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Barnstable Mass.

Six Oldest Libraries in New England

Identifying New England’s oldest libraries is no easy task. In the early days of European settlement, book collections took many different forms.

Many New England libraries evolved over time from private collections to public institutions. Philanthropists founded some, while collective town actions resulted in others.

Many New England towns claim to have the oldest libraries in their state. In New Hampshire, for example, the Portsmouth Athenaeum was founded as a private library in 1817, 16 years before the Peterborough Town Library. But Peterborough, funded by taxpayers from the start, claims to be the oldest tax-supported library.

We decided to exercise our editorial prerogative and limit our list to the oldest libraries that lend books. So Peterborough in, Portsmouth out.

Here are six of the oldest libraries in New England, one in each state. If you have a candidate for oldest library, please mention it in the comment section below this story.

Scoville Library

Connecticut’s oldest library is in Salisbury.

The Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, Conn., started in 1771 when a local blast furnace owner named Richard Smith offered to buy 200 books from London. But the rest of the town had to chip in, and 39 people contributed. On the third Monday of every third month, patrons could borrow and return books. The library fined them for damaging books, usually by greasing – letting candle wax drip on the pages.

In 1805, another local philanthropist named Caleb Bingham donated the Bingham Library for Youth. Then Miss Harriet Church donated the Church Library. Town Meeting in 1810 voted to authorize selectmen to spend $100 to buy more books for the town library.

The library now claims to be the oldest publicly funded library in the United States.

Jonathan Scoville in the 1890s left $15,000 in his will to build a library for the town’s books, then kept in Town Hall. Miss Grace Scoville bought a tower clock, which still chimes on the quarter hour. Salisbury Cathedral in England sent the library a 15^th-century stone carving, which the library placed above the fireplace in the reading room.

The library has recently redesigned its interior and now has 30,000 items, including the original books, genealogy and history of the town. Incidentally, settlers came to Salisbury after the discovery of iron nearby, and during the American Revolution the government took over the iron works to cast cannon.

38 Main St., Salisbury, Conn.

Witherle Memorial Library

Maine’s oldest municipal library is in Castine.

The Witherle Memorial Library in Castine, Maine, began in 1801 as a private collection of books that only paid subscribers could use. The Town of Castine took over the library in 1827 and established it as Maine’s first municipal library in 1855.

Local ships chandlers George and Mary Witherle donated the money for the land and the building’s foundation. The building itself was finished in 1913. Today the library has more than 13,000 volumes and local history collections, including the story of Castine’s founder, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. It also includes the history of the Penobscot Expedition; books by and about Civil War journalist Noah Brooks; and the letters of Union Army soldier Henry Butler to his wife during the Civil War.

41 School St., Castine, Maine

Sturgis Library

Barnstable, Mass., has one of the oldest libraries in New England and the oldest US building used as a library.

The Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Mass., is the oldest building in the United States to house a public library. The original part of the library was built in 1644 as the house of Rev. John Lothrop (also spelled Lothropp or Lathrop).

Lothrop immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, having been imprisoned in England as an outspoken Puritan who advocated independence for congregations. He was pardoned after he agreed to leave for the New World. Lothrop landed in Plymouth and settled in Barnstable on Cape Cod in 1639, one of the town’s first settlers. In New England, Lothrop strongly supported the separation of church and state.

He married twice and had 13 children. Today his descendants number 80,000, including six U.S. presidents (the Bushes, Franklin Roosevelt, Millard Fillmore, James A. Garfield and Ulysses S. Grant).

One of his descendants, William Sturgis, made a fortune in the China trade. When he died in 1863, he bequeathed his family home, $15,000 and his books for a public library.

The first two rooms of the house were used for religious worship, so the Sturgis Library also has the distinction of being the oldest building in the United States used regularly for religious services. The Lothrop Room is quintessential early Cape, with wide pumpkin pine floorboards and a beamed ceiling.

