Before the tiny white building by the General Store was moved to its current location, it served as Harrisville’s first tramp house. With the introduction of railroads paired with economic hard times, transient paupers, or tramps, became an issue across New Hampshire. Tramps became so numerous that many towns built small, simple buildings called tramp houses.

In 1881 Charles Asa Blake, of Jaffrey, bought the Union Hotel at the western entrance to Harrisville village, which had been a place of lodging since the late 1860s. Blake reopened it as “Nubaunsit House.”

Jeannie Eastman explores the architectural styles of Harrisville, from Georgian and Federalist to Gothic Revival and Victorian.

Harrisville, New Hampshire is important because it is the only nineteenth century industrial community in New England which survives in anything like its original form. All the major components of the town are still intact and it appears today almost exactly as it did in the nineteenth century.

On Sunday, January 27, 2013, Rick Monahon and his wife, Duffy, were killed in a tragic automobile accident in Hillsborough, NH, as they were returning from a day of skiing at Mount Sunapee.

Repairs to the Eagle Hall Carriage House have generated a lot of interest and many questions as to why Historic Harrisville chose to undertake the extraordinary measures necessary to keep the original structure standing rather than take it down.