Who Was Hannah Grimes? And Our Story

Mary Ann Kristiansen grew up as a first generation American in the rural Midwest. She spent time traveling overseas and attended school in Oslo, Norway before moving to New York City where she worked in advertising, publishing, and administration. Equipped with all of this new knowledge and experience, Mary Ann moved to rural New England in 1991.

Mary Ann moved into an 18th century home in Roxbury, New Hampshire. A home that once belonged to Hannah Grimes. Hannah was an ordinary woman, but Mary Ann fell in love with her story and her way of life. Hannah Grimes was born in 1776 and lived at a time where families baked, gardened, and produced as many of their own goods as they could. What they couldn’t produce themselves, they traded locally. This was an art that was nearly lost to the Keene area in 1991 when Mary Ann bought Hannah’s farm in Roxbury. 

On the farm, Mary Ann gardened, raised sheep and chickens, and started a home-based soap making business. She shortly realized that there was a lack of marketplaces for local small businesses to work with. With so many big box stores housing aisles and aisles of generic, mass produced products, there was not much opportunity for local artisans to sell and share their goods. At the time, handmade goods were looked down upon and many of the makers who created those goods were lacking business skills.

To solve these problems, in 1997 Mary Ann founded Hannah Grimes Marketplace. For decades now, Hannah Grimes Marketplace has been a thriving hub for local entrepreneurs to sell their goods and embrace their New England roots through the heritage of Hannah Grimes. The mission of the Marketplace has always been to provide space and business skills to local entrepreneurs and artisans. The space is a once in a lifetime opportunity for many artisans to sell their goods out of a premium Main Street location and learn business skills from a local business with a team that understands where they’re coming from. Sellers, consumers, and members are able to come together and support one another through the purchases of high quality, unique products. Hannah Grimes Marketplace provides a space for people to buy local goods like jams, soaps, and other daily necessities, as well as unique gifts made by local producers that they wouldn’t be able to find in other stores.

The space and the opportunity for expansion were offered to Hannah Grimes by the Monadnock Economic Development Corporation, who had recently closed their business incubator program in 2003. It was through this opportunity to take over the unoccupied building that Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship was founded in 2006. The Center is a place where local business owners and entrepreneurs can come to rent office space and conference rooms, attend workshops and programs, and network with an extensive group of professionals and peers. Building off of the Marketplace, the Center also offers a support system for local entrepreneurs. Hannah Grimes works with entrepreneurs from their first ideas with idea jams Business Labs all the way through to fully formed businesses with growth pitches, incubator programs, and workshops. 

In 2006, the Center hosted a small networking event called CONNECT. This was initially a dinner where entrepreneurs who had been through the Center’s Business Lab program could meet and mingle with one another. Shortly after that, the event grew to include other program alumni and community members. In 2018, this small local event evolved into Radically Rural, a national summit for rural community members to come together and share their ideas, resources, and experiences freely with one another.

What we’ve come to realize is that Hannah Grimes encapsulates the celebration of and love for ideas. To bring ideas to life, regardless of whether it’s in the form of a business, nonprofit, or project, you need space, tools, and connections. And that’s where we come in.