New Boston Historical Society
New Boston, New Hampshire

The Morrison house in 1935

The Morrison House on Old Coach Road
Bob Morrison's "Account of the Farm in New Boston"

If you've ever lived in an old house, you know that repairs are often needed. A Massachusetts family who bought a house on Old Coach Road in 1935 had more fixing up to do than most. You may know their house as the home of Janet and Dave Nixon — it's a white cape now owned by the MacDonalds. The original house may have been built as early as the 1770s.

Robert Morrison was twelve years old when his parents, Howard and Mildred, bought the New Boston house as a summer home for $1,500. Seventy years later Bob wrote "An Account of the Farm in New Boston" and gave a copy to the Historical Society. (You'll want to read the entire account here — this page is only a brief summary of Bob's memoir. He was a wonderful writer with a distinctive style.)

In his account Bob explained that his parents came to our town because their friends had bought a different farm in New Boston and wanted company for the cocktail/cribbage hour. Also, Howard Morrison liked hunting and fishing, and Mildred wanted to raise their two sons in a rural environment.

Kitchen stove and hand pump

The house was on 150 acres and had a carriage shed which "collapsed in on itself one quiet summer day when we weren't looking." The kitchen in the oldest part of the house had a cast iron pump and a wood-fired cook stove. The cellar had a dirt floor. The barn was in good shape, Bob wrote, although "it hadn't housed horse or cow for years." Later it survived the Hurricane of 1938 with only the loss of some windows and roof shingles.

Rear view of house shows a board missing from the privy

There was no phone, no electricity, and no plumbing. When the Morrisons bought the contents of the house for fifty dollars, included were some "thunder jugs," chamberpots you'd use at night so you didn't have to go through the shed to the privy. The Morrisons kept the old tables and chairs but made a bonfire of the beds.

The Morrisons installed a water tank in the big shed attached to the house to supply their kitchen and a bathroom they added inside. Until the house was wired for electricity in 1941, water was pumped by hand, requiring five strokes of the pump handle to lift one gallon to the tank. The responsibility for filling the tank was Bob's, and he quickly became a conservationist. He remembered that his immediate family was good about conserving water; however guests were exempt from his strict rules. Those he thought guilty of excessive washing and flushing, he "cursed mightily and wished them ill." Once electricity arrived, the Morrisons enjoyed hot running water in their kitchen and bathroom, with an endless supply from an artesian well.

One of three fireplaces

There were three working fireplaces when the Morrisons bought the house, and they added a furnace that burned wood and later coal. The cook stove was converted to use kerosene — Bob needed three paragraphs to describe how the kerosene stove was lit.

The previous owner of the house was Frank Greer, who had a drugstore in the village. Greer's son Frank Jr., when a teenager, "used to smoke cigarettes lying on his back with his snoot in the fireplace, smoke wafting undetected up the chimney."

The new owner Howard Morrison remodeled the big shed into a family room, adding four sets of windows and the arched barn doors you see from the road today. The "shed room" was used for parties and barbershop-style singing, "the kind participants love but which inspires non-participants to wish they were somewhere else," Bob remembered.

Later in his "Account of the Farm," Bob wrote of Dodge's Store and Marshall's Market, swimming in the Picataquog, 4th of July parades, driving a Model A Ford, picking blueberries, and the neighbors' daughters, to whom he was too shy to talk. Bob's forty-page memoir of life in New Boston is delightful, and I've posted it on the Historical Society website with the kind permission of his family.

Howard Morrison died in 1959, and his widow Mildred sold the house to the Nixons the following year. Their younger son Robert Morrison (1923-2017), the author of the account I've quoted from here, graduated from the Holderness School in New Hampshire and from Harvard College. Bob wrote for newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and also worked in advertising.

(This article appeared in the New Boston Beacon in October 2025. — Dan R.)