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Atlantic Monthly

Lady Blanche Forsakes Her English Manor for True Love in the White Mountains

One rainy day in the autumn of 1875, a writer named A.A. Smith met Lady Blanche Murphy, the daughter of an earl, on a sidewalk in North Conway, N.H.

She was a “graceful little figure wrapped in a gray waterproof walking with a quick elastic step, the fresh rosy face fair as a flower framed in thick golden brown hair,” he wrote.

Lady Blanche Murphy, courtesy Bartlett Historical Society

Lady Blanche was also a writer. She wrote magazine stories for money because her father had disowned her for marrying a commoner. Her husband found a job in New Hampshire, which is how she ended up on a North Conway sidewalk. Eventually, Lady Blanche would buy a rustic cottage near the shadow of Humphreys Ledge in nearby Bartlett.

The year before she died, she would publish an essay about the first-ever Christmas tree in her adopted town.

Lady Blanche

Lady Blanche was born on March 25, 1845, the eldest of the five children of Charles George Noel. Her father served as a member of Parliament and high sheriff of Rutland. Then in 1866 he succeeded his father as Earl of Gainsborough and entered the House of Lords.

Her mother, the former Lady Ida Hay, was the daughter of an illegitimate daughter of King William IV and his Irish mistress. That didn’t bother Queen Victoria, his niece. The queen agreed to be Lady Blanche’s godmother.

Exton Hall

Her birthday fell on Lady Day. Roman Catholics celebrate it as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus Christ. Her parents gave her the name of Lady Blanche Elizabeth Mary Annunciata Noel.

Before her fifth birthday, her parents publicly announced their conversion to Roman Catholicism on New Year’s Day in 1850. They belonged to the Tractarian movement, which held the Church of England had grown “too plain.” The Tractarians wanted to include liturgy and ceremony from the Middle Ages into the Anglican Church.

Growing Up

Her parents had her privately tutored at home, a baronial mansion called Exton Hall. She learned Italian, French, German and Spanish, and some Latin and Greek. She also traveled through Italy and Germany, trips that she would later describe in magazines when she needed money.

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning met her in her eighteenth year and described his impressions in a letter to her father. “I thought her quick, observant and thoughtful, and in character decided and independent beyond her years,” he wrote. He noted that she had visited Rome and talked about Garibaldi. “[But] she was too truly Christian and Catholic to sympathize in anything opposed either to the faith or to the Holy See.”

Cardinal Manning

Then, in a prescient observation, the cardinal wrote, “Though she had been born and brought up with all the surroundings of the world, and with all the relations and associations which draw other minds under its influence, she seemed to me not only to be unattracted by such influences, but to be repelled by them. I thought I saw a reaction against them and a decided tendency to break through the conventionalities of her life.”

Thomas Murphy

Lady Blanche’s parents hired a handsome young Irishman named Thomas Murphy to tutor their children in music. He played the organ in the Exton Hall chapel, where the family attended daily Mass. Blanche sang in the choir.

A.A. Smith later described Thomas Murphy as a fine musician. “[H]e is sympathetic, cordial, warm hearted in his manners, well educated.”

Americans would find nothing strange, wrote Smith, “that in the hours spent singing together after matins or vespers in the chapel, the glad young voices pouring through the chapel windows, making the old woods ring, the young enthusiastic Lady Blanche and the impulsive young organist fell in love with each other.”

Her father, dismayed and furious when he finally found out, forbade them to wed. The daughter of an earl did not marry a commoner in 1870.

Elopement

Lady Blanche and her unacceptable boyfriend eloped to London in March 1870. After their wedding they sailed for the United States on the Plymouth Rock, landing in New York.

Isaac Hecker

Disinherited and unemployed, the newlyweds tried to find work. According to the story, they had no money, and when they hadn’t eaten for 24 hours Lady Blanche sold her earrings for a loaf of bread. She said it was the best meal she ever had.

While in New York, Lady Blanche met Father Isaac Hecker. An activist priest, he had founded the Catholic World publication as well as the Paulist Fathers, a religious society of men.

Hecker put them in touch with employers, Thomas with the Kearsarge School for Boys in North Conway and Lady Blanche with magazine publishers. They took their sparse belongings to New Hampshire and boarded with the founder of the Kearsarge School. Thomas taught French and music, and he may have worked as an organist at the local Catholic Church.

