New Book Documents 50 Years of HHI
The opening title pages for chapter 3 of Out of Date & Ahead of Its Time: Historic Harrisville's First Fifty Years
“Historic Harrisville, Inc. represents the second founding of the town by a small group of visionaries.”
—Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize winning environmental historian, and speaker at HHI’s 50th anniversary celebration, August 28, 2021
Now, with the forthcoming publication of the history of Historic Harrisville, Out of Date & Ahead of Its Time: Historic Harrisville's First Fifty Years, you can find out what it took for the visionaries of this organization to keep the village alive, while preserving and shepherding it into the 21st century.
“Harrisville dramatically transformed itself from a dying town with only a past to one with a sound economic present and a secure future.” (William Morgan, architecture critic for the (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal, July 16, 1978)
Historic Harrisville (HHI) was founded in 1971, with the mission of preserving the 170-year-old mill village, a National Historic Landmark, without turning it into a museum. As the noted architecture critic Robert Campbell wrote, “New people come to Harrisville, but they have been integrated into its ongoing life. Preservation has occurred without freezing. In a way it was a radical solution, yet it was also the most traditional one imaginable.” (Boston Globe, August 25, 1974)
Today, the village is flourishing, with a thriving general store, businesses like Harrisville Designs that employ dozens of community members, contemporary artists in studios situated in former industrial spaces, and an expanding portfolio of renewable energy. HHI even offers affordable housing within the historic district.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Historic Harrisville, we are raising funds to publish a special, limited-edition book that tells Harrisville’s story from 1970 to today, through the lens of HHI, but placed firmly in historical context. Historic preservation consultant Elizabeth Durfee Hengen and writer Robert Russell are combing through our archives to present a comprehensive history of our innovative organization. This full-color coffee-table book will be accompanied by intriguing news articles, images, and anecdotes, and professionally designed by Gwarlingo Studio.
Selected Sample Pages
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This new 233-page color hardback documents the history of Historic Harrisville in interviews, photographs, and archival materials.
As for many New England towns, the decline of the textile industry in the twentieth century was devastating for Harrisville. Tucked into the southwestern hills of New Hampshire, the town's primary employer was a mill that in 1970 finally filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors. Yet fifty years later, the village and mill buildings survive-in fact, thrive. Dozens of structures that date to the mid-1800s-including the mill complex, a library, boarding houses, and handsome homes-remain the center of a vibrant town. The village boasts a lively general store, post office, children's center, affordable housing, artist studios, a woolen yarn spinning mill, and hydroelectric and solar power-surrounded by nearly 150 acres of conserved land.
This unusual small-town success is in part a consequence of a radical idea that became Historic Harrisville, Inc. Established the year after Harrisville's mill closed, the organization launched when three friends, still in their twenties, resolved to convert the beleaguered nineteenth-century industrial complex into a modern town where they could continue to live and work. They rallied a small group of farmers, conservationists, disillusioned businessmen, unorthodox lawyers, inspired architects, and all-out optimists, and began inventing their own strain of historical preservation rooted in the character of their village. What began as a gamble soon evolved into a sustainable approach to conservation, one that is now a model for communities across the country.
To celebrate the first five decades of this unlikely organization, Historic Harrisville's story has finally been set down in full. Written and assembled by preservation specialist Elizabeth Durfee Hengen and conservation expert Robert H. Russell, Out of Date and Ahead of Its Time is an illuminating portrait of this pioneering effort. Weaving interviews, archival material, and choice historical context with full-color photographs, Hengen and Russell explore the origin of the organization and how it maneuvered long odds, necessity, and luck to remain essential for more than fifty years.
A distinctly local story of determination and originality, Out of Date and Ahead of Its Time is a unique tribute to a groundbreaking organization that is responsible for America's most completely preserved mill village. From the untold stories to the triumphs now taken for granted, it is a marvelous bricolage of substantive, creative historic preservation and its transformative potential.
“Perhaps the most unique thing about Harrisville is that it’s lovely long after most towns have ceased to be lovely.”
—Richard M. Vogel, curator of heavy machinery and civil engineering at the Smithsonian Institution, quoted in the Keene Sentinel, Aug. 17, 1968
“We’ll find a way to keep it [Harrisville] as it is—not because it’s old, but because it’s good.”
—Warren Thayer, mill foreman, quoted in the New York Times, March 28, 1971
“[Harrisville IS] one of the best preservation efforts in the country. They managed to preserve the village as a working community. They didn’t just make a museum of it.”
—Dr. William H. Pierson, professor of studio art and art history, Williams College, quoted In the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel, May 21, 1999
“Historic Harrisville is constantly moving forward by preserving the past.”
—Keene Sentinel, December 19, 2018
About the Authors
Elizabeth Durfee Hengen is a preservation consultant with more than forty years of experience in historic preservation planning. Her consulting projects cover the broad spectrum of preservation issues, opportunities, and documentation, among them pioneering initiatives focusing on the cultural landscapes of the Squam and Chocorua lake watersheds and an early study of the tenement housing for Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire. Past publications and articles include Capital Views: A Photographic History of Concord, New Hampshire 1850-1930; Life Everlasting, The History, Art and People of Woodlawn Cemetery, 1850-2000; articles for Historical New Hampshire and Forum Journal; Preserving Community Character, A Preservation Planning Handbook for New Hampshire; and walking tours and design guidelines for communities throughout New Hampshire. She holds a BA in art and architectural history from Harvard College. She resides in Concord, New Hampshire.
Robert H. (Rusty) Russell is an environmental lawyer and policy and communications consultant. As faculty in Tufts University’s graduate Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP), he co-directed its interdisciplinary water policy program, while teaching environmental law, water and air policy, and field research. Before that, he served as an attorney-advocate and communications director for the Conservation Law Foundation. He also has been a journalist and corporate lawyer, and directed a state health policy program. He holds degrees from Amherst College and Harvard Law School. Publication topics include the future of offshore wind energy, the impacts of affordable housing on environmental protection, the impact of intermittent water supply in developing nations, and the use of carbon capture and sequestration as a strategy to combat climate destabilization. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.