This New England

Commentary and Photos by WILLIAM MORGAN

The Harrisville General Store is not the way I remember it from a summer spent in the small village almost 25 years ago.

Then, it was a typical rural northern New England general store, selling a few necessities, along with work gloves and rubber boots. It still sells Rice Krispies and Snicker Bars, but it also peddles pickled ginger, goats milk and local sausage. Plus, you can get a decent cup of coffee and a slice of quiche for lunch.

The welcoming store does not so much signify the gentrification of Harrisville (a town of around 1,000 people in the Monadnock Region, in southwestern New Hampshire), as much as another attempt to maintain the viability of this mill village.

Wool has been spun in Harrisville since the 1790s, and the place is a sort of industrial Brigadoon--one of the very few factory communities that looks much as it did in the 19th Century (the general store itself was founded in 1838).

When the last big company left in 1970, citizens under the rubric of Historic Harrisville banded together and bought up the mills. Harrisville Designs began spinning wool again, while light industry, research tanks and artists moved into the mills.

After a number of owners in recent years, Historic Harrisville has purchased the general store, believing that its continued operation as a center of village life is essential to the town's survival.

 Tags  Harrisville Harrisville Designs Historic Harrisville N.H.

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