Center Harbor Memories

Center Harbor Memories

By Thomas Visser

Located on a gentle bluff overlooking the northwesternmost bay of Lake Winnipesaukee and surrounded by foothills of the White Mountains, Center Harbor village gained distinction as a fashionable summer resort destination in central New Hampshire during the 1840s. I first became acquainted with the place in 1956 at the age of five years when my family moved to a small white cape about a mile east of Center Harbor village. Although our family's house was located over the town and county line in Moultonborough, our mail and telephone addresses were listed as Center Harbor, and it was to this village that we walked or drove for shopping, swimming, church, and entertainment.

The commercial hub of Center Harbor village was then still up at "the square" at the intersection of Main Street and Plymouth Street (Route 25B). A granite horse-watering trough with its bronze Kona fountain of a naked Indian boy holding a flapping goose stood in the center of the three intersecting streets, surrounded by the Nichols Library, Nichols Variety Store, the Coe Mansion and E. M. Heath's store.

Nichols Store housed the post office. Here, as elsewhere in Center Harbor, much of the way of life and business from earlier decades seemed to linger gracefully. Minnie Nichols reigned over her high-ceilinged store from behind the long marble soda fountain counter with brisk efficiency, standing tall on her laced, black high-heeled shoes with her hair in a tight Victorian bun, while her short companion Miss Gillpatrick, would be sure to share a sweet smile with a twinkle in her eyes. It was here that we picked up the Boston Herald before church on Sunday mornings and where were treated to five-cent-a-scoop ice cream cones on hot weekend evenings. Gasoline could be purchased from the red and white pumps by the front curb and RCA Victor radio tubes in all sizes and shapes were displayed in long racks in the back room.

Behind Nichols Store on Plymouth Street stood the flat-roofed, four story, Garnet Inn. This white clapboarded vernacular Italianate style hotel was connected to the neighboring gable-roofed section of the inn by a long wooden veranda that would be lined with wicker rocking chairs. During the late 1950s, the Garnet Inn served as a summer home for many musicians with the New Hampshire Music Festival. It later became a dormitory for Belknap College, a short-lived school popular with those avoiding the draft in the late 1960s and 1970s. Both sections of the Garnet Inn were demolished in the 1990s.

Across the street from the fountain, E. M. Heath's store ("Dealers in Most Everything") had groceries shelved in open aisles with squeaky oiled wooden floors sprinkled with sawdust. Everett Heath did his own butchering in the small room behind the meat counter wearing a white shirt and dark tie beneath a long white apron with black leather gauntlets on his arms. In rooms to the rear and side, he also stocked hardware, Benjamin Moore paint, Lee dungarees, and plaid flannel shirts. Freeman Brooks (better known as "Brooksie") ran a small barber shop upstairs above the store during the summer months. Brooksie would finish off our "wiffles" by flipping up our hair in front with his comb and running a stick of wax across the tines to hold it in place.

West of the main intersection, a bandstand stood between the Nichols Library and the Center Harbor Congregational Church on the old main street that led to Meredith and to Garnet Hill Road. Shaded by tall American elm trees, the eight-sided white wooden bandstand was raised about four feet above the ground to provide a space for storing the musicians' folding wooden chairs beneath. Its deck was surrounded by an open railing with posts at the corners that rose up about six feet. These were fitted with electric light bulbs. During July and August the Center Harbor Band offered concerts on Thursday evenings. Founded in the late 1800s, the town band had its own one room "concert hall" hidden in the woods off Plymouth Street behind the Center Harbor Grange Hall. Here, amidst a jumble of nineteenth century woolen band uniforms, hats, banners, tattered sheet music, rickety wooden chairs, a big bass drum, and a cast iron woodstove, the band held its annual one-evening rehearsal to start the summer season.

