What this covers

Meredith is a mill town that turned to face the lake. Its centre sits a quarter of a mile inland from the water everyone comes to see, because Lake Waukewan lies roughly sixty feet above Meredith Bay and drains into it fast enough to turn a wheel. Everything in the middle of town is either a consequence of that drop or an accommodation to it.

The site is organised in four sections, and they follow the water rather than the calendar. A town that sited itself on a fall is the geography and the engineering: the head of water, the gate, the race, the wheel pit. The mill block, six bays wide is what the fall powered and what the buildings record about it. Then sold the lake takes up 1848, when the Boston and Maine branch reached the village and the working surface became the product. Two hundred and fifty-three islands is the basin itself — the depth, the ice, the granite underneath.

Where the material comes from

The writing is built from town records, the collections of the Meredith Historical Society, and the ice-out and lake-survey data maintained by the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. Historical figures appear where the record carries them; the stonework, the bay spacing and the tailrace depths are read from the fabric itself, which is more precise than the paperwork.

The archive holds every piece on the site, laid out by section.