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Sightseeking in Contoocook

[Earlier this year I had the double-pleasure of reading a book on New England history entitled Sightseeking and then hosting its author, Chris Lenney, in my home. Chris works at Harvard University's Lamont Library, where he once was a colleague of Ann-Marie Breaux, today of YBP. It was Ann-Marie who put me onto Chris's book, a marvelous and entirely original study of how the particulars of our New England surroundings came to be.

In fact several of us at YBP read the book and were so taken by it that we invited Chris to Contoocook, hoping he would be interested in studying the village where many of us in this company live, and where all of us work. To our delight, he accepted. Chris spent most of three days, on bicycle, immersing himself in the area. Afterwards he wrote this "travel letter," describing what he saw in Contoocook and adjoining Hopkinton. We think customers who would like to know something more about YBP's home, Contoocook—and many have asked over the years—will enjoy reading it.

We also think they will enjoy reading Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England, which we wholeheartedly recommend (University Press of New England, $24.95, ISBN 1-58465-205-5). For a review, see the April 2003 issue of Academia, YBP's online magazine, accessible from this website. Bob Nardini]

Chris Lenney

Dear Bob,

Thank you for the opportunity to tour your operations at YBP and to sightseek in Contoocook village and the surrounding town of Hopkinton. Someone once shrewdly advised that you should never set out on a walk without some objective, because then (at the very least) you will return home with a disappointment, which is more than most people return with from a walk. Sightseeking (like archeology) is about formulating expectations, and then carefully adjusting them as events unfold in the field. It involves comparing known places, richly held in memory, with places newly encountered.

"Main highways bound elsewhere" also lead to Contoocook

My own expectations began with the YBP cartons, and that well-known address: 999 Maple Street, Contoocook, N.H. Elsewhere in America, where street numbers routinely run in the thousands, such an address would not raise an eyebrow, but in older, smaller-scaled New England, it is not without implications. What 999 suggested to me was a recent,

Nearing YBP, on Maple Street, driving from Fountain Square

somewhat whimsically assigned street number on an old radial thoroughfare (Maple has such connotations) in former farm country, on the outskirts of a village. My Grandmother's address was 1062 Pleasant Street, Athol, Mass., and this well-remembered place became my instinctive basis of comparison. Both Pleasant and Maple Streets lead by the farmhouses, fields, and barns of once-tilled uplands, now brusquely cut by main highways bound elsewhere. Both streets drop townwards with momentary, memorable views of landmark mountains (here, Kearsarge; there, Mount Grace) before reaching the river valley and mill town below. The simple geography of highway and mill location must conspire to endlessly reproduce this pattern: a pattern unnoticed but not unfelt. Sightseeking is as much visceral as visual: it carefully analyzes that recurrent sense of familiarity which makes New England feel like home.

Farming hasn’t disappeared

Fountain Square, the storefront where YBP began in 1971

So 999 places us on the old-farmed outskirts, Maple on an old (and perhaps once sugar maple-lined) country road. What of Contoocook? Etymologically, the name is a puzzle: it may mean "crow-place," or "upstream place," or even "at the butternut river." What a sightseeker would remark is that place names ending in -cook are of Abenaki origin and highly characteristic of northern New England. Native American names, as old, official township names, are rare in New England, and so ironically, when bestowed on inhabited places, tend to be of later, nineteenth century origin, when romantic, "Indianesque" names were in vogue. New England mill towns, mill villages, and mills all proudly bore such names—often lifted from the very rivers that powered them: names like Amoskeag, Chicopee, Manchaug, Pawtucket, and Contoocook. That Contoocook is a river village that grew from a few mills at Hill's Bridge in 1800, to boast a post office and fire engine company in 1831 is no surprise. Gristmills, sawmills, woolen mills came and went. In time the eclectic miscellany of manufactures would count needles and silk thread, mackerel kits (fish tubs), and box-making machinery. While I could not have predicted that 999 Maple Street, Contoocook, N.H. meant all this, the significance of the address has, in retrospect, a certain inevitability. While sightseeking at its most dramatic is about predicting, it is more importantly about savoring: recognizing the historical fitness, and harmoniousness, of how New England happened.

A connected farmstead, Contoocook

YBP, another connected farmstead

Realizing that 999 was a modern address, I was curious to know what YBP would look like. Undoubtedly, it would be modern, but a sightseeker could not fail to note that it—unlike its nearest neighbor—is satisfyingly New Englandly in the connected farmstead tradition, with its (vinyl) clapboarded front office running back to its (steel) barn-sided warehouse. And like so many of the connected farmsteads hereabouts, the "barn" is far bigger than the "house!" While the buildings are tan, not white, their deeper bond with the New England vernacular is real, and like the vernacular itself, it is pragmatic, not studied.

The Contoocook River

Many sense-images return to me from my three-day bicycle tour. Even with the surge of warmth, the earth still hung between seasons. April had coaxed forth crocus and glory-of-the-snow, awakened the spring peepers and red maple buds, but ice still gripped the ponds and hemlock swamps. Everywhere, snow patches and winter starkness lingered, relieved by somber plumes of pine. In Contoocook, the river rolled like misty, molten glass over the dam and offered me glimpses of riffled olive-green through the floorboards of the old covered bridge. Every day, three o'clock would burst on Contoocook village in a flurry of yellow buses and knapsacked children, and every day this innocent spectacle moved me like a poignant affirmation. Soon thereafter, the crack and smack of ball on wood and leather could be heard above the waters of the dam. We crave these tiny constancies.

