History in my own Backyard!

The Boyd Farm painting in the Morrison House

Last August, on Old Home Day, I was helping out in the Londonderry Historical Society's Morrison House Museum. I sat in the dining room for several hours, helping with a weaving demonstration. My husband snapped a few photos of the weaving, and then he also snapped a few photos of artifacts inside the museum. Later he asked me if I had noticed the painting behind our table. I had to laugh when I turned around to look. It was a painting of the house that used to stand our own backyard!

The Boyd Dairy Farm is now the Rolling Meadows Condominiums, built over forty years ago. It is an open area of about sixty acres, bordered by forest land and surrounding three good sized ponds. I had blogged about this land last year at the post http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/08/boyd-and-towne-families-of-londonderry.html

The photo above was taken yesterday, of the same piece of property. The old homestead and attached barn are no longer standing. Boyd Road, on the right, is still there, and so is the pond. Many trees have grown up along the edge of the pond. The modern townhouses sit just about where the homestead was, and if you walk along the road you can still see a stone wall. In the back, the hill is still covered with dark green pine trees. Just a little bit further up the road you will find our maintenance shed, which used to be the calving shed when this was all a dairy farm. The original painting was probably done before 1950, and you can see the changes in the landscape.

There are a few paragraphs about the Boyd family in the book Early Londonderry: Tidbits and Sketches, Volume II, by the Londonderry Historical Society, pages 136 -7. Before becoming condominiums in the 1960s, the land was known as the Thomas Boyd estate, and then owned by the Harrington family. The Harringtons built a newer, modern home on Boyd Road, but I'm not sure which one house might be the Harrington House.

This is the link to the post I did for Old Home Day...
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/08/londonderry-old-home-day-2010-weaving.html
If you look close you can see the painting right behind us as we are weaving!

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Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo