Hillsboro NH Archives - New England Historical Society

Currier & Ives produced thousands of hand-colored lithographs that together create a panorama of the mid-19^th century.

The firm got its start in Roxbury, Mass., before hitting on its formula for success in New York City. It produced two kinds of prints: rush prints of news events and stock prints of American life, including landscapes, religion, entertainment, sports, games, home life and city views.

Currier & Ives’ most popular and enduring images are of the New England countryside, especially in winter. The iconic prints define rural New England at its most picturesque.

Currier & Ives prints can be quite valuable, and are among the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H., the White House, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn., and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Here are 6 New England places depicted in stock prints by Currier & Ives

East Rock, New Haven, Conn.

George Durrie created the archetypal Currier & Ives images of charming, quaint rural scenes: horse-drawn sleighs, haying, gathering wood, sugaring off and coming home for Thanksgiving.

Durrie was born in Hartford in 1820 and settled in New Haven in 1842. He painted nostalgic genre scenes of the New England countryside near his home. He also made painting trips to New Jersey, New York and Virginia. His winter scenes are probably the most popular of all the Currier & Ives prints and still appear on Christmas cards, calendars, plates and posters.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell exactly where Durrie’s barns, gristmills and ice-covered ponds actually are (or were). Durrie painted several scenes at the Jones Inn (pictured above), identified as near Farmington, Conn. There is a historic house in Farmington once owned by Belinda and Clare Jones. Could it be the same?

One New Haven scene painted by Durrier is easy to identify: East Rock.

East Rock

Here’s what it looks like now:

Mount Desert Light

Mount Desert Light is the farthest land from which a New England coast lighthouse shines its beacon. It is more than 20 miles from the nearest port at Mount Desert Island and sits on a rock that’s 17 feet above sea level at its highest point. Perhaps that’s why Currier & Ives misnamed the print as Desert Rock Light. The auction company Skinner sold a print of it in 2008 for $711.

Desert Rock Light

The current granite tower replaced a short wooden tower in 1847. The lighthouse was automated in 1977 and transferred to the College of the Atlantic in 1998. Today it is used as an ecology research station specializing in humpback and finback whales.

Mount Desert Light in 1892

Boston, Mass.

Currier & Ives printed detailed views of 40 cities by Charles Parsons and his son, Charles R. Parsons. The view of Boston appeared in the Boston & Beyond exhibit at the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library in 2008.

This map of Boston is dated 1873, the year after the Great Boston Fire destroyed 800 buildings. (The city quickly rebuilt.) The Currier & Ives print was apparently sketched before the fire.

Here’s a more recent view of the city:

Franklin Pierce Homestead, Hillsboro, N.H.

Nathaniel Currier printed this lithograph of the birthplace of Franklin Pierce in 1852, before Pierce took office as president of the United States, before he became one of the most hated men in America and even before Currier went into business with Ives. Pierce was actually born in a log cabin next door while his father, former Gov. Benjamin Pierce, built the homestead.

Today the Pierce homestead is a National Historic Landmark, open to visitors during the summer season. It doesn’t look a whole lot different than it did in the days of Nathaniel Currier.

Yacht Squadron, Newport, R.I.

Currier & Ives nautical prints were popular then and they are popular now. In 1932, a dozen Currier & Ives experts selected what they considered the 50 best large Currier & Ives prints. The New York Sun printed one a day for 50 days. The series was so popular that another 50 ‘best of’ small prints were chosen and run in the newspaper. The two lists stimulated market demand for Currier & Ives prints.

Nautical themes are among the most popular prints, and they can command high prices even today.

The Philadelphia Print Shop, for example, lists the print of the Clipper Ship Dreadnought off Sandy Hook on Feb. 23, 1854 at $4,200.

Yacht Squadron shows yachts, a steamboat and several rowboats in a harbor at Newport, R.I.

Here’s how Newport looks today:

Lake Memphremagog, Newport, Vt.

