Celebrating Stone Walls

Lidar is creeping towards Conway

LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances) to the Earth.

Much of New Hampshire is already covered by the lidar overlay. However, only a bit of Conway is covered. 

On the other hand, all of Tamworth is covered. 

By zooming in, you can see the stone walls throughout the town.

Even the stone walls around the Grover Cleveland summer home. You can also read about stone walls in a recent Vibe magazine article.

You can also check out our previous blog about the Cleveland Memorial Wall here.

Pressing the Issue

Recently we mailed 24 reels of microfilm to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where thanks to a grant of $3,600 from the Henney Historical Fund they will be digitized and made available online. The first microfilm reel starts with the masthead of the White Mountain Reporter, published North Conway, Thursday March 14, 1895 price 5 cents (click on images to enlarge).

The central motif of the masthead's logo is a scene of Mount Washington with the Cog Railway. 

Notice how the image is somewhat unfocused and obscured by reflected light and due to back lighting has inconsistent bright and dark sections making it hard to read.

Once digitized the images will have much better resolution and clarity as well as have the ability to search for keywords, crop and save images in multiple formats. 

Over the last couple years we ran a series of blogs focusing on Conway's experience during World War One as seen through the local Reporter Newspaper. Once digitized we will be able to explore many other themes.These newsletters reveal weekly concerns of the community from 1895 through 1943.

The first column of the early paper listed the times for the arrival and departure of the mail. Below that was the church and lodge directory. Taken together, the prominent placement of this information reflects the changing nature of our community from then to now. 

The end of the last reel we shipped was The Reporter, Thursday, December 30, 1943. Included in this newspaper was an advertisement for the Majestic and North Conway movie theaters wishing "A Happy and Victorious New Year to You All, May 1944 mark the milestone of the end of the war."

It featured a young boy banging a drum emitting sparking stars and stripes creating a V for "victory."
Their was also an article about Christmas in Conway.

And a chronology of the year 1943.

There was an advertisement about "New England farmers make your wood fighting wood" in support of the war effort. 

By the way, did you get the multiple entendre puns about the title of this blog, "Pressing the Issue."

Pressing the issue (verb) can also be read as bringing an issue to the public's attention. We will be doing that in the future soon through a public program by the press (newspaper and media people) who will talk about the past, present and future challenges of presenting the news.

You can also think it of as a pressing issue, an urgent or needing to be dealt with immediately. The first amendment to the U. S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press. Many people feel that that freedom is being challenged today. 

Finally, you can think of the title as referring to the historical tradition of the labor or literally pressing the issues. On the right a young apprentice is using a pair of inking balls or dabbers to press the ink onto the face of the metal type. In the middle is the pressman, pulling and pushing (or pressing) the bar to press the ink onto the paper with such force that the type leaves an indentation in the paper that can still be seen today in some of our original newspapers.

However, soon this will all be done in the cloud.

- finis -

KNOW all Men by thefe Prefents

At first it might seem that I have lost all sense of orthography (proper spelling, capitalization, &tc.) but see for yourself.

This is the top part of a recent donation to the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room. There are several things to note before we even show you the rest of the document. Look at the first line. It reads "KNOW all Men by thefe Prefents." It seems like it should read "know all men by these presents." Whoever printed this part seems to have used "f"instead of "s"  in a couple places.

Well if you look close, you can see it is not an f, rather it is what is known as a long, medial, or descending s. One of most famous examples of this can be seen in our Bill of Rights. Here is one of the 14 originals preserved and displayed at the National Archives in Washington D.C. For more on the originals see this link.

You might wonder who spends their time studying fonts? Did you know that the study of fonts it is a graphic design specialty. We actually have several books about it at the library.

A great new study of typography, and another recent donation to the circulation collection, is W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design, written and designed by Bruce Kennett. See link here. This book also has a great chapter on marionettes but that later blog. 

But back to our main topic. The phrase, "Know all men by these presents" is commonly found in legal documents to this day. Generally it means that this document announces the transaction.  
How would "presents" be pronounced? It is a verb or a noun or an adjective?  It can in fact, be all three.

It could be a noun pronounced like Christmas presents. 
Or it could be a verb and pronounced like the school presents a Christmas play.
Or is it an adjective about time, the present time, but plural, like multiple presents, of the past, present and future?

So here is the whole document (click on images to enlarge them)

Near the signature of William Chadbourne can be seen the remains of a wafer that sealed the document.

You can see a previous blog on this kind of wafer here.

The printed text was pressed so hard that it embossed the paper and created a relief that can be seen from the back.

Now to the paper itself. You can see that is the type of "laid" paper used during the period. See a previous blog here that explores laid paper and watermarks. 

You can tell from the folds that the document served as its own envelope. It was folded to fit in a "pigeonhole" in a desk. See our previous blog on pigeonholes and desks for more about that.

Now let's look at a summary of the document.

So this is an introduction to our new donation. We have covered a lot and have not even looked at the second line of the text. More on that later.

Here's to New Year

I present to you a New Year's post card from the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room. While the library has a plethora of books on the history and traditions of New Year celebrations, the history room has very little in the way of photographs or archives that document the way that our community honors the transition from one year to the next. We would love to borrow and scan any photos you may have of how your family have celebrated the holidays.

