Livermore Ghost Town

An abandoned logging town established in 1876, deep in Crawford Notch, with a population that dwindled to 2 people by the 2020 census.

The loggers of Livermore never really left. This ghost town in the White Mountains of New Hampshire rose from nothing, was stripped bare, and collapsed back into the forest in less than seventy-five years -- but the sounds of industry still echo through the Sawyer River valley on certain nights. Livermore was established in 1876 in the shadows of Crawford Notch, founded by the Saunders family of Lawrence, Massachusetts, who held vast tracts of old-growth timber in the Sawyer River watershed. They named the town after Samuel Livermore, a New Hampshire senator and relation of the Boston lawyers who bankrolled the operation. The Saunders family chartered the Sawyer River Railroad in 1875, a ten-mile logging railroad that connected their timber operations to the outside world, and built a large sawmill at the heart of the settlement.

At its peak, Livermore had a population of roughly 200 people, complete with homes, a school, a post office, a company store, and the constant screech of the sawmill. The town existed for one purpose: to cut down trees. And it did so with devastating efficiency. Competing loggers like James E. Henry -- who in 1887 bought 142 hundred-acre lots at tax sales for a total of $547 -- stripped the surrounding valleys bare. Within a few decades, the Saunders operation had cut most of the merchantable timber. The population began its slow collapse: 98 residents in 1920, 23 in 1930, and just four souls in 1940.

The killing blow came on November 3, 1927, when unrelenting rain caused catastrophic flooding across northern New Hampshire and Vermont, killing eighty-five people and destroying infrastructure throughout the region. The flood washed away much of the Sawyer River Railroad and its bridges, severing Livermore's only transportation link to the outside world. The railroad never rebuilt. The last residents departed by 1950, and the town was officially dissolved in 1951.

Today, only foundations and scattered artifacts remain along the Sawyer River Trail, which follows the old railroad bed. The forest has reclaimed the town site with such thoroughness that hikers can walk directly over building foundations without realizing they are passing through what was once a functioning community. Stone walls emerge from the undergrowth. Rusted metal fragments poke through the leaf litter. The Sawyer River, which powered the mill and carried the logs, runs clean and cold through a valley that shows almost no trace of the industry that consumed it.

But visitors to the Livermore site report experiences that suggest the town has not entirely surrendered to the woods. Hikers describe hearing the sounds of sawmill machinery -- the rhythmic whine of blades and the crash of falling timber -- coming from the direction of the old mill site, where nothing but foundation stones remain. Voices carry through the trees, not the sounds of other hikers but the indistinct murmur of a working crew. Some report the sensation of being watched from the forest, as though unseen eyes are tracking their progress along the trail. The feeling is not hostile but territorial, as though something is quietly monitoring who enters and who leaves this patch of reclaimed wilderness. The loggers cut the last tree decades ago, but some part of Livermore is still punching the clock.