News from the Farmhouse.....Autumn 2026

         Don't it always seem to go....that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?                                             

Those words from an old Joni Mitchell tune sure ring true these days.  As we see more land clear cut and our beautiful little New England towns beginning to look like New Jersey it dawns on me that our life here is not what it was when we first set eyes on New Hampshire.

The beautiful Merrymeeting River has been a place of peace and recreation in Alton for decades.   Locals and tourists alike have enjoyed its beauty for many decades.   850 acres of marshland have been home to a variety of wildlife including bears, otters, beavers, turtles, deer, and a host of different fish and birdlife, among others.

But now the state, with its bevy of bloated bureaucratic know-it-alls has deemed it necessary to remove the dam on this river and drain the whole lot down to a stream with ugly smelly mudflats where once there was a river and marshland.   The dam has withstood a number of serious floods in the past few decades, including one a few years ago and the big one in 1996 that sent a 44 acre "pond" down a mountain in our neighborhood destroying properties and taking the life of a neighbor.

Yet the DES (Dept. of Environmental Services) has been going all around New Hampshire declaring dams unfit and removing them.

They care as much about our environment as I care about doing the tango on busy Route 140.                                                                                                            

While our town has enlisted legal aid and dam engineers/experts to fight this onslaught of bureaucratic overreach we all know that fighting the state is like David going up against Goliath, without the benefit of a stone.   As Autumn unfolds and winter is just around the corner, the residents of our small town wonder what will become of the wildlife, property values and the beauty of this region.   Does the state give a damn?   Of course not, so long as they can preserve their jobs for another few years while they continue to remove dams and spoil the very environment they're supposed to be protecting!

Towns people like myself are left wondering if the marshland will be filled in and strip malls or housing put in.   What a nightmare that would be!  No place is sacred anymore and unless you have the $$ to buy a lot of acreage to surround yourself no one is spared the onslaught of urbanization that the "Agenda 2030" crowd is pushing.  These are the same one-world government types that would love nothing more than to dissolve all private property rights.   Local control is being lost and I can only pray people wake up before we all find ourselves living in concrete jungles.

         Once beautiful marshlands are now quickly drying up                 

  Even Coffin Brook is low now, a far cry from the day I took this photo in years past.

  Below are photos of our river now in early October.  As the water continues to drop we wonder what will become of the big turtles and all the other wildlife that have enjoyed this marvelous stretch of river and wetland habitat for decades.  We hope the town of Alton can stop the devastation of this beautiful site before it's too late.

                         No water over the spillway, just drying mud

        Those rocks were once covered with water.  The water level

         has dropped so much the shoreline is now much wider.

      All that mud was once covered with water.  The Canadian geese that

raise their young in this location every spring will likely not come back next year.