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Isles of Shoals

Ellen Robbins, Flower Painter and Perennial Prank Victim

What was it about Ellen Robbins that inspired people to play practical jokes on her?

She made a good living as a flower painter in the 19^th century. Her gorgeous botanical watercolors sold well, in bound books and in frames. She grew up in shabby gentility, helped along by her well-to-do family and friends.

Wildflowers by Ellen Robbins. Chromalithograph. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Summers she spent in fashionable resorts, winters in her Beacon Street studio. Artists more high spirited than she frequented those places, which may explain why Ellen Robbins was the butt of so many jokes. She was prim, temperate, careful. She preferred nature to the social ramble, and she didn’t like displays of wealth, which she considered vulgar.

Toward the end, though, Ellen Robbins got a good laugh on everyone else.

Ellen Robbins

She was born in 1828 in Watertown, Mass., the youngest of seven children. Her father owned a factory, but his business failed and he died when she was two.

She described herself as a plain, sickly child with a lame foot. She grew up poor, but with prominent neighbors and cousins—Maria White, who married James Russell Lowell, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis were both cousins. Her relatives also included a leading family of Watertown, the Thaxters, through whom she would discover the artists’ colony on the Isles of Shoals.

Autumn Leaves, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

As a child, she loved to paint. As the youngest, her sisters played jokes on her. They told her sugared almonds were spiders, which she believed. When presented with the treat, her sisters held out their hands for her almonds, which she gave them.

She attended the School of Design in Boston on the suggestion of her cousin, William Abijah White, an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Then, needing to support her family, she got a series of jobs trying to design prints for textiles., For a time she worked at the Merrimac Printworks in Lowell, Mass., and at the Manchester Printworks in Manchester, N.H.

But she never got the hang of it, so she gave up and went home to Watertown. There she attended Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman‘s School of Design, which taught her what she needed to know about watercolor.

Flower Painter

She excelled at painting watercolors of flowers, and decided to create books of spring flowers as they came. Each book had 20 paintings and sold for $25. Here having wealthy friends and relatives paid off. Cousin Hollis Hunnewell bought one for another cousin, a countess living in Paris. Philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway bought another.

“I now began to feel my good fortune had begun,” she wrote.

Ellen Robbins in her studio, photograph by J. Appleton Brown

She then contributed a watercolor of autumn leaves to an exhibit of amateur paintings. Several people who liked her paintings asked her to give lessons, and so she took a class of seven students. Ellen remembered how Susan Cabot Lowell Sohier brought a melon basket filled with flowers to paint, a Herculean task.

Eventually she began giving private lessons She continued to attract pupils, and after many years she had seven classes a week, at $150 a class. Her students came mostly from Boston’s old moneyed families.

“In my classes, when those came, I lived for two hours each day in the fashionable world; and after hearing of balls and parties, the rest that followed in my simple home was most grateful,” she wrote.

The Cool Kids

In addition to Boston’s elite, Ellen Robbins had entree to an expatriate community of American artists in Rome. One of its members, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, had been a close friend since childhood.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

Hosmer had a relationship with the leader of that expatriate group, the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. When Cushman was performing in Boston, she visited Robbins’ studio and gave her tickets to her shows. She also gave her a recipe for shampoo that supposedly thickened hair. But the shampoo had red lavendar as an ingredient. When Ellen used it to wash her mother’s hair, it turned pink.

Charlotte Cushman by William Page, 1853. National Portrait Gallery.

Another member of Cushman’s group, sculptor Margaret Foley, suggested Ellen sell her paintings through a Summer Street gallery eventually known as Doll & Richards. The gallery accepted her work, which sold out in a matter of weeks. Henry Ward Beecher was her biggest customer.

She took a studio at the corner of West and Tremont streets in Boston, later at 6 Beacon Street. There she made friends with John Appleton Brown and his wife, who had a studio next to hers.

Asters, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

She kept boxes of butter and sausage on the window ledge overlooking Beacon Street. One day she got a postcard from her landlord remonstrating her for putting food on the window ledge. She went next door to share her indignation with Appleton Brown, who made a show of sympathizing with her. But then his mouth twitched and she realized he had sent the postcard.

Travels

Reflecting on her success, she wrote, “My pictures were in great demand, and everything seemed to help me, for I was almost alone in the painting of flowers, and had relatives who were interested in my success, helping in a financial way.”

