Faulkner Mills Employees Memorial

Exeter, NH

In the years just after the Civil War, Exeter, New Hampshire had settled into life as a mill and market town on the Squamscott River, its side streets filling with the modest homes of tradespeople and working families. This house, raised around 1867 and still marked with the name of Thomas and Ellen Shinnick, is one of those domestic survivors — a plaque-dated reminder of the everyday households that gave a New England town its texture. Homes like it were seldom grand, but they anchored the daily rhythm of their neighborhoods for generations.

Guilford, CT

In 1886, when the Statue of Liberty rose over New York Harbor, the granite that anchored her pedestal came in part from the storied quarries of the Connecticut shoreline near Guilford. The region's dense, salmon-hued Stony Creek granite was prized in the Gilded Age for grand public works, shipped by rail and barge to build banks, bridges, and monuments up and down the East Coast. A century later, on June 28, 1986, the town set this marker to claim its small but enduring share in the nation's most famous symbol of welcome.

Stark, NH

In the spring of 1944, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp tucked into the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire took on a strange new life. Ringed by a high fence and four guard towers, it became the only World War II prisoner of war camp in the state, holding roughly 250 German and Austrian soldiers—many taken during the fighting in North Africa. Like thousands of POWs held across the wartime United States, the men at Stark were put to work, cutting pulpwood in the surrounding forests to relieve a wartime labor shortage. Over months of shared labor, wary captors and captives in this remote mountain town formed unexpected human bonds that residents remembered long after the war.

Lowell, MA · est. 1978

Lowell harnessed the Merrimack's drop through a network of power canals to run the nation's first integrated cotton mills. Its young women workers — the 'Lowell mill girls' — wrote the first chapters of American labor history.