Notes from the 2024 Fall Incorporators Meeting

The Incorporators Meeting held on November 2, 2024 went off without a hitch. The meeting was well-attended by nearly ninety incorporators, the food was wonderful, and everyone was treated to a presentation by Tom Driscoll, part of the team at Sash & Solder who have restored the stained glass windows of St. Denis. In her opening remarks, Michelle Aldredge made sure to thank Erin Hammerstedt for all of her hard work as the outgoing executive director. Michelle highlighted Erin’s many achievements, especially the $800,000 grant she secured from CDFA for St. Denis, the way she transformed Historic Harrisville’s relationship with the town and community, and her indefatigable dedication all areas of the organization, from rental analysis to bolstering our archives, completing the hydro project, and guiding us through the Covid years. Her leadership, preservation knowledge, creative thinking, and community relations have all strengthened the foundation of our organization, and we’ll miss her.

John Knight then addressed the room, introducing himself and talking about the initiatives taking shape at HHI. For those who could not be there, we’ve posted his remarks below.

Good morning. Thank you all for coming and thank you Michelle. For the past five years, I’ve been sitting in these chairs listening to Erin talk about Historic Harrisville with such ease and charm that, honestly, it’s a bit of a nerve-wracking act to follow. There are big shoes to fill. But it’s also an exciting moment, for me and hopefully for Historic Harrisville. This meeting, as you know, is one of two semi-annual meetings we hold for incorporators, but it’s not our official annual meeting—that comes in the spring. Which means that this morning there’s no business to conduct—we don’t have to take votes and give you committee reports—it’s really just a chance to share with you what’s been going on, have lunch, and connect.

So I’ll talk for a little while about what’s happening at Historic Harrisville and try to introduce myself by sharing with you what I’ve noticed about the organization since coming on in this new role. Naturally I had some vague sense of it when I was sitting in one of those chairs, but now I’ve a whole new perspective about what’s really under the hood. And I have a few images to share, but admit that I’m more of a word guy, so the pictures are sparing, but deliberate.

I remember very clearly the first incorporators meeting I attended, in the spring of 2019. I had just moved to Harrisville with my wife, Rebecca, and we hardly knew anyone. In fact, being here at all felt a bit like an accident: I grew up in Greenfield, New Hampshire, and Rebecca and I wanted to move out of New York City, where we were living, to a small town. We hoped to buy an old house, fix it up, start a family. But our lives were still very much ensconced in New York, and so we’d been looking for property in the Hudson valley and the Berkshires. We traipsed from showing to showing, and though we saw some decent places, I kept having the feeling that the towns weren’t real. They weren’t necessarily bedroom communities—they had plenty of people who lived there all week—but still, the general feeling was always of being a satellite; everyone had one foot in a backyard, and the other on Sixth Avenue or Wall St.

Still, I was hesitant to go further north, to come back home. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps something generational in which people my age were so enthusiastically encouraged to go out into the world! by movies and music and eventually the internet that coming back home seemed somehow small, like a last resort. Or maybe that’s how things always are for people: we’re always on a tightrope between home and away, feeling our way to our particular equilibrium.

In any case, Rebecca and I were staying with my parents over in Greenfield in the fall of 2018. They live in a wonderful eighteenth-century farmhouse, the kind with the big wood cookstove in the kitchen, horse-hair plaster walls, floors that haven’t been level for two hundred years, a stream running through the basement. It was exactly the kind of place I was hoping to find for myself. Yet still, ridiculously, Rebecca and I would haul over to Hudson or Rhinebeck or Great Barrington on weekends to look at shabby cottages.

Then one evening we went to a small community theater show in Peterborough—not the Players, but a new group called Firelight. It was some of the best theater I’d seen in years, and among the truly glittering array of stylish and intelligent people all chatting amiably afterwards, I met Michelle. We exchanged stories, I told her what we were up to, and she said “Let me have your number, I might know of something.”

About a week later I got a call.  “There’s a little yellow house in Harrisville,” she said. “The people who own it are wonderful but they’re moving into town. Would we like to see it?”

My first thought was no. New Hampshire was too far away, our jobs were in the city. And honestly I think I felt as though moving back to this area would be like throwing in the towel—the world is so big! Why not go somewhere new?

