The Campbell Farmhouse on Kendall Pond Road in the town of Windham, New Hampshire, is a characteristic example of an Italianate style farmhouse with a shallow pitched roof, L-shaped footprint, and two stories with a shallow pitched roof and bracketed cornice with overhanging eaves. The residence was built by 1868 for its original owner, Deacon Samuel Campbell Sr. (1819-1902) and the farmland backed up to the Beaver Brook behind the residence. When the property was threatened for redevelopment and demolition, the community banded together and voted for the Town of Windham to purchase the property. A feasibility study was conducted in 2015, which resulted in the restoration and sale of the Campbell Farmhouse to private owners and the preservation of the surrounding marsh and farmland into publicly accessible conservation land.
The area now known as the town of Windham, New Hampshire, was colonized and settled by Scots-Irish immigrants in 1719. Many were from Londonderry in present-day North Ireland and they settled in Southern New Hampshire establishing a colony, which was closely tied to the Presbyterian Church, similar to in their homeland. An early church was built, but the congregation preferred a central location. When a new meetinghouse was built in 1798, the congregation utilized the building for its sermons. Being a town-owned building, the townhouse was used for town meetings and church services for any denomination wishing to worship there. There was dissolution of church from state in New Hampshire in 1819 with passage of legislation that ended support of churches through taxation. In 1833, the congregation sought their own house of worship and purchased a lot nearby and sold pews to area families to help fund the building. Completed in 1834, the Windham Presbyterian Church has long served as a landmark in town. At its peak in 1845, the church had 250 members out of the total population of the town at 818. In 1874, extensive repairs were made to the church, with the windows replaced and modified to accommodate the lowered gallery. The Greek Revival style building with its Italianate alterations (round arched windows and door and window hoods) has been lovingly preserved by its congregation for nearly 200 years.
One of the most enchanting and unique buildings in the state of New Hampshire, can be found tucked away in the woods in the town of Windham. This is Searles Castle. Built between 1907-1915, the massive castle was built for Edward Francis Searles (1841-1920), who was born in Methuen, Massachusetts, to middle-class parents who worked in a local cotton mill and operated a small farm. As a young child, Edward’s father died and he would leave school to work in a nearby cotton mill at just 12 years old. As a young man, he eventually moved to Boston, where for the next twelve years, Edward sold furniture and used his savings to pay off the mortgage on the family farm. Edward travelled to Europe and upon returning, he secured a job with Herter Brothers, a New York interior decorating firm. In 1881, Searles decided to go to California where he would take some time to call on some of the very wealthy clients of Herter Brothers. One of those clients was Ms. Mary Sherwood Hopkins of San Francisco, a wealthy widow of Mark Hopkins, a railroad tycoon who died in 1878 and left his wife with a massive fortune. Mary had no children of her own and would eventually marry her designer, Edward Searles, who was 22 years her junior. Mary changed her will to leave all her wealth to her new husband. It was at that time that Edward Searles started building several large mansions all over New England, including the massive castle in Windham. Mary died in 1891. For his castle in New Hampshire, Searles hired English-born architect Henry Vaughan, to furnish designs for a building to replicate a Tudor mansion in Stanton Harcourt, England. It is built of cut granite, fieldstone, and dark red sandstone, most of which came from Searles’ own quarries in nearby Pelham, New Hampshire. Edward spent most of his time at his estate in Methuen, and after his death in 1920, the property was inherited by his secretary and later deeded to The Sisters of Mercy in 1952. Due to the incredible costs maintaining this architecturally significant castle and expansive grounds, the Sisters of Mercy relocated to another building on the grounds and have rented the Castle for weddings and other events.
The Armstrong Memorial Building is the first purpose-built library building serving the town of Windham, New Hampshire, and is an eclectic example of late 19th century architecture combining elements of the Shingle and Craftsman styles. Built in 1899, it was the town’s first purpose-built library building, a role it played until 1997, when a new library was built elsewhere in town. The building is constructed of random laid fieldstone with a broad hipped roof with corbeled eaves and a shingled gabled entrance. Local architect, William Weare Dinsmoor, furnished plans for the building which has long been one of the beloved structures in Windham. Its namesake, George Washington Armstrong (1836-1901), funded the building for the town but it is unclear who it memorializes. After the new Nesmith Library was built in 1997, the building has been repurposed into a museum detailing the town’s history.
The town of Windham, New Hampshire, was initially home to the Pawtucket people, later joined by Scots-Irish immigrants began to settle in the area in 1719. The town was established in 1742, being the the second town designated by Governor Benning Wentworth following the establishment of the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border a year prior. In colonial-era New England, every town needed a meetinghouse to serve as a base of religious and civic functions for the community. Windham built an early meetinghouse which lasted decades until this building was constructed in 1798 as the town’s second. This structure was used for town meetings and religious services for the community until the 1830s when, after he began with the passage of the Toleration Act of 1819, which ended compulsory taxation to support established churches and religious institutions. Area congregations built their own churches and the meetinghouse was converted to the Town Hall. In 1868, the Town voted to repair and remodel the exterior of the building and finish a room on the second story for town meetings, giving the structure its current appearance.
