Harrisville mill village brick
— — red brick held by still water.
Not only on a wall.
“A small brick mill village in southwestern New Hampshire, built along Goose Brook where it falls between Harrisville Pond and Nubanusit Lake. Cheshire Mills ran woollens here from the 1850s into the 1970s. The whole village is a National Historic Landmark, the only nineteenth-century textile village in the United States that survives essentially intact. Brick on water, still doing its work.
Harrisville mill village brick, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Harrisville sits in Cheshire County in southwestern New Hampshire, in the Monadnock highlands. The town was incorporated in 1870, named for the Harris family who built the mills. Roughly 950 people live here today. The village runs along Goose Brook between Harrisville Pond and Nubanusit Lake, the water powering Cheshire Mills from the 1850s until the company closed in 1970. The Harrisville Historic District was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977, the only nineteenth-century textile village in the United States that survives essentially intact.
The mills, the storehouses, the bell tower and the mill housing are all brick, made locally in the nineteenth century. The buildings step down a granite drop along Goose Brook, the water doing the work of moving from one pond to the other. Cheshire Mills closed in 1970 after more than a century of woollen production. The non-profit Historic Harrisville, Inc. took over the buildings and runs them now as offices, studios, and the headquarters of Harrisville Designs, the yarn company founded in 1971 to keep the textile work alive.
Goose Brook is the reason the village is here. It falls roughly forty feet between Harrisville Pond above and Nubanusit Lake below, and the mill owners stacked turbines and water wheels along the drop. The same water still moves through the village, the ponds quiet on either end of the brick. Nubanusit Lake stretches three miles north toward Hancock, undeveloped along most of its shore. Mount Monadnock rises about five miles to the southwest. The village is reachable by Chesham Road off New Hampshire Route 137.