But that Firelight Theater show was also jingling in my head. It was seriously fun; and these were impressive people—the kind you hope will be your friends. I also knew about Silver Lake, and the Harrisville beach, and of course I knew about the General Store. Why not? I figured. It doesn’t hurt to look.

That house turned out to be the one owned by Andrew and MaryLou in Chesham next to the cemetery. We loved it immediately, not only because it had a little wood stove in the kitchen, a beautiful skylight in the bedroom, crooked old floors, and big trees outside. But it had the feel of soul, something warm and human, and immensely real. This, it turns out, was also Edie Clark’s house, the one she wrote about in her book The Place He Made in which she says inside “the light was right.” And before her, it belonged to Ralph Bemis, a man who ran a poultry farm from the barn that still stands in the backyard, and who was not only on the school board, but also one of the very first trustees of Historic Harrisville.

A few months later we had hardly put all our pots and pans away before a white van pulled into our driveway. Do you remember the white van? I watched a dapper man knock gently at our door. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Chick. Welcome to town. You’ll let us know if you need anything?” He didn’t say anything about Historic Harrisville, didn’t talk about himself or put on airs. It was simply a welcome and a kindly, Who are you?

Now, I’ve come to think that however half-formed it may be, Chick rarely does anything without some scheme in mind. But at the time I was simply glad for the welcome. And then as he was backing around in the driveway, he pointed to a grassy patch and said, “I think your septic tank is right there. Be careful you don’t drive over it.”

This was baffling, and it took me weeks to figure out what he was talking about. But of course it turned out that he was right: Chick knew precisely where the septic tank was on a property he had never owned.

Some weeks later I found myself sitting right here in this room for my first Incorporators Meeting. It was astonishing, and a little confusing, to see so many people talking seriously and earnestly about running hydroelectric power in a centuries-old mill, about making walking trails from one end of the town to the other, about a strategic plan with words like “vitality” and “community”; talking about hand-rails and new sandwiches at the general store and about bricks—so much talk about bricks. It was incredible to me that an organization could exist that was striving to take care of a place and the people who lived there in so many different ways—in fact, in every way it could think up. And there was nothing vapid or bureaucratic about it, nothing self-serving—everyone seemed genuinely interested in each other, in me, in their town. It was precisely the sort of thing that seemed down-right impossible in the Hudson Valley.

But most of all, I remember that it was at that meeting in April 2019 when Chick announced he was stepping down as chairman of the board. I still didn’t really understand who Chick was or where he was coming from, but there was no question that whatever half-formed plan he had tossed off fifty years earlier had been working. There was hydropower, none of the buildings were falling down, there was no highway running through town, the store was up and running, all the buildings were rented to businesses and residents. 

And part of what he said—the thing I really remember—was a question he put to the room, to us: Is this as good as it gets?

Now the thing about Chick is that he’s not afraid to stir the pot. He likes to put something forward that he knows is open-ended, betting that someone won’t be able to resist taking him up. Obviously his answer was “no” and I think that has only been borne out in the past five years as Historic Harrisville fielded everything from the planned-for work—installing new roofs, replacing boilers, finding tenants, running the store—to the unplanned things like five-foot snow storms and a global pandemic.

At the time I didn’t think much about Chick’s rhetorical bit and life carried on. Rebecca and I had two children and I kept on as book editor, working with people across the country on their novels and memoirs. But increasingly I felt a nagging in the back of my head that I was only half-living here because this work was always involved somewhere else. I think this is one of the difficulties of remote work that communities like this will have to sort out in the next fifty years—the internet makes it possible to work anywhere, but doing so inherently removes you from the community and world you are actually in. I may have made it further north, but I was still living as though we had purchased a house in the Hudson Valley. But what’s astonishing about Historic Harrisville, is that it provides the opportunity for people—employees and volunteers and families—to be genuinely engaged with where they are. The work here is local in the most exquisite sense, and over the years I’ve come to think of Chick’s rhetorical question not as a congratulations, and not even a genuine question, but as a challenge and an invitation: What is the work that needs to be done?

