Spring may be on the horizon, but it’s been an awfully cold winter – and for neighbors in need in Lebanon and beyond, it’s a good thing our community is home to an office of Tri-County CAP.

Tri-County Community Action Programs, by its long name, serves residents of Grafton, Carroll, and Coös counties with resources that can help them with home energy costs and conservation, housing, transportation, and more. And if Tri-County CAP doesn’t have a program to help a person in need, they know who does.

“We offer a huge referral system for people in our New Hampshire Upper Valley,” said Upper Valley Community Contact Office Manager Angel Hudson.… Read More

She didn’t marry to make this so, but Adele Patch has the perfect name. Over the years she’s earned fame locally, nationally, and even internationally for her quilts, her patchwork quilts. But she married for love, in storybook style.

The story started, classically, with a tough childhood in northern New Hampshire, where Adele was born in 1931, in the depth of the Depression.

“I was a skinny kid,” she says, one of 13 in an often tense blended family. Enough food was hard to come by, never mind extra for piling on the pounds. When she had just turned seven, the 1938 hurricane flattened the family’s house and blew out all the windows in the barn.… Read More

If you’ve ever been to downtown Lebanon, you can hardly have missed AVA Gallery and Arts Center, a centerpiece of the community’s creative economy for decades. Located just off Colburn Park on Bank Street, the center offers artist studios, galleries, and numerous events and programs for youth and adults interested in a wide variety of visual arts.

There’s always something interesting happening at AVA. Here’s a selection of some of the latest news from the center. To learn more about upcoming classes and events, visit avagallery.org – or better yet, drop in and see what’s going on for yourself!

7th Annual Best of the Upper Valley High School Exhibition

An exhibition at AVA Gallery this month features works by Upper Valley high school students who have been nominated for participation by their art teachers.… Read More

If a company has successfully served a local community for 65 years in one location, you have to acknowledge that it has found the key to success.

Lebanon’s Blaktop paving company is such an example. Founded by Lebanon resident William Taylor back in 1950, the company later merged with the nearby Twin State Sand and Gravel. Located at 73 Elm Street in West Lebanon, the two companies cover some 85-plus acres overlooking a breathtaking view of the Upper Valley.

On its website, Blacktop bills itself as “a family-operated asphalt paving business founded in 1950 to provide the highest quality asphalt and paving services to the Connecticut River Valley region of New Hampshire and Vermont.… Read More

We like to think that education as a “gateway” is open to all, but the reality is that for some that gateway is hidden, slams shut as they approach, or just won’t open at all.

Many young people struggle to find their own way to that gateway. However, there is a man who knows where that gateway is and, furthermore, has the key to unlock it.

He is John Higgins, executive director since last July of the six-year-old Ledyard Charter School (LCS) in Lebanon. As I spoke with Mr. Higgins in his office on the third floor of the Whipple Building overlooking Colburn Park, it became increasingly evident that his passion is to try to help every person “find that gateway.”… Read More