The Rehabilitation of the Col. Robert Means Mansion Amherst, New Hampshire Bill Veillette For more information on the Col. Robert Means man- sion and its occupants, please contact me at: Bill Veillette 1 Pierce Lane Amherst, NH 03031 (603) 673-4856
[email protected]### © William P. Veillette, Amherst, N.H., 2009. Front cover image: Postcard of Col. Robert Means mansion. Hand colored, standard size, divided back; Boston: NEN, printed in France, c. 1910. Rear cover image: Eighteenth-century copper button and doll’s dress found in walls of Col. Robert Means house, Amherst, N.H. classical form. And, where it has seen alterations, al- The Rehabilitation of the most all of the evidence is still there to be able to de- Col. Robert Means Mansion, termine its original shape and features and how they have changed over time. Amherst, New Hampshire The house has dodged a few bullets, however. The 1 By Bill Veillette first was in 1788 when Michael Keef, a struggling yeoman, unfairly accused Robert Means, by now a wealthy merchant, of “grinding the face of the poor.” The Col. Robert Means “mansion house” (1785) is He threatened Means with “trouble.”4 Keef was later located in Amherst, New Hampshire, directly off the convicted of arson, which may have been the trouble southeast corner of what was known as “The Plain,” he had in mind. Next, the roof of the house caught fire where livestock used to graze and the militia once during town meeting in 1797. Because it was a stone’s drilled (1.1). Thirty-two-year-old Robert Means, a throw away from the meetinghouse, the mansion “was budding merchant, acquired the initial quarter acre of saved by there being plenty of help nearby.”5 There the property in 1774 “with the Shop & barn thereon was also the Great Fire of 1863 when Means’s adja- built by Me [Paul Dudley Sargent].”2 The “Shop,” cent store and three neighboring buildings on The which presumably became Robert Means’s store, Plain burned in the middle of the night.