On a snowy evening last December, Paul Morrissette arrived at Loudon’s town hall to make an unusual request.
“I’d rather pay taxes to my own damn town,” he told his three selectmen.
In more than two decades as a town resident, Morrissette had never received a school tax bill from Loudon. Instead, he and his wife, Beth, pay thousands of dollars per year to fund Concord’s schools.
In a dynamic likely unique in New Hampshire today, the Morrissettes and 11 other neighboring property owners exist in a state of legal luminality: A quirk in the history of their properties makes them both residents of Loudon and members of Concord’s school district.
Elementary school-aged children who live in these houses along Oak Hill Road, just over the border from Concord, are ineligible to attend their hometown school, less than two miles up the hill. Instead, a bus shepherds them to Concord’s Mill Brook and Broken Ground schools, more than twice as far away. Older students go to Rundlett Middle School and Concord High rather than Merrimack Valley Middle and High School.
However, the property owners’ membership in Concord’s school district is not absolute. Though they pay taxes to Concord, their status as Loudon residents makes them ineligible to vote in Concord’s annual Board of Education elections, according to its clerk.
“The people on this road — we don’t have a voice,” said Derek Bolduc, whose younger son is a junior at Concord High School. “It’s taxation without representation.”
The situation is not merely a civic anomaly. It also comes at a cost.
Because the school tax rate is higher in Concord and the properties’ assessments get multiplied by an equalization coefficient, residents paid 15% more in school taxes in 2025 — an average of $942 per property — than they would have as Loudon school taxpayers, a Concord Monitor analysis found.
The dynamic also affects other taxpayers in Concord and Loudon, albeit on a far smaller scale. Concord gained and Loudon lost a total of $4.8 million in cumulative property value from the houses last year, effectively slightly reducing taxes for Concord residents and increasing them for their Loudon counterparts.
As the Morrissettes began researching the history behind their predicament, they homed in on a law from more than a century ago, from a bygone era of one-room schoolhouses and malleable district boundaries. The law, it was clear, was to blame. But initially, they could find no obvious blueprint for how to change it.
A historical vestige
The properties in question lie on a winding, rural stretch of road dotted with old barns, a large pond and acres of sloping farmland. Though just 15 minutes away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Concord, the area maintains an old-time feel. The land possesses a certain power over the sparsely-spaced houses. Birds chirp. Smoke from wood stoves permeates the air.
More than a century ago, before a succession of owners subdivided the properties, the area consisted of three farms.
It was a time before school districts, as we now know them, existed. Students received their education in one-room schoolhouses, financed through taxes from the surrounding area.
One such schoolhouse, known as Turtletown or school district No. 15, stood down the road from the Loudon farms, over the border in Concord. (That schoolhouse was built in 1781, according to various records. Today, the property on which it was built features another former schoolhouse, built in 1887. The historical record, including a 1903 history of Concord that described the schoolhouse, is silent on what happened to the original one.)
For whatever reason, the 18-by-18-foot structure must have appealed to the three farmowners, likely because of its geographic proximity to their land. In 1859, the state legislature passed a law that “disannexed” the farms from a school district in Loudon and added the properties to the Turtletown school district. The children of Thomas Pattee, Gardner Batchelder and Abia Maynard would begin walking — or perhaps riding — down the hill to go to school.
At the time, the law was not unusual.
A review of statutes from the 1850s revealed seven similar school district zoning changes. In 1853, for example, a Pittsfield farm was added to a Barnstead school district; a year later, another Pittsfield property was added to a Chichester district. In 1859, five properties were transferred from a school district in Enfield to one in Springfield.
But in each case, the laws appear to have long since been repealed. Employees of the tax collectors’ offices in Pittsfield, Colebrook and Enfield all told the Monitor they had never heard of any property owners paying school taxes to other towns.
What makes the Loudon-Concord law distinct is that it remains on the books today.
(Penacook, a village in Concord that is part of Merrimack Valley’s school district, bears some resemblance, but the history and current status differ. Penacook used to have its own district before joining Merrimack Valley in the 1960s. Its residents are full members of the district, with representation on the school board and voting power.)
Retired state architectural historian James Garvin, who has studied the evolution of education in New Hampshire, said the persistence of the situation in Loudon puzzles him. An 1885 law, he noted, eliminated self-governing one-room school districts and established the current system of townwide districts. He would have expected that law to make cross-town schooling arrangements obsolete.
“I have no idea or theory as to why part of Loudon continued to be ‘annexed to Concord for schooling’ after the passage of the 1885 legislation,” Garvin wrote in an email. “After 1885, it would seem that Loudon would have been responsible for funding all of its rural schools through taxation in Loudon only, and the same with Concord.”
Life in the grey zone
For whatever reason, however, residents of the properties in this corner of Loudon continued attending Concord schools and paying Concord school taxes. Some, particularly those without children, learned of the quirky arrangement after they moved into their new homes. Others, like Derek Bolduc and his wife, René, said it was actually a draw.
