Livermore remains?

[cooperhill]

I'm currently in the Middle of C.Francis Belcher's "Logging Railroads of the White Mountains" book and thoroughly enjoying it. Does anyone know if there are still remnants of the old town of Livermore (Mills)?

 

[RoySwkr]

You can see some remnants from the road. The heart of Livermore has a cabin, is still private property and is posted as such.

 

[peakbagger]

The ruins of Livermore are actually more impressive when the leaves are down and there is enough snow to pack down the underbrush. During the summer it is all obscured, but in the winter you realize that it was a fairly big town. There are numerous cuts in the slope to the right where buildings used to sit. The old foundations for the sawmill rails are quite impressive, they run for quite a distance.

The local oft repeated rumor over the years is that one of the previous owners of the camp either sold or left the property to a new owner with the proviso that it would revert to some other private owner if the current owner attempts to sell it to the forest service. Apparently the forest service has been quite aggressive in the past in trying to buy out the inholding. There was speculation that the extended time it took to rebuild sawyer river road after a wash out a few years back was another tactic to drive them out. I did run into someone years ago who claimed that they had checked out the deeds at the registry and had contacted the owner about selling and he had confirmed the story but this could qualify as a not so "urban" myth.

 

[Grumpy]

. . . The local oft repeated rumor over the years is that one of the previous owners of the camp either sold or left the property to a new owner with the proviso that it would revert to some other private owner if the current owner attempts to sell it to the forest service. . . ..

There may have been some restriction like that written into the deed or sale agreement, but it hardly seems like it would be enforceable or would withstand a legal challenge. As a friend of mine puts it regarding matters like this, "you can't rule from the grave, much as you'd like to sometimes."

G.

 

[arghman]

spiffy! didn't know there are still buildings left there. "Logging Railroads of the White Mountains" is a great book.

(FYI it refers in several places to George Morris's autobiography "Yankee Jurist" which is also a very good book, but sadly out of print. Here's a guy who was a lawyer but spent many months out in the wilds of NH dealing with timber trespass & other real estate law cases. One of the chapters is fascinating, it goes into his experiences in 1901-1902 when the State Legislature changed the boundary between Lincoln and Livermore, and a new boundary line had to be spotted at the edge of the Pemigewasset watershed. "Logging Railroads" quotes several short passages, but leaves out some of the best parts. If anyone is interested I can try scanning in that chapter -- I found a copy of the book at a used bookstore a few years ago.)