There’s no doubt that there is much here that is good, maybe even as good as it gets. One of the things I’ve been doing to understand Historic Harrisville these past few months is going through each of the buildings with Fred—I call it the Fred tour. Very different than the Chick tour. Walking around with Fred one understands immediately the immense task of stewarding all these very old buildings, and one quickly realizes the small miracle it is that it’s all under control. Sure, there’s a few leaking pipes, a couple antique boilers, a couple more that are even older, perhaps the occasional leaking roof, but there are no obvious and dire crises—at least at the moment. Fred, Kat, Scott, and many others have poured themselves into these properties and as a result they are beautiful, and efficient, and stable.

And Fred can tell you when every valve was replaced, what time of year a particular crack in a particular basement leaks and how much it leaks. With ease he rattles off the maintenance schedule of sprinkler and septic systems, builds custom dam weirs and period-perfect doors, analyzes paint chips and discusses inferior cement mixtures.

Fred is as good as it gets. And this is not just because he’s outrageously qualified and learned and attentive and hardworking, attuned to all the needs of twenty-six different properties. He understands the essential and unique qualities that make these buildings special. The most obvious example of this is the Granite Mill. Many of you probably remember the restoration of this building—the crane out front, the work in the attic—this was a major job, one that I understand didn’t happen too soon either. But did you know that Fred figured out the origin of the lime cement used to build it, tracked it down to the mine in New York, and began mixing it for the first time since the nineteenth century so that the rehab of this building would be genuine and true to the original construction?

Did you know that all the stones were cut from a granite quarry in Marlborough? Each block was hand carved using tiny metal wedges and hammers, and each mason paid by the block. They probably cut a block a day, maybe two. Not only that but all the blocks are different sizes—the ones at the bottom bigger than the ones on the top, some angled, others perfectly square. And the whole building was laid out flat on the ground at the quarry before it was sent here, so that they knew it would all fit together. It was then loaded onto mule carts and hauled over the hill, usually at night so that the blocks would be here, ready to assemble in the morning. And then they put it all together. In a sense, this means that that building was built twice—once flat, a second time vertically.

Fred, who has trained and lectured at thirteenth century castles in Scotland, maintains that it is one of the highest-quality buildings in the world. And when you walk around with him, you believe it. One of my favorite things I’ve learned in the past month is that the cornice stones of this building were undercut by hand, probably out here in the parking lot. If you look up at the roof when you go out, you’ll see a step cut into each stone block directly under the roofline. A quarter of each stone was carved out by hand, each one identical to the next, work that Fred estimates probably took about six months to do. And it’s done perfectly—that’s inverse ninety-degree corners at the very center of each block, again and again and again.

The other day Peter and Parker Hansel were here, recalling what it was like when Filtrine was in this building—more or less it sounds like it was a bit ragged. And when they came into this room the first thing they noticed were the windows. They were amazed by how good they looked. “You must have replaced all those,” they said. “No,” we replied, “Fred restored them.” I had been in this room maybe a hundred times, and I’d never seen these windows until that moment.

This is real labor, true craftsmanship, the kind that is so good you don’t even notice it. But when you start looking for it, it’s everywhere here. Some of it was done two hundred years ago, some of it was done twenty years ago. Fred’s probably going to go do a bit more this afternoon.

My point is that there is a huge amount of effort and skill and dedication that has not been lost because of the wonderful combination of a haphazard vision fifty years ago, and the dedicated support of the people in this room. The result is that we have these buildings that feel good to be in, that draw people and artists and business to them. Buildings that can successfully sustain a world-class daycare, a thriving general store, and quality affordable housing. This seems to me to be preservation at its finest—something that is concerned with the souls of buildings, something irrefutably alive.

The other thing I’ve been doing these past couple weeks is working at the General Store. Now what you have to realize about the General Store is how hard the staff works up there. They are astonishing. Everyday two people make tray after tray of completely fresh food—all different kinds. I asked Teresa and Maddie to try to quantify this, and they estimated that in a single day over the summer they can use 150 eggs. In a week they go through thirty-five pounds of just mozzarella cheese and a hundred pounds of flour. Every time I’m in the kitchen up there I can feel this volume—there is so much. Teresa and Chris and Maddie and Laura and M’Lue making new entrees every day, multiple soups, salads, pizzas, burritos, deserts, baked goods, all the sandwiches. Merissa and Reed and Jake and Maddie greeting everyone, taking orders, making thousands of gallons of coffee. It’s wild.

