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atHome with History Buckminster-Kingsbury Farm

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atHome with History atHome with History

By Robert Audette/Photography by Kelly Fletcher

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The Buckminster-Kingsbury Farm Roxbury, New Hampshire

you 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 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.

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.

“I had friends who were beautiful artisans, spinners, weavers ... And I had maple syrup and all this stuff and I just thought, ‘Oh, there should be a place to sell this,’” she says. Kristiansen said she was inspired by the self-sufficiency of the early farmers and by their connection to the land and their communities. “Whatever she (Hannah Grimes) and her family could not make or grow themselves, they bought from or traded with friends, neighbors and regional businesses in a local marketplace which positively bustled,” says Kristiansen. Establishing the Hannah Grimes Marketplace was a way for Kristiansen to reach back to those times. “It was really just restoring that concept of a way of life

Mary Ann Kristiansen at home in her kitchen

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and a way of living that was very connected to each other, to a place of all of those deeply meaningful things that I think give life meaning.” The farm itself epitomized the early days of farming in New England, before the farms moved West and the forest reclaimed its rightful place in the rocky soil. “By the early 1830s, the farm was well established and W. Stoddard Buckminster was listed in town tax records as the owner of four horses, four oxen, five cows and eight ‘neat stock’ (cattle),” states the successful 2011 application to the Historic Registry. “In addition to the farmhouse and related buildings, he held a half-acre orchard, two acres of tilled land, ten tons of hay, twenty acres of pastureland and 250 acres of unimproved land and woodlots.” David, the son of William and Hannah, took over the farm before his mom died, selling it to Elbridge Kingsbury in 1878, wrote Gregory Farmer in the registry application, managing it and the nearby Kingsbury Farm. Under Kingsbury, the farm became a center of activity, both agricultural and civic. “A husking bee at the Buckminster-Kingsbury farm in 1881 involved thirty neighbors, 140 bushels of com and elaborate supper,” wrote Farmer. “A Christmas party in 1884 brought 150 friends with sixty teams of horses to a house trimmed with evergreens and two large Christmas trees. Live music and seasonal greetings were conveyed from the farm to Keene and other locations by telephone. Forty people at a time were seated for supper and Santa Claus arrived at midnight.” A photo in the collection of the Cheshire County Historical Society shows a picnic in 1884 > with more than 120 people in attendance along

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with the East Sullivan Brass Band. Ada Kingsbury, Elbridge’s widow, and her son, Elbridge L., conveyed the farm to Gertrude, daughter and sister, respectively, in 1919. Gertrude, a teacher in Keene, rented the farm to a group of teachers, wrote Farmer, who ran the Ashuelot Camp and summer school in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1946, Gertrude sold the farm to Harry and Mary Pierce, who later sold it to the Platts Box Company for logging and timber. The 200-acre farm was acquired by Robert and Cheryl Burroughs in 1984 and subsequently subdivided, noted Farmer. Kristiansen’s 13 acres of the historic farm are noticeably much quieter than they must have been >

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during the heyday of the Buckminster-Kingsbury Farm or the Ashuelot Camp. Kristiansen tends a small vegetable and flower garden in the cleared area that encircles the house. She had sheep for a while and still has Nigerian Dwarf goats. She has chickens, but she doesn’t let them free range too much because she’s spotted a bobcat roaming around lately. She has a cider press, and in the fall she harvests apples from the still-standing apple trees and makes cider. Sometimes friends come up to press their own apples, in a scene that harkens back to the Buckminsters and Kingsburys, except for folks snapping selfies with their phones. “Cider is so much better if you have people coming together, mixing them all up for much better flavors,” says Kristiansen, who is thinking of moving on to a plot of land and a home that is easier to maintain. “I’ve laid my hands on just about every inch of this farm,” notes Kristiansen, who sees her efforts in maintaining the property as her own legacy. “They left this behind for me; they built a solid house that lasted 200 years. Whether I leave now or in 30 years, I’m leaving it, too. We’re not here forever, and I’d love for this place to continue in loving hands.”

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