The Town Hall Notebook
August 17, 2026
Today, the old industrial building beside Keyes Memorial Park is hard to imagine as a symbol of promise. Its windows are covered with plywood, graffiti marks the walls and weeds grow along the edge of the building and through cracks in the pavement. It has sat unused for 11 years.
The picture was considerably different in March 1964. “Quietly, without much fanfare, a new industrial building has taken shape in Milford,” the Milford Cabinet reported that spring. The 10,000-square-foot building, tucked between the Souhegan River and Elm Street near what is now Keyes Memorial Park, was a “modern, colonial-front structure” already occupied by three small industries.
“It is clean; there is little noise and no smoke,” the newspaper reported, describing the building as typical of the small, modern light industries then reshaping New England manufacturing. But the new building represented more than floor space and machinery. “A lot of dreams have gone into that building,” the Cabinet wrote.
An even more ambitious dream belonged to Chester C. Akeson and his son Alan, who built the structure after their former Permatech Diamond Tool location on Middle Street became crowded and inefficient. They saw the building as the beginning of a small industrial park, eventually surrounded by a cluster of modern plants that would bring “diversity and strength to the town.” The industrial park never took shape, although the Akeson company remained in Milford for decades.
By 2015, the building's story had taken another turn. The town purchased the property, but the aging industrial building has remained unused. The Recreation Commission is now confronting demolition costs that may be approaching $500,000. A multigenerational community center has been proposed for the site, but for now its future remains unclear.
More than 60 years after the Cabinet described a clean, modern building filled with promise and dreams, it is difficult to see much of either behind the boarded-up windows.
The Town Hall Notebook
August 17, 2026
Downtown parking is back on Milford's priority list.
At its March meeting, the Economic Development Advisory Council spent considerable time discussing parking and identified it as an issue to focus on in 2026. The town plans to revisit earlier parking studies and map existing and potential spaces, while a new parking subcommittee took a driving tour of downtown and the Oval in June. The possibility of a small downtown parking garage has even been raised.
If the problem sounds familiar, it should. For more than 70 years, Milford has been trying to figure out how to keep enough parking available around the Oval—and how to keep the same cars from occupying those spaces all day.
In 1951, a committee of Union Square merchants led by pharmacist Ray Dyer concluded that “parking meters are the only way to control our traffic and parking problems.” The Town Meeting nearly unanimously agreed, despite the strenuous opposition of legislator and Ober clothing store owner Fred Wadleigh, who called the meters a parking “tax” that would take away one advantage enjoyed by Milford merchants.
The new meters allowed two hours of parking at five cents an hour—or a penny for just 12 minutes. A year later, the committee declared them “successful far beyond our expectations,” saying they had eliminated all-day parkers and generated revenue.
But the meters became less popular and less profitable as Union Square storefronts emptied and shopping centers touted free parking. By the 1990s, a new generation of downtown merchants wanted them gone.
The meters eventually disappeared, but one complaint proved remarkably durable. “There is frequent criticism of merchants and clerks who occupy spaces” all day, the Milford Cabinet reported in 1951. In 2018, Union Street Grill owner Kevin Stephens struck a familiar note: “When business owners take up parking spaces on the Oval, it's ridiculous.”
The debate, it seems, has come full circle.