East Weare, New Hampshire: The New Hampshire Village Sacrificed to a Dam

01The Village on the Piscataquog

East Weare was one of the villages that made up the town of Weare. The Weare Historical Society says the town "grew up around five major villages," East Weare among them. The village lay in Hillsborough County, at roughly 43.0970° N, 71.6742° W.

East Weare was a working mill village. The town's Master Plan, as quoted by the Cow Hampshire blog, places mills along the Piscataquog River at East Weare and other villages. Dunbarton Conservation describes "several large water powered factories" and a large sawmill. The village sat where water power, timber and a rail line met.

02A Self-Supporting Village in Hillsborough County

New Hampshire's official historical marker for the village, No. 0143, was erected in 1982. It calls East Weare "self supporting" and lists what stood there: a train depot, churches, a school and a post office, a toy shop, a garage and a grocery store, lumber mills and a grist mill, a Grange Hall, cemeteries, a blacksmith shop and a creamery. The marker gives the economy as farming and lumbering and says the village was home to "over 60 families."

The railroad was part of daily life. A station named East Weare appears in listings from 1871, 1885, 1894, 1906 and 1918. It sat on a line that began as the Concord Railroad's Manchester & North Weare route and later passed to the Concord & Montreal and then the Boston & Maine, as the North Weare Branch.

Faith left a trace too. According to the church's own history, the East Weare Baptist Church was the longest-lasting of five small splinter churches in town and continued into the early 1900s. After the evacuation it moved to North Stark Highway and became Weare Bible Baptist Church.

Daily work could be dangerous. A fatality listing transcribed from an unnamed source records that Buzzell Barnard fell from a high staging near the toy shop at East Weare on 18 April 1875 and was killed. The same listing is one of the few places the toy shop appears in a dated record.

03What Happened to East Weare?

The short answer is the Everett Flood Control Project. The state marker says the village was "sacrificed" in 1960 for the project, and the Weare Historical Society likewise says it "was lost to a federal flood control project in 1960."

Dunbarton Conservation gives more of the sequence. Devastating floods, including the 1938 hurricane, led Congress to act, and the government used eminent domain on about 10,000 acres. In the late 1950s the village's homes and businesses were dismantled or burned, and about 60 families were displaced. Construction of Everett Dam began in 1959 and finished in 1962. The project cost $21.4 million, and the dam is described as 2,000 feet long. The village's end came around 1960.

UNH Today frames the loss differently. It describes more than 90 properties lost in the 1938 flood, after which the federal government moved residents out. The accounts are probably compatible: the flood prompted the project, and the project ended the village. The sources do not fully reconcile them.

04What Remains of East Weare Today

The abandoned East Weare site is now Army Corps flood-control land, partly under the waters of Everett Lake. It is not a ruin in the usual sense. The buildings were removed, but the layout of the village is still there to be walked.

In 2018, UNH Today profiled anthropology student Riley Boss, who worked from a count of 97 buildings and located 33 of them. She used granite markers that a Boy Scout troop placed in 1993. She found surviving old streets and paths and the sites of the toy store and a doctor's office. Pieces of foundations remain in the river.

A walking trail begins at the end of South Sugar Hill Road. A pamphlet keyed to the numbered granite posts is available from the Weare Historical Society. The old railroad grade also survives as a trail leading to the former East Weare station site. In 2017, Weare Middle School students hiked through the flood control area in East Weare Village as part of a visit to the dam.

For deeper reading, William Little's The History of Weare, New Hampshire, 1735–1888 and Helen E. Dearborn's 1959 Town History of Weare are the obvious leads. A bookseller's listing says Dearborn's volume includes photographs of East Weare Village.