What New Hampshire means to me is inseparable from my family history.
My mother’s side has lived in New Hampshire since shortly after the Mayflower landed. I am a descendant of Major Richard Waldron, who helped found Dover before being killed by Native Americans in 1689 in an act of retribution. Years earlier, Waldron had invited the Pennacooks to a feast, only to imprison them and send them to Boston, where eight were hanged, and others were enslaved. My father’s family history is shorter. His Irish ancestors, as he tells it, fled Ireland for America to avoid being hanged as horse thieves.
Like my ancestry, New Hampshire is an anagram of old Yankee traditions and brash intrusions by outsiders. This clashing of cultures has made me who I am. My grandfather, Jean, is a prime example.
He was a promising pianist growing up in Boston until, as a teenager, he ran away to the wild west, supporting himself by playing piano in bordellos, before coming back east and settling down. Eventually, he became an editor at the Boston Herald. When my grandfather started his family, he didn’t want his kids to grow up in the city, so he purchased a farm in Pittsfield. His responsibilities required him to be at his desk three days a week, so for the other four days, he returned home to his family by train.
My parents built their house nearby in neighboring Northwood. Because Northwood didn’t have a public high school, I chose to attend high school in Pittsfield, back when Pittsfield was still known as “The Gem of the Suncook Valley.” The well-off were civic-minded and active in town affairs, and in agreement that their own children should attend local public schools. Hence, though not affluent, Pittsfield provided a quality education to all, good enough to get me accepted into two Ivy League colleges.
Burnham & Morill operated a seasonal corn canning factory in Pittsfield. Local farmers grew corn for it, garnering extra income to pay their taxes, while townspeople worked there as a handy second job. I worked there in my teen years, side-by-side with working people from every generation. The atmosphere of camaraderie that prevailed there was a formative experience for me, impressing on me the power of community.
Indeed, a big part of what New Hampshire meant to me growing up was not only its beauty and rural traditions, but its sense of community. However, since then, two blights have descended on my state, which are threatening its character and charm.
The first came when Meldrim Thompson and William Loeb took up residence in New Hampshire. One became governor, and the other the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader. Together, they concocted the infamous tax pledge, “Axe the Tax,” that still holds our state hostage. To this day, Republicans have enforced the pledge: cutting taxes on businesses while nixing any broad-based taxes that might make the well-to-do pay their fair share.
As a result, towns like Pittsfield and Claremont, which have a small tax base, have become impoverished, unable to provide the education their students are entitled to under our state constitution.
The second curse is the Free State movement, which has, through stealthy maneuvers, taken over our legislature. They think the value of education is overstated and, in any event, none of the state’s business. They have engineered a slow-moving coup: each year, stealing more of our public education funds to subsidize private schools, which will soon bankrupt public education.
I believe the Free State movement is a stalking horse for the very rich who, because they already send their kids to private schools, don’t want to pay for public schools or, for that matter, any public services. They claim they already pay too much in taxes, although, as a percentage of their income, they pay less than you or I.
We have become a haven for the wealthy who have flocked to the state because we have no broad-based tax or a tax on dividends. A good example is Mitt Romney, who summers in Wolfeboro in one of his many houses, one of which has an elevator for his cars.
Or Alex Karp, the CEO and co-founder (along with the notorious Peter Thiel) of Palantir Technologies, who has moved to New Hampshire to cloister himself and his associates on a 500-acre compound that includes a “Norwegian ski instructor, his Swiss-Portuguese chef, his Austrian assistant, his American shooting instructor, and his bodyguards.”
New Hampshire’s saving grace is the accumulated Yankee wisdom of the oldtimers, along with the mojo of the creative folks who were born here or have chosen it as their home: the artists and nonconformists; the farmers and back-to-the-landers; the blacksmiths, potters, and woodworkers; and the philosophers, poets, and novelists, all of whom have livened our spirits and enriched our souls.
As we move forward, we, the people, must continue to resist the dark forces that want to turn New Hampshire into a wholly owned subsidiary of the rich and powerful. If we fail, we will suffer the same fate as when the white man arrived: to colonize the Native Americans and despoil their sacred land.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.