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A river runs through it.

A mountain towers over it.

It's home to a state park, a state forest, two covered bridges, and the wild and storied Mink Hills with fewer than 3000 residents, this small town thinks big.

Five museums, restaurants and a coffee house, performance and gathering spaces, and a great bookstore that has its own art gallery.

It's home to more than its share of writers, painters, potters, musicians.

It's a stop on the Black Heritage Trail.

During the Fall Foliage Festival the population triples as thousands of visitors fill the streets.

Hello, I'm Rebecca Rule.

Welcome to Our Hometown Warner This town's motto is "Something wonderful is happening in Warner".

And they're not wrong.

Many of us associate Bud Thompson with Canterbury Shaker Village, where he lived and worked for decades, but he also had a large collection of Native American artifacts.

And he had a dream.

The museum's been in existence for 35 years.

But a lot of people are really surprised about how it ended up in Warner New Hampshire.

That really goes back to our founder, Bud Thompson.

Bud, as a young child at seven years old found an arrowhead on his grandfather's farm that inspired him.

Even at that young age, to start reading everything he could about native people.

As a young man of 25, he was a troubadour traveling the Midwest singing folk songs.

There was a push at that point to find unrecorded folk songs.

He went to Canterbury Shaker Village and knocked on the door.

And yes, they had thousands of unrecorded folk songs.

So Bud was actually quite instrumental and in fact actually moved his family to Shaker Village, and they lived there for 30 years.

So he lived in the East House, and he was starting to amass his collection of Native American art.

And, so on one of my visits to Canterbury, he said, come on Andy, jump in the van.

And we drove and drove and drove.

And he pulled up Kearsarge Mountain Road here in Warner, pulled into this dirt lot, and it was an indoor riding arena.

So there were literally wood chips on the floor, pigeons in the rafters.

So Bud renovates this wonderful museum and a 12 acre campus.

And then, as beautiful as it could be, he takes his collection and lays out the Plains Indian collection and the horse collection like he had imagined from day one.

So the museum is actually broken down into seven different galleries, by region.

The goal there is to actually explain to people that native people don't dress alike, eat the same foods, have the same transportation all across the country.

We can have a third grade class come through, take them through the all of the galleries, talk about all of the artifacts and the concepts and things like that.

And have a very meaningful experience.

But then the next group of people through might be PhD candidates or students from Colby Sawyer.

Every gallery really has multiple layers.

So Budd was active with the museum until he passed away at 99 years old.

He was at the museum 2 or 3 days before he passed away.

Community stories, I call them something happens that makes such an impact that everybody in town tells a version of it.

This next story is one of those.

But we went right to the source and boom!

Around 1976 when they had the bicentennial, there were some guys from town that went on that Arnold's Expedition that went up to Quebec.

So we went up through Maine, sailed up the Kennebec River and went to the various towns.

And they had celebrations and we had races with a Bateau and other towns.

And ultimately that was to be a battle.

We had a battle.

We had a lot of music, especially from the Canadian side.

They had drums, bugles, and cannons.

But I saw this cannon thing going.

I said, I got to have one of those.

We had a Legion meeting one night, and I said, I'm going to make a cannon.

You could buy a cannon barrel.

So I found a catalog.

Ordered a cannon barrel, and proceeded to make the rest of it.

Gerry Courser had an excellent set of wheels.

Old farm wagon wheel that made cannon wheels, so Gerry got in on it at that point, the first morning we pulled it round here on the 4th of July.

We told nobody and we set it off and people were running out of the house in their nightgowns and everything else looked at us, and we proceed to come up the street, shot it off, right over in front of the church, went up by the bank, shot it again.

We see the windows of the bank kind of vibrate, and the next thing we know, the bank, the burglar alarm in the bank went off.

Boom!.

And we watched a man who belonged to the American Legion from World War One come running out of the house.

Saw what was up then?

Let's go up and wake up Dick Violette.

Which we did.

Boom!

And he came running out, putting his pants on, to see what was going on.

"Hi Dick" That's what started the pancake breakfast in town.

We we ran around with the cannon a couple of years, and then we went up there and had a pancake breakfast at the at the horse farm up the HighLawn Farm.

So the next year, the Legion said, let's have a Pancake Breakfast, it made a big thing.

But we did every 4th of July for 35 years with that cannon, and we got 3 or 400 people at the breakfast on the 4thof July.

That just about kept our post running.

Some families have been here for a couple of hundred years, but sometimes it takes a newcomer's perspective to uncover the true character of a town.

