AUDIO TEXT:
Site Number 45: Elm and Spring Streets. Imagine this intersection in 1820. Surrounded by apple orchards, the old spring pump path to the south joined this cart path. Called the Way to Piscassic, the path led past Judge Shackford’s home up at the top of the hill. Only if his gate across the path was open could people pass through. A metal ring can still be seen in the rock in front of 46 Elm Street. It used to anchor the old gate on Shackford Hill.
Looking back toward Main Street in 1820, instead of the Library, you would see Job Savage’s house. But things were about to change. By 1830, the Newmarket Manufacturing Company had bought up all this land, and they had a couple of wooden buildings where we now see the Elm Street Mural. These were boarding houses for the Factory Girls. Not long after, the little Spring Pump Schoolhouse appeared on the corner here.
Over the next 80 years, the building continued. Sometime after the Civil War, Mill Agent George Frost built a large 3-story tenement across the street, not far from his house. First known as the French Block, after a domestic murder in 1870, it got a new name – the Slaughterhouse. A two-story tenement from that era—known as Steamboat Block—is still here on Spring Street. It went up for sale in 2022 for nearly two million dollars.
More mill housing popped up on Nichols Avenue—first known as Little Canada. With so many people living in such close quarters, it’s not surprising that a couple of epidemics broke out here – the first being diphtheria in 1886. During the smallpox epidemic in 1903 the town set up a quarantine hospital here in the old Elm Street boarding houses. To cover costs, the town took out a $5000 loan. That would be nearly $170,000 in 2022 terms.
But life in the factory town was not all grim. Children played in the streets or down by the river. The mills supported a local baseball league with teams of mill employees who played teams of townies. Their first ballfield upriver by Sliding Rock was eventually replaced with a new field just off Nichols Avenue—now known as the Beanie Howcroft Field.
In 1913, mill management chose a spot up the hill on Elm Street and created “Newmarket Park.” It was open to the public daily and had a pavilion for Saturday night dancing. That’s how “Shackford Hill” became known as “Park Hill.” The Beaulieu Little League Park replaced it in 1956.
By 1920, construction of Mill No. 8 had erased an entire street. With all of its buildings moved to the surrounding streets, High Street disappeared. Other buildings in the area were relocated as well. The smallest houses were moved and given a tiny street of their own—Elm Court. Only then was the giant five-acre Weave Shed put up, right across the street from the Slaughterhouse.
But both these landmarks would disappear by World War II. The mills tore down the Slaughterhouse before abandoning all their property in town; and the huge weave shed went for scrap to help the war effort. Its old foundation wall remained; it later became the canvas for the Elm Street Mural.
Newmarket’s population plummeted as families left town when the mills left. It would not bounce back until new industries once more occupied the old mills. Slowly families returned and grocery stores appeared. By the 1960s, local children once again had snowball fights on Elm Street and played “kick the can” in Elm Court.
Continue on Spring Street past Steamboat Block and Elm Court. Stop when you get to Chapel Street.
END OF AUDIO TEXT. See below for photos and more information.
In the 18th century Elm Street was a cart path known as the “Way to Piscassic”. It was renamed Elm Street once the NMCo created a new street plan and built the Agent’s House in 1823. Over the years, many other names would be associated with this street.
The boulder in front of 46 Elm Street has a metal pin in it—all that remains of the hinge that held a gate barring anyone from going down the west side of the hill through the pasture and orchards to the Piscassic River. As late as 1885 Elm Street was gated at the top of “Shackford Hill”. The Shackford family was heavily involved in town affairs during much of the 19th century, and owned property here for over a century. In the early 1800s Judge Seth Ring Shackford (1783-1848) built his house atop the northwest side of the street, near that boulder. Seth Ring Shackford was one of several surveyors hired by NMCo; their task was to assess the potential of the Lamprey River. Seth’s son Judge
William A. Shackford 
(1807-1885 ) later built a house across from his father’s, on the opposite (southeast) side of the hill; and that house (photo on the left) still stands. Seth Shackford’s house (photo on the right) was torn down in the 1970s.
