cummings stood in the shade of the tree-lined road that evening and observed. In The Madison Church, he’d seen something special – something that couldn’t be seen by just driving past; something that transcended wood and paint and glass. He returned with Marion to Joy Farm. There, in the artist’s loft his father had long ago built for him, Cummings wrote one of his favorite, and perhaps least known poems: i am a little church (no great cathedral).

i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection;
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever;
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

For Cummings, or ‘Estlin’ as locals called him (for Edward Estlin), “i am a little church” symbolized how something so outwardly ordinary could hold such importance for a community.

Cummings waited until 1958 to publish “i am a little church.” It would not earn him the renown or schoolbook celebrity that other iconic works like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” or “i thank you God for this most amazing” would. But when Cummings appeared before more than 10,000 at the Boston Arts Festival in 1957 – the largest public reading of his career – it was his snapshot of life in Madison he chose to recite.

“He really does capture the finite and the infinite with this poem… how a church can be the central part of this kind of rural rhythm of life,” says The Madison Church’s pastor, Sean Dunker-Bendigo.

Five decades after Cummings published his poem, The Madison Church stands just as it did – unadorned, but undoubtedly the heart of this tiny mountain community of less than 2,000 people; its only house of worship, open since 1789.

Despite its Baptist beginnings, it is the place where neighbors of all faiths and political stripes gather to contemplate and offer thanks, to celebrate beginnings and mourn endings.

Each Sunday, 70 or so residents young and old, many of them farmers, pack The Madison Church’s cozy pews; folks like Donna Nichols, the church’s treasurer and a deacon, who’s been on church missions to Haiti and Mississippi and greets parishioners with a big, enveloping hug; folks like 80-year-old Ruth Shackford, a former caretaker for Cummings’ farm, who’s been going since she was a little girl, and each year whips up crowd-pleasing cakes for the church’s annual Oyster Stew, Corn Chowder and Fancy Cake auction for charity. (This year’s is set for Nov. 1.)

“It’s truly a special place,” says Shackford. “It’s not something you’d necessarily see just by driving past, but it really is the focal point of the town.”

At its heart, parishioners say, is a faith that extends beyond psalms and sermons – a coming together of ordinary people to help their neighbors. The Madison Church houses the town’s only independent, non-religious pre-school. It’s where Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are held on Friday nights. An average day for Dunker-Bendigo may be split between chopping wood for parishioners in the morning, helping to run the church’s call-in and shuttle services for seniors, and responding to a five-alarm blaze as a volunteer firefighter.

As for Nichols, the deacon, it is a place that summons emotion each time she thinks about it.

Nichols had just moved to Madison with her daughter and boyfriend, when the home they built burned to the ground one awful night three decades ago. Left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, she would awaken the following morning to find an Angel of Mercy from The Madison Church bearing pots and pans, clothing, and gift certificates to grocery and department stores.

“I was not a churchgoer; I wasn’t even a member,” Nichols says, her voice breaking. “They didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. They just knew I needed help.”

The deliveries continued every day for another three or four weeks – food, furniture, breadboards, things Nichols says even she wouldn’t have thought of. She eventually rebuilt her family’s house in Madison, and began attending the church off and on. Today, Nichols is among The Madison Church’s most active members, leading efforts to help others in times of need.

“It’s a community church, plain and simple,” Nichols says. “It is for the community. That’s who it serves, and that is why it’s endured for more than 200 years.”

And that, no doubt, is the snapshot Cummings took with him as he closed the door of his car and drove away from the little white building on Rural Route 113. It is a snapshot that hasn’t faded in the years since and likely won’t for decades to come.

Special thanks to Ruth Shackford and Carol Batchelder of Silver Lake for their help with this story.

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