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The Contoocook Railroad Depot is located in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, United States, in the village of Contoocook. The depot was completed in 1849 as one of the first substantial railroad passenger stations west of Concord on the Concord and Claremont Railroad. The building is one of the best preserved of a small number of gable-roofed railroad stations surviving from the first decade of rail development in New Hampshire. The station exemplifies the pioneering period of rail development in the state. The Contoocook Railroad Depot is significant under National Register Criterion A as a building that served and controlled the junction of two of the earliest short line railroads of New Hampshire, the Concord and Claremont Railroad and the Contoocook Valley Railroad. The building provided essential passenger service and communications for these interrelated lines. Under Criterion A, the depot symbolizes the impact of a new technology on a village that had been at the periphery of Hopkinton's economic life. With the arrival of the railroad, Contoocook Village assumed greater economic importance than old Hopkinton Village, becoming the center of most of the town's manufacturing and commerce. The depot is therefore associated with a historic change that significantly contributed to the development of the community and state. It is one of the earliest and least altered depots of the 1850 period in New Hampshire. Displaying the Greek Revival style, with modifications that proclaim its identity as a new building type, the depot is an important artifact in the history and evolution of railroad architecture in New Hampshire. Under Criterion A, the period of significance extends from 1849 to 1955, the arbitrary fifty-year cut-off date for National Register listings. Under Criterion C, the period of significance is 1849. The Contoocook Railroad Depot possesses integrity of location, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association for both periods of significance. The building's setting has lost some integrity through the partial removal of railroad facilities in the vicinity, including a long-removed engine house, although the wooden railroad bridge remains nearby and is one of the most significant railroad structures that historically characterized the rail center in Contoocook Village. ==Architectural significance== Because the Concord and Claremont Railroad remained a small and under-capitalized short line, and because capital investment in its property was limited even when the line was acquired by the larger Northern and Boston & Maine railroads, the Concord and Claremont line remained a virtual museum of early railroading structures and technologies. The long-continued practice of maintaining the Concord and Claremont Railroad with minimal investment caused the Contoocook Depot to survive to the present day as one of a very small group of comparable structures. Stagecoaches were the first form of public land transportation and were the direct predecessors of railroads. Stage routes provided precedents for many of the basic elements of railroad operation, including corporate structuring, tickets, waybills, mail delivery, and the interconnection of travel routes served by various companies. The structures that served stage travel, and thus preceded railroad depots as transportation centers, were ordinary taverns. Taverns provided shelter for passengers, ticket sales, and mail and baggage accommodations for stage lines. Taverns took many forms, but almost all of them reflected a template provided by dwelling houses of their respective periods. Taverns were multi-purpose buildings, with the greater part of their facilities devoted to providing food and overnight shelter to their passengers, and with only incidental accommodations to their role as stopping places for public transportation. Railroad stations, by contrast, represented an entirely original building type intended to serve a new technology and mode of travel. They provided no food, and offered only temporary shelter from the elements, but accommodated much larger numbers of travelers at any one time. As a consequence, depot buildings devoted most of their volume to large, warm waiting rooms, to mail and baggage storage, and to ticket sales, all provided adjacent to the tracks. Almost invariably, depot buildings offered both inside shelter from the elements, and also a measure of outside shelter afforded by widely overhanging eaves or adjacent sheds, especially welcome in warm weather. The majority of railroad depots constructed prior to the Civil War outside of major cities (where monumental masonry buildings were common) were rectangular wood-frame structures, oriented with their major axes parallel to the tracks, characterized by detailing in a simple Greek Revival style, and covered by gable roofs that exhibit a broad, sheltering overhang on at least two sides of the building. It appears that a majority of these buildings were also provided with a bay window on the track side, permitting the station superintendent to survey the tracks in both directions. The earliest depot buildings to survive in New Hampshire reflect the Greek Revival style in their details. These buildings also reflect the Greek Revival style in their overall design, with one important exception. Whereas Greek Revival-style buildings dating between 1830 and 1850 had raking and eaves cornices of a classic profile, placed close to the walls of the building, the earliest surviving railroad depots display roofs with exaggerated overhangs. Retaining the gable roof that was universal in the Greek Revival style, these buildings altered that type of roof by an exaggerated extension of their roof planes beyond the walls, creating sheltering eaves of six feet or more, especially on the track and road sides of the buildings. To support these unprecedented overhangs, diagonal braces support the tails of the rafters from below. The exposed brace or bracket was unknown in Greek Revival architecture of the 1840s or 1850s. Exposed braces or truss elements were seen only rarely in the most modern buildings designed under the influence of romantic theorists like Alexander Jackson Downing. In such buildings, braces generally served an ornamental rather than a structural function. In railroad depots, by contrast, diagonal braces served to support the overhanging tails of the rafters. It was common to sheath the undersides of the braces and the projecting rafters of railroad stations, hiding these members and creating an enclosed soffit, as described above. By the 1870s, many new depots were being designed with hipped roofs. Hipped roofs had the advantage of permitting equal overhangs on all four sides of the building, and the hipped roof was aesthetically compatible with broad overhangs, being reminiscent of pavilion roofs that had long been used in tropical locales. The earlier hip-roofed stations tended to reflect the stick style, while the later stations were often clad with wooden shingles and reflected the shingle style of the late 1800s. Only one other such building remains on the earlier portion of the Concord and Claremont line between Concord and the original terminus in Bradford. That building is a two-story station in Warner, also built in 1849 and now altered to serve as an apartment house. Despite its two-story height, this station measures , the same as the Contoocook Depot. During construction of the Concord and Claremont Railroad toward Bradford, the first terminus of the line, for some months, was at Warner. The unusual two-story design of the Warner Depot may reflect the temporary need to provide housing for employees as the railroad was pushed through difficult terrain toward Bradford, which remained the end of the line until 1871. In comparison with the Warner station, the Contoocook Depot is the least altered. Other comparable depots on the Concord and Claremont line, and on its sister Contoocook Valley Railroad, have disappeared. Very similar stations once stood at West Concord and Bradford, but no longer exist. The Contoocook Valley Railroad, built at the same time as the Concord and Claremont by the same builder, Joseph Barnard (and joining the latter just west of the Contoocook Depot), once had nearly identical depots. The destroyed station at Hillsborough Bridge, the original terminus of the Contoocook Valley Railroad, was a virtual twin to the Contoocook Depot. Like the Contoocook and Warner buildings, it measured twenty-four by fifty feet. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Contoocook Railroad Depot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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