Lady Blanche wrote for Father Hecker’s magazine, Catholic World. She also wrote essays on English high life and the English nobility for the Galaxy. Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly published her work, and she drew on her familiarity with Europe to write travel pieces for Lippincott’s.

Lady Blanche also stayed in touch with her family. Soon word got out that the unassuming wife of the schoolteacher received letters addressed to “Lady Blanche.”

Bartlett, N.H.

The story goes that Lady Blanche came into some money and bought a house and a small farm in Bartlett, N.H., a town in the Mount Washington Valley. Either her father relented and sent her an annuity, or an aunt had left her some money.

Bartlett Haystack Mountain

The Murphys did not live together in the house for long. Lady Blanche died after a short illness on March 21, 1881, only 36 years old.

Three days after she died, Bishop James Healey said a Gregorian funeral Mass for her in Portland. Her body was then shipped to England, according to the New York Times.

“Her remains will find a last earthly place in the family’s vault on the estate of her father in Exon [sic], England, and will be placed by the side of her mother, who died many years ago,” the Times reported.

Thomas Murphy moved to a boardinghouse, but kept the farm. He eventually found his way to Boston, where he died. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery.

First Christmas Tree

Just before Lady Blanche died she had written a description of the Mount Washington Valley’s first Christmas tree. It appeared in the March 1881 edition of the London Graphic.

Lady Blanche described the valley as “a backwoods (where) the necessities of cold weather stifle the chance of keeping up the etiquette of civilized life.”

Just before Christmas in 1880, she wrote, “a few of the more travelled individuals in the neighborhood had the bright idea of having a Christmas tree, a novelty in this district where the children had never seen one.”

As an English Catholic, Lady Blanche noted the “puritanical seriousness” of a meeting in a neighbor’s house, held to discuss the tree. “To an outsider, this particular Christmas meeting would have suggested a funeral,” she wrote.

They decided in favor of a tree “to give the children a little amusement” and named a committee of four to set it up.

“[A]n American feature of Christmas trees, which I believe is not known in England, is the ‘Santa Claus’ who distributes the gifts and is required to make jokes and have ready ‘smart’ sayings fitted to the occasion,” she wrote. “We had to choose one among the committee to undertake this part.”

The local men trekked through deep snow to cut down a suitable tree, which they set up in the schoolhouse, she wrote.

The Gods Deliver Lady Blanche

“The men did little but that, and the women spent their spare time popping corn and stringing it bead-like (a very pretty decoration, as the grains of “popcorn” take all sorts of surprising shapes when held over the hot coals) … and otherwise arranging presents.”

Candles and lanterns illuminated the little schoolhouse, and a local woman spelled out in evergreens, “A merry Christmas to all.”

Because the tree was too tall for the room, they stuck the top into a stovepipe hole in the ceiling. “On a bristling crown of stout nails round the hole … hang some of the abundant gifts and ornaments,” wrote Lady Blanche.

The novelty of the tree attracted a crowd. “About 60 more people than the place was built to hold (for a host of strangers beyond the district insisted on coming to witness our modest efforts).

Then the adults called on some children to recite little pieces and sing hymns. Lady Blanche didn’t think much of the practice, calling it ” a foolish habit much in favor in the United States — the gods deliver Englishmen from it.”

In the end, though, she wrote that the Christmas tree did what it was supposed to. “The children were delighted, the tree was a success, and many of the grown people, who also had never seen one, were immensely pleased.”

That Christmas, Lady Blanche had given presents to all her neighbors. When she died, the man who worked for them on the farm was said to have wept like a child.

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

Images: Haystack By Ken Gallager – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92244583. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Ladies of Gray, Maine, Bury an Unknown Confederate Soldier

The Ladies of Gray had good reason to despise the Confederacy and its people. The small Maine town sent 200 of its sons—more than a tenth of its population–to fight for the Union in the Civil War. There are 178 Civil war veterans resting in peace at the Gray Village Cemetery.

Maine sent proportionately more men to serve in the Union forces than any other state. Gray claimed to have sent more men per capita than any other town in Maine.

