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Peterborough Family Dental & Implant Center
Our Story

A corner with a long memory

Two hundred years of making things, keeping the town's money, and keeping its records. Today this corner keeps Peterborough's smiles.

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The Peterborough Family Dental & Implant Center sign outside the practice on Grove Street in downtown Peterborough

The corner

Before the first patient sat down

Long before the first patient sat in a chair at 21 Grove Street, this corner was the engine of Peterborough. In 1813 the Phoenix Factory rose here, one of the first cotton mills in New England, built where the Nubanusit Brook drops toward the Contoocook. Phoenix Mill Lane, the little street outside our windows, was lined with mill worker housing running down to the water.

A few steps up the street sits the Peterborough Town House, at the intersection of Grove and Main that is widely believed to have given Thornton Wilder the name "Grover's Corners" when he wrote Our Town in 1937.

The First National Bank of Peterborough, chartered in 1865, eventually built here and kept the corner until it merged away in 1990. In 1966, when the last two surviving Phoenix Mill houses were slated for demolition to make room for bank parking and a drive-through teller window, the Peterborough Historical Society intervened and moved both buildings two doors down to 19 Grove Street, where you can still walk through them today.

So this ground has spent two centuries doing the same thing: making things, keeping the town's money, and keeping the town's records. It seems fitting that it now keeps the town's smiles.

  1. 1813

    The Phoenix Factory rises, one of New England's first cotton mills

  2. 1865

    The First National Bank of Peterborough is chartered and later builds here

  3. 1937

    Grove and Main give Thornton Wilder his Grover's Corners

  4. 1966

    The Historical Society saves the last two mill houses, now at 19 Grove Street

  1. 1973

    One dentist, two states

    Peterborough Family Dental began in 1973 with Dr. Paul L. Jane, whose first office sat in the Centertown plaza on Main Street, across from Roy's Market. During the week he treated sailors at the Boston Naval Shipyard as a dentist with the Navy Reserves. Nights and weekends, he drove north to Peterborough for his New Hampshire patients.

    The practice grew faster than he could handle alone. In 1977, Dr. David A. Hedstrom came up from Boston to join him. In 1983 the two bought a colonial home on Concord Street and retrofitted it into a dental office. By the late 1990s they had outgrown that too.

    A staff member mentioned a building for sale on the corner of Grove Street and Phoenix Mill Lane, in the heart of downtown. The doctors bought it in 2001 and spent twelve months converting a financial institution into a modern dental office.

    Still visible if you know where to look

    • The teller line is now the sterilization area
    • The drive-thru bay is an office, and its overhang shelters patients on snowy days
    • The vaults hold supplies instead of cash
    The reception counter and hallway inside the practice at 21 Grove Street
  2. 2004

    Dr. Jasper Ainslie

    Dr. Jasper Ainslie did not take a straight line to dentistry, which is part of what makes him good at it.

    He earned his BS in Biological Science from the University of California, Davis in 1996, with an emphasis in microbiology and a minor in art. He then worked as a staff researcher at UCSF's Osteoporosis and Arthritis Research Group, where he led quality control for dual X-ray absorptiometry scanners. That is a career spent making imaging equipment tell the truth about bone, which turns out to be excellent preparation for a lifetime of implant surgery.

    He graduated from NYU Dental School in 2004 with his DDS and a year of Honors in Oral Medicine, then moved his family to the Monadnock region and joined Dr. Jane and Dr. Hedstrom that same year. He has since attained Mastership in the International Dental Implant Association and is a Diplomate of the same organization. He is also, improbably and delightfully, an honorary co-founder of the Vail Film Festival.

    Twenty-plus years later, he has treated three generations of some Peterborough families.

    Read Dr. Ainslie's full story
    Dr. Jasper Ainslie, DDS
  3. 2016

    The search for a successor

    By 2016, after more than four decades on the job, Dr. Jane and Dr. Hedstrom were ready to retire. That left them with a decision they took more seriously than most retiring dentists do.

