The town kept its roads open in the winter with men hired to “break” the roads in their neighborhoods. In 1858 the town “voted $113 for the year for breaking roads. Men to be hired for $.08 per hour; oxen for $.10 per hour; horses for the same rate as oxen and cows for less.” They did this by packing the roads with rollers like the one shown in the photograph, from Sutton, VT. Rolled snow made a good surface for sleighs and sleds.

The first record of a town purchase of equipment specifically for road maintenance came in the form of a vote in the March town meeting of 1882 instructing the selectmen to purchase a road scraper: “Voted to instruct the selectmen to purchase a road scraper.” The treasurer’s report shows it cost $60. It was likely similar to the ones illustrated in this advertisement from the late 19^th century:

Six years later, the selectmen recommended a serious upgrade in town equipment.

Article 7 on the March 31, 1888 warrant read: “To see if the own will vote to purchase one American Champion Road Machine.”  As the name suggests, this was quite a machine.  The picture of the American Champion below shows it to be a horse- or ox-drawn grading machine with a blade that can be angled and leveled. It had two operators; one who drove the team and the other who adjusted the blade.

Voters of the town passed over article 7. Chastened, the selectmen waited five years before trying again. From the records of the March 1893 town meeting:

“Article #5 To see if the town will buy a road machine or pass any vote in relation thereto.”

“Voted to instruct the selectmen to purchase a road machine. “

The treasurer’s report for 1893 reflects the purchase of a “John Hadlock road machine” for $250.  John Hadlock was the Milford, New Hampshire agent for American Champion Road Machine.

Early in the twentieth century automobiles began to travel Nelson roads made smoother, no doubt, by the new road machine. The first “resident” automobile came to town as the property of William L. Story.  The Story Farm cellar hole can still be seen at the foot of Jonathan Smith’s driveway on the aptly named Story Road. A year later Wayland Tolman, Wilmer C. Tolman, Albertis Wilder and Willie L. Guillow all owned the machines. That same year Fred A. Fisher brought the first motorcycle to town. But in 1915 Nelson was still hiring ox teams and their owners to maintain its highways. Though the town may have moved on to the use of motorized equipment earlier, the first record of such a purchase occurs in 1927.

The selectmen placed a tractor on the March 8, 1927 warrant:

“Article 5 Voted to buy a tractor.” The voters approved.

“Voted that $500 of the purchase price of the tractor be raised by taxation and the balance borrowed. “  The meeting recessed until 2PM on March 26^th when voters met to decide what kind of tractor to purchase.  One can imagine tractor dealers bringing their machines to show off to Nelson voters.

The record of the meeting reads as follows:

“Motion made and passed that vote be taken by ballot to see what kind of tractor to buy.

Result of vote.  Whole number of ballots cast 28

Fordson had 3

Cleveland had 25”

The Cleveland was considerably more expensive than the Fordson and was a tracked vehicle, not a wheeled machine like its competitor. The meeting voted to raise $500 in the current year and issue notes for three years; tractor payments totaled $3,233.

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Sources: Nelson Town Records, Google Books

The author is grateful to Sue Kingsbury for her skillful editing.

To see additional articles that Rick Church has written about Nelson history, click here.

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Nelson Old Home week promises to be as fun and exciting as ever. You can start on Saturday, August 7th, dancing with your friends and neighbors in the Nelson Town Hall. Dudley Laufman is the caller – who better than the man who got his start in Nelson in the 1970′s and went on to make contra dancing popular all over the country (and make Nelson known as the contra dance capital of the world). Dancing starts at 8:00, admission is only $2.00. No experience necessary – come and have fun!

Sunday morning pick a bouquet of flowers from your garden, dress up “old fashioned” (if you wish) and come to the Old Home Sunday service at the Nelson Congregational Church, at 9:30.

Monday night it’s back to the Town Hall for the regular Monday night dance, featuring a variety of callers and musicians. Donation $3 – dancing starts at 8:00.

Tuesday wander up (or down) to Apple Hill for their regular Tuesday evening concert, starting at 7:30. Outdoor seating is free. In the barn, $10.

Wednesday you can come here Rebecca Upjohn, telling the story of Lily and the Paper Man, at the Library at 3:30. Stick around for the ham and bean supper in the church basement (5:00) and over to the Town Hall at :30 for the Scott Norman Magic Show.

Thursday evening Monadnock Music performs in the Nelson Congregational Church. Admission is free, the concert starts at 7:30.

