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colonial revival

How Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground Was Saved by the Gold Street Lady

The Ancient Burying Ground, the oldest historic site in Hartford, contains the remains of 6,000 men, women and children who settled the town.

But it might have disappeared were it not for the efforts of Emily Seymour Goodwin Holcombe, also known as the Gold Street Lady.

Beginning in 1640, anyone who died in town, regardless of race, religion or economic status, was interred in the Ancient Burying Ground. Not everyone could afford a tombstone, and most people didn’t have one. Only 563 stones marked graves in 1835, and today only 415 stones still stand.

the Ancient Burying Ground

Who’s Buried in the Ancient Burying Ground?

Buried in the Ancient Burying Ground are five early Connecticut governors; Hartford founders Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone; Jeremiah Wadsworth, commissary general of the Continental Army; and Daniel Gardiner, the first white child born in Connecticut.

The stones themselves show the progression of the stonecarver’s art, from simple facts about the deceased to elaborate death’s heads with batwings.

The Ancient Burying Ground, though, is located right in downtown Hartford on Gold Street, across from the Travelers Insurance Company Tower and near an apartment building designed by I.M. Pei.

Real estate development had threatened to gobble up what remained of the Ancient Burying Ground when preservationists stepped in.

Daniel Wadsworth, son of Jeremiah, started the effort to save the Ancient Burying Ground in 1836. He led the campaign to erect a brownstone obelisk in the cemetery with the names of the founders on it.

Mrs. Holcombe

Then in 1892, Emily Seymour Goodwin Holcombe stepped in. She came from an old New England family and married another WASP, John Marshall Holcombe, who rose to president of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Co.

Emily Holcombe

Emily Holcombe started by organizing the Ruth Wyllys Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1892. Four years later she began restoring the Ancient Burying Ground, no small task. It required widening Gold Street, demolishing several buildings and preserving the crumbling gravestones. She raised $100,000 for the project and on June 17, 1899 – Bunker Hill Day – 5,000 people came to the dedication of the restored cemetery.

During the ceremony, one city official praised Emily Holcombe. “If any man of my knowledge in Hartford had undertaken the task, there would have been nothing left of him but the footprints of those who had stepped upon him,” he said. He added that ‘official boards and public men, court committees and obdurate property owners, all bowed to the persuasiveness of Mrs. Holcombe.’

Colonial Revival

The Colonial Revival was in full swing then, and Emily Holcombe was far from done. In 1903, the descendants of Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth gave his house to the Connecticut DAR. Emily Holcombe furnished it with period antiques and established it as a museum.

When the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis opened in 1904, the Connecticut State Building featured a colonial home furnished with restored heirloom furniture, Connecticut paintings and books on genealogy.

In 1909, Emily Holcombe helped save Connecticut’s Old State House, slated for demolition. Again she raised money for the project and argued for the building’s historic importance. She also persuaded the General Assembly to change Connecticut’s motto from the Nutmeg State to the Constitution State.

The Old Statehouse

When Emily Seymour Goodwin Holcombe died in 1923, she was afforded the rare honor of being laid to rest in the Ancient Burying Ground.

According to the Connecticut Encyclopedia of Biography, published in 1917, no one was better known in Connecticut than Mrs. Holcombe. “Her achievements have carried her name far beyond the confines of her native State,” it said. “She is a woman of great modesty, but possesses initiative to an unusually large degree with the will to accomplish an undertaking decided upon as necessary or desirable. She also possesses great tact, diplomacy and executive ability.”

There’s More

Over time, the cemetery again grew shabby. Homeless people sought refuge there, and vandals made mischief in it. In the 1980s, Hartford began locking the gates. A second restoration campaign restored some headstones, fixed the masonry and ironwork and added benches and litter containers. Shepherd Holcombe, Emily Holcombe’s grandson, led the effort.

Images: Ancient Burying Ground By Staib – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12647042. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Gilded Age Gentleman Farm in Each New England State

During the Gilded Age, the gentleman farm was an important element of the upper-class lifestyle. They served as formal summer mansions and working farms that often supplied produce and dairy products to the owners’ winter residences.

George Washington led the way as the nation’s first gentleman farmer in chief. But the fashion for elegant mansions sitting on landscaped farmland didn’t take hold until after the Civil War.

