Roads and Stone Walls
Three roads pass through the Historic District: Center Road, which is a paved class-IV (state-maintained) road; Stone Bridge Road, which is an unpaved class-VI (unmaintained town) road; and an unnamed class-VI right-of-way connecting Center Road to a lower section of Stone Bridge Road. Center Road was created as a two-rod (33-foot) right-of-way sometime before 1770, and was widened to three rods (50 feet) as part of a project to create a road across Hillsborough County in 1800-1804. The right-of-way was widened in 1840 between New Road and Stone Bridge Road because of problems relating to blowing snow. The original section of Center Road, which ran much closer to the Old Town Hall, Town Pound, Congregational Church, and Congregational Parsonage, was not discontinued, but generally fell into disuse as a travelled road after 1840.
Stone Bridge Road is a two-rod (33-foot) right-of-way that was constructed in 1770 to connect Lyndeborough Center (and the meetinghouse) to western Lyndeborough. The road passed by the location of the first town meetinghouse on Putnam Hill Road, through the South Lyndeborough Village Common, and along Citizens' Hall Road and Pettingill Hill Road before veering southward into Wilton.
The unnamed class-VI road appears as a road on an 1858 map of Hillsborough County, but like Stone Bridge Road, fell into disuse by 1892 (though it was never discontinued, and thus legally is still a public right-of-way). Under New Hampshire law it is a prescriptive road, created through "adverse possession" (continuous public use) over a 20-year period prior to the mid-1960s. Thus, the width of the right-of-way is legally undetermined, but is assumed to be two rods.
The stone walls behind the Town Pound, Town Hall, and former Town Barn date from between 1800 and 1860, the period during which most stone walls were built in Lyndeborough. The stone wall along the east side of Center Road dates from 1840, when the road was moved to its current position.
Read more about this topic: Lyndeborough Center Historic District
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—Piet Hein (b. 1905)
“Then the master said to the slave, Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 14:23.
“The stone often recoils on the head of the thrower.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“Yet, when the walls of flesh grow weak,
In such an hour it may well be,
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And each anointed sense will see.”
—Ernest Christopher Dowson (1867–1900)