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When Teddy Roosevelt Barnstormed New England

In the fall of 1902, President Teddy Roosevelt barnstormed New England on behalf of Republican congressmen. He wanted as many elected as possible in the upcoming midterm elections.

He had spent less than a year in the White House, having risen to commander in chief upon the assassination of William McKinley on Sept. 6, 1901.

Roosevelt was only 43 years old and an object of some fascination, especially in Europe. From New Haven to Bangor to Burlington, wildly enthusiastic crowds met him with music, military salutes, flowers and flags.

He had not run for president before. In fact, he’d been drafted reluctantly to run for vice president. Roosevelt barnstormed New England in part to lay out themes that would win election in 1904: business regulation, manifest destiny and the need for a strong U.S. Navy. He also harped on the virtues of outdoor living and outdoor work, which he said promoted vigor and good citizenship.

The trip, though, ended in tragedy when a runaway streetcar ran over his bodyguard, William Craig. Roosevelt had grown fond of Craig, who read comic books with his four-year-old son. The accident happened in Pittsfield, Mass., toward the end of Roosevelt’s barnstorming trip. The president, himself cut and bruised, quieted the crowds that greeted him on the way home.

Cartoon showing New England welcoming Teddy Roosevelt with flowers. Courtesy Library of Congress.

How Roosevelt Barnstormed New England

On Aug. 22, 1902, he left his home in Oyster Bay aboard the naval yacht Sylph, landing in New Haven at 1:29 p.m. His secretary, William Loeb (father of the longtime Manchester Union-Leader publisher), had planned the itinerary.

Roosevelt and his entourage headed a procession of carriages through New Haven’s slums, the factory district and the city center. They covered four miles in less than an hour with the Connecticut National Guard providing an escort. Crowds lined the street, cheering and waving flags and handkerchiefs – as they did everywhere the president went.

By 3 p.m. he was in Meriden, where he gave a short speech, and then by 4:18 he reached Hartford by train. In Connecticut’s capital he was driven around in an electric car, also an object of fascination. In Pope Park, a Catholic priest presented him with an enormous horseshoe of flowers given by the working people of Hartford.

Roosevelt told the crowd, “I should, of course, be unfit for the position I occupy if I did not give my best thought and purpose to it and if I did not have the interest of the toiler of America – and also those who work with the head – at heart.”

In Hartford, he attended a formal dinner and gave a speech defending imperialism. Then he spent the night with a prominent Republican, John T. Robinson. The next day he left for Willimantic by train, but requested the workingman’s horseshoe of flowers be placed on the engine.

“The need in public and private life is common sense, decency, courage.” – President Roosevelt, Willimantic, Conn. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The Trust Speech in Providence

Roosevelt chose Providence to make a campaign issue of breaking up the trusts, delivering what was later called “his famous trust speech.”

“One of the features of the tremendous industrial development of the last generation has been the very great increase in private, and especially in corporate fortunes,” he said. Along with the benefits of industrial organization came evil – inequality, poor health and a loss of the feeling of brotherhood, he said.

“The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. There is clearly need of supervision – need to possess the power of regulation of these great corporations through the representatives of the public wherever, as in our own country at the present time, business corporations become so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for work that is not always beneficent.”

The original caption of this photo reads: The great crowd intently listening to President Roosevelt’s now famous “Trust” speech, Providence, R.I. Library of Congress.

Roosevelt then took Sen. Nelson Aldrich’s yacht to the home of socialite Winthrop Chanler, where he spent the night. The next day he attended the christening of Chanler’s new baby, Theodore, acting as his godfather. Theodore Chanler would grow up to become a composer, teacher and music critic for the Boston Herald.

Massachusetts

In Massachusetts, he spent the night of August 24 at Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge’s waterfront mansion in Nahant. It had been an exhausting day. He had left Newport by train and waved to cheering crowds when the train slowed in Stonebridge, R.I., Fall River, Taunton and Mansfield in Massachusetts. More crowds in Boston, where he boarded a special train to Lynn. Then he boarded a carriage and drove four crowd-lined miles to Nahant.

