Fitzwilliam NH Archives - New England Historical Society

June marks the start of Old Home Days season not just in New England, but throughout the United States, in Canada and Australia. The birth of the celebration can be traced to one man: Frank Rollins. He set in motion the first Old Home Days – 44 of them, all in New Hampshire – in 1899.

Canaan, N.H., decked out for Old Home Days.

Frank Rollins was born into a prominent political family in New Hampshire. His father, a railroad executive, had served in the New Hampshire Senate and then won election to the U.S. Senate. Frank also won election to the state Senate and then as governor in 1898. He also worked with John Wingate Weeks on writing the National Forest Act.

Rollins worried, as well, about the decline of the state’s rural communities because people began to move away.

They’d begun to move a lot in 19^th century New England. Yankees went west, looking for better land and a warmer climate, or they went to work for the mills in the cities. Newcomers from Europe also arrived seeking work. It was a big change from the settled population patterns of the previous centuries.

Frank Rollins

Farms were abandoned and rural towns started to look shabby. One New Hampshire farmer urged his neighbors not to move west: “Had you not better be content to keep and improve the old homestead, so near the school house where you can hear the church bell and where you can enjoy the association of good neighbors?”

Rollins, New Hampshire’s governor from 1899-1901, encouraged people to buy old farms, spruce them up and use them as summer homes. He encouraged town centers to get facelifts with new monuments and renovated municipal buildings.

Rollins had an interest in promoting investment: He and his father, Edward H. Rollins, had started a banking house. It then became one of the largest in the United States until the crash of 1929.

Old Home Days

In 1897, Rollins broached the idea of Old Home Week:

“I wish that in the ear of every son and daughter of New Hampshire, in the summer days, might be heard whispered the persuasive words: Come back, come back!” he wrote in 1897.

“Do you not hear the call? What has become of the old home where you were born?…Do you not remember it — the old farm back among the hills, with its rambling buildings, its well-sweep casting its long shadows, the row of stiff poplar trees, the lilacs and the willows?”

He founded an Old Home Week Association, and presided over the state’s first homecoming as governor.

In 1899, 44 New Hampshire towns held Old Home Week celebrations during the last week in August.

“They celebrated with bands and bonfires, parades and poetry, dances and dinners, and statesmen and speeches,” wrote Gary Crooker, in New Hampshire Old Home Celebrations.

Old Home Days in Newmarket, N.H.

The first Old Home Day in Concord on Aug. 31, 1899 ended with a 53-part fireworks show. Each part had a theme, such as No. 22 Design Portrait of Admiral Dewey, the hero of Manilla, No. 45 Starry Flags and No. 52, Aladdin Jeweled Trees.

Notable Days

At other notable celebrations:

Rollins came to Woodstock’s Old Home Day and 100th anniversary celebration in 1900. An 1812 cannon was fired from Sunset Hill.
Rollins also attended Mont Vernon’s Old Home Day in 1900, which featured a performance of the Tobasco Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar Club of Lowell, Mass.
In 1913, Fitzwilliam held an Old Home Day party in mid-August. The invitation included a poem about the ‘latch string,’ a term often used in Old Home celebrations. Putting the latch string out meant ‘welcome.’
Brookline celebrated Rural Free Delivery and Uncle Sam (who came from nearby Mason) in its 1921 Old Home Day celebration.
In 1933, Swanzey celebrated its bicentennial with a mile-long parade featuring 49 floats.
In 1936, Salisbury celebrated Old Home Day with a baseball game between the Sand Crabs and the Sand Fleas in a ‘Little World Series.’

Old Home Days Catches On

Maine and Vermont adopted Old Home days in 1901, and soon Massachusetts and Connecticut followed. By 1907, the custom spread to New York, Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, North Caroline, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and onto Nova Scotia, Ontario and Australia.

Bradford, Vt., readies for Old Home Days.

Old Oaken Bucket

Old Home Days included parades, church services, reunions, band concerts and poetry – lots of it. Come Home to Your Mother was typical, describing, “the pond where you skated, the lake where you fish’d and the great elm shadows, where you swung all you wished.”

Poets described the vanished farm, the ticking of the old clock, the flowers in the yard, the old oaken bucket, the fleecy clouds, the granite mountains and the omnipresent latchkey.

