I spent over 20 years building homes in NH. Now I inspect them.

Troy, Fitzwilliam & Richmond: What to Know

These three towns sit in the southwestern corner of Cheshire County, clustered around the Route 12 corridor and the lower slopes of the Monadnock region. They’re different enough in character that grouping them requires a word of explanation: Troy has a village, a history, and a visible industrial past. Fitzwilliam has one of the most intact 18th-century commons in New Hampshire. Richmond barely has a center at all — it’s mostly woods, stone walls, and people who like it that way.

What they share is the thing that matters most for a home inspection: older homes, private wells, private septic, and a general absence of the kind of rapid development that occasionally makes a house easier to read. Out here, a house has usually accumulated its history the slow way.

Troy

Troy is a genuine mill village, which means it has a shape and a logic that most NH small towns don’t. The village center grew up around the Troy Mills complex — textile manufacturing that ran from the early 19th century through the 20th — and the residential streets still reflect the social structure of that era. The larger, more ornamented houses on South Main Street belonged to the factory and store owners. The plainer worker housing fills the side streets. It’s all still there, which makes Troy’s historic district one of the more honest documents of small-town industrial New Hampshire you’ll find.

The housing here is predominantly 19th and early 20th century in the village core — colonials, Greeks, workers’ cottages, and the occasional Victorian with enough detail to remind you someone was doing well when it was built. Working on some of these highly ornamented old homes always leaves me impressed at the skill of the craftsman who came before me. Further out on the rural roads you find the usual mix of farmhouses, postwar ranches, and the occasional newer build on acreage. Troy is one of the smaller Cheshire County towns, which means the market is thin and properties don’t turn over constantly — when something comes up, it’s worth looking at carefully.

For an inspection, the village properties reward patience. Multiple generations of ownership mean multiple generations of updates, repairs, and improvisations, often layered in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. The older foundations, electrical work done in stages, and heating systems that have been nursed well past their designed service life are standard territory here.

Fitzwilliam

It could be argued that Fitzwilliam has the best-looking village green in Cheshire County. It sure is pretty. The common — laid out in 1765 and surrounded by Federal and Greek Revival homes, a church, a town hall, and the old Fitzwilliam Inn — is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. So are the twelve antique houses around it. The whole scene looks like someone assembled it for a period film and then forgot to take it down, which I mean as a compliment.

The town’s history includes granite quarrying, farming, and enough turnpike-era commerce to justify the architecture that’s still standing. Rhododendron State Park — a 16-acre grove of native rhododendrons that bloom in mid-July and reliably surprise people who weren’t expecting them — sits just outside the village and gives the town something to tell visitors about beyond the common.

The housing in Fitzwilliam ranges from the National Register properties in the village center through antique farmhouses and Greek Revival homes on the rural roads, to more modest cape and ranch construction from the postwar decades, to waterfront properties on Sip Pond, Laurel Lake, and a handful of other smaller ponds scattered through the hills. The 165 properties within the formal Historic District carry an additional layer of oversight — any exterior work requires approval from the Historic District Commission — which buyers should know about before they start thinking about additions or alterations.

Properties in the historic district tend to be both the most appealing and the most demanding. Wide-plank floors, original woodwork, and period detailing are all genuine features worth having; they come alongside foundations, framing, and systems from the same era that deserve careful attention. Having worked on historic homes myself, I know how intricate the repair process can be when there is work required, and bear that in mind while inspecting.

Richmond

Richmond is not a town with a village in any conventional sense. There’s a Four Corners — a 1837 church, a town hall, a few houses — but no downtown, no commercial strip, no center of gravity beyond the intersection itself. The population is just over 1,200 people spread across nearly 38 square miles of wooded, hilly terrain above the Massachusetts border. People who live in Richmond chose it because of what it isn’t as much as what it is, which I understand. I live out in the sticks of Alstead, NH, and like it just fine.

What you find here is mostly rural single-family homes on larger lots — antique farmhouses, older capes and colonials, some postwar ranches — spread along roads that get quieter the further you go. There’s very little new construction. The age of the housing tends to run older than in towns with more active markets, and the infrastructure reflects that: private wells, older heating systems, foundations that range from dry-laid stone to early poured concrete, and mechanical systems that have often gone a long time between professional eyes.

If you’re buying in Richmond, you’re buying into genuine rural New England, and the inspection is your best chance to understand what that actually means for the specific property in front of you.