Near midnight, while he slept at the Lodge estate, an intoxicated gentleman appeared under his window and tried to serenade him with a song called “Annie Rooney.” The military guard threw water on him.

The next day brought a speech at the Nahant Public Library, a long one in Lynn and a longer one in Boston at Symphony Hall. On August 26th he passed through three states, delivered eight speeches and encountered a quarter million people. Roosevelt praised imperialism in Lowell. He met his old barber from North Dakota in Lawrence. And he told an unruly crowd in Haverhill the United States needed to strengthen its navy.

“Whether we will it or not, we as a nation front a great destiny,” he told the cheering crowd in Lawrence, Mass.

Roosevelt barnstormed the mill towns on Boston’s North Shore, including Lawrence. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Teddy Roosevelt Barnstormed Maine

That same day the people of Dover, N.H., heard Roosevelt speak about the need for honesty, courage and common sense in public and private life.

The train engine overheated in Biddeford, Maine, giving Roosevelt a chance to deliver another speech. In Old Orchard Beach, he spoke from the back of his railroad car. In Portland, he shared the platform with Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top. Then he drove around Portland, visited the Longfellow House and at 4:50 p.m. left on the train for Lewiston, where he addressed 10,000 people. He stopped for two minutes in Brunswick. Auburn came next. He spoke at twilight and got off a joke, or perhaps a nonsequiter: “I have an archaic temperament, and I wish you all large families, by the way,” he said. Maybe he was tired.

Roosevelt made it to Augusta in time for dinner and the final speech of the day.

The next day in Bangor he reunited with his old Maine guide, Bill Sewall. “I am glad to see you Bill,” Roosevelt said. “You ain’t no gladder than I be,” Sewall replied. The president recalled they had eaten muskrat together the last time Roosevelt had a meal in Maine. He invited Sewall to join him on the train to New Hampshire.

A crowd listens to Roosevelt at the State Fair in Bangor. Library of Congress.

New Hampshire

Roosevelt had slept on the train from Maine, but a cheering crowd woke him up when it stopped in a small village. He threw on his overcoat to wave to the people, his socks and long underwear peeping out from beneath the hem.

Roosevelt arrived in Manchester with a crowd pleaser. He mentioned Revolutionary hero John Stark, who penned New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” motto.

“It is about 125 years ago that Molly Stark’s husband had a sawmill here,” Roosevelt said said. “He had his saw mill. He did his work here, but when the country called to arms he was going to do his duty or Molly Stark was going to be a widow.”

The president gave a speech in Nashua, one in Concord and one at the Weirs. He visited John Hay in Newbury. Then he went to Newport, N.H., to the game park owned by the late robber baron, Austin Corbin. There he shot a boar.

Teddy Roosevelt in New Hampshire at Corbin Park in 1902.

He then went to Cornish to visit his friend Winston Churchill — the American novelist, more famous then than the English politician.

R & R in Vermont

A speech at the State Fair in Windsor kicked off the Vermont leg of the trip. Roosevelt hit White River Junction, South Royalton, Bethel and Randolph. Fifteen minutes after finishing a long speech in Montpelier he was on a train to Burlington, stopping briefly in Waterbury. In Burlington the governor held a reception for him.

“You have understood that the best products of the state were its men and women.” President Roosevelt at Proctor, Vt. Library of Congress.

By then, the exhausted Roosevelt needed some rest and relaxation. He boarded a yacht to Thompson’s Point, where he busily acknowledged the crowd’s greetings. That night he stayed at U.S. Treasury Secretary L.M. Shaw’s house. The next day he went to Shelburne Farms, home of Dr. Seward Webb and his wife, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb. Roosevelt spent the afternoon inspecting the horses.