The way our holiday traditions have changed over time can be seen in an illuminated Gothic manuscript made between 1412 and 1416. It is a book of hours, or a collection of prayers, to be said at specific hours (click on images to enlarge them).

 The page for December shows a wild boar hunt in the Forest of Vincennes.

The page for January shows the feast of New Year's and the exchanging of New Year gifts.

Working at a library, I love the fact that books were once considered the most appropriate gift for New Year's Day, especially for children. There was in fact a series of books published during the nineteenth century literally called a "token." We have one in the history room (see this link).

Making "resolutions" is a time honored tradition for New Year's. We can help you if you make a resolution to write your own book and want to present it as a gift. We can help you write your family history. We can help you scrapbook either digitally, or with archival materials, or both.

For a number of years this is how we have spent some of our holiday time working on preserving, researching and sharing our family history. ... and for good luck we would have a heaping plate of hoppin' john and collards on New Year's Day. 

A Monumental Winter's Tale

Not far from the Conway Public Library there is a remarkable, surprising and enigmatic granite column on top of a small hill called Jockey Cap in the town of Fryeburg, Maine.

This monument and others like it connects the Mount Washington Valley to two places on earth where it's like winter all year round. It also connects two heroic men and two dogs to the north and south pole.

To help unravel the story, let's look a post card version of the scene.

The caption explains that this is a monument to Robert E. Peary. On top of the monument is a bronze plaque (click on image to enlarge it).

It reads "From the original profile survey made by Robert Edwin Peary, discoverer of the north pole, made during his residence in Fryeburg 1878 - 1879, erected to his memory by the Peary family in 1938 at the suggestion of his boyhood friend Alfred E. Burton"

This monument is decorative and symbolic. It is also functional. Around the ring is a series of mountain profiles that line up with the actual mountains allowing the viewer to identify local landscape features.

Not far from Jockey Cap on Fryeburg's Main Street is Robert E. Peary Park.

A small quartz boulder points to another set of stones that again are both symbolic and functional.

The bronze plaque reads "Fifty and four hundred feet north lie stones erected in 1883 by Admiral Robert E. Peary discoverer of the north pole, a former Fryeburg resident. These two meridian stones indicate the true north and thus enable surveyors to obtain the magnetic variation"

Now what about the two dogs I mentioned? Well they are connected to the Chinook Trail that leads from Tamworth Village to the village of Wonalancet.

The Chinook is New Hampshire's state dog breed. The original great Chinook was a lead dog during Admiral Byrd's expeditions to the south pole. His mother, Ningo was descended from Admiral Peary's lead dog on his expeditions to the north pole, so together their tale (or tail) encompasses the entire earth.

There are a number of monuments at the Chinook Kennels in Tamworth.

Here they are from left to right,

The first reads "Admiral Byrd Memorial to all noble dogs whose lives were given on dog treks during the two expeditions to Little America, Antarctica to further science and discover 1928 - 1930 (and) 1933 - 1935, dedicated October 8, 1938"

Other monuments honor Dick Moulton, Milton and Eva Seeley and Arthur Walden among others with ties to the Mount Washington Valley who were involved in polar exploration.

These monuments can help us trace the Mount Washington Valley's contributions to polar exploration. They are also featured in a new outreach program that is offered to local schools and community groups for free. For more information on these or other local history sites, contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.

Conway Our Hometown - Come and Tell Your Stories

We are starting work this week on a new project that is planned to result in a thirty minute NH PBS television program. It feature Conway and will be part of the new "Our Hometown" series. To learn more and to see programs already done for other towns see this link. They have done six towns so far out of 221 towns and 13 cities. 

There is information and a sign up sheet at the reference desk at the Conway Public Library. Here is some info from their website.

No one knows your hometown like you.

The premise of NH PBS's award-winning Our Hometown series is that each New Hampshire town and city has a unique story to tell, and the people who live there are ideal storytellers for their hometowns.

Each episode in this series will explore the culture, commerce, history and people of one of New Hampshire's 221 towns and 13 cities. New Hampshire author and storyteller Rebecca Rule hosts each 30-minute episode. Your town could be next!.

Want to recommend your town for an upcoming episode? Contact our producers at hometown@nhpbs.org or call (603) 868-4372.

Our old friend Rebecca Rule is the host. If you want to see her in action you can check out the Henney History Room DVD "Full of Moxie" with her and the late David Emerson.

The current plan is for them to come and film in the Spring of 2019. Hope you will be a part of this interesting and important project.

The Babe Was Here

It is often surprising to folks when they realize the wealth of biographical resources we have in the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room. Sometimes it takes a great newspaper article like that published last week by Tom Eastman in the Conway Daily Sun about Babe Ruth receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Tom does a great job outlining some of the many ties Ruth had to this community. If you would like to learn more about Babe Ruth, you might check out "The Babe and I" written by his wife in 1959.

We also have a couple books written by Babe Ruth's daughter about the famous baseball player.

1998

 2001

Both of these books are full of family photos showing the Babe in settings other than the ball park. Thanks largely to invitations by Harvey Dow Gibson, Ruth was also a feature in Conway's hot spots.

The local Reporter newspaper from August 10, 1939 helps explain the setting (click on image to enlarge it).

On a more personal note, here are some items from the handwritten autobiography of this blogger's father (born 1920).

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Can anyone say "batter up?"