atHome with History atHome with History By Robert Audette/Photography by Kelly Fletcher
The Buckminster-Kingsbury Farm Roxbury, New Hampshire
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ou could be forgiven if you’ve driven on Route 9 through Roxbury all your life and never knew that just before you enter the twists along Otter Brook there is a farmhouse in the forest on the east side of the road. A post-and-beam wooden cape was built in the 1790s at what would become known over time as the Buckminster-Kingsbury Farm. In 1825 or so, William Stoddard Buckminster, who was married to Hannah Grimes, built a brick farmhouse, attached to the post-and-beam cape which was serving as a simple camp until then. The two-story brick house represents a Federal and Greek Revival style that evolved in New Hampshire and southern Maine in the 1820s and ‘30s, wrote Gary Farmer, on the application to list the farm on the National Register of Historic Places. “The style is characterized by a very broad gable end with a center entrance and symmetrical window placement and may incorporate exterior architectural details in the Federal, Greek Revival or Gothic Revival style,” he wrote. Grimes was born in 1776 and moved to the farm when she married William Buckminster in 1806. She
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died in Roxbury in 1859 but her legacy lives on in the region. Mary Ann Kristiansen, who bought the farm in 1991, is the executive director of the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship in Keene. Before she opened the center in 2008, she had opened the Hannah Grimes Marketplace on Main Street in 1997. Though she grew up in rural Minnesota, Kristiansen and her then-husband fled New York City for New Hampshire, ending her career at Merrill Lynch. “I was just kind of farming and gardening and making soap,” says Kristiansen, who also raised a daughter in Roxbury. “The soap-making business was actually the impetus behind Hannah Grimes marketplace. It was before the buy local movement and I just simply couldn’t sell soap to anybody. Back then there wasn’t so much awareness about homemade goods.” Kristiansen was also building a network of friends who were also artisans, struggling to make a living.
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TOP: Exterior of Mary Ann Kristiansen’s home, a post-and-beam wooden cape built in the 1790s (now attached to a brick home built in the 1820s). INSET: Mary Ann Kristiansen, relaxing at home. She works as the executive director of Hannah Grimes Center in Keene, named for the wife of the original owner of the Buckminster-Kingsbury Farm in Roxbury, New Hampshire.
