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The Massachusetts Camouflage School that Taught How To Razzle-Dazzle

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.

Template for a razzle-dazzle design on a 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 2022.

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The Pet Names of Famous New Englanders

When the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower, they brought with them two dogs described as a spaniel and a mastiff. Though their names are unknown, the pet names of many famous four-legged New Englanders have not been lost to history.

John Adams and his wife Abigail were the first inhabitants of the White House, and their dogs were the first to romp on the White House lawn. The Adamses had two mutts named Juno and Satan. “If you love me … you must love my dog,” Abigail wrote in a letter to her granddaughter, Caroline Smith. As president, John Adams had the White House stables built, presumably to house his horse Cleopatra.

‘Love me, love my dog.’ Abigail Adams, detail from painting by Gilbert Stuart

Satan and Sin

Mark Twain loved cats and loved to play pool. Whenever he played, he put a kitten into the corner pocket.

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote. So great was his affection for cats that he once rented two kittens, named Sackcloth and Ashes, during a summer stay in Dublin, N.H.

His pet names for his cats also included Sour Mash, Appollinaris, Zoraster, Blatherkite and Beelzebub. His favorite: Bambino.

pet-names-mark-twain-with-cat-on-his-shoulder

Mark Twain and friend.

He had a black cat named Satan and a tortoise-shell cat named Sin. They got along well.

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote.

“I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one,” he said. “They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”

Henry David Thoreau had a pet cat named Sylvia. Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently didn’t much like animals and had no pets. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Una had a Newfoundland named Leo.

Smart Setter?

Author Thomas Bailey Aldrich had an Irish setter named Grip, who he believed was smarter than some men he knew. The dog loved to bring Aldrich’s slippers from the bedroom to the parlor. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier had a dog named Robin Adair.

Daniel Webster wasn’t terribly fond of dogs or cats, but he loved oxen. When the great statesman returned to his Marshfield farm to die, one of his last pleasures was to sit in his window and admire his oxen. He was said to know them all by name, but alas, those pet names are lost to us.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., during his two-year voyage aboard the Pilgrim, adopted a dog he named Bravo in San Diego. Frederick Law Olmsted took a bull terrier named Judy along when he traveled the South to write about slavery.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait

Abolitionist John Brown loved animals and gave pet names to many. As a boy he had a pet squirrel named Bobtail. He raised sheep and had two shepherd dogs named Toss and Jack.

A Vice Named Cuddle Bunch

Louisa May Alcott joked her vices included an inordinate love of cats. She had a black cat named Cuddle Bunch who “had a fit,” and fell out of a window to her death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe loved her cat named Calvin who, according to Charles Dudley Warner, “walked into her house one day out of the great unknown and became at once at home.” Stowe named Calvin after her husband and let him sit on her shoulder while she wrote.

Marian Anderson owned two Kerry Blue terriers, Falla, after President Roosevelt’s dog, and Fenon.

Presidential Pet Names

Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace brought a menagerie to the White House. Their pets included white collies named Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, terriers named Peter Pan and Paul Pry, a Shetland sheepdog named Calamity Jane, chow chows named Tiny Tim and Blackberry, a bulldog named Boston Beans and a German shepherd named King Cole.

The Kennedy family on vacation with their dogs. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

The John F. Kennedy White House was filled with pets comprised of a mutt named Pushinka, a gift from Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev. Other pet names included a German shepherd named Clipper, a cocker spaniel named Shannon, an Irish wolfhound named Shannon, and the president’s favorite dog, a Welsh terrier named Charlie.

The First Couple often took one or two of the family dogs out for a walk under the cover of darkness. Traphes Bryant, the White House dog handler, said the people didn’t recognize them as Secret Service agents followed discreetly in a car. Sometimes, Bryant said, they “looked like two young college kids taking the dogs for a walk. They looked so happy.”

Cultural Pet Names

Leonard Bernstein, who grew up in Lawrence and later lived in Redding, Conn., owned a series of Dachsunds all named Henry. As an adult he owned a sheltie named Honey.

