The Old Route 28

If you are following in the comments, you will see I am exchanging emails with Frank, a highschool friend who is a UCC pastor, now in the Clifton/Ft Lee area of NY. He has a son still in NH and other connections in Center Barnstead up to Jackson.  So I of course thought of my old (2011) Rte 28 series, which details the highway changes just before the interstates. There were routes that acquired numbers in the late 1920's, which went through all the towns along the way. Significantly, they followed the new telephone lines coming in at the same timeBut improvements - by some definitions - came along in the 1950s, bypassing the town centers and making travel much faster. I did a few NH numbered routes, but none in as much detail at 28, which has 100 years of family history for us.

Most of you care little for the history of NH routes and where the telephone lines went, I know.  But I think you will be interested in the change in how people travel from Point A to Point B. I grew up and then learned to drive and then went up for holidays and vacations to my parents' in Wolfeboro 1980-2000, with a decade +/- on both ends for other stuff. That was all on that yellow Rte 28 lines.  But my mother's family saw a different world here 1940-1960. I drove their old road, which has several family stories,  when I wrote the Rte 28 series. Look how different it is from that tight yellow line. I liked that road, and if you are here and go from that point A to B, Alton to Wolfeboro, I recommend it. Heck, you might even make a special trip to travel the old road on the way up in the daylight, and the new road on the way back whether it is daylight or not.

Once. 

Changes are gradual, yes.  But they add up. If you are really adventurous you can continue on to the Yankee Smokehouse barbecue, the "Pink Pig" that was so legendary in my children's imagination (and okay, I admit it, mine) in the 1980s and early 90s. I note with alarm that they now have a pizzeria. This seems ill-advised! And yet...they also now have a pub, which looks worth a field trip. Jonathan? Ben? Mike, Dan, Tim? (Okay, okay, Bethany too, but you can't tell any other females that you were invited, or you are never, never being extended that honor again, capice?)