The Gentleman Farm

Gentleman farms reflected the outsize egos of their wealthy owners during an age of soaring inequality. They sat on large swathes of land, sometimes thousands of acres. Elite architects designed the mansions as well as the farmhouses, barns, carriage houses, greenhouses and follies.

Sometimes business moguls or their heirs used their farms to demonstrate their prowess in agricultural pursuits. They developed prize livestock or managed woodlots scientifically or created vast formal gardens. Landscape designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and Beatrix Farrand sculpted the grounds for scenic vistas, pleasant walks and interesting flower gardens.

The income tax put an end to many of the Gilded Age estates, though a brief perusal of real estate listings shows the gentleman farms may have entered a new heyday. Here, though, are six late-19^th to early 20^th century gentleman farms, one in each New England state.

Eolia Mansion at Harkness State Park

Birdseye view of a Connecticut’s gentleman farm, Eolia.

Stephen V. Harkness had the good fortune to invest silently in John D. Rockefeller’s fledgling Standard Oil Co. His son Edward, clearly a fan of the gentleman farm, built a 42-room mansion on 230 acres overlooking Long Island Sound and named it Eolia.

The family used the estate as a summer retreat and a working farm, which included a prize dairy herd and vegetable gardens. They later added outbuildings, like the teahouse and the carriage house.

Architect James Gamble Rogers redesigned the interior of the Roman Renaissance Revival style mansion to evoke the feeling of the inside of an oyster shell. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand improved the grounds with lush formal gardens.

In 1920, Mary Harkness turned some of the grounds into a summer camp for children with polio. In 1950, she left the estate to the State of Connecticut. For years the house had to be boarded up, but by 1998 it had been restored.

People can rent Eolia for weddings and parties, as well as visit the estate on weekends and holidays from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day.

275 Great Neck Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Isaac W. Dyer Estate

The Isaac W. Dyer Estate in Gorham, Maine.

Gilded Age gentleman farms are increasingly scarce in Maine, but the Isaac W. Dyer Estate survives in a rural section of Gorham.

Isaac W. Dyer and his wife lived in Portland, where he built a large corporate law practice. For many years he served as district attorney, earning a reputation as an old-school conservative. Dyer also wrote a biography of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

He bought the large Greek Revival farmhouse and 126 acres in 1887 and transformed it into a gentleman farm. Eventually he built many of the outbuildings, including sheds, barns, a garage and a greenhouse. Landscapers created a croquet lawn, a sweeping circular driveway and a rare walled garden.

In 1998, the National Register of Historic Places put the Isaac W. Dyer Estate on its list.

The Dyer Estate has shrunk to 6.4 acres and is privately owned.

180 Fort Hill Rd., Gorham, Maine

Turner Hill Farm

Turner Hill Farms, one of several gentleman farms in Ipswich, Mass.

North Shore businessman Charles Rice and his wife Anne Proctor Rice bought 700 acres and a farmhouse on Turner Hill in Ipswich, Mass., just before the turn of the century. They then crossed the Atlantic with their architect, William Rantoul, to check out the gentleman farms in England and Scotland for ideas. The Rices came back and spent the next few years building an immense Elizabethan mansion.

They also built 13 other buildings, including cottages for the butler and gardener, stables, a garage and barns. As many as 50 people worked the farm in the summer to pick produce and fruit and milk the 20 cows. The gigantic house required 22 domestic servants.

The Turners had three children, and during the summer held children’s parties every week for 175 children. Anne Rice, a skilled equestrienne, broke many bones riding over the property, and in 1933 died when her horse threw her. Charles Rice declined and died 10 years later. The LaSalette Fathers bought the property and turned it into a spiritual retreat. The National Register of Historic Places listed Turner Hill Farm in 1982.

Today it functions as a golf club and condominiums. Another gentleman farm in Ipswich, Castle Hill, is less than 10 miles away.

Historic Ipswich has fascinating photos of Turner Hill’s early days. Click here to see them.

251 Turner Hill, Ipswich, Mass.

The Fells, John Hay’s Gentleman Farm

The Fells in full bloom in Newbury, N.H.

In the 1880s, New Hampshire farmers were abandoning their land and moving west for better farmland. The New Hampshire state government stepped in and encouraged wealthy families to buy up the properties and turn them into gentleman farms.

John Hay, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and U.S. Secretary of State, answered the call. He bought 1,000 acres of land on the shores of Lake Sunapee in 1888. Hay hoped to establish a summer colony for his group of friends. But then one of his friends, Clover Adams, committed suicide, and Hay abandoned his plan.