Bernstein incorporated the pet names of his friends’ animals into his music. The Library of Congress’s collection of his music manuscripts includes a trumpet score in Bernstein’s writing called Rondo (for Lifey). He sent it to actress Judy Holliday, whose dog was named Lifey. The music and lyric sketches for Bernstein’s orchestral composition Slava! have an alternate title on the title page: Puk – the pet name for Rostropovich’s dog.

The Bernstein family and Honey. Photo courtesy Library of Congress .

T.S. Eliot, though he grew up in St. Louis, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Eliots and summered in Gloucester, Mass. Eliot wrote “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” full of eccentric pet names like Skimbleshanks, Growltiger, Mr. Mistoffelees and Gus.. The book became the Broadway musical Cats.

And Lillian Jackson Braun, a native of Chicopee Falls, Mass., also invented fictional cats — Koko and Yum Yum — in her The Cat Who… mystery series.

This story about the pet names of famous New Englanders was updated in 2022.

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Secrets to a Long Life From Holders of The Boston Post Cane

When the Town of Westmoreland, N.H., gave its Boston Post Cane to 113-year-old Mary Ray in 2008, she was believed to be the third oldest person in the world. Born in 1895 on Prince Edward Island, she was the second oldest when she died two months short of her 115^th birthday. A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, she often ate cake and ice cream after a game.

Mary Ray

Year after year in town after New England town, the board of selectmen presents the gold-knobbed cane to a very old person. It often hapens in the presence of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Often the recipient receives gifts or pins or plaques. A newspaper photographer snaps a photo and a reporter records a witty or poignant comment.

Usually the reporter asks the secret to a long life. The answers then range from luck to clean living to daily exercise. An awful lot of Boston Post Cane holders seem to love the Boston Red Sox.

On May 5, 2011, 100-year-old Ruth Green threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park. The Lunenberg, Mass., holder of the cane, she had seen six Red Sox titles.

Boston Post Cane

Edwin Grozier

The tradition of awarding the Boston Post Cane to a town’s oldest resident began in 1909, when Boston Post owner Edwin Grozier dreamed up the publicity stunt. The Post reigned as the most popular newspaper in New England for a century until it folded in 1956. William Beals founded it in 1831 along with Charles G. Greene, younger brother of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene.

The newspaper distributed the cane to 700 towns in the Post’s circulation area in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. They were made by J.F. Fradley and Co., a New York manufacturer, from ebony shipped in 7-foot lengths from the Congo. A 14-karat engraved gold knob topped the cane.

The towns only loaned the canes. Upon the recipient’s death, they were to be returned to the town. Sometimes that didn’t happen. Two Massachusetts towns, Dover and Watertown, lost the canes for a century before finding them and reviving the tradition. The cane belonging to Lee, Mass., was found in the rubbish in Charlton, Mass., after 50 years. Farmingdale, Maine, recently got its cane back in two pieces, so now the recipient gets a plaque, as do many. Someone stole the Leominster, Mass., cane from the town offices during a renovation project. It later turned up on eBay. The town contacted the seller and ‘reacquired’ it.

Controversies

The Boston Post Cane Information Center has tracked down the canes from 494 towns of the original 700. The site reports several town, such as Florida, Mass., never got canes but made up their own.

According to the site, the Town of Barre, Mass., in October 2015 presented canes to Bess E. Difley and Warner F. “Bill” Smith, the only two recipients known to be born on the very same day — July 29. 1914.

John Smith, first Boston Post Cane recipient in Grafton, N.H.

In Hudson, Mass., two people born the same year got into a fight over who should have the cane. The selectmen wrote to the Boston Post, asking what they should do. The newspaper told them to do what they wanted, so they retired the cane. Then Hudson brought it back in 2004 and gave it to Col. Adelbert M. Mossman, 96.

In the early 1970s, Hampton, N.H., retired the cane. Selectman Ashton Norton called it too much of a pain. “We were having problems with people in nursing homes, and there was no way to find out who was the oldest or who was a native,” Norton said. “Then we’d give the cane out, and we’d get complaints that we didn’t give it to the right person. It got to be so much trouble the board decided to leave it in the town office building.”

Fear of the Cane

“People started to fear getting the cane,” said Hampton Town Clerk Jane Kelley. “The cane would be given out, and within a week, that person would be dead. It was awful.”