After 36 hours on the shores of Lake Champlain, Roosevelt barnstormed more Vermont towns. Enthusiasm grew as he progressed through the state. It was Labor Day, and he praised the working man in short speeches along the way. In Middlebury he spoke from the rear of the train, then stopped at Sen. Redfield Proctor’s house. School children almost buried his carriage with flowers. He gave a short speech about the Monroe Doctrine, then delivered remarks in Rutland, Ludlow, Bellows Falls and Brattleboro, praising Civil War veterans and the working man. Then on to Northfield, Mass., where he spent the night in the Northfield Hotel, and delivered a speech the next day.

Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge to the left of President Roosevelt in front of the Northfield Hotel. Roosevelt barnstormed Vermont the next day. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The Pittsfield Tragedy

On Sept. 2, 1902, Roosevelt barnstormed the Massachusetts towns of Millers Falls, Athol, Gardner, Fitchburg, Worcester and Springfield, where he carefully examined the latest model of the Springfield rifle. Then he visited Westfield and Dalton before encountering tragedy in Pittsfield.

The top brass of the Pittsfield Electric Street Railway disobeyed the Secret Service orders to shut down the streetcar. They got behind schedule so they urged the driver, Euclid Madden, to go faster.

Euclid Madden did as ordered. But as he rounded a steep curve near the country club, he saw to his horror the presidential carriage crossing the tracks. The streetcar driver frantically clanged the bell, but too late.

William Craig

“Look out! Hold fast,” shouted William Craig as he tried to shield the president. Those were his last words.

The streetcar barreled into the carriage, fatally injuring one of the horses, who screamed in pain. Craig fell under the trolley, which crushed his skull and ground him under the wheels, killing him instantly.

Roosevelt flew out of the carriage and landed on his face in the mud. The crowd had to restrain him from attacking Madden. (Read what happened to Euclid Madden here.)

Roosevelt Barnstormed No More

A pall fell over the rest of the journey. The president had a black eye, swollen cheek and cut lip as he traveled by train through Lenox, Stockbridge and Great Barrington. He asked the crowds not to make noisy demonstrations and spoke only a few words.

In Connecticut he quieted the crowds in New Milford, saying he wouldn’t give a speech because a bad accident had killed a man he esteemed. He met with an enormous crowd in Bridgeport, but asked to be excused from a scheduled speech because of the tragedy.

He boarded the Sylph and went home to Oyster Bay.

With thanks to A Bittersweet Journey: Theodore Roosevelt’s 1902 New England Trip by James Blase.

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WWI Camouflage School Taught How To Turn Warships Into Pop Art

In 1917, the U.S. government set up a camouflage school for women artists in Marshfield Hills, Mass. About five dozen women artists came to the month-long training camp to learn how to camouflage cars, locomotives and battleships. Their work would help save lives on the European front and in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic during World War I.

Painting of the Mauretania in razzle-dazzle

Camouflage was a very big deal during that war, though deception had been part of armed conflict since the Trojan Horse. But not until World War I did camouflage become an official branch of warfare. Architects, artists, cabinetmakers, stage designers, carpenters, ironworkers, chemists – and women artists — brought camouflage to a new level.

The so-called camoufleurs designed uniforms that disguised soldiers as rocks, as sky, as ice. They painted designs on guns and covered them with camouflaged nets to hide them from aerial surveillance. And they tried to make artillery emplacements invisible to the enemy.

Camouflage perhaps reached its apogee with razzle-dazzle battleships, a technique the women were to learn at the Marshfield camouflage school. They painted bold geometric designs onto 1,250 US. battleships, no two alike, to confuse the German U-boats about where to aim torpedoes.

RMS Mauretania painted in dazzle. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The fantastic razzle-dazzle designs inspired none other than Picasso to claim the Cubist school of art invented the technique. Artists from the camouflage school left their mark on New England in ways that can still be seen.

