Wilton Town Hall

Wilton’s Second Meeting House, located in the old colonial center of town, burned to the ground in 1859. The town built another, smaller Town House near the site in 1860, but by that time the economic and social locus of the town had already been shifting away from Wilton Center down into the section of town known as the East Village, in the Souhegan River Valley, where a great many businesses – carpet and woolen mills, furniture and woodenware factories, and a burgeoning dairy industry -- were already making use of the abundant water power available in Wilton, not only along the Souhegan but from several other water sources such as Blood Brook and Gambrol Brook, the development of which was further fueled by the extension of the railroad line from Nashua and Milford into Wilton by 1851.

By the 1870’s the Town had decided to sell the “new” Town House and had moved Town Meeting into temporary quarters in the East Village until a suitable building could be constructed. In 1874 Main Street in the East Village was destroyed by the first of three great fires that struck over the space of eleven years, in 1874, 1881, and 1885. One of the casualties of the 1874 fire was the Whiting House Hotel, arguably the most prominent structure on Main Street. Built in 1866 and enlarged again prior to 1874, it served as a convenient stopping place for travelers heading west to Peterborough or Keene. The property remained vacant through 1881; in the aftermath of the second fire that destroyed a great many of the new structures built after 1874, the Whiting family generously decided to donate the land to the town for the site of a new Town Hall. Construction began in 1883, and the structure was completed and dedicated in 1885.

Abiel Abbot Livermore and Sewell Putnam, History of the Town of Wilton, Hillsborough County New Hampshire: With a Genealogical Register. (Lowell: Marden and Rowell, 1888), pp. 185 -187; pp.219-226

Bryant F. and Carolyn K. Tolles New Hampshire Architecture: An Illustrated Guide.  (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1979), p. 103.

Young’s Amusement Company Advertisement, Wilton Journal, 6 June 1912, p.8, col. 5.

Young’s Amusement Company, Cancellation of Picture Shows at Town Hall, Milford Cabinet and Wilton Journal, 8 August 1912, p. 8, col. 1.