Our Town: Peterborough, N.H.

Any town official, bookstore clerk, short order cook, or art gallery owner in Peterborough, N.H., has a lot to say about what their town is known for—and one of the things they say is, it’s all about tradition.

Incorporated in 1760 by Scotch-Irish trades people, Peterborough, which has grown to 2,100 residents, has the oldest public-supported library in the United States, established in 1833. The idea of Rev. Abiel Abbot, a Unitarian proponent of community learning, the library grew out of his lecture hall where talks were held on social issues of the time such as temperance, abolition, and religious tolerance.

The MacDowell Colony, established in Peterborough in 1907, is a town centerpiece and an outgrowth of Abbot’s teachings. A nationally recognized, free working retreat for talented artists, musicians, and writers, it has nurtured such notables as American composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, poets Edward Arlington Robinson and Galway Kinnell, and novelist Alice Walker. Thornton Wilder wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town, in 1938, while living in the forested quiet of nearby MacDowell—and most townspeople believe the gentle drama about small-town life was inspired by Peterborough.

The Peterborough Players theater company, hewn out of an old barn lighted by kerosene lamps in the 1880s—along with the town’s many galleries—are other symbols of Peterborough’s commitment to the arts. “It is nothing less than a bastion of arts and learning, education, religion, and politics,” says Dana Hadley, Peterborough’s assistant town administrator.

And yet, for all of that, “Peterborough’s ongoing vitality—indeed, its very survival—has depended on ordinary folks who care,” says Pam Brenner, town administrator. They’ve shown this pride with gifts of money, by volunteering, and sometimes with ideas alone. In all cases, it’s been “the perseverance, vision, and vigilance of Peterborough’s residents, not only to keep the town shining with artistic, economic, and intellectual vitality, but to keep it from the destructive effects of sprawl,” she says.

“Too many small towns across America look the same, with strip malls, fast food stores, and gas stations. Not so in Peterborough,” says Brenner. “Our citizens just won’t have it. They’re very protective of their town. Just a few years ago the town denied McDonald’s a license to do business here. The people thought that … would be the beginning of the end. It just wouldn’t be welcomed.”

Peterborough’s citizens also have been fighters and providers, whenever the need arose.

Ellen Derby, executive director of the Peterborough Historical Society, speaks of her town as if she’s lived there from its beginnings. “In the 1880s, when the town’s population was dwindling, its citizens got together to find a way to bring employment into the town. They figured they’d attract a lucrative piano factory to move here by offering 10 years of operation, tax-free,” Derby says. And it worked.

“When the town needed an electric power plant, it built its own, drawing from a willing community unified by the desire to stay independent. There’s been a lot of cooperation in projects like this, a readiness to rise to the occasion,” says Derby.

The common will to preserve, however, can conflict with the desire to attract visitors and new business. Former New Hampshire Gov. Walter Peterson, (1968-1973), a 54-year Peterborough resident now serving as town moderator, says that “among good people, it’s a natural subject of debate, and it’s my job to try to bring the two sides together. I have a strong desire to conserve and protect our environment, but I also recognize that any society that does this to the point of blocking out its sources of livelihood will go stagnant.”

Peterborough’s artistic character and New England charm have been preserved because of the initiatives of its people—and because, according to Brenner, “It didn’t have to be forced or manmade. Its beauty has been allowed and protected, in a sense, more than deliberately constructed.

“The moral of the story,” she says, “is you need only keep a town out of harm’s way, and, like a flower, it will show forth its own character—like a person.”

Bradwell Scott, a New Hampshire-based freelance writer, is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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