Five Guys and a Mountain

One hundred sixty-five years ago today...

... five guys stopped by the side of a road to sketch Chocorua Lake and Mountain. The sketch is now at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City. See this link for more info. You can also read about it in a book at the Conway Public Library. See this link.

For more on the book's cover painting see this link here. 

Here is the site of the pencil sketch today. The barn was moved back away from busy Route 16 only a few years ago. In this photograph you can see part of the original foundation of the barn to the right of the photo.

For more on this view, the stone walls and surrounding fields see our previous blog here. The Henney History Room of the Conway Public Library offers a free outreach program to local schools and community groups on this view and its history. For a somewhat different perspective on this view and how it has been preserved see this blog here.

A detail of the sketch shows four of the five artists (click on images to enlarge them).

This sketch is inscribed at the lower right "chicorua pond Sep 28./54" for September 28, 1854. Notice the spelling of Chocorua as chicorua. Directly below each of the figures are their names. Reading from left to right they are Edwards, Dodge, Ordway and Champney.

These would be Thomas Edwards (1795-1856), John Wood Dodge (1807-1893), Alfred Ordway (1819-1897) and Benjamin Champney (1817-1907).  

The fifth artist is Daniel Huntington (1816-1906) who is "off camera" sketching the other four. So we see the scene through his eyes. The Cooper Hewitt Museum has a number of other sketches from that same trip that we will explore in future blogs.  

While Huntington's sketch is quite accurate, an oil painting said to have resulted from this sketching trip is very fanciful.

For more on this painting now in the collection of the New York Historical Society see this link. 

We can also look through the eyes of the artist Benjamin Champney depicted at the very right of the sketch. A few years ago, the New Hampshire Historical Society acquired a large collection of sketches by Champney that included a number of sketches done that same day.

It may be possible that this is the sketch that Champney was sketching when Huntington was sketching him. For more information on this sketch see this link.

We know from another sketch in the collection that Champney went down to the edge of the lake that same day and made this sketch.

Here you can see the mountain peaks from right to left: Paugus, Passaconway, Wonalancet and Whiteface. For more information on this sketch see this link.

For more details on this or any other historical subject in the White Mountains, contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.

Pumpkin Spice is Back!

Today is the first official day of autumn and in this blog we will look at iconic images of fall such as this one from 1871 by Benjamin Champney who lived and worked in Conway.

But first, a bit about the official start of the season. The equinox actually occurred at 3:50 am this morning eastern time.

Recently we did an outreach program for the John Fuller Elementary School and mapped the earth and sky to examine what that means. We used a globe, protractor and planisphere to calculate the key angles of the sun and the latitudes and axis of the earth to understand what makes the seasons change.

They had fun doing it, and don't tell them,... but it was actually a sneaky hands-on way to teach a little math.

If you would like to sign up for that free program for your school or community group let us know. We also have another program called "Art of the Harvest" which this blog draws many of it's images from.

The image above is actually a detail of this larger image below. I just felt that with the blog title I had to show the pumpkins up close first (click on images to enlarge them).

Here you can see the foliage that matches this time of the year when the colors are transitioning. From the chimneys you can see the welcoming smoke representing warmth and dinner. A variety of livestock graze in the field. The men are shocking.

Say what? Shocking?
The tepee shaped bundles they are building are called shocks. Specifically they are corn shocks. While you can find these for sale today as decorations, historically they were used to properly dry corn in the field before today's modern methods using hot air and silos. 

This was not the sweet corn of the summer. For more on sweet corn see our previous blog here.

This Benjamin Champney image of Humphrey's Ledge, Mount Washington and Adams looking from the Saco and the North Conway Meadows near his studio from 1870 has often been described as a haying scene. In a previous blog here we discussed the need for art historians to take a course in farming forensics. The first obvious clue is the color of the crop. Hay is cut when green. This crop is yellowish brown. Again, you can see tinges of fall colors and that period of transition in the foliage. Compare the colors of the trees in another local Champney view showing the hay harvest in this blog here.

The shape of the crop bundles in the field confirms it. As that previous blog explains, hay is not bundled and tied like this grain. It is piled into rounded shapes called haycocks before being loaded onto wagons for the barn or into larger haystacks if left in the field. A detail of our image shows that these structures are stooks, not shocks. This crop is a grain not corn or hay.

While real leaves are starting to fall and goldenrod and blue asters fill our fields, more modern ceramic, metal and plastic pumpkins and colored silk leaves stock the shelves at nearby Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes and Michael's stores.

In cultural traditions, the past and present mingle together and emerge separately. To help us understand the world around us, our family has often participated in living history or creative anachronism. We have built both shock and stook and used horses to do it. Here is a diagram of the horses we used.

