Why Suncook Village in Pembroke NH Is Worth Watching

Three miles apart, on the same Saturday, you can visit two different endings to the same story. One is a patch of woods off Fourth Range Road where an entire 1730s settlement gave up and let the pines take it back. The other is a bend in the Suncook River where a downtown that spent decades looking like it might do the same thing instead filled back in. Pembroke holds both outcomes at once, and most people who live here have only ever walked through one of them.

The One That Stayed Empty

When English settlers laid out Pembroke's original grid, they ran a series of "range roads" parallel to the Merrimack and divided the land by lottery. Whoever drew a parcel close to the river got soil worth farming. Whoever drew a parcel past Fourth Range Road got rock, hills, and ground that fought back against every plow. The settlers there tried anyway, then didn't. The town eventually closed Fifth Range Road to traffic altogether, and the forest did what forests do when nobody's stopping them.

What's left is now called Whittemore Town Forest, and if you know where to look, the woods are still keeping records. Local historian Ayn Whytemare, whose own family name is where "Whittemore" comes from, has led residents through what she calls the town's own ghost town: cellar holes sunk into the forest floor, stone walls running through underbrush, a scatter of brick where a homestead chimney used to stand. One belonged to the Kimball family, a hole about five feet deep, still holding its shape more than two centuries later.

People ask if they can bring metal detectors. She tells them no.

"Once you take something out of its context, it is forever gone."

That's the whole point of this particular ghost town. Nobody is trying to bring it back. It's preserved exactly because it stayed abandoned, a fixed record of what happens when a place runs out of reasons to keep going.

The One That Came Back

Downhill and downstream, Suncook Village is a different kind of experiment. The Suncook River drops 70 feet in about half a mile right before it meets the Merrimack, which is precisely why mills got built there in the first place. Three of them, Webster Mill, Pembroke Mill, and China Mill, ran the local economy for the better part of a century. When the mills closed, the jobs that depended on them left, and Main Street quieted down the way mill towns across New England quieted down. For a long stretch, this was the ghost town Pembroke actually worried about, not the historical kind people take walking tours through, but the ordinary kind where storefronts sit empty and nobody's sure it turns around.

It's turning around now, and the shape of the turnaround is worth paying attention to. The old China Mill, on the Allenstown side of the river, has been converted into the 25 Canal apartments. The former Pembroke Mill site now holds the Emerson Mills apartments. Housing went into the old brick before commerce did, which meant paychecks showed up on Main Street before the storefronts had anything ready to sell them. According to reporting from the Suncook Times, downtown vacancy was extremely high as of 2023 and had dropped to under 15 percent by last fall. Suncook's historic commercial core is a compact place, a roughly three-acre civic district on the Pembroke side of the river built around the old Pembroke Mill, so a swing like that isn't an abstraction. It's a small enough footprint that you can walk it in ten minutes and count the difference yourself.

Here's some of what's filled in:

• Pembroke City Limits, a live-music bar opened by Rob Azevedo, who moved to town and bet on downtown Suncook when it wasn't an obvious bet. He's since expanded next door into Pembroke City Limits Records and Books.
• Oddball Brewing, tucked onto Glass Street just past the clock tower, occupying a small building that spent a century as a saloon and, more recently, an office before it became a brewery again.
• Shirley's Kitchen, opened on Main Street by Bonnie and Jae Shirley after they came across an open storefront and decided the village suited them.
• Beautique Salon & Spa, run by Sarah Biddle, and Lily Flower Floral Designs, run by Nicole Plouffe, both of which expanded out of smaller original spaces on Main Street.
• The Creative Duckling, a new shop opened by Hooksett resident Anita Wolcott.
• Famous Village Pizza, sitting directly beneath the four-story clock tower that anchors the village and remains the tallest structure downtown, and Jacques Pastry Shop nearby.

Bonnie Shirley put it simply when asked what she likes best about running a restaurant in a village this size.

"One of my favorite things is watching people in the community inside the restaurant."

The clock tower itself is part of a stretch of Main Street recognized on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, a district that covers 21 commercial buildings, 19 of them historically significant. Nothing about that designation required any of the current businesses to open. They opened because enough people decided the bet was worth making, one storefront at a time.

What the Vacancy Number Actually Means for a Saturday Night

A vacancy rate dropping from very high to under 15 percent sounds like a real estate statistic, but for someone who already lives here it's really a description of where you go on a Friday night. A few years ago, a night out from most Pembroke addresses meant a drive to Concord or Manchester, because Main Street didn't have much open past five. Now there's a brewery, a live-music bar, a sit-down kitchen, and a bakery all within a few blocks of the clock tower, and getting a table on a weekend has become enough of a thing that parking on Main Street has turned into its own minor complaint among the business owners who share the curb. That's not a sign of decline. It's the least glamorous possible proof that people are actually showing up.

This Month on the Calendar

If you want to see both the old rhythm and the new one in a single stretch of August, this is a decent month for it. The Pembroke Pines Country Club runs its Men's Member-Member tournament August 15 and 16, part of a season that's also brought new valet service, pro shop upgrades, and front-nine course renovations, plus an inaugural charity 5K through the championship course with live music from Miles to Memphis and proceeds benefiting the Pembroke Action League for Schools. The club's own 1759 Grille sits right there on the property if golf isn't your thing but dinner is.

Then, on Saturday, August 22, Pembroke and Allenstown hold their joint Old Home Day, with fireworks over Memorial Park on Exchange Street starting at 9 p.m. It's the kind of small-town tradition that predates every mill closure and every apartment conversion mentioned above, the one constant in a town that's spent the last two years quietly rewriting the rest of its map.

Two Ghost Towns, One Town

What makes Pembroke worth paying attention to isn't that it has a preserved ruin in its woods or a revived Main Street by its river. It's that it has both, on purpose, at the same time. The town forest stays empty because letting it stay empty is the point. Suncook Village refused to stay empty because enough people, from a brewery owner to a bar owner to a couple who drove in from Nashua looking for a storefront, decided it shouldn't. Living here means having access to both instincts: the patience to let some things rest and the will to bring other things back.

If you're curious what that shift has meant for property values along Main Street or want a local's read on which block is worth watching next, Holistic Homes Group knows this stretch of the Suncook River the way Ayn Whytemare knows the cellar holes off Fourth Range Road. Schedule your free 30-minute consultation with Allison Driscoll whenever you're ready to talk about it.