It's not news...

... to me it's history! 

Yesterday, I was able to catch a passing glimpse of the elusive Conway Daily Sun reporter Tom Eastman as he was making up the news, documenting a "ballet" performance of steel and glass, brick, wood and cinder block. The results of his work (and photographer extraordinaire Jamie Gemmiti) can be seen in today's issue on the cover and p. 6.

While he was recording the last moments of the old Pine Tree School in Center Conway, I was reflecting on the future of the past... and we need your help! My job is to clip and file by subject the  work they do.

Now we want the old school to live again by gathering your stories about it as well as collecting or copying any photos, papers or memorabilia you may have for posterity. 

We also plan to continue tracking history as it is being made for the next phase of this property including the wonderful plans for a park and community gardens and possible connection to trails. Many thanks to Sut and Margaret Marshall, the Spears Brothers and all the others involved in this project.  

Recently I have enjoyed watching the use of cranes and excavators on several projects with a historical connection including the steeple for the Little White Church in Eaton and the covered bridge in Conway.

I will be exploring each of these projects in future blogs, so stay tuned! 

For more information contact the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room. 

Time is of the Essence

 

There are many different paths to approach a work of art on the way to understanding and appreciating it. For example, I recently used the seasonal color in this image in a previous blog here to celebrate the first day of autumn and to serve as a starting point for an interpretive guide for a display at the entrance to the Conway Public Library, which in turn is designed to stimulate interest in the library's Henney History Room collection.  

I did not know at the time that this painting would soon be on display within driving distance of the Conway Public Library at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, but only through November 29, 2020. It is usually found at it's home at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City. 

For this blog we will move from the background landscape to the figure in the foreground. Art historians and critics often speculate on the actions and emotions of the characters in the scene. Has the man in the painting reached his goal and is now enjoying the prospect at the top of a mountain? Or is he starting a journey and facing a fork in the trail?  In this case the evidence is inconclusive.

In this blog we will look at only four of the many items on display in this fabulous exhibit. 

This first one above embodies the spirit of many a White Mountain place, but can not be tied to a specific site in the White Mountains. 

The second depicts a place known to be in the White Mountains, but there is some controversy about its exact location. 

The third is a scene that started in the White Mountains and then taken out of it's place. 

The fourth is a scene "re-placed" into the White Mountains.

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you can see the first painting is signed and dated at the bottom right: Winslow Homer/Oct 10th 1873. 

Now I invite you to look at this image in a number of different ways. It seems to me that this painting captures the essence of time. Notice how the paint and brush strokes record the elusive nature of the moment. It is like action frozen in time on the canvas. The seasonal subject can also be taken as a metaphor for the changes taking place during this state of transition, from its bright autumn tints to the green leaves by his feet and the evergreens around his head. 

As part of the exhibit, the Portland Museum of Art website invited people with different backgrounds to comment on the art. The description for this painting was done by a working artist and can be found here. In discussing the artworks composition, he points out that "The brim of the hat, the horizon, the tree branch, the figure’s leg, are all on a descending slant. The knapsack goes the other direction. I keep putting it into a metaphor of personal baggage that pulls us and holds us back. The figure is in the center of the frame, halfway in between where we are going and where we came from." 

My White Mountain art friends and I are often to be found tramping around looking to tie an artwork to a specific place. This one defies a definite location. There just are not enough clues to be specific. However, it is a great image to capture one's sense of exploration as well as the autumn season.

Another way to look at this artwork is to examine the clothing and gear that the man has. It would be unusual today to see a hiker with a long sleeve white shirt, a suit coat, dress slacks and a hat like that. The knapsack is old fashioned.

The history of outdoor gear guides us to another timely event that took place the day after I originally posted this blog, Thursday, October 15. The zoom program was recorded and can now found at this link. 

The program In Their Words: Historical Hiking Journals and hear the voices of hikers from the 1910s and 1920s, was presented by Appalachian Mountain Club Archivist, Becky Fullerton, who works at the archives in Crawford Notch.