Instead, Hay built a rustic cottage and named the property The Fells, a term for a rocky upland pasture. His son Clarence and wife later expanded the cottage into a 22-room Colonial Revival mansion. Clarence wrote a book about it in 1962, called Gardening in Granite. “This is about a rock garden on Lake Sunapee, in the foothills of the White Mountains,” he wrote.

The Hays donated much of the land to the government, and when they died The Fells became a nonprofit organization. The Fells, a preservation project of The Garden Conservancy, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today visitors can hike the forest paths and, in season, visit the house and grounds, which include a rose terrace, a rock garden of rare alpines and a hidden walled garden.

456 Route 103A, Newbury, N.H.

CCRI Knight Campus, Once a Gentleman Farm

Part of the old Knight Estate, now a community college in Warwick, R.I.

The Fruit of the Loom brand started with Rhode Island’s Knight family, headed by Benjamin and Robert Knight. When Robert died in 1912, the New York Times called him the largest cotton manufacturer in the world.

The Knights actually replaced the Spragues as the dominant manufacturing family in Rhode Island. When the Sprague family’s businesses went belly up in the financial panic of 1873, the Knight family bought many of the Spragues’ textile mills, mill housing, company stores and large farms.

The Knight Estate in the Natick section of Warwick was considered the nicest of the Knights’ gentleman farms. It had a large Federal and Greek Revival home and a number of fine farm buildings. Robert Knight used the farm to develop prize livestock.

In the 20^th century, developers bulldozed some of the farm to make way for the Midland Mall. Then in 1964, Royal Webster Knight donated the farm to the State of Rhode Island for a junior college.

Today, the old Knight Farm forms the nucleus of the Community College of Rhode Island. In direct opposition to the ideal of the gracious farm, CCRI built a Brutalist megastructure on the campus to house all educational functions. Some of the original farm buildings still survive. The college uses the manor house as the president’s residence.

400 East Ave, Warwick, R.I.

Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms in Vermont, one of the Vanderbilt gentleman farms.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in history, had many descendants who built elaborate mansions and yachts. Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, chose to create one of the Vanderbilt’s gentleman farms in Shelburne, Vt. Her brother George then one-upped her with the granddaddy of them all, Biltmore, in Asheville, N.C.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course. Architect Robert Henderson Robertson designed 16 buildings, including a stunning Shingle Style mansion. No less a conservationist than Gifford Pinchot advised them on forest management.

The farm began to shrink in 1910, and the next generations of Vanderbilts struggled to keep it up. In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows.

The National Register of Historic Places put Shelburne Farms on its list because of its significance as a Gilded Age ornamental farm.

It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Eolia By I, PostMan1107, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2412245; Isaac W. Dyer Estate By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35570189; Turner Hill Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21986299; Knight Estate By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20439041;The Fells, By The Fells –http://www.gardenvisit.com/assets/madge/the_fells_newbury/600x/the_fells_newbury_600x.jpg, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11155642. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Blandings House in Conn. Inspires the Ultimate Movie Premiere

Seven decades after the premiere of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, fans still sometimes make pilgrimages to the Connecticut home that inspired the classic film comedy.

Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings promo.

It isn’t the same house as the one in the 1948 movie. That’s in Malibu Creek State Park in California, also a location for the television series M*A*S*H.

There are also four Blandings houses in Connecticut — in Hartford, Bridgeport, Trumbull and Wethersfield. There’s one in Rhode Island in Warwick. Massachusetts also has four: in Worcester, Natick, Newton and Springfield.

The studio, in fact, built 73 Blandings houses throughout the country and raffled some of them off to promote the film.

It worked like a charm.

The Real Mr. Blandings

It all started when Eric Hodgins, a vice president for Time, Inc., decided to move his family from Manhattan to the countryside. In 1939, he bought a house on 33 acres in New Milford, Conn. He then began to build a classic colonial farmhouse on the property. To the detriment of his finances, he refused to compromise on quality.

The house had two bars, a flower room, a wine cellar and a 54-foot swimming pool. Hodgins had the house undergirded with a copper pan to protect against termites. And it had the latest features: recessed lighting, central air conditioning and one of the first dishwashers ever. (Since donated to the Smithsonian Institute after more than 40 years of service.)