But, in a foreshadowing of Memorial Day ceremonies that started after the war, the Ladies of Gray showed compassion and forgiveness for the Confederate soldier who arrived in their midst.

Intersection of Greenleaf and Brown in Gray.

Ladies of Gray

Gray at the outbreak of the Civil War had about 1,700 residents and a woolen mill, the first in America powered by water. The town also had sawmills, a brickyard and prosperous farms.

The son of a prominent Gray family, Charles H. Colley, enlisted in the 10th Maine Infantry Regiment on Oct. 4, 1861.

On Aug. 9, 1862, Sgt. Colley was wounded in the knee at the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Culpeper, Va. Promoted to second lieutenant, the 29-year-old died of septicemia on September 20 in a hospital in Washington, D.C.

The Battle of Cedar Mountain by Currier & Ives.

When notified of his death, his family asked to have his body sent home to Gray. During the war, funeral directors loitered around the hospitals, offering to embalm the dead—for a price, of course. Colley’s grieving mother Sally arranged to have her son’s body embalmed and shipped by rail back to Gray.

When the plain, lead-lined casket arrived, someone—probably a family member—opened the lid. Charles Colley wasn’t in it. Instead, an unidentified Confederate soldier dressed in his gray uniform lay in the pine box.

They had no place to return the body. And so the Ladies of Gray had the unknown Confederate soldier buried in the Gray Village Cemetery. After the war, they raised enough money for a headstone on his final resting place. It reads,

“Stranger

A Soldier of the late war died 1862.”

Memorial Day

Ladies all over the country were doing something similar. People on both sides began to long for reconciliation after the agony and bloodshed of the war. The women’s groups began to act on that impulse.

The Ladies of Gray raised money for this headstone of a Stranger.

In Columbus, Miss., a women’s memorial association visited the local cemetery on April 25, 1866. They put flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers who died at Shiloh. Nearby were the bare graves of Union soldiers who had also died at Shiloh. That disturbed the ladies of Columbus, so they put some of their flowers on those tombs.

That act of kindness, so similar to that of the Ladies of Gray, inspired Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to publish an editorial about it. The Atlantic Monthly also published a poem called “The Blue and the Gray” by Francis Miles Finch.

Women’s groups all over the country began decorating the graves of the war dead with flowers. Today, at least 25 towns claim credit as the birthplace of Memorial Day.

The first national Memorial Day – then called Decoration Day – happened on May 30, 1868. Gen John Logan, commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued an order “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

A few days later, Washington officials, including Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over a national ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. From then until 1871, the United States celebrated May 30 as Decoration Day.

In 1971, the federal government changed Decoration Day to Memorial Day, to be held on the last Monday in May.

Charles H. Colley

Perhaps the Ladies of Gray still have some work to do. Charles H. Colley’s family asked the Army to send them the right body. They may not have looked inside that time.

The Gray Village Cemetery.

In the Gray Village Cemetery lies a soldier with the headstone, Charles H. Colley. According to the inscription, he was ‘among the first to rally in defense of his Country.’

But it t appears the Army failed. According to War Department records, Charles H. Colley is still buried in a cemetery in Alexandria, Va., that preceded Arlington.

So is there a second unknown soldier in Gray, Maine?

Image of the Stranger’s headstone By DetroitWheels74 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77620758. Image of Gray Village Cemetery By RootsLilla – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42261992. With thanks to Confederates in the Attic (and Maine cemeteries, too) from Maine at War by Brian Swartz. This story was updated in 2022.

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Touched With Fire – Oliver Wendell Holmes and America’s Deadliest Day

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., left Boston in 1861 an ideological foot soldier for the Union Army. He returned from the war – thanks to some amazing luck – a somber, pragmatic man whose father made him a household name.

Holmes served as a lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, known as the Harvard Regiment because it drew all its officers and many of its members from Harvard University. Holmes had just graduated when he departed Boston to fight for the great cause of his day – the abolition of slavery.

Oliver Wendell Holmes – junior and senior

Holmes’ mother was an ardent abolitionist. His father – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., – opposed slavery, but far less adamantly than his hot-headed son. Holmes, Sr.. was a physician and best-selling author, poet and essayist. He felt both pride and fear for his son.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at War

The 20^th Massachusetts missed out on the first battle of Bull Run. After that it engaged in every major Civil War battle until the fighting ended. Holmes, Jr., was wounded three times.

