JAFFREY — A bustling 18th and 19th century mill village along the Old Boston Post Road stagecoach route comes alive in a recently completed historical survey of Jaffrey’s Squantum Village.

At a Select Board meeting on Dec. 14, Janet Grant, chair of the town’s Historic District Commission, reported that the survey shows Squantum Village qualifies for inclusion in the state and national historical registers. She said the survey work was funded by a federal grant of $7,800 and was completed by Elizabeth Durfee Hengen, a Concord preservation consultant.

“It was a neighborhood, but it was also part of our historic industrial development over 250 years ago,” Grant told selectmen. “It’s a beautiful area.”

Grant said the historical survey would be available for public review at the town offices and the library. She said the Commission is also considering other ways to educate and distribute information about the village to the public.

The first working mill, which was a saw and gristmill, in Squantum Village was built in 1743, according to the survey. It supplied the lumber for private and public buildings, such as the Rindge Meetinghouse. It was in operation for 100 years until a replacement for it was built nearby.

It is noteworthy that the name of the village, Squantum, is of Native American origin, but on an 1858 map of Jaffrey the village is named Prescott Ville — a designation that didn’t stick — in honor of the influential Prescott family. The first of the Prescotts to arrive in Jaffrey was Benjamin Prescott in 1772. He owned the Squantum sawmill briefly in the late 1700s and his farm was on the Third New Hampshire Turnpike, Route 124. His son, Oliver Prescott, built the Prescott Tavern on Route 124.

In 1825, John Adams Prescott, another of Benjamin Prescott’s sons, bought the saw and gristmill back and held land in the village, as well as elsewhere in Jaffrey and Rindge. In1828, Prescott built the Federal-style home that still stands today at 137 Prescott Road overlooking the village common and the six cottages he built across from his home for people who worked in his mills.

As the survey recounts, “On October 8, 1836, Prescott sold his mill property to Burleigh French and William Emerson of Wilton, described as ‘experienced mill builders and operators who made immediate improvements upon their new holdings.’ ... French sold his share in the business in 1839, leaving the mills under a mortgage held by Prescott, until Emerson Hale, a wealthy farmer from Rindge, bought in. Circa 1840 Emerson and Hale built a new, substantial, three-story grist mill behind the saw mill.”

By the late-1850s, Ephraim Murdock of Winchendon, Mass., and Dennis Howe of Rindge were in control of the mills and began focusing on manufacture of wooden nest boxes in demand at that time for pantry food storage. Thomas Annett of Rindge, who had worked his way up the ladder in woodworking mills in Rindge, was hired to oversee production of the Squantum mills. By 1882, Annett was sole owner of the mills and living in what had once been John Adams Prescott’s home, where Annett lived until his death in 1903. In 1896, the company incorporated as the Annett Manufacturing Company.

“The company flourished and additions to the mills increased the variety of products, including baskets, toys, and novelties, such as fern stands, jardinières and vases, which found a ready market. In the early 20th century, the mill employed fifty people. Few who lived in the village were employed elsewhere,” the survey reads.

The mill buildings built in the mid-19th century burned down in 1966, but many remnants of the past remain in this historic village, where the bustle of the past has given way to a quiet neighborhood with some light industry. The once strategic location of the historic village is today more of a back road pass-through to neighboring Rindge for most people.

On Prescott Road, the former Annett Manufacturing Company boiler house and engine house, a brick building built around 1906, is one of only two buildings in the mill yard to survive the 1966 fire that ruined the plant. “The subject structure is thought to stand on the site of the grist mill built ca. 1840,” the survey tells readers.

The village was home to Annett Lumber Company until the 1960s and Monadnock Forest Products, which developed the former Annett Manufacturing mill yard for pine paneling production, until the late 1990s. Belletetes Inc., a local lumber company, and New England Wood Pellet now occupy the site on opposite sides of Squantum Road.

This story appears on Page 1 of the Dec. 29 Ledger-Transcript.