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Bennington Architecture: Gable-Front House
One can tell a lot about the economic history of a community by looking at the houses. If one style predominates, that reveals when the fortunes of the town were at their peak. Architecture styles change over time, showing the preferences of the people based on convenience, availability of materials, and outside influences. Bennington is no different, as eight distinct styles were employed from late 1700s to the 1950s: the Cape; the Colonial; the Federal; the Gable-Front; Gothic Revival; Italianate; attached barn; Second Empire; Queen Anne; and the Ranch.
In the old days, people built houses with one of two orientations: front door/long axis facing the road, or front door facing South, to maximize sunlight and winter warmth. From around 1830, a major change in orientation occurred, resulting in the Gable-Front House.
Two factors went into this shift: lot size and the Greek Revival. As town populations grew, previously large lots were divided. Some of the resulting lots were too narrow to build a Cape or Federal, so the house was rotated 90 degrees, causing its gable end to face the front. The style quickly became popular in urban areas. Furthermore, early in the 1800s, with the discovery of Pompeii, interest about Classical architecture grew. Houses with the gable facing the road became the next new thing — very fashionable.
Going away from the Village on Bible Hill Road, we see Gable-Fronts. 
Also on Bible Hill Road, another example, with a bit less symmetry. Typically, the house had 2.5 stories and was one or two rooms deep. The front door was on the left or the right, along with two windows downstairs and three windows upstairs. The gable roof line is strongly reminiscent of the pediment on a Greek temple.
This Acre Street version has only two windows upstairs. 
This Acre Street version adds a front porch. The style was popular throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, since it could be constructed as a large, stately house or as a smaller, humble dwelling. It was often the base style for subsequent add-ons in the later part of the century, as we shall see in a future post.
A stately house on Mill Street has a Gable-Front. 
A Worker’s House on Starret Road has a Gable-Front The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on September 16, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
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Schools in Society Land, 1700s
Before there was a ‘Bennington’, back when it was called “Society Land“, there were schools here. In 1791, citizens agreed to hold a school at John Putnam’s house, but after 1794, classes were held at Horace Roger’s house. These might have been “Dame Schools”, where a mother or grandmother or maiden aunt would undertake the education of the neighborhood children in her sitting room.
By 1797, so many families were setting up homesteads far beyond the river-side village, that the town established three ‘school districts’. Each District served 8 households, but that did not mean that each school had the same number of students. The Southern District was near the Greenfield border, on the Greenfield Road, serving the Rogers, George, Eaton, and Martin families. The Middle District covered the homesteads east of Town on the Francistown Road, for the Dodges, Newtons, Bells, and Favors. The Northern District school was at the lower end of Gillis Hill Road in the orchard/ pasture of the Colby Family. Children from the Sweetser, Burtt, Colby, and Huntington families might have walked a mile or less to attend. Built without a foundation, the school-house was small but it had a wood stove and its own near-by well.
Rough locations of the three school districts established in 1797, shown on a map from 1858. The schools were paid for by taxes, with money being allocated to each school based on the number of students. School was in session for two terms: Fall and Spring. In 1798, a Summer term was added, but school attendance was never mandatory. Sometimes parents were not happy with the education for which their taxes paid. In 1799, families west of the river on the Hancock border lobbied to have their children attend Hancock’s school. Some things never change.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on August 19, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
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Sunnyside Cemetery
If you have a town, and you have at least one church, then you are in need of a cemetery. The first settlers to any area lacked a ‘sanctified ground’ in which to inter their deceased family members, so they would have a ‘family burial plot’ on their own property. The Burtt House at the lower end of Bible Hill Road has such a private cemetery on premises.
The most visible cemetery in Bennington is Sunnyside, established in the early 1800s. Originally, the land belonged to the Whittemore Family, and was the location of their ‘family plot’ since their house was across the road.
A row of Whittemore Family headstones. 
Turn from there, to look down upon the former Whittemore Family House. Located at the intersection of Main Street, Bible Hill Road, and Eaton Avenue — conveniently between the Congregational and the Baptist Churches — the land was purchased by the Town in 1850. Perched on a steep hill, the deceased would have a fine view South-West up the Main Street of the village, and would see the first light of dawn on Judgement Day.
It was called Sand Hill Cemetery. [Surely the grave-diggers were happy that the land there was sandy!] The oldest headstones are from 1817, as seen at the right. Oddly, they are not graves of Whittemores. In the mid-1800s, people wanted their beloved deceased relatives to be near-by, in a pretty, park-like place. Sand Hill reflected those ideas of a peaceful, shaded resting place where families would visit the graves for a pleasant outing, complete with picnic baskets. Trees were planted to create a park in the former pasture. Many of the citizens who were founders of the Town are buried there. The headstones read like a Who’s Who of early Bennington.