Nantucket put a stop to the tradition around 1998, when it became clear the cane was not a good omen for its residents.

In April 2006 the Bow, N.H., Board of Selectmen extended the time between the death of a Boston Post Cane holder and awarding the honor to a new citizen from 45 days to 60 days, ‘for respect and grievance purposes.’

In Unity, Maine, several people declined the cane because they didn’t want their neighbors knowing their ages.

Patten, Mass., gave the Boston Post Cane in 2006 to Lillian Perry Wheaton, age 96, at their Pioneer Days celebration. Lillian refused to take it home with her because she considered it bad luck.

Longevity Secrets

Others enjoy receiving the cane, especially if they get a party in their honor. As her 108th birthday approached in September 2016, Mary Cousins of Deer Isle, Maine, said she didn’t know the secret. “All I know is that I’m here, and I’m very thankful and happy for that.”

Cane holders often credited their longevity to work, genetics, God’s will, friends, family and exercise. In March 2011, George Barner received the cane from Kennebunk, Maine, at 102. He attributed his long life to playing tennis and not smoking. Gordon Maddix of Berwick, Maine, forced himself to walk every day.

When Virginia Day Zimmerman of Monson, Maine, received the cane, she still swam every morning from Memorial Day to her birthday at the beginning of October.

Florence Brayson in Exeter, Maine, shared the secret to a long and happy life: Keep your mouth shut and mind your business. Anne-Marie Veilleux, 99, of Jay, Maine, said she never let anything bother her. Myrtle Mileage, of Mexico, Maine, said, “I just do as I please. I hear only what I want to hear.”

In 2009, Foxborough, Mass., passed its cane to Harry Cederlund, age 100. He said he lived long because he ate well, didn’t smoke or drink and left the window open at night to let in fresh air.

But take heart, smokers and drinkers. Lillie Young Weissenberger received the cane in 2011 in Washington, Maine, at 94. Asked if she drank or smoke or caroused, she smiled and said, “Oh, yes. We hung around with racing people, remember. We did all of that!”

Boston Post Cane: Not Funny

Some Boston Post cane holders demonstrated it’s never too late to get started.

Maude Thomas of Falmouth, Mass., received the cane at age 108 in 2010. She worked as an office manager at an architectural firm in Boston into her 80’s, enrolled in Harvard University and received her degree at age 75.

Doris “Granny D.” Haddock got the cane by Dublin, N.H., at age 95. She became famous when she walked across the continental United States between the ages of 88 and 90. She then lived another five years after receiving the cane.

Goffstown, N.H., gave the cane to May Gruber on her 100^th birthday in 2012. She had led the Pandora knitwear company, run a 10K at age 65 and held a sign during the Occupy Wall Street protest at 99.

Becket, Mass., gave its cane to Margaret Peg Lynch, a sitcom pioneer who created the Ethel and Albert comedy series. When she got the cane, she thought about doing a show on Ethel and Albert getting older. But, she said, she couldn’t think of anything funny.

This story about the Boston Post Cane was updated in 2022.

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Frank Weston Benson, New England Painter of Light

Frank Weston Benson painted everything from duck stamps to Library of Congress murals, but he is most beloved for his sunny outdoor paintings of New Englanders at leisure.

Sunlight, 1909, by Frank Weston Benson

“I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes,” he once said.

Ducks in the Rain, 1918

Frank Weston Benson

He was born to an old and privileged Salem, Mass., family on March 24, 1862. As a boy, his father gave him a shotgun and taught him how to hunt shore birds. Benson wrote to his friend of his childhood adventures,

We used to spend our Saturdays chasing coot and old squaws in Salem Harbor. Then, after working hard all day to get one bird, in we would assemble at Sam Shrum’s or mine and chew the rag until we were so sleepy we could not hold up our heads. What a minute account each had to give of each movement of every bird seen and every shot missed. It was almost criminal to miss an easy shot in those days, so many excuses had to be invented. One word would have served for all in my case if it had been invented then, I was generally ‘rattled,’ I think, when you and I went ducking.

Self Portrait, Frank Weston Benson

On his 21^st birthday, his parents gave him $2,000 to travel to Europe. He studied old masters, especially the 17^th century masters Johannes Vermeer and Diego Velázquez. He was also influenced by the French Impressionist Claude Monet.

