Major funding for the production of Our Hometown Ashland was provided by Freudenberg NOK Sealing Technologies.

Jeremy Hiltz Excavating Inc.. Sippican Partners Construction with additional production support by.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Do you know why a lot of New Hampshire towns sprang up just where they did?

Gravity, and this town is one of them It sits happily between Little Squam Lake and the Pemigewasset River, which are separated by a couple of miles and 112 feet of elevation.

The town grew and thrived here, as did its many mills along the Squam River, powered by the moving water And yup, gravity.

Hello, everybody, I'm Rebecca Rule.

Welcome to Our Hometown.

Today we're in Ashland, where the mills, once the beating economic heart of the village, fell on hard times, as did many others across the region, forcing this former mill town to reinvent itself.

Ashland, the geographic center of New Hampshire, sits at the gateway between the Lakes region and the White Mountains.

Years ago, trains carried goods and passengers from Boston to Ashland to Montreal and back.

Now, Interstate 93 connects the town to the rest of the world.

There's a lot of history here.

The Whipple House Museum was home to five generations of the Whipple family, including Dr. George Hoyt Whipple, who won the Nobel Prize in 1934 for developing a cure for pernicious anemia.

In the 1800s Moses Cheney founded a paper making and printing business here.

He was a conductor on The Underground Railroad, a famed abolitionist who on several occasions hosted Frederick Douglass.

Alex Ray started the Common Man family of restaurants right here on Main Street.

A quieter Ashland is seeking and finding its way to a prosperous future.

It's no surprise that Ashland has become a haven for artists, writers, musicians and craftspeople of all kinds new and old, modern and historic.

This former mill town nestled in no reveling in the natural beauty that surrounds it.

Ashland seeks and finds balance.

The mills in Ashland were going strong through most of the last century in tough times, though, tough folks prove you can't keep a good mill town down, not for long.

My grandfather bought the Briggs Woolen Mill in 1916, but before that it had been the Ashland knitting mill and before that there was just there was seven different water wheels on the site at different times in its history.

When my grandfather's uncle bought the mill in 1916, it was just there was three other mills that were in the textile business, and eventually they ended up buying each and every one of them over the years.

It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And, you know, eventually in the 1990s, we had well over 300 employees working three shifts, and it was a very busy place, a very busy place.

In the nineties, we could see that there was going to be an end to our business.

And before we ran out the business, we had started making goods for other other things garments instead of fabric.

And we made some snowmobile suits and we made some long underwear and we would just kind of just a little side business off the side.

And around 2001, we kind of incorporated called it Minus 33 while we were building that business while we were closing down the big plant.

But Minus 33 just kept ticking along and it kept growing and growing and growing.

So now we we sell like 300,000 pieces of base layer or socks, or some some outerwear based primarily on merino wool superfine, super comfortable.

This is a Minus 33.

The Mill we went from over 300 employees.

Down to three.

And now we're up to 16.

In fact, we'd sold all of the buildings except for one of them back around in the 2000s.

And I just barely bought one of the old buildings back.

We call it the Scribner Building, a three story old brick building, and we're in the process of renovating it It's going to be quite a project, but the building in itself has got a story because it was built in 1880 and it was built as a hosiery mill.

It was called Ashland Knitting Company.

Well, as it is Minus 33 added sock making machines two years ago.

So we're now manufacturing hosiery just on the other side of the wall of this old building, and with luck with luck, we're going to put in more sock making machines.

We're going to put them in the Scribner Building.

So it will have since 1880, it will have made the full circle.

I walked in and I thought, Oh my gosh, this place is amazing, so beautiful.

And the river rolling by, you know, just sounds fantastic.

It's so soothing and healing.

And the space really just spoke to me and I had been looking for a space to start a yoga studio.

So I contacted the owner and we had a meeting, and that was that was the end of it.

We totally connected right away.

They're more than just landlords, you know, they really embrace the community, and they have a beautiful vision for the larger mills space, which is arts movements and events.

It was very exciting to open up.

We started with the yoga studio and then had plans to open the cafe.

But several several things happened which put the brakes on the cafe in 2020.

So my husband was diagnosed late in 2019 just before Christmas with non-small cell lung cancer.

I stopped working and stayed at home to care for him.

He was very late stage cancer and it was basically all throughout his body.

So I knew having worked in oncology for the last 13 years, I knew that we didn't have a lot of time together.

You know, us being together was a very special, special time.

So we're part of this amazing community and Ashland and Plymouth and the surrounding towns with friends who supported us throughout the entire pandemic and the entire cancer, you know, journey.

He was saying, You know, this place is so healing like, you have to keep going with it.

And I think that's something that we both recognized and for Ashland to have such a gem.

I'm just so honored to be able to continue what we started, even though it's been challenging.

But again, it's the community that really helps people move forward.

And you know, when you get those arms wrapped around you from all different angles, it's it's enough to keep you, you know, moving forward, I think gives you strength.

A bet on the presidential election of 1892 made the Ashland history book a man named Shepherd believe that Benjamin Harrison would win, but his friend, Mr. Gordon, had had his money on Grover Cleveland.