In 1891, a town vote declined to expand the cemetery, ending the selling of new plots, although burials continued well into the 1900s. In 1913, the Whittemore family gave an iron fence and gates to enclose the cemetery. They insisted that the name be changed from Sand Hill to Sunnyside, the name on the gates we see today.
Looking through the 1913 gates, we see the Historical Society across the street. In Northern New England, burials typically occurred within a few days of death — especially in hot weather. But in the winter, the ground was frozen solid and graves could not be dug. Thus the Town built a ‘receiving tomb’ in 1888, and placed it at the back of the cemetery. Coffins and their contents would be stored in the crypt until the ground could be worked and burials could resume. In 1921, will all the previous improvements, a new ‘winter crypt’ was built, handsomely set into the slope of the hill.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on July 23, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
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Rhubarb: the Town Festival
Busy Bake Table on the Library Lawn in 2015. In 2013, neighbors Janice and Molly decided to start a rhubarb celebration. Why? you might ask. They were looking for a fund-raising activity to benefit the town library’s building fund, and they thought that it was high time that there was a town fest of some sort. Rhubarb is the ‘first fruit of the season’ and by early June, the plant is up and thriving in gardens all over the region. No other town in the area had a Rhubarb Festival, so it had to be Rhubarb! After much planning, they held a bake sale on the Library Lawn in early June. The next year, a baking contest, a face-painter, craft sellers, a children’s Fun Run, and a basket raffle joined the bake sale.
More events were added to the festivities, so activities moved from the down-town Library lawn to Sawyer Memorial Park. By 2020, the Town’s Recreation Committee was involved in the planning. There was no Festival that year at all due to the Pandemic but through modern technology, entries for widest leaf, longest stalk, and rhubarb floral arrangements were judged on-line.
This year, the Festival will be held on Saturday, June 1, 2024 at Sawyer Memorial Park from 10 am to 4 pm, and the Library Trustees are in charge. Parking and entrance are free. There will be craft vendors and food vendors; children’s activities and contests for adults and children. The Library Bake & Book tent is always popular — that’s where the Rhubarb Pies are for sale! Proceeds still go to the Building Fund.
All in all, Bennington has embraced its home-grown Rhubarb Festival, just as the early settlers welcomed the first fresh vegetable of spring when the Rhubarb came up every year. We hope that the Festival will continue for decades to come. Rhubarb has been called the “neighbor plant” because when you started your homestead, neighbors would give you rhubarb to plant. It would be right neighborly if you would come to our Rhubarb Festival.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on June 24, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
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Carkin’s Mill
On this 1858 map of Bennington, we see the house of ‘J. Carkin’ [just above the B] and
‘Carkin’s Powder Mills’ [just above the E]. Note that there is no Powder Mill Pond at this time.Bennington became a community because of its factories. Most began as ‘cottage industries’ and one of the oldest was John Carkin’s gunpowder mill. Carkin was originally from Lyndeborough, but moved to the banks of the Contoocook in 1823, when he was 31 years old. Initially, his house was on the Greenfield side of the river, and that was where he made his gun-powder — at home. We do not know where Carkin learned his trade, but he was rather successful at it.
The making of gunpowder involved several steps. First, you needed charcoal, made from the controlled burning of hardwood trees. The charcoal was crushed, then combined with sulphur and saltpeter. The mixture had to be kept moist, otherwise it might explode. It was rolled into cakes and then permitted to dry. The dried cakes were pulverized and sifted into sizes suitable for various guns: from hunting rifles to cannons.
To move this dangerous manufacture out of his house, Carkin dammed the Contoocook River south of the town, creating the Powder Mill Dam. When Bennington was incorporated, the section of Greenfield that contained the powder mill became part of the new town. By 1850, Carkin’s business was thriving, employing him and his son Willard, also Thomas West and Lucas Griswold, all described a “powder manufacturers” . The mill contained crushing rollers which were powered by the river, but that made the job no less dangerous. Some workers were killed by fires or explosions — such as Carkin’s brother Aaron — or killed by the machines themselves. The only reason to work there was the exceptionally high pay and the extremely short hours. I have been told that the company provided gunpowder for Union troops in the Civil War.
In 1866, Willard Carkin sold the mill, the dam, and the land to George W. Burns, who continued to operate the mill. Willard still worked there. His father died at age 91 in 1883, and the mill closed a few years later. Nothing remains of Carkin’s mill or his house. Perhaps they are under the water of the Powder Mill Pond, formed by expanding the dam in the early 1900s.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on May 27, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
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The Catholic Church
In small towns of northern New England, if you see a Roman Catholic church, you know that you are in a former or current Mill Town. With the influx of people from Quebec Province, Ireland, and Italy in the 1890s, those workers needed a place of worship. And so it was in Bennington, New Hampshire.
