When this you see remember me

A recent Conway Daily Sun article reported on the contributions of the  Mountain Valley Garden Club, Home Depot Associates, and a crew of vets from the American Legion installing five memorial benches and a flower garden at the North Conway Community Center.

The article explains that “Each bench represents a different branch of the service: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, with a plaque on each.” This project is only the most recent in a long tradition of using the landscape to share memory. Throughout the area, there are many memorial benches, flagpoles, sidewalks, roads, walls, watering troughs and even commemorative mountains, rocks, and trees honoring our heritage.

Did you know that there is a “Liberty Tree” planted in Conway, one of 500 “Liberty Trees” planted in New England as a Bicentennial Momento  in 1976.

One of our ongoing projects involve researching, mapping and documenting our landscape of memorial. Without the story behind the name on the marker, the memorial becomes meaningless. If you have any information on any of these monuments, please comment us as we work on this project, Thanks!

A Small Suitcase? Decipimur Specie!

I recently attended a wonderful program on hiking in the White Mountains given by the Appalachian Mountain Club archivist. If you have been following this blog you know that we have been doing research in the Samuel Bemis papers on his early role in developing and promoting trails in the region. You would also know that we have a new initiative to digitally share our collection and connect it with related items in other collections. Inspired by this lecture I browsed around the AMC archives website and noticed a photograph with the caption “Alpine Garden, June 29, 1919. Mount Adams in back [Clyde H. and Hilda Smith carrying a small suitcase…” I suspect it is not a suitcase, instead I think it is more likely a vasculum.

These items, now forgotten, and as we will see now mistaken for a suitcase or lunch box, were once common and easily recognized, when poet scientist scholars were treated like rockstars, botany was a verb, and botanizing was as popular an outdoor activity as pokeman go.

We had some experience with these items when we developed an artist-explorer character for a living history museum in Indiana a number of years ago. We had a reproduction made for the program.

Several nice drawings and a good explanation for this item can be found in the self-help book, Botanizing: A Guide to Field-Collecting and Herbarium Work, 1899, by William Whitman Bailey.

The idea was for the vasculum to be a rigid container used by botanists to preserve and transport field samples. The main purpose of the valsculum is to transport plants without crushing them and by maintaining a humid environment. Wet moss was often packed in with the plant samples to keep them from drying out.

The famous scientist Linnaeus called it a vasculum dilletanum, from Latin vasculum - small container and dilletanum, referring to J.J. Dillenius, Linnaeus' friend and colleague at the Oxford Botanic Garden.

Along with a plant press and several other simple tools, anyone could create their own herbarium.

The small item below belonged to the artist Benjamin Champney and was identified as a “lunch box.” While it may have indeed served that purpose, it looks like a vasculum to me too.

Champney and other White Mountain artists sketched "plein air" out among the field and forests of Conway and surrounding towns. In the photo below you can see Champney with a white umbrella slung over his shoulder. The umbrella was used to diffuse light on the sketching or painting surface.

Here is a Chamney folding stool he used in his "field work."

Edward Tuckerman's vasculum now in the Amherst College archives is similar in size, shape and color to Champney's "lunch box" vasculum. 

The eggplant (aubergine, purple) color finish was a popular style known as pontypool or japanning. There were many different recipes to create different colors and shade but they all provided a corrosion resistent coating for the sheet iron the vasculum was made from. They usually included some combination of asphaltum and linseed oil and heated to make it the finish both tough and durable.

However, it does scratch fairly easily. As you can see in the pictures here of Tuckerman’s vasculum, he used that to write notes on his botany box (click on the pictures to enlarge them).

On the front cover he has inscribed his initials (E.T. jr.) and the date 1841. It is hard for me to tell if the middle word is a place or a time. I think it reads August, but it may also be a place. As we will see he records dates and places around the surface of the vasculum. 

Also written on the cover is “Decipimur specie” a warning in Latin that comes for the Art of Poetry by Horace. Roughly translated it is a warning not to be deceived by the semblance of what looks to be right or true, but to explore more deeply and not be fooled by appearances. 

On the back he has written another indecipherable word, and perhaps Aug 1841?

Below that he has written the following:

Nimium ne 

crede colori

Heideleberg

This Latin phrase is from Virgil’s Eclogae and can be translated to something like don’t put too much faith in your appearance, beauty fades. In it can also be seen references to color fading and the bloom of a flower withering away, both quite appropriate for an object intended to preserve both color and bloom.

The most decorative work is reserved for the top end, with the hooks for the carrying straps. You can imagine it placed on the shelf this way so it would appear almost as a book. Here we can see a Christian cross alluding to his service in the ministry and the letters IHS referring to Jesus

Below that is a heraldic style shield that may take me some time to figure out.

Around the vasculum are other places and dates including Niagara Aug 1848, Mt. Holyoke 30th March 1855, Trenton Falls 25 Aug 1859, Lake Memphremagog Sept 59 (for 1859) and Newport Mtn, Mt Desert (Island) 8 Sept 1871.  

