Effingham is about forty square miles in the southeast corner of Carroll County, roughly 1,800 people, and not one foot of municipal sewer or municipal water anywhere in it. The state’s own community profile lists the water supplier as private wells and the sanitation as private septic systems. That is the whole utility picture. Every one of the town’s nine hundred-odd housing units drinks from its own well and treats its own waste in its own yard.
Four villages and no downtown. Lord’s Hill up on Route 153, where Squire Lord built a twenty-room Federal house with a domed cupola between 1822 and 1826 and the whole village went on the National Register in 1985. Center Effingham, which the old maps call Drake’s Corner. Effingham Falls, an industrial place in 1859 with a woolen factory, five sawmills, three gristmills and a carriage shop. And South Effingham down toward Province Lake. The town is drained by the Ossipee River and two tributaries, the Pine and the South, and the South runs north right past Center Effingham. Province Lake straddles the Maine line at the bottom of town; Broad Bay and Berry Bay off Ossipee Lake reach into the top of it, and the Head Works Dam that lets the big lake out into its canal sits on the Effingham side. Green Mountain stands 1,884 feet over the middle with a fire tower on it that first went up in 1907. Here is the number that explains the septic work, though: Effingham had 1,252 residents in 1859 and 329 in 1960. Three hundred and twenty-nine. Everything in this town is either older than the Civil War or newer than 1980, and there is almost nothing in between.
If you are selling developed waterfront on Province Lake or on the Ossipee Lake bays, New Hampshire wants a septic site assessment before the deed moves — that is RSA 485-A:39, and it applies to the New Hampshire shore regardless of which state your buyer is driving from. Book it the week you list. Province Lake has been on the state’s impaired list since 2010 with repeat cyanobacteria blooms, so an assessment there gets read a little more carefully than most.
Routine pump-outs with filter rinse and baffle check. Most tanks $300–$500.
Baffles, lines, distribution boxes, and honest leach field diagnosis.
Pump-and-inspect evaluations and shoreland site assessments with 48-hour reports.
Same-day pumping when the system backs up.
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