Conference Venue
The hotel headquarters for the meeting is The Doubletree by Hilton Manchester Downtown (visit their website here). The Thursday board meeting and evening reception, as well as Friday’s paper sessions, business luncheon, and evening banquet and awards ceremony be held there. Thursday walking tours and the Saturday field trip will depart from the hotel. The address of The Doubletree by Hilton Manchester Downtown is 700 Elm Street, Manchester, New Hampshire 03101.
Conference Events
Conference events will begin Thursday, October 3.The Board of Directors meeting will be held that day at The Doubletree by Hilton Manchester Downtown Hotel. Participants who are staying overnight are invited to check in to the hotel on Wednesday after 3 p.m.
Thursday Walking Tours: Also on Thursday, October 3, two afternoon walking tours will focus on ethnic neighborhoods in industrial and post-industrial Manchester. On one tour, we will explore Manchester’s West Side (“Flat Iron”) and Piscataquog Village neighborhoods. Although the area was partially “rehabilitated” during the city’s Urban Renewal period, remnant landscapes exist pointing to the areas’ French Canadian, Irish, and German history. We will also focus on the role of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in the lives of the residents of these areas. The second tour will consider areas east of the downtown, including former Greek, Ukrainian, French, and Irish neighborhoods. We will also walk through the Valley Cemetery, an 1841 burial ground inspired by Mt. Auburn and the Rural Cemetery Movement. Each tour is expected to last about two hours. An evening welcoming reception will be held at The Doubletree by Hilton.
On Friday, October 4, paper sessions and a business luncheon will be held in the ground-floor meeting rooms of The Doubletree by Hilton. An evening reception, banquet, and awards ceremony will also be hosted at The Broadway.
On Saturday, October 5, a bus tour will explore southern New Hampshire between Manchester and Peterborough. Along the way we will stop in Amherst, which served as Hillsborough County’s first shire town. Although the courthouse where a young Daniel Webster practiced law no longer exists, its replacement, where future President Franklin Pierce practiced law, still exists on the town’s early nineteenth-century common. We will also visit the mid-19th century Town Hall and Congregational Church in Lyndeborough, as well as the town of Peterborough, which served as an inspiration for Grover’s Corners in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Many of the landscapes on the route were “Yankee” reactions to 19th and 20th century immigration from Europe.
More info coming soon!