Hodgins had a construction budget of $11,000. But as is often the case, things began to go wrong and the cost began to mount. He spent nearly $60,000, came close to bankruptcy and ended up selling the house after two years.

Eric Hodgins, the real Mr. Blandings.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

Hodgins ended up writing a book about the experience, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. It went straight to the bestseller list, and Hodgins sold the movie rights. His finances restored, he tried to buy back his dream house. The new owners refused to sell.

Hodgins’ New Milford neighbor Dore Schary produced the film, which starred Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.

Grant played Jim Blandings, an advertising executive with a penchant for getting locked in closets.

Myrna Loy played Muriel Blandings, Jim Blandings’ picky wife. In one famous scene, she directed the contractor to buy yellow paint for the dining room:

“Not just yellow; a very gay yellow,” she said. “Something bright and sunshiny. If you’ll send one of your workmen to the A&P for a pound of their best butter and match that exactly, you can’t go wrong.”

Benjamin Moore later adapted the gag for a series of advertisements.

73 Houses

In an ambitious promotional stunt, the studio had 73 Blandings houses built around the country and raffled some of them off. Many opened for house tours, with ticket proceeds going to charity.

Connecticut, fittingly, had two, one in Wethersfield and one in Trumbull. Rhode Island got one in Warwick, and Massachusetts got four: in Worcester, Natick, Newton and somewhere near Springfield.

A local department store furnished the Ottawa Hills, Ohio, house, and advertised house tours. Thousands came to look at it after the movie premiered in June 1948.

Advertisement for a Blandings house

General Electric furnished 60 of the kitchens, including the one in Spokane, Wash., with ‘atomic age’ amenities like a garbage disposal. Visitors were especially impressed by the electric garage door opener.

Similarly, Jordan Marsh furnished the Blandings house in Natick, Mass., with a General Electric television, furnace and kitchen. The kitchen offered ‘the latest in modern efficiency with a livability designed to make the housewife’s working hours in the kitchen shorter and more pleasant.’ For 25 cents, you could see it. Myrna Loy came to visit it, presumably for free.

The promotion helped make Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House a box-office smash. It’s now considered a classic, ranking 72 on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Years … 100 Laughs.

Tom Hanks and Shelly Long starred in the 1986 remake, The Money Pit. Ice Cube starred in another loose remake in 2007, Are We Done Yet?

The original Blandings house? It sold in 2004 for $1.2 million.

Alert reader Eric V. has a pinterest site dedicated to Blandings Dream Houses here.

This story about the Blandings houses was updated in 2024. Image of Eric Hodgins By Joseph Janney Steinmetz – Joseph Janney Steinmetz photographic collection (1930s-1970s), State Archives of Florida, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24459107.

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Six Colonial Homes by Wallace Nutting

Wallace Nutting was a dyspeptic minister so overwhelmed by urban life and modern values that he led millions of Americans on a nostalgic journey into the colonial age.

As the Martha Stewart of the Colonial Revival, he influenced the décor of countless American homes. He spurred a wave of historic preservation and advanced the study of American decorative arts and architecture.

Wallace Nutting

A nervous breakdown forced Wallace Nutting to retire from the pulpit at 43. He took to selling photographs of rural scenes and colonial homes to earn a living. Before Martha Stewart ever brandished her glue gun, Wallace Nutting created an empire of hand-tinted photographs, books, reproduction furniture and experiences, all evoking a better, happier time. By 1915, he earned $1,000 a day.

As an entrepreneur and a businessman, the Wallace Nutting name stood for quality, according to Charles T. Lyle, executive director of the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, and curator of a recent Nutting exhibit.

Wallace Nutting

“Wallace Nutting was a true pioneer in the emerging fields of historic preservation, and in the study and appreciation of American decorative arts and architecture,” Lyle said. “Nutting created an aesthetic that popularized the use of American antiques that people wanted to have in their own homes and could live with comfortably.”

Historic New England has an online collection of Wallace Nutting photographs, called the Wallace Nutting photographic collection, 1910s-1930s. It’s searchable by state. Click here to see it.

Following are photographs of six colonial homes featured by Wallace Nutting. If you have any Wallace Nutting favorites, please share them in the comments section.

Joseph Webb House

In 1914 Wallace Nutting began buying a series of colonial homes that he called “The Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.” They gave him the freedom to create ‘a proper setting for quaint pictures with attractive background and furnishings.’ But he didn’t have to adapt to the schedules and room arrangements of the new house museums.