When Seth Shackford died in 1848, access to the road was controlled by his son William. Likewise, the railroad crossing further up Elm Street was called Shackford Crossing. In 1873 William Shackford’s cow was struck and killed by a train at that crossing. Since it was considered a “private crossing” and the gate leading into the road was open at the time, no damages were paid by the railroad company.
Only after William died in 1885, did town selectmen open the gate permanently. They had heard more than enough complaints about the inconvenience of having to travel from Main Street via Packer’s Falls Road to go to the “new” (Riverside) cemetery.
In 1921 the last of the Shackford line, William’s daughter Mary Elizabeth Shackford died at age 79. She had been ill for some time, but was remembered in her obituary as “a woman of unusual mental endowment with a keen wit and a gift of mimicry.” As was typical of the times, she died in the family home. Mercifully, it was a more peaceful passing than that of her grandfather Judge Seth Shackford. By many accounts, he died a painful death on April 9, 1848 around 3 am. It is said that his moans were so intense that for decades after, on the 9th of April, they could be heard again, echoing from the top of the hill at 3 am.
Later the home was owned by Civil War Veteran Jeremiah Young who commited suicide by a blast from his shotgun in the building. As late as 2005, a clairvoyant visiting another house near the top of Elm Street declared: “There’s certainly is a lot of activity going on up here that I’m trying to block out”.
In contrast to the horrible deaths occurring in the house at the top of the hill, in July 1893 The Newmarket Advertiser printed a story describing Elm Street as a “Land of Eden”. It was written that Issachar Doeg transformed his grounds ftom an area strewn with the uncouth boulders that dotted the hillside to one of green sloping lawns. “There were magestic elm, oak and maples shading the streets….There was a time that this part of town was considered as dreary and remote, a sort of benighted region where lamps were unknown and to vetunre here after dark would have been hazardous…but now there is a spacious sidewalk and lamplight guides a way so that there is no pleasanter drive than this route to Packers Falls”.
When sidewalks first came to Elm Street, the town supplied the cement and the homeowner provided the labor…or the town provided both and the homeowner paid half the cost. The town eventually improved the road in 1913 when the NMCo built its new park on top of the hill. By the time New Village was constructed beginning in 1916, Elm Street was completely passable as it travelled down the west side of the hill, over the railroad tracks and connected up with Packer’s Falls Road.
The evidence of the elm tree beetle was verified in July 1909 by Colonel Thomas Dearborn of the NH State Commission for the Extermination of the Brown-tailed and Gypsy Moths. He spoke of the ravages of the elm tree beetle and observed damages done on Elm Street (pictured here) and said that unless they were destroyed all our elm trees would be killed. This beetle kills an ordinary elm in three years, and this was the second year they had been seen here. He warned the only remedy was to spray.
Most the of stately elm trees lining the street were destroyed within the next few years.
First there were the boarding houses. In the 1830s, the first mill agent Stephen Hanson began construction of two-story wooden boarding houses on the south side of Elm Street. These were in addition to the large brick buildings on Main Street near the newly-created High Street. All were to house the young women and girls working in the mills—the Factory Girls. That would be the model for several decades, but by the end of the Civil War, the mill’s workforce had changed. NMCo responded with the construction of the two-story “Steamboat Block” on Spring Street and the larger three-story Elm Block (AKA “French Block”) at the corner of Elm and Nichols Avenue. These were tenement houses; and when Ambrose Nichols became the sixth Mill Agent in 1879, he completed the housing transition that addressed the needs of the Newmarket’s new immigrant families.
But not all of the workers during those early years were young single women. Men with families moved to town to fill other positions in the mills or to work in one of the many businesses that sprang up—salesmen, delivery people, stable hands, etc. This meant additional children in the schools, and mill management responded, erecting a small schoolhouse nearby. According to Nellie Palmer George in Old Newmarket:
In 1838 Valentine Webster was paid by the town for “making good the underpinning of the North District School-house.” This was the Spring Pump School-house, so called. It stood near the northwest corner of Spring Street and Piscassic Road. The north boundary between Newmarket and Durham was near by.