Another cousin, Henry Durant, who founded Wellesley College, hired her to paint a frieze at Wellesley (now gone).

She then built a studio in Bar Harbor, where she sold her flower paintings for many summers. But Bar Harbor began to attract wealthy swells, so she changed summer venues to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.

Hyacinths, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

There at her family’s hotel, poet Celia Thaxter hosted many artists and literati of the day. Some of them enjoyed playing practical jokes on Ellen Robbins. One night they sneaked a parrot into her bedroom.

Thaxter’s granddaughter remembered how the high-spirited Hassam played another joke on her.

Childe Hassam and Appleton Brown greatly annoyed a most temperate fellow artist, Levi’s cousin Ellen Robbins, by sneaking into her studio and filling her Franklin stove with empty champagne bottles. She was not amused when, the next damp day, she tried to light her fire and was choked by smoke.

Celia Thaxter’s garden at the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam

In 1873, she had saved enough to go to Europe with her sister. Again, a wealthy friend helped her out. Two days before she sailed, John Cummings, a wealthy banker, walked into her studio and handed her a letter of credit for a thousand dollars. He told her he wanted her to see Switzerland and Germany.

In London she befriended May Alcott, whose sister Louisa May, had written the blockbuster children’s novel, Little Women.

Ellen Robbins Gets the Last Laugh

The joke was on everyone else in 1893.

Back home in Watertown with her sisters, Ellen, then in her 65th year, fell gravely ill. As she lay in her sickbed, the Young Men’s Republican Club gave a dinner in town. Toward the end of the dinner, the Episcopal minister made some remarks, and ended by pointing to some flowers on the table. He said they reminded him of Miss Ellen Robbins, who painted such realistic flowers. He then added that “she is lying very ill at her house tonight.”

The next day, Ellen’s sister Martha ordered a sewing machine from a man who also worked as an undertaker. He delivered the sewing machine in his undertaker’s wagon. A Mr. Hartwell, who worked in the paper mill nearby, happened to look out the window just as the wagon left the house. One of his workmen had a sister who boarded at the Robbins’ house, and he told Mr. Hartwell Ellen would be the one taken away by the undertaker.

Wildflowers No. 2, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

Mr. Hartman went to tell the minister, who stopped by to pay a condolence call. Startled when he saw Ellen on the sofa embroidering, he said he was pleased to see her looking so well. A stream of visitors followed the next day, all commenting on how happy they were to see Ellen looking so well.

A neighbor, Miss Mary Fitch, wanted to attend her funeral. Mary’s sister heard that a funeral would take place the next day at 2 p.m., and assumed that meant Ellen Robbins would be laid to rest. Mary went to the funeral service, and viewed the remains – of a bald old man wrapped in a shroud. “Oh, how changed,” she said. She soon figured out she’d gone to a stranger’s funeral.

Ellen Robbins lived another 12 years, dying at the age of 77.

With thanks to Reminiscences of a Flower Painter, parts I and II, by Ellen Robbins for the New England Magazine, Vol. 14, 1896. This story last updated in 2022.

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How the Irish Immigrants Came to New England

In 1718, five ships from Ulster arrived in Boston Harbor. Their passengers, Scots-Irish immigrants, came at the invitation of the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts. The Puritans sympathized with their plight, fellow Protestants who suffered from Anglican intolerance.

But the Puritans didn’t exactly welcome them with open arms. And they weren’t the first Irish immigrants to New England.

Their story usually begins with the Great Hunger of the mid-19^th century, but it started well before that—and lasted long after.

The First Irish Immigrants

Before England destroyed Ireland’s merchant marine, Irish merchants traded with the American colonies as early as the 1630s. Irish fishermen from Galway and Waterford settled the Isles of Shoals, an archipelago of tiny islands nine miles from the Maine and New Hampshire coast. At first seasonal residents, several hundred Irish and other European fishermen had a permanent settlement on the islands by 1653.

The Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam (painted many years later)

The archipelago developed into a thriving entrepot where they caught fish, salted it and sold it on the world market. Fishermen named Kelley, Haley and McKenna lived on the islands with their families. They abandoned the Isles of Shoals during the American Revolution.