Roots of the Camouflage School

A Dublin, N.H., painter better known for his angels made key advances in the science of camouflage. Abbott Handerson Thayer, an ardent outdoorsman, studied animals’ protective coloring. He and his son Gerald in 1909 wrote and illustrated an influential book called Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. The book discussed disruptive patterning (they called it ‘razzle-dazzle’), which breaks up an animal’s outlines. The Thayers also wrote about masquerade, as when a creature mimics something in its environment. And they described countershading, such as the white undersides of animals that make them seem less round and less solid.

Illustration from the Thayers’ book, showing a concealed ruffed grouse.

Abbott Thayer and his friend, fellow Dublin artist George de Forest Brush, proposed camouflaging ships during the Spanish-American War. They failed to interest the military. Theodore Roosevelt later mocked Thayer’s theories about camouflage, calling him ‘a poor lunatic goose.’

But Thayer’s ideas about camouflage reached across the Atlantic. For a time, it seemed, every country adapted his ideas about the strange art of Yankee origin — except for the United States.

Norman Wilkinson, a British artist who served in the Royal Navy Reserves, read the Thayers’ book. During World War I, he served on submarine patrol. When German U-boats began sinking British ships with abandon, Wilkinson suggested using razzle-dazzle camouflage to confuse the Germans.

Razzle dazzle design for a British warship. Courtesy National Archives.

In the summer of 1917, Wilkinson took charge of a special Dazzle Section for the Royal Academy of Art. In a year or so, the Dazzle Section painted about 2,300 battleships in bright abstract patterns. (To see templates for the designs, click here. They’re fascinating.)

Norman Wilkinson painting of a battleship painted in a dazzle design, 1918.

The French had also formed a special camouflage unit in 1915, and called its artists camoufleurs. They, too, painted thousands of battleships in dazzle patterns. And in In Australia and New Zealand, women made camouflage nets to disguise guns from the enemy’s aerial photographers.

Back in the USA

Before the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, a younger generation of U.S. artists began to promote the art of camouflage. They formed the New York Camouflage Society, a group that included Gerald Thayer, Thayer’s cousin Barry Faulkner, Brush’s son Gerome and Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of the Cornish, N.H., sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

They offered their services to the War Department. As usual, the War Department didn’t have much interest. But by the end of July, a military mission sent to Europe recommended the Army Corps of Engineers create a 260-man “camouflage park.” In September, the first recruits reported to camp in Washington, D.C. By December, the camoufleurs had their own section, Company A of the 40th Engineers.

Camouflaging artillery in World War I.

They shipped off to France on January 4, 1918. Barry Faulkner spent the rest of the war in France, camouflaging artillery and machine gun positions.

Upon his return to the States, Faulkner painted murals, most notably the ‘Faulkner Murals,’ which adorn the rotunda of the National Archives. He also painted murals in the Senate Chamber in the New Hampshire Statehouse, Hartford’s Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, and the old John Hancock building in Boston.

Dazzled by the Faulkner Murals at the National Archives.

Camouflage School

When the male camoufleurs went off to war, the ladies took over at home.

On Dec. 3, 1917, newspapers picked up a wire service report that reported about the camouflage school.

“An appeal has been issued to women artists urging them to enroll in a camp for the training of women camouflage workers,” it said. Seventy-five women had already joined and as many as four a day were signing up. Camouflage school would last as long as six months. Before they arrived, the women were urged to practice at home by painting sailcloth with house paint.

As the men before them did, some of the women migrated south to New York City from New England. In 1918, the Army formed the American Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps.

The women worked on camouflage uniforms, trying them out in Van Cortlandt Park and Kykuit, a Rockefeller estate, just north of New York City. Disguised as rocks and trees, they often fooled visitors. One police officer told a journalist in 1918, he knew they were there, “but ye can’t see thim till they move.”

Now you see her…

Now you don’t.

The military soon learned of the public attraction for razzle-dazzle camouflage. Women went to work painting crazy patterns on tanks, ambulance and trucks for parades and other wartime events.

One of those women, Edith Barry, grew up in a wealthy New Jersey family but summered in Kennebunkport. Before the war, she studied painting and sculpture at the Art Students League in New York and abroad, in Paris, Rome, Austria and Spain.