It’s located on the Old King’s Highway, and has 65,000 books the Cape Cod History Collection, the most important collection of its kind in the United States; the Kittredge Maritime Collection, one of the finest maritime collections on the East Coast; and the Lothrop Genealogy Collection.

3090 Main St., Barnstable, Mass.

Peterborough Town Library

oldest libraries Town_Library,_Peterborough,_NH

Taxpayers started one of New Hampshire’s oldest libraries.

The Peterborough Town Library, founded in 1833, is the oldest taxpayer-supported free library in New Hampshire.

Unitarian minister Abiel Abbot had the idea for a collection of books owned by the people and free to everyone who lived in Peterborough. The State of New Hampshire made money available for it. A capital stock tax had been intended to build a state university, but it didn’t raise enough money. Hence, the state created a Literary Fund, and Peterborough decided to use it for books.

On April 9, 1833, Town Meeting approved the library on the principle that, like the public school, it deserved maintenance by public taxation. The people of the community should also own and manage it.

The town bought 100 books and put them in Smith and Thompson’s General Store, along with the post office. The postmaster acted as librarian until 1854, when the town appointed Miss Susan Gates to take care of the town library books. In 1873, the growing collection of books moved to Town Hall. Within two decades Peterborough had 6,000 books and not nearly enough room. So in 1893, the town gave the library own building designed by noted bridge engineer and summer resident George Shattuck Morison. The collection now includes more than 50,000 volumes.

2 Concord St., Peterborough, N.H.

Redwood Library

A great philosopher founded one of New England’s oldest libraries.

The Redwood Library and Athenaeum started off as a 45-member literary society founded by Bishop George Berkeley, the great Irish philosopher. Berkeley moved to Rhode Island in 1729 to start a college. The Company of the Redwood Library in Newport, R.I., was founded in 1747 for the purpose of ‘having nothing in view but the good of mankind.’

Newport merchant Abraham Redwood gave the library 500 pounds sterling to buy 751 used books from London.

When the British occupied Newport in 1776, they used the library as an officers’ club. Many of the books disappeared. In 1806, the library began advertising for their return, but didn’t get many back. In 1947, the library staff tried again and recovered 92 percent of the missing volumes or copies of them.

Peter Harrison, the first professionally trained architect in the United States, designed the building. He later designed Newport’s Brick Market and Touro Synagogue. Ezra Stiles, who later helped found Brown University and served as president of Yale, served as its most well-known librarian.

The Redwood Library and Athenaeum is the oldest community library still occupying its original building. Unlike the Peabody Library in Vermont, the Redwood is private. It began charging $10 for admission in 2016.

50 Bellevue Ave., Newport, R.I.

Peabody Library

Thetford, Vt., has one of the oldest libraries in New England because of George Peabody.

The Peabody Library in the Post Mills Village of Thetford, Vt., was built in 1867, making it the oldest active library in the state federation of public libraries. George Peabody gave it to the town as a gift.

In the first decade of the 19^th century, Peabody was a teenager from South Danvers, Mass., who wanted to visit his grandfather in Post Mills. Too poor to pay for a horse or carriage, he walked for 10 days He chopped wood for innkeepers along the way and slept in their stables. Once he arrived he then spent the winter with his grandfather and became close to his aunt and uncle.

By 1867 Peabody acquired great wealth and gave some of it away from his home in England. He gave the village $5,000 to pay for land, building construction and 1,500 volumes from a London book dealer. Peabody founded and endowed museums at Harvard, Yale, and Salem, Mass. He also gave a Peabody Conservatory of Music and Peabody Institute Libraries in Baltimore, Danvers, Newburyport, Mass., and Georgetown, Mass. The town of South Danvers renamed itself Peabody in his honor.

Today in Thetford the one-room library building still has a long wooden table and rows of white bookshelves. Two curved staircases lead to an open balcony. Everything in the building is original except for the carpet and the paint.