The oldest churches in Town were the Congregational Church [1833] and the Baptist Church [1824]. The Town was founded as a place for mills, but originally those were small, local, family-run operations. Immigration to Bennington hit its stride in the late 1800s, when people arrived to work in the Paper Mill. These immigrants needed a church of their own, but there was no Catholic Church.
The first Catholic residents of the Town had to travel to Keene to attend church. Beginning in 1870, a priest from Keene would come to Bennington once a month, to hold mass in some private home. In 1875, they could go to Peterborough, once a church was established there. In the 1880s, Catholic church services were held weekly in the Town Hall, conducted by visiting priests from Hillsboro. It was a dream to have a church of their own and a dedicated cemetery. All this required several steps: purchasing land [1894], receiving permission from the Bishop for a ‘mission church’ without a resident priest [1895], and building a church. Ground was broken in 1895, for a church named Saint Patrick’s which rose on a knoll at the south end of Main Street, where it turns south to Greenfield.
The original church, before it was painted white. Not until 1936 did the parish finally have its own pastor for the flock. A house was built across Greenfield Road from the church as a rectory and parish hall. By 1942, members of the parish came from Greenfield, Antrim, Francestown, Hancock, and New Boston. In 2005, the Bishop of New Hampshire decided that there weren’t enough priests to go around. Thus the Bennington, Harrisville, and Peterborough parishes were to be com-bined into Divine Mercy parish. In 2011, the church was decommissioned, and for a few years the basement of the building was the location for Town elections, until they moved to the school due to mold in the walls. The building is now a private home.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on April 29, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
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Bennington Architecture: the Federal
One can tell a lot about the economic history of a community by looking at the houses. If one style predominates, that reveals when the fortunes of the town were at their peak. Architecture styles change over time, showing the preferences of the people based on convenience, availability of materials, and outside influences. Bennington is no different, as eight distinct styles were employed from late 1700s to the 1950s: the Cape; the Colonial; the Federal; the Gable-Front; American Gothic; Italianate; Second Empire; the Queen Anne; and the Ranch.
High up on Verney Farm Road, we find this gem of a Federal-style house. Only one room deep, it has extensive additions in wood, built as the family out-grew the original farmhouse. The ‘Federal Period’ of US history coincides with the years after the Revolutionary War. Our nation was then deciding what type of government to use, and eventually, it was agreed that a Federal System would work best. From about 1780 to 1840, a style of architecture emerged called “Federal.” An evolution of ”Georgian Style“, it is very similar. What makes a house of this era Federal instead of Georgian is that it is built in America — Georgian Style is named after the British king against whom we rebelled. No way was anyone going to name a house style after him any more!
Benjamin Whittemore built his elegant Federal in 1830 at the North end of Main Street. The bricks were produced in Bennington with clay from the Weston family property. Note the wooden El at the back, which most likely housed the kitchen. There were two stories, like a Colonial, five windows above, two windows flanking the central door. Often built of brick, these buildings had two or four chimneys and were highly symmetrical. One of the hallmark features surrounds the doorway: above the door is a ‘fan’ of wooden slats or often a fan-shaped window. Alongside of the door, on both sides, are small-paned, narrow windows. You see that fan-light, you are seeing a Federal.
Stagecoach Road is the site of another grand Federal house that checks all the style boxes. Inside of the rectangular or square building were rooms at each corner: four upstairs, four downstairs. There was a large central hall that featured a graceful staircase to the upstairs. Often, a two-story wooden El was built on the back, for more bedrooms and for work space for the servants. The roof is gable-ended or hip-style.
When the Federal Style was popular, owners of older houses would ‘up-date’ their Capes or Colonials by adding windows around the front door to look more modern. That sure muddies the waters when trying to guess the age of an old house!
This Cape-style house on Bible Hill Road has a very Federal doorway. 
This house on Main Street has elements of a Colonial, with a Federal-ish doorway and portico. The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on March 25, 2024. If you click the ‘Subscribe’ button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month.
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Hancock Road
One of the most important roads in early Bennington was the road to Hancock. Until 1842, Bennington was part of Hancock, so if you had to go “to town,” that was the town you were going to. Nowadays, it takes eight minutes to drive the 4.7 miles, but in 1820, you would have gone by horse or wagon or on foot — and it would have taken a lot longer. Remember, that there was no US Route 202 in those days, so there were two ways to go, both over back roads. The Google Map screen shots below show both the approximate routes. Hancock Road was the better route, since it did not involve climbing steep Pierce Hill, but it tended to be much muddier when wet due to proximity to the river.
One path to take was over Pierce Hill Road to where it intersected with the road from Antrim to Hancock. 