Becky is a self-professed history nerd, a trail runner and White Mountains landscape painter. She is also a historian of outdoor gear and was featured in the current (Summer/Fall 2020) issue of the Mount Washington Valley Vibe magazine (p. 44). You can read it here.

Now, let's take a virtual hike to the Portland Museum of Art exhibit starting here.

Using the virtual navigation tools we can enter the exhibit and make our way to the painting we have explored above. We can click on the caption icon and read the community contributor's description.

Let's focus again on the knapsack in the painting.

We can then use the way finding tools on the exhibit's website to find another Winslow Homer depiction of another knapsack on display in the painting Artists Sketching in the White Mountains. 

You can see the knapsack in the lower left of the painting with the name "Homer" on it.

Here is a detail of it.

Below and to the left of the knapsack the painting is labeled "White Mts" and dated 1868. 

There is some controversy among art historians about the exact location of this viewpoint in the White Mountains. One prominent scholar says it was a mountain top, another a valley.

I believe the true answer is in the middle. I believe that it is a hill, specifically Conway's Sunset Hill, now the site of the Red Jacket Hotel. You can see Chocorua and the Three Sisters towards the left of the painting. 

A sketch used in developing the painting can be found at the Cooper Hewitt Museum here.  

Note there is no knapsack in the original sketch. 

Displayed next to the painting is a print related to the painting. It features a young lady admiring either the art or the artist, or perhaps both?

Here is a detail of the print. You can see the knapsack in the lower right of the image.

While the print maintains many of the elements seen in the painting, the background landscape has changed and it is no longer recognizable as a specific White Mountain location. It has been taken out of it's previous cartographic context. 

To the left of the print is the next Homer we will explore with ties to the Mount Washington Valley. 

The painting A Mountain Climber Resting can also be read for its imagery of outdoor gear.

Again can look at the gear, clothes, spats, hat, pipe, and walking stick. Unfortunately, this climber seems to have forgotten his knapsack. 

The exhibit website takes an very interesting approach to this painting, using a perspective I would never have considered, relating it to a Civil War veteran. You can read it here. 

However, I associate it with hiking Mount Washington as you will see. However, there is no river that can be seen like that near the summit in this painting, nor in the original sketch from which the painting is based. 

The sketch is at Cooper Hewitt Museum and can be seen here.

My viewpoint comes from a print in which Homer or an engraver combined the climber figure with others and placed them in a print that is clearly the summit of Mount Washington.

If you drill down into the print, note the building in the background held down with chains.

Upon closer inspection, the name "Tip-Top House" can be read.

Our family recently visited the summit and the somewhat altered Tip Top House is still there.

For the next chapter of the story let's look at the landscape behind the Tip Top House. 

 

Notice the small figures on horseback across the felsenmeer, a German based geological term for "sea of  rock."

The character in the back of the herd bears a striking resemblance to another of Homer's work, The Bridle Path. 

There are a number of preparatory sketches for this and a related painting scattered across the country. Here are some examples. It is interesting to see how Homer make changes as he developed his ideas.

 A number of scholars have suggested Homer was playing on the homophone title: bridle path (path for horses) and bridal path (leading to marriage).

While we were there this past weekend, we happened to catch a young woman (bride to be) proposing marriage at the summit of Mount Washington. Notice the cairn behind the couple. We found it interesting that the groom to be is a geologist and the young women is a marine biologist.

While it is of course, up to them, we understand that while the couple currently live in Florida, they may get married in the White Mountains. Perhaps they will incorporate a traditional means of transportation used in the White Mountains for their wedding such as this seen in Homer's Mountain Wagon. A number of these can be seen in museums around the area.

Thomas Cole's Autumn Tour Sept 30, 1828

One hundred ninety-two years ago today...

... Thomas Cole created this delicate artwork on his way to Conway, New Hampshire. Today it can be found at the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA). For more information see their website here.

