Map of Windham, New Hampshire in 2026

High on its estate in Windham stands Searles Castle, which the millionaire designer Edward Francis Searles began in 1905 as a quarter-scale copy of Stanton Harcourt, a Tudor manor in Oxfordshire, England. It’s printed on this map with the Searles School and Chapel he built for the town, the Armstrong Memorial Building, the Windham Town Hall and the Nesmith Library, along with Butterfield Rock, Deer Ledge and West Windham.

Windham is in Rockingham County, about 3 miles north of the Massachusetts border.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 from public survey records in the style of an old atlas. The shaded terrain around Butterfield Rock and Deer Ledge comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the highest point in town is Jenny’s Hill in the northeast, at 505 feet. The roads come from the Census Bureau, from Range Road down to smaller roads such as Sherwood Drive. Interstate 93 crosses the town from southeast to northwest, with one interchange at Exit 3, and Range Road carries Routes 111 and 111-A past Cobbetts Pond and Canobie Lake. The Armstrong Memorial Building and the Searles School and Chapel are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records. Windham had 15,817 people at the 2020 census, up from 13,592 in 2010, in a town of 27.8 square miles.

From Nutfield

The Pawtucket people lived here first. Scots-Irish settlers began arriving in 1719, in a region they called Nutfield that also took in what are now Derry and Londonderry, and by 1721 some of them had asked to form a community of their own. Windham began as a parish of Londonderry, and Governor Benning Wentworth granted the request in 1742. One published theory traces the name to Windham in Ireland, the petitioners’ homeland; another holds that it honors Sir Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont, a good friend of the governor. The first census ever taken in Windham, in 1790, counted 663 people.

Samuel Dinsmoor was born in Windham in 1766, the grandson of settlers who came to Nutfield in 1723. He served in Congress, helped set the boundary line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1825, and was elected the 14th governor of New Hampshire in 1831, then reelected twice. His son, Samuel Dinsmoor Jr., became the state’s 22nd governor. In July 1909 Searles put up a plaque honoring Governor Dinsmoor “a few rods” from his birthplace on Jenny’s Hill, and the town page says it stands today as a historic landmark.

Searles Castle and the school he traded for

Searles was born in Methuen, Massachusetts, in 1841, and after his wife’s death in 1891 he spent the rest of his life putting up grand buildings, often with the architect Henry Vaughan. After 1900 he bought 1,300 acres in Windham and had Vaughan design a home he called Stanton Harcourt, now known as Searles Castle. It’s built of cut granite, fieldstone and dark red sandstone, most of it from Searles’s own quarries in Pelham, and it was finished in 1915 at a cost of about $1,250,000. Its page notes that most of the English manor had been torn down in the 18th century, so the castle bears little resemblance to it.

Searles also wanted a piece of town land that held a rural district schoolhouse. He offered the town a nearby parcel in trade and built a new school and chapel on it, begun in 1907 and finished in 1909, at a cost rumored to top $40,000. The Searles School and Chapel joined the National Register on January 11, 1982. After Searles died in 1920, the castle passed through several owners. The Sisters of Mercy bought it in 1952 and used it for a while as a novitiate, Castle Junior College held classes there from 1962 to the mid-1980s, and since an effort to restore its interior began in 1991, it has been available for public events, weddings among them.

The library’s two homes

Windham’s first library was a subscription project shared with Salem, founded in the 18th century, and its first free public library opened in 1874 in the town hall, paid for by Colonel Thomas Nesmith, a Windham native. In 1897 another resident, George Washington Armstrong, gave money for a library building. The Armstrong Memorial Building, at 3 North Lowell Road in the town center, was finished in 1899 to a design by the Windham architect William Weare Dinsmoor, built by the mason Loren Emerson Bailey of fieldstone under a hip roof, with bands of diamond-paned casement windows. It was the town’s first purpose-built library, and it served until 1997, when the library moved to a modern building on Fellows Road. The old building now holds the town museum, and it joined the National Register in 2018. The Nesmith Library is Windham’s public library today, and each June the Friends of the Library host the town’s Strawberry Festival.

Ponds and a rail trail

Cobbetts Pond covers 302 acres east of the center of town. It’s about 2 miles long and mostly spring-fed, its shoreline forms the shape of an 8, and the town beach sits on its west edge. Canobie Lake lies on the eastern border, Beaver Brook forms the western one, and the paved Windham Rail Trail runs 4.1 miles into Derry. The town page counts Windham among the fastest-growing towns in New Hampshire and New England between 2010 and 2020. The Windham Town Hall is printed on the map, across from the fire and police stations in the town center, and so are Butterfield Rock, Deer Ledge and West Windham.

This Windham map would make a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of an old Nutfield town. It’s made for people who call Windham home, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the town as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Windham map.

Sources

• Windham, New Hampshire, Wikipedia
• Samuel Dinsmoor, Wikipedia
• Edward Francis Searles, Wikipedia
• Searles Castle (New Hampshire), Wikipedia
• Searles School and Chapel, Wikipedia
• Armstrong Memorial Building, Wikipedia
• Cobbetts Pond, Wikipedia