This story was originally produced by The Keene Sentinel. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Outside the windows of John Knight’s office in downtown Harrisville, the Nubanusit Brook gurgles through the town’s historic mill village.
A teenager heads to the water with a long yellow fishing pole. Two men in baseball caps chat as they cross the parking lot to an office in the mill building. Up the hill, two seniors enjoy fresh sandwiches on the porch of the General Store.
And all of it happens with the backdrop of a village virtually unchanged in a century.
That’s largely thanks to Historic Harrisville, Inc., a 50-year-old organization working to preserve and develop the town’s historic buildings and character.
Knight, who has been at the helm of the organization since last year, said those decades have laid a bold foundation not only for ongoing efforts in Harrisville, but also for an idea that could serve as a model for other towns.
The good life
Knight moved to Chesham in 2019 with his wife, novelist Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, and their two children.
A native of Greenfield, Knight studied literature at City University of New York before immersing himself in the Big Apple’s publishing world as an editor.
“I never intended to come back here,” he said of New Hampshire.
But his work in the city eventually took on an air of monotony and isolation, he said, and he started to question what difference it was making.
Driving into Harrisville, “it feels like you went back 100 years,” he said. That was part of why he and his wife wanted to live there, bolstered in 2020 by the ability to work fully remotely.
After moving, Knight quickly discovered that Historic Harrisville was a big part of “the reason it felt so good to be here.”
He joined the board five years ago.
“I love old buildings and old things, and I care for the aesthetics of spaces,” Knight explained.
Growing up in a historic farmhouse in Greenfield, on a piece of land decorated with towering old trees, Knight’s conception of a good life became tied to place — beautiful places.
As a book editor, he was drawn to stories that explored the relationship between place and the human psyche.
And today, as executive director of Historic Harrisville, he uses that same sensibility to cultivate local vitality.
The organization’s projects aim not only to maintain the historic character of downtown Harrisville’s many antiquated buildings, but to harness those resources to boost the town’s housing stock, economic opportunities and quality of life — in short, to make Harrisville a place for thriving.
It’s difficult, Knight opined, to thrive in a place that isn’t beautiful.
A beautiful place, on the other hand, tends to beget good living. “This town, these buildings are that,” he said.
When he’s not at work or thinking about how to help build a beautiful way of life for the village of Harrisville, Knight can be found enjoying the region’s beauty in other ways, playing outside with his kids or working on the family’s historic farmhouse.
Life together
At his great big wooden desk with the view of the village behind him, Knight slips seamlessly between the philosophical — aesthetics, the remanence of history, social divisions — and the practical — grants, ADA compliance, plumbing.
Coming into the role, he had little background with the latter part of the job. It was creative vision that led him to the role, not technical experience.
The previous executive director, Erin Hammerstedt, moved to a new job last summer.
Months out from the 2024 presidential election, Knight, then a board member for the organization, had division on the mind. He was wondering things like “What makes people like or dislike each other?” and “What can bring local community together?”
As the board began discussing a new executive director, Knight saw how historic preservation in Harrisville was intertwined with community building and economic and social possibility, and began to think about the organization’s work as a way to strengthen community and play at least a small part in healing division.
“It seemed like an exciting challenge, and an opportunity to embrace this community,” he said.
Community development isn’t typically the goal of historic preservation, but the Harrisville organization has the unique mission of “exploring what historic preservation can do for a town, and what old buildings can do for a community.”
For Knight, although he’s a self-professed fan of old things of all sorts, it’s not so much about the buildings as it is about the life that will happen in and around them. By preserving and maintaining the buildings, Historic Harrisville gets to have a hand in shaping that life, he said.
New life
Unlike some historic sites, downtown Harrisville isn’t a museum. And the people at work, at play and at rest on this sunny August morning aren’t reenactors or guides.
This is modern life, happening in revitalized, well-cared-for buildings that date to the 1800s.
It’s a vibrant, active little town, with the soul of its past mingling brightly with hopes for the future.
“That’s unusual in rural America,” Knight said of that liveliness.
At the General Store earlier this summer, Manager Laura Carden called that project a “labor of love.” Like Knight, she works for Historic Harrisville, which owns the store building.
The store is a convenience for locals, who don’t have to drive to Keene to buy milk or other supplies, but Carden described it as first and foremost a gathering place — one of only a few such places in the small town.
That’s the power these old buildings have, Knight said. They’re spaces that people feel invested in for all sorts of different reasons, and that can bring people together for work, play and community engagement.
In the village, Historic Harrisville has worked on more than 20 buildings.
Old buildings often have quirks than can make them challenges to develop, like outdated plumbing (or no plumbing) or simply being constructed in strange, haphazard ways.
But those abnormalities are often part of the story of the building, Knight said — remnants of a long process of human life and its context evolving side by side.
“They retain a lot of life in them,” Knight said of old buildings. “You can feel it when you’re in a house that house has a history — it has a soul.”
Historic Harrisville is in the process of renovating the historic St. Denis Church on Church Street for use as a community center.
It’s a project, begun by Hammerstedt, that Knight said he’s particularly proud of.
“I’m really excited about the potential it can offer for this town and this region,” he said.
The plan is for the former church building to host classes, workshops, health clinics and more as a community center independent from Historic Harrisville.
It’s a project for the community, and by it. “A lot of people have worked really hard to make that happen,” Knight said.
For him, it’s a step toward a goal of making the organization’s work benefit a broader swathe of residents, and to “find where the needs are and meet them.”
Currently, he said there are four main reasons to come to the village: you live there, you work there, you’re going to the General Store, or, for people with kids, to stop by the Children’s Center.
He wants to add to those reasons — to make the village a place for everyone.
