Gail Rousseau’s photos of the Daniel Webster farm in Franklin helped save the historic property from the wrecking ball. (Photo: David Lazar)

Gail Rousseau never set out to be a hero in her rural community of Franklin – only to take some decent photos. A part-time bartender and amateur photographer, Rousseau in 1990 discovered her ideal subject in the old Daniel Webster farm and homestead up the road from her.

For more than a decade, Rousseau snapped photos of the farm’s fertile fields, 18th century architecture and pristine swimming holes along the Merrimack River. Today, those pictures and Rousseau’s advocacy are credited with helping save one of the state’s most prized properties – a place Webster himself called “the very sweetest spot in the world” – from the wrecking ball.

“There’s so much history there,” says Rousseau, 55. “There’s a cemetery, there’s beautiful nature, there’s a swimming hole, there’s a place where eagles nest and go to hunt. Everything that is New Hampshire is there, all rolled up into one area.”

Two years ago, much of that was in danger of being bulldozed. The Webster homestead, where the American patriot and statesman lived most of his final days, had fallen on tough times. Once an orphanage for children left parentless from the Civil War, the farm had served decades as a convent for retired nuns. When its tenants, however, began to dwindle and upkeep became too expensive, the nuns sold to a developer looking to build high-density, affordable housing.

“The area was just too beautiful, too wholesome to let it go,” Rousseau says.

So Rousseau and her neighbors began a grass roots campaign before the town’s zoning board to halt the demolition, using both history and hundreds of memorable photos she’d snapped over the years. Though outmatched in funding, the neighbors prevailed, ultimately utilizing the photos in a fundraising campaign with the Trust for Public Land to buy the property back for $1.75 million. Today, the farm and homestead remain intact and restored as Webster Place, a drug and alcohol recovery center opened last year by Common Man restaurant owner Alex Ray. Rousseau has never taken nor asked for any money from the photos she shot.

“It blows me away that doing something you love will eventually find its way out there. I figured those photos would just stay in a folder somewhere,” she says. “If all I did in this life was to help save that land, I could die tomorrow and be happy.”