I moved to Warner with my wife in 2016.

We moved to a beautiful piece of property, and what we found out is that we had moved into a beautiful community.

We were invited to a party, put on by these two neighbors, and it turns out that they had invited the entire neighborhood and that we were the guests of honor.

The whole idea was to introduce us to the people in the neighborhood that they clearly cared about, and wanted to make sure that we were going to care about that, too.

And we were floored by this, just blown away by it.

And it's been that way ever since, is that it's a very close, community that cares about each other, that talks to each other.

That was our welcome to Warner.

Within the first six weeks, kind of the next piece about becoming part of, the town was soon after we moved in where, we both decided that we were going to volunteer for the Warner Fall Foliage Festival, and we decided that, a neat way to do this.

I don't know why we did this, but we continue to do it was to be on garbage duty.

And so by going around and emptying garbage cans, which is pretty gross at the Fall Foliage Festival, they're serving lobster dinners and I mean just nothing worse, especially on a hot day.

And but we went all over to all the trash cans, so we saw all the different parts of it and could therefore interact with a lot of people.

Mostly we got to know other volunteers who were all people from Warner.

And in that regard, we met a bunch of people and it was nice to get feedback from them right away.

Like, wait a minute, you've been here two months and you're on garbage duty at Fall Foliage Festival.

It's like, well, sure, why not?

By my getting involved and Laura and my getting involved in things in town and picking up garbage at the Foliage Festival and, for me, joining the board of the Historical Society and being involved in so many of these things that I found my community.

George Alfred Pillsbury lived in Warner from 1840 to 1851, and it made quite an impact on him.

Community minded, he served on the Select Board and in the legislature.

He served as the postmaster and town treasurer.

Later, he joined the family business in Minneapolis.

You may have heard of it.

Pillsbury and company.

The Pillsbury Doughboy?

At age 75, having made enough money to "meet all foreseeable needs for himself and his family", he turned to philanthropy.

Warner happily accepted his gift of a public library, which opened in 1892 with 4500 books.

That collection has grown to 25,000 books, plus music videos, computers and much more.

Oh, and there's a beautiful space just for the kids.

I think George would approve.

In the 1800s, water power from the Warner River supported sawmills, grist mills and the paper mill.

It was a busy spot.

At the same time, it was also a prosperous farming community, and it still is.

Do you know what a gore is?

The Kearsarge Gore Farm actually starts on the highway at 11:00 at night, driving back from Vermont, sheering sheep with who else but Fred Courser and Fred Courser in the middle of the night?

As I'm nodding off, saying, Andrew's place is for sale.

Oh, that's good, Fred, where's the Andrews place?

Up on Mount Kearsarge, in the Gore.

Oh, thank you Fred.

And back to sleep I went.

Two days later Fred said, we're going to go look at the land, and we walked down a cow path.

This would be about 1980.

We walked down a class six road, which was little better than a cow path, and there was this woodlot there.

There was nothing there but trees, except that you could see the infrastructure.

You could see where the roads of the old farm were, and you could see the walls, and where the old fields were.

I got kind of interested in that and went and talked to the fellow who owned the land.

At this time I owned pickup truck and a skidder payment.

That was it.

There was no way in the world I could get a mortgage for this piece of property.

It was 300 acres.

And so I went and talked to the fella who owned the property.

And after a couple of days of talking to him, he told me that if I came up with $20,000 down, he would hold the paper on the rest of it.

So I went to Henniker Hardwood Pallet Company, and I borrowed $5,000, and I borrowed $5,000 from my mother, and I borrowed $5,000 from my college roommate.

And I borrowed $5000 from my sister.

And I gave this guy $20,000 down.

He handed me a piece of paper that said I owed him $500 a month for ten years.

That's how the farm began.

Today, the farm is 500 acres.

We added to it over time, and we raise American Milking Devons, which are antiques, and Dorset sheep, 7 or 8 hoop houses of vegetables and maybe five acres of vegetables.

We had just boiling our 1000th gallon of syrup today, right now.

And, it's a busy place.

It's a family place and we work all day, every day at the Kearsarge Gore Farm.

There's no dollar that goes further than a dollar that's spent on our farm.

My dollar gets spent on the mechanic and the carpenter and the electrician, and the people who eat from the farm.

And it doesn't go to Chicago or Atlanta or New York City.

Wow.

A vibrant village center like Warner's Main Street doesn't just happen.