The more usual route was to take Hancock Road, which went South along the River, then to Hancock. Today, “Hancock Road” in Bennington runs from the former Bennington Train Station south-west along the river to join what is now Route 202 West. The 1858 map below shows the full extent of the route, trending south-west, past the houses of J. Wilson and H. Ober, then taking a right onto what is now NH 137, which leads to the center of Hancock. It was a bucolic unpaved road, suitable for horse travel or pedestrians. In the Summer, it would be shaded but dusty. In the Winter, it would be snow-covered and drifted. In Mud Season, it would be impassable.
View of the road to Hancock, from an 1858 map. 
Colorized picture postcard c. 1890 with the title: Hancock and Bennington Road. Beautiful Autumn Scene. Imagine having to travel that distance to attend church on Sunday, to go to the Town Office to pay taxes or to speak to a Select Man — it would be an all-day excursion! In a time when people were self-employed [as farmers] or were on a factory payroll, there was no time to travel the Hancock Road for a less-than-serious reason.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on February 26, 2024. If you click the Follow button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month.
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The Pest House
Nowadays, ‘pest control’ might mean getting the red squirrels out of your attic, but in centuries past, it was a matter of public health and safety. Epidemics would sweep through communities: cholera, diphtheria, measles, chickenpox, influenza. We are vaccinated against diseases these days, but before modern medicine, they could kill. Towns needed a way to deal with pestilence, since there were no hospitals and not every town had a doctor.
Isolation was a method for stopping the spread of infectious disease. An infected family could shelter in place. But for illness in many homes at once, there was the Pest House [that’s short for ‘pestilence’]. Bennington built a simple structure on the West side of the river, outside of the Village Center. The very ill who were highly infectious would be sent there to wait it out. Volunteers, either a family member or a charitable townswoman who had previously survived the disease, would tend the sick.
The building was fair-sized but comfort was doubtful. The sick probably had to provide their own bedding and food. This was not a hospital in the modern sense — it was a holding space to keep the sick away from the well, until they recovered or died.
Eventually the building had other uses. Being near the railway, it became the Tramp House for a while. Homeless men who were out of work would ride the rails in the 1930s, going from place to place looking for jobs. When they arrived in Bennington, they were told to stay in the Tramp House until they left town.
Later, the Pest House was moved next to the Town Hall and used for storage. At last, it was moved down Main Street, to the sight of one of the original factories, to become the building for the Bennington Historical Society.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on January 29, 2024. If you click the Follow button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month.
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The Baptist Church
Baptist Churches began in 1612, among English refugees living in Holland. They were unwelcome in England due to their non-participation in the Church of England. This was the same group that became known as the Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock. In New Hampshire, the first congregation was established in 1751, and by 1809, there were churches in Weare, Temple, Mason, and Dublin. The time was ripe for the formation of a Baptist Church in Bennington — except that there was no Bennington then.
A Baptist Church was begun in Greenfield. They met at Joseph Eaton’s house on December 17, 1805. They called the new entity the “Peterborough and Society Land Baptist Church.” The Eaton house was in Greenfield at the time, but when the borders of Bennington were drawn, that part of Greenfield became part of Bennington. Among the early members were John Colby, Joseph Eaton, Benjamin Nichols, and Isaac Tenney, along with some wives and daughters, and they all became Bennington residents when the borders changed. On the 19th of August, 1824, the name was changed to Society Land Baptist Church. At last, Bennington was formed in 1842, and the name of the congregation became the Bennington Baptist Church.
Church services were held in a barn, but it is unknown where it was located. Surely it was in the Village, as down-town Bennington was called. Earliest ministers were chosen from among the Elders of the church: Elders Elliott, Westcott, Farrar, Goodnow, McGregor and Joseph Davis. After a while, ordained ministers were called to serve: Reverends J.A. Boswell, F. Page, John Woodbury, Zebulon Jones, Amzi Jones, J.M. Chick, S.L. Elliott, and W.W. Lovejoy.
During Rev. Lovejoy’s tenure, a big decision was made. In January, 1852, the Bennington congregation decided to rent Woodbury’s Hall, at Antrim for their meetings. Why? Did the meetinghouse roof leak? Was the building in Bennington too small, or too drafty? Had the road along the river toward Antrim been improved? A month later, the group voted to hold all their meetings in Antrim, and five years later, they were calling it the Antrim Baptist Church.
The barn of the house at 27 Bible Hill Road was once the Bennington Baptist Church.
The photo shows the barn at the rear of the house, projecting off to the right.In those days, an unused, unclaimed structure was often moved to another location and repurposed. The former Bennington Baptist Church building was moved from its original location to become the barn of the house at 27 Bible Hill Road. It is still there today.
The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on January 1, 2024. If you click the Follow button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month.
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