Livermore

A White Mountains ghost town that still reported two people in 2020

Livermore was a company town built for timber in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and its ruins lie in the woods about a mile and a half up the Sawyer River Road off US Route 302, some 16 miles west of North Conway. The Saunders family made it. In 1874 they incorporated the Grafton County Lumber Company, the next year the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad opened Crawford Notch, and in 1876 the state incorporated the town, named for Samuel Livermore, a former US senator and the grandfather of Daniel Saunders' wife. The first mill burned down the year it was built and was rebuilt at once. The Saunders' own logging line, the Sawyer River Railroad, eventually ran about nine miles of track into their timberland.

For half a century it was a real place. The 1880 census counted 103 people, a third of them children, in 18 buildings, millworkers, teamsters, blacksmiths and engineers. That year smallpox killed six townspeople, who were buried in the woods under a stone monument. A post office opened in 1881, a school followed, and by 1900 the population had reached about 200. The Saunders feuded over the boundary with James Everell Henry's logging empire in neighbouring Lincoln until the legislature redrew the line along the ridge crest, leaving Livermore with an exclave, a stray piece at the head of the Little River nearly five miles from the rest of the town.

Then the decline set in. The founding brothers died and the business passed to managers. In 1919 fire destroyed the mill, and in 1920 the town's only locomotive derailed and fell into the Sawyer River. A new mill was finished in 1922, but a November storm in 1927 wrecked it and washed out much of the railroad bed, and the last mill closed in 1928. The loggers had cut most of the good timber anyway. The post office closed in 1931, nearly all the land went to the US Forest Service in 1937, the last two residents left in 1949, and in 1951 the legislature dissolved the town.

Livermore never quite vanished from the books. It survives as an unincorporated township covering 64 square miles, nearly all of it White Mountain National Forest, with Mount Carrigain, 4,700 feet, its highest point. A single 12-acre parcel stayed private, and the family that owns it keeps a small red cabin near the ruins. When a census taker asked in 2000 whether they lived there, the grandson joked that they did, and three residents appeared on the census. The 2020 count found two.