The Puritans in Boston looked down on the Shoalers, a hard-drinking, Maypole-erecting lot. They also viewed the Protestant Irish who arrived in 1718 with a measure of dismay.

Protestant Irish

The Scots who settled in Ulster beginning more than a century earlier were called the Ulster Scots-Irish, or the Ulster Presbyterians. Squeezed between hostile Irish Catholics and the Anglican Church, they had to pay tithes, but couldn’t hold official positions. Parliament passed the Test Act in 1704, which required them to take Holy Communion in the Anglican Church — otherwise they couldn’t hold civil or military office and their marriages weren’t recognized.

The impoverished Scots-Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston in 1718 created a problem: How to support them? The Rev. Cotton Mather wrote,

But what shall be done for the great number of people that are transporting themselves thither from ye North of Ireland?

Massachusetts Gov. Samuel Shute envisioned Irish pioneers settling on the frontiers of Maine and New Hampshire, buffering the colony from French and Indians. So in 1720, an ordinance passed in Boston ordering ‘certain families arriving from Ireland to move off.’

Boston Harbor ca. 1765

Some settled in Nutfield, N.H., now called Londonderry. Some went north to Casco Bay, where they had a land grant. Fifty families moved to Worcester. From those settlements they spread out, and they kept arriving from Ulster. According to one estimate, the Scots-Irish made up 10 percent of New Hampshire’s population in the 18^th century.

In 1730, Massachusetts Gov. Jonathan Belcher tried to annex New Hampshire. But enough Londonderry Scots-Irish lived along the border to make sure it didn’t happen.

Today, many place names in Maine and New Hampshire reflect their Scots-Irish roots: Derry, Antrim and Londonderry, N.H.; Belfast and Limerick, Maine; Colrain, Mass.; and Londonderry, Vt.

Early Irish Immigrants

By 1650, a steady stream of Boston-bound ships began to leave Ireland filled with redemptioners, many of them Irish Catholic. They were indentured servants who agreed to near-slavery for seven years in exchange for passage, food, shelter and clothing.

They sailed from Dublin, Cork and Waterford to Marblehead, Boston, Providence and Piscataquis County, Maine. Some came from Galway via Newfoundland, where they fished.

Some came by way of Barbados, where Oliver Cromwell had deported 50,000 Irish Catholic peasants as indentured servants in the mid-17^th century. Ann Glover was one. She was living in Boston by 1680 and hanged on Nov. 16, 1688 as a witch. The proof: she could only say the Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic.

The Puritans treated Irish-Catholic newcomers even worse than they treated the Protestant-Irish immigrants. They wouldn’t let people own property or carry on a business in Boston unless they took the Oath of Allegiance to some Protestant faith.

The Catholics kept out of the Puritans’ way and they stayed out of the historical record. Historian Michael O’Brien argues that many Irish Catholics abandoned their faith and became Baptists and Methodists. “There was no alternative for them,” he concluded.

One Irish immigrant who came to Rhode Island left his mark. The Irish-Anglo philosopher George Berkeley arrived in Newport in 1729, hoping to found a college. He stayed for a little less than three years, but helped found the Redwood Library and donated his library to Yale College.

American Revolution

The Irish may have avoided the Puritans, but they had no love for the English. So when the American Revolution broke out, Irish immigrants and their descendants played major roles in achieving American independence.

Hibernian names fill the muster rolls of the Continental Army. The name “Kelly” alone appears 695 times. So many fought, in fact, that one British general testified at the House of Commons that “half the rebel Continental Army were from Ireland.”

Henry Knox by Gilbert Stuart 1806

Some of the best fighters and leaders on both sides of the American Revolution were Irish immigrants or sons of Irish immigrants. Continental Army generals Henry Knox and John Stark were Scots-Irish, and Gen. John Sullivan’s parents had emigrated from County Cork. American general Richard Montgomery and his friend Guy Carleton, a British general, both grew up in Ireland.

Eight of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence had Irish birth or ancestry as did seven of the 54 framers of the Constitution.

Great Hunger

Between 1815 and 1845, as many as 1 million Irish immigrants came to “Amerikay,” looking for opportunity. They found a measure of it, building canals and railroads and factories.

