Tag: Bennington Historical Society

Bennington Architecture: Gothic Revival

December 22nd, 2025

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 10 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 mid-1800s, a new building style emerged. Architect Alexander Jackson Davis had written books about house construction from 1830-1850. Whereas previous buildings had been inspired by Greek or Roman sources, Davis suggested something of a medieval style. The pointed windows and steep roofs of the Gothic Revival were popular for a while, before they were supplanted by the next cultural fashion. Some say that the Gable-Front House is influenced by the Gothic Revival, with its pointed gable facing the street, but that might be a coincidence. Another name for this style is Victorian Gothic. The house in the background of Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic” is built in the Gothic style.

In truth, there is no real example of a Gothic Revival house in Bennington. But there is one dwelling that shows how styles evolve, even within the same structure. Where Mill Street/Antrim Road meets Main Street, next to the Historical Society, there is a brick house. It was built as a Cape in the early decades of the 1800s, facing South, at right angles to the road. The front door has Federal side-lights, maybe original, maybe added later, reflecting yet another style.

Mid-century, a door was added on the street-facing wall, turning the house into a Gable-Front. Above the door on the gable side is a window — but not just any window. The pointed arch of the window [typical of Medieval church architecture] shows that it was designed with Gothic Revival in mind.

Over 50 years, the owners of the house responded to changing fashion four times! “Keeping up with the Jones”, and keeping up with the times!

Promo: The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on January 19, 2026. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
Cider Season

October 20th, 2025

Self-sufficiency has its seasons. In the Spring, the 19th century residents of Bennington would have been tapping their maple trees to produce enough syrup and sugar to last the family through the year. In the Summer, planting, harvesting, and putting up the crops took up their time and dictated the school year of their children. In the Fall, harvesting apples to turn into cider was the order of business.

Apples were grown for several purposes: to eat fresh in the Fall, to make into pies and other desserts, to sell, to store in barrels to eat in the Winter, to make into cider, to make into vinegar. There were many varieties of apples that the homesteader could plant, some best for applesauce, some good for storage, some especially for cider. Cider itself had two purposes. When freshly pressed, it was a pleasant, sweet beverage, however it had a short shelf-life. On the other hand, sweet cider was also very easy to ferment into what we now call ‘hard cider’, which could be imbibed from Fall into Spring. The alcohol content might have been 5-8%. BTW, the apple trees that Johnny Appleseed [John Chapman] planted in Ohio were for making apple cider — hard apple cider. Making cider took some long-term planning!

We live on land originally settled by the Colby Family in 1825. Where our house stands was the farm’s pasture and orchard. As we cleared the white pine forest for our house site, we found the descendants of ancient apple trees, still surviving. Colby’s trees had been planted in the 1820s, and might have begun to bear fruit 15 years later. Before Bennington was even a town, people were preparing to make apple cider. We preserved as many of those antiques as we could. One tree produces cider apples — small and tart and late-bearing, perfect for cider. Good cider is a combination of ‘cider’ apples and ‘sweet’ apples.

Pressing cider for the family could be done at home, using a small press, but more likely there was a neighborhood or town press that would deal with whole wagonloads of apples at once. Like a corn-husking bee, neighbors would gather to press their apples communally, putting the cider into barrels to store in the cold ‘back house’ at home. There it would ferment all by itself, if conditions were right. When temperature were cold in the Winter, the alcohol in the cider would prevent it from freezing, forming a layer of water ice on the inside of the barrel, with hard cider of high alcohol content [ABV 20%] in the center. Now we call this Ice Wine, and you pay a lot for it in the State Store. Teenage boys would sneak out to the back house with a straw, to sample the Ice Wine, knowing they would be in for a hiding if their dad found out! Dad was looking forward to that tipple for himself, to get him through the winter.

Apple cider, sweet or hard, was the go-to beverage of the 1800s. Making it was an important part of village and farm life of the past.

The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on November 17, 2025. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
Sap Season, the Old Days

February 25th, 2025

As winter days grow longer, the trees know that Spring is coming, and the sap starts to rise. When colonizing settlers first arrived in New England, they had never heard of maple syrup. The Abenaki People had invented the process of turning maple sap into maple syrup generations ago, and they taught the new-comers the process. Sugar from the Caribbean was an expensive commodity in New Hampshire, so settlers took to making their own sugar from maple sap.

