Our Town: Happenings in Hampstead

On a frigid morning in February, the Hampstead Happenings Facebook page featured a shoutout to the highway department employees who were out clearing the roads during a snowstorm. 

The Hampstead Meeting House, in the center of town, was established in 1749.

“Stop in to the Honey Dew Donuts for a free coffee and donut. Just mention you’re a town plow driver, and they’ll put it on our tab.”

The offer was from Hampstead Hearts, which was founded in 2021 by Leigh Combs and five of her friends as a small charity to practice random acts of kindness, perform good deeds and generate positivity throughout this community near the state’s southern border. In 2018, she created the Facebook group page and serves as its administrator.

“What makes Hampstead great is the people who live here. This is a really nice community,” says Combs, a psychotherapist who is a Hampstead native, and is raising her family here. “People are super helpful and always willing to assist neighbors who need help. When anyone posts in Happenings to ask for help for someone who is elderly, disabled or needs a hand shoveling out after a storm, or for help of any kind, people always step up and that’s really cool.”

Rob Morris, who has lived there for nearly all of his 66 years, concurs.

“That’s the spirit and heart of Hampstead,” said Morris, president of the Hampstead Historical Society and chair of the Hampstead Historic District Commission.

Rob Morris holds the rope for ringing the town’s Paul Revere Jr. bell.

Hampstead could double as a Hallmark movie set. With the town center’s historic buildings that include the Meetinghouse, Congregational Church and Town Hall — plus the stately homes lining Main Street, which is a section of the Old Stagecoach Byway from Boston to Concord — it’s utterly charming.

It also claims a fascinating past.

“The first white settlers arrived in the 1720s and were Puritans,” Morris says. “The Hampstead Meetinghouse cornerstone was laid in 1745. They began to build the meetinghouse before the town was incorporated in 1749. The interior wasn’t finished
for several years (1768).”

The two-story, wood-framed building with a gabled roof and white clapboard exterior is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is one of southern New Hampshire’s only four well-preserved meetinghouses still in use today. 

“A big renovation took place in 1792, and they put the tower on. In 1809, we got the bell installed in the tower,” Morris says. “It’s a Paul Revere Jr. bell, and it’s the only bell known of its kind that was cast by him. Paul Revere made lots of bells, but ours is not one of them. It weighs 1,212 pounds and cost the town $600 (about $20,000 today).”

Every year since 1809, except for the few when the yoke was under repair, the Revere bell has been rung at the stroke of midnight on the Fourth of July. Anyone in town can take a turn.

Hampstead board of selectman chair and EMT Laurie Warnock, right, and her daughter, Hampstead firefighter and EMT Catherine Warnock, gather with the family dalmatian, Molly the Fire Dog.

“It’s a tradition we carry on. You do get hoisted in the air if you’re holding onto the rope tightly,” says Laurie Anderson Warnock, an EMT who is the board of selectmen chair, the wife of interim fire chief William Warnock, and the mother of Hampstead EMT and firefighter Catherine Warnock.

The only other time the bell was wrung was during Hampstead’s 275th anniversary celebration in 2024. The big birthday party brought the entire community together, and many dressed in authentic period costumes for the festivities.

The celebration lasted all year.

“It really gave people a chance to examine the history of our community and participate in it in a variety of ways,” Warnock says. “The big week was in late August. We had a restoration of what is called The Curtain in the Meetinghouse. It had depictions of advertisers from the era and the 1800s. To see the names in town then that are still the names of families currently in town, or names that prominent streets are now named after, really brought the sense of where we came from and where we are today.”

Currently, 9,100 people call Hampstead home. In 1950, the population was 902. That’s not the only dramatic difference. 

“I’ve seen Hampstead change a lot over the years,” Morris says. “We have the luxury of having three lakes in town, Big Island Pond, Sunset Lake (also called Wash Pond) and Angle Pond. In the ’50s and ’60s, Hampstead was known as a recreation town, and in the summer the population would double with people here for the whole season.”

Few of those seasonal homes remain. Morris has watched as the Hampstead of his childhood, where families lived in the town for generations, transitioned into the bedroom community of commuters who work in Manchester, Portsmouth, Salem and Boston that it is today. 

Hampstead used to be a blue-collar town, says Morris, who now considers it upscale. Few if any would disagree. There are million-dollar-plus waterfront homes and luxury condominiums, and real estate values have increased exponentially. So have the taxes. 

“What are the challenges we face? Property taxes,” Morris says. “We all want to maintain our excellent schools, because that’s what draws people to Hampstead. But they’re expensive. Even though property taxes are a statewide problem, I see that as one of our biggest problems.”

Warnock agrees.

“As long as we continue to rely on the property tax as our sole source of revenue, the pain of that is going to continue,” she says. “Revenue is what we need to pay for the services that we expect, and we will get the level of services that we agree to pay for.”

Hampstead Hospital is another major issue of concern for residents. The hospital, which provides in-patient, acute psychiatric care, was a privately owned facility until the state purchased it in 2022. The state contracted Well Path Recovery Solutions to administer the facility and treat the over 40 children and adolescents with acute psychiatric and behavioral disorders who are receiving treatment at the hospital through the court system.

After two years of well-documented problems, including escapes and violent incidents, the contract with Well Path was not renewed due to heightened community concerns, and Dartmouth Health took over the facility in December 2024.

“Unfortunately, the kids who will be incarcerated in the Hampstead facility are likely those who cannot be safely placed in the community,” says Warnock, who worked with state Sen. Regina Birdsell on the matter. “We are expecting that they will be predominantly gang members, who will stay there until the age of maturity. It’s a different population than what was initially described to us.”

Warnock also worked to secure payments from the state to partially make up for the loss of property tax revenue previously paid by the private hospital. 

While she has less concern about security since the new facility will be state-of-the-art, Warnock would prefer it get a new moniker.

Hampstead Congregational Church, originally established in 1752, burned down and was replaced in 1861. In 1955, the bell was replaced in the steeple to replace the original, which cracked when it was rung to celebrate the end of World War I.

“I’d like us to rename the campus to something like the New Hampshire Juvenile Services Campus, because I don’t think Hampstead will benefit from the connotation,” she says.

“Hampstead Hospital has been a treatment facility to help kids get better. I don’t think we suffer from that affiliation, but I do worry about the association with a juvenile detention facility no matter what it’s called,” she says. 

“Hopefully, the state is receptive to that. Dartmouth Health has a pretty good track record, so we have good confidence in the level of care that the kids will be receiving.”

Nonetheless, Hampstead retains its reputation as a beautiful place to live with an expanse of conservation land, open green space and unusually high rate of volunteerism. 

The St. Anne’s Food Pantry, now with its Heaven’s Kitchen Mobile Meal Deliveries, serves those facing food insecurity, and the Hampstead Garden Club maintains gorgeous gardens in the public spaces. The beautiful Storybook Garden behind the town library is beloved, especially by autistic and neurodivergent children and by couples using it as the setting for engagement photos. 

“We value our rural culture. We value our history. We value education,” Warnock says. “We have an excellent school system, and it’s partly as good as it is because we have a high degree of town volunteerism. We do a good job of taking care of our town.” 

Hampstead has been able to maintain its sense of community even as the town has become home to a large number of commuters, she says.

“It’s a little bit harder for young families, because the housing market is so extraordinarily high right now, but there is bang for your buck with good town services and good schools,” she says. “If that’s the kind of environment that you’re looking to raise your kids in or you’re looking to retire to, it’s really a lovely place to live.”