Out of Date and Ahead of Its Time: Historic Harrisville's First Fifty Years

This new 233-page color hardback documents the history of Historic Harrisville in interviews, photographs, and archival materials.

As for many New England towns, the decline of the textile industry in the twentieth century was devastating for Harrisville. Tucked into the southwestern hills of New Hampshire, the town's primary employer was a mill that in 1970 finally filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors. Yet fifty years later, the village and mill buildings survive-in fact, thrive. Dozens of structures that date to the mid-1800s-including the mill complex, a library, boarding houses, and handsome homes-remain the center of a vibrant town. The village boasts a lively general store, post office, children's center, affordable housing, artist studios, a woolen yarn spinning mill, and hydroelectric and solar power-surrounded by nearly 150 acres of conserved land.

This unusual small-town success is in part a consequence of a radical idea that became Historic Harrisville, Inc. Established the year after Harrisville's mill closed, the organization launched when three friends, still in their twenties, resolved to convert the beleaguered nineteenth-century industrial complex into a modern town where they could continue to live and work. They rallied a small group of farmers, conservationists, disillusioned businessmen, unorthodox lawyers, inspired architects, and all-out optimists, and began inventing their own strain of historical preservation rooted in the character of their village. What began as a gamble soon evolved into a sustainable approach to conservation, one that is now a model for communities across the country.

To celebrate the first five decades of this unlikely organization, Historic Harrisville's story has finally been set down in full. Written and assembled by preservation specialist Elizabeth Durfee Hengen and conservation expert Robert H. Russell, Out of Date and Ahead of Its Time is an illuminating portrait of this pioneering effort. Weaving interviews, archival material, and choice historical context with full-color photographs, Hengen and Russell explore the origin of the organization and how it maneuvered long odds, necessity, and luck to remain essential for more than fifty years.

A distinctly local story of determination and originality, Out of Date and Ahead of Its Time is a unique tribute to a groundbreaking organization that is responsible for America's most completely preserved mill village. From the untold stories to the triumphs now taken for granted, it is a marvelous bricolage of substantive, creative historic preservation and its transformative potential.