WHAT'S NEW?

SITE OF THE WEEK

We celebrate just about everything in these parts. There are full-blown festivals held in honor of chili, children, chowder, seafood, strawberries, blueberries, blues, beer, film, jazz, tap dancing, the Renaissance, the Revolution, apples, arts, even alewives. In Newmarket they celebrate an historic immigrant community.

VISIT the NEWMARKET HERITAGE web site

Now in its fifth year, the Heritage Festival is people celebrating people of the past. Mill towns often attract immigrants, and Newmarket was home to a mix of French Canadian, Polish, German, Russian, Italian and other very festive ethnic populations. Their heritage formed the core concept for the festival. Since then, the three-day shoulder-season block party has evolved into a multicultural celebration of a diverse community.

The music says it all. According to the group’s revamped web site, the funky fare includes gospel, African drumming, sea chanteys, Laotian dance, fiddling, clog dancing, Randy Armstrong’s world music, Gary Sredzienski’s accordion polkas, some jazz, the Jumbo Circus Peanuts and King Ludwig’s bavarian Band. Now that is a festive venue! There are historic tours through the historic mills quarried of Newmarket granite and one of my favorite historical societies in the old stone school. There are artisans – making cane chairs, turning clay to pots, spinning, weaving, quilting, making splint baskets while visitors watch. There’s the abundant feast, of course, a cornucopia of ethnic edibles, and the Lamprey River to roam.

Suki Casanave, a well known local writer (www.sukicasanave.com), is the Heritage Festival’s volunteer publicity and program coordinator. She says that, as Newmarket grows and evolves, it becomes increasingly important to bring its diverse community together and celebrate the heritage of its residents.

"You have to really nurture that sense of community," she says, "so that, as we’re growing and growing, new people can grasp all that has happened here and we’re part of all those traditions."

This year it will be hard to miss the festival, which coincides with Newmarket’s 275^th anniversary. Police chief Rod Collins, a festival advocate and officer, has arranged to divert Route 108 traffic around the Main Street festival area. The world, for the first weekend in 20 years, will not cut the town in half.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

If you don’t know Newmarket, you probably blinked while driving up Route 108 from the University of New Hampshire at Durham towards Exeter. It winds along the Lamprey River, although you’d never know that without a map. The river, tucked just off the road, powered the machinery in the great stone and brick mill buildings that still dominate the sleepy working class downtown. If the road didn’t run smack up the middle of Newmarket, it would be Rollinsford. If you don’t know Rollinsford, another little Seacoast town dominated by factory buildings, then picture this. I once watched a stray cat walk lazily down the middle of the full length of Rollinsford’s main street unmolested by even a single passing car.

But Newmarket is "in medias res", as my Larin teacher used to say, and the middle of things is a good place to be. While the downtown looks pretty much as it has for a century, the population has doubled in just the last generation to about 8,500 people today. Besides descendants of the immigrant populations, today there are university professors, high tech professionals, an ever-changing parade of UNH students.

There’s just enough business in town to form a business council. And there are just enough concerned citizens to form the Newmarket Main Street Corporation, a not-for-profit group dedicated to celebrating the town’s culture and history. Ranan Cohen, who helped design the festival as a former town councilman, is current present of the festival group.

"It’s all about community building," he says, "literal and figurative. I think the town is a real eclectic mix. Now we’re expanidng that definition of what it means to carry on traditions. Newmarket is almost a microcosm of New England and the country, and we get to live out that melting pot effect."

The festival is literally about heritage itself, about what it means to have a past and celebrate that past. That definition has evolved, as has the group’s web site, created by Tim Donahoe. His company, Easy Web Solutions works from an affordable office in the restored mill. Working in Front Page, Donahue has volunteered his work on the site for years, but says things really started to hop this year under Suki Casanaave (who incidentally is married to Rahan Cohen.)

"No one ever took advantage of me until her," Donahue says. "And I mean that in a good way. She’s a wordsmith. Suki gets it!"

Kathy Couture, a Newmarket dancer, florist and web developer, designed the strong new homepage that shows, in one instant, what the festival is all about. Lenharth Systems, a local high-tech firm has just offered free hosting. Like the festival itself, the web site is an authentic community effort.

This is an all-festival web site. It’s sole purpose is to show you what’s going on, which it does in clear detail. The calendar for all three days is smoothly laid out, packed with readable detail and cross-referenced to topical themes. I can tell from the site what stories will be read to kids and when. I know how to buy buttons ($5 has to be the biggest bargain in the Seacoast for a three-day show), how to get there, where to park. I know who won every prize in the raffle that benefits the restoration of the old Newmarket Firehouse. That’s important info since it allows visitors to target their arrival time and plan. These are busy times, and we want to get the maximum festivity for our dollar, right?

THE UP SHOT

Okay, I’m prejudiced. I admit lived in Newmarket for two years and I love that little town. In my day Newmarket was an odd cocktail -- half hippies, half blue-collar workers. That was three decades ago, nearly halfway between the devastating factory closures in the 30’s and the gentrifying real estate boom that marked the beginning and end of the 20^th century. I was on the scene when the Stone Church opened at the top of the hill. In those days, if you got up on stage and sang, you got a free roast beef dinner on Sunday. Everybody in town sang, spawning a neighborhood of talented folk musicians like Bill Morrissey and Cormac McCarthy. Peter Stolper, the legendary Sneaky Pete, of Sneaky Pete’s saloon lived in my semi- communal farmhouse on the edge of town. I’d tell you more about those halcyon days, but modesty and good taste forbid.

That farmhouse is gone now, lost amid the swirling change that confronts this not-so-little former mill town. Sometimes I still launch my shell from the downtown landing and find my way down-river toward Great Bay. That river started it all. In the 1600s, the place was little more than a sawmill outpost, like Exeter and Durham, York, Bewick and Dover. When the Newmarket Manufacturing Company arrived in 1822, the Newmarket we know began to take shape. At one time, there were more looms in a gigantic factory there than anywhere on earth. There was child labor too, and hard times, and young women drawn from rural life to a wholly new America. It was no picnic in the best of times. Then one day, 1,500 jobs were lost in a town of 3,000 souls. The millworkers stood up for their rights and the owners shut the town down. It’s a hell of a story.

And it’s a story that keeps on revising itself decade after decade. Will gentrification change the town forever? Will history be preserved? Will ethnic communities learn to live in harmony? Can one town come to represent the heritage of many? Stay tuned. Buy a button. Check the web site. Bring the kids.