The Atkinson Town Pound

On the corner here, at Route One Twenty-One and a lane named for it, sits a small stone enclosure called the Atkinson Town Pound. It is said to date to the late seventeen hundreds, and it has survived in remarkable condition for well over two centuries. Its stones were pried loose from surface bedrock in bar-like shapes, and because the pound is too early for the plug and feather quarrying method, the stones show no half-hole quarry marks.

A town pound was a kind of colonial animal jail. Early New England towns built pounds to hold livestock that had wandered loose or caused trouble. The earliest were wooden, and stone later replaced them. An owner whose animal turned up in the pound had to pay a fee to the town pound keeper before getting it back, which gave farmers a strong reason to keep their fences mended. The Atkinson pound is one of the best preserved survivors of a practice that quietly governed daily life in early America, long before fences and laws made it unnecessary. The town around it was incorporated in seventeen sixty-seven and named for Colonel Theodore Atkinson, a local landowner. Atkinson Academy opened there in seventeen eighty-seven as a boys' school and began admitting girls in seventeen ninety-one.