He first was shot in the chest at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. He nearly died. Holmes’ father had given him a supply of laudanum to take with him. He almost took the medicine to end his life because he believed he was near to death. His field doctors persuaded him to hold off.

Holmes took a train to head back to Boston to recuperate, and his father travelled to Pennsylvania to meet his son and bring him home.

After a six-month convalescence, Holmes returned to his unit. In June of 1862 at the Battle of Glendale the true cost of the war became clear to the young officer. As the Union and Confederate Armies lined up to do battle, he scanned down the line of soldiers and saw his cousin. He gave a salute, then looked away. When he looked back his cousin had gone. Dead.

Three months later the 20^th Massachusetts assembled as part of the massive Union force that would square off against the rebels at Antietam in Maryland. It was the first attempt by the southern forces to attack in the north, and it was the deadliest day ever in America. Thousands died on both sides. Casualties topped 20,000.

Dead confederate artillery men littering the battlefield at Antietam

The northern forces won, but the immense cost made it a national tragedy. The victory gave Abraham Lincoln the lift he needed to announce his Emancipation Proclamation. That effectively blocked the British from aiding the southern states. The anti-slavery British would never join with the confederacy in reestablishing slavery once abolished.

Back in Boston, Holmes, Sr., received a telegram the day after the battle. His son had been shot again – this time through the neck. The father’s mind flooded with fear, and he joined others heading south to again rescue their sons.

The Journey South

Holmes, Sr., would write about his journey for Atlantic magazine. He told of the bodies stacked atop one another, the wounded everywhere. Holmes bounced from town to town and hospital to hospital on the trail of his son, always just one step behind. He finally stationed himself in Harrisburg, searching among the wounded on train after train coming north. His story of his journey movingly captured the fears of all Americans for the soldiers at war . It also crystalized the risks the young took on the battlefields.

Finally Holmes found his son in the first seat on a northbound train. Their greeting to each other seemed remarkably free of emotion: “How are you, boy?” senior said. “How are you, father?” replied junior. In publishing his story, Holmes made his son famous – an everyman and hero in the war for the union.

A Third Time

Holmes, Jr., would recover and return to his unit, but he hadn’t finished dodging death. One final time he was shot in the heel at Chancellorsville in 1863.

The 20^th Massachusetts would fight until the end of the war, but Holmes declined to reenlist when his time was up in 1864. Exhausted and sick of war, he returned home and to Harvard, where he studied law. Though Holmes went on to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice for nearly 30 years, his experience in the Civil War was the greatest event in his life. He would always remember it with pride and sadness.

Speaking to a group of veterans, he said: “…the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.

But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.”

This story was updated in 2022.

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Louisa May Alcott Shakes Off the Blues

One day in 1857, Louisa May Alcott walked to the Mill Dam in Boston’s Back Bay, stared into the Charles River and thought about throwing herself into it. She was 24, poor, discouraged and unable to find a job to help support her family.

Louisa May Alcott

Looking into the river, she talked herself out of suicide. In a letter to her family, she wrote that it

…seemed so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over that I went home, set my teeth & vowed I’d make things work in spite of the world, the flesh & the devil.

She resolved ‘to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.’

A decade later, Little Women brought her fame and fortune. But not before her beloved sister died, the Civil War broke out and she developed a debilitating chronic illness.

Growing Up

Louisa May Alcott was born in what is now Philadelphia on Nov. 29, 1832, her father’s 33^rd birthday. Like Jo March, the main character in Little Women, she was the second of four sisters. Like Jo, she was a tomboy. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters,” she once wrote. Her mother, Abigail May, was the model for Marmee.

Louisa May Alcott wrote her father out of Little Women, sending the Father March character off to the Civil War. She probably knew Bronson Alcott, a 19^th century hippie, wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

Bronson Alcott abandoned his first career as a traveling salesman because he thought it would ruin his soul. He became a vegan and turned to teaching. He once lost all of his students after admitting a young African-American girl 25 years before slavery was abolished. Alcott also started a Transcendentalist utopia called Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass., but that, like so many of his ventures, failed.