And what’s more—there’s hardly any waste at all. Whatever isn’t eaten is immediately reused to make something new. After making a hundred sandwiches for a catering event the other day, Teresa used all the left-over bread crusts to make pudding. The pizza up there is one of my favorites because it’s the ideal vehicle for the leftovers—you never know what toppings they’ll have and the combinations are so inventive, so brilliant because they came from salmon cakes and roasted potatoes. Totally delicious. And what truly can’t be eaten goes to feed seventeen chickens at Dierdre and Scott Oliver’s farm, some of the very hens providing those hundreds and hundreds of eggs.

My point is two-fold: that the staff up there is incredible, both in their inventiveness and hard work. And secondly that the store is thriving. The number sales are up 7 percent from last year and that’s because the staff are busting their butts to make the store welcoming, well-stocked, and delicious. This is a true testament to Laura who in the past two years has done a remarkable job streamlining merchandise, thinking carefully about our budget, and providing the staff with the tools and support they need to thrive. I always think of Laura as the magician up there—sometimes you see her, sometimes you don’t, but you feel her everywhere.

And there’s simply no question that a major part of the store’s success these past years has been the support from the Friends of the General Store. It is now clear that we were lucky to make it through Covid—for about two years the store’s balance sheet took a serious hit, and these kinds of financial pressures can take a couple years to be felt. Were it not for the support of the friends these past few years, we would have to be asking some very difficult questions.

Now, I think it is possible make the store more self-sufficient, but the simple truth is that we haven’t figured this out yet. It’s not for lack of trying. Perhaps the silver lining of the Covid pressure was that it compelled us to do rather rigorous financial analysis about how the store can continue to serve as the heartbeat of this town. We’ve gone through all kinds of models of store hours, the amount of merchandise we sell, number of staff, sandwich prices, alcohol sales—you name it. One of my goals is to close this gap and work to make the store self-sustaining. But most likely we will always need the support of the Friends. These donations allow us to replace equipment, cover merchandise costs, take chances on things like the book nook, source high-quality local foods, and most of all work to pay fair, competitive salaries.

To be more specific, so far this year we’ve raised $35,000 in support of the store. Our goal is to hit the $40,000 mark, which, if we do, we project that the store will do just a little better than break even for the year. That’s not an easy position to be in, but it’s the reality of where we are, and the work we still need to do.

But think about what this store represents. We live in a region that is rural living at its finest. Our lakes and forests and mountain are some of the most exquisite in the world. We have dirt roads and old houses, fields of cows and sheep, stands of sugar maple. This is not an easy scenario to justify or sustain in the twenty-first century—industry and tech might prefer that we live differently. The store is one of those pillars that preserves an important, human way of life that would otherwise stagnate and disappear. You don’t have to go to Keene to buy eggs from Market Basket. You don’t have to order your books on Amazon. You don’t have to buy a cup of coffee in the morning from a stranger at Dunkin’ Donuts. It is impossible to overstate how much this matters.

And here are my next pictures. The first two images are from the floor up in the attic of this building. It is a divot in the wood formed by a mill worker’s boot. It’s where someone stood day after day making a product that was of real value to his community, to his world, and earning a living for his family here in this town.

This is a picture of the floor in front of short-order station at the store—the place where Maddie and Chris, and many others, have stood making Nelsons and Harrisvilles and Standards and breakfast burritos—sometimes a hundred of them a day. Work that is of real value to their community, to their world, and earning a living to support life in this town.

And, I’m glad to say that in January, we’re going to replace the floors up there at the store.

The store brings together neighbors, it invites visitors, it offers a space to bump into a friend you haven’t seen, but also—and this seems crucial to me—it can be a space in which you are familiar with people you might not know, or with whom you may not share political or religious or civic opinions. The store is the space in which all that doesn’t matter because you are forced to recognize others as your neighbors, as your community. Everyone is just eating lunch.