But it wasn’t until the potato crop began to fail in 1845 that the enormous influx of Irish immigrants sailed into New England. Hunger and poverty had pushed them out of Ireland, but the promise of work pulled them to the region’s industrial powerhouses. They flooded into Boston, Pawtucket, Lowell, Portland and Burlington, and to the manufacturing cities in the Merrimack and Connecticut river valleys.

Irish famine victims, Bridget O’Donnell and her children, 1849.

From 1845 to 1855, the so-called famine ships brought 2 million Irish immigrants to ports in Boston, New York and Canada. Many came to Canada first because of the cheaper fare, then made their way to New England. Those immigrants had a nickname: Two Boaters.

Many Irish immigrants died aboard the famine ships, also known as coffin ships. A Boston priest wrote a survival guide for those who dared make the journey. Father John O’Hanlon began it with a caution: “Change of location does not always bring better fortune to the emigrant.”

Suffering and Discrimination

The Irish immigrants often lived in crowded, unsanitary housing. Some dwellings had 100 people living in them with one sink and one toilet. In 1849, a cholera epidemic struck Boston. Of the 611 people who died of it, 500 were Irish.

“No Irish Need Apply” signs appeared in many a shop window and classified advertisement. The Irish endured frequent mockery as drunken, slovenly, ape-like creatures. They also suffered outright persecution.

Thomas Nast cartoon titled, “The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things.”

In Rhode Island, a man named John Gordon was hanged in 1845 for the murder of a prominent industrialist. His real crime was being Irish.

Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, Maine, waged a war against booze in 1855. The city’s Irish community thought he was waging war against them. They had a point. When a riot over rum broke out, Dow called out the militia. A fisherman was shot to death in the melee.

When the Civil War started, many Irish immigrants fought in the Union Army, not always willingly. Some viewed it as practice for their military campaign to free Ireland from England. In 1870, a fanatical Irish-American army decided to conquer Canada to win Irish freedom. They invaded Canada from a Vermont farm, but their effort failed.

Depiction of Irish immigrants arriving at Constitution Wharf, Boston, 1857

Another Wave

Even after the famine subsided, they still came. From 1855 to 1921, large numbers of Irish immigrants left their farms for jobs in the industrial cities of the Northeast. They came to Portland, Maine, Burlington, Vt., and the New Hampshire cities of Manchester and Dover. They came to Pawtucket, Providence and Cranston in Rhode Island, to Hartford and New Haven in Connecticut. And they especially came to Massachusetts, to Boston and its North and South Shores, to the Merrimack River Valley and to Holyoke and Worcester.

Then, in 1922, quotas restricted the number of immigrants into the United States, including the Irish.

Concentration of Irish in America, 1970, according to the U.S. Census.

Triumph

When John F. Kennedy won the presidency of the United States in 1960, people viewed it as a triumph over a century of discrimination. But his family had already succeeded. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had amassed a fortune and served as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Many other Irish immigrants and their descendants had thrived in politics, people like Boston Mayor James Michael Curley and Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O’Neill.

Today, more than one in five residents of Massachusetts and New Hampshire claims Irish ancestry. And about 18 percent of people living in Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont have Irish forbears. Connecticut may be the least Irish state in New England, with only 16.6 percent of its people claiming Irish blood. But still, it’s in the top 10, with only Delaware claiming slightly more.

The world’s largest Irish flag at Rowe’s Wharf in Boston.

Boston, the most Irish city in the country, has retained much of its Irish culture and still attracts Irish immigrants. Mayor Marty Walsh’s parents were born in Ireland. Boston has the Celtics, Boston College, many churches and pubs, as well as the legacy of Whitey Bulger. Boston’s South Shore, known as the Irish Riviera, gave us the Dropkick Murphys.

Many Bostonians take off from work on March 17, a holiday in Suffolk County. To appease Yankee sensibilities, though, it’s called Evacuation Day. Though it commemorates the British departure from Boston, there’s no Evacuation Day parade.

Largest Irish flags By John Hoey from Framingham, MA, United States – World’s Largest Irish Flag (1), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47411665 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47411658.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Oldest Lighthouse in Each New England State

TThe oldest lighthouse in the country would have been in New England had the British not blown it up during the American Revolution. Today, Boston Light is the second oldest lighthouse in the country — and the oldest in Massachusetts.

Lighthouses and history go together like — well, ‘New’ and ‘England.’ Many of the coastal beacons predated the United States itself, but, like Boston Light, were replaced with newer, better versions.

