Keene has a history as fascinating and diverse as it is long. It has changed a great deal in the last 140 years, growing from a small village in the 1850s to the industrial and commercial center of the "Currier and Ives" corner of New Hampshire by the 1960s. Yet while many tremendous and sometimes tumultuous changes have taken place in Keene, the proud spirit of its people and the rural beauty of the surrounding area have remained constant, proving that a balanced combination of history and change can be a recipe for success as the twentieth century draws to a close and we enter an almost unthinkably different twenty-first.
