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Today as you turn onto the camp road from Route 109, you enter a dense
recent growth of broadleaf trees with an occasional pine or hemlock. If it
were 1928, you would have been in between farm fields.
There would have been horses and cattle grazing on fields edged by
painstakingly built stone walls dating to the early decades of the
nineteenth century. As you drive up the hill, you will remember two rock
walled springs that you visited on Treasure Hunts. Almost to the top of
the hill there is the many-trunked birch. You round the curve and see the
farmhouse with broad porch and rocking chairs. The porch and chairs are a
relatively recent addition to the scene, dating to the ownership of the
Blakes who ran a summer boarding house at what is now North Woods Camp.
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The
original camp property was purchased in December, 1927. The sellers were
Frank P. and Maria Blake, the buyer, the Young Men’s Christian
Association of Boston. The 110 acres consisted of two parcels purchased by
the Blakes at the end of the nineteenth century. The parcel north of the
present camp road, consisting of sixty acres, was bought in 1899; the
parcel south of the road, consisting of fifty acres, in 1896. The Blakes
farmed the property, rented pasturage, and ran the boarding house.
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Boarders at Blake Heights were city people who came by train to Wolfeboro
or the Weirs. If they came to the Weirs, they could continue by boat to
Union Wharf at Nineteen Mile Bay. Frank Blake would meet them with his
wagon.
The Blake establishment was known as one of the “better” boarding
houses and was noted for plenty of excellent home-cooked food featuring
fresh vegetables and milk from the farm. Mrs. Blake had two “help” for
the cooking. The Blakes had an especially deep hand-dug well to
accommodate the boarders in the six to eight rooms rented in the
farmhouse. The well still supplies cold water for the more than two
hundred “boarders” seventy-five years later.
In the Blake days, a boarder could rock on the porch and see the Ossipee
range ahead and the Sandwich range in the distance to the left. Farther
left and at a greater distance the White Mountains were visible. Today
only the peak of Mt. Shaw (in the Ossipee range) is visible because of the
height of the trees.
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Because the Blakes had purchased two
separate farms, there were also two farm houses. Sometime after 1907, the
Blakes moved the farm house from the north parcel (the cellar and stone
foundation can still be seen in the Old Tenting Ground) and joined it to
the larger farm house on the south parcel. The ragged roofline we see
today was the result of this move. The slope of the front roofs was
altered to accommodate the porch which stretched the length of the two
buildings.
The house on the south parcel (where
the farm house now stands) was built by Wingate Chase not long after the
beginning of the nineteenth century. The farm was then sold to Josiah
Libby and then to Andrew Chase. Stephen McIntire was the next owner. He
lived there until his death. The McIntires arranged that father, Stephen,
could live out his days on the farm if son Charles W. would “stock,
cultivate and improve said homestead in a husband-like manner”.
The Blakes of Blake Heights came after the McIntires.
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Additional Parcels
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