The Urban Refugee

Understanding Hanover House Pricing: Zone Approach

The three rings of Hanover houses can explain rational selling prices

Hanover Yellow Zone: Walk-to-Town Ring

Within 5 minutes of being in my car new clients will have been exposed to the “3 rings of Hanover houses” concept.  This handy device forms a framework for conversations and explanations on topics as varied as price justifications, zoning & variances, commute times, playdates and seasonal variations in social habits of the Upper Valley.  It very well may be the second most important concept for the incoming individual or family that is certain that they want to end up in Hanover, Etna, Norwich or Lyme.

On the surface it’s very simple - we can break the housing options into three concentric “rings” (or concentric polygons for those that who aren’t into the whole brevity thing).  The center of the rings focuses on the Main St, Howe Library, Dartmouth Campus (shown by a green “D” on the map above) and the Hanover Food Coop areas.  For short form that is the Walk-to-Town ring or the Yellow Zone on the map.  This ring is characterized by late 1800s and early to mid 1900s houses on lots of 1 acre or less but most often 1/3 acre or less.  The two car garage that actually fits two modern cars is a rare and enviable commodity in the Yellow Zone!  If we were to track Selling price per Square footage of houses in Hanover then this zone would certainly be the highest and probably so by a wide margin.

Life in the Walk-to-Town or Yellow Zone is characterized by… Continue Reading…

Noel Perrin: The Godfather of Thetford Bloggers

We are fortunate to have had the grandad of all small town bloggers live & work in our midst for 25 years.  Noel Perrin was musing on “this, that and the other” long before there even was a name for it!

See Perrin's Farm - Click for more

Mr. Perrin came to Dartmouth College in 1959 as a member of the English Department.  He was, by that time, a respected professor of literature however it seems that something in the Hanover air or water (or perhaps the maple syrup?) must have been inspirational to him.  He uncorked 10 books (6 of them about the very soil he worked) in the 25 years he called this home and another two which were published after his death in 2004.  And in his delightful writing you can trace the path from Mr. Perrin (intellect and New Yorker) to Farmer Perrin (intellect and Thetford, Vermonter)!

This guy must have been a character and I feel that I knew him just from the wit and the horse-sense he packs into a paragraph. One of  Mr. Perrin’s most endearing qualities is his quickness to point out how much he didn’t know and how clumsy he was to learn a rural way of life.  At the same time he was not shy to point out contradictions in the RUGGED & TRADITIONAL aspects of Vermont which he called the “Last Stand of the Yankees”.  Take this great section from his book First Person Rural (published in 1978 by David R. Godine):

Excess capacity to store all that maple syrup, don't you know.

“…the public image of Vermont and its private reality seem to be rapidly diverging.  My favorite example comes, of course, from the maple sugar business.  Suppose you buy a quart of maple syrup in the village store in South Strafford.  It comes in a can with brightly colored pictures on it.  These pictures show men carrying sap pails on yokes, sugar houses with great stacks of logs outside, teams of horses, and all the rest. They are distinctly last-stand pictures.

But suppose you decide to go into the sugaring business for yourself.  When you write away for advice, you get a go-modern or private-reality answer.  You are told not to hang pails at all, much less to carry them to the sugarhouse on a yoke.  Instead, install pipes.  Don’t bother to cut any four-foot logs, oil gives a better-controlled heat. And finally, your instructions say, the right way to market the stuff is to put it in cans that show men carrying sap pails, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs…”

He loved poking fun at how the urbanites he left behind viewed and misunderstood life in small towns like Thetford, Norwich, Lyme and Hanover.   Take this paragraph from a letter to the editor of The New Yorker magazine in 1963 regarding a cartoon that Farmer Perrin didn’t see as quite accurate:

“I think there’s something I shall henceforth call The Wooden Bucket principle at work here.  By this I mean a tendency to imagine almost anything in the country as simpler and more primitive and kind of nicer than it really is. Picture calendars are the most familiar example. Every time I see a calendar decorated with a photograph of a New England Village, I look, and I am never disappointed. There’s a little village nestled among the hills. There’s the white church. There the majestic maples. What about the filling station? It’s been cropped. There are never gas stations in pictures of New England villages. Those big orange school buses don’t generally get into such pictures either nor does the town shed, with a couple of modern of road scrapers lying around out front.”

This guy had things nailed, didn’t he?  A kind of “everyman’s” urban refugee!  These are WONDERFUL reads on a chilly winter night.

With thanks to Terry S. Osborne (who lives to this day in Noel Perrin’s farmhouse in Thetford VT) for prompting my sister & me to read these wonderful books!

Oooooh, I Should Have Bought the Farm!

With warm thanks to Austin “Bud” Gedney, III (Dartmouth College class of 1948) who sent us this real estate classified ad from the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, circa 1950.  Anyone who has ever met Bud knows what a gentleman & a sharp mind he is!

Etna Green in Hanover

Now, lots of people have a story that goes something like this:  “It was a perfect fall weekend and I was happily enjoying a weekend away from my city life in Hanover.  My spouse and I attended a gathering an old classmates house and noticed that the house (or farm) next door was for sale.  Everyone joked that we should BUY THE PLACE and by the end of the party I was half-serious about doing so.  I went so far as to call the agent to find out how much they were asking.  We walked the property and it was quite a perfect spot but we just went home and got caught up in ‘life’ and didn’t think too much about it again.”

The story typically transitions to the epilogue…”I see what the prices of properties that are half the size of the one we looked at and MY JAW DROPS!  Oh how I wish we had Followed Through.”

So it turns out that when you test the veracity of these histories , yeah - they shoulda bought the farm…check out these properties and their prices:

Continue Reading…

Community Profiles: Etna, NH 03750

Etna, Hanover’s sibling ?

Just Another Hard Autumn Day in Etna !

More than one plan has gone awry with the agreement “We’ll meet in Hanover Center.”  At the appointed time one party stands on Hanover’s busy Main St and waits (then waits some more).   Meanwhile the other party is some 4.5 miles away on quiet patch of green bordering a historic church, an old New England cemetery and a handful of beautifully restored antique houses looking across to the peak of Moose Mountain.

That green patch would be Hanover Center in Etna and the person standing there would be the one more clued-in! It’s true.  Hanover Center has  nothing physically to do with Downtown Hanover but in another sense it has everything to do with it!

When friends and clients looking to move to the area ask “Is Etna farther from the Dartmouth Campus than other parts of Hanover?” the answer is “Yes…and No.” To the question “Are the houses cheaper?” we answer “Yes…and No.” And when asked “Is it like a bunch of old farms?” we also have to say “Yes…and No.” Continue Reading…