Part of our operations at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room is connect diverse and distant collections to shed light on our shared local history. In this case, we will connect small towns in the Mount Washington Valley with collections in Albany New York, Detroit Michigan and Washington D.C.

Drawn with graphite (pencil) on off-white wove paper with watercolor highlights, this sketch was done on the second of Cole's three trips to New Hampshire. The other visits were in 1827 and 1839. This was his only trip during the autumn. The other two trips were during the summer. 

The 1828 trip is also the best documented.  Both Cole and his traveling companion Henry Cheever Pratt kept journals of their expedition. An article detailing the trip by Catherine Campbell is available through the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room. 

The DIA website allows you to enlarge the image.  The top of the page depicts a finely detailed group of pines. At the top left are five watercolor swatches.

Across the center of the page are some notations including the date and title used by the DIA. While it is hard to decipher all of the text, what I can make out has a very poetic sense to it. 

Just below the autumn colors can be read "Tints from Maples September 30, 1828."

It goes on to read... 

The gradation of colours was extremely beautiful
More brilliant than I have represented

The Maple is one of the most beautiful trees of the American Forest

Its stem rises gracefully with branches leaving it obliquely upwards and bending at the ends as

Beneath the weight of foliage - The foliage is luxuriant in the extreme. ...

…

...Autumn yellow, orange...  crimson tawny green, rich green, purple and ?

… gradations sometimes in one tree is seen ? the extremities of the

Higher branches orange or yellow in the lower parts and on the extremities of lower branches

The comes the … in the inferior parts. The bark is a delicate gray.

 

We will continue following in Thomas Cole's footsteps as he explores New Hampshire's autumn landscape.

 

I Fall for Autumn: Summer Leaves, Autumn Leaves

Today is the first day of autumn as my homonyms imply. Please visit our seasonal display near the Conway Public Library's entrance and let it lead you around the building as you fall into autumn.

The days will continue to get shorter until the winter solstice. It was 35 degrees this morning when I got in the car. Today's forecast was for a high of 63 degrees. Autumn colors are starting to show well especially on the edges of the wetlands. 

Today we pick apples and wander through corn fields just for fun. 

 

Then and now we craft corn husk dolls and celebrate the season with symbolic plants. 

We can purchase plastic shrink wrapped bales of straw for decorations. However, it was not that long ago that the "art of the harvest" was critical to survival.

These "stooked" stalks can be found on Conway's West Side Road.

 

Today many of us don't even know the difference between straw and hay, nor the intricacies of intriguing obsolete farming terminology such as sheaves, shocks, stooks, cocks and so on. For more on that see our previous blog here. 

The image on the left here is of a "scutching bee." Here is a larger image of the scene.

 

For more information on this traditional event see this link. 

The item with the sharp pointed spikes is called a hetchel or hackle. For more on this item, see our previous blog here on "growing clothes." 

There is also seasonal display of food related books at the library with titles such as root cellaring, putting food by, pickle, and can it that teach how the fruits of the fall harvest can be preserved using traditional methods that date back hundreds or even thousands of years.

We also have many cook books that describe how to make the most of the cornucopia of fall produce. 

Jeremy Belknap's History of New Hampshire lists some of the 18th century meals our early settler's enjoyed such as  samp, hominy, nokehike, succotash and upaquontop. He acknowledges the contribution of Native Americans to this cuisine and reports that "The lip of a moose, and the tail of a beaver, prepared in this manner, were among their greatest luxuries."

For more on this or any other local historical topic contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.

 

What's this about a Wizard?

Last week we received an incredible donation from Noel Quinton of over one-hundred postcards. It is a magnificently rich collection, full of potential stories that will help us unlock some of our local history mysteries. Here is the first of many more tales to come. This one attempts to map out a lost trail to a misplaced tourist attraction.

We start with this postcard from our new collection of a large tree labelled horizontally at the top right "The Wizard Birch, Intervale N.H." Along the right edge of the image it reads vertically "Copyrighted by N. Weston Pease, North Conway, N.H. 1577" (click on the image to enlarge it). 