Eleanor Holding a Shell, 1902

By 1888 he was an established artist and married the daughter of a family friend, Ellen Perry Peirson. They had four children: Eleanor, George, Elisabeth, and Sylvia. Benson established studios in Salem and Boston, but used his family as subjects during their summer sojourns in Dublin, N.H., New Castle, N.H., and North Haven Island in Penobscot Bay.

The Sisters, 1889

Most Medaled

His painting of the sisters, his two daughters Eleanor and Elisabeth, won him many medals throughout the United States and Paris and solidified his reputation. By 1914, the Boston Transcript called him America’s most medaled painter.

Aglaia, Library of Congress mural

During that phase of his career, he also painted allegorical murals for the Library of Congress.

Red and Gold, 1915

Eventually his paintings were criticized as too pretty, and he returned to his first love, waterfowl. He mastered etchings of wildlife prints and was persuaded by a friend to design the second Federal Duck Stamp.

2nd Federal Duck Stamp

Frank Weston Benson died on Nov. 15, 1951. Of his art, critic William H. Gerdts wrote,

Frank Benson painted some of the most beautiful pictures ever executed by an American artist. They are images alive with reflections of youth and optimism, projecting a way of life at once innocent and idealized and yet resonant with a sense of certain, selective realities of contemporary times.

This story updated in 2022.

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The Old Farmer’s Almanac — All You Needed To Know And Then Some Since 1792

New Englanders have always had the Bible for directions on how to get to heaven. Since 1792, they’ve had The Old Farmer’s Almanac for directions on everything else.

The Almanac on its hundredth anniversary advised farmers to plow up the old strawberry bed and plant sweet German rutabagas in July. Household tips ranged from advice on music in the household (it should comfort each member) to destroying red ants. The secret: Dip a sponge in hot lard and place it on the shelf where they appear.

Abraham Lincoln may have used the 1858 edition to get a “not guilty” verdict for his client. The story goes that young Abe Lincoln defended William “Duff” Armstrong, accused of murder in Illinois. An eyewitness claimed he’d seen the murder by moonlight. Lincoln read from the almanac that the moon was in the first quarter and about to set on the horizon when the murder took place.

Old Farmer’s Almanac

Lincoln may not have used The Old Farmer’s Almanac because other almanacs existed at the time. The first almanac in America was printed in 1639 in Cambridge, Mass., and others followed. Benjamin Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanac in Philadelphia. And Franklin’s sister-in-law, Ann Smith Franklin, published Rhode Island Almanac by Poor Robin in Newport, R.I.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac outlasted them all.

Thomas Starts the Old Farmer’s Almanac

Robert Bailey Thomas started the Farmer’s Almanac on Oct. 13, 1792, something he’d wanted to do for a long time.

He was born April 24, 1766 in Grafton, Mass., the oldest son of Azubah Goodale and Robert Thomas, a farmer. Robert helped out with farm chores and attended the district school. His father had a large library that included Robert’s favorite book, Astronomy by James Ferguson.

From the age of 20 until 26, Robert Bailey Thomas taught nine different Massachusetts schools in Princeton, Sterling and Boylston. In his spare time, Thomas taught himself the bookbinder’s trade by mending his father’s books. He then bought textbooks in sheets and bound them and sold them to nearby storekeepers and schoolmasters.

He then went to Boston in 1792 and studied under Osgood Carleton, an almanac author. Thomas researched solar activity, weather patterns and astronomical cycles to come up with a secret forecasting formula still in use. The formula is kept in a black tin box in the almanac’s current offices in Dublin, N.H.

Robert Thomas’s upstart almanac was an instant hit, selling 9,000 copies of the 1794 edition, its second year. It was ‘fitted to the town of Boston’ but would ‘serve for any of the adjoining states’ with ‘new, useful and entertaining matter.’

Don’t Rush Into A Lawsuit

Thomas edited the Old Farmer’s Almanac for 54 years until his death on May 19, 1846. Over time he made changes. For example, he drilling a hole in it so people could hang it from a nail. He also added “Old” to the title.

