GETTING CLOSER TO HOME: Historic 1-room schoolhouse's journey almost at end

The Plummer School sits beside White Mountain Highway as it awaits its next move to the foundation, background left. (Rochester Voice photos).

MILTON - The 1801 Plummer School's travails are almost over.
On Friday, with the help of Granite State Building Movers, Mike Merrill Trucking of Amesbury, Mass., the New Hampshire Farm Museum and some $150,000 in donations from hundreds of contributors, the historic 28- by 34-foot one-room schoolhouse was hauled less then a mile up the road from its former location at the corner of Bolan Road and White Mountain Highway.

A Bay State trucking firm hauling the schoolhouse north on White Mountain Highway early Friday morning (NH Farm Museum photo)

Now it rests on a trailer on museum property by the side of White Mountain Highway, awaiting its final move to a newly poured foundation a couple of hundred yards away.
After the heavy rains this week, the Farm Museum will now wait for the muddy, spring soil to dry before making the final jog.
Once it is moved to its new home the schoolhouse will be fully restored and serve as part of the museum's mission to preserve New Hampshire's rural past.

MAKING THEIR MARK: The replica outhouse had both boys and girls facilities and features the original toilet holes and a vertical plank of wood where students carved their initials

The Plummer School was donated to the museum following a Milton Town Meeting vote in 2025.
Among the stunning details volunteers have worked on is a replica of the school's outhouse, which was built by Steve Collins of Lebanon, Maine, who is on the Farm Museum's Board of Trustees.
Museum Executive Director Jonathan Hotchkiss said that a slab of wood where students from the 1800s had carved their initials, and the outhouse's original toilet holes were also preserved.
A fund-raising campaign continues to help defray the cost of the move and the rehabilitation project that lies ahead before the schoolhouse can be open to the public.
When it is, museum Program Director Janet Hotchkiss said they will regularly have programs where a group of schoolchildren can spend a day at the schoolhouse where they'll get to read and learn from the school books used back in the day.
"We have some of the original desks, the original potbelly stove, the teacher's bell and teacher's desk," she said. "We'll also be developing school programs that have recess where the students will play old-time games they played back in the 1800s."

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