A Victorian house on Fountain Square

Contoocook, if cash-poor, is house-proud. Everywhere plain Cape Cod houses invite with elegantly arched Federal doorways. Rusty tin roofs harmonize with the glistening red of freshly painted clapboards. Even the "bad" Victorians of the old mill magnates capture like nothing else the ebullient energy of their times. Contoocook is a place where old houses still speak of history and family, not of money. Now, as the sun drops, come on foot, and climb with me the village back streets; admire the floodmarks of '36 and '38 inscribed on a porch post; then, where the way turns upward, stop a moment and gaze. Late afternoon edges in shadow each clapboard, each cornice, each gable, and silently bids you to behold the stark geometry of the house-shapes, yet uncamouflaged by leaves. Angled light reveals plain-spoken carpentry as subtlest art. And perhaps, at half-past five on a balmy April afternoon, you, too, will find yourself ineluctably drawn into this quiet streetful of houses—into this fragile, wooden, handmade, hand-me-down, village world—as if into some timeless realm ....

The depot

Timelessness, of course, is a delectable illusion, one which the sightseeker learns both to savor and analyze. The horse fountain of Fountain Square is nowhere to be seen. The elm-arched streets, known from photographs, are gone. Fire, flood, and bulldozer have erased the shops and mills that once made Contoocook tick. A single covered bridge remains where once stood two. Time has added and subtracted much, but the townscape harbors clues enough to revisualize its past. Both a sense of place, and a stubborn pride therein, endure. Everywhere, as I bicycled the roads, the cheery boast of "Contoocook, N.H." was flung to me, from the indigo station-board of the defunct depot, from the grange hall, from the branch bank, from the backs of fuel trucks and plumbers' vans.

Contoocook is the industrial north village of the old town of Hopkinton, and the duality (and rivalry) that exists between this upstart scion of factory and railroad and that staid, old meetinghouse center is a classic tale of two villages, retold everywhere in New England. Like envious siblings, each village once vaunted its academy, its engine company, its cornet band, but the two worlds the villagers fashioned on hilltop and river bottom were as unlike as the old agrarian and the new industrial order. The two villages are still remarkably intact—and distinct—today.

Hopkinton town hall

Hopkinton was settled in 1736 as Township No. 5, part of an outer settlement bulwark thrown up against attack in the French and Indian Wars. In outline, it is a roughly six-mile square diamond-shaped township with a center crossroads meetinghouse: precisely the same formula as exemplified by Petersham, Mass., which I described in Sightseeking. Both towns were chartered almost back to back by Massachusetts—overstepping jurisdictions was a tireless colonial gambit. Both Hopkinton and Petersham were clearly engaged in similar, early essays at the range township: the New England forerunner of the midwestern grid township. Knowledge of some other, like-settled place can deeply enrich, by comparison and contrast, your understanding of that particular town in New England where business or pleasure or the road home takes you.

A central chimney large house, pyramidal roof, Hopkinton

A central chimney large house, pitched roof, Hopkinton

Hopkinton village wears the antique dignity of a jilted spinster. It was courted four times as New Hampshire's capital when the legislature met there round about 1800, but it lost, in the end, the coveted prize of the statehouse to Concord in 1814. To add insult to injury, redrawn county lines stripped it of its status as a "half shire-town" as well (what New Englanders call a joint county seat). Early eminence (and precipitous decline) has made Hopkinton village a truly remarkable outdoor museum of New England domestic architecture. Indeed, its house-types might have tumbled like play-blocks from the charts that illustrate Sightseeking: Twin Rearwall Chimney houses (a downcountry, Boston fashion); Central Chimney houses with pyramidal roofs (provincially stylish); the ell-enlarged Stanley Tavern (so true to type for an early hostelry). A local fashion for fan-louvered gables breaks out everywhere. And was it family feeling or social rivalry that built, side by side, the two grandest houses in town, each with three formal entry facades, left, right, and center? The old village fairly rings with echoes of Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United States, which stopped here in 1825. In its architecture, Hopkinton center contrasts curiously with like-settled Petersham, for while the one is frozen in the Federal era, the other is notably Greek Revival.

Hopkinton Dam

Covered bridge, near Hopkinton dam

As we have seen, much of sightseeking involves what I call déjà vu, an acquired ability to overlay the resemblances of well-remembered places on the landscape at hand. One last instance of déjà vu came at the Hopkinton Dam. The recreational beach; the colossal earthworks; the monolithic headhouse so much like a concrete castle-keep and drawbridge; the vaguely regal Corps of Engineers standard slapping on its mast. All are a familiar formula, eerily repeated everywhere. But this familiarity needs to be particularized. I was instantly put in mind of the Townshend Dam in Vermont (also with its adjacent covered bridge). This dam I knew to have been a scaled-back New Deal hydroelectric project that, if built as planned, would have drowned both valley and town. This comparison piqued my curiosity. A half hour in the local history room of the Hopkinton library revealed that the original Hopkinton Dam had been cast in the same mold, and had unleashed the same local frustration, outrage, and political maneuvering. Had things ended differently, there would be no Contoocook village today. Engineering works, such as dams and railroads, are parts of obvious systems, replicated by blueprints far and wide; but frailer human works, such as villages, houses, and farms, have their cultural blueprints, their artifactual templates, if we but look, remember, and learn to interrelate the examples that we see.

In Sightseeking, I offer curious travelers a historical framework in which New England houses, gravestones, place names, and other enduring cultural artifacts can be understood and enjoyed. My trip to Contoocook came at an exciting moment, only two weeks after the book's publication. This visit became for me my first opportunity to re-test, book-in-hand, the validity and utility of the framework I had slowly elaborated over many years. The results pleased me deeply: while I can't yet vouch for Peoria, Sightseeking most assuredly plays in Contoocook!

Thanks again for the Yankee hospitality, and for the splendid chance to discover your own corner of New England.

Happy Sightseeking!
Chris Lenney

© Christopher J. Lenney

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