One of those homes was the Webb House in Wethersfield, Conn. Joseph Webb, a successful merchant with ships that traded in the West Indies, built it in 1752. He died at 34, leaving six children and a widow. Diplomat Silas Deane, executor of the estate, later married Webb’s widow and built a house next door.

Webb’s son Joseph, Jr., inherited the house. In 1774, he hosted Gen. George Washington for five nights while he planned the Siege of Yorktown with the Comte de Rochambeau. It passed through several owners after Webb sold it in 1790. Martin Welles bought it around 1820, and it stayed in his family until 1913. Wallace Nutting bought it in 1916 as a sales office, studio and tourist attraction.

He lovingly photographed the details of the house, including the doors, the fireplaces, the shell dome cupboard and the china inside. For a time the public flocked to Wethersfield to pay 25 cents for admission to the house. World War I and gas rationing interrupted the business.

Nutting sold the house to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in 1919. Today it belongs to the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

211 Main Street, Wethersfield, Conn.

Wadsworth-Longfellow House

Wadsworth House

Since childhood, Wallace Nutting set his heart on becoming a Congregational minister. He grew up in Augusta, Maine, and attended Philips Exeter Academy before entering Harvard. After graduating seminary he took a job as minister at the Fryeburg Congregational Church for a season.

Wallace Nutting was back in Maine in 1914, photographing the Wadsworth House, now the Wadsworth-Longfellow House, in Portland.

Elizabeth and Peleg Wadsworth, a Revolutionary War general, raised 10 children in the house, built in 1785-86. It was the first brick building in Portland and the oldest standing building on the peninsula.

Wadsworth’s grandson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, lived in the house from the time he was 8 months old until he was 35. Henry’s younger sister Anne Longfellow Pierce was the last family member to live in the house. When she died in 1901, she left it to the Maine Historical Society, which has run it as Maine’s first house museum since 1902.

Wallace Nutting was buried in Augusta after he died at home in Framingham, Mass., on July 19, 1941, at age 79.

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House opens to the public from Maine through October; click here for information about hours and directions.

489 Congress Street, Portland, Maine.

Hazen-Spiller House

Wallace Nutting photo of the Hazen-Spiller House, courtesy Historic New England.

Wallace Nutting was born in the village of Gleasondale, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1861. His father died in the Civil War when he was eight months old.

A story about his ancestor resonated with him. The forebear was killed in an Indian raid in Groton, Mass., in 1639, and his head stuck on a pole to warn off new settlers.

Nutting returned to Massachusetts again and again. He bought the Cutler-Bartlett House in Newburyport and the Ironmaster’s House in Saugus.

In 1917 he bought the Hazen-Spiller House in Haverhill, where Indian raiders burned many wood houses. That may have contributed to the decision to have the house made of brick. Many brick makers lived in Haverhill, and the house is notable for both its size and its two fireplaces. Rather than two central fireplaces, the fireplaces in the house stand at either end of the building.

Richard Hazen, member of an early Haverhill family, built the house.

Nutting’s speculated the house was partially a shoe factory and garrison, used by early settlers to escape Indian raids. He dated the house to sometime before 1700. But today historians date it to 1724, after the Indian raids in Haverhill ceased.

Wallace Nutting operated the house as a museum in 1918, though it was not one of his more successful properties. Today the house has private ownership.

The Hazen-Spiller House today

8 Groveland St., Haverhill, Mass.

Wentworth-Gardner House

‘Colonial woman’ descending staircase, Wentworth-Gardner House.

Wallace Nutting eventually took his art of hand-colored photography to a new level. He began to stage scenes of domestic life with people dressed in colonial garb inside of colonial houses, such as the woman descending the staircase, above.

He bought the Wentworth-Gardner House in 1915 and restored it as one of his ‘Chain of Colonial Picture Homes.’ It’s a Georgian-style waterfront mansion in Portsmouth, N.H., built in 1760 by Mark Hunking Wentworth. Mark Wentworth was a wealthy member of the prominent Wentworth family. His brother was colonial Gov. Benning Wentworth. He built the house as a wedding gift for his son Thomas and his daughter-in-law Anne Tasker.

The house itself very nearly wound up in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it with the intention of dismantling it and moving it. But the museum changed its mind and left it in place. The house is notable for the skill of the local craftsmen who carved its intricate details to mimic the tastes of the English aristocracy.