Each New England state has multiple lighthouses. Maine, with its long coastline, has 57, while New Hampshire has only two along its 18 mile coast. Vermont actually has six.

But which are the oldest? Here, then, is a list of the oldest lighthouse in each New England state.

New London Harbor Light

Built in 1801, the New London Harbor Light is not only Connecticut’s oldest lighthouse, it is the tallest.

New London Harbor Light

The colonial Connecticut legislature in 1760 decided to build the first lighthouse at New London, then one of the busiest whaling ports in the colonies. The government sold lottery tickets to raise 500 pounds to pay for building it. In 1781, Benedict Arnold led a British raid on New London and burned the town, but the stone lighthouse and keeper’s cottage survived the attack.

Connecticut ceded New London Harbor Light to the United States in 1789, and 11 years later Congress voted money to rebuild it.

Abisha Woodward, a New Londoner, built the 80-foot-tall octagonal stone tower.

Lighthouse keepers were political appointees, and Martin van Buren appointed John Munn at New London Harbor Light. Munn lost his job in 1841 after van Buren lost reelection, and before he left he blackened the reflector and trashed the lamps. His successor, a popular fisherman named John Mason, took weeks to repair Munn’s vandalism. But after Mason served only four months as keeper, Munn wrangled his job back, outraging the locals. The controversy died down when Munn passed away and Mason took his place.

The Bureau of Lighthouses automated the New London Harbor Light in 1912, and auctioned the property. Today the lighthouse remains in private hands, but New London has others. Today, you can see five lighthouses from Pequot Avenue — and learn more about lighthouses at the Coast Guard Museum.

U.S. Coast Guard Museum, 15 Mohegan Ave., New London, Conn.

Portland Head Light

You may know the Portland Head Light as the Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse. The General Court of Massachusetts appropriated $750 to build it on the shores of Cape Elizabeth in 1787. Three years later, the U.S. government took responsibility for lighthouses and provided $1,500 to finish the job. President George Washington reminded the contractors the government didn’t have much money, so they should take building materials from the fields and shores.

Portland Head Light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine

Sixteen whale oil lamps first lit Portland Head Light on Jan 10, 1791.

One of the strangest shipwrecks in history took place at Portland Head Light on Christmas Eve, 1886. The three-masted bark Annie C. Maguire rammed right into the ledge by the lighthouse, though the crew plainly saw the light before the disaster. The keeper, Joshua Strout, along with his family and volunteers used a ladder as a gangplank to rescue all 14 aboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard decommissioned Maine’s oldest lighthouse in 1989. Today Portland Head Light, which sits next to 90-acre Fort Williams Park, has a museum within the former keeper’s quarters and a seasonal gift shop.

1000 Shore Rd., Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Boston Light

One would almost think Boston Light was cursed, given the trouble that befell the people who associated with it and the number of attacks it sustained from fire, lightning and warring armies.

Boston Light

There had been beacons on Brewster Island before to signal the approach of enemies and ships. The Boston merchant who petitioned the General Court to build Boston Light died before construction began. The first lighthouse keeper drowned. So did the second. The third lighthouse keeper had to clear his name after he was unfairly blamed for a fire in the light.

Fire broke out again and lightning struck the lighthouse several times. During the American Revolution, the Americans burned the wooden parts after the British captured it. When the British evacuated Boston, they left a time charge in Boston Light and blew it up.

A second Boston Light was built in 1783, and it is now the second oldest lighthouse in the United States. (The oldest is in Sandy Hook, N.J.)

Massachusetts gave Boston light to the federal government in 1790. In 1813, lighthouse keeper Jonathan Bruce and his wife watched the battle between the USS Chesapeake and the HMS Shannon. Just before dying, the wounded Chesapeake captain told his men, “Don’t give up the ship.” The crew gave up the ship anyway nine minutes later.

The military extinguished the light during World War II as a security precaution, and relit it on July 2, 1945. The Coast Guard decommissioned Boston Light in 1998, but it remains staffed by a keeper who acts mostly as a tour guide.

The National Park Service conducts tours of Boston Light twice daily on summer weekends.

Little Brewster Island, Boston, Mass.

White Island Light

The oldest of New Hampshire’s two lighthouses: White Island Light.