In her Cow Hampshire blog (here), Janice Brown traced the tree's history and asked the question "where is it now?" (or more precisely where was it?) The obvious answer would seem to be in Intervale N.H. as noted on the postcard above, but it is harder to track down Intervale that it might first seem. The question is "which intervale?" There are several places with that name in the area. 

According to this website, Intervale is a village that spans two towns, Conway and Bartlett.  The Intervale post office (zip code 03845) is in Conway. Here is a Google satellite view showing that "Intervale."

To make it more confusing, all of the low lands on both sides of the Saco River are called intervales.

This use of the term can be seen here in Jeremy Belknap's 1792 History of New Hampshire and another postcard from the new donation helps illustrate the viewpoint. This is basically the same view you can see now from the Intervale scenic vista rest area.

The Cow Hampshire blog has another clue that may help. Janice includes a photo of the tree from the Library of Congress with the caption "Cathedral woods, Intervale, White Mountains; Detroit Publishing Company, 6 December 1900."

 

However, once again we have a problem - which Cathedral woods? There were at least two in the area. 

By coincidence we have a similar photo (without the people) on display in the history hall by the same company and the same year 1900 (which by coincidence was also the year the library's construction where that date is literally written in stone and more recently steel.  For more on that see our previous blog here). 

In a previous blog, we focused on the poster on the left of Cathedral Ledge located on the west side of the Saco River rising out of what is now called Cathedral Woods. Now we will move our attention down the hall to the next image on the left wall, in the hallway leading to the Henney History Room to an earlier Cathedral Woods on the east side of the Saco River, literally over the river and through the woods from the first. (we will map this out and try to explain that below).

Here is a closer view of that image.

At the bottom left it reads "015104. THE WIZARD TREE, CATHEDRAL WOOD, INTERVALE, WHITE MOUNTAINS"

Details on the original copyright for that photo can be found here.

On the bottom right it reads "COPYRIGHT 1900 BY DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO." 

On the left on the map above can be seen the road leading to Cathedral Ledge. The woods at the base of the ledge are now known as Cathedral Woods. However the older Cathedral Woods were over at the top right in Intervale.

John Cannell who lived in the area and remembered the location of the tree sketched a map on the back of our photo. It locates the tree close to the Intervale train station near the Abenaki Gift Shop.

While the Intervale train station has been moved away and now serves as a residence, the area can be identified by nearby buildings and other physical remains of the past. 

 

This postcard can be found on the Bartlett Historical Society here along with some relevant information. 

 

Here is that view today. 

 

The station sign still stands.

 

And the train still passes by. 

Pease also did a stereoview photograph labelled Cathedral Woods... 

... as well as a later colorized postcard of Cathedral Woods.

Here is another Pease postcard entitled Cathedral Woods, Intervale, N.H.

We know this was the Cathedral Woods on the east side of the Saco as the titles locate it in Intervale. Also period photos show that what today is called Cathedral Woods (on the west side of the Saco) had been clear cut during that time, so there were no woods there.

To add even more to the mystery, the new donation also includes the following post cards with similar, but not identical scenes, entitled "Enchanted Woods, North Conway, N.H."

 Below is another "Enchanted Woods."

So is enchanted woods the same as the early cathedral woods?  Let's turn to another photographer of the Wizard Birch, T.E.M White.

Both Pease and White ran ads in the The White Mountain Echo newspaper (August 27, 1881 p. 14).  

Here is a detail of the ads (seen in the red box above).

Note the last two lines of White's ad "House on the edge of the "Enchanted Woods," adjacent to the Indian Tent."

You can see the locations of both the White and Pease studios on the map below from another issue of The White Mountain Echo (click on image to enlarge it).  

You can find a short bio on Pease here showing his house where Joe Jones is now across from the North Conway Public Library he worked so hard to develop (click on image to enlarge it). 

 

For more information on this wonderful collection contact us at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room.