Geotagging

Ira Littlefield dwelled on his family's Pleasant Street farmstead for his entire life. While farming kept him well occupied, he also conducted property surveys throughout the central New Hampshire. His timing couldn't have been better. In the early 1900s, farms were bought and subdivided for lakefront cottages at a rapid rate as recreation became the mainstay of the local economy.

Ira's drawings are held at the New Hampshire State Archives in Concord, and because of their significance to New London's past, we have been cataloging portions of the collection. To date, we have seen nearly 300 sheets (field notes, ink drawings, and blueprints) within the towns of New London and Sunapee. Still unexamined are properties in Springfield, Newbury, Sutton, Wilmot, Andover, and points beyond.

As we sift through the boxes, we also photograph any plans that might be of interest to researchers at back our own archives. The images are loaded into our existing library of digitized maps and identified by general location. Using Google Maps, we are also able to graphically locate each property and the GPS coordinates become part of the digital file's metadata. For archivists, this sort of geotagging is a boon. Unlike residents, road names, and street numbers, the GPS coordinates do not change over time, providing future researchers with at least one fixed geographic data point.

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.

Ski Tows

Winter sports may be off to a slow start this year for lack of natural snow, but that wasn't always the case. Since the 1930s, New Londoners have promoted the town's winter recreation as a means of attracting visitors during the off season. Local children, of course, made their own excitement, and many residents still have memories of thrilling rides down the South Pleasant Street hill on a double-runner sled. Their parents, meanwhile, organized winter carnivals and constructed ski areas to embrace, and perhaps profit from, the snowbound months.

The second ski tow (1948–1961)

New London's first ski tow, off of Seamans Road, operated in 1939 and 1940. Colby Junior College wanted to offer skiing for its students (then all women), so it hired three young men, Harold Buker, Maurice Shepard, and Dick Messer to provide a lift. They anchored a 1929 Ford Model A to a Kearsarge Telephone Co. pole and ran a rope around one of the rear wheels, jacked up and fender-less. It served its purpose, but the second world war intervened. Shepard was stationed in Newfoundland. Buker's bomber was downed in the North Sea, and he became a German POW. Messer was killed on the final day of hostilities in Europe.

Sketch of the GMC truck-powered tow rope

But interest in skiing was renewed after the war, and in November 1947 a small group organized the New London Outing Club to help construct a local ski tow. It leased property from Camp Tonawanda on Pleasant Lake and bulldozed a trail up the hill towards Seamans Road—with volunteers and other assistance from the college and local businesses. They built a warming hut and installed an 800-foot rope tow.

Postcard view of Pleasant Lake (c. 1955)

On January 3, 1948 the Northeast Ski Tow opened. The slope was operated as a private venture by Wes Blake, who had prior experience, but when it proved less profitable than expected, the New London Outing Club purchased Blake's share for $3,100 (with $2,000 borrowed from the bank in Newport). The club took over the lease, equipment, and operations.

The non-profit Outing Club hoped that a successful ski tow would help fund other programs like skating, swimming and even contribute to the Information Booth. In his 1948 Planning Board report, Chairman Ken Rich wrote: "We are glad to report satisfactory progress on the ski area with the erection of a ski tow and we hope through other organizations to see a skating rink before another year."

For all their optimism, the early years were lean, presenting frequent cash flow problems. Club Treasurer Mary Wright recalled that she often called on founder and president Bill Clough, Jr. to cover overdrafts. The ski area did become self-funding—especially during early-snow years when the slopes could open in time for the Christmas break. Despite modest expansion to three trails, demands for more terrain, more instruction, and more lift capacity prompted the search for a new hill. The old ski tow closed in March 1961, and King Ridge Ski Area opened the following December. Having introduced the sport to a post-war generation of townspeople, college students, and visitors, the ski tow had served the community well.