As a Concord High graduate herself, René felt her children would thrive in the district’s schools. After the family bought their house in 2003, her oldest son attended kindergarten at the Eastman School, 3.5 miles away from the family’s home at the roundabout off of I-93’s exit 16.
After it closed in 2010 during Concord’s school consolidation, the distance to elementary school grew longer for both of her sons. Concord’s Mill Brook and Broken Ground Schools are five miles from the Bolduc home, while Loudon Elementary is 1.7 miles away.
But the distance was never an obstacle, René said. The boys played sports growing up with Concord kids. In a lot of ways, despite their official residence, they identify as a Concord family.
“Because my kids grew up around Concord kids, we just kind of flock to Concord functions rather than Loudon functions, because that was our community based around our children,” René said.
Before the Bolduc boys attended Concord schools, another boy grew up in the same house, doing the same thing.
Mike Martel, now 54, feels the unorthodox arrangement has shaped his life in a surprisingly significant way.
He met some of his best childhood friends, a family of four Concord brothers, on bus rides to and from school. Now he works for their father in property management.
“I’m completely embedded with them,” said Martel, who now lives across the street from the Bolducs. “My whole life is surrounded around their business.”
“If I had gone to Loudon schools, I probably would have still met them because they’re right down the road, but I don’t think the connection would have been as strong,” he added.
Across the 12 homes, two school-aged children attend school in Concord, according to Beth Morrissette. At the end of next school year, the Bolducs’ younger son will graduate, bringing that number to one. The other family whom Morrissette said has a child in Concord schools did not respond to interview requests.
Concord Superintendent Tim Herbert did not respond to a question about whether the current arrangement poses any logistical issues for the school district. Merrimack Valley Superintendent Randy Wormald, whose regional school district includes Loudon, said he was aware of the situation but didn’t know much about it.
For those property owners without children in Concord schools, the law is more a financial nuisance than an engine of serendipitous social connections, many residents said.
“It’s very bizarre,” Dennis Vincent, a 69-year-old electrical contractor, said. “I tell people this story that I pay Concord taxes and they kind of scratch their head.”
Derek Bolduc was the only resident interviewed who was particularly concerned by the disenfranchisement the group experiences. Several years ago, he wanted to cast a vote in Concord’s school board election. He went to Loudon’s town office but they didn’t know whether he could vote, he said. Then, he called Concord’s city clerk, who confirmed he was ineligible.
He never pushed the issue after that.
“I was the lone voice that I was aware of looking into this,” he said. “And I just figured: How far am I going to get?”
Changing the law
If one had to choose the leader of an effort to change a 167-year-old law, Paul Morrissette would be a good pick. A fast-talking former auction house owner, Morrissette has sued the state before, ultimately taking his case to the Supreme Court. He now works in the cannabis business and has lobbied New Hampshire’s legislature to revise its marijuana laws.
The Morrissettes have known about the situation since 2005, when they requested a permit to build their house on a steep hill with a picturesque view of the State House dome.
An old stone wall just below their house marks the border between Concord and Loudon. The couple also owns dozens of acres of land on the other side of the wall in Concord, but the two acres on which their house sits are firmly in Loudon.
At the time they moved, the Morrissettes looked into getting the law changed, but they were busy running their auction business, and it fell by the wayside. Every year after, Beth said she would remind Paul: “We’ve got to do something about these taxes. It’s so unfair!”
When she ultimately retired, Beth had time to look into its origins. She tracked down the law itself, which was buried in fraying books at the State Archives.
Still, it was not clear how to get it repealed. Loudon’s selectmen, none of whom responded to requests for comment, wrote in a letter last month that they had reviewed the matter and concluded they don’t “have the authority to change or override this law.”
Last month, Paul contacted state Senator Howard Pearl, a Loudon farmer. He was sympathetic and submitted a request to the Legislative Research office to examine how the other similar laws had been repealed.
About two weeks ago, before Pearl received any information, Paul heard back from his attorney, who had also been looking into a legislative remedy. The lawyer, Bruce Marshall, had discovered one obscure law specifically designed to repeal another.
“He had figured out what nobody else knew,” Morrissette said.
In 1893, over 40 years after the Loudon properties were annexed, the legislature appeared to codify the process to remove a portion of one school district and add it to that of another.
The law included a section on “restoration.” All a resident had to do was create a petition, get 25 signatures, and submit it to their selectmen for a vote at an upcoming town meeting.
For the Morrissettes, after years of hoping for the law’s repeal, it all seemed shockingly simple. Paul was downright giddy.
But there was a catch: The deadline to submit the petition warrant article was just three days away. The day before the deadline, Beth went door-to-door, traversing the same stretch of road where, for over a century, children had caught the bus going west to Concord, rather than the one going east to their neighborhood elementary school.
Over five hours, Beth got 37 signatures, enough to get the warrant on the Loudon town meeting agenda in March.
Next month, assuming Loudon residents are on board, a vestige of another educational era will finally come to an end.
“It was almost like giving birth,” Paul Morrissette said of the journey he and Beth have been on. “It was painful. Years of years of research trying to get this done, and then finally you get a break.”
“I’ll feel good,” he added, “when I write the first check to my kids in my town.”