Growing Up

When Louisa May Alcott was two, the family moved to Boston. Much of her life was spent in Concord, Mass., where she knew many of the household names of the 19^th century. William Lloyd Garrison was a close family friend after he, her parents and a few others formed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. She knew Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Elizabeth Peabody boarded with the Alcotts, and John Brown’s daughter lived with them after Brown was hanged. Nathanael Hawthorne was a neighbor who didn’t get along with her father, Henry David Thoreau was her schoolteacher and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived next door. Bronson Alcott’s teaching assistants included Margaret Fuller and Dorothea Dix.

For all that proximity to fame, the Alcotts struggled to survive. Alcott believed in the ‘sweetness of self denial’ — a convenient philosophy for someone who couldn’t support his wife and four daughters. Their poverty combined with Bronson Alcott’s ideas about nutrition meant their diet consisted of unleavened bread, porridge, potatoes, squash, rice, graham meal and water. Sometimes Louisa May and her sisters went hungry. One year, they ate apple pudding for their Thanksgiving dinner.

Art Imitates Life

Louisa May Alcott 1940 commemorative stamp

At an early age, Louisa May Alcott went to work to help support her family. There weren’t many jobs available to women then, and none of her jobs paid well. She worked as a companion to invalids, as a maid, as a seamstress, as a teacher, which she disliked. She later wrote a semi-autobiographical book about those jobs called Work, A Story of Experience.

In Work, Christie Devon, her main character, can’t find work and thinks about killing herself. Christie stands on a bridge, looking down at swirling black water, and says to herself, “I must go.” An old friend happens to pass by and saves her from herself.

In real life, Louisa May Alcott walked away from the Mill Dam and started going to Sunday meeting. She followed the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who preached a message of social activism. One Sunday, Parker preached a sermon called ‘Laborious Young Women’ in which he advised, Don’t be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work till you can find the task you want.

Louisa May Alcott presented herself at his door. Parker wasn’t home, but his wife was. She put her in touch with a woman named Hannah Stevenson, who helped her find a job working four hours a day as a governess.

No More Sisterhood

The next year, her younger sister Elizabeth died and her older sister Anna got married. Louisa May felt her sisterhood was broken up, but she soldiered on. In 1860, she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly.

By 1862 she was officially a spinster. Approaching 30, she went to Washington, D.C., to work as a Civil War nurse. There she became ill with typhoid fever. She would never fully recover from what she thought was the doctor’s ministrations of mercury.

There was an upside: Her letters home about the Civil War hospital were published as Hospital Sketches and earned her critical recognition. She was then able to make a living writing novels under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard.

Little Women

Back home at the age of 36 she angrily began writing Little Women at her publisher’s request. She didn’t want to write a girls’ book, but she persevered. The book was hugely successful, enabling the Alcott family to live in comfort and Louisa to write best-selling novels for the next 20 years. Of the surprising success of ‘Little Women,’ she wrote, “It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational but simple and true, for we really lived most of it.”

Over the course of her lifetime, Louisa May Alcott produced 200 literary works, including children’s books, serious novels, pulp fiction and suspense novels. One, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was first published in 1995 and became a best seller.

Louisa May Alcott may have remembered her low moment by the Charles River when she wrote

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

With thanks to American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever and Eden’s Outcasts: Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson.

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James Russell Lowell Finds Mrs. Right

James Russell Lowell, a scion of the prominent New England Lowell family, was as great an ass at Harvard ‘as ever brayed and thought it singing.’ So he said.

It was a woman who straightened him out after years of floundering: his first wife, Maria White.

James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell was born Feb. 22, 1819 at Elmwood, the Lowell estate in Cambridge. He was the son of the Rev. Charles Russell Lowell and Harriett Brackett Spence Lowell.

At 15, he entered Harvard, where he read travelogues, romances, plays and poems – everything but the textbooks prescribed by the Harvard faculty.

As a sophomore he skipped class 56 times and chapel 14 times. As a senior, he said, “During freshman year, I did nothing, during sophomore year I did nothing, during junior year I did nothing, and during senior year I have thus far done nothing in the way of college studies.”

Elmwood

He did graduate, though, and enrolled in Harvard Law School. Two years later, he was admitted to the bar. He said he so hated being a lawyer he once pointed a cocked pistol at his own head. He didn’t pull the trigger, though.