It’s unclear exactly when the little schoolhouse appeared, but it was likely used until the Stone School was built in 1841. The old Spring Pump Schoolhouse appears in a photo later in this article. It seems to have been moved several times, as it ended up on Spring Street near Central Street—not where it started out.
“Little Canada”
The mills began to advertise for experienced weavers in Canada and Europe, offering incentives to employees who recruited other workers. Many immigrant families sponsored and housed extended family members who would remain until they could afford a home of their own. Waves of immigrant families – first Irish and English, then Canadian French, then Slavic families would share the American Dream in Newmarket. Mill Agent Nichols built a total of 23 tenement houses for employees, most of which were on High Street (these houses would later be moved in 1916 to make room for Mill No. 8—the giant one-room weave shed). Nichols also built housing in an area off Elm Street that became known as “Little Canada” — a label that appears in the 1898 and 1904 Sandborn Fire Maps. Years later, Little Canada was renamed Nichols Avenue in his honor. Typically, one house or duplex would house one family. But 1910 census records on Nichols Avenue listed as many as 17 people living in one 4-bedroom house, with most of the adults employed in the mills. And eventutally, the High Street houses ended up here—on Nichols Avenue, Washington and Lafayette Streets, and Elm Street, adding to the burgeoning mill employee population.
It must have been a challenge to keep track of the youngsters during this time. Very often mothers worked in the mills; and their younger children were watched by another relative or an older sibling. Truancy was rampant during the late 1800s and into the 1900s, with some families encouraging children to leave school for a factory job as soon as possible. Even play could be rough—like the snowballs that children formed around chestnuts to provide a more lethal effect. But another event in 1870 gave the “French Block” a nickname that stuck for years.
The “Elm Block” AKA the “French Block” was built sometime after 1865. On the night of June 4th 1870, tenant Hiram Jones murdered his wife; and the name immediately and unofficially changed to the “Slaughter House”.
Hiram Jones, who had lived in this town but a short time, fought with his wife as she screamed out for help. Neighbors came running to the door as he murdered his wife by cutting her throat with a razor, and then tried to cut his own throat. There was blood everywhere when police arrived and arrested him. The police had been to the residence twice within the past month concerning domestic disputes which he charges over his wife’s fidelity, and which the neighbors denied. The day of the murder, he had been fired from his job on a packet boat due to his acting irrationally. In October, Jones was tried at Portsmouth, convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to be hanged. Due to his health in prison he was hospitalized and the hanging was postphoned until he recovered from pneuomia — this caused an uproar when the story hit the national outlets. On appeal, due to his age, near seventy, and of doubts as to his sanity at the time, his sentence was commuted to State prison for life. He was much displeased at this, but lived only about three years, and died in prison.
The name The Slaughter House stuck: an October, 1903 newspaper article noted that the mills were painting some of their tenements including “the Slaughter House”.
On February 1st 1909 a Mrs. Marie d’Aberu, a Portuguese immigrant was employted in the silk mills. She lived in the “Slaughter house” when she was abducted from her home at gunpoint by a stalker named Harry Deveux. Deveux was Marie’s old lover back in Portugal prior to her marriage. After she came to the states she found work in the Lowell, Mass. mills where she met fellow mill worker and Portuguese immigrant Loraenz d’Aberu. Thney married in August 1908. Deveux left Portugal, tracked her to America, first to Lowell and then to Newmarket.
He threatened to kill both her and her husband if she did not leave quietly. He forced her out of the building and took her to Providence, R.I. where she escaped three days later on Febrary 4th and ran to the Providence Police for protection. Deveux was arrested in R.I. and Marie returned home and resumed her position in the mills.
NMCo contractor Frank WIlley demolished in December 1931. As production slowed in the mid 1920s, and as the mills had been laying off people prior to the strike all these residents had moved out of town to find work else and the building sat was vacant. The NMCo announced that it had “for some time contemplated the wrecking and removing of non-productive taxed property which had no possibility of becoming profitable. The destruction of the Elm Block was the beginning of that process.” That explanation seems highly suspect in hindsight: in 1931 the NMCo. was already shutting down and moving operations to Lowell, MA. This was very likely a last-minute attempt to change the tax listing from a three-story tenement building to an empty lot.
