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A Look Back: The Upper Valley fight over NH’s ‘Live Free or Die’ motto
12-01-2024 12:25 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Half a century ago the Upper Valley was ground zero for a battle between state power to compel citizens to display a message they disagreed with and determined dissenters willing to resist, even to the point of going to jail for their beliefs.Over a...

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A Look Back: The closest race for a U.S. Senate seat in history
11-03-2024 5:01 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was almost five o’clock in the morning and the election was coming down to the vote totals from the three wards in the City of Claremont. Ballots were still counted by hand in those days, but out of 299 New Hampshire voting precincts the statewide...


A Look Back: One-room schools often served as community gathering places
10-06-2024 5:01 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

If they lived within two miles, students walked or rode their bikes to school. Mabel Pillsbury was their teacher and she handled all eight grades for many years. And the majority of the pupils came from families who had been in the town for...


A Look Back: Upper Valley labor unions of today differ from those of the 1950s
09-02-2024 2:01 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Ramble through archived issues of the Valley News from three-quarters of a century ago and you’ll find five, six or more mentions of local labor disputes every week. The 1950s were a time when the Upper Valley still had an extensive assortment of what...


A Look Back: Longtime Upper Valley dance band Woody and his Ramblers got its start with ‘kitchen junkets’
08-04-2024 4:01 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

For many hundreds of Upper Valley folks, the soundtrack of their lives in the late 1940s, the 1950s and into the 1960s was the music of Woody and the Ramblers, a band composed of five local Greatest Generation guys who traversed the region for as many...


Looming disappearance of hand-mowing skills prompted start of competitions
06-30-2024 5:03 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

It once was a skill every man and boy over age 10 in rural Vermont and New Hampshire mastered, an activity absolutely vital to sustaining animal agriculture with antecedents tracing back thousands of years. Watching someone doing it today seems like...


A Look Back: Witnesses remember the Great Lebanon Fire of 1964
06-01-2024 5:01 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

LEBANON — Most folks have a few events in their memory they’ll never lose track of, days like Nov. 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, or Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon....


A Look Back: Upper Valley dining scene changes with the times
05-05-2024 4:31 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Before franchised fast food and corporate-owned restaurants hit the Upper Valley, there was a time when locally owned diners and a variety of family-run eating establishments flourished and produced many fond memories and much nostalgia. For at least...


A Look Back: Crank telephones connected Meriden community for 75 years
03-31-2024 5:16 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was a great conversation starter half a century ago, and, if you lived it, the subject can bring amusement, even awe, to those hearing about it today. That’s the “hand crank” or magneto telephone system that served Meriden Village for nearly 75...


A Look Back: The legislation that changed town meeting
03-03-2024 6:31 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was arguably the greatest change in the structure of New Hampshire town government in almost three centuries, seen by advocates as a necessary response to rapid population growth in many communities and by others as an assault on a cherished...


A Look Back: That Golden Age of ski jumping
02-04-2024 7:27 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Erling Heistad came to Lebanon from Norway in 1923 and in a matter of a few months he set off a half century’s worth of excitement that would eventually establish a local Golden Age of what had been an obscure Scandinavian sport, ski jumping. For...


A Look Back: Citizen access to the candidates central to NH primary
01-08-2024 4:17 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was 36 years ago, back when Lebanon was largely a moderate Republican bastion, and Karen Wadsworth was an up and coming figure in New Hampshire GOP politics. One day she hosted a good-sized gathering of the GOP faithful at her home on Bank...


A Look Back: The Golden Age of radio added color to Upper Valley life
12-05-2023 4:29 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Radio had come in big-time by the 1930s, but if you lived in the Upper Valley, you needed a wire hooked up to a tree or post outside your house if you wanted to get any reception. And the reception you got off this crude antenna system came from...


A Look Back: Upper Valley grocery stores change with the times
11-06-2023 1:57 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Talk about all the things that have changed in the Upper Valley since, well, 1950 — the interstates, the rising influence of Dartmouth College and its ever-expanding health care colossus, disappearance of textile mills and hill farms, staggering gains...


A Look Back: Bridges knit together the Upper Valley
10-03-2023 8:22 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Bridges across the Connecticut River have been essential for more than two centuries to creating what former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean once called a “third state” nestled between New Hampshire and his Green Mountain State. Indeed, as the current...


A Look Back: A Tunbridge Fair of a very different vintage
08-28-2023 10:02 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

THE TUNBRIDGE FAIR AS IT ONCE WAS — Yes, it was good that a crusading young minister came to town and led the charge to clean up the wild, alcohol-fueled atmosphere of the Tunbridge Fair and get rid of its reputation as “the drunkards’ reunion.” That...


A Look Back: Farm auctions reflect Upper Valley’s changing way of life
08-07-2023 10:45 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

There’s a measure of melancholy that always surrounds a farm auction. Chances are it is bringing down the curtain on a life’s work, an ending compelled by bodies aging out, debts that can’t be covered by cash flow or plain old bad luck. The effects...


A Look Back: Fourth of July celebrations meld civic and social elements
07-02-2023 9:14 PM

By STEVE TAYLOR

John Adams famously said the true founding of the United States of America came on July 2, 1776, not on July 4, because on July 2 the Continental Congress passed by majority vote the Declaration of Independence. On the fourth, the delegates signed the...


A Look Back: A celebration of the square bale
06-05-2023 1:47 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was by far the greatest technological advance of the 20th century for livestock farmers, and it lives on today serving what’s become a niche market of hobby farmers and horse owners. It’s the hay baler, and it’s a machine that can be pulled around...


A Look Back: I-89’s arrival made Purmort, Montcalm real
05-02-2023 12:38 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

‘Twas 63 years ago when the Enfield board of selectmen — Charlie Tupper, Isaac Sanborn and Henry Laramie — sat down with representatives of the state highway department to discuss whether the town had any wishes for naming its two exits off the new...


A Look Back: Muddy roads of springs past
04-03-2023 4:54 AM

By STEVE TAYLOR

Upper Valley roads are wicked muddy this spring? Ha! Go back a few decades, or maybe a century or two — that’s when just about every road around here was a muddy slog, even in downtowns, for weeks on end. Little wonder folks then actually liked winter...

Displaying articles 1 to 20 out of 26 total.
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