Well, the bet was that the loser would wheel the winner from Ashland to Plymouth in a wheelbarrow.

And sure enough, Grover Cleveland prevailed.

So Sheppard was to wheel Gordon all that distance.

Gordon tried to let him off the hook, but Sheppard said, No, I can do this thing.

And he was a strong man, well-respected in town.

He had served in the Civil War.

In fact, at the Battle of Gettysburg, tough guy.

So he picked that wheelbarrow up full on Mr. Gordon and off he set 7:00 a.m. heading to Plymouth.

Naturally, they were accompanied by an entourage of horses and carriages, people on foot.

Everybody wanted to see the bet as it worked out.

At the Plymouth line they were greeted by a coronet band and escorted to the Pemigewasset Hotel, where they enjoyed a cordial reception and a substantial collation.

That means a good meal.

David Colburn started the Vntage Fret Shop in the early seventies.

He's done a lot of pickin' all over the world, and he's done a lot of pickin'.

What's your primary instrument to play out?

Mostly the guitar for me, and I do enjoy performing with the ukulele and the Appalachian dulcimer, too, but I use the ukulele a lot as a songwriting instrument because it's it's unintimidating and you can get people to write songs despite themselves.

If you if you take a kind of a casual and easygoing approach and you show them how to do you know this and that here, And they can do it and then they can come along and before they know it they're writing themselves a song.

I thought you might like to hear a song I wrote about the dump.

And yes, and I can I can sing it without an instrument.

I can sing it what they used to call Acapulco, or Oh, I'd love it hear an Acapulco story, a song about the dump.

Because the dump is I mean.

The dump is the source of all.

You betcha.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, let's hear it.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.. Now that's the chorus, So that's easy enough.

Sometimes my wife will send me to the landfill with some trash.

I'll harvest bits of copper pipe and turn them in to cash.

Watch out for poison ivy could wind up with a rash just zip right past the metals pile with an elegant panache.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

I'll trade you a carburetor for a baseball bat.

If you give me an old TV and the Boston Red Sox hat, I saw you coming back from the river where the bleepedoff Ring tail cat.

If you want to try some serious pickin I could help you out with that.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump.

Picka picka picka picka picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump, one more time, Picka picka picka picka picka picka picka picka, pickin' at the dump and that is classic.

I spoke with Carolyn Gosse and Liz Cody, just a few feet from the shining water of Little Squam Lake.

Liz talked about raising her son here and how this special place shaped the man he would become.

He was five when we first started coming up and he could invent his day.

We didn't have television, and he started exploring everything and learning the names of all the plants and and what this lake did was give him freedom that he never could have had otherwise.

The rule on the beach among the mothers was ten years old.

You could drive the motor boat.

We had a whaler.

There were no rules then, it had no rules at all on Little Squam.

And then when you turn twelve, you could go through the channel and into big Squam.

Another thing that was interesting friends of my son would come up and no television, no computer games.

What do you do all day?

It took them invariably two days to sort of get the hang of it.

And then they'd say, Can we come back?

Can we come back?

So my memory of the lake is David leaving early in the morning, going to pick up his friends, taking their fishing gear and finding the best spots and going down the the river and up into Owl Creek.

And they knew where the osprey nested, they knew where the loons nested that they knew where the turtles hung out and they they owned this lake.

So by the time they were twelve in fear and trepidation, I could say, All right, you can go down the channel, you can go to the Big Lake, and then they owned that lake as well, Rattlesnake Cove, where they would jump off the rock and swim, and they lived on the lake.

They would go to the library by boat.

They would run errands.

For me, it's a little grocery store by boat.

It was a separate world and one where they were in charge and they were magnificent and responsible.

And which is not to say I didn't worry every single second they were out there, but I knew that I know that they'd make it.

And so for me, the the story, my story is my son on the lake and my reason for being here.

He is totally independent.

And he he sees that the world is interconnected.

And I think that comes from feeling nature every minute of the day.

The rhythms are different.

The timing is different.

We never had a clock.

We never had an alarm clock.

But he was able to organize his day around the rhythm of the seasons, and I did as well it.

It's what makes this place feed your soul for the rest of your life because the memories remain.

Ashland has always enjoyed a Fourth of July celebration, and Carl West remembers the Fourth of July of 1965 when, in addition to the parade, the big bonfire and the crowning of Miss fourth of July, a small plane was slated to fly over the ball field and drop 500 red, white and blue ping pong balls.

Each ball was good for cents off a purchase at the refreshment stand.

Naturally, a crowd gathered in the field and awaited the plane and here it came, flying low and it gets overhead ready.

Set it drops 500 red, white and blue ping pong balls.

Except just at that moment, a gust of wind blew through and blew all of those ping pong balls off into the nearby swamp.

The children were undeterred.

They ran into the swamp after those ping pong balls.

And, you know, after a while, the parents were a little concerned because the children weren't in a hurry to come back .

But you know what?

Eventually, every child emerged from the swamp with ping pong balls in hand, and all but 40 of those 500 red, white and blue ping pong balls were redeemed at the refreshment stand.

