Each  of  these  little communities  needed certain other amenities besides the mills that provided a living. They needed a school, and usually a store and a church, or a place for community gatherings. In 1850, Acworth had thirteen school districts to serve 474 children. Several of these schoolhouses are still standing: the Grout Hill School built in 1847 and the little East Acworth schoolhouse where the Keegans now live. Since children all had to walk to school, the schoolhouses needed to be within two miles of every family's house. The key factor here was darkness, and the distance children could walk on a snowy late winter afternoon. Schools included children as young as four, and went through the eighth grade. Many residents ended their schooling there because it was too difficult to travel to a local high school. Obviously electricity and school bus transportation have changed education patterns, and have also made it possible for families with young children to live much further from schoolhouses. At the same time, that has eroded the cohesion of these very small little micro communities, as has the very necessary establishment of regional school districts. Not only in the Fall Mountain district, but also in the Monadnock district we see growing tensions and competitions among the various towns concerned that each should pay its fair share and no more. At the same time citizens who have no children in the high school are less committed to supporting it because it's a more distant extension of community.

South Acworth Fair ~ October 1914

Acworth's  historic  Church  on the Hill  demonstrates  the powerful force of religion in the early community. Until 1819 everyone in any New Hampshire town was expected to contribute to the minister's tax. The assumption was that everyone shared the same religious beliefs, and that the religious community and the town itself were one and the same. But the religious unity ended very early, actually about 200 years ago. Quakers petitioned for exemption from the minister's tax to attend meeting in Quaker City in Unity, where the meeting house was built in 1820. Then it could be handily reached along Black North Road, before the beaver made it impassable. Here on the Common, there were three churches between 1844 and 1854. The school in those days was held in the red brick house opposite the southeast corner of the Common. The Baptist Church, which was moved down to South Acworth in 1867, stood where the Acworth School is now. And the Methodist Church, which is now the Grange Hall, stood about where the flagpole and memorial boulder are now, from the time it was built in 1844 until it was moved down to South Acworth in 1854.

These churches served a social function at least as important as their religious role, especially vital to women. Churches provided music, singing, and intellectual stimulation, as well as a chance to sit down and rest. Men worked with other men, particularly in Acworth's numerous water-powered mills. There they also enjoyed the sociability of farmers bringing corn and wheat and rye to be ground, or hauling logs to be cut into lumber or turned into chair stock or barrels or shoe pegs. Women generally worked at home with young children until Sunday. No wonder they were eager to take a bath on Saturday night, put on their best clothes, forgo cooking any hot meals on Sunday, and spend the day sitting down in the company of other women. They extended their church community to organizations like the Female Charitable Society too. So while we commonly think of women of the 1800s and early 1900s as more religious than men, we should also consider what the church as a social institution contributed.

There were two floods that played a role in reshaping the town. Regardless of human settlements and the way they shape the landscape, Nature comes back every few decades to remind us that we are not the absolute rulers of the universe. During a huge flood in November 3 through 5th of 1927 the Cold River flowed over the road by Leon Newton's farm, and Crane Brook flooded down Crane Brook Road. The state allocated over $5,000 to repair this highway district in the west part of town alone. Glenn Bascom harnessed four of his horses and he and his neighbors filled in the washouts with stones from old stonewalls, and then hauled in gravel to spread over the damaged areas. The bridges in South Acworth and in East Acworth washed out and had to be rebuilt as well.

Another flood, this time in the spring, struck Acworth between March 12-19th, 1936, when several feet of heavy snow melting over still frozen ground contributed to the flooding. Roads were so impassable that the school bus, the mail carrier, and the stage, by now a motorized vehicle, were unable to get through. Much of the Cold River Road in East Acworth and 123A into South Acworth remained under water for days. Harry Gowen was unable to get his milk to the creamery in Bellows Falls, so he took it to the shelters opened in Keene by the American Legion and the Red Cross. Men used dynamite to blast huge icebergs out of the Cold River near the Newton farm and further downriver in an attempt to break up the huge ice dams that flooded low-lying fields and roads. This rainstorm destroyed traces of the foundations and dams of many of the water-powered mills. There was still a cement-topped mill dam in South Acworth that washed out and had to be repaired. By then it belonged to the town, which needed to pay for its repair as well as around $4,000 in road damage. Some of the work was funded by the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, which was one of President Roosevelt's make-work programs to counteract the massive unemployment caused by the Great Depression. Locally, the WPA was called the Working People of Acworth. Oddly enough, some of the factors that helped put an end to the Great Depression were further disasters: the 1938 hurricane that began on September 21st, the Marlow fire of 1941, and finally the Second World War. If there is a message here, it may be that these natural disasters can provide a creative opportunity for change. Today Acworth’s residents continue to work together to adapt the land to present needs, and to tie the community together.