Band stalwarts included conductor Charlie Bickford, who had a penchant for cleaning his ears with his baton during concerts, and Mr. Bushnell on the alto horn who taught music lessons and had recruited many into the band. Sitting up front with his silver cornet held out straight as he carried tunes for all to hear was the trumpeter we just called Clyde, who never spoke above a whisper. Another devoted band member was saxophone player Mossy Smith who would drape his smoldering half-chewed cigars over the edge of his tattered instrument case while he played some wheezy notes. The smoke helped to repel the bugs and his case doubled as a spittoon. Before each concert was over, someone in the brass section would surely crack a joke aimed to get Mossy to break into his braying laugh. This would prompt a broad chorus of giggles, snickers and laughs in response, which in turn would get Mossy to laugh even harder. The band's repertoire consisted mainly of marches by John Philip Sousa and E. E. Bagley, interspersed with turn-of-the-century overtures, twenties hits and Broadway show tunes. Favorites were the Washington Post march, Corinthian Overture, Tiger Rag, Moon River and Everything's Coming Up Roses. The audience, who mostly sat in the comfort of their automobiles, applauded by tooting their car horns.

A narrow street ran down the hill on the east side of E. M. Heath's, crossing Route 25 past a cluster of summer cottages and a long white public bathhouse to the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. The long gable-roofed bathhouse had an open porch in front of a row of changing rooms with dark green doors. Inside, these dark and dingy changing rooms had smelly wooden floors and tongue-and-groove partitions, well decorated with rude carvings, words and initials. The two end rooms had one-holed privies.

From the narrow town beach next to the bathhouse, one could swim out to a wooden raft supported by steel barrels. A few large rocks in deep water provided convenient waist-level perches. It was here that we learned to swim. My mother, brother and I usually walked the mile from our home to the Center Harbor beach. Often we pulled along our two matching red Radio Flyer wagons filled with beach towels, swimming suits and lunches.

One very hot afternoon, Randy and Jimmy Huston's cheerful mother gave us all a ride to the beach in her 1937 Plymouth four door sedan. We loved to ride in her car with its separate headlights that looked like strange melon eyes and its hump-backed trunk on the rear. When parked at the beach, we placed our crayons on the shelf behind the rear seat, but on our return from swimming we were dismayed to find that they had melted into the car's fabric in a colorful sticky soup of wax.

In front of the Center Harbor beach, a few small wooden piers provided berths for local and visiting boats. At the center, a gas pump stood next to a public boat launching ramp. Left of the ramp was an open wooden pavilion with benches. Here, passengers and onlookers could sit in the shade while waiting for the arrival of the 205 foot M.V. Mount Washington that docked at the main long wooden pier daily through the summer months at 10:15 AM and 3:15 PM. With a long blast from its horn, The Mount would enter the bay through the distant narrows by Half Mile Island. Within minutes the large white ship would approach the dock. Slowed by a mighty surge of its reversed propellers as deckhands tossed monkey-fisted heaving lines ashore, the ship's gunwale would screech against the wooden pilings as the heavy manila docking ropes were wrestled in place. Meanwhile teenagers dove for coins tossed into the water by passengers on the decks above. If successful, the divers would surface, yell and wave their catch before slipping the silver treasures into the cheeks of their mouths. After disgorging a crowd of summer people, a sharp blast of The Mount's horn would announce departure. The gangplank would be heaved back onto the splintery dock with a slap and with a rush of swirling water, the ship would swing astern out and to the left, pause a moment, and then steam ahead on its seventy-two mile excursion around the lake. Center Harbor was the off-season berth of The Mount, along the smaller mail boat Sophie C and later the Doris E. Each spring after the ice melted, The Mount was pulled from the water for painting the hull and other maintenance on a large steel cradle on the left side of the town landing behind the ship company's long maintenance shed.

In the early 1950s, a section of Route 25, one of the main auto and truck routes between the Boston area and the White Mountains, had been expanded into a wide paved highway, bypassing a mile-long, elm-shaded stretch of the narrow dirt road that ran east of Center Harbor village toward Moultonborough, passing the white cape where we lived. The old road, renamed Lake Shore Drive (and later known just by its initials in the Belknap College years), started at a six-way intersection at the Center Harbor - Moultonborough town line. Here, Route 25 was met by Bean Road that came down from Center Sandwich, Main Street, and a small dirt road that led down to some boathouses on the lake and to a path that wound around the Mount's cradle to the beach. Peacefully nestled in the shade beneath tall elm trees at the northeast corner of Bean Road was the Winn's Lodge, a summer guest house. At the southeast corner stood Fred Robbin's store, where most went to buy fishing licenses, bait and beer. We rarely shopped at Robbin's, but we would sometimes stop next door at Felix's Market for a frozen Popsicle to cool our walk home.