References:

• Buker, Harold W., Jr. Oral History Interview (April 1992)
• Clough, Dr. William, Jr. "The Outing Club and King Ridge" (September 1976)
• Lauridsen, Laurids. "New London's Northeast Slopes" (January 1976)
• Squires, J. Duane. Mirror to America: A History of New London, New Hampshire 1900–1950
• Stecker, Anne Page. Our Voices, Our Town: A History of New London, New Hampshire 1950–2000

An Industrial Imprint

The H.F. Walling map of Merrimack County (1858) contains an inset of Scythe Factory Village, located at the outlet of Pleasant Pond (now Pleasant Lake). Here the Phillips, Messer, & Colby Company began forging scythe blades in 1835. The business operated for over fifty years, and its product line expanded to include hay knives and axes.

Over the period, its small, wooden factories were enlarged or rebuilt, and water-power systems were upgraded. Iron, steel, coal, and grindstones, once delivered by teamsters from Concord, arrived at Potter Place storage facilities on the Northern Railroad. Mechanics Hall and later the Masonic Hall were built. The village merited its own post office. At its peak, the reincorporated New London Scythe Company employed about 75 workers, and the new schoolhouse enrolled forty children, though rarely did so many attend.

The map depicts a compact village, complete with mills and factories, warehouses, company-owned tenements, owner-manager houses, a school, store, and blacksmith shop. Altogether it's a fine example of the industrial landscapes scattered around New England's flowing water courses.

After a long series of building removals and demolitions, that former landscape has nearly faded from view. But by tracing the millponds, sluiceways and tailraces, you might still see the imprint of our 19th century industrial heyday in unexpected places.

To learn more about Scytheville, find a copy of Reflections in a Millpond, published in 1984 for its sesquicentennial celebration, or stop by the Archives to browse the book and see more images, documents, and maps of the area.

Mapping Everytown

Imagine a map of New London that identifies the location and occupants of every building. Now expand that image to Merrimack County, to the state of New Hampshire, and finally to all the New England states. The task would require Google-sized resources today, but in the mid-1800s one man undertook that cartographic challenge.

New London Center (1858)

Henry F. Walling (1825-1888) produced around 150 maps, some on such a large scale that building footprints are represented (at a time before fire insurance maps made such views commonplace). A commercial endeavor, Walling’s maps were drawn and embellished in ways that might appeal to the broadest audience, and the fact that every property owner’s name appeared in print may have helped promote sales. While his success attracted competitors in larger markets down in Massachusetts and Connecticut, his wall maps of New Hampshire counties, with their inset engravings of landmarks and details of villages and town centers, were unrivaled.

Trained as a civil engineer, Walling apparently used a combination of earlier town maps, subcontracted surveys, and his own original field work. (On the Walden Pond portion of his Concord, MA, map, for example, he credited “surveys by H.D. Thoreau Civ. Engr.”) For practical reasons, Walling favored a compass and wheel odometer over the more traditional surveyor’s chain to plat town roads; his odometer was fast, accurate, and required just one man rather than a crew of three.

Walling also saw the artistry of his profession. In 1886, he concluded an address on topographical mapping with these remarks:

As the success of the portrait painter is measured by his skill in reproducing not only the more striking and familiar features of his subject, but a certain subtle, undefinable expression of individual character, so the topographer is a true artist who brings out upon his map not only the salient contours of the country, but the less apparent though real markings which reveal to experienced eyes the conflicts of the past between the great sculpturing forces of nature and the rugged resistances which have opposed them, the effective touches in either work of art being applied in the presence of the subject portrayed, with a true artistic sense of form and proportion.

Today you can find his large (5' x 5') 1858 map of New Hampshire’s Merrimack County at the Archives and displayed at several local businesses.


Sources:

• Buehler, Michael. “Henry F. Walling and the Mapping of New England’s Towns, 1849-1857” in The Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society, Spring 2008.
• Walling, Henry F. “Topographic Surveys of States” in the Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies, Vol. 5, 1886.