08/26/2026
I swear some buildings look like they have gossip, and 31 Main Street in Meredith absolutely looks like it knows things. 😂 The old fashioned commercial front, the tall squared off roofline, the apartments tucked above the storefronts, and that deep green trim immediately made me wonder how many different versions of Main Street this place has watched come and go.
A little digging turned up something interesting: public property records date this building to around 1930, making it just shy of a century old. It is roughly 4,800 square feet and was built as the kind of mixed commercial structure that helped define small-town downtowns throughout New England. The documentation I could find does not give me a trustworthy name for the original shopkeeper or business here, and you already know I am not about to sprinkle imaginary people into history just because it makes a better story. What we can say is that by the time this building went up, Meredith Village was already well established as the commercial heart of town.
The street underneath my feet is actually much older than the building. What we now call Main Street existed before Meredith Village was settled in 1786, connecting the earlier settlement around Parade Road with the eastern side of town. The village truly began growing once people figured out how valuable the water running from Lake Waukewan toward Lake Winnipesaukee could be. A sawmill was operating here by 1787, followed by gristmills, textile operations, shops, inns and eventually an entire manufacturing center. When the railroad and steamboats arrived in 1849, Meredith suddenly had an even bigger doorway to the outside world, and Main Street became exactly where you wanted to be if you were doing business.
That makes a 1930 storefront like this one part of an interesting transition period. Meredith was beginning to evolve from a community driven heavily by mills and manufacturing into the Lakes Region destination we recognize today. Tourism would eventually become a major piece of the local economy, particularly after the mid-20th century, but these Main Street buildings kept doing what small-town commercial buildings do best: adapting. Different signs go up, different people unlock the doors in the morning, and somehow the building just keeps standing there watching everybody reinvent the space.
There are little breadcrumbs from more recent years too. Pizza Faktory of Meredith was registered at 31 Main Street in 2006, which means at one point you could apparently walk through these doors looking for pizza instead of precious metals. Today my photo catches Estes Jewelry & Coins, also known as Estes Collectible Investment, occupying part of the building. They deal in jewelry, estate pieces, coins, bullion and other collectibles, which feels wonderfully appropriate for a building this old. Imagine how many coins that are older than the storefront itself have crossed that counter. There is something delightfully weird about standing inside a nearly century-old building while potentially holding something minted another century before that. History casually stacking itself like Russian nesting dolls. 😂
Main Street is loaded with even older neighbors in this area. A few doors away, the site at 23 Main Street became Meredith Village’s first inn and tavern in the 1830s after originally beginning as an early store around 1805, while the building at 45 Main Street, now home to the Meredith Historical Society, dates to 1812 and once served as both a saddler’s home and shop. So, 31 Main may be the younger kid on this particular block, but when the “kid” is approaching 100 years old, I think it has officially earned permission to tell us to get off its lawn.