White Island Light, also known as Isles of Shoals Light, was built in 1859, though the New Hampshire light station had been around since 1821.

Thomas Laighton famously took the job as lighthouse keeper after losing the election for New Hampshire governor in 1839. He sold his business in Portsmouth, moved his family to the small archipelago known as the Isles of Shoals and vowed he’d never set foot on the mainland again.

Laighton bought four of the nine islands and wrangled the federal appointment as lighthouse keeper. His daughter Celia wrote a poem about the island’s sandpipers, which the Atlantic magazine published. Laighton later built a summer resort on another island in the Isles of Shoals, and Celia Laighton Thaxter became one of America’s most popular writers. She maintained a salon on the Isles, hosting such luminaries as Childe Hassam, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

New Hampshire’s oldest lighthouse was built of brick with a cast iron lantern.

The island is closed to the public, but you can get close to White Island Light in an excursion boat.

White Island, Rye, N.H.

Poplar Point Light

Built in 1831 in North Kingstown, R.I., Poplar Point Light is not only Rhode Island oldest lighthouse, it’s the oldest with a wooden tower in the United States.

Wickford, R.I.’s, protected harbor off Narragansett Bay allowed the village to develop as a shipping point for trade between local plantation and international ports.

Poplar Point Lighthouse

Congress agreed to spend $3,000 for a light at the entrance to Wickford Harbor, and local contractors finished it by the end of 1831. The Poplar Point Light guided sloops and schooners in and out of the harbor’s wharves.

By 1838, a Coast Guard survey concluded the light wasn’t needed, but Poplar Point Light stayed lit. By 1870, the government decided to build a new lighthouse at Old Gay Rock to guide the burgeoning ferryboat traffic. Albert Sherman bought Poplar Point Lighthouse at auction for $3,944.67. By 1932, Edith Grant owned the lighthouse and built a large house around it. The Shippee family bought the building in 1962, and has lived there since.

Poplar Point Light is not open to the public, but Rhode Island Bay Cruises and Save the Bay offer lighthouse cruises that may go near. They usually run between May and October.

Juniper Island Light

The oldest lighthouse in Vermont: Juniper Island Light in Lake Champlain.

Juniper Island Light is not only the oldest lighthouse in Vermont, it’s the oldest cast iron lighthouse left in the United States. Originally a lantern on a post on Juniper Island marked the entrance to Burlington Harbor until a 30-foot-tall brick tower, the first on Lake Champlain, replaced it. That fell to a tower of cast iron in 1846. The lighthouse guided thousands of ships into Burlington Harbor, for many years the second busiest lumber port in the United States.

After 108 years of service, an automatic light on a tower replaced the Juniper Island Light. A state senator named Fred Fayette bought the island and the lighthouse in 1956. Careless campers started a fire that destroyed the lighthouse keeper’s house in 1962. Fayette’s 11 children inherited the island after his death and in 2001 began to reconstruct the keeper’s house with reclaimed bricks. They later restored and painted the tower.

Juniper Island, Burlington, Vt.

Images: Portland Head Light, By Rapidfire – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7161757; Boston Light By Dpbsmith at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1663166. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Autumn Paintings of New England (And How They Look Today)

New England’s fall foliage inspires so much imagery we were pretty sure we could find six autumn paintings of New England. Then we thought we could identify each location and find a current photo, with help from Google Maps, Wikipedia and our own archives.

Sure enough, we found a painting of an identifiable scene in each New England state – all beautiful, of course, and all of autumn. We even found photos of the subjects of some of the six autumn paintings from the artist’s vantage point.

Here then are six autumn paintings of New England, one for each state.

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Reflections of Old Lyme by Guy Wiggins

We naturally turned to the village of Old Lyme in New London to find an autumn landscape painting.

Old Lyme was the site of an artist colony, arguably the largest and most important in the United States for 20 years from about 1900. It started when Florence Griswold and her sister Adele fell on hard times, as had New London. The Griswold sisters began to rent rooms to boarders in their family’s old Georgian home. When New York artists learned about the picturesque seaside town, they flocked to Miss Florence’s art colony.

Guy Wiggins, who painted Reflections of Old Lyme, was one of the youngest members of the Old Lyme art colony. He painted with his father, Carleton Wiggins, also a landscape artist. Guy Wiggins was better known for his paintings of New York skyscrapers in winter.

