The Town That Isn't There

The flat ground opening up around you here has a name, and it's Passaconaway — and it's worth knowing that you're driving through a town that no longer exists.

In the logging years this was a working settlement: houses, a school, a church, a post office, mills, and at its height a population that swelled into the hundreds when the crews were in. Two logging railroads served it. There were children here, and Sunday services, and gossip, and everything that makes a place a place.

And then the timber ran out. That's the whole story of the White Mountains in one sentence. The mills closed, the rails came up, the families moved away, and the forest — which had been cut to the ground — came quietly back over the top of all of it. Today you can drive through the middle of Passaconaway and never know a town was here.

Two things survive. One is the Russell-Colbath house, that small white historic home along the road, kept as a museum by the Forest Service — the last building of the village still standing, and Boone has the story that happened inside it, which is the one people remember this whole road for. The other is the cemetery, back in the trees, with something like seventy stones in it: the loggers and their wives and a distressing number of their children.

So as you roll across this quiet flat with the woods on both sides — there was a town here. There were people. The forest simply took it back.