Demand for wool in the first three decades of the 19th century shaped the boom years of agriculture in New Hampshire, at least until the invention of the cotton gin allowed for a cheaper clothing alternative – a condition that was accompanied by a changing American workplace and economy.
The brief but prosperous boom financed many of the Granite State’s landmark large farmhouses and barns as well as the nearly ubiquitous stone fences that are still visible, some in the most unexpected remote forests.
Pay attention while driving along country roads, and you’ll often notice stretches where each house seems to be an evolution among the others. I suspect that what happened was they were all built by one craftsman carpenter and his crew – perhaps itinerants who would stay for a season of erecting a house before returning home – who were invited back in another year to build another, each one to customized specifications. The chimneys, for instance, reveal a progression away from the massive central fireplace of the Colonial era to the use of multiple chimneys after the Revolutionary War – something that has me thinking of how much firewood these houses must have consumed through a winter.
It’s possible, of course, that the carpenters and masons and others came to live in the neighborhood as well. But one thing I feel certain: the resident commercial farmers, faced with the demands of their flocks and fields, did not have the time or perhaps even skills to build houses like these.
Here are some of the fine examples found in a village along a ridge in the town of Deerfield, a neighborhood known as South Deerfield. There are more, I should mention, than I could capture in this outing. Meanwhile, I’d like to know more about the site of the popular Mack Tavern, with its fiddler’s throne to protect the player from the wild dancers.