We are in a moment of easy division. And no matter what happens on Tuesday, it is vital that we—as a town, a region, as individuals—look for and create new ways to connect with each other. There is so much that unites the people who live here, and I think we have much more in common than the national dialogue would lead us to believe. I’m of the opinion that it is precisely places like the general store that help find new identities that allow us to respect each other and connect. To my mind, this is the major work of our time.

But it only happens step by step. So in this vein, the store is going to host a community dinner in a couple weeks, one of what I hope will become a series of evenings at the store throughout the winter. It will be a ticketed dinner, and the food will be prepared by two guest chefs—Sher Alam and Sadia Mashwani—a refugee couple from Afghanistan who live in Keene. They’re going to cook a traditional Afghan meal, and we’re going to reserve half of the available tickets to give to people who might not otherwise be interested in coming to a dinner at the general store. Laura and I are working with Eric Swope to give away tickets and hopefully encourage a diverse attendance. My goal is that everyone at this dinner will be seated next to someone they don’t know or wouldn’t otherwise talk to, and that you’ll be able to share a meal together as neighbors.

This kind of work is precisely what drew me to this job. Historic Harrisville is unlike any organization I know because it is active in so many different capacities, each of them supporting the kind of rural lifestyle that is so prized here, and so unusual. Yes, there is considerable preservation and maintenance work to be done, and we’re doing it. Just yesterday we were approved for a grant of $77,000 to install water treatment systems in this mill complex, the building with the children’s center, and the general store. These are systems that treat the water for micro-plastics and currently the levels of these are too high in this mill complex to be safe, which is why you’ve probably noticed the water bubblers all around. As of now the plastic levels at the store and children’s center are below what is considered safe, but from our perspective, we don’t want any plastic in the water that people are drinking, and so we’re installing these systems even before the state realizes that it’s the right thing to do.

This kind of maintenance work is endless, and it is a testament to the success of Historic Harrisville that we are faced with the problem of funding these initiatives. Some of this can be done through grants, some of it is relies on the support of the people in this room. But in either case, my goal is that Historic Harrisville will continue to be leader of and a model for preservation organizations about how to be conscientious and ethical stewards of historic properties.

In turn, this work feeds the second aspect of our mission, which is to enhance the community spirit, quality of life, and vitality of this town. One of the pressing arenas for this effort in to increase our affordable housing options, and figure out responsible, deliberate ways to help grow Harrisville’s population. Currently we offer twelve apartments where twenty-one residents live with reduced in rent. You’ve heard about the Mackey House down the street and the septic woes that have dogged that project. I tend to think that if there’s a will there’s a way, and there’s a lot of will to get that building into livable shape. This is precisely the kind of work we can and need to do, I’m committed to exploring all the possibilities for housing and how Historic Harrisville can support this kind of initiative.

And the other exciting community project underway is the rehabilitation of St. Denis Church—the one up on the hill here next to the General Store. As you likely know we received a grant this past spring to renovate the church and finally start using it again. This was a Catholic Church that was built in 1894 to serve a growing contingent of Catholic families in town, mostly French-Canadians and Irish mill-working families who had been meeting in Eagle Hall behind the general store. Many of these families were the ones who donated the money to have the stained glass windows built and installed, and their names are at the bottoms of many of them. We know the histories of some of these families, but there’s not a huge amount of information still available—so if you happen to have any connection to the church, especially if you have any pictures of what it used to look like inside, please reach out to Katy Burchett, our archivist—we’re always interested in learning more.

The church itself is a kind of mash of Gothic and Stick style that was typical of the late nineteenth century, and in emulating the European Catholic tradition, it is oriented facing east, for the rising sun. One exciting part of the rehabilitation is that underneath the current vinyl siding is a really beautiful trim design that we are planning to bring back. Our goal is that it will look pretty close to this early photograph, which is the oldest image we have. Fred has done all kinds of paint analysis of the church and we’re honing in on the colors.

Which is to say nothing of the windows, which were completed this week. I’ll let Tom talk about this, but I’m thrilled to have these back and be able to see them. I think they’re beautiful, and the space inside will be stunning.