There was even an Old Home Week songbook. In 1906, one observer wrote, “In every New England town observing the festival the local poet has been burning the midnight oil so assiduously that it is no wonder the price of kerosene has been advanced a cent or so a gallon.”

After the world wars, Old Home Week celebrated the return of the men and women who fought. Then eventually Old Home Week season spread out from June until September.

This story was updated in 2022.

As World War II was ending, 730 delegates from 44 nations converged on the Mount Washington Hotel for the Bretton Woods Conference. They aimed to create the economic foundations for a lasting peace.

At Bretton Woods: Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes

The two key figures in Bretton Woods, N.H., during three summer weeks in 1944 came from opposite ends of the social scale. On the one hand, British economist John Maynard Keynes has been described as the ‘servant-reared scion of Cambridge academics.’ U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White, on the other hand, was‘ a brash, dogged technocrat raised in working-class Boston by Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.’

One was a Soviet spy.

Bretton Woods

The 22-day Bretton Woods Conference increased government power over markets and ended shortages of gold and U.S. dollars. It established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prevent the manipulation of exchange rates and to restrain dictators from economic aggression. It also created a predecessor to the World Bank.

Some people credit the economic reforms that emerged from Bretton Woods for the robust economic recovery after World War II. Others blame the World Bank and IMF for increasing poverty around the world.

The conference got off to a chaotic start at exactly 3 pm on July 1, 1944. The Mount Washington Hotel had been closed for two years, and its president needed to be persuaded to reopen it. The staff had only a month to get the hotel ready for the sudden influx of guests, and there were shortages of everything from beds to hot water.

Bit there was a political reason to hold the conference at the Mt. Washington Hotel: the Republican senator from New Hampshire, Charles Tobey.

Treasury Secretary Harry Morgenthau wanted an Eastern resort away from the heat and crowding of Washington, D.C. Charles Tobey faced a tough primary opponent. He was also likely to vote against the formation of a new international organization. President Roosevelt figured the conference would help Tobey win his primary, and he’d be more likely to vote for the Bretton Woods agreement when it came to the Senate for approval.

Mt. Washington Hotel

Harry Dexter White

Harry Dexter White was born on Oct. 9, 1892, the seventh son of recently arrived immigrants. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in France. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he entered college. He graduated from Stanford and earned a PhD at Harvard at 38.

After teaching for a few years, White accepted a job at the U.S. Treasury in 1934. Long fascinated by the Soviet Union, and in Washington, D.C., he met men working for the Soviet Underground, including Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers.

Whittaker Chambers

Officially, Harry Dexter White was a New Deal Democrat. Unofficially, he supported Soviet-style socialism. He believed it worked.

At Bretton Woods he served as the senior U.S. negotiator. He dominated the conference and prevailed over Keynes, who sought a central world bank and a reserve currency other than the U.S. dollar. White was solicitous of the difficult Soviets at the conference, but biographers say that didn’t affect his negotiations on behalf of U.S. interests.

Revelations

On Jan. 23, 1946, President Truman nominated Harry Dexter White as U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund. The Senate approved him two weeks later, unaware the FBI had White under investigation.

On June 19, 1947, Harry Dexter White abruptly resigned from the IMF and cleared out his office that day. The U.S. attorney general had just ordered a federal grand jury investigation into charges he had passed documents to the Soviet Union during World War II.

White testified that he was not a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Aug. 13, 1948. Three days later he died of a heart attack at his home in Fitzwilliam, N.H. He was 55 years old.

Aftermath of Bretton Woods

The World Bank and IMF have come under heavy criticism. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz argued their free-market reforms harm developing countries.

The Washington Consensus, reached in the 1990s by the two organizations in the 1990s, also has a growing chorus of detractors. The Consensus preaches deregulation, privatization and shrinking of government. Critics call those “failed neoliberal policies” and charge they have exacerbated poverty.

With thanks to The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Mt. Washington Hotel By rickpilot_2000 from Hooksett, USA – Mt. Washington HotelUploaded by jbarta, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26447136.

Fitzwilliam NH

Old Home Days: Frank Rollins, the New Hampshire Man Who Invented Them