Doctor Greene disclosed that: “ The first case was September 26th, followed up with one or two cases per week for some time. About three weeks ago it raged in a more malignant form. It is, I think abating and the new patients have not so violent symptons. It did start among the French, and among them the germs spread rapidly. We have a bad drainage, and in more than two-thirds of our tenements the sink spouts are allowed to drain on the surface of the ground.” The tenements he referred to were The French Block, Steamboat Block, and some of the boarding houses in Little Canada, Elm and Central Streets.
The Dover papers were all ablaze with headlines that diptheria was breaking out in Newmarket—an epidemic stemming from the influx of French. There was a call for action, and Dover Superintendent of Schools Channing Folsom (himself a Newmarket native ) warned Dover schoolchildren not to go to Newmarket. At that time the town population was about 2,200 people; the mills employed 900 workers—about one third of which were French Canadians. It was among this group that the disease had spread.
Yet in January, when Charles Tasker the undertaker listed the deaths, it tells a different story:
01/09 Corn. M Witherill, o1/10 Harry Merchants (French) 01/13 J.H. Pinkham, 01/21 George Sampson; 01/26 Charles Sampson (French); 01/25 Martha A. Buckley, 01/ 27 Marian Chapman, 01/30 Ella Chapman and Ella Kenniston, 01/28 Annie Josephs — This was a total of 10 deaths in 19 days. All of them were children—only two of them were French.
Recollections of the diptheria epidemic may have prompted the mandatory lockup of patients during the smallpox outbreak 17 years later. In 1903 Mill Agent John Burton turned the houses at Nos. 7 and 9 Elm Street into a temporary hospital. The town rented it for $110 during the epidemic, and took out a $5,000 municipal loan ($5,000 in 1903 is equivalent to $147,997 in 2021).
”The total Town expenditures for this pandemic were $5,523 covering:
• Supplies, medical staff and vaccinations performed by Doctors Greene, Morse and Beaudet;
• Joseph Martineau, M. Lefevre and Mrs. Mailard for their work caring for the sick;
• Police Officers John Gordon and Peter Morin to guard the quarantining of the building;
• Henry Billiveau for cooking meals;
• Various vendors and druggists for food, supplies and fuel;
• Joseph Martineau for destroying clothing, and Charles Tasker for transporting furniture to the pest house for destruction.”
January 1903 notice: “One patient, a Peter Maynard, a young man living at 25 Nichols Avenue was forcibly removed to the “Detention Hospital”, suffering from a mild case of small-pox”.
These houses were among the many that were later moved in 1916 to make way for the weave shed—Mill No. 8.
See the link attached to this site for more information about the smallpox outbreak, including Dr. Charles Morse’s letter to the editor.
There have been baseball teams in Newmarket at least since the 1890s; and by 1903 the mills had organized teams. The Newmarket Advertiser reported on a baseball game in May 1903 between the weavers and the loom fixers (the weavers won, 11 to 8). (1903 was also the year of the first modern World Series—won by the Boston Americans playing against the Pittsburgh Pirates.)
Upstream on the Lamprey River, in a forested area around Sliding Rock, there had been a company baseball field for some time. In 1908 Mill Agent William Garner reseeded and improved the fields. Renamed the Company’s Pine Grove, it featured a new cinder walkway, a bridge over the brook, a fenced-in entrance and a ticket booth. For those less inclined to make the hike from Elm Street and Nichols Avenue down along a rocky path to sliding Rock — for a few cents Mr. McKone would ferry passengers from his boat house by the Main Street bridge at the bottom of Elm Street.
(photo: 1909 Eagle’s Baseball Outing at Pine Grove)
On July 3rd, 1913 Walter B. Gallant, an NMCo. employee and son of Mill Agent Walter M. Gallant created and opened a new park on Shackford’s Hill designed to hold band concerts and had a lit pavilion for dancing. The park was open every day to the public, not just employees. There was dancing every Saturday night from 7:30 to 11:00 pm, until such time in the fall as attendance would support it.
