Telegraph photo by DEAN SHALHOUP A painting he completed several years ago is behind Herb Mosher, who is closing his longtime downtown Nashua business The Framery after 45 years.

Herb Mosher still remembers clearly the day a number of years ago he stumbled upon “buried treasure” while shoveling out a crawl space under an historic Main Street building.

Although likely worth more by weight than value as collectibles, the “treasure” consisted of old lead plates, artifacts of a long-ago era in the printing industry that has since given way to a succession of mechanical inventions and technological advances.

An engineer by trade with a lifelong affinity for painting and sketching, Mosher couldn’t help but study the relics, squinting in the dim light to read the words etched into the thin, but deceptively heavy, squares and rectangles of lead.

Actually, it was the spots where there was no writing or images that were etched away, a process called “relief printing,” in which the words and images ended up raised slightly in order to pick up ink to be printed on paper.

But I digress.

Courtesy photo Longtime downtown Nashua shop The Framery has closed.

I too remembered that discovery while chatting with Mosher the other day on what would be my final visit to The Framery, where Mosher, over the course of roughly 45 years, took in goodness knows how many different kinds of artwork, photos, sports memorabilia and families’ assorted priceless valuables, then returned handsome finished products that kept them coming back.

“Well, I’ve just been feeding it to keep it alive,” Mosher said with a slight smile, a way of saying business isn’t what it used to be. Now throw in the COVID-19 virus pandemic, the sneaky killer of people and businesses that discourages walk-in customers and browsers – a large chunk of Mosher’s customer base – and his decision to call it quits isn’t surprising.

And then there’s Father Time. I know it seems impossible to anyone who’s met Mosher, me included: But his birthday last month was his 90th.

That would put Mosher in his mid-40s when he first opened The Framery, a project borne out of his enjoyment of sketching and painting and the eventual need to frame some of his work.

“It was 1974, give or take a year or two,” he says, obviously not one to concern himself with exacts like he presumably needed to in his engineering career.

He first opened in the building that’s now Peddlers Daughter, in the space vacated by Isadore Guerette’s namesake hair salon. Next door, he recalls, was Chuck’s barbershop, where owner Chuck Aveni and his longtime associate, Reno Long, worked side by side.

That’s when Mosher and some of the other tenants chipped in on digging out the crawl space in order to lay a cement cellar floor, which led to the discovery of the lead plates.

When Goodale’s Bike Shop owner Brad Hill bought the building for his rapidly growing business, Mosher moved across the river.

“I put everything in a wheelbarrow and came up here,” he said, half-joking about his relocation from the north bank of the Nashua River to the former Telegraph building on the south bank.

A native of Newport, Rhode Island, Mosher was a teenager when he started working for owners of the legendary huge sailboats that populated the harbors of the well-to-do seaside resort community.

He moved up to yachts, he said, a summer job that was probably the envy of many a high school or college-age kid.

Mosher moved on to study engineering, eventually landing a position at Sprague Electric, the former Nashua-based firm that occupied space in the city’s Millyard.

He was there for about 15 years, he said, when one day the bosses came to him and other employees with an offer.

“They said I had a choice – Texas or Denmark,” Mosher said, referring to the two options he had if he wanted to remain with the company.

So he chose option three: None of the above, leading to the birth of The Framery.

Now, more than four decades later, the time has come for the next step, and while it’s impossible to not miss something you brought into the world and nurtured for so many years, Mosher knows it’s time to say goodbye.

What will he miss the most? “The people,” he says without hesitation. “I’ve met a lot of nice people over the years,” he added, making The Framery “a nice place to come to every morning.”

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