About the town of acworth
Acworth is a small town with fewer than 900 living in 39 square miles. A lot of those square miles are forests and a lot of brooks and streams run through them. When you look at the landscape, not much has changed in the last fifty to one hundred years. The town hall was built in 1821, the Acworth Village Store in 1865, and the Silsby Library in 1892. Acworth has its own elementary school built in 1931. There’s a magnificent church on the town Common, also built in 1821, and the United Church of Acworth holds services there on Sundays. There’s a small veterans Memorial Park nearby with a bench, another good place to sit, and you can sometimes see Mount Monadnock from up there on the Common. In the northeast part of town lies Crescent Lake, parts of its shore bordered by Lempster and Unity as well as Acworth. There’s a boat launch but no public swimming place there.
The biggest business in town is Bascom Maple Farms. They sell maple syrup and maple sugar-
making supplies. The Bascoms own acres of sugar orchards around town and much of that
acreage is conservation land, so it’s a business that keeps the landscape rural. There are a few
farms left also. The other business in town is the Village Store in South Acworth and it’s been right there since 1865. It sells groceries, snacks, beer, cigarettes, and locally made crafts like soaps, jewelry, gifts, and greeting cards. You can get a drink and a sandwich and sit on the porch and see what passes for traffic around here.
The town is eleven miles from I-91 in Vermont and the biggest road in town is New Hampshire Route 123A. The town has too many miles of roads to pave, so many of them are gravel. Don’t trust your GPS or your navigation system out here, and if you see a Dead End sign, it means just that.
About the acworth historical society
Our Mission
The Acworth Historical Society is a 501 C 3 nonprofit charitable trust which works to promote local history through preservation and education, and acts as a repository to receive, store, and display material which is of historical interest to the town.
The Acworth Historical Society
The Historical Society began in 1948 to gather materials and eventually publish the town’s history. Its collections of genealogies, house histories, journals, business records, and photographs are stored today in the Silsby Library. The Society owns a few artifacts but lacks the facilities to properly care for or store items other than documents and pictures. A far larger collection of Acworth historical materials is housed in the New Hampshire State Archives which are open to the public. (https://www.sos.nh.gov/archives-and-records-management).
Today the Historical Society is a 501c-3 nonprofit managed by its members. The Society purchased the Village Store when its last owners went out of business in 2001. A Save our Store committee raised funds and secured grants to rehabilitate the building. We manage rental of the upstairs apartment and work closely with the Acworth Community Project to maintain the building. Membership in the Historical Society is open to everyone.