Edith Barry, self-portrait.

Razzle-Dazzle

Barry painted portraits and landscapes, at least until 1918 when she started painting razzle-dazzle camouflage onto military vehicles in New York City. She belonged to a group of camoufleurs who painted bold abstract patterns onto a replica battleship in Union Square.

Women artists painting a replica warship in Union Square. Photo courtesy National Archives.

The ship attracted a great deal of public attention. That, after all, was the point of the exercise as the razzle-dazzle ship served as a recruiting station.

The razzle-dazzle battleships also enjoyed popularity among critics, who compared them with crazy quilts at a county fair, a Russian toy shop gone mad and a flock of sea-going Easter eggs. Those critics failed to understand the purpose of the razzle-dazzle: to deceive the eyes about the speed and direction of the ship.

Since then, scientists have tried to ascertain whether the razzle-dazzle camouflage really protected battleships.

The Brick Store Museum..

At war’s end, Edith Barry resumed her art and her world travels. She painted a mural in the Kennebunk post office in 1939 as part of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. Also during the Great Depression she inherited a historic brick building in Kennebunk. She turned it into the Brick Store Museum in 1936. Dedicated to the history of the Kennebunks, it was one of the few museums founded during the Depression.

With thanks to the Camoupedia blog and Camoupedia, by Roy Behrens.

Images: Edith Barry portrait: By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54578744; Brick Store Museum, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18018629. This story was updated in 2023.

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6 Places That Became a Summer White House

The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.

Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.

Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.

The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.

A Thimble island

According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.

The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.

Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.

Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.

The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.

Bar Harbor, Maine

President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.

President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.

Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.

Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.

Hancock House

A Summer White House in Maine

Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.

He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.

“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”

However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.

Taft at his summer White House

And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.

Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.

Hyannis Port, Mass.

The Kennedy Big House

The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.

The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.

In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.

John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.

To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.

Cornish, N.H.

Harlakenden House

Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.

Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.

The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.

Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Newport, R.I.

Eisenhower House

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.

He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Plymouth Notch

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Brigadoon as a Summer White House

The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”

Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916

Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.^”

Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.

This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2023.

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Catcher in the Rye Reaches Best-Seller List in 1951, Never Leaves

Catcher in the Rye, the hilarious and profane classic tale of adolescent alienation, begins with Holden Caulfield’s 951voice:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger spent much of the rest of his life avoiding discussion of that David Copperfield kind of crap, famously withdrawing from the world in the 1950s.

He was born Jan. 1, 1919 to a prosperous Jewish family in Manhattan. In 1942 he was drafted into the U.S. Army and he saw combat, participating in the invasion of Normandy. While overseas he entered a liberated concentration camp and met Ernest Hemingway. After the war, he wrote short stories and poems. He only had limited success until The New Yorker magazine published A Perfect Day for Bananafish in 1948.

Catcher in the Rye

On July 16, 1951, Little, Brown and Company published Catcher in the Rye. It told the story of Holden Caulfield’s weekend in New York City hotel after his fourth prep school, Pencey Prep, kicked him out.

Pencey Prep had plenty of phonies, and Holden hated them. He also hated the movies, hated growing up, hated cars, hated a lot of things. “Goddam money,” he said. “It always ends up making you blue as hell.”

But Holden also wanted to catch children from running off a cliff. And he worried about where the ducks in Central Park went in the wintertime.

Catcher in the Rye was banned in schools and in several countries because Holden drank and swore. He also visited a prostitute, though he didn’t have sex with her because of his depression. That only increased its appeal to teenagers. British literary critic Ian Hamilton wrote it “become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed.”

Gerald Rosen maintained that Holden’s profound disillusionment got the book banned. “The radical nature of Salinger’s portrayal of disappointment with American society, so much like Twain’s in Huck Finn, was probably as much of the reason that Catcher (like Huck) was banned from schools and colleges as were the few curse words around which the battle was publicly fought,” he wrote.