Throughout his academic and legal career, Lowell wrote poetry. And when he met another poet, Maria White, in 1839, everything changed. He became a renowned poet, diplomat, Harvard professor and editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

The Better Poet

Maria White

He called her ‘half of earth and more than of Heaven.’ Amy Lowell, a later Lowell family poet, wrote Maria White was a better poet than James: “That is poetry! It is better than anything her husband ever wrote, and he always said that she was a better poet than he.”

She died 12 years into their marriage. He soldiered on.

James Russell Lowell died Aug. 12, 1891 at Elmwood. Today, Elmwood is a National Historic Landmark in the midst of the National Historic Landmark District in Cambridge, Mass. Since the 1970s, it has been the home of Harvard’s presidents.

Photo: Detail from ‘James Russell Lowell, 1844,’ by an unknown photographer. Digital Commonwealth. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Detail from ‘Maria White,’ by Frederick Langenheim and William Langenheim. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Elmwood By Midnightdreary – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5578063. This story was updated in 2022.

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Sarah Orne Jewett Spends the Night in the White Mountains

Sarah Orne Jewett traveled in 19th-century international literary circles, but it was the White Mountains, the ocean and the people of her native New England that inspired her. She was an early feminist writer whose masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, described provincial life in southern Maine.

Jewett viewed the world through the lens of Romanticism, which celebrated the picturesque life of common folk and the sublimity of nature. Awe was an emotion to be cultivated, especially in the presence of majestic landscapes. Her description of her trip to the mountains reveals her visionary union with nature.

Mount Washington from Sunset Hill by Benjamin Champney

In the summer of 1872, she was 22 years old and had already been published in The Atlantic Monthly. She wrote about the otherworldly experience of climbing Mount Washington in New Hampshire in her Aug. 8, 1872 journal entry.

“I may travel to the ends of the earth and see more wonderful things than I have ever dreamed of now, but one thing is certain: I never shall be standing on the top of a mountain for the first time again!” she wrote. She had just come home from her first visit to the “White Hills,” and spent one night and part of the next day on Mount Washington.

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine on Sept. 3, 1849, the granddaughter of a sea captain and the daughter of a well-to-do country doctor. She spent about half of her adult life in South Berwick. The other half she spent traveling in Europe and in Boston’s literary circles, notably at the salon of James T. Fields and his wife Annie Fields.

Sophisticated and worldly, but never lost touch with her village, her roots as a country doctor’s daughter or her natural surroundings.

She introduced her readers to the traditions of Southern Maine. Critics more recently recognized her as a feminist chronicler of women’s lives. She wrote about independent women, mostly single like herself. They supported themselves by the means available to them in the 19th-century countryside.

Jewett wrote short stories, poems, novels and children’s books during her lifetime. She made her reputation in her mid-40s with The Country of Pointed Firs.

The White Mountains

Sarah Orne Jewett

Her account of her visit to the mountains reveals an adventurous spirit and a romantic sensibility.

“I can understand people’s being afraid of the mountains and imagining them gods themselves, or peopled with creatures not of this earth,” she wrote. “It did not seem as if I were in the world I had been born and brought up in.”

What had become of all the houses and the people and the climbing and pushing and falling and laughing and crying? It had all been taken away for a while, there were rocks and clouds — and the hills were alive.

She then compared the mountains to huge giants crouching there asleep. They waited “for the day when they are to rise up and march away with their bowed heads lifted, chanting with their great voices, with Mt Washington for the captain, a grand and solemn and stately procession.”

A Religious Experience

She wondered if the mountains meant as much to everyone else as they did to her. “Their strength teaches me what God’s strength is like,” she wrote. “[A]nd the wonderfulness of them grows greater and greater to me.”

As they climbed the mountain, she kept thinking of the Psalms. “It was so good to “lift my eyes unto the hills,” she wrote. “I thought most of the Psalm which begins “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

Then she wrote of her fear to “ascend into the hill of the Lord.” Her hands, she wrote, were soiled with the wicked things she had done. Her heart was far from pure.

“Somehow I could not help taking it literally, for there was the hill of the Lords and there was I — And when I said it over and over again to myself and came to the last verses, I could not believe anything else but that these were the very gates and that the King of Glory was coming very soon.”

This story was updated in 2021.

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