Erin and I spent 5 hours with Douglas Brackett yesterday getting a tour of the Isaac Adams estate in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Wow. Quite the hidden treasure of history. Isaac Adams invented the printing press that exploded the reach of information in the 1800’s. Before his press a family would only have a Bible at home and it would save 10 years to buy that. After his press took hold, a Bible sold for 50 cents. Isaac Adams was the Bill Gates of the 19th Century. His Inventor father passed when he was 10 of consumption and he left his home in Rochester, New Hampshire and took a job in a factory in Berwick, Maine. Once a week he walked home to bring the earnings home to his mother and at the age of 12, he was a foreman at the factory. He later went to apprentice with a famous cabinet maker in Sandwich and after that was off to Boston.
In Boston he repaired the Gutenberg Presses which were mostly wood and always in need of being shimmed and adjusted to accommodate shrinking and swelling of the wood. So Isaac over time on his own came up with an all metal press and Harper’s bought it and then all the bookmakers used it and he did very well financially.
Isaac also had an electrical lab and may have had some milestones in that field yet to be discovered.
He came back to town after hearing that the private school in town that his son was attending was in trouble and he bought the school. He then bought up a lot of land on this hilltop with the gorgeous views and moved a host of gorgeous old buildings to the site over the course of 5 years. He hauled all the large granite pieces out of the fields that had foiled so many farmers and made the most incredible stone wall around the corner from the site on a side road. A very long dry laid granite wall that is flat walls with flat tops and as deep into the ground as it is above ground. Only 1/3 of it is visible from the road with 2/3 going off into the woods.
Generations go by and along comes Denley Emerson who does well in Real Estate after riding his bike up from Brookline, Massachusetts as a young teenager one Summer for three days. Denley winds up buying up all the properties that Isaac used to own without knowing of the history of Isaac Adams. He eventually figures out the history and partners with Douglas Brackett, an inventor and son of an inventor who had moved to town to seek to preserve the Isaac Adams estate. Denley and Douglas get a plan together and are executing it when Denley has an accident and his 85 year old frame doesn’t recover and he passes.
Denley has placed some restrictions on the preservation that the buildings can’t be used as abodes, for restaurants, or for a museum. Quite the challenge.
So the plan is to make the buildings into conference and office centers and finance this trust with proceeds from a high end residential development on one of the Estate of Denley Emerson’s many gorgeous Mountaintop acreages. A New Urbanism site with townhomes complimented by some gentleman farms on the ridges and some major estates on the knobs. Incredible views of the nearby mountains for all. 200 acres of the 460 acres would be kept out of development and there would be a winding small street in the new village with the town homes with a traditional New England meeting house at the end along with a village store and other small town services that could all be walked to. The open fields would be kept in agriculture but not necessarily by the home owners.
Quite the vision!