Today the library has 6,000 volumes, DVDs, audio, e-books and WiFi – which some people who don’t patronize the library use while sitting outside.

7922 VT Route 113 (Junction of Routes 113 and 244), Post Mills, Vt.

End Notes

Images: Scoville Library By Phinisi Stuart – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21632787; Sturgis Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22634220; Redwood Library, By slgckgc – The Redwood Public Library, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38248325; Peabody Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Post Mills, VermontUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29767643

This story about New England’s oldest libraries was updated in 2021.

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A Brief History of New England Town Meeting Controversies

The first Town Meeting controversies didn’t have anything to do with buying a new fire truck or a proposed zoning law, but whether Town Meeting should even happen in the first place.

When John Winthrop arrived on the shore of Massachusetts to build a city on a hill, he didn’t have Town Meeting in mind at all.

Town Meeting, Woodstock, Vt., 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The First Town Meeting Controversies

During their Great Migration to New England, the Puritans fled the monarchy, not the monarch. Massachusetts Bay Colony hardly started out as a bastion of representative democracy. Members of the General Court elected themselves for life in 1630.

But the Puritans had also brought with them English ideas of the rights of subjects and of constitutional guarantees against arbitrary power. As a result, freemen struggled against the lifers in Massachusetts’ General Court.

In 1632 they got the right to elect two people from each plantation (an early version of a township) to confer with the Court about raising a public stock. They also agitated to elect their representatives annually.

In 1639, the Rev. Nathaniel Ward cautioned against allowing the freemen to vote on laws. “I see the spirits of the people runne high and what they get they hould,” he wrote.

John Winthrop

Town Meeting Gets Started in Connecticut

To the south of Massachusetts, the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven had more democratic leanings. Winthrop wrote to Thomas Hooker in 1639 telling him he thought the leaders of Connecticut’s government shouldn’t have submitted its constitution to the people.

And on June 4, 1639, in New Haven Colony, a Town Meeting took place when “all the free planters assembled together in a general meeting to consult about settling Civill government according to God.”

Winthrop was fighting a losing battle.

Early Town Meeting

At first, Town Meeting handled all civil affairs. In the earliest days, for example, Dorchester, Mass., held Town Meeting every Monday at 8 a.m.

The colonists realized that was an unwieldy way to do business. So they limited Town Meeting issues to taxes, appropriations and other recurring items. They made attendance mandatory and imposed fines on those who didn’t show up.

In colonial elections, only male property owners could vote. But in Town Meeting, all adult male taxpayers voted. Early town meetings dealt with grants of land, bridges and pounds, the appointment of fence viewers, loose animals, alms for the poor, bounties for wolves, ministers’ salaries and provisions for churches and schools. Early Puritan towns sometimes elected ‘seaters’ to affix the relative rank and dignity of the meetinghouse seats.

Whatever was discussed at town meetings was discussed thoroughly. That still holds true, sometimes to the despair of the meeting-goers. During the all-day meetings, men chewed on meeting house seeds — dill or caraway — to promote concentration.

The Revolutionary Town Meeting

Massachusetts royal governor William Shirley viewed Town Meeting as a crucible of democracy. Not a good thing, to his way of thinking.

In his book, The Unknown American Revolution, historian Gary Nash quotes Shirley complaining about the “Mobbish turn in this town.” Shirley blamed it on the constitution, by which the management of it is devovl’d upon the populace assembled in their town meetings.” The “meanest inhabitants” generally outvote the “gentlemen, merchants, substantial traders and all the better part of the inhabitants; to whom it is irksome to attend.”

Gov. Wiliam Shirley. No rabble for him.

Nash and other historians drew a straight line between New England’s Town Meeting, the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. Town Meetings at Faneuil Hall provided the main forum for the leaders of the American Revolution. Throughout New England, they organized depots of military stores, converted farmers and tradesmen to Minute Men and prevented anarchy in a time of war.