Friday it’s a game of Capture the Flag at the Ballfield 5:30), the Book Sale pre-sale at the Town Hall (7:00), and the exciting Mock Drive-In (complete with pop corn) showing the Wizard of Oz, at the Nelson School (8:00).

For more details about any of these events, click on the appropriate listing on the calendar (to the right).

And for details about Old Home Day itself, click here.

Nelson’s earliest roads were made and maintained by hand, using men and teams of oxen — the same methods that cleared farms. Road layouts reflected that labor intensity. They tended to be built straight up and down hills rather than be bench cut, and they were likely to follow property lines and avoid using already cleared and productive farmland. However, early property deeds made it clear that all property was “subject to all necessary highways.” Between its founding and today, Nelson has laid out, built, relocated and improved several hundred roads.

In May 1834 the selectmen received a petition from a number of residents to layout a new road. A public meeting was held and the town approved the following road: “Beginning at the Stoddard line near the brook in said Nelson thence south 34 degrees west through land of James Clark 12 rods to a stake and stones. Thence south 12 degrees west 16 rods 9 links. Thence south 5 degrees west 20 rods 12 links to the bank of the brook. Thence south 40 degrees west across the brook to the old road near James Clark’s cider mill 6 rods. The above line is to be the center of the highway which is to be 3 rods wide.”

This road is part of the current Old Stoddard Road from the Stoddard town line to the big culvert that carries Bailey Brook.  The stone foundation visible on the north side of the road today is probably James Clark’s cider mill.

For construction purposes, road layouts were divided into lots. The town set up contracts for different lots of the new road, and they were put out to bid.

The following is lot number 1: November 6, 1834:

“Conditions of sale [contract to build] of a piece of road in Nelson near James Clark’s.  Lot number 1 is 12 rods to be made 20 feet wide from the center of ditches and 20 inches crowning and all the stone and roots to be taken out that will come within 15 inches of the top of the road and all necessary sluiceways to be put in where needed and covered with hemlock plank or stone the whole to be done in a thorough and workmanlike manner.”

Another road contract, in1836, read:

“Lot number 4 of a road near the Widow Stiles.  Said road to be made 20 feet wide from the center of the ditches and 20 inches crowning and all the stone and roots to be taken out that will come within 15 inches of the top of the road and all necessary sluiceways to be made and covered with good sound hemlock plank 2 ½ inches thick or good covered stone, the plank to be 18 feet long the whole to be done in a thorough and workmanlike manner and to be completed by the 20^th of September, 1836.  Bid off to Joseph Osgood at $1.97 [per rod].  19 ½ rods.”

Old stone culvert off Nubanusit Pond Road

These records are the earliest records of formal road specifications. Twenty feet of width would allow the careful passage of two carriages. Provision was made for water management with crowning of 20” — particularly good for the steep hill sections and the specification of “sluiceways” [culverts] made of stone or thick hemlock planks.  At the prevailing, town-set rates for roadwork ($0.08 for a man and $0.06 for a team of oxen) we can estimate that Mr. Osgood needed about 12 hours to construct each rod (16.5 feet) of road.

Roads were mostly built and maintained by the people who lived nearby. The earliest records show the town meeting setting daily rates for work on the roads. A proprietor’s meeting in 1772 decided as follows: “Shareholders may work off their taxes on the roads.  Rates as follows: 2 shillings 6 pence per man per day; 2 shillings for a yoke of oxen; 1 shilling 6 pence for a plow; 1 shilling for a cart.” With cash to pay taxes scarce, and a need for roads, it was the only workable system.  Workdays were set at 9 hours. A pair of oxen was soon worth as much as a man. In fact as late as 1915 a man with a pair of oxen was paid twice what a man alone was paid for roadwork.

The town was divided into “highway districts” (as many as seventeen at one point) and a highway surveyor elected for each one.  Property taxes were levied separately to pay for town services like roads, schools and the minister’s salary. Highway taxes were turned over to the Highway Surveyors for collection. With the money collected or work done in lieu of highway taxes, the highway surveyor kept the roads in his district in repair. The following is a transcript of highway surveyor, Thaddeus Barker’s, warrant to collect the highway taxes and maintain the roads in his district:

5/29/1815

To Thaddeus Barker Surveyor of Highways in the Town of Nelson: In the name of the State of New Hampshire, you are required to warn the several persons in the above list [listed below] of Taxes, to work out the several sums annexed on the Road in Nelson aforesaid; beginning at the post guide by Doctor Goodell’s thence by Henry Wheeler’s, by Esek Phillips’ to the Roxbury line; thence by your own house to the Roxbury Line…. And you are to allow each man eight cents for each hour’s faithful labor and six cents for each hour’s work of a yoke of oxen and the common price for utensils…. J. Robbins, S. Griffin, N. Osgood, Selectmen

Highway taxes owed [in dollars and cents]:

This district included Lead Mine Road and old roads leading south from “5 B Farm” to Roxbury near Woodward pond.