It takes planning, hard work, community support, and a shared vision.

It helped to have a visionary like Jim Mitchell.

The bookstore was opened by myself, my brother and my husband, and my brother was Jim Mitchell.

He was, all about the arts and supporting business and supporting the town.

And so he started something called Friday Night on Main Street.

So every Friday night in the gallery, we had something going on down there.

It wasn't long before Jim started talking about turning the land around the building, there's about an acre around the building, turning that land into a community park, what it could bring to the town and what it could bring to the community, and getting support for all of this.

He became very much of an ambassador for Warner.

He he adored Warner.

He thought it was the best place that he had ever lived.

And people really, adored him.

So, in June of 2008, he died of a heart attack.

It was it was hard for all of us.

I remember Rebecca Corsair saying that, it brought the town to its knees.

So the park was just an idea at that point.

The hope was that we could create a park and an amphitheater so there could be music and events and a place for people to gather.

Next thing I know, the town just, I swear, just got behind this project and because of the volunteers, amazing volunteers and amazing donations of different sorts, whether in-kind or monetary, the park started to roll out.

The stage is perfectly amazing, and that was built primarily by three carpenters who volunteered close to two years of their lives.

So, so the park all the events are free to the public, and we pass a bucket around and so forth.

The first phase was the terrace, the second phase the amphitheater and the stage.

And the third stage was the Children's Park, which now completely wrapped around the building.

The children's park is all edible landscape and places for children to play, you know, fruits and vegetables and herbs and things like that, for them to experiment and play with.

>>> MUSIC <<< Mother nature provides.

Just ask any squirrel and Warner they know.

We may have even gleaned this sweet idea from them.

Native Americans were very much in tune with nature, and they probably observed squirrels in the spring.

Squirrels will hang upside down on a branch and chew the bark off and drink the sap.

I've watched it.

I've watched them do it, and probably the Native Americans watched that too.

They boiled it in long wooden troughs by dropping hot stones in.

And then?

Then when the early colonists came, the Native Americans taught them how to make maple sugar, and they soon improved upon the old process, and they began using iron tools to bore a hole in the tree instead of slashing it like the natives did.

And they boil their sap in iron kettles instead of the wooden trough.

Now we have a nice post & beam sugar house that our son built for us, and we have about 325 taps.

Most of it's on plastic tubing, piped right to a collection tank, and from that collection tank we pump it into another tank upstairs in the sugar house.

And then it's gravity fed down into the evaporator.

You boil the sap over a blazing fire in a stove called an arch.

When the syrup has reached the proper density, you draw it off, filter it, and bottle it up.

The word pure is important in maple syrup.

There's absolutely nothing added to maple syrup.

No such thing as added sugars and stuff like that, and it's illegal to do it.

They call it adulterated, if anything been changed at all.

Maple syrup is just maple syrup and maple is healthy and nutritious because it comes from plants.

It has more antioxidants then blueberries.

That's right.

It's loaded with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

So it's one of those superfoods.

Quite an industry, actually, here in New Hampshire.

Warner has its share of beloved characters, and their stories are passed from one generation to the next.

Charlie Brown was one of those guys.

The amazing thing about the man was the stamina.

He made himself a harness and he would drag log lengths of hard wood out of the woods to the house, to saw up for wood for the winter, with the potato fields, with the bean fields, with a truck garden.

He just always kept going.

And he walked to work.

We didn't get a car until I was probably 15, 16 years old.

He'd get up at four in the morning, build the fires, cook his own breakfast when he was in grade school, and Ralph Pratt for one term, he came to school to teach art.

Well, the kids could care less, except for my father.

He loved it.

He loved it.

He did chalk on boards at the mill, and he gave'em to everybody.

We still have some.

But he did crayon.

He did colored pencil.

He did not do oils until he was 62 when he retired.

And I gave him a box of oil paints from Rowland's Studio.

That's when he started with oils.

And that first picture of that train is the first thing he did on a cardboard box.

And and it just grew from there.

So we were in Vermont, but I would go in and get our beverages in New Hampshire and, take advantage of the, the bottle redemption centers.

You know, one verse is kind of myself.

Another verse is kind of loosely based on a, local hero here.

Charlie Brown, who I heard would do the same thing.

He would gather up all the gather cans and bottles and and take him across the border.

I thought it was just, I just loved that, kind of Yankee ingenuity.

I guess.

And he was just a real, cool character growing up.

He would take old photographs of Main Street and different, you know, cover bridges and and color them in, and, just a cool, cool guy.