Located in the bucolic town of Princeton, Massachusetts, Goodnow Farm sits at the heart of a landscape that has been farmed for more than two and a half centuries. The farm and road take their name from the Goodnow family who owned the land here for well over 100 years. The farmhouse, which dates to around 1786, was built for Edward Goodnow (1742-1798) and his wife Lois, who married in 1770. Edward was a corporal during the Revolution, serving both at the Lexington alarm on April 19, 1775, and at Dorchester Heights in 1776, before settling in Princeton to spend his remaining years on the farm. The property was inherited by his son, Edward and later by his son, William B. Goodnow (1815-1904), the brother of Edward Augustus Goodnow, a merchant who made his fortune in Worcester and donated the Town Hall and Library to his birthplace. After nearly 150 years of Goodnow family ownership, in 1917 the old farm was sold to industrialist, Charles T. Crocker, Jr. of Fitchburg and became a gentleman’s farm. Crocker used the farm as a summer retreat from the city and hired staff to maintain the working farm aesthetic, though Charles Crocker did not actually do much or any of the agricultural laboring himself. Investing in the old farm to maintain the rural charm, Crocker added this large cow barn and attached dairy house. The shingled barn is roughtly 80 by 36 feet, with its long, west side built into the slope of the hillside. The barn was a state-of-the-art farm building for its day, with its high gambrel roof supported on closely spaced rafters of dimensioned lumber sheltering a single soaring space built for the moving and storage of massive amounts of hay. After the death of his father, in 1956, Mr. Crocker’s son, Charles T. Crocker, III, gave the main part of the farm, in two parcels totaling 636 acres, to the Massachusetts Audubon Society, to be preserved in perpetuity as a wildlife sanctuary. He made an additional gift of 118 acres in 1963. Over the subsequent decades, other parcels were acquired and the site has been operated as the Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary, covering roughly 1,100 acres of the oldest farmland in Princeton, with twelve miles of public walking trails and historic stone walls. In the 1960s, the barn interior was altered to provide classroom, storage and exhibition space for Mass Audubon, with housing for the working farm’s sheep in the barn next door.
Located in the bucolic town of Princeton, Massachusetts, Goodnow Farm sits at the heart of a landscape that has been farmed for more than two and a half centuries. The farm and road take their name from the Goodnow family who owned the land here for well over 100 years. The farmhouse, which dates to around 1786, was built for Edward Goodnow (1742-1798) and his wife Lois, who married in 1770. Edward was a corporal during the Revolution, serving both at the Lexington alarm on April 19, 1775, and at Dorchester Heights in 1776, before settling in Princeton to spend his remaining years on the farm. The property was inherited by his son, Edward and later by his son, William B. Goodnow (1815-1904), the brother of Edward Augustus Goodnow, a merchant who made his fortune in Worcester and donated the Town Hall and Library to his birthplace. After nearly 150 years of Goodnow family ownership, in 1917 the old farm was sold to industrialist, Charles T. Crocker, Jr. of Fitchburg and became a gentleman’s farm. Crocker used the farm as a summer retreat from the city and hired staff to maintain the working farm aesthetic, though Charles Crocker did not actually do much or any of the agricultural laboring himself. Investing in the old farm to maintain the rural charm, Crocker added a large cow barn and attached dairy and the estate managed livestock and orchards. After the death of his father, in 1956, Mr. Crocker’s son, Charles T. Crocker, III, gave the main part of the farm, in two parcels totaling 636 acres, to the Massachusetts Audubon Society, to be preserved in perpetuity as a wildlife sanctuary. He made an additional gift of 118 acres in 1963. Over the subsequent decades, other parcels were acquired and the site has been operated as the Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary, covering roughly 1,100 acres of the oldest farmland in Princeton, with twelve miles of public walking trails and historic stone walls. The site preserves what early Princeton was known for, at a simpler time when families depended on their own gardens, orchards, livestock and labor.
Susan Minns (1839-1938), one of the first women to graduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a trained biologist and collector, and benefactor to many scientific and environmental causes in her home state, purchased four acres of farmland in Princeton, Massachusetts in 1910 to build her country house. Ms. Minns lived on Louisburg Square in Beacon Hill, but would ultimately fall in love with living near nature in Central Massachusetts and established Princeton as her year-round residence. Built in 1912, Minns’ house is said to have been inspired by her many travels to England and was designed after an old publishing house she saw there. The long and low “cottage” of stone and wood has always been covered at its roof with red asphalt shingles. While in Princeton, Susan spend much of her inheritance to acquire large amounts of land in town, including two farms and 140 acres around Little Wachusett Mountain, a picturesque drumlin covered in forest. In 1926, Miss Minns donated the entirety of Little Wachusett to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a wildlife sanctuary, which for 100 years, has been managed by the State as the Minns Wildlife Sanctuary. Susan Minns’ legacy lives on, not only in the form of her rustic Princeton home, but for her generosity and foresight to preserve important open space for the benefit of all.
