Every year, the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance highlights historic landmarks at risk of neglect or destruction in its Seven to Save list.
This year’s list includes buildings like town halls, a museum and a railroad signal tower, but it also includes the New Hampshire tradition of Old Home Days.
Old Home Days is celebrated in the summer or early fall by communities across the state and are organized by local volunteer committees. At its height, over 120 communities celebrated the event annually. This year, around 40 towns held an Old Home Day celebration.
Andrew Cushing is with the Preservation Alliance. He joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about why Old Home Days is on the Seven to Save list and what it would take to keep these events around.
Transcript
Andrew, for our listeners who have not had the opportunity to go to an Old Home Days celebration, take us there. What happens?
It's going to vary depending on the community or the town you're visiting or maybe you're from, but I can give an example of one of my favorite Old Home Days, which is in Canaan, and it's a three-day affair. Usually you can expect firemen's suppers, firemen auctions in the evening, churches might be doing chicken barbecue dinners, and in Canaan, the local hardware store hosts a belt sander race. It's a big deal. There are prizes for the speediest belt sander, but also the best decorated. So I'd say my friend who is known for her decorations, has won in the past with things like Bernie Sanders or ‘Sander Claus.’ So there's an element of humor, I think, with the best Old Home Days, because you're trying to make it fun and engaging. You want people to come back.
The whole idea of Old Home Days was to make it a celebration, not a funeral. Because the roots of Old Home Days are from the turn of the 20th century, when New Hampshire farms were really being vacated at a pretty alarming rate. And the governor at the time said, how can we get people to come back to these towns to remember what it was like, the good things about what it was like to be here? And so they did this huge PR campaign, essentially, for New Hampshire. They encouraged people who had moved to the cities or moved out west to come back, and if they wouldn't stay there, at least to invest for that week or maybe even for a second home.
Usually when I think of historic preservation efforts, it's trying to save old buildings or landmarks, but Old Home Days is an event. So why did it make it onto the list?
Historically, our Seven to Save list highlights particular endangered properties or maybe neighborhoods that are going to be impacted by, say, climate change, poor political decisions, just bad planning policies or maybe just deferred maintenance. But we have listed, every other year, kind of a thematic listing or something that's a little more intangible. So a few years ago, we listed the preservation trades to our Seven to Save, acknowledging that the age of our contractors is increasing and the number of younger professionals coming in is not keeping up with the demand.
This year we decided Old Home Days is tangentially related to historic preservation. A lot of times, Old Home Day committees would invest in, say, the town hall or a particular church, because that's where the symbol of the town was. Also, just the idea of preservation is very rooted in community.
You've spoken with a lot of folks who were involved in organizing towns’ Old Home Days. What are you hearing from them about this announcement?
I'd say common themes are that it's really important and really rewarding when you can see scores of people come back to your hometown. But we're also hearing, just like with other social organizations, that there's a real concern with volunteerism. It takes a lot of work to pull off these events and it's usually resting on the shoulders of a few dedicated and often aging members of the community.
What do we lose if we lose Old Home Days?
If we lose this kind of really important tradition, I think we lose a little bit of New Hampshire. And I think a lot of people don't know even that New Hampshire is the creator of Old Home Days, so it's a really special [and] unique event for our state.
I think now more so than ever, when we've kind of come out of this pandemic, this is a really important time to bring people back and remind them why it's important to be invested in your community.