People say we've all been there, but these days it seems like I live there, born and raised there.

Can't seem to change the state I'm in, get to the top just to fall again.

Man, this hill is too steep to climb.

Spending money to make some.

Bandit crossing state lines.

Chasing some dog down the highway.

Those border town, Bottle Redemption Blues.

A local hero at a local bars.

his back's bent from working hard, telling tales to anyone who would hear.

He collects glass and cans, but he ain't got shaky hands.

Hasn't touched that stuff in years.

You know that old man never slows down.

It's all about that high finance.

Just haulin' his stash across the river.

Those Border Town Bottle Redemptions Blues.

5 cent here, 15 there.

Pass the bottle, I don't care.

It all adds up in the end.

Loaded up.

Haul it down.

On the other side of this border town.

Cross the river Redemption's near.

Stuck between black slate and granite.

Bridging a gap that lies between.

Just another soul out on the highway.

With those Bordertown Bottle Redemption Blues.

Those Bordertown Bottle Redemption Blues.

Sometimes the beauty and tranquility of a place speaks to you.

It whispers, it heals, and makes you feel connected to the earth.

It makes you feel gratitude sparking an idea of giving back, and gratitude for all of your neighbors asking, "What can we do to help?"

Mike and I found this property in 2007.

We came to the town not knowing really anything about New Hampshire, and we came to this town and instantly we knew there was something different about this town, something really special.

And then when we saw the property, when we saw Pumpkin Blossom Farm, I immediately could tell that it had a really positive energy.

It had something about it, a little bit of a twinkle or some magic.

It wasn't until after we purchased the house and got here that we heard from a number of people in town about the very rich and storied history of the property.

It had once been, an inn or a boarding house.

It had been an art center.

It had been, a horse farm, as well as, the manufacturing site for the Warner Woodstove Company, which a lot of people throughout New England have in their homes.

Today.

We found ourselves on a rooftop garden at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center, and it was called the Healing Garden.

And we sat there and it did not take long for me to realize that there was something really amazing about this space.

It felt very healing.

It felt like just what we needed at the moment.

And so the idea for a Healing Garden right here on my hillside in Warner was born.

And in 2019, my husband and I planted 2000 lavender babies on the hillside, the first of our many to come.

They really just started to sprout.

And we had these beautiful green plants, and these shoots started popping up.

And Mike said, you know, like, now what?

What are you going to do with all this lavender?

And I said, I have no idea.

But the idea was just, hey, let's again invite the community in to pick some lavender and and find a little peace in the field.

We felt really strongly about how the community had supported us during that time, opening up our farm and and we wanted to do something to give back.

So somewhere in September of 2020, that year, once our harvest was complete, I had some bright idea in the middle of the night to host a free wedding for someone who had been affected by Covid.

We jumped on and did like a quick Facebook post to say, hey, this is what we're thinking about doing.

Is there anybody out there that's been affected by Covid?

You know, is it something that we can help you with?

Tell us your story.

And so 36 people entered to win a wedding that we were going to pull off in just three weeks.

Immediately got messages from people throughout town wanting to help and volunteer.

I'm a justice of the peace.

I'll volunteer my time.

I'm a DJ.

I'm happy to DJ for you.

I'll cook, I'll serve, I will help clean up.

I'll help decorate.

It was immediate and it was just an amazing experience to be able to host that as a community.

We pulled together and gave them a beautiful, intimate wedding.

We had more people from the community there than we actually had wedding guests, helping and pitching in.

And it was just the the bow on that season.

Missy sensed something magical when she first set eyes on Warner, "a twinkle", she called it.

What is it about this place that's so appealing?

The folks we talked with appreciate the natural beauty and history, and they know what community means and what it can accomplish.

There's your twinkle.

Jim Mitchell coined the phrase, "Something wonderful is happening in Warner".

We heartily agree.

Thank you, Warner, for welcoming us so warmly.

We could only squeeze a few stories into this program, but all the stories will be online at nhpbs.org/hometown.

I'm Rebecca Rule.

See you around town.

I have always wanted to live in Warner, but I had no idea the treasures I would find with the people & places that live here.

Caring and kind people that really would give their shirts off their backs for you.

I mean, it's a town full of characters.

It's wonderful.

It's wonderful to be around.

It's a comforting, creative, welcoming community.

I can come to work here everyday.

That's awesome.

Support for this episode of Our Hometown was provided by: with additional production support by: And by viewers like you.

Thank you.