“Maple Sugaring”, a print by Currier & Ives

In the early 1800s, farmers and townspeople alike would plant sugar maples close to the house to make the process easier. Look for a row of old maples alongside a country road, or arranged around a Colonial or Federal-style house — those were put there on purpose by a canny long-dead resident to have a convenient source of maple sap. Otherwise the home-owner would have to range through the forest to find enough trees to tap. During the Civil War, this became an act of Northern solidarity, since the sugar made from sugar cane was produced with slave labor.

To make syrup, 40 gallons of sap — preferably from Sugar Maples, Acer saccharum — are boiled down to yield one gallon of syrup. To supply a family’s needs took a lot of sap and a lot of firewood. If the boiling is continued past the syrup point, the sugar will begin to crystalize, and come out of the solution. “First run” sap produces a light-colored, mildly-flavored syrup and sugar, compared to the syrup that the tree produces weeks later, and thus the early run was more highly prized. Sap season lasts around four weeks.

Maple syrup was used as a sweetener in baking, and of course to put on griddle cakes and bread. Maple sugar was used as a sweetener in beverages, and for dusting over a cake for decoration. Many farms that took in summer visitors would sell maple sugar candy or syrup to their guests. Those products were also useful for barter.

The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on March 25, 2025. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
The Bridge in the Village

November 19th, 2024

Residents of Bennington refer to the center of the town as “The Village”. This was the original settlement of the town, where the houses and mills were located around 1800. The population moved into areas outside the Village as farms became established away from the river. But the river defined the town and the river needed a bridge.

When Joseph Putnam moved to Bennington and set up his water-powered saw mill, he built a wooden bridge across the Contoocook. Like the house of the Second Little Pig in the children’s story, wood is not the most suitable material for a bridge: either the water rots it or it is washed away in a flood.

Within 10 years of building his first bridge, Putnam solicited help from the Town of Hancock to build a new one. He made a deal to join his land on the right bank of the river with Hancock on the left bank. This done, the bridge would be the responsibility of Hancock’s citizens to pay for it. They dragged their feet for five years, and at last a wooden bridge with stone abutments was completed in 1799.

That bridge was destroyed by successive Spring floods in the 1880s. A special town meeting was gathered in 1886, “to see what kind of a bridge the town will vote to build…” They elected to buy a pre-fab iron bridge from the Berlin [Connecticut] Iron Bridge Company for $1559.31. It had a footbridge on the upstream side with a railing.

Merry cyclists cross the 1886 bridge in style. Attached footbridge is seen on right.

That bridge was still standing in the early 1930s. In 1935, in an effort to employ the millions of people impoverished by the Great Depression, the US government established the Works Progress Administration. The town applied to upgrade the bridge and the approaches to it, and in 1934, a new structure appeared: a single arch span of New Hampshire granite. The road and bridge surface were widened to accommodate cars and trucks. Houses were moved out of the way, as was the Bennington Railroad station.

The bridge is still in use, festooned with greenery in the winter and decked with flowering baskets in the summer. It does its job well.

The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on December 17, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
Bennington Beverages, alcoholic types

October 14th, 2024

An historian asks, “What happened on a particular day – a battle? The death of a king?” The social historian asks, “What did people do on that day – what did they wear? What did they eat?”

Today we will answer the question, “What did people drink in Bennington?” We know that people were living within the boundaries of the present town as early as 1782, so we will take that as a starting place. My references for this foray into the past include: Tea With Jane Austin; the two Town histories and Colonial Spirits.

As we saw last month, there were many non-alcoholic beverages available to early residents. Do not think that our early residents were teetotalers: alcoholic beverages were part of daily life. The Farm Wife had to be well-versed in turning plant matter into beverages: for family consumption, to supply to hired hands, to serve to guests, to preserve the harvest, and for medicinal use.

>>Gruet is an ancient fermented mixture made from herbs and grains but no hops. It is a light, refreshing alcoholic beverage with a short storage life. It would be made and served at home during the summer when the flavoring herbs were ripe.

>>Beer was consumed in vast quantities all day long. This was in keeping with traditions from the Old Country. When we read today about a man of that era drinking a gallon of beer a day, it sounds shocking. But you should know that the alcohol content was very low: 1-2.5% — practically water! Beer was made at home and also at taverns and public houses. With the addition of hops, beer could keep for months.

