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.”

In the fall of 2010, Historic Harrisville marked the 40th anniversary of the closing of Cheshire Mills. I couldn’t make the meeting but I heard a lot of people who worked in the mill talked about their experiences there. Though I never worked in the mill, it was a big part of my life growing up in town.

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.