Town meeting controversies erupted in Boston in the 1740s and in 1784, when elitist conservatives proposed replacing the annual gatherings with an elected mayor and aldermen. “At a raucous town meeting in 1784, efforts to present the plan were met with shouts of “No incorporation. No mayor and aldermen. No innovations.”

Two-Faced Jefferson

As a revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson admired Town Meeting. As a president who imposed an embargo unpopular in New England, he disdained it.

“I felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships,” he wrote. “[A]lthough the whole of the other states were known to be in favor of the measure, yet the organization of this little selfish minority enabled it to override the Union.

The Last Century

Perhaps no state guards its prerogative of direct democracy more jealously than Vermont, which held its first Town Meeting in Bennington in 1762. In 1844, the Town of St. Albans refused to allow presidential emissary Gen. Winfield Scott to speak to them about flouting the country’s neutrality laws. Today the first Tuesday in March is a state holiday in Vermont. Coffee and maple sinkers (doughnuts) are the preferred treat.

By the early 19^th century, towns turned into cities. Some began to view Town Meeting as a quaint, if admirable, artifact of the past. Newspaper reporters focused on the impassioned wrangling over minor disagreements. In 1892, the Boston Globe reported Melrose, Mass., Town Meeting had a lively debate over the wisdom of suing the Boston and Maine Railroad. The issue? The railroad parked freight cars so they blocked a shortcut to the depot.

At Barnstable, Mass., Town Meeting in 1937 a fight between two brothers earned press attention because one described his overweight sibling as “an elephant.” The dispute involved the right-of-way over Henry B. Day’s Wianno property.

Woodstock, Vt., Town Meeting, March 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Year after year, Town Meeting settled such local disputes in New England town halls, schools and gymnasiums. What to do about the failings of the Reading, Mass., municipal light board in 1926. The fate of the Scituate elms in 1937. Whether to sell intoxicating beverages in Woodstock, Vt., in 1940. The $350 bonus to the Redding, Conn., highway employees in 1948.

On Jan. 22, 1928, Boston Globe writer Louis Lyon bemoaned the disappearance of a tradition – Town Meeting Cake, similar to a fruitcake,

… that peculiar confection that is as distinctive to town meeting itself is distinctive to the soil of New England.

On the Radio

In 1935, New England Town Meeting caught the attention of NBC Radio. The network decided to experiment with a talk radio show featuring live comments and questions from the audience. NBC expected little from America’s Town Meeting of the Air, but listeners loved it. The show ran from May 30, 1935, to July 1, 1956.

1935 promotional brochure for America’s Town Meeting

Throughout the 20^th century, Town Meeting survived and flourished in New England, despite the press’s lamentations that it was dying out. In 1953, the Boston Globe reported Harvard, Mass., was one of the few towns to continue the tradition of an all-day town meeting.

The menu was turkey and lemon meringue pie. And, according to the Globe, ‘there was more debate over not spending $1,500 for road improvements than there was in spending $170,000 for the new school.’

This story was updated in 2022.

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Abigail Adams Vents to Mercy Otis Warren About John

In the spring of 1776, Mercy Otis Warren received a letter from her good friend Abigail Adams complaining about her husband John.

Though she loved John, Abigail resented her subordinate position to him. She had included her now-famous reminder, “Remember the ladies,” in a letter to him. Perhaps she expected a sympathetic response. Instead, John Adams made fun of her.

Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley. Courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Abigail shared her hurt with her friend Mercy Otis Warren.

Though 16 years younger than Mercy, she had much in common with her. Both witnessed and recorded the American Revolution. They both made passionate commitments to the cause. And both lived on the South Shore of Massachusetts: Abigail in Braintree, Mercy in Plymouth.

Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren was born Sept. 25, 1728 in Barnstable, Mass., where a statue of her now stands in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse. Her parents educated her with her Harvard-bound brother James Otis. When she married James Warren, her brother and her husband encouraged her to write poetry and essays satirizing the colonial government. That she then did.

