Alstead Remembers Flood

The Red Cross hosted a pancakes and bacon breakfast.

Politicians made speeches.

The Historical Society displayed photographs chronicling the devastation.

The town blazed a temporary trail, pinpointing the location of washed away and abandoned homes.

Alstead residents were asked to sum up their feelings and experiences.

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4:40 Sfx: 18-wheelers honking

But it's clear from the load these semi's are carrying it's really too soon to sum anything up.

Alstead resident Bruce Bellows explains what's underneath the huge Tyvek boxes.

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5:08 this is the new home that was built at the Cheshire location...it's coming to one of the families that lost their home in the flood. They are bringing it in today, and placing it with it today with a crane and bringing 50 workers...it's just one more step forward for one of the flood victims.

For some- like the family receiving the new home- it's obvious lives are still in transition in Alstead.

For others the adjustment is more subtle.

Bellows, who runs the town's historical society, is an 8th generation resident.

He says he's had a lot of history up Warren Brook, a section of town devastated by the flood.

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6:04...I lived up there in a house that was washed away, that my son was living in, when it was washed away. The house my wife grew up in was washed away. We were married in a house up there. My uncle and cousins lived in a house that was destroyed by the flood. So I have a lot of memories up there....the little house I grew up in the only thing left is one tree. No land, no nothing. One tree survived.

Bellows's attitude about the flood sounds like a lot of people living in Alstead: trying to make the best of it, moving forward, not dwelling on the past.

A curious thing to say for a historical society president.

Bellows admits on occasion he has at least glanced back.

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9:09 there isn't a day a drive through town and there isn't a day you don't look at the river as you go along and think about the past and think about what it is now. It is something as long as I live, it won't be the way it is. So ten years from now, when I drive up through there, I will remember what it was like...that is just something that is going to be.

Alstead's Commemoration was also a day for big words and ideas.

At 6:57 in the morning people gathered at the Village Bridge.

Town Selectman Matt Saxton offered folks a basket of little stones.

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1:11 we've got a nice crowd here on the bridge, and at 6:57, which is when the power went out in town...we are ringing all the church bells in town. And everyone here has a small stone with one of four words, 'faith, love, hope, and peace,' and the date of our flood and we will toss them into the river.

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:11 sfx: ambient, bells

As the bells tolled people pitched the pebbles into the Cold River.

85 year old Stella Winham knows all about those four words, faith, love, hope and peace.

The infamous wave of water carried Winham's house 60 ft. before it hit a neighbor's barn- with Winham and her daughter trapped inside.

The past 12 months have been an odyssey for a woman who became quite comfortable in a home she had inhabited for 50 years.

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1:08 I lived with one daughter for two weeks...then I moved to Saxon's River...I stayed there for four months. Then I moved to Walpole Senior Housing.

She says the experience was awful.

But after almost ten months outside her house, she purchased a new home, right next to the same river that ruined her previous place.

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9:00 I am not really, it just that it's so wonderful. I didn't ever think it would happen. I thought I was doomed to die in that apartment. I always had my own house, I had been independent, made my own way.

Winham says she's happy now, living in a house, just two doors from where she grew up.

I ask her what she's learned in the past year,

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15:20...That trouble is inevitable. This is what happened. We had the flood. My brother-in-law died. Georgie died, Minny found out she had cancer again, second time around. I don't know. I try not to analyze the day or time, b/c you can go out there and get run over. You don't know what is going to happen.

As the day went on, people continued to marvel at how well Alstead has absorbed the catastrophe.

Town Selectman Matt Saxton will be the first to say Alstead is still pulling itself out from the wreckage of the disaster.

But looking around the community and seeing the vitality, he says he has seen something, in his neighbors, and in people in general that will stick with him for a long time.

8:00 we asked for a level of cooperation and we got it. I don't think we expect that in America. I don't know if I expected it in this little town. But it happened, and that's the reason we are here today. If the selectmen had been asleep at the switch, or the flood babes hadn't appeared, or the governor has been less interested, none of this would have happened.

For NHPR News, I'm DG.