Rae Ann Towle was jogging on Horse Corner Road in Chichester when the beauty of the homes there first jumped out at her.
“I thought, ‘somebody really needs to capture all of this,’ ” she said. “ ‘And I think I’m going to be the one to do it.’ ”
Art has long been a passion of Towle’s, and she decided to harness that in drawings of the Horse Corner homes. She finished a few sketches in early summer and approached the homeowners to ask if they would be interested in purchasing one.
“It was a little uncomfortable at first to knock on somebody’s door and say, ‘I did a drawing of your house,’ ” she said. “But everyone really received them well.”
One neighbor was former U.S. senator Gordon Humphrey, who lives on Garvin Hill. The former senator not only purchased Towle’s drawing of his home, but also contracted her to draw his gardens as well.
Now, Towle is working on a drawing series of historic Concord.
Towle, 62, grew up in Chichester in the 1960s, but left New Hampshire when she was 20 years old to travel and become a psychologist in Murfreesboro, Tenn. Now retired, she spends her summers visiting her mother, Ann Fournier, 83, who still lives in the house where Towle was raised.
Towle said she never noticed how beautiful the historic buildings in Concord were until this summer.
Since she came back to New Hampshire in May, Towle’s been doing a drawing every day.
She started with the old gasholder building, built in 1888 to store flammable gas made by processing coal that was brought to sites in railroad cars.
Then she moved on to the Endicott Hotel on Main St., and the old site of the New Hampshire Hospital, then called the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane, on Pleasant St. Both structures were established in the 1800s.
Walker and Dewey schools were next, and the Chichester store. She sketched the Sacred Heart Church on Pleasant St. where her grandmother’s two sisters had a double wedding in 1920. That church closed in June and will be converted to condominiums.
Towle also captured the shops on Warren Street, where she remembered buying saddle shoes as a kid. She brought that drawing to show the crew at Granite State Candy, and the owner decided to purchase it.
“I left it over there, for the owner to look at, and then they called me and said, ‘who do we make out the check out to?’” she said.
“I’m just now realizing that there is a market for these drawings of Concord’s historic buildings, and that somebody’s got to do it,” she said. “I think I’m the one because drawing has been a skill of mine since I was very young.”
Endicott Furniture invited her to do a show at their store on South Main St., and Towle has hopes to present her drawings to the New Hampshire Historical Society later in the summer.
Towle will be continuing her drawing projects through the summer. Interested parties can reach her at (615) 856-3575.
(Leah Willingham can be reached at 369-3305 or lwillingham@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @LeahMWillingham.)