>>Cider was a very important beverage in early times. By 1800, apple trees had become well-established and their fruit was needed to make the mildly alcoholic drink we refer to today as ‘hard cider.’ Cider is very easy to make and was put up in barrels to last the family through the year. The alcohol content was 3.5-4%. In the winter, the cider barrels would freeze – except for the alcohol portion. Teenage boys would sneak out to the shed and get schnonkered on the highly intoxicating liquid. Cider was usually of the ‘still’ variety, not the bubbly cider more popular today.

>>Apple jack is distilled cider. Distilling was a common home activity to make small quantities of medicinal alcohol necessary for preparing tinctures. Most farm wives had a distillation apparatus and they took pride in preparing liqueurs and other distilled delights. A gallon or two of apple jack would be doled out for celebrations or as medicine for its stimulating effect.

>>Wine from Europe could be purchased at great expense in port cities, but it is unlikely that even the most wealthy Bennington citizens were drinking it until the later 1800s. Local people could make do with home-made wine. So-called ‘country wines,’ they were not made from wine grapes but from local fruits. If the Good Wife sent the children out to pick wild fruit, some of it went into pies and jellies and lots of it went into wine. Wine would be served socially and also used for medicinal purposes. “Take a little wine for the stomach’s sake,” said Saint Paul to Saint Timothy.

>>And then there is rum. Made with molasses from the Triangle Trade, rum could be purchased at the tavern or even at Whittamore’s general store. Making rum oneself was not a common practice since it took ingredients in quantities not found at home. Rum was in punch, in cocktails [they go back to the 1700s], and sometimes drunk straight up. Rum was used to influence voting all over the 13 Colonies as ‘vote buyers’ would bribe people with liquor to vote early and often for their candidate.

Rum in those days was a rather nasty beverage. To temper its harsh flavor, many other ingredients were added. A typical drink of the era might have been a Cold Flip. It contained rum, molasses, salt, a raw egg, and brown ale all shaken together and topped with nutmeg. Then there was Regent’s Punch, made of tea, rum, wine, and fruits.

The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on November 11, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
Bennington Beverages, non-alcoholic choices

September 16th, 2024

An historian asks, “What happened on a particular day – a battle? The death of a king?”

The social historian asks, “What did people do on that day – what did they wear? What did they eat?”

Today we will answer the question, “What did people drink in Bennington?” We know that people were living within the boundaries of the present town as early as 1782, so we will take that as a starting place. My references for this foray into the past include: Tea With Jane Austin; the two Town histories and Colonial Spirits.

>>“Adam’s Ale”, as water has been called, was not uncommon as a beverage. Living on the river made fresh water very accessible. The hill farms had to rely on dug wells, but the water in town was good to drink. It is popularly said that Colonial-era people drank beer because the water was unhealthy. That was true in European cities, but not in early small-town New England, until industrial pollution made the water unsafe.

>>Tea from England was expensive and had been a bone of contention during the revolutionary war, so it is unlikely that early residents of Bennington drank much tea. Tea leaves were expensive, so they would have been steeped over and over to wring all the flavor from them. The alter-natives were herbal teas from such sources as raspberry leaves or bergamot. These were considered inferior but patriotic. Herbal teas were also used as medicines. Tea also found its way into drinks that packed a bigger punch, as we will see later.

>>Coffee would have made its way into local stores by mid-1800.

>>Sumac ‘Lemonade’ was made from the red clusters found on Staghorn and Smooth Sumac in late Summer. Soaked in hot water, then strained, the tart liquid was sweetened with honey or maple syrup to make a pleasant beverage. This knowledge came from the Indigenous People of the area.

>>For the farmer or laborer toiling in the hot sun, Switchel was considered the best thirst-quencher. Made of water sweetened with molasses or honey, the most important ingredient was cider vinegar or sometimes rum. Pitchers of cool switchel were a boon to the hay-making crew.

>>In Autumn, apples would be pressed into cider. While the season lasted, cider was a delightful drink, just as it is now.

The next installment of the Bennington NH Historical Society Blog will be posted on October 14, 2024. If you click the Subscribe button, all future posts will be sent straight to your inbox every month – for free.
Schools in Society Land, 1700s

July 22nd, 2024

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.
Sunnyside Cemetery

June 24th, 2024

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.
Carkin’s Mill

April 29th, 2024

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.
The Catholic Church

April 1st, 2024

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.