November 14 in New Hampshire History: The Supreme Court Backs Roxbury’s Planning Board Over the Housing Appeals Board in 2023

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

A 2023 order about a gravel road in Roxbury leads an edition that also launches the steam sloop Saranac at the Portsmouth yard in 1848 and revisits a 2002 ruling on a hospital “gag order” in Exeter.

On November 14, 2023, the New Hampshire Supreme Court told a state appeals panel that it had to respect the record a town planning board built about its own road. Six dates fall on November 14 across 175 years: a warship launched at the Portsmouth yard, a future governor born, two former governors dead, a hospital fight over silence, and that Roxbury order.

November 14, 2023

A dirt road, a fire chief and the limits of a state panel

The New Hampshire Supreme Court issued its order in Appeal of Town of Roxbury, Case No. 2022-0238, on November 14, 2023, and reversed the state Housing Appeals Board. The case began in April 2021, when Greatwoods Unity Forests, LLC asked the Roxbury Planning Board to split a 159.3-acre parcel on Middletown Road into three lots, two of them intended for homes.

The board said no. Its written decision described a sand and gravel road with grades over 15 percent, at least six blind curves, stretches narrower than 20 feet, and a dead end at the top of a hill. The fire chief testified that the nearest hydrant was two miles away and that the road hampers tankers even in the best conditions and is hazardous for them in winter and mud season. The board found the road “at its capacity to safely support the present density of residences” and denied the subdivision as premature, citing RSA 674:36, II(a), which lets towns adopt rules against scattered or premature development.

Greatwoods appealed to the Housing Appeals Board. Its members viewed the road on November 30, 2021, drove its full length, and in February 2022 found the denial unreasonable. They saw new drainage, adequate width and no hairpin curves, and they reversed the town.

The Supreme Court said the panel had done the wrong job. Under RSA 677:6 and RSA 679:9, the order explains, a planning board’s findings of fact are prima facie lawful and reasonable, and under the court’s precedent the appeals board’s review is limited to whether the record holds evidence the local board could reasonably rely on. The Housing Appeals Board instead used its own observations to reject the planning board’s findings, including findings no evidence in the record contradicted. The court also accepted that board members, three of whom live on Middletown Road, could draw on their personal knowledge of it alongside the residents’ and the fire chief’s testimony.

The order rejected the panel’s other conclusions as well. The board’s reasoning, the court found, was narrowly focused on this three-lot proposal and on conditions already on the road, even though the board also worried about future development. Chief Justice MacDonald and Justices Hicks, Bassett, Hantz Marconi and Donovan joined the order. The single word at the end: reversed.

November 14, 1848

The Saranac goes into the water at Portsmouth

The Portsmouth Navy Yard launched the steam warship Saranac on November 14, 1848, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command’s ship history. The yard had laid her down in 1847. The Navy’s history calls her a side wheel steam sloop of war and lists her as the second ship of the name.

She was commissioned on October 12, 1850, with Capt. Josiah Tattnall in command, and after a trial cruise in the North Atlantic she served with the Home Squadron along the Atlantic coast. Later she was sent to the west coast of the United States, and she operated along the California coast during the Civil War. The same history records that she was wrecked on June 18, 1875, in Seymour Narrows off Vancouver, British Columbia.

November 14, 1906

Lane Dwinell, who ran the House, the Senate and then the state, is born

Lane Dwinell was born in Newport, Vermont, on November 14, 1906, according to his National Governors Association biography. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1928 and from its Amos Tuck School the next year, and he came to own the Carter and Churchill Company.

He climbed the State House in order. The biography lists him as a member of the 1948 constitutional convention, a House member from 1949 to 1952 and speaker in the last two of those years, then a senator and Senate president in 1953 and 1954. Voters elected him governor in 1954 and again in 1956, and he served from January 6, 1955, to January 1, 1959. The biography says that during his tenure state salaries rose, the accounting system was restructured and a hundred new schools were developed. He died in Hanover on March 27, 1997.

November 14, 1932

Samuel Felker, the governor the Legislature picked, dies in Rochester

Samuel D. Felker, governor from January 2, 1913, to January 1, 1915, died in Rochester on November 14, 1932, according to his National Governors Association biography. He was born in Rochester in 1859, graduated from Dartmouth in 1882 and took a law degree at Boston University in 1887.

The Democrat reached the corner office by an unusual road. The biography says the 1912 popular election was close and that the Legislature then named Felker governor. Before that he had served in the 1889 constitutional convention, the state Senate, the House, and as Rochester’s mayor and city solicitor. He declined to seek a second term and later sat on the Rochester Municipal Court until 1930.

November 14, 1955

Huntley Spaulding, governor and education board president, dies

Huntley N. Spaulding, governor from January 6, 1927, to January 3, 1929, died on November 14, 1955, according to his National Governors Association biography. Born in Townsend Harbor, Massachusetts, he built up his family’s fiberboard business and was New Hampshire’s federal food administrator in 1917.

Before the governorship he presided over the State Board of Education from 1921 to 1926. The Republican was elected governor on November 2, 1926; his brother Rolland H. Spaulding had also held the office. After leaving it he led the trustees of Tufts College, Lawrence Academy and Tilton School, the biography says, and he established the Spaulding-Potter Charitable Trusts.

November 14, 2002

A doctor, a hospital board and a “gag order” in Exeter

On November 14, 2002, the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided Exeter Hospital Medical Staff v. Board of Trustees of Exeter Health Resources, Inc., 148 N.H. 492. Dr. Mark Windt became president of the Exeter Hospital medical staff on January 1, 2000, and with it an ex officio seat on the boards of Exeter Hospital and Exeter Health Resources. The boards removed him, and the notice of removal he received on June 2, 2000, ordered him to keep information about the removal and the reasons for it confidential unless the boards consented in writing.

Windt and the medical staff went to court to lift that order. The superior court dismissed the medical staff as a party and later dismissed Windt’s petition as moot after a November 2000 order let him discuss his removal with part of the staff. The Supreme Court split the result. It held that the medical staff was not a legal entity able to sue, but it found Windt’s petition was not moot, because the limited permission to speak fell short of what he asked for. Justice Duggan wrote the opinion. The disposition: affirmed in part, vacated in part and remanded.

The Roxbury order and the Exeter ruling turn on the same thing: who gets to decide, and on what record. In 2023 the answer was the local board that built the record. In 2002 the court would not let a trial judge call a doctor’s case finished while what he asked for, the unfettered ability to discuss his removal, went unmet.

Fact check

Editor’s note. This edition draws on the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s order and opinion as published by CourtListener, the Naval History and Heritage Command, the National Governors Association’s governor biographies, which list the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources among their sources, and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. The Roxbury case was resolved by order rather than a full published opinion. The NGA biographies also assign the governors ordinal numbers; this edition does not repeat them.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.