Wentworth-Gardner House

Nutting removed later additions to the building and returned it to its 18th Century appearance. Today it is open to visitors, along with the adjacent Tobias Lear House, as a museum.

140 Mechanic St., Portsmouth, N.H.

Eleazer Arnold House

Nutting had his final pulpit at the Union Congregational Church in Providence. He hated the city, but he found a way to soothe his jangled nerves in the countryside. “I took long bicycle rides on Monday,” he wrote.

On those bicycle trips, he began to take photographs of landscapes. He then made a deal with a local printer to print platinotypes of birches and blossoms of photos he’d taken in Northern New England. Nutting had so much success he opened a studio in New York City, but soon moved to Southbury, Conn.

He photographed the Eleazer Arnold House in Lincoln, R.I. Wheeler, a tavern owner, built the house in 1693. It’s a rare example of a 17^th century ‘stone-ender,’ a house with fieldstone side walls and chimney and wooden end walls. The building type came from western England, mostly to northern Rhode Island.

Nutting’s photograph shows the side stone façade.

The Eleazer Arnold House was donated to Historic New England (then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) in 1919, when Wallace Nutting took the photograph. The public can visit on weekends year-round from 11 am-4 pm.

487 Great Road, Lincoln, R.I.

Gen. David Robinson House

David Robinson House

Wallace Nutting collected furniture as props for his photographs, then opened a factory and sold high-quality reproductions. But he lost $100,000 in the venture, he wrote.

His furniture was so authentic unscrupulous dealers bought pieces, aged them artificially and sold them for a hundred times what they paid. Wallace Nutting also published The Furniture Treasury in 1928, which collectors then used as a standard guide for many years.

In the 1920s, Wallace Nutting began publishing his States Beautiful series of travel books. Read his book, Vermont Beautiful, online by clicking here.

David Robinson House

One example of Nutting’s colonial vignettes is this oddly hand-colored photograph of a man and a woman in period dress standing at the gate of the Gen. David Robinson House in Bennington, Vt. The man wears a coat tinted bright red but the woman is in black and white.

General David Robinson, a Revolutionary War general, built his house in 1796. Handed down through the family, in 1912 it contained an invaluable collection of Revolutionary relics. Those included the sword and hat worn by Robinson during the Battle of Bennington.

Monument Avenue, opposite the Robinson marker, Bennington, Vt.

Images: Wallace Nutting images courtesy Historic New England; Wentworth-Gardner House By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28778716; Hazen-Spiller House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9715789. This story was updated i 2022.

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Wallace Stevens, Humdrum Hartford Lawyer By Day, Drunk and Belligerent Poet by Night

Wallace Stevens was a plodding insurance executive in Hartford for nearly all of his adult life, except when he spent winter vacations in Key West. There he got drunk and fought with Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway.

Wallace Stevens

Stevens was also a poet – on the side, to be sure. He didn’t publish his first book of poems until he was 44. At 72, just before he died, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

He composed poems on slips of paper on his way to work in the morning, and had his secretary type them up.

His boss at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company knew nothing of Stevens’ hidden passion. “Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart,” he said.

Robert Frost didn’t think much of Stevens’ poetry. The feeling was mutual.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pa., on Oct. 2, 1879, the son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher. For a while he went to Harvard, where he published his poems in the school’s literary magazines. He needed to make money, though, so he went to the New York School of Law, passed the bar exam and went to work for a law firm.

Elsie Stevens as Mercury

He married the beautiful but uneducated Elsie Kachel, whose profile would later appear on the Mercury dime. She didn’t share his literary interests and showed signs of mental illness, straining their marriage.

In 1916, he moved to Hartford and began the humdrum existence of an insurance company lawyer. He moved to a large Colonial Revival house with his wife and only daughter.

At the office he was an introverted and dour presence. After hours he was socially inept, or worse when he drank too many martinis. A colleague called him, ‘tall, austere, very dignified.’

He found escape in booze, poetry and Key West, Florida.

He usually traveled without his wife on his annual winter vacations to Key West between 1922 and 1940.

Fight With Frost

In late March of 1935, Stevens was vacationing at the Casa Marina in Key West when he spotted Robert Frost on the beach.

As a poet, Frost’s reputation then outshone Stevens’. He had won two Pulitzer prizes. Stevens, on the other hand, had only published a volume of poetry, Harmonium, more than 10 years earlier. But as a denizen of Key West, Stevens had the upper hand. He was a successful businessman who’d been coming there for years, while Frost was a first-time tourist.

