At the time of the Civil War, Brownfield, Maine, had only one village, called Brownfield Center. It sat at the northern foot of Burnt Meadow Mountain, with the usual array of stores, shops, mills and churches perched above or along Shepards River, serving the wider agrarian community. The st…

What ultimately became a tiny park was nothing but a watering-trough stop for passing horses when the picture on the left was taken of the main road through Center Conway. Back when land was plentiful and property owners didn’t mind people taking a little liberty with it, the little triangle…

Baman Stone came to Fryeburg, Maine, in 1873 to be minister of Fryeburg’s Congregational Church, but just four years later, he was “uninstalled” — or fired, in common parlance. Too liberal, would be my guess, especially since he went straight from that posting to found a congregation of Swed…

The Saco River posed an impediment to travel for nearly a century after the first British subjects settled in Conway. Rickety bridges crossed the river at narrow spots, but spring freshets would take them out eventually, and sometimes right away. It must have been frustrating for the demandi…

At the end of November 1945, an early blizzard dropped up to a foot of snow on northern Carroll County, and occasional storms thereafter made the hunting season a lot riskier for deer in the once-expansive forests of Conway and the surrounding towns.

An old sawyer named Moses Bemis lived at the foot of Pine Hill, a mile north of Conway Village. He and his wife both died there in 1920, and in May of 1930, a railroad conductor from Manchester named Nathan Morrell and his wife, Wiona, bought the house and a few adjoining acres. By the end o…

The Lovell Stage started long before the Civil War. The route ran daily between Fryeburg and South Paris, Maine, 32 miles away, to pick up passengers debarking from the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Many of the buildings on the downtown section of Berlin’s Main Street stand on what was, at the beginning of the Civil War, an island in a pond at the outlet of the Dead River. Two bridges linked that island to the rest of the city — one located a few yards north of today’s Mechanic Street, …

Lumber magnates were zealously leveling Michigan’s virgin forests in the 1870s, and many of the loggers they hired came from northern New England or Quebec.

Alonzo Webster lived a hard life by today’s standards, but he probably never thought of it that way.

Fryeburg, Maine, was once infested with Bradleys. Robert Bradley arrived in town from Concord at the dawn of the 19th century and established a farm on the north side of Main Street, where he built a 2½-story house just before the War of 1812.

In 1775, the Congregational Church was the only religious game in most towns along the Saco River — so much so that most official references to churches were made without distinguishing adjectives. Land grants merely specified that “protestant” ministers had to be settled in the various comm…

Edwin and Anna Levoy moved to Conway Village from Lancaster before 1910. Anna was an industrious Irish gal, married in her mid-teens and a mother of three at 19, but she was an accomplished pianist and a driving force in her family. Once her last child entered school, Anna launched her own b…

In 1961, Silvio LaChance and his brother, Joseph Edgar LaChance, bought the old Airport Restaurant beside Wiley Apte’s White Mountain Airport. Joseph, known in his Berlin family as Eddie, managed the business and named it Eddie’s Steak House. He moved his family into a ranch house at the rea…

In 1826, while local Congregationalists were eracting their church on the south side of Main Street, Samuel Thom built his house on the highest point in Conway Village. Off the corner of his front yard, he also built a store, and over the years he invested heavily in his neighborhood. In 185…