Sandown Town Pound

This little stone enclosure is the old Sandown town pound, built in the late seventeen hundreds. In early New England, livestock roamed free, and a single loose pig or cow could ruin a neighbor's crops in a night. So towns were generally expected to build a pound, a sturdy stone pen where stray horses, sheep, cattle, goats, and even geese were locked up until their owners paid a fine and claimed them.

The Sandown pound did this work for generations. Of the roughly seven hundred fifty pounds once scattered across the six New England states, only about one hundred seventy survive, and New Hampshire keeps more of them than any other state. This quiet ring of stones is a relic of a time when fences were the law's business.