A concrete sidewalk ran along the south side of Lake Shore Drive for about a quarter of a mile. Between the road and the lake were large and small summer cottages. Some were grouped and painted in matching color schemes. Those that were operated as tourist cabins and guest houses had painted signs in front. During July and August, boards reading "No Vacancy" would hang from almost every one of these signs.

Several groups of cottages were owned by extended families. Everyone knew the Rooney clan with their bright blue eyes, freckles and big smiles. Few in the village missed the story about the time that old Mr. Rooney took an unexpected dip in the lake while attempting to step aboard a boat at the town docks. Other summer people preferred more seclusion, like the Chiarello family whose long black Cadillacs would quietly disappear behind the tall white picket fence and dense privet hedge that screened their private lakefront compound.

Only a few buildings stood on the north side of the street away from the lake. Moulton's Garage with its large hinged garage doors on the left and an office on the right looked as though it had once been a barn or a livery stable -- or even a church without a steeple. The Moulton family lived upstairs in the two-story, gable-fronted wooden building. Kathy Lambert and her mother lived across the street. Mrs. Lambert had a flock of hens and sold eggs to neighbors.

About halfway between the village to our house, the pavement ended on Lake Shore Drive near the Oak Corner House, a summer inn with cottages on the lake. A dirt road at this corner led to more lakefront cottages on First Neck. One large white summer house there was surrounded by a wrap-around porch and a few small cottages. For several years we moored our 1930s Town Class sailboat here. The high point of one hot summer afternoon there was the sound of a steam whistle marking the passage of the S.S. Anna E. George, a nineteenth century steamboat towing a skiff full of wood for the long trip back to its home berth at Lee's Mills at the northern tip of Moultonborough Bay.

Just beyond the Oak Corner House, Chet Wilder's home, and the Blackey place, Lake Shore Drive passed an abandoned gable-fronted house that we assumed must be haunted. It stood opposite a red barn. The house had partially collapsed and concerned that the barn would fall next, I borrowed my father's camera to record the view shown here of the last barn on the street. Behind this barn, an over-grown field stretched down to Blackey's Cove, an inlet of Lake Winnepesaukee. A small brook running into Blackey's Cove from Lake Kanasaka passed through the dense woods behind our house. Although no paths led directly to the brook from our house, we used a towering white birch tree with a smooth white truck that looked like an ocean liner's funnel as our landmark in the forest.

This brook crossed Route 25 just beyond the east end of Lake Shore Drive after spilling over a dam near the Old Red Mill House. We moored our first sailboat, a thirteen foot wooden lapstrake sloop with cotton sails, in the cove of Lake Kanasaka next to the Old Red Mill House. Mr. Kent, a quiet retired gentleman who rented rooms in a wing of the Old Red Mill House, kept a watchful eye on our sailboat and the small rowboat we kept tied up on the shore. We, in turn, often visited with Mr. Kent to help brighten his days.

Our closest neighbor, Mr. Roy S. White, was a robust eighty-year-old retiree with bright white hair and bright red suspenders. He kept busy working in his garden or in his workshop or repairing his white gable-fronted house which was covered with asbestos siding that he assured us would never burn. His live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Canfield, sometimes invited my brother and me into their dark kitchen on hot summer afternoons for a glass of ice-water that she poured from a large glass jar kept in the refrigerator. In the fall, Mr. White would navigate his long white Dodge with slanted headlights and tall tailfins to his winter home in Sarasota, Florida.

Next to Mr. White's lived the Brown's at the end of Lake Shore Drive. Phyllis Brown and her mother were charming, but firmly commanding ladies of dignified tastes, while husband Bob seemed happiest when he could sit undisturbed with a cool beer. A large white sign with black letters reading simply "Guests" stood in the lawn by their house. The centerpiece of their summer guest house was a long, partially-enclosed screened porch with thickly cushioned wicker chairs and cardtables set up for playing canasta. The porch overlooked a picturesque view of Lake Kanasaka and Red Hill. This same view, engraved by W. H. Bartlett, had been published in 1840 in American Scenery, one of the most popular American travel books of the mid-nineteenth century. The engraving, shown here, was captioned "Sawmill at Center Harbor, Lake Winnepeseogee."

Nichols Variety Store, circa 1957