The painting was in the archives of the Caldwell Gallery in Hudson, N.Y.

Today, the Old Lyme Art Colony lives on as the Florence Griswold Museum (open from May through October), and Old Lyme has regained its prosperity.

Old Lyme today, courtesy Google Maps.

Mount Katahdin

Mount Katahdin by Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, was a renowned Modernist artist who painted manly, rugged scenes of fishermen, mountains and rocky seashores. He often painted Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain in Baxter State Park.

He moved to New York to embrace Greenwich Village Bohemianism, then in 1901 began a pattern he would repeat throughout his life: He left New York for Maine for the first of many summers. Hartley would forever bounce between the city and the country, tiring of one, then the other. In 1937, after a long stint in Europe, he returned to Lewiston, declaring he wanted to become ‘the painter of Maine.’

He made no money and almost abandoned art at the age of 29. Then he got a job as a handyman as a utopian community in Eliot, Maine, and continued to paint. He decided to continue as an artist after he put on a successful one-man show at the home of one of the community members.

Mount Katahdin

Marlborough Street, Boston

Frederick Childe Hassam, a New Englander through and through, painted many landscapes of the region throughout his life. Born in the Dorchester section of Boston in 1859, he was related to Nathaniel Hawthorne on his mother’s side.

Despite an uncle’s offer to send him to Harvard, Hassam dropped out of high school at 17 and got a job at Little, Brown & Co. He then worked as an engraver and an illustrator, until 1893 when he had his first solo exhibition of watercolors. The next year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to stop calling himself ‘Fred’ and use his middle name instead. Hassam often painted the Isles of Shoals when he visited Thaxter at her salon there.

Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam painted in Massachusetts in Gloucester and Provincetown, and at Connecticut art colonies in Cos Cob and Old Lyme.

He married Kathleen Maud Doane in 1882 and moved to Boston’s then-tony South End. Hassam began painting Boston cityscapes – an unorthodox choice at the time.

Later, Hassam painted cityscapes in Paris and New York. He died in 1935, and for years he was considered one of the abandoned geniuses of American Impressionism. He was rediscovered in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his paintings sold for millions.

Marlborough Street in 2017

Mount Washington

Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington by Albert Bierstadt

More than 400 artists painted landscapes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire beginning at the turn of the 19th century. They wanted to promote the region and sell their paintings. It worked. Their dramatic images of a mountain wilderness attracted tourists from northeastern cities, especially in the summertime.

Albert Bierstadt was known for his paintings of the American West and considered a member of the Hudson River School. He was born in Germany in 1833, but his family moved to New Bedford in 1850. He studied art in Boston, and developed an interest in topography. It was natural for him to be drawn to Mount Washington, the tallest mountain on the East Coast.

Bierstadt studied painting in Germany for several years before returning to New Bedford. He painted Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington in 1858 just as he was getting noticed as an artist. The next year he headed west. There he was inspired to paint the large landscapes that gained him enormous popularity.

Mount Washington today. Not much has changed.

Sakonnet Point, R.I.

A Breezy Day: Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, by Thomas Worthington Whittredge, courtesy Amon Carter Museum

The Great Hurricane of 1938 destroyed nearly all the buildings in the seaside village of Sakonnet Point in Little Compton, R.I.

Thomas Worthington Whittredge got there many years beforehand. Like his friend Albert Bierstadt, he was a member of the Hudson River School of Art. Like Bierstadt, he was famous for his paintings of the West.

Whittredge was born in 1820 in Ohio, and studied painting in Europe with Emmanuel Leutze. Leutze used Whittredge as a model for George Washington and his steersman in his iconic painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Worthington Whittredge painted A Breezy Day–Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, sometime around 1880. Four years later, Sakonnet Light was built. Preservationists made sure the historic lighthouse is still there.

Sakonnet Point. July 2012. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Bob Slater’s Hill, South Royalton, Vt.

Bob Slater’s Hill by Edward Hopper, courtesy Huntington Museum of Art

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death in 1967.

He is mostly associated with Cape Cod, Boston’s North Shore and New York City, but he spent some little-known time in and around South Royalton, Vt. He visited first in 1927 and then in the latter 1930s.

