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
Famous quotes containing the words roads and, roads, stone and/or walls:
“They’re busy making bigger roads,
and better roads and more,
so that people can discover
even faster than before
that everything is everywhere alike.”
—Piet Hein (b. 1905)
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Painting consumes labour not disproportionate to its effect; but a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)