Charles Darwin’s vasculum

Edwin and Nellie Teale’s vasculum presented to them by the Baldwin Bird Club in 1959.

Dr. John Torrey’s vasculum. Courtesy Archives of the New York Botanical Garden.

Antique vasculum for sale online showing a variety of condition and shades of color.

As always, if you have thoughts or questions, please comment us or contact us at the Conway Public Library’s Henney History Room.

Teresa Blanche Duffy

We recently had a couple ask for a list of war memorials in the area. We gave them a copy of a map and listing from the newspaper from a number of years ago. Ironically, one missing from the map was one of the earliest and closest. In fact it was from World War One and on the lawn of the Conway Public Library. For more info on the memorial see this link.

Let’s now follow up on one the names on the monument. Teresa Blanche Duffy seems to be the only women on the monument (the gender of some names are hard to tell and further research is needed). To follow her story we used the super powered library edition of Ancestry plus and found her marriage record, indicating she was a nurse.

That gave us the date we needed to check our microfilm collection for the wedding coverage from the local newspaper.

In turn we were able to track them through census records. This in turn gave us more information so we could follow up on where they lived and where she is buried and so on.

So through this process we can get a fuller picture of her life and be able to more properly honor her service to our country. If you are interested in more of the story and especially if you would like to volunteer to help track down more of the names in this and other veteran memorials in the area, please comment us or contact us at the Conway Public Library’s Henney History Room.

Reading Redstone

 

 

Over the past two weeks, we have had several outreach programs with the Kennett Middle School summer program. It involved three days of special tours and included a visit to the Conway Public Library,  a walking tour of Conway village, and a field trip to the Redstone Quarry.  

 

These tours are part of a larger and ongoing project to understand, research, document and understand Conway’s historical landscape. We are building on programs we did with the Pine Tree School, the UNH Cooperative Extension spirals program and other groups. We are happy to do them for other schools and groups, just contact us.

For this blog, we will focus on the theme of Conway’s granite history. On display in the Ham Community Room at the Conway Public Library is a fantastic painting by artist Ernest O. Brown.

 

It is one of the many landscapes in the “Shades of Spring” art exhibit on display now through August 31, 2016. The acrylic painting entitled “Spring: Chaos and Time Travel,” features an enigmatic hand split fence. Nearly photorealistic yet still painterly it shows incredible detail, amazing perspective and his signature dramatic shadows and composition.

Upstairs in the main reading room of the Conway Public Library the group learned about the now lost tourist attraction, the Washington Boulder, from which the foundation stones of the library were cut and quarried. See this link.  

 

 

At the Conway Historical Society’s Salyards Center we saw tools used to cut and dress stone by hand and dioramas and poster board displays on the quarry’s history done by school students in 2015 for the town’s 250th anniversary.

 

During the walking tour, we studied the cellar hole of the Conway House Hotel at the four corners near the library as well as the World War One Memorial on the library grounds. (now also known as a site for Pokémon Go).

 

To learn more about Conway’s larger, industrial scale granite history we took a bus tour to the Redstone quarry. It was only a short way into the trail before the intrepid explorers discovered a large pilaster with a high glossy finish.

We studied the curious "tool marks" on the usually hidden top and bottom faces of the pilaster.

 

We were then able to match the tool marks to the actual tools (just down the trail) used to hold and shape and finish and move the pilaster.

 

The Conway Public Library's Henney History Room has a wealth of information about this and many other sites in the area. Please contact us if you would like more details. Click on the pictures to enlarge any of these images.

After exploring the village of Redstone, we were back on the bus on time and ready for our next adventure.

After 40 years photos find their way home

This year we celebrate 40 years of the Conway Public Library's Nella Braddy Henney History Room. Recently, a friend and neighbor of the Henneys donated 64 photographs and over 100 slides taken by Keith Henney. The donor pointed out that Mr. Henney certainly knew how to capture a characteristic moment of time. Bert Heath was said to be able to fix anything. He put his jalopy together from bits and pieces of scrounged materials and always had a cigarette in his mouth. Comfort was key, style was secondary.

Many of the pictures show the affection, appreciation, and understanding folks had of their animals. It's a love the Henneys shared. Above is Lucille Thompson in front of the Isaac Bean House. Notice the nice white socks on the mare. Below a pair of bald-faced Hereford steers bring home the hay under the goad of Herbert Thompson.  You can see the pride they had in a well built rick.

This is how Yankees celebrate the acquisition of a new generator for the town. You can see how excited they are and Mr. Henney was there to document the moment.

Many of the photos share the composition, lighting and other artistic flourishes seen in WPA photos of the period and the aesthetics of Norman Rockwell.  They also show the Henney's interest in history and love of their neighbors and friends. 

For more on the Henney History Room click here.