Stevens invited Frost to dinner with his friend Judge Arthur Powell. At cocktails before dinner, Stevens drank too many martinis and insulted Frost’s poetry. Frost later described Stevens’ drunken behavior to a lecture audience at the University of Miami.

Word of Frost’s gossip got back to Stevens. Frost wrote him a letter of apology, saying he’d only meant to be playful. He treasured the memory of that evening – which, he wrote, he was in a better condition to remember than Stevens.

Fight With Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

The next year. Stevens was again in Key West, and again he got drunk over cocktails at a party. Ernest Hemingway’s sister Ursula was there, too. That didn’t stop Stevens from loudly trashing Hemingway. She defended her brother. Stevens replied by calling Hemingway a ‘sap’ and ‘no real man.’

Ursula went to her brother’s home to tell him what happened. Stevens had already dumped on Hemingway twice before, and Hemingway was fed up. He followed his sister to the cocktail party, where Stevens was just leaving. Stevens drunkenly announced he wished Hemingway was there so he could knock him out with a single punch.

Stevens, at 6’2” and 220 lbs., was bigger than Hemingway, but 15 years older. He took a swing at him, and missed.

Hemingway punched Stevens twice, sending him splashing into a puddle – ‘spectacularly,’ Hemingway wrote to a friend.

As Stevens got to his feet, Hemingway started to take off his glasses. Stevens sucker punched him in the jaw, breaking his own fist in two places. Hemingway then whaled on the insurance executive until he went down and couldn’t get up.

Stevens spent the next five days in bed, a nurse and doctor tending to his broken hand and battered face.

Aftermath

A week later he meekly apologized to Ernest and Ursula Hemingway. He asked the writer to keep the story to himself, as word about it could hurt his career at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Hemingway agreed to a cover story that Stevens fell down a flight of stairs. He also kept his word to keep the matter quiet.

Hemingway, magnanimous in victory, later asked a friend to tell Stevens that he was a damn fine poet but that he couldn’t fight.

Stevens didn’t stop feuding with writers. Five years after he first insulted Frost, and again in Key West, Stevens said to him,

The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects.

Frost replied,

The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.

With thanks to The Whole Harmonium, by Paul Maniani.

Images: Wallace Stevens, By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31317123. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Churches (All Gorgeous) Designed by Ralph Adams Cram

Once the most famous architect of his day, Ralph Adams Cram designed many churches, schools and libraries throughout New England. He also planned much of Princeton University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the great cathedral St. John the Divine in New York City.

Phillips Church, by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram

Cram was born Dec. 16, 1863, in Hampton Falls, N.H., to an old New England family. His parents named him for Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Adams.

He became not only a prominent architect but an Anglo-Catholic, or High Episcopalian. He also founded the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Cram headed MIT’s architecture department for seven years. In 1926, he made the cover of Time magazine.

Though an ardent advocate of Gothic Revival, Ralph Adams Cram also designed buildings in the Colonial Revival and Art Deco styles.

Cram died Sept. 22, 1942. Unlike his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, his fame has dimmed. The Episcopal Church, though, celebrates his birthday as a feast day.

Here, then, are six churches designed by Ralph Adams Cram, one in each state. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

Seymour St. John Chapel

In 1924, The Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., had 339 male students and a pressing need for a chapel. (John F. Kennedy would later attend Choate.)

Then-headmaster George St. John wrote in his autobiography, “To run a school without a chapel seemed like running a line for light and power without a powerhouse.”

To raise the $100,000 to pay for the chapel, alumni, parents and friends contributed, as did students who sold bricks for $5.

Ralph Adams Cram designed the chapel in the Colonial Revival style. Choate broke ground for the building in May 1924 and dedicated it in 1925.

Choate merged with a girl’s prep school in 1971 and became Choate Rosemary Hall. In 1998, the school rededicated the chapel and renamed it after the Rev. Seymour St. John, headmaster from 1947 to 1973.

All Souls Congregational Church

In 1911, a great fire destroyed much of Bangor, Maine, including the First Congregational church, which overlooked the central business district. The Third Congregational Church also burned in the fire, so the two parishes joined together to build a new church on the site of the First’s old one.

