On 5/16/2022: Andrew Boucher: Owner, wrote:
My parents, Robert and Mary Boucher, bought 64 Bow Center Road in 1972. My father died in 1998, my mother moved to Concord in 2005 or 2006, my brother and his family rented it from my mother until 2014 when I purchased the property. The full property has 50 acres, 40 of which are under a conservation easement through Bow Open Spaces. We essentially retained the “footprint” of the house, the horse pasture, and the back field in the 10 acres that are not under the easement.
I actually live in Charleston, SC, so we AirBnB the house when we’re not there. We’ve done extensive renovations to the house in the past three years.
We had a contractor who specializes in historic barn preservation and renovation walk through the barn while we were up there over Christmas. We had always had the date of the barn at around 1860, but he noted that much of the large timber in the barn was hand hewn. He believes the barn was probably built around 1860 but was something of a rebuild using timber from a previous, much older barn.
Harry Clough built the current house around 1930, and moved the original house up the street – it’s the red house at 74 Bow Center Road. The attic of the older house at 74 Bow Center Road has similar construction to the barn. Harry Clough’s daughter, Rae Carson, was married in the living room of the new house in the 1930s, and ended up living out her days in the older house at 74 Bow Center Road. About 30 years ago, I wrote a history of the property for a school assignment, and learned much of the history from Mrs. Carson. The barn had been about a third larger than it is today (the footprint clearly extends out the back). There had also been a corn crib on the property at one point near what is now a very overgrown and muddied up irrigation pond in the woods between the house and the back field. As kids we knew where we could go to dig up old cans, and we even used to play on a rusted Model T that had been abandoned in the woods. Alas, the car has now been completely reclaimed by the elements.
My understanding from looking through the old property records was that before Bow Center
My parents, Robert and Mary Boucher, bought 64 Bow Center Road in 1972. My father died in 1998, my mother moved to Concord in 2005 or 2006, my brother and his family rented it from my mother until 2014 when I purchased the property. The full property has 50 acres, 40 of which are under a conservation easement through Bow Open Spaces. We essentially retained the “footprint” of the house, the horse pasture, and the back field in the 10 acres that are not under the easement.
I actually live in Charleston, SC, so we AirBnB the house when we’re not there. We’ve done extensive renovations to the house in the past three years.
We had a contractor who specializes in historic barn preservation and renovation walk through the barn while we were up there over Christmas. We had always had the date of the barn at around 1860, but he noted that much of the large timber in the barn was hand hewn. He believes the barn was probably built around 1860 but was something of a rebuild using timber from a previous, much older barn.
Harry Clough built the current house around 1930, and moved the original house up the street – it’s the red house at 74 Bow Center Road. The attic of the older house at 74 Bow Center Road has similar construction to the barn. Harry Clough’s daughter, Rae Carson, was married in the living room of the new house in the 1930s, and ended up living out her days in the older house at 74 Bow Center Road. About 30 years ago, I wrote a history of the property for a school assignment, and learned much of the history from Mrs. Carson. The barn had been about a third larger than it is today (the footprint clearly extends out the back). There had also been a corn crib on the property at one point near what is now a very overgrown and muddied up irrigation pond in the woods between the house and the back field. As kids we knew where we could go to dig up old cans, and we even used to play on a rusted Model T that had been abandoned in the woods. Alas, the car has now been completely reclaimed by the elements.
My understanding from looking through the old property records was that before Bow Center
Tom Campbell Wilson: studio-i19
unless noted otherwise, photos taken
c. May, 2022 by
Eric Anderson: Photographer
Road was built, the property line was actually the creek that cuts through the woods behind our house, and there is an evenly-spaced line of oak trees along a stone wall in our back field that was probably part of the original homestead.
We did make maple syrup as a family, starting in the early 1970s and going through 1996. (I have the never-opened last bottle that I bottled myself from the last batch on my bookshelf.) My uncle, who lives in Penacook, built the sugar house on the property in the late 80s. Treat still taps our trees and knows more about the land than anyone else. Bruce has been thinning out the non-maples to create more of a grove, and he started a project a couple of years ago to reclaim and revitalize the hay fields. (He even bottles some syrup for us under our own label that I had designed.)
At some point in the next decade or so, we plan to do “something” with the barn, but anything we do will have historic preservation as a pre-requisite. The first stages will involve bringing in an excavator to shore up the foundation and make sure the thing doesn’t fall down.
Finally, when my parents bought the house, they found an old sign on one of the trees reading, “Intermaples,” and that’s the name we’ve always used (I know the Bow history has it as “The Maples.”) When I was growing up, there were two perfect rows of giant maples lining the driveway. (I’ve attached a photo that someone took in the early 80s that ended up on a random calendar. My mother’s brother, who lives in Colorado, noticed it on the wall in his boss’s office and said, “That kind of looks like my sister’s house in New Hampshire.”)
Most of those maples have died, and so last year I planted new ones. Traditionally, maples planted by landscapers are red maples, but I made sure we planted sugar maples.
This is an ongoing project for us, and even though they’re “southerners,” my kids now see Bow as part of their family history and look forward to Christmas in the Bow house each year. (And now they know how to shovel snow.)
We did make maple syrup as a family, starting in the early 1970s and going through 1996. (I have the never-opened last bottle that I bottled myself from the last batch on my bookshelf.) My uncle, who lives in Penacook, built the sugar house on the property in the late 80s. Treat still taps our trees and knows more about the land than anyone else. Bruce has been thinning out the non-maples to create more of a grove, and he started a project a couple of years ago to reclaim and revitalize the hay fields. (He even bottles some syrup for us under our own label that I had designed.)
At some point in the next decade or so, we plan to do “something” with the barn, but anything we do will have historic preservation as a pre-requisite. The first stages will involve bringing in an excavator to shore up the foundation and make sure the thing doesn’t fall down.
Finally, when my parents bought the house, they found an old sign on one of the trees reading, “Intermaples,” and that’s the name we’ve always used (I know the Bow history has it as “The Maples.”) When I was growing up, there were two perfect rows of giant maples lining the driveway. (I’ve attached a photo that someone took in the early 80s that ended up on a random calendar. My mother’s brother, who lives in Colorado, noticed it on the wall in his boss’s office and said, “That kind of looks like my sister’s house in New Hampshire.”)
Most of those maples have died, and so last year I planted new ones. Traditionally, maples planted by landscapers are red maples, but I made sure we planted sugar maples.
This is an ongoing project for us, and even though they’re “southerners,” my kids now see Bow as part of their family history and look forward to Christmas in the Bow house each year. (And now they know how to shovel snow.)