The Warren home frequently attracted such patriot leaders as Sam Adams, his cousin John and Mercy’s brother-in-law, Joseph Warren.

Abigail Adams met Mercy Otis Warren in the spring of 1773, when she accompanied John to a court session in Plymouth. Like Abigail, the elegant and erudite Mercy had five children. Abigail and Mercy hit it off, and the Adamses and Warrens would meet often in the coming years.

Abigail Adams

At that first meeting, Abigail was 28 and Mercy was 44. Mercy then wrote to Abigail afterward, which flattered her and began a long friendship and correspondence.

Correspondence

In 1776, John Adams represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Abigail wrote to him on March 31, eager to hear about the new code of laws she presumed he worked on. She then urged him to remember the ladies.

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

“That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute,” she wrote. But, she added, those of you who wish to be happy can give up the “harsh title of Master” for the “more tender and endearing one of Friend.”

“‘Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams’ most famous comment, didn’t impress her husband. Not one little bit.

‘I Cannot But Laugh’

In his reply on April 14, 1776, he mocked her plea for women’s rights:

As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient — that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent — that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.–This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

Bronze sculpture of Mercy Otis Warren in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse

Sausy John

Abigail didn’t think much of her husband’s reply. On April 27, 1776, Abigail vented her frustration about John to Mercy Otis Warren.

“He is very sausy to me,” she wrote. “I think I will get you to join me in a petition to Congress.”

She indignantly repeated his comments, then wrote,

I will tell him I have only been making trial of the Disintersstedness of his Virtue, and when weigh’d in the balance have found it wanting.

Her friend’s reply — if she did reply — disappeared.

Abigail waited 10 days after she wrote to Mercy Otis Warren to compose her reply to her husband:

I can not say that I think you very generous to all the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining and absolute power over Wives.

And then she reminded him that arbitrary power, like most other very hard things, can be broken.

…notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet –

This story about Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams was updated in 2022. Image of Mercy Otis Warren statue By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32733257.

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The Cape Playhouse and The Fable of Mrs. Tweedy’s Beard

For a few years the cover story about the Cape Playhouse and Cinema held: A visionary ex-botany teacher moved an old church to a pasture in Dennis on Cape Cod. Then he transformed it into a world-famous theater complex.

The Playhouse debuted Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, while the Cinema featured a spectacular ceiling mural by Rockwell Kent.

Raymond Moore, Cape Playhouse founder

A 1930 promotional brochure added some implausible details to the story. The ex-teacher, young Raymond Moore, lived in Provincetown when a “For Sale” sign on an old church caught his attention. He bought it, partly with money from his savings as a teacher in California and partly from small funds borrowed from a few enthusiastic friends.

They moved the church to Dennis, converted it into a playhouse and in the spring of 1927 began to organize the Cape Playhouse Company. Moore attracted stage luminaries such as Basil Rathbone and Violet Kemple because they “admired the young man’s courage.” And he attracted Kent, then at the height of his fame, because the artist had started his career in nearby Barnstable.

Really?

The story beggars belief. Basil Rathbone hauls off to a Cape Cod barn for a performance because of a persuasive letter from an obscure producer? A world-famous artist designs the largest mural in the world because of his fondness for a town in Massachusetts? While he was boycotting the state for railroading Sacco and Vanzetti?

The Cape Cinema

It was also hard to believe the ex-teacher of modest means could hire one of New York’s most prominent architects, Alfred Easton Poor, to design the cinema. Or that he could afford the celebrated Frankl Gallery to create the 317 seats in black lacquer and tangerine.

“Dear — oh dear!”

After a few years the real story behind the “Let’s put on a show in the barn” fable emerged. It turned out a behind-the-scenes Judy Garland financially backed Moore’s Mickey Rooney. And a cache of revealing letters to Rockwell Kent suggests the Cape Cod Playhouse and Cinema was more the work of a married Judy than of the Mickey who was 30 years her junior.