Reception

The book reached the best-seller list in 1951 and has sold 65 million copies. Critic Adam Gopnik called it one of the three perfect books in American literature, joining Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby. Between 1961 and 1982, it was the most studied novel in U.S. high schools and libraries. It also got teachers fired for teaching it.

In “The Why of the Rye,“ Sarah Graham in BBC Magazine opined that Catcher appealed to a rising generation of teenagers who identified with Holden’s existential angst. “The first novel of the modern teenage years,” she called it in 2009.

Others have called it a war novel. Salinger had, after all, experienced the horrors of World War II (see his short story, For Esme — With Love and Squalor). Rosen, for example, argued that Holden’s truant weekend resembled the Buddha’s quest to find a guide to help him confront death and decay.

A book reaching tens of millions of people is bound to have detractors. Some found the plot dull and the hero self-obsessed and whiny. Catcher has aged, too, and Salinger’s 1940s New York slang seems outdated.

The book also inspired several notorious acts of violence. Mark David Chapman, after gunning down John Lennon in 1980, stayed at the scene reading Catcher in the Rye. He had written in it, “To Holden Caulfield, From Holden Caulfield, This is my statement.” Then after John Hinckley, Jr., tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, police found the book in his hotel room.

Withdrawal

As Catcher in the Rye earned more notoriety, Salinger withdrew from public view. That added to the novel’s mystique. He moved to Cornish, N.H., in 1953. For a time he invited Windsor High School students to his house to play records and talk. Then one student persuaded him to do an interview for the high school paper. After the interview appeared, he cut off all contact with the students.

After Catcher in the Rye, Salinger only published three more books: Nine Stories in 1953, Franny and Zooey in 1961 and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

On the dust jacket to Franny and Zooey he wrote,

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

J.D. Salinger died Jan. 27, 2010.

Photo of J.D. Salinger by Washington Post via Wikipedia. With thanks to Gerald Rosen (1977). A Retrospective Look at the Catcher in the Rye. American Quarterly, 29(5), 547-562. doi:10.2307/2712573. This story was updated in 2021.

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Philander Chase, Frontier Bishop of the Episcopal Church

Philander Chase brought the infant Episcopal Church to America’s frontier and founded one of the country’s finest liberal arts colleges in what was then wilderness.

Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase, daguerrotype by Matthew Brady

Chase was descended from Aquila Chase, who arrived in Hampton, N.H., from England in 1640. He was born on Dec. 14, 1775, to parents who were among the first settlers of Cornish, N.H. Chase wanted to be a farmer like his father, but at 15 he broke his leg and severely cut his foot. His father persuaded him that studying at Dartmouth would assuage the pain of a long lameness.

Philander Chase, Episcopalian

At Dartmouth he happened upon a copy of The Book of Common Prayer, which inspired him to abandon his Congregational upbringing and become an Episcopalian minister. As a Dartmouth student, he persuaded the pioneers of Cornish to build Trinity Church, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Trinity Church

The Episcopal Church had split from the Church of England during the American Revolution. Young American men who wanted to be ministers couldn’t attend English seminaries, and at first there were no seminaries in America. So Chase, upon graduation, went to Albany, N.Y., to study under the Rev. Thomas Ellison. He was ordained in 1799 as one of the very few Episcopal clergymen in the United States. As a missionary he helped organize St. John’s Episcopal Church in Canandaigua, N.Y., and other parishes in western New York.

Moving Around

Chase and his new wife Mary Fay accepted an invitation in 1805 to found Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans. Five years later he returned to New England to become the rector of Christ’s Church in Hartford. He clashed with the bishop of New York, though, and decided to head west. He and his family settled in Worthington, Ohio.