Barker was authorized to get the work or collect the taxes. Nelson records contain numerous small paper receipts taxpayers received for work done in lieu of taxes. A typical example:

Nelson June 9, 1871 $0.40 received of Lydia Robbins. Forty cents in labor on the highway. Jewett Morse Agent

Sources: Nelson Town Records, The Ethan Tolman Papers

The author is grateful to Sue Kingsbury for her skillful editing.

When mail is addressed to one or more of the addresses below, it is forwarded to the individual(s) who can best respond. In some cases this may be a board chair, or in other cases it may go directly to the town office, where a determination will be made as to who should receive it. One value to this new process is that when town officials change, the email address can remain the same, but it is forwarded to the new town official.

Individuals who have been regularly corresponding with any town officials at previously established email addresses should make note of the new addresses, as the old ones will eventually be phased out.

Please remember that many town officials are volunteers, and the administrative staff and paid officials work only part time. Therefore you should not expect an immediate reply when sending email.

The addresses are:

The Town Office               admin@townofnelson.com

The Board of Selectmen        selectmen@townofnelson.com

Conservations Commission        conservation@townofnelson.com

Fire Department             firechief@townofnelson.com

Library                   library@townofnelson.com

Planning Board                planningboard@townofnelson.com

Police                    police@ townofnelson.com

Tax Collector                taxcollector@townofnelson.com

Town Clerk               townclerk@townofnelson.com

Zoning Board of Adjustment         zoningboard@townofnelson.com

They arrived at the museum around 6:00 pm, after an early dinner at Friendly’s, and spent the evening rotating in small groups through three different activities:  StarLab, Evening Walk, and Science Discovery Lab.  The activities were followed by a light evening snack and then the students drifted off to sleep in the main exhibit hall.

In the morning, following breakfast, the students headed out to explore some of the trails with a self-guided nature hike.  As the sun came out and the day began to warm up, the sixth graders put on their bathing suits and splashed around in the 250-foot interactive watercourse.  They had a lot of fun floating balls downstream, making dams by redirecting the water flow, and watching patterns of light and shadow as water spun around cylinders and moveable shapes.

Nelson School’s sixth graders had a wonderful class trip, and would like to thank all those who supported their fund raising efforts this year.

Breed Batchellor was the town’s first resident, settling as early as 1766.  He moved into an early structure built by Josiah Billings just over the east line of Keene in Monadnock Number Six, comfortably in Roxbury today.  That part of Keene was settled sparsely, but Batchellor’s home had access to Keene over Keene roads.  Dr. Nathaniel Breed followed Batchellor, building a large log cabin on the Old Stoddard Road followed shortly thereafter by Joseph Stanhope who built on the north slope of Osgood Hill on today’s Homestead Lane. Aaron Beel, James Bancroft, Phineas Stanford, Thomas Upham and Eleazer Twitchell are mentioned in the first road records as living in town. Certainly they created trails to serve their farms and these probably became the first roads.

In 1768 Breed Batchellor and Nathaniel Breed were appointed to layout roads.
Their layout is lost but we know there were at least five early roads that predate the first recorded layout in 1773:

• From the site of the future Packersfield meetinghouse to Keene
• From the meetinghouse site to Joseph Stanhope’s and on to Limerick (Stoddard)
• From the meetinghouse site to the outlet of Pleasant Pond (Silver Lake)
• From the meetinghouse site to the outlet of Center Pond
• From the outlet of Pleasant Pond to Eleazer Twitchell’s

The first of these connected our town with the region’s most established town: Keene. It went from the old meetinghouse site west along the current Lead Mine Road as far as the house currently owned by Dorothy Iselin, where it turned south through the woods.  Then as now, it shortly crosses a brook and turns west south west and runs north of Woodward Pond. It comes out at the old Roxbury Center and passes Breed Batchellor’s cellar hole in present-day Roxbury. Roxbury calls its end “Middle Town Road” today.

The second early road connected Nathaniel Breed and Joseph Stanhope to the center and led to the neighboring town of Limerick. The third and fourth connected the two earliest mills to the center and the last connected another early resident and may have gone on to connect to Dublin.

