Jigsaw for September 12, 2026: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/one-horse
Last week we stood on Main Street in White River Junction, looking at the Hotel Coolidge, which in 1919 was still the Junction House. I told you then that Samuel Nutt started it by hauling the Grafton House over from Enfield, and to let that sink in. That came from the town’s own walking tour of the historic district, which puts it in one flat line:
He moved the Grafton House from Enfield, New Hampshire, to the site and re-opened it as the Junction House.
I was dumbfounded. I pictured that huge building towed up and over the big hill on Route 4, and then sitting on Main Street in West Lebanon village. Ready to go over the bridge? Phew.
I had pictured only one way of doing it, and it was the wrong one. Nutt did not drag that hotel anywhere. William Howard Tucker, writing the history of Hartford in 1889, says so twice, in two separate chapters, as though it were the least remarkable thing in the book:
This he took down and transferred to W. R. Junction, where he reconstructed it.
He bought it in Enfield from a Mr. Willis, took it apart, carted it sixteen miles and put it back up. It opened as the Junction House and was doing good business by the summer of 1850. A timber frame comes apart the way it went up. The skeleton holds itself together with mortise and tenon joints pinned by oak pegs, every joint cut to fit one partner and scored with a Roman numeral when the frame was first raised, so the pieces could be told apart on the ground. The nails in a house like that are all in the skin, the sheathing and clapboards and floorboards, and the skin is what you strip off first. Sixteen miles of hills with a river in the way, in 1849, and taking it apart was the only thing he could have done.
That is one of the two ways to move a building. The other one is the photograph at the top of this page, and it is the reason this turned into more than one post.
Look at it again. A house is going down Central Street in Woodstock in 1909, whole, on the move, in the middle of a working village. Count the animals doing the pulling.
One. One horse.
I could not make that make sense, and finding out why it is true took me a long way from White River Junction. So rather than cram it into one week, here is what is coming:
One horsepower. How a single horse moves a building that weighs two hundred tons, which turns out to be a question about a machine and not about a horse at all.
The church that walked. In 1852 the Congregational church got up off the Norwich green and moved. Photography had barely reached Vermont by then, so what survives of the green as it was is a drawing, and the church is dead center of it.
Buildings on the move everywhere. Chicago jacked whole blocks of itself out of the mud with the shops open and the customers walking in, and Boston slid a seven-story hotel sideways on Tremont Street with the tenants still living in it.
This week, though, the jigsaw is that Woodstock street, one horse and all. It is a good one.
What happened next
More Upper Valley buildings
A word of thanks
To the Woodstock History Center, who not only keep that photograph but did the detective work that identified it. It reached them with nothing written on the back. They compared the 1904 and 1910 Sanborn maps, found a house that was there and then was not, and named it: the Dr. Mack house, moved in 1909 from the Green to a lot by the railroad depot. It is still standing, at 58 Pleasant Street. Read their excellent article here:
https://www.woodstockhistorycenter.org/articles/2021/anewhomeforahouse
Thanks for your support, as always,
Cameron Cross
Full-resolution image
The Woodstock photograph at full size, for zooming in on the rig, the horse and the men: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/one-horse-hires/woodstock-1909-dr-mack-house.jpg
Sources
The photograph: the Dr. Mack house being moved along Central Street, Woodstock, July 1909, Woodstock History Center collection, archive item 0681, reproduced by courtesy of the Woodstock History Center.
The one-line version of the move: the Town of Hartford’s White River Junction historic district tour. The passage that corrects it: William Howard Tucker, History of Hartford, Vermont, 1889, page 350, and again in Nutt’s biography in the same book.
I also find it interesting that almost every business on the street had an awning. Must have been a thing back then.
Hello Cam, I find it interesting that the family on the right of the photo near the storefront appear to be African American. Wouldn't you love to know their history.