Stream Meets Street

A stream has always flowed beneath this place, where settlers traveling inland from the seacoast in the 18th century followed a path that crossed the water and later became the main street of Bethlehem after Massachusetts settlers coming up the upper Connecticut River incorporated the town in 1799. The largest of several streams flowing north off Mt. Agassiz to the Ammonoosuc River is Barrett Brook, which passes under the street. What began as a muddy crossing was carried by a small culvert under the road by the early 1800s. The route through the White Mountains connecting the seacoast and the Connecticut River Valley became part of the New Hampshire turnpike system in the early 1800s, and the irregular dirt path known as Bethlehem Street gradually shaped the town as farms and houses lined it. Later, summer cottages and hotels replaced farmhouses as tourism grew, and new infrastructure followed. Hotel and business owners formed the Bethlehem Improvement Association in 1875, and by the end of the 1870s the street was leveled and graded, the dip in the road was filled, and a new deep stone box culvert was built under the roadway. Wooden sidewalks were added, kerosene streetlights were installed in 1887 for the summer months, and electric lights followed in 1896, transforming the street into a tree-lined boulevard. In the early 1900s the town used the stream's water to create Sunset Lake, and after the hurricane of 1938 rebuilt it as a swimming pool. By the early 1900s the street was a smooth gravel road with concrete sidewalks; in the 1920s automobiles replaced horse-drawn coaches, the street was widened and paved, and it became part of New Hampshire's western trunk line highway and the first east-west transcontinental highway, the precursor of U.S. 302. In the 1930s crosswalks, lanes, granite curbs, and paved parking spaces were added, and the street had a new name, Main Street. The stone culvert built in the 1870s still remains below the street: its original mortared random-rubble box section under the roadway is 66 feet long with seven feet of interior clearance, later extended on the south by a 33-foot concrete box and on the north by a 68-foot corrugated steel pipe to support a parking area beside a 1940s restaurant, now the post office.

Bethlehem, New Hampshire · United States