Roads I’ve Traveled In The Granite State
PHOTO: This of the road near our home that is now classified as a Class 6 road and not maintained by the town with pass at your own risk sign at the entrance.
by Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr.
Weirs Times Contributing Writer
Snow and ice in the winter, mud in the spring, sand dust in the summer, and washboard surface in the fall describe the changes on the surface of the road we traveled on from our home in New Hampton to get to about anywhere else.
We lived on a dirt road and if you don’t know what a washboard surface is like, I can tell you where you find some. There is even one road that is named “Dirt Road.” Many dirt roads still exist, and one does not have to go far in these parts to find them.
Sometime during my teen years our dirt road became a paved road and I had a small part in its transition. I guess it would be more accurate to say, as we did back then, that the road was tarred, not paved. Truckloads of sand were laid down over the sand and gravel already there, liquid tar was then poured onto the sand, and the two components were then mixed together and smoothed out by a grader. The mixture would harden and your dirt road would no longer be a dirt road.
My small part was that of removing any large rocks that somehow had not previously been removed from the sand. I walked back and forth after the grader picking out rocks with the tool which seemed just like a potato digger to me. My work assignment didn’t last very long, and my boss, Road Agent Millard Blake, hardly spoke to me while it did, so I’ve always felt that I must have been doing an OK job. It only just occurred to me, these many decades later, that his silence might have meant something else.
Another road I have traveled many times is the road between New Hampton and Laconia or mainly the two roads between the two, Route 104 and Meredith Center Road. My Dad traveled these roads to work in Laconia for many years and they have not always had a reputation of being pleasant roads to drive on.
I remember hearing in my childhood that the officials at the New Hampton School wouldn’t take any students that needed hospital treatment to Laconia Hospital because the road was so bad. They would go to Franklin Hospital instead. My Dad was a state representative in 1949 and my information has been that he had influence in persuading the state to build the new Route 104 (new in the middle of the last century), and I remember the travel on that road when it was under construction. It also brought a new family to become part of our neighborhood because the father worked for the construction company. I also had a new road on which to learn to drive, not so long ago, or long ago, however you want to look at it.
Our longest road trip in my early years was the occasional trip to Lowell, Massachusetts, where my grandfather lived. There was no interstate highway in those days, and the best way to get there was by United States Route 3 right through Concord, Manchester, and Nashua and into Massachusetts. My grandfather had a T.V. Set before we did and when there was a Red Sox baseball game on he would turn the T.V. on to my delight. I was not delighted when he would immediately turn the television off as soon as the ball game was finished.
It took much longer in those days to travel from the Lakes Region to Lowell, Massachusetts than it does today, and there were times when we would spend some of the time singing as we cruised back towards home. The one song I remember singing with my siblings was “Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon.”
I’ve been on Route 3 many times going north also, some of them to see New Hampshire’s mountains, which Westerners, I’ve found, like to challenge us to compare to those in that part of the country. Size, however, should not intimidate us into enjoying any less the beauty of this State’s mountains and hills and appreciating the fact that the clear-cutting of the forests that adorn them is long past.
The scenes of my childhood include Franconia Notch and the Old Man of the Mountains, the Indian Head, the Flume, and the Basin. Route 3 continues all the way north to Pittsburg and the Canadian Border. Some readers may have traveled there many times, but I only recall going all the way to Pittsburg only once. It was with my oldest brother, who taught school in that town for a few years, and a friend of his. We were there to go fishing at a small rustic camp my brother had bought deep in the woods on a logging road and near a small stream. The trout were small but hungry. When I ran out of worms they still bit at a bare fish hook. Trying to sleep in the camp (or shack) was interesting, and I lay on the bunk listening to the mice scurrying to and fro and wondering if they would join me on the bed.
There are many types of roads, and some are loops whose beginning and ending join with the same road. One is near my New Hampton home; actually there are two different roads, the Hollow Road (or Little Hollow Road )off from Dana Hill Road, which joined with the Huckins Road which ends or begins (depending on which way you are traveling) at Dana Hill Road. The Hollow Road is no longer maintained by the town and you can no longer drive around the loop, but the memories of childhood when one could do so remain. Memories in winter of high snowbanks from a road plowed by town tractors, sleeping near it in a tent on a summer’s night, berry-picking near it’s borders, walking on the way to hunt or fish, loading a truck with wood to heat our house, etc.
I rode the school bus the two years I attended the New Hampton Community School, the town’s consolidated school with three classrooms. The bus went down the still dirt Huckleberry Road on its circuit of gathering students for school, and one morning a beaver was in that road and was not inclined to move. Melvin Huckins, our bus driver, had to leave the bus and with a wooden stick, probably from a fallen tree branch, persuade that beaver to move and let the bus pass by.
There were two dirt roads from our house that led to the town of Ashland. We could go up the hill on Dana Hill Road, though I don’t recall calling it by that name then, and down the steep hill to Winona Road and into Ashland, or we could turn onto Huckleberry Road and down hill to what is now Rt. 132 and into Ashland. I took the latter route with my brother when we rode our bicycles to the freight office at the Ashland Railroad Station to pick up the hamsters I had ordered.
I’ve traveled on many roads in New Hampshire and several other states, and it has occurred to me that I probably have enough material stored somewhere in my mind that I could write a book about those roads. Beyond that there are the figurative roads that I’ve traveled, of which I think I can say, in keeping with Robert Frost’s sentiments, I have often taken the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference, though that difference be different for he and I.