There were swings, teeter-boards and sand boxes for children. After “Newmarket Park” opened, the name “Shackford Hill” gave way to “Park Hill”. Even in 2022, many older residents still call the top of Elm Street
“Park Hill”.
Two years later in May 1915, the NMCo created a new athletic field behind Elm and Nichols Avenue with an entrance from each street. The old Pine Grove Park was abandoned due it’s condition and distance from the village. The new spot (today it’s called the “Beanie Howcroft Field”) had a ball field, a tennis court, a running track, and available seating.
The Sunset League Association of Newmarket managed this new area, running late afternoon and evening ball games and other sports. Even after Walter B. Gallant took his father’s job as Mill Agent, he remained a baseball fanatic who was on the Sunset League Board, with a continued commitment from the NMCo to maintain the grounds and facilities. The Sunset League games were played between teams of mill employees and townies. A team composed of the best players from all these teams was chosen to play out-of-town teams. No admission was charged to any of the games or other sporting events.
(Photo from Elm Street looking south down Spring Street – 1914)
#1 - The first building on the lower right was purchased by Al Zych after WW II. Al (1925-1999) and his wife Libby (1926-2018) owned and operated Al’s Superette for twenty years in one side of
the building while living in and above the the other side of the old tenement. This would be one of several local groceries that sprang up nearby in the mid-20th Century.
#2 - The façade of “Steamboat Block” the two-story tenement built by the NMCo around 1870 is visible on the right.
#3 – Is the entrance to the old High Street
#4 – Is the old one-room Spring Pump School House first built for millworker family youth before the Stone School was built in 1841. After that it served as a warehouse and a carpentry shop. It was later demolished and a two-story condo townshouse was built on the site.
The Old Spring Pump School was demolished and replaced in 2009 with a new townhouse / apartment complex (pictured left).
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The Old Steamboat Block (pictured right) as of August 2022 was on the market billed as either condos or townhouses- depending on the wants of the new owners.
Asking price: $1,950,000….
The old mill workers would faint at that price tag.
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After the Great War, Isreal Beauchesne moved his milk house near the railroad crossing east on Elm Street to the bottom of Park Hill across from Beech Street. He turned it into a small grocery store, catering to the residents of New Village.
By 1930 Adelard Beaulieu (1894-1966) was working in the store and selling local bread made in Blanchette’s home bakery. He purchased the business in 1945 and operated it until his death. The store was then purchased by the Harold Mastin family. The building footprint today remains pretty much as it was in 1920.
(photo: seated left is Adelard Beaulieu, and Mr. Isreal Beauchesne is on the right)
There were always private homes turned into boarding houses along Elm and Spring Streets where mill workers would stay. Other larger buildings also took in boarders. The large boarding house pictured below was operated by the widow “Grammie” Philomene Dion (1847-1920) Philomene has a stained glass window in her memory installed in the Vestry of St. Mary Church. She is shown seated in the photo below. Her daughter Amanda Poulet is directly behind her. Another woman, Doris Cardin worked for her as well. In 1910, they ran a boarding house from 9 Elm Street - the former “smallpox hospital”. It was seven years after the outbreak, and they catered to seven full time boarders. The trio also ran a boarding house with five boarders on Nichols Avenue in 1920.
Photo: Mrs. Dion’s boarding house.
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After WW II the basement section of the house on the right side of the photo became Ryan’s Market.
Frances (Olsonoski) Ryan (1913-1977) operated a grocery store here. Her husband Everett Ryan (1902-1965) was Chief of Police for the Portsmouth Navy Ship Yard in
1942; after his retirement, he joined his wife in running the store until their deaths.
