Drive any back road in New Hampshire and the inventory is breathtaking: post-and-beam barns leaning into the wind, white-steepled churches that have watched two centuries pass, stone walls threading the woods like a forgotten road map, colonial farmhouses with original wavy-glass windows still in their sashes. The Granite State’s identity is bound up in those buildings. The problem, as preservation advocates have warned for years, is that the people who know how to keep them standing are aging out faster than they are being replaced.
A hands-on training program run by the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance at Canterbury Shaker Village is trying to close that gap one teenager at a time. As detailed in a recent NHPR report, the Career Exploration in the Old Building Trades program brings high school students into the village during school vacation weeks for week-long, no-cost crash courses in the disciplines that built early America: timber framing, dry-stack stone walling, slate and copper roofing, wood window glazing, horsehair plaster, blacksmithing, and old-school carpentry done with wooden pegs instead of nails.
A Workforce Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
Stone mason Kevin Fife, who grew up in Canterbury and now runs his own preservation business, told NHPR that “whether it be stonework or blacksmithing, timber framing, window glazing, wooden shingles, all these trades are in demand.” Demand, as it turns out, is not the problem. Supply is. Industry surveys conducted by UNH Extension and the Preservation Alliance have found that young people are not entering the historic trades workforce nearly as fast as veteran tradespeople are retiring. The result is years-long waitlists for clients trying to hire qualified contractors, and a slow erosion of skill as institutional knowledge walks out the door at retirement age.
Jennifer Goodman, executive director of the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance, framed the stakes plainly. Without enough hands trained to do this work, “that can mean loss of old windows, loss of old plaster, loss of an old porch that really gives the building its character. On another level, we can see that there could be demolitions and total loss of buildings if there aren’t enough people around to do this work.”
That is the quiet emergency behind the picturesque postcard. A barn that loses its sill plate can become unsalvageable in a single bad winter. A church steeple that goes one summer without flashing repairs can take in enough water to rot a beam that has stood since the Revolution. Modern general contractors are excellent at modern buildings, but the techniques and materials that hold a 1790 building together are not standard curriculum.
Inside the Workshops
The latest cohort gathered at Canterbury Shaker Village during New Hampshire’s spring vacation week, the second session of the program for the 2026 calendar year. An earlier session ran from late February through early March. Both weeks ran a packed schedule. At one station, students laid out wet plaster on wood lath. At another, they fished electrical wires through walls. A third group worked with Fife on the foundations of a dry stack stone wall, the kind built without mortar that you still see edging old pastures across New England.
Other stations had teenagers shaping copper sheets, glazing wood windows by hand, making wood mallets and timber framing pegs, and installing wood shingles on a 19th-century privy on the village grounds. The Shaker Village itself, settled by followers of the Christian Shaker movement in the 1700s and now operated as a museum, is the kind of working site where every project is a real-world repair on a real-world historic structure. The Alliance has framed the next step as launching an internship program that places graduates of training tracks alongside contractors working on village projects, blending classroom and job-site experience.
The Students Who Show Up
Seventeen-year-old Joshua Adams, a student in the construction program at Concord Regional Technical Center, took Fife’s stone wall workshop. He went in skeptical and came out a convert. “I wasn’t really too sure about this one, but I’m having a wonderful time here with the stone wall building,” he told NHPR. Joshua already learns electrical, plumbing, and welding at his tech center. The preservation week introduced him to skills his standard curriculum does not cover, including the way old barns were assembled without nails, using wooden pegs and mortise-and-tenon joinery.
He sees a market. “Around here, especially in places like New Hampshire and New England, there’s so much historical stuff. I used to go to historical places, museums, with my grandfather all the time. There was just so much work to be done, but I think people just aren’t pursuing it.” For Joshua, that demand is opportunity.
The workshops are not just for kids on a construction track. Rowan McGrath, 18, is studying computer engineering at the same tech center. He picked up preservation trades as a backup plan in a moment of clear-eyed thinking about the future of digital work. “AI, it’s a big thing that’s going to probably take over tech. So with these skills I have something I can rely on as a backup, and it makes pretty good money.” That comment alone is worth quoting in every economic development meeting in the state. A teenager studying engineering is reasoning that hand-craft preservation is one of the more AI-proof career paths available.
Why This Matters Beyond Nostalgia
Historic preservation in New Hampshire is not just a sentimental project. It is a working part of the state’s economy. Heritage tourism brings dollars to small towns that have few other revenue engines. Historic Main Streets anchor downtowns that compete for retail and restaurant traffic. Tax credits for the rehabilitation of historic structures are some of the most effective housing tools available in older communities. And as the state approaches its semiquincentennial moment, the NH at 250 commemoration is making New Hampshire’s role in the American founding visible to a national audience.
The link between the preservation workforce and broader workforce development is also clear. Vocational pathways like the Concord Regional Technical Center are producing graduates ready to apprentice, and programs like the Alliance’s Career Exploration week show students that the trades include disciplines with a story behind them. The pitch is straightforward: skilled hands, steady pay, a craft you can be proud of, and buildings that will outlast everyone who works on them.
Where the Pipeline Goes From Here
The Alliance’s longer-term goal is to build a pipeline that does not end at a one-week workshop. The proposed internship program would pair graduates with working contractors on Village projects. Conversations are underway about deeper partnerships with the state’s career and technical education centers, with the regional community college system, and with private contractors who would benefit from a steadier supply of apprentices. Statewide, similar conversations are happening in adjacent fields where workforce questions dominate the policy agenda, from the push to make Granite State homeschooling rules clearer to the broader debate about how New Hampshire’s economy is treating its workers.
For Kevin Fife, the bigger picture is generational. His family roots in Canterbury go back generations. The walls he rebuilds were laid by hands whose names are mostly forgotten. “I like to do it the traditional way because that’s a part of our ancestry, our heritage, and that’s why people come to New England. It’s just more fitting.” If enough teenagers like Joshua and Rowan stick with it, those walls will still be standing when the next generation drives those same back roads.
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