Lake Memphremagog is a glacial lake between Newport, Vt., and Magog, Quebec. It’s 31 miles long and mostly in Quebec.

The name Memphremagog is derived from the Algonkian language and means ‘where there is a big expanse of water.’

The Currier & Ives print from 1860 shows a shepherd with three sheep, sitting on a knoll looking across lake with islands and Owls Head in the background.

The modern photograph is taken from Owls Head.

Photos: East Rock neighborhood, By Emilie Foyer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31125004; Boston from Long Wharf, By Chris Wood (User:chris_j_wood). – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=984357; Newport sailboats, By chensiyuan – chensiyuan, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9070731; Currier & Ives prints courtesy Library of Congress.

Amy Beach’s parents realized their daughter was a prodigy when she knew 40 songs at the age of one, sang countermelodies at two and composed waltzes at five. As a young child she heard each key in a different color.

Unfortunately, she was born in 1867, when opportunities for a female musical prodigy were limited.

Amy Beach in 1908

Fortunately, her parents didn’t view that as an obstacle.

Amy Beach

She was born Amy Marcy Cheney on Sept. 5, 1867 in Henniker, N.H., to Clara Marcy Cheney and Charles Abbott Cheney, the nephew of Oren Cheney, co-founder of Bates College.

When she was eight, her family moved from Henniker to Boston. Her parents hired piano teachers Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann. Word of the child prodigy spread. Her parents received offers to manage Amy’s performances, all of which they turned down.

At 13 she met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and wrote a song from his poem The Rainy Day. It was the first of her many published compositions.

At 16 she made her professional debut as a pianist and performed as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At 18, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a prominent physician 25 years older than she. Amy Beach changed her professional name to Mrs. H.H.A. Beach. At her husband’s request she limited her performances to one recital a year, donating the proceeds to charity. He encouraged her to focus on composing music though she’d only had a year of formal training.

As Mrs. H.H.A. Beach she played the role of society wife, but she had few household duties and used her free time to compose.

Success

Amy Beach’s first major composition was the Mass in E-Flat, which was performed by the Handel and Haydn Society on Feb. 7, 1892. It was her first major success and catapulted her into the ranks of America’s foremost composers. That position was confirmed in 1896, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed her Gaelic Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32.

She also wrote songs. Ecstasy was so popular the Beaches used the royalties from it to build a large summer home on Cape Cod.

Amy Beach would write 150 works during her lifetime: church music, songs, chamber music and orchestral works. (For a sample of her work, click here.) Fifty-four years after her death, the Boston Pops Orchestra paid tribute to Amy Beach. Keith Lockhart led a concert of her works. Her name was also added to the granite wall on the Hatch Shell along with Bach, Handel, Chopin, Debussy, MacDowell, and Beethoven.

As a young performer

Dr. Beach died in 1910, when Amy was still in her early 40s. She decided to tour Europe for three years, playing her own compositions on the piano. She established her reputation playing with Europe’s finest orchestras until the start of World War I forced her to return home.

New Hampshire Roots

Throughout her life, Amy Beach would stay in touch with her family and friends in Henniker and Hillsboro, N.H., In 1921, she took up summer residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. She incorporated melodies sung by a thrush family near her MacDowell studio into two of her most famous piano pieces, Hermit Thrush at Eve and Hermit Thrush at Morning. As a young girl she had contributed to ornithological science by writing down bird songs as she heard them.

Amy Beach spent winters in New York City, where she performed, composed and encouraged young students. Her admirers formed ‘Beach Clubs’ around the country. She visited them during her travels, sometimes performing impromptu recitals. She also wrote about music. During World War II she wrote, “Music must elevate. Because it is spiritual, it must give us courage to live and to fight for those things in life worth fighting for—whether we struggle on the battlefield or in our daily lives.”

She retired in 1940, ill with heart disease, and died on Dec. 27, 1944.

Thanks to More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women by Gail Underwood Parker. This story was updated in 2022.

Hillsboro NH

6 Places That Appear in Currier & Ives Prints