atHome with History
atHome with History
The Luther Nourse Farm Keene, New Hampshire By Nancy McGartland Photography by Kelly Fletcher
T
he Luther Nourse Farm on Beech Hill, one of Keene’s oldest houses, was a self-sufficient farmstead in 1773. It’s self-sufficient again 248 years later in 2021, ready for another century, thanks to owners Mark and Terri Whippie. In 1990 the Whippies – Keene natives – sought farmland. They “dickered for a year” with 90-year-old Mr. Kalb, the longest owner of the house (since 1947) out of its seven 20th-century owners. The Whippies love the house’s history and take pride and joy in restoring it. “The house deserves it, “Mark says. “We love the old ways,” Terri adds, “so quiet and efficient.” The Whippie house on 164 Jordan Road is one of Keene’s few remaining saltbox houses. It extends back from its original footprint with a chain of additions common to New England houses: The original loom room tucked under the saltbox slant, the current kitchen fashioned from the old screened porch, dining room turned sitting room, and finally, the former carriage shed and stable turned into a cozy apartment for Mark’s dad, Mort. Behind the house at the top of the long drive stands the large barn, with a machine shop addition behind it. THE HISTORY Jacob Stiles first owned the land. Colonel Abraham Wheeler purchased it, then built the house in 1773. Col. Wheeler, married to Mary Morse of Dublin, was a leading citizen, wealthy, well-educated, and enfranchised. According to Marjorie Whalen Smith in the 1968 book “Historic Homes of Cheshire County,” Wheeler “built his home with a base of heavy oak timbers, a central
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chimney and facing south as was the custom.” Jordan Road was then called Proprietor’s Road, “for the proprietors of the town to use traveling to and from the ranges of the two 30-acre lots that had been mapped out on Beech Hill in 1763,” according to Smith. She goes on to tell us that another leading citizen, Peleg Sprague, a lawyer active in government, bought the house in 1799, retiring from Main Street to the “healthier” altitude of Beech Hill. His son, Nathaniel, “grew up to become the superintendent of Keene Glass Works.” His sister, Elizabeth, was a “co-partner at Miss Fiske’s School for Girls in Keene.” It’s said she brought the first piano to Keene. Today, the central chimney still stands, massive, perhaps six feet long by four feet deep (photo, above). “Its ample fireplace provided with crane and pot-hooks and its brick oven and ash hole,” according to the 1904 “History of the City of Keene.” If you stick your head in the brick-arched-ceiling bake oven (as I did!), you’ll see its impressively intact curves. On the north side of that sturdy beehive chimney, another fireplace opens onto the former loom room used for spinning and weaving, now divided into an office and a formal dining room. Walls of lath and plaster cover horizontal wide-board sheathing. The Whippies contemplated removing it to expose the wide planking as they have done upstairs. Original batten board doors lead to two bedrooms up-
TOP: The 200+ year old fireplace at the Luther Nourse Farm. INSET: Mark Whippie with two of the couple’s many chickens. RIGHT: The original home features hand-sawn square rafters.