The store was sold in 1978 to John and Shirley Harvey,
News Clipping photo of the 1978 store opening: from left- Paul Gahan, Chief of Police; Dorothy Shorey, welcome wagon; Peg Plummer, Indian Head Bank; Fr. Phil Bruni, St. Mary Church pastor; Patti Blanchette, state rep.; Laurence Beauschesne, realtor; Shirley and John Harvey, owners; Ed Wojnowski, state rep.; Joe Arsenault, first customer and friend; Joanne Harvey, cashier; Mike Provost, Newmarket Service Club; and Bill Ernest, meat specialist.
Moving along Spring Street toward Central Street we pass Weaver’s Row which was the old Weave Shed from 1917 until 1932 when the mills left town. The property was demolished for wartime scrap during WW II and remained a dusty parking lot where in the 1950s and 60s an occasional Legion carnival would sparkle for a week and then disappear for another year.
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The site of the old Mill No. 8 Weave Shed would become the home of Rockingham Shoe, with its odd quonset hut building. It had its Grand Opening in June, 1956. Owner Joseph Goodman and his son and manager Edward invited 430 visitors to a buffet luncheon and inspection of the new 2,400-ft. shoe factury made out of steel and concrete. It was one massive floor of machinery; small square windows ran along the side of the building. Rockingham made shoes for women and children.
The Goodmans closed the business in 1981 when—like so many other US manufacturers—they couldn’t compete with the global market’s cheaper foreign-made shoes.
Adelard Beaulieu (1894-1970) immigrated to Newmarket from Canada with his entire family in February 1912. He had worked as a woodsman prior to his employment by the NMCo. Trained as a loom fixer in the silk mill, he lived in Newmarket for 54 years, owned the Village Grocery 1945-1970 and the old town dump on “Dump Road” (which later became gentrified as “Beech Street Extension”). He donated land on Park Hill for a Little League Field (previously the site pictured above of the old Newmarket Park created by Mill Agent Walter Gallant in 1913). (The perimeter of the field was later used as fill from the Newmarket Shoe Company, and many kids who lived around the hill would slide in the winter in the back of the site, landing at the bottom amid compressed sawdust, old wooden heels and broken shoe lasts.)
A Little League Oganization was formed by men and women affiliated with the Legion and Elks who pooled resources to create the baseball park. The men also formed an Old Timer’s League (men over 40) and played other Seacoast teams of similar age; gate proceeds were split among each groups’ respective Little League teams. Today scores of boys (and now girls) continue the sport on top of the hill. A playground with slides and climbing ladders was later added for the younger kids.
Posted below is the opening game program for the first season of the “Newmarket Little Mule League”. It lists the officers, teams, players and coaches. It also lists those businesses and individuals who contributed to make this a success for generations to come.
During the early months of 1967 townspeople were gripped by the horror of an attack on a young girl. On February 1st, 21-year-old Jimmy St. Pierre stalked and assaulted Newmarket High School junior Amy Brousseau, prompting calls to the police. St. Pierre pulled her from Elm Court into a wooded area behind some houses and shot her multiple times. Pursued on foot by Newmarket Police Officer Donald Howcroft, St. Pierre shot at the officer and fled the area. Howcroft stayed with Amy while an ambulance was called. 
Amy was hospitalized—first in Exeter and later in Boston. The entire town mobilized when a call was put out for blood. Response from town residents was so great that most were turned away. Civic groups sponsored benefit dinners and events to help the family with medical expenses. A Boston boy band, the Runaways made a special recording, with all proceeds going toward this fund. From her hospital bed in Boston, Amy wrote cards to those who supported her during her struggle to survive. Among those were Newmarket’s Dr. Vernon Brown and his family. On March 7, Ruth Brown wrote Amy a letter thanking her for the card:
Your card arrived yesterday and brought a great deal of happiness to us—to know that you were strong enough to do this…I know that the nurses have kept inquiring…so they were pleased to receive a card from you at the [Exeter] hospital, and Dave said that there was a card at school too.
On March 26, 1967, after eight weeks of hospitalization and treatment for massive infection, Amy Brousseau died at Mass. General Hospital.
