Road Signs

This morning New Hampshire Public Radio aired the first in a planned series of reports on historical markers positioned along roadsides throughout the state. Administered by the Division of Historical Resources and the Department of Transportation, the program was started in 1958.

Unveiling the town's first historical marker in 1963.

A few years later, New London created its own roadside marker program in order to highlight people and places of historical interest throughout the town. Its first marker was installed in 1963 near the site of the first town meeting on Knight's Hill, and a new one was added each year until the town's bicentennial in 1979.

In conjunction with a graphic design project by students at Colby-Sawyer College, we revisited those signs recently. The subjects and text on most of our signs have held up well, but in two cases the houses that once sat in close proximity to their descriptive signs have been moved farther away, altering the setting and perhaps giving a false sense of the place. We hope to remedy that problem by offering historical photographs of the buildings accessible via smartphones and other web-enabled devices that can read QR codes.

The NHPR story mentioned that some people are taking the time to visit each of the 236 official roadside markers in New Hampshire. Those marker-baggers will bypass the entire set of bicentennial signs here in New London, installed at town expense, but you can find them in person or online using the Google map embedded below. Clicking on each location displays the corresponding marker text, somewhat edited, and its installation year.

Badge of History

The Historical Society recently received a medallion depicting a four-horse coach running past a building, with the letters “NL” visible on a hanging sign. The coach is not exactly a Concord Coach, nor does the building look quite like any in town, so what is this artifact?

The sesquicentennial celebration, marking 150 years since New London’s incorporation, took place over three days, August 2–4, 1929, preempting Hospital Days that year. Scheduled events included three performances of an outdoor historical pageant (professionally written and produced, with 500 participants and 20 yoke of oxen), the dedication of four historical site markers (Colby homestead and sites of the first dwelling, schoolhouse, and meetinghouse), a golf tournament, baseball game, band concert, and a church service.

For an event logo, the stage coach was chosen as symbolic of the town’s development, and, in episode five, the pageant recreated a scene in which Colby Hill school students were excused from class to watch the first stage coach travel down Main Street in 1831. Future Governor Anthony Colby was credited with the securing the New London stop on the Lowell (MA) to Hanover (NH) route.

In 1929 the elected organizing committee of Emma Colby, Charles Shepard, and Stanley Spiller oversaw the work of 28 subcommittees. Taxpayers had appropriated $2,500 for the celebration, and of this amount, $575 was paid to the Whitehead & Hoag Co. of Newark, New Jersey, to furnish “badges” — cast medallions with ribbons and attached pins. The sale of badges, along with programs, postcards, and reserved-seat pageant tickets, raised over $4,000 to help meet expenses for the three-day observance.

So this coach-themed medallion played a fundraising role in one of the most ambitious historical celebrations the town has ever undertaken. You can learn more about New London’s sesquicentennial and read the pageant’s script in J. Duane Squires’ book, Mirror to America: A History of New London New Hampshire, 1900–1950.

Street Pageant

Since ancient times historical pageants have provided entertainment, education, and community. Here in New London, even the nation's 1976 bicentennial failed to match the elaborate production of the town's Sesquicentennial Celebration of 1929. Role-players, horses, and oxen dramatized the town's early settlement and later growth. Seven "episodes" were acted out on a hilltop field under the banner of "Hills Against the Sky." The logistics alone were impressive: a first aid tent was erected on the site; exhibits were displayed at Assembly Hall; questions could be directed to the Information Bureau at Post Office Square (i.e. old Four Corners); a Housing Committee lodged visitors at local hotels and guest houses. Altogether, the pageant's organization required the services of nearly one hundred volunteers.

A scene from The Hills Against the Sky (August 1929)

In the same tradition, albeit on a smaller scale, New London's historical society last Saturday presented a walking tour of Main Street—complete with actors portraying a governor's wife, a Grange master, a pair of young entrepreneurs, a long-term resident of the Inn, and a town librarian and photographer's assistant. Each related stories about the earlier life and times of New London.

A group visits Colby Academy's lower campus (now Sargent Common)

Those performances were supplemented by guide-narrators, who imparted local lore on subjects ranging from town halls to pharmacies to college dorms. All of those facts, figures, anecdotes, and images were drawn from published histories and from our collections; much of the research and writing was conducted here at the Archives.

If you attended the sold-out tour and would like to follow up on something you heard along the way, please contact us. You may also review the tour's historic images at our online gallery. And if you missed the tour, watch for another one next year, as the historical society plans to move the pageant stage farther down the street.