Salmon P. Chase

His fatherless nephew Salmon P. Chase came to live with them, and would grow up to become a U.S. senator, governor of Ohio, Treasury secretary and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Old Bexley Hall building at Kenyon College

Philander Chase was named the first Episcopalian Bishop of Ohio, but he didn’t get paid for it. He also had no help, as there was almost no trained clergy on the frontier. So he decided to establish a theological seminary. His rivals in the east wouldn’t support him, so he went to England to raise money. He founded Kenyon College and Bexley Hall, named after his chief benefactors, Lord Kenyon and Lord Bexley. He moved the college to Gambier, where he had bought 8,000 acres. According to legend, he was scouting a location and reached the crest of Gambier Hill, where he exclaimed, “Well, this will do.”

Surprise Bishop

Chase set about creating a self-sustaining institution with a farm, a gristmill and a printing press. But he fought with the trustees, faculty and clergy, and finally quit to live a quiet life on a farm in Ohio.

Former chapel and dormitory of Jubilee COllege

Then, without his knowledge, a group of Illinois parishes formed a diocese and elected him bishop. He accepted the job and went about fundraising for another college in Illinois, called Jubilee. Philander Chase died, exhausted, in 1852, and Jubilee College failed several years later. It is now a state park.

The Episcopal Church honors Philander Chase with a feast day on Sept. 22.

This story last updated in 2021.

Image: Bexley Hall By Chamberednautilus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61324774. Trinity Church By bruce denis – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21099185. Jubilee College State Park By Wonderrenae – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21548905.

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The Birds’ Best Friend: How Ernest Baynes Saved the Animals

Ernest Baynes was the closest thing New England, and the world for that matter, will ever get to a real-life Dr. Doolittle. All sorts of New England birds and animals–foxes, wolves, chickadees, bears and bison–roamed around and in and out of his house, “Sunset Ridge,” in Meriden, N.H.

Though he never claimed to talk to the animals, he did just about everything else with them. His cordial relations with animals resulted from treating them like friends, he said. And by the standards of his day, animals never had a better friend than Ernest Baynes.

Armed with an outsized reputation as a naturalist, he had a gift for ingratiating himself with powerful people. He used that gift to forever change the fortunes of two particular animals: bison and songbirds.

While it might be a stretch to say that these animals would be extinct without his taking an interest, it’s no stretch to say no one did more to popularize their plight.

Ernest Baynes

Baynes was born in 1868 in Calcutta, India. His parents, John and Helen, were of English origin, and he was educated in English schools as a young boy. At age 11, the family came to Bronx Park, N.Y., and he graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. He went on to attend the College of the City of New York.

In college, Baynes excelled in athletics as a runner and a lacrosse player. He explored the law as a potential career. For a time he worked with his father, who invented celluloid film, in attempting to establish a business.

But he soon settled on nature as his true calling. A bout of typhoid kept him out of the Spanish-American War, and his course was set. A short stint as a reporter for the New York Times had sharpened his writing. Soon he regularly contributed articles on nature and animals to magazines and newspapers in the 1890s.

Wildlife Showman

With no formal education in science, Baynes had a natural ability to examine the natural world. Without the constraints of scholarly publishing, he became a wildlife showman through his articles and appearances.

In 1901, he married and settled in Stoneham, Mass. Here, located near the Middlesex Fells, he studied birds in greater detail. He also took to raising orphaned animals and famously led a children’s brigade in feeding wildlife during one particularly hard winter. In 1903, his father died in Portland, Maine, and the next year Baynes moved farther afield to Meriden. It was here that he adopted the bison as his pet cause, both literally and figuratively.

Two of Baynes’ Tame Buffalo Pulling a Wagon

Baynes’ home was on the edge of the Blue Mountain Forest, also known as Corbin Park, a wildlife preserve established by New Hampshire businessman Austin Corbin. The park was home to a herd of 160 buffaloes, which represented a huge percentage of the overall population.

Bison neared extinction as a result of over-hunting and encroachment on their habitat. Their population fell to just 1,000 animals by 1890, down from its peak of 60 million. Very few were left in the wild. Corbin’s bison herd was a valuable resource for those who wanted to preserve the animals.

Austin Corbin, Jr., was by 1904 entrusted with running the park his father established. However he feared he couldn’t sustain the expense of maintaining the buffalo herd. When Baynes arrived in 1904, he was named conservator for the park. The then immediately began putting his skills to work.