    Between them they had treated thousands of patients and cared for hundreds of Peterborough families across three and four generations. They had watched children come in for their first cleanings, then bring their own children in years later. Those relationships were the actual asset, and they knew it.

    Practices like theirs get offers. A retiring pair of dentists with a downtown building and a full patient roster can sell to almost anyone. By their own account, Dr. Jane and Dr. Hedstrom were not willing to sell to just any dentist, and they were not looking for the highest bidder. They had spent forty-three years building something they cared about, and they wanted it handed to someone they trusted.

    They described what they were looking for plainly enough: a dentist with the same work ethic, capable enough to take on the complex cases they had been referring out, and caring enough to look after their patients the way they had.

    Someone who would keep the standard on a Tuesday afternoon in February when nobody was watching.

    They were selective, and they took their time. And they chose Dr. Muhammad Rahim.

  4. 2016

    November 2016

    Dr. Muhammad Rahim

    Dr. Rahim was born in Manhattan, Kansas, and raised in Egypt from the age of seven before returning to the United States to pursue dentistry.

    He earned his DMD at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston in 2010. Tufts is not an ordinary dental school. Founded in 1868 as Boston Dental College, it is one of the oldest dental schools in the country and one of the most respected, and it sits in the middle of Tufts's health sciences campus in downtown Boston alongside the School of Medicine, so dental students train shoulder to shoulder with physicians. Its teaching clinics are among the highest-volume in New England, serving more than 30,000 patients a year. That volume matters more than any brochure statistic: a dentist trained there has seen the difficult mouths, the failed previous work, and the medically complicated patients that a smaller program never encounters.

    Dr. Rahim did not stop at the DMD. He accumulated nearly a decade of dental and advanced dental training, concentrating in the technically demanding areas of the profession: prosthetic dentistry, implant dentistry, and full-mouth rehabilitation. These are the cases most general practices refer elsewhere. He seeks them out.

    That combination is exactly what Dr. Jane and Dr. Hedstrom were looking for. In November 2016, Dr. Rahim joined Dr. Ainslie, and together they renamed the practice Peterborough Family Dental & Implant Center, a name that says plainly what the office now does: everyday family dentistry alongside the surgical and prosthetic work that used to require a drive to Nashua or Boston.

    Outside the office, Dr. Rahim supports charity work for orphans and children in need.

    What counts for us is when patients allow us to make a difference in their lives by helping them achieve a beautiful smile and optimal health.
    Dr. Muhammad Rahim, DMD
    Read Dr. Rahim's full story
    Dr. Muhammad Rahim, DMD

Today

The oldest independent practice in the Monadnock region

Ten years on, the patients Dr. Jane and Dr. Hedstrom spent forty years caring for have stayed. Many of them have been coming to this practice for thirty and forty years, and a good number of those are whole families who have been with us across generations. Some drive past closer offices to get here, and a few drive hours. The words that come up again and again from Dr. Rahim's patients are the same ones his predecessors were hoping for: gentle, kind, thorough.

Peterborough Family Dental & Implant Center is the oldest privately owned dental practice in the Monadnock region, and one of the few remaining independent ones. No corporate owner sets our schedule. No private equity firm decides how many minutes your hygiene appointment gets.

What independence buys you

  • The same doctors, year after year
  • A team that knows your kids' names
  • Implants placed and restored under one roof, crowns milled while you wait, and emergencies answered by a dentist who picks up the phone on weekends

Two hundred years ago, this corner ran the mills that built Peterborough. Fifty years ago, a Navy dentist started driving up from Boston on weekends. Ten years ago, he handed the keys to someone he trusted with it.

We are still here, still independent, still on Grove Street.

Prefer to talk?

Still have questions?

Call and you'll reach a real person on our team: no phone tree, no hold music. We'd genuinely love to help.

(603) 924-3664

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Become part of the next chapter

Book a free consultation at 21 Grove Street and meet the team that has kept this corner's standard since 1973.

Book Free ConsultationCall (603) 924-3664
  • New patients welcome
  • Most insurance accepted