One of the tricks of this project has been how to bring bathrooms and handicap accessibility into this space while preserving its historic character, and I think we’ve landed on a brilliant solution. It turns out that the floor of the church and selectman’s office—that little squat building just to the right—are at exactly the same height, so we’re going to connect the two buildings with a deck, put bathrooms in the selectman’s office, and make a sloped entrance into the church with stone pavers. Again, these aren’t finalized plans, and there are approvals to be had from the Historic District and the Zoning Board, but I wanted to show you where things are headed. I love the deck solution, not only because it allows the church to remain more or less in its original condition, but we talk about having store dinners out there and events. Imagine being on that deck in the evening and watching the sun fade on the brick across the stream. Or having sunrise yoga out there in the summer.

The goal is to have the renovations finished by the end of this coming summer, and get the center open shortly after that. It’s hugely exciting, not only because we’ve been trying to figure out how to fund this work for more than a decade, but for the opportunity it provides Historic Harrisville to really partner with the town and create a communal space that is used by a true variety of people. There are all kinds of ideas for what this will be, from an event space to after school care to bingo nights, dances, ping pong, after school care, soup kitchen—you name it we’ve been talking about it and in the next few months we’ll work with the town to really establish a robust plan. Again my hope is that this space serves as one that encourages connection and recognition between all kinds of people, and offers the opportunity to find and create identities in this town and region that are not the divisive and narrow ones we have to watch play out on the national stage.

One of the things I’ve discovered about this job is that when I have some question, when I need to talk to someone in town, I can of course pick up the phone and call, or write an email, but it turns out I can also just wait and I’m almost guaranteed to run into that very person within the next three days. The other day I was looking at parking plans for the area near the post office and thinking to myself, I should call Don Scott. Two days later, we were checking mail next to each other. Or earlier this week I got a bill for repairs made to a rototiller at the community garden, but no name to make the check out to. I told myself I’d write an email to Deirdre and Scott Oliver, but put it off. Then yesterday, there they were at the store—obviously Scott just didn’t put his name on the bill because, well, he didn’t need to. I love this aspect of this job—that communication isn’t dependent on emails and phones because we’re all actually here, together. This is an extraordinary gift in this day and age, not least because, of course, there’s so much more in a face-to-face interaction than in an email. Yesterday Eric Swope and I were talking business about the dinner at the store, and by the time he left my office we were discussing paw-paw trees, and the best way to overwinter seedlings. This is the stuff of community, and it is precisely this kind of invitation that resides at the core of Historic Harrisville. It depends on everyone, and it’s not to be taken for granted.

Which leads me to two quick fundraising notes. One that we are working to establish a planned giving program, and we have brochures available for anyone who is interested. You can talk to me or Chick or Kathy about this, but essentially it’s a really great way to support Historic Harrisville by including a bequest in your will and there are a lot of options about how to do this that works for you. So I hope everyone will consider this—it’s never too early!

And secondly, we’re getting ready to send out our annual appeal. In the next couple weeks you’ll receive a letter about this and again it’s impossible to understate how important your support is to all these things we’re trying to do, for all the reasons I’ve been talking about this morning. And this year we are going to focus the campaign on St Denis. The caveat to the grant for the restoration of the building is that we are on the hook to match 20% of the funds, which means we have to raise $137,000. So that’s our goal for this year’s annual appeal. Last year we raised $109,000, so its possible, but it’s going to take some work.

I’m not asking for the money now (though if you are inspired to hand us a check today or donate by credit card at the swag table afterwards, we won’t turn you down!) but am saying—get ready. And I’m not saying it lightly. I started this talk with the story of how I came to this town because I wanted to remind you how remarkable this corner of the world is. It’s a real place with jobs and community and tremendous diversity of skills and opinions and lifestyles and expertise. It is a place of beauty and history, and of completely unique energy. It is a place that is possible because people here care about their home, their land, their families, and each other. And whether you’ve been here all your life, whether you’ve left and come back, whether you’re new, it’s a place where you can make a difference, a place where your choices truly matter, and a place where all of us have the responsibility to extend ourselves to each other, to say hello, and welcome, and how are you. It’s a place that’s world class, and it’s alive, and there’s work to be done.