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By STEVE TAYLOR

It once was a skill every man and boy over age 10 in rural Vermont and New Hampshire mastered, an activity absolutely vital to sustaining animal agriculture with antecedents tracing back thousands of years. Watching someone doing it today seems like...

By STEVE TAYLOR

If they lived within two miles, students walked or rode their bikes to school. Mabel Pillsbury was their teacher and she handled all eight grades for many years. And the majority of the pupils came from families who had been in the town for...

By STEVE TAYLOR

Ramble through archived issues of the Valley News from three-quarters of a century ago and you’ll find five, six or more mentions of local labor disputes every week. The 1950s were a time when the Upper Valley still had an extensive assortment of what...

By STEVE TAYLOR

For many hundreds of Upper Valley folks, the soundtrack of their lives in the late 1940s, the 1950s and into the 1960s was the music of Woody and the Ramblers, a band composed of five local Greatest Generation guys who traversed the region for as many...

By STEVE TAYLOR

LEBANON — Most folks have a few events in their memory they’ll never lose track of, days like Nov. 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, or Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon....

By STEVE TAYLOR

Before franchised fast food and corporate-owned restaurants hit the Upper Valley, there was a time when locally owned diners and a variety of family-run eating establishments flourished and produced many fond memories and much nostalgia. For at least...

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was a great conversation starter half a century ago, and, if you lived it, the subject can bring amusement, even awe, to those hearing about it today. That’s the “hand crank” or magneto telephone system that served Meriden Village for nearly 75...

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was arguably the greatest change in the structure of New Hampshire town government in almost three centuries, seen by advocates as a necessary response to rapid population growth in many communities and by others as an assault on a cherished...

By STEVE TAYLOR

Erling Heistad came to Lebanon from Norway in 1923 and in a matter of a few months he set off a half century’s worth of excitement that would eventually establish a local Golden Age of what had been an obscure Scandinavian sport, ski jumping. For...

By STEVE TAYLOR

It was 36 years ago, back when Lebanon was largely a moderate Republican bastion, and Karen Wadsworth was an up and coming figure in New Hampshire GOP politics. One day she hosted a good-sized gathering of the GOP faithful at her home on Bank...

By STEVE TAYLOR

Talk about all the things that have changed in the Upper Valley since, well, 1950 — the interstates, the rising influence of Dartmouth College and its ever-expanding health care colossus, disappearance of textile mills and hill farms, staggering gains...

By STEVE TAYLOR

There’s a measure of melancholy that always surrounds a farm auction. Chances are it is bringing down the curtain on a life’s work, an ending compelled by bodies aging out, debts that can’t be covered by cash flow or plain old bad luck. The effects...