When the town of Princeton was incorporated, vast land holdings were acquired, sold, and subdivided into large farmsteads for families moving westward from Boston. Part of the land in present-day Princeton was owned by William Brattle of Cambridge, but was undeveloped and confiscated by the Government as Brattle was a Loyalist, and sold in 1781. The property was purchased by David Osgood and later inherited by his son, Houghton Osgood (1768-1844), who built this farmhouse around 1794. The farmhouse and surrounding property with small pond, remained in the Osgood family until the mid 20th century.
Captain David Rice (1757-1825) was a resident of Rutland, Massachusetts, upon the outbreak of the American Revolution, where he served as fought in the local militia. After the war, David Rice married Abigail Newton in 1785 and purchased farmland in the western portion of Princeton, Massachusetts. With a property of over 100 acres, David and Abigail Rice had this farmhouse built, which is believed to be the main block of the present house on Old Colony Road. The Rice family farm was impacted in 1825 by the deaths of both Capt. David Rice and his eldest son, David Rice Jr., within four months of each other. The Rice farmland, which at the time of the patriarch’s death, included 121 acres and it underwent a complex division among the heirs, who included the two Rice widows. In 1852, area resident, Simeon Clark, purchased the Rice farmstead and modernized the house in the Greek Revival style, adding a side ell and corner pilasters which remain today. The property was again enlarged and “modernized” in the early 20th century with the present Queen Anne Victorian modifications which include the the paired ridge chimneys, projecting cornice, side ell, bay windows at the facade, pedimented dormers with patterned shingles, and the full-length front porch. The house was renovated from a farmhouse to a country estate, similar to many other area farmhouses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Princeton.
After the Civil War, summer tourism boomed in New England towns, where city residents flocked to the coasts or mountain towns as a respite from the hot and polluted city. Princeton, Massachusetts, became a favorite location for Boston and Worcester families, due to the extensive farmland, forests, and hilly terrain which provided cool summer breezes of fresh air. Due to this, a number of summer hotels were built in Princeton, including the Mount Pleasant House in 1868. Owner, Charles Augustus Whittaker, opened the main block of the house to summer boarders in 1868, which would see immediate success. The three-bay mansard-roofed Second Empire style residence was outgrown in the first couple summers and in 1875, Whittaker would expand the building with two side wings of the same style, to accommodate up to 60 guests. Moses Goodnow (1846-1934), the nephew of Edward A. Goodnow, a wealthybenefactor to the town, would acquire the hotel in 1879 and operated the facility until 1908, when the summer hotels began to see less visitors. In 1912, wealthy Worcester-based manufacturers, Edward C. and Harry S. Whitney, purchased the Mount Pleasant House, subdivided its lot, and divided the house in two, each taking one half as their private summer residence. The original section was occupied by Harry and remained on its site and the wing, this house, was moved down the street for his brother, Edward. The building has remained a single family residence and is a stellar example of its style.
Third Summit House, courtesy of Princeton Historical Society.
Built as three buildings over a span of one hundred years, Mount Wachusett’s Summit House stood over the town of Princeton, Massachusetts, and epitomized the rise of tourism in the community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In as early as 1866, William Morse began selling candy and cigars to summer tourists at the summit of Mount Wachusett, later building the first Summit House in 1870. The small stone building was a respite for visitors who walked or took horses up the mountain until 1874, when the Wachusett Mountain Company built a road to the top drawing even more visitors from the summer-resort boom in Princeton. As the mountain saw increased visitors, a second hotel, built in 1884 by Phineas A. Beaman, was constructed and nicknamed the “Tip Top,” with lodging in 30 rooms, with water supplied by a windmill on the shore of Summit Pond. Stagecoaches carried guests up from the Princeton train depot, and the season is estimated to have drawn around 30,000 visitors a year at its peak. The third Summit House, built in 1907, is known from postcards as a hotel that treated the summit as a parlor. The building was slated for demolition in 1970 to make way for a new recreational facility, but burned to the ground later in the year. Today the hotels are gone, but the summit still draws visitors by foot, car, or ski gondola, who take in the views of Massachusetts.
Soon after the town of Princeton, Massachusetts, incorporated in 1759, residents of other towns in the central part of the state flocked to the area to establish homesteads and farm the land. One of the new residents of Princeton at this period was Jonas Beaman (1750-1804) who settled here from Lancaster and built one of the most significant and unique farmhouses in town. Jonas built the stone house around 1780 from stones harvested near Mount Wachusett, and his family maintained the farm here. The basement of the house for a time served as a district school, following a fire that destroyed the previous school building. The Late-Georgian style residence features a hipped roof with center chimney, a center entry with transom, six-over-nine sash windows, and stunning site at the edge of a small pond.