Our early roads connected the people who lived here, the early mill sites and the common where the meetinghouse was and the Nelson Cemetery is today.  It was also important to connect to the surrounding towns of Keene, Dublin, Marlborough, Hancock and Stoddard.  Modern cartographers may be surprised by this list, but there was no Sullivan, Roxbury or Harrisville when Nelson built its early roads.  Other inter-town roads were established to Hancock and Marlborough.

A map or roads in 1774, the year of incorporation, probably looked like this:

Monadnock Number Six Roads at Incorporation (click on this image to see a larger version)

First recorded road layout:
Records of Proprietors’ Meetings Monadnock #6
July 1773 Extract from Records:

“From the Dublin Line near Mr. Wood’s mill to the meetinghouse. Beginning on the town line (Nelson/ Dublin) near the SE corner of Joseph’s Mason’s land and then runs northerly to a red oak then to a stake and stones a little north of the Corn Mill [at the outlet of Pleasant Pond] and the NW corner mark of the road leading from said mill to Twitchell’s to a large red oak tree near Pratt’s barn … Then between Aaron Beel’s house and barn and John Adams’ land then to a small beech at the line on the north side of John Adams’ land to a large rock with stones on top on the line between Thomas Morse’s and Ensign Batchellor’s land to a white ash on the southeast side of a Great Hill then under the east side of said hill to a stake and stones then crossing the centerline into the northeast quarter then 3 rods west of the southeast corner of the ten acres on common land. All marks are three chops facing the road.”

The above road layout is a good example of early road descriptions. It states the road’s purpose: connecting Dublin and Mr. Wood’s Mill to the meetinghouse. It described landmarks that would have been known to Monadnock Number Six inhabitants at the time, both man-made and natural terrain features. It made reference to the map of 1768 showing the division of the town into quarters with a centerline dividing the town east to west.

Those early residents probably called the road: “ The Road from Daniel Wood’s Mill to the Meetinghouse.” The road connected the meetinghouse to Dublin starting at the Dublin line at the outlet of Pleasant Pond, swung just east of the pond on what is now Breed Pond Road in Harrisville, then headed north on Crickett Hill Road, past the Pratt barn and Aaron Beel’s house and barn (still in Harrisville). Today it goes through the woods east of the Silver Lake until it joins the Hardy Hill Road eventually joining the road to Keene (Lead Mine Road today) at the site of the original meetinghouse.  It passes cellar holes and early houses. They are not in the road description as they all came later.

Unlike the Hardy Hill Road today it did not follow the contour line, but left the current Hardy Hill Road and went over the shoulder of Hardy Hill (the Great Hill) behind what is now Betsy Street’s house. The description reads, in part: “to a white ash on the southeast side of a Great Hill then under the east side of said hill to a stake and stones then crossing the centerline into the northeast quarter then 3 rods west of the southeast corner of the ten acres on common land.” Having come over the hill, the road probably turned east and passed the Street house (built about 20 years after the road by the Reverend Gad Newell). That house had doors facing the road to the south and east.  The road was moved to its current location in 1912.

Terrain was a big factor in early road building. Roads tended to follow original lot lines perhaps because they formed property boundaries and laying them out on those lines did less damage to early mowings, pastures and orchards. Roads tended to be built right over hills rather than following contour lines. In our hilly town contour lines meant bench cuts in hillsides made by hand. Horses and horse-drawn wagons fared much better straight up or down rather than having to negotiate a side hill.

The Road from Daniel Wood’s Mill to the Meetinghouse

In the years between 1773 and 1820 the town grew rapidly toward its population peak. The original pattern of a few roads radiating out from the center to other towns pausing to connect settlers on the way grew to include other “spokes” as well as a network of connector roads. The network looked a bit like a spider’s web heavily modified by the limitations of our local terrain.

Road Network 1820

There are 174 records of road layouts, road abandonments and changes in the path of old roads from the Corn Mill Road through the year 1820 near Nelson’s population peak.  Each was laid out by the selectmen and approved by town meeting. The process of laying out roads was so hectic at one point that a committee was appointed to determine which of the three roads to Hancock would be the official one.

Please make note of this (this information is also published on the left sidebar of this web site).

Since this is a new process, there is some getting used to it, but in general the various boards will attempt to post the minutes in a timely fashion after each meeting. Please note that minutes from meetings are generally approved at the next meeting, so the most recent minutes are considered to be pending approval.

If you have questions about meeting minutes, please stop by the town office during business hours.