(photo: Memorial page of the Newmarket High School Class of 1968 yearbook)
Amy was 16 years old when she passed, leaving her parents and five siblings. To her older sisters she had become Auntie Amy, their children’s favorite babysitter. She was a popular teenager with dreams of being a nurse; and she enjoyed writing poetry and prose for her high school English class. One of Amy’s last assignments for English 11C was dated January 25, 1967—the week before she was attacked. Here’s how it begins:
There are many words that bring beautiful thoughts to my mind, and there are many words that bring ugly thoughts to my mind. I think that a word is important not for its sound, but instead, for its deepest meaning. As I thought of beautiful words and ugly words, one specific word kept appearing in my mind—“life.” Life may suggest many ugly things, but I think that the beauty overcomes the ugliness.
After Amy’s attack, Jimmy St.Pierre was arrested; and after her death he was charged for her murder. On January 17, 1968 he was sentenced to the NH State Prison.
See the link (Amy Brousseau: 1950-1967) attached to this site for the family’s memorial to a too short life:
http://www.newmarketnhhistoricalsociety.org/the-walking-tour/site-no.45-elm-spring-streets-nichols-avenue/amy-brousseau-1950-1967/
A summer thunderstorm released a 90-mph straight line wind gust which touched down on Packers Falls Road by the cemetery and raced down Elm Street along Bay Road as it dissipated out over Great Bay. It created a half-mile by 200-yard-streach of damage to more than 30 homes, toppling chimneys, shattering windows, destroying roofs, uprooting and snapping old large trees, and downing power lines. It tore the slate roof off the Library, “totally demolished” four trailers and seriously damaged eight others in the Lamprey Mobile Home Park. It peeled the roofs off the mill buildings housing Essex International Inc. and MacAllen Co. Inc.
No one was seriously injured, although four people were taken to area hospitals for minor cuts and bruises. The slates from the Library and MacAllen buildings were found ½ mile away stuck like razor blades in trees, roofs and other buildings. The Rockingham Shoe 23-year-old factory buckled and was forced to close down for two weeks for emergency repairs, sending 110 employees home. When assessed by the NH Disaster Office, total damage was more than $3 million.
The wind lifted shingles from Mills #2 and #4 and blew out windows, leaving the old millyard looking as if it had survived a bomb blast.
The gust was so strong that it twisted the Masonic Building at the joint between the first and second floors, causing an evacuation of the building.
(photos of Riverside cemetery & the NMCo millyard)
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After its beginnings in the old Kingman building, the Lamprey Health Center moved to the corner of Elm Street and Nichols Avenue. Eventually this facility became too cramped, with the demand for services far outstripping the property’s capabilities; so the Center expanded into its current location on South Main Street.
(photo of US Senator John Sununu at Lamprey Health taken by Jay Reiter of the Portsmouth Herald, Published Feb.5, 2005)
In 2005, US Senator John Sununu visited the state’s oldest nonprofit community health care center . This was a photo-op concerning the Center’s plan to break ground in April on a $2.5 million addition that would more than double the size of its South Main Street office. Sununu and US Rep. Jeb Bradley, both Republicans, helped obtain $450,000 for the expansion as part of the federal budget adopted in December, 2004.
The 300-foot foundation wall of the old Mill No. 8 Weave Shed is still here, extending from the Library to Spring Street. For the town’s 250th Anniversary celebration in 1977, Newmarket schoolchildren painted scenes on it. Those paintings faded and peeled with time; and in 1996 the Newmarket Business Association decided to do something about it. They commissioned mural artist Leann Wiley to capture images of Newmarket to include members of the Business Assocation. It was funded by the Association and members of the community whose names were included in the last section of the mural. Leann transformed the blank cement wall into snapshots of Newmarket in the 1990s. Some of the businesses such as Oliver’s Cafe and Marelli’s Fruit and Real Estate have since closed, but others like the Stone Church, Riverworks and Kruzeck’s Garage are still here. The wall has been a favorite spot for family photographs ever since. (Leann returned to touch up the wall in 1998 for the dedication of the wall in memory of Laurence Beauchesne.)
Leann Wiley pictured here, repaired sections of the wall.
NH Crossroads filmed her at work which was published on the Youtube channel — visit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VmVuhn8ww4
