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…

LOVELL, Maine — The Lovell Historical Society, located at 551 Main St. on the corner of Route 5 and 5a, will be unveiling a new exhibit featuring unidentified photos from the society’s collection on Saturday, Dec. 11.

The Then & Now of a fortnight ago depicted the heart of the now-vanished village of Brownfield Center. The old postcard shown here was photographed from about the same spot, by the same photographer, and perhaps on the same day, by simply turning his lens in the opposite direction. The v…

With immigrant families pouring into town to work in the mills, and a new state law forcing the entire town to bear the cost of any new schools within its boundaries, Conway Village built a new grammar school in 1886. It was erected on Main Street beside the village church. For a quarter-cen…

The idea of making money from a lodging place overlooking the intervale and Mount Washington is hardly new. One building that has enjoyed that view for about 235 years has provided its owners for most of that time with income from renting rooms to people who want to enjoy it with their morni…

As in many other backwoods communities, the struggling farmers in the town of Adams, N.H., gravitated toward low-church religious denominations. Like their counterparts in the bony hills of South Conway and Eaton, where flat land was not to be found and soil lay thin between the rocks, the F…

The scene depicted by the antique postcard here is easy to locate, given a little familiarity with Fryeburg history. The date is more difficult to estimate, but with allowance for a little speculation it might be narrowed down considerably

There is still a town road in Conway called Old Goshen Road, but it’s just a development road that some think was part of the original route from Center Conway to the heart of South Conway. I remember it as a mere logging road.

With the opening of the Mount Washington Stage Road in 1861, North Conway and Jackson began sprouting new lodging establishments. Jackson already had the Jackson Falls House and the Forest Vale House, but a third hostelry opened up on the other side of the Ellis River, right beside the narro…

Waiting for the morning train, circa 1900