Regardless, the playhouse was an instant hit in 1927. Three years later John Barrymore praised Moore for bringing Broadway to “dirt road and oil-lamp country.” The Cape Playhouse and Cape Cinema, he wrote, are “a dream come true.” It had attracted the attention of the theatrical and playgoing world as nothing since the Provincetown Players brought Eugene O’Neil to fame and fortune,” he wrote. “It is the dream of a young artist, Raymond Moore, who has transformed a wilderness off the beaten path into a thing of beauty.”

A 1936 account in the travelogue, “And This Is Cape Cod,” begins with the exclamation, “dear — oh dear!”

“In a garden of flowers, in a stone-walled pasture, what was once a seventeenth-century church is now a theater – the most successful summer theater in America.

“Nearby is the Cinema. And in the Cinema is the largest and possibly the loveliest mural in America. A midnight sky. A comet flashing. A Milky Way where leisured lovers stroll. Horses charging through a sea of blue. Flying figures dance. And the bull jumps over the moon. A quite mad mural by Joe Mielziner and Rockwell Kent.”

A Secret Marriage

The fable was dispelled that year when lumber heiress and Cape summer resident Edna Bradley Tweedy died. It turned out that Moore had secretly married the widow a year before. She was at least 65, he in his late 30s. Tweedy had inherited the Bradley lumber fortune and left him a generous bequest. That became public when Moore quarreled over the will with her three daughters, the main beneficiaries of the estate.

Bette Davis

By then the story about the Playhouse origins had to change a little. Promoters acknowledged that Moore had persuaded the elderly “widow” to help him and to pay for the Rockwell Kent mural.

No one persuaded Edna Bradley Tweedy to do anything, judging by her boldly scrawled letters. She once described herself as “imperious.” That is borne out in correspondence saved in the Rockwell Kent Papers collection at the Archives of American Art.

In 1927, Mrs. Edna Tweedy was still married to Robert B. Tweedy, president of the Tweedy Realty Co. in Milwaukee and a former candidate for governor of Wisconsin. She, however, lived on 5^th Avenue in New York and summered in Wianno, an exclusive resort community on the Cape. Her correspondence with Kent suggests her marriage to Tweedy was at least open and probably over.

Edna Tweedy

Edna Tweedy summoned Rockwell Kent to New York in 1930 to offer him and his partner the $5,000 commission to design the mural. Her lawyers negotiated the contract for Kent to design it and for celebrated set designer Jo Mielzener and his crew to install it. She who managed the project, she paid him and she consulted with him – apparently constantly. In one letter Kent wrote to her in 1930:

I am trusting to find so many occasions during the course of this decoration to consult with you that by the time it is finished I will be coming to see you quite as a matter of course and habit.

Their correspondence suggests she actively managed the theater as well. Kent once sent her a bill for a large rug he’d ordered for the Playhouse. Wshe replied, “business has been good” if we “don’t get unexpectedly swamped with bills like this.”

Rockwell Kent

“You are a crazy not-so-young man!”

The relationship between the newly widowed Edna Tweedy and Rockwell Kent developed quickly into a warm rapport. At 48, Kent was living on an Adirondack farm and a veteran of many extramarital affairs.

Kent was at the height of his fame, having illustrated a wildly popular edition of Moby Dick, which reignited interest in the book. One day early in 1930 he received a letter from Edna: “I am most anxious to consult with you in regard to mural decoration I am considering having done in building on Cape Cod.”

He later claimed he accepted the commission because he’d had “too many martinis.”

But within a few months the correspondence became more intimate. She gossiped about her sister’s facelift, worried about finances and began to sign her letters with her middle name, “Mentora.” In one letter, she writes, “If as you said “I am a crazy old woman” I will say you are a very crazy not so young man!”