The two parishes commissioned Ralph Adams Cram, who designed an exceptionally creative (some say odd) Gothic Revival church. He incorporated flying buttresses, a rose window, a slender copper-clad spire, a small bell tower and stone from the Third’s building.

The church, which occupies a city block, once faced a row of stately homes. Today it looks across at offices, gas stations and retail stores.

All Saints Church, Ashmont

One stormy Sunday, a snow squall stranded Mary Lothrop Peabody and her husband Oliver near the small wooden chapel of All Saints in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. They were on their way from their estate in Milton to church. They had just lost a young child. Coincidentally, so had the rector of the All Saints chapel. The storm hit them on Dec. 28, 1879, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The Peabodys stopped in the chapel instead of forging on to church in Boston. The sermon moved them deeply. The minister preached, “Rachel, weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Oliver had co-founded the investment bank Kidder, Peabody. He and Mary decided to build a new All Saints church. They, like Cram, were children of Unitarian ministers who became Anglo-Catholics, aka High Episcopalians.

The Peabodys hired young architects, Ralph Adams Cram and his partner Bertram Goodhue. They persuaded the Peabodys (or perhaps they needed little persuading) to revive the Gothic style in the design of All Saints. It was Cram’s first church. Cram biographer Douglas Shand-Tucci said of All Saints, Cram’s first church:

A significant landmark in American architectural history, All Saints’ is, of its type, Cram and Goodhue’s masterpiece, and a model for American parish church architecture for the first half of the 20th century.

All Saints Church

The Episcopal All Saints Church, Peterborough, is one of Cram’s small masterpieces, considered by some to be the most beautiful church in America. It’s set back from the road on four acres in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. Ralph Adams Cram modeled it after St. Mary the Virgin Church in Iffley, Oxfordshire, England.

Cram stressed local workmen and local materials – hence, he ordered the building built of granite. Some of the finest Arts and Crafts artisans in the region decorated the interior: woodcarver Johannes Kirchmayer, ironworker Frank Koralewski and stained glass artisan Charles Connick.

Mary Lyon Cheney Schofield commissioned the building in 1913 to honor her family. Her first husband, Charles Cheney, was the son of the founder of American Express. He died in 1897, shortly before their third child was born. Her second husband, Harvard professor William Schofield, died in 1920. One of her sons died in World War I. Mary lived until 1947. She, her husbands and her son are interred in the chapel.

Emmanuel Church

In the early 19th century, many residents of South Newport, R.I., couldn’t afford to attend church because they had to buy pew seats. So in 1841, three women from Trinity Church began to hold religious meetings in their homes.

Eight years later, with 88 members, they bought an empty Baptist church. Within three years, the Rhode Island Episcopal diocese admitted Emmanuel Church. The parish soon built a wooden Tudor-style church.

By the turn of the century, the old church needed repair or replacement.

Rhode Island’s prominent Brown family stepped in and commissioned Ralph Adams Cram to design Emmanuel Church in Newport. He later designed other buildings for the princely Browns.

Natalie Bayard Brown built the church in memory of her husband, John Nicholas Brown I. It took two years to build, reaching completion in 1902. Cram’s partner, Bertram Goodhue, designed the rich interior ornamentation, which went wildly over budget.

In the early 1930s, concert organist E. Power Biggs served at the church.

Today, Emmanuel still prides itself on welcoming anyone who wishes to worship.

St. James Episcopal Church

The parish of St. James was organized in the summer of 1826, when Woodstock, Vt., was a prosperous mill town that produced scythes, carding machines, woolens, carriages and tack.

It was built in time for Christmas Eve service in 1827 and consecrated the next year. The founders of the parish bought stone for the church, but discovered quicksand under the land donated for the site. They built a wooden frame church instead, and put a Paul Revere bell in the tower.

In 1907, St. James got the stone church its founders wanted. Ralph Adams Cram designed the building, considered one of his most distinguished smaller churches. He incorporated the brass pulpit and lectern, the marble font and three stained glass windows, one of which came from Tiffany studios.

If you’d like to read more about Gothic Revival buildings in New England, see our story about Henry Vaughan.

Photos: St. James Episcopal Church, AlexiusHoratius~commonswiki; Emmanual Church By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434397; All Saints Church, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19104034; All Saints, Ashmont By Jim Roberts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51960817; Seymour St. John Chapel, Wallingford, Conn. By Daderot (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

This story about Ralph Adams Cram was updated in 2021.

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