The almanac included tide tables, weather predictions, schedules for colleges and Friends (Quaker) meetings. It gave carriage fares in Boston, postal regulations and advice. For example, along with the dates the courts would open in six states, it offered a morsel about lawsuits.

If your neighbor’s hens or hogs or cattle have trespassed on your crops, and you can get no satisfaction, don’t rush into a lawsuit about it; think it over carefully … The best lawyers advise clients to settle contentions out of court, sometimes even to buy a peace rather than to undergo the cost and worry of a contest.

In 1815, The Old Farmer’s Almanac inadvertently predicted the weather correctly. A printer’s mistake included a prediction of winter weather for July. The next year, 1816, was known as the Year Without a Summer. It had heavy snowfall in June and a hard frost during every month of the year.

Alabama Flour

Robert Bailey Thomas

The Almanac once conducted an experiment comparing Cincinnati flour to Alabama flour to see which made the bigger loaf of bread. Alabama won.

The centennial edition began 1892 year with the admonition “to decide if John or James, or both, shall be sent to the Agricultural College.” It also advised “Get Up early enough in the morning to give all the cattle a good carding.”

Then in October, the almanac warned the farmer not to permit his boys or hired men to shake off good winter apples. They should pick them off and handle them as carefully as if they were eggs, the almanac advised.

Winter Reading

In 1794, the Farmer’s Almanac advised the farmer to catch up with his reading in the winter. His farm, the almanac noted, afforded him all the “comforts and necessities of life,” with his barns, granaries and cellars “all well filled by his own industry and frugality.” The farm then enables him “to spend the long and tedious winter evenings with his family round a good fire and a clean hearth.” There he may read theology, geography and history “to edify and entertain them.”

Robert Thomas advised his readers to call upon their debtors for settlement in order to balance their books before the new year. And he recommended The life of Dr. Franklin, “for the amusement of winter evenings.”

Today, The Old Farmer’s Almanac reigns as the oldest continuously published periodical in North America.

This story was updated in 2021. Image of Old Farmer’s Almanac CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48736804.

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The Angels of Abbott Handerson Thayer

Abbott Handerson Thayer was a bird-crazy boy who grew up to paint stunning pictures of angels — and to promote the military use of camouflage.

Angel

He was born on Aug. 12, 1849 in Boston, the son of a country doctor. He grew up near Keene, N.H., at the foot of Mount Monadnock, which he also painted to acclaim. Sometimes he painted an angel hovering over the mountain. That symbolized his efforts — ultimately successful — to protect the mountain from development.

Winged Figure, 1889

Thayer dedicated his career to painting pictures of ‘the highest human soul beauty.’ He belonged to a small group of American painters who returned from Paris art schools in the late 19th century. They tended to depict beautiful young women as ‘timeless beauty.’

Stevenson Memorial

Abbott Handerson Thayer’s reputation grew during the 1880s. He was considered one of the finest painters of the human figure. He had more commissions than he could handle — including portraits of Mark Twain and Henry James. Thayer finished the painting above, a tribute to the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, in 1909 in his studio in Dublin, N.H.

He had strong opinions and odd habits. With his family he slept outdoors year round to take advantage of fresh air. He wore long underwear in winter and gradually cut off the legs until summertime, when he wore them as shorts.

Camouflage, by Abbott Handerson Thayer

Thayer developed an interest in camouflage as a boy observing animals’ protective coloring. Later in his life he wrote books on camouflage. Then he tried to interest the military in his ideas. He is credited with being the first to write about disruptive patterning (he called it ‘razzle-dazzle’), which breaks up an animal’s outlines. He also wrote about masquerade, when a creature mimics something in its environment. Thayer identified countershading as well. It shows in the white undersides of animals, making them seem less round and less solid.

Eventually the military accepted his proposal for countershading U.S. ships.

Boy and Angel

By 1918, he fell into a depression because so many young men died in the influenza epidemic and in World War I. That sadness informs this 1918 painting, Boy and Angel. He considered it his finest work.

Abbott Handerson Thayer died May 29, 1921. John Singer Sargent remarked, “Too bad he’s gone. He was the best of them.”

With thanks to Smithsonian Magazine. This story was updated in 2022.

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