Think of this "horse" like a saw horse, or a log "dog." Terms that were more familiar when animals were expected to work not just serve as pets.

The horse helps you built around the point where the cross bar fits.

Then the bundles can be tied at the top (this kid is now a professional engineer in Boston).

Then the cross bar is pulled out one direction and the horse can be pulled out at a 90 degree angle, leaving the bundles to stand on their own.

... and clever kids always find new ways to have fun!

... and start a new trend.

For more details on this or any other historical subject in the White Mountains, contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.

Imagine...

... you heard the news today, oh boy... actually the news is from one-hundred years ago today, and it took another day for this news to be printed in Conway (no Twitter in those days)... and you can read about it here and now thanks to a new program at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room!

The news is that the New Hampshire State Legislature ratified the 19th amendment to the US Constitution.

Note the article reports that "while the debate was short it was at times spicy." The news on suffrage was combined with a report about "our valiant boys" getting a soldier's bonus.

Today we have a hard time imagining what was so controversial? Or that it would take almost another year (until August 18, 1920) for enough other states to ratify it and make it law. Or that the right for women to vote was not guaranteed earlier.

Here is the wording of the amendment "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Seems pretty simple and fair? 

For more on the history of this struggle check out one of our favorite blogs off all time - Cow Hampshire at this link.

As usual, the blog's author, Janice Brown scooped me and published her blog back in June.

The National Park Service has mapped out some of the history of the suffrage movement at this site. Here you can read about the key role this landmark building played in the story. 

And now back to the news. Thanks to a grant from Henney Historical Fund we have been digitizing our collection of the Reporter newspaper. See this link for details. Now you can catch up on all the local news and gossip from March 14, 1895 to Dec 31, 1973 from anywhere anytime. Here is the direct link to the search page.

If you want to read all the news from the issue printed Thursday, September 11, 1919 you can go directly here for that. Be sure to give it a few seconds to load properly. At first the text appears as an ancient alien hieroglyphic language but then the image clears up. From there you can zoom in, search, crop, download, send, etc. You can create a digital scrapbook, etc. and copy info about births, deaths, marriages, etc. We will do more on using this fantastic new resource in future blogs. In the mean time, if you have any questions about navigating the site contact us.

In other news, another front page article noted that runaways were becoming frequent in our village. The article is in the weekly "Busy People of Conway" column.

 Now before thinking it was teenagers, these runaways were probably only two or three years old.

They were in fact horses. This tradition continues today as someone recently tried to create a new drive through at the Conway post office. You can read about that at this link.

For yet more information on suffrage commemorations see these links here and here.

In the mean time, please let me know what you think. For more details on this or any other historical subject in the White Mountains, contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.

Wicked Good Charcoal

Common among the imagery of recent Labor Day advertisements were iconic scenes of cooking out with charcoal. Remember we still have seventeen days of summer left and fall is also a great time for grilling - especially tailgating for football games at Kennett (our first home game is next Friday the 13th). Today we think of charcoal briquettes as having a standardized shape and size.

However, charcoal in this form only goes back to the late nineteenth century...

...and has a lot to do with these so-called vagabonds who camped in our White Mountains.

For the history of the vagabonds (from left to right: Firestone, Ford, Edison and Kingsford) see this link.  

Today there is an emerging trend which represents the renaissance of an ancient industry. This new "artisan" charcoal is promoted as being 100% natural, gourmet, and both gluten and petroleum free.

This "natural" charcoal played a more important role than cooking in our local historical landscape.

In his 1858 journal, Henry David Thoreau wrote that he spent the night in a colliers (or charcoal makers) "shanty" on Mount Washington. Here is a view of Chocorua from 1882.

Here is a photo of the same view from 1982. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of a small group of landowners, this view of Lake Chocorua and indeed, the surrounding area, has been protected and this comparison of views from 1882 and 1982 one-hundred years of conservation. For more on this group see this link.

However, if you could have seen this area about one-hundred years before that, the scene below would have been common.

This is the way charcoal was made for ages. The picture below shows the different stages in building the charcoal kiln and removing the finished charcoal.

Charcoal was a key ingredient in making local iron. Chocorua Village was known at Tamworth Iron Works as seen on the 1860 Carroll County Map.

The village of Iron Works Falls once straddled the towns of Freedom and Effingham on the Ossipee River as seen on the same map.

Throughout the state there are a number of New Hampshire highway markers that help map out the early industrial landscape. The best preserved iron furnace is the Franconia Iron Works. 

In a future blog, we look at how an iron furnace works. In the mean time, please let me know what you think. For more details on this or any other historical subject in the White Mountains, contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.