Building Towns and Myths

Abstract

Walpole, New Hampshire, is a picture perfect New England town. White buildings surround a quiet green where brass bands perform summer concerts and notices caution traffic to proceed one-way on Sundays, churchgoers creating community's only rush hour of week. Beautiful old homes line streets and newer houses dot hillside behind town, affording an expansive view of Connecticut River below and hills of Vermont beyond. Walking around Walpole (people still walk there), one hears engines of individual automobiles, not constant drone of traffic. Route 12 and Interstate 91 pass by town, taking people where they are going without taking them through Walpole. Sheltered from hurry of modern life, town seems a vestige of New England past, when life was simpler and more peaceful. But things were not always that way. Few people driving along Route 12 take any notice of a gray stone roadside marker that commemorates a skirmish between town's first settler, John Kilburn, and an Indian raiding party. Walpole in 1750s was at northern edge of English colonial settlement, a place where men plowed with their muskets close to hand. Fifty years or so later, Walpole was a very different place from what it had been in Kilburn's day and from what it is today. It was a bustling commercial and business community with stores and shops, merchants, a bakery, a hattery, a tailor's shop, a tannery, blacksmiths, printers, stores, a post office. Artisans, lawyers, and doctors plied their trades. Travel then did not pass by Walpole; it passed through it along the great river road that hugged Connecticut Valley. Just north at Great Falls (later Bellows Falls, Vermont), a rope bridge spanned Connecticut, and river traffic bypassed falls via a navigation canal. The Third New Hampshire Turnpike passed through town and stagecoaches stopped there en route between Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire. Walpole's several taverns became meeting places for exchange of news, information, and ideas. The poems and prose of local literati