Bison Savior

He authored a series of articles to begin raising public awareness about bison. In them he hinted that if the government did not act, the Corbin buffaloes would not survive.

Baynes tamed some bison, feeding the calves by hand with a bottle. He famously rode around the Corbin estate in a wagon pulled by two trained bison, just like a team of oxen. From time to time bison could even be found wandering inside Baynes’ house.

This hand-rearing of wild animals was something Baynes did frequently. He raised fox, raccoon, and wolves. His attempts at raising a bear came to a bad end, however, when he couldn’t teach the bear house manners. Baynes could not be prevent it from raiding his pantry. The bear then ended his days in the Bronx Zoo.

Baynes Postcard

Baynes used his animal-taming antics to build himself a following and reputation as a naturalist. Not unlike a modern day zookeeper visiting the Tonight Show with exotic animals, Baynes developed a fan base for his lectures. Later, he wrote books. And he used the fame to promote his conservation causes.

When President Teddy Roosevelt visited Corbin Park in 1902 to go hunting, he had already shown an interest in the bison. Roosevelt’s long-standing interest in wildlife led him to establish the National Park System. So in 1904 when Baynes wrote him about plans to help increase the herds of buffalo in the American West, he had a ready-made supporter of the plan in the White House.

The American Bison Society was formed, with Baynes as its founding secretary, and Roosevelt as honorary chairman. Soon, the association became the cause of the day, attracting support from wealthy philanthropists. It became the private-sector partner to the government’s efforts to preserve and increase the numbers of American bison. Baynes’ work paid off, and, within 15 years, the bison population had increased to 20,000. The recovery of the herds was underway.

Ernest Baynes for the Birds

Equally important to Baynes was the fate of the songbirds. His quirky affection for animals was at its over-the-top best when it came to birds. He authored a popular book in 1915: Wild Bird Guests: How to Entertain Them.

Bird feeder window box project

In it he included tips for protecting wild birds from the elements, as well as projects such as a birdfeeder that could be constructed in the window box of a home so people could see the birds up close. As usual, there was an ulterior motive to his showmanship: protecting birds from being killed for their plumage. The book contains lengthy discussions of the economic and natural costs of decimating the bird population.

He extended his activism to establishing one of the first bird sanctuaries in the nation in Meriden. To mark its opening in 1913 he enlisted poet Percy MacKaye, a member of the Cornish Art Colony, to write a play, Sanctuary: A Bird Masque. It was a naked effort at bolstering public opinion against continued slaughter of birds for their plumage.

Sanctuary

With a featured role for himself, the play also included a spot in the cast for the daughters of then-president Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson was in nearby Cornish, N.H., staying at the home of American author Winston Churchill for a short summer break. Baynes mounted the play in Meriden. And no doubt the message was not lost on Wilson, who watched from the audience.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress. Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for their decorative value. The play helped keep the heat on. When Wilson returned from his vacation to sign the bill, the language about birds hadn’t changed.

An actor in the play Sanctuary: A Bird Masque

The play went on a nationwide tour. It fueled the growth of the movement for bird protection that roared ahead full-steam in the 1910s. And it enjoyed a revival in New Hampshire’s upper valley.

Legacy

Baynes died in January of 1925, leaving a legacy of activism on behalf of animals. But his activism had its limits. He supported the right to conduct medical experiments on animals, an issue as hotly debated then as now.

And his obituary told the story of a varied and interesting life. He traveled the world, usually chronicling the activities of animals. When he died, he was cremated and his ashes scattered on Mount Croydon near his home. A monument on the mountain reads: “Here were scattered the ashes of Ernest Harold Baynes, lover of animals and men, and loved of them. May 1, 1868, January 21, 1925.”

Much of the personal history of Baynes in this article comes from Ernest Harold Baynes, Naturalist and Crusader by Raymond Gorges, 1928. This story was updated in 2022.

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