Rockwell Kent Mural at the Cape Cod Playhouse

Kent apparently visited the Cape twice, at the beginning and end of the project, according to the correspondence.

A letter to Kent from Mrs. Tweedy tells him to meet at the Ritz in Boston and then drive to the Cape with her. She writes that she’s looking forward to having him in her home. A letter that followed, sent on June 21, says: “Take this scrap of paper do whatsoever you wish with it. Always remember me! I send it down to you with a big kiss and loads of birthday love!”

That Kent invited her affection is clear from a flattering letter he wrote to her, and from a telegram responding to his complaint that a check she sent him lacked a zero:

CORRECT CHECK MAILED TO YOU TODAY I WAS INCLINED TO MAKE FIVE ZEROS INSTEAD OF FOUR YOUR LETTER WAS SO CHARMING YOURS TRULY THE CROOK.

Moore’s Sad Demise

Though Edna Tweedy wrote that she hoped Kent’s work on the Cape would be the beginning of a long friendship, the archives include no more correspondence between them after 1930.

In 1931, Raymond Moore produced two Broadway plays, “Ladies of Creation” and “Berlin.” He married Edna Tweedy on May 17, 1935.

She died 17 months later, and Raymond Moore’s life took a series of bizarre twists before ending in 1942.

Edna Bradley Tweedy Moore was reported to have inherited a Wisconsin lumber fortune worth $10 million. The court, however, determined her gross estate was worth $1,082,856. She had given Moore $517,000 in gifts before their marriage and $112,000 during it. Presumably much of that money had gone to creating the 30-acre theater complex. In addition to the Playhouse and Cinema there were actors’ houses and a restaurant, a scene shop and a goldfish pond, orchids in a pergola and gardens throughout.

It is also hard to imagine that the Bradley lumber money wasn’t used to lure internationally known actors, architects and designers – as well as Rockwell Kent — to the pasture on Cape Cod.

Breakdown

Mrs. Moore bequeathed her husband a life interest in a trust fund of $100,000, but her three daughters got most of the money. Moore contested the will, apparently claiming a surviving spouse’s share. In 1937 he compromised with the daughters. He agreed to give up the trust and accept two cash payments of $45,000 and $58,828.

The money didn’t buy Raymond Moore happiness and it didn’t keep him out of the newspapers. He suffered what the New York Times described as a “nervous breakdown” and went to Hollywood, Calif., to recover. There he met a nurse, Miss Marianne Schultz. They married in 1938 and divorced a year later in Barnstable on Feb. 15.

Two months after the divorce, however, his ex-wife bore a son. Moore denied he was the father. Marianne Moore told the Milwaukee Sentinel that she would authorize blood tests to determine the parentage of the baby, Michael Dennis Moore. She posed for a photo with the child in her arms. Her attorney said the blood tests would show Raymond Moore was the father and they would try to get the divorce revoked.

Raymond Moore died in March 1940, 11 months after his ex-wife went public with the controversy over the child. The New York Times reported he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his apartment at the Hotel Elysee. He was 42 years old. The obituary makes no mention of the child and states he was divorced from his second wife.

Another Turn

The story took another strange turn five months after his death. His ex-wife was arrested in Santa Barbara, Calif., on suspicion of being under the influence of drugs. Authorities placed the baby in a detention home pending an investigation of her fitness as a mother, the San Jose News reported. She then took the child from the detention home and was sought on a warrant charging her with kidnapping. What became of her and the child is unknown.

Raymond Moore left his money to the Raymond Moore Foundation. The Cape Cod Center for the Arts now owns the Playhouse and Cinema.

Images: Cape Cinema By Nhart1001 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47814823. Rockwell Kent mural By Lucy Vivante, murals by Rockwell Kent and Jo Mielziner – Rockwell Kent and the Cape Cinema Murals, The Berkshire Review for the Arts[dead link], CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4792676, This story was updated in 2021.

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