I know this is a true story because Diane West Jackson, now a university professor, also Carl's daughter, was one of the children who ran into the swamp to receive the Fourth of July treasure.

Ashland first family of Covered Bridges, the Graton family has constructed and repaired covered bridges all over the country, so it made perfect sense for them to build one close to home.

The town found a way to make it happen.

I like this kind of work, it's there's a lot of challenges, we've done a lot of the structural work, you know, restoration moving stuff, and my dad was a building mover, rigger and he got interested in the covered bridg here, Quimby.

They wanted to do enough repairs on it to keep it from falling down and on.

It was just Fourth of July weekend or maybe a day or two before the bridge happened to fall into the Baker River.

So instead of restoring or repairing it, I was, you know, about 14 probably, he got the job of getting it out of the river, so naturally, a lot of six by six, six by eight timber, so that became more shoring for us.

And you got interested in the joinery on it because it was so tight that some places a lot of places, the sunlight hadn't even got to it, you know.

So that got him interested and covered bridge restoration instead of all structure moving, so then that got it, The whole ball rolling.

I think Pauline Colley and Marion Merrill.

I think they were the ones that got the thing, rolling, and the bridge that was there when I was a kid.

It was a concrete bridge and that got condemned and they put a Bailey Bridge across.

That was, I think, after the highway was improved here.

So it was just Ashland Street then.

So we had had a number of bridges around that we'd built.

I also think these ladies decided Ashland since it was home.

Bridge builders ought to have a bridge.

Everybody was pretty much in favor of it since it fits in well with the with the lake and the river and all.

You know, I actually, I guess, did the design because it's such a steep grade that I wanted to keep room enough so that the boats had the same clearance underneath that they had with the old concrete bridge.

So that was my main goal.

When we pulled it across, we pulled it was oxen and a capstone winch, and when we pulled it across, we actually had probably 30 or 40 people on the bridge that came across just to wave to the neighbors and whatnot You know Ashland may have gotten its start as a mill town separate from the then farming community of Holderness, but Ashland loves and supports its own farms and farm stands.

I didn't think I would ever actually have a farm stand.

I think we always just try to do something once we have our boys when they were younger for me to stay home during the summer and actually, Sean moved his sawmill over to White Oak Pond Farm, which is who we work with, produce wise.

And Sean was milling up some trees and some logs and met Peter Brown, who is the farmer.

He doesn't use any machinery.

He's all broad fork, pitchfork, no herbicides, pesticides, fungicides there.

He just wants to teach the world to eat better and pay attention to what you're putting into your body.

Peter said he wanted a place to sell his produce out and do a farm stand, and we said we have the perfect spot.

And that's how we ended up, and now we just have picked up, it's turned into a local farm stand community like everybody all around us has a hand in it.

White Oak Pond Farm is where we mostly have all our produce from.

And then we have.

Our dairy is the Huckins Farm, which is down the road from us on Dana Hill.

We have the Sandwich Creamery with us for ice cream.

We have a lot of local farms for eggs and then Owl Brook is right behind us is Owl Brook Farms, He does all our meats and Mariana lives right next door to us.

She's Let Live Farm and she does a lot of our flowers too and eggs.

We've really grown and added the food truck.

And also that's Andre and Casey.

The more the merrier.

Definitely here.

The community takes care of the farm stand right now, everybody looks out for it, and they they love having knowing that everything is organic here.

I don't know, we have a bakery with us that's not unusual, but Wicked Good Bakery has been with us for four years now and everybody waits for them.

On their delivery days.

I have two boys that help out, also 15 and twelve.

They help me put everything out when I come back from a harvest.

So they were down here yesterday.

Usually, the whole you know the community in Ashland supports us, everybody around the lake.

Our neighbors love to just cross the street and come here.

And you know, one of the things is is that we stay open pretty late.

By the time we're done in late afternoon, we like to go down to the lake and then we come up.

It's dark, but we haven't been closing the farms down until about 10 or 10:30 at night.

So everybody comes here a little bit later to grab ice cream and come up and grab some baked goodies.

Yeah.

Thank you for traveling with us to the center of New Hampshire.

We are grateful to Ashland for sharing both its proud history and its promising future.

The mills rising again but transformed the bridge builders, continuing a tradition of excellence, creating enduring monuments to craftsmanship, thanks especially to those who stepped up and sat down with us.

This was a tough one.

Covid presented many challenges, but the stories about what makes Ashland so special found their way to us and now to you.

In this short program, we could include only a few of the many stories we gathered, but soon they will all be available online at nhpbs.org/hometown.

I'm Rebecca Rule.

See you around town.

I wonder why more people don't live right here.

I feel like it's kind of like a kept secret.

The main street is very cool and the people are so interesting.

I have gone on a journey all around the world to discover that this is where I want to be and this is where my heart is.

It's just a great community.

Everybody helps each other out because Ashland is the geographical center of New Hampshire.

Major funding for the production of Our Hometown Ashland was provided by Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies.

Jeremy Hiltz Excavating Inc. Sippican Partners Construction with additional production support by.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.