The Harrisville Rural District is a well-preserved hill farm community in the Monadnock Highlands of New Hampshire. The district is significant for its cultural, economic, social, political and physical association with the nearby mill village of Harrisville, a national Historic Landmark. In addition, the district is significant for its wealth of documentary, architectural, archaeological and geographical information which details late eighteenth and nineteenth century northern Mew England frontier settlement and subsequent social and economic development. As a cultural landscape, the Harrisville Rural District visually illustrates the evolution of early community planning, settlement patterns, and 200 years of agricultural practices and adaptations of a Scotch-Irish-English ethnic community. The boundaries delineate the largest area of arable soil in the vicinity which supported the largest number of contiguous farm homesteads associated with the Harrisville mill village. (Other early farms were located singly on small pockets or arable land to the north, and west of the village). The extant structures possess integrity of location, setting, feeling, design, materials, and workmanship; the land maintains a visual, economic, social and political continuity with the agricultural and industrial past. The archaeological resources provide considerable potential for investigation into hill-farm history and culture. - NRHP, August 1982