Then & Now: Making a living from ice cream and mineral water

Harry Chandler Blanchard did not rise from auspicious beginnings. His parents were Canadian immigrants who worked in the cotton mills of Lawrence, Mass., and he lost his father at an early age, but he did all three things that still almost always lift people out of the cycle of poverty. He graduated from high school, got a job and waited until he was past the age of 21 to get married. He waited until 1913, in fact, when he was nearly 27, to marry a girl from Lawrence and bring her to Conway.

First they settled in Redstone, where he took over the bottling plant at the White Mountain Mineral Spring. By 1917, they had two sons, and the business was thriving. In September of 1920, he bought land on Main Street in North Conway just south of the then-new Congregational Church, where he built the house shown in the old postcard depicted here.