Enfield: Shakers, Mascoma Lake, and the Grafton Turnpike

Enfield, New Hampshire, was chartered in seventeen sixty-one as part of a wave of New Hampshire Grants that the colonial governor issued across the Connecticut River watershed. The town sits along the western shore of Mascoma Lake, a long narrow body of water that drains east toward the Connecticut River.

The most defining chapter in Enfield's history began in the seventeen nineties when a Shaker community called the Chosen Vale established itself on the lake's western shore. For more than a hundred and thirty years the Shakers shaped the local economy, producing seeds, brooms, and textiles and constructing the Great Stone Dwelling, a six-story granite communal building that remains the largest structure ever built by the Shakers anywhere in America.

Enfield today is a small residential town of roughly forty-five hundred people, best known to most visitors as the location of that Shaker museum. The Mascoma Lake shoreline draws summer residents and boaters. The old turnpike that once linked Enfield to Hanover is now largely followed by Route Four A, carrying traffic past stone walls and cellar holes that mark farms long abandoned.