Hopper painted two dozen known works of Vermont, all watercolors and mostly ignored until rediscovered and assembled in an exhibit recently. Many of the scenes he painted then haven’t changed much.

Wagon Wheels Farm, July 2019. Image courtesy Google Maps.

There is actually a book and an entire blog devoted to Finding Edward Hopper in Vermont, both by Bonnie Tocher Clause. Of the painting Bob Slater’s Hill, she writes,

From the window of the upstairs guest room on Wagon Wheels Farm, Edward and Jo Hopper looked out over another South Royalton hill — Jigger Hill, or “Bob Slater’s Hill,” as Edward dubbed it. He recorded his fascination with the changing light and shadows in a watercolor, a striking study of contrasting views, near and far… In Bob Slater’s Hill and others of the Vermont watercolors, Hopper captured the particular shade of yellowish-green that’s a harbinger of fall in Vermont.

It isn’t clear to us which hill is “Bob Slater”s” or “Jigger” Hill. But today a historical marker stands in front of the old farm, with the message, “Tourists Accommodated 1937-1942.” It notes that the Hoppers stayed there, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt (not at the same time).

Image of Mount Katahdin By TJ aka Teej – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091663. This story was updated in 2021.

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Six New England Places With a Unique Name

The early English and Scots-Irish settlers tended not to give a new settlement a unique name.

Many New England place names came from towns and shires in England and Ireland. The Puritans even named groups of towns in New England after groups of towns in England: Boston and Lynn, for example, were next to each other in East Anglia as they were in Massachusetts. So were Worcester and Leominster, and Amesbury, Salisbury, Newbury and Andover.

In Rhode Island, the geography of England was mimicked in Warwick and Coventry and in Bristol and Newport. In New Hampshire, Sandown and South Hampton are next to each other as they were in England. And, as in England, there was once a Gosport on the Isles of Shoals next to Portsmouth in New Hampshire.

Unique Names

The Scots-Irish did the same. As the earliest pioneers after the Puritans, they named their frontier towns after home. New Hampshire has a Derry, Dublin and Antrim; Massachusetts a Colrain and a Charlemont; Maine a Belfast, a Limerick and a Newry. Both Vermont and New Hampshire have a Londonderry, and Connecticut has a Waterford.

But sometimes the first settlers simply named a place after its geographic features, like Marshfield, Mass., and Rockport, Maine.

Others named their towns after heroes, like Washington, Warren, Hancock and Adams. Generally, individuals only had towns named after them after the American Revolution, though one New Hampshire governor was the exception that proved the rule.

There are at least six New England places that have a unique name found nowhere else.

Mianus, Conn.

The Mianus River

Mianus is a village along the Mianus River that lies in three other districts in Greenwich, Conn: Riverside, Greenwich and Cos Cob.

It began as a project of the Veterans Administration and the Town of Greenwich to build 40 starter homes for servicemen returning from World War II and their families. During the Baby Boom there were 90 children in Mianus, and they played in the nearby woods and along the river and harbor. A writer named Jack T. Scully grew up there and wrote a book of poems celebrating his elegiac childhood, called Mianus Village.

The unique name is pronounced ‘maɪˈænəs,’ which made it the butt of jokes on the reality show Jackass.

Mianus is also known to antique inboard marine engine enthusiasts because it was home to the Mianus Motor Works, founded in 1889.

The area was given its unique name by English settlers in the 17^th century, who called it Mianus after the chief of the Siwanoy Indian tribe.

Kennebunk, Maine

The King’s Highway in Kennebunk, Maine.

A large sign once proclaimed, “Kennebunk, the only village in the world so named.” The locally famous billboard boasting the town’s unique name was attached to the Kesslen Shoe Mill on Route One.

‘Kennebunk’ was an Abenaki Indian word meaning ‘the long cut bank,’ which refers to the long bank behind Kennebunk Beach. The town’s presence on the Kennebunk and Mousam rivers made it an early center of shipping and shipbuilding. Later, manufacturers built mills on the rivers to make textiles, leatheroid, shoes and luggage.

Today Kennebunk is a bedroom community and a destination for upscale tourists attracted by its beaches and shopping. The town was overshadowed by its neighbor – also with a unique name. Kennebunkport was often in the world’s news when President George H.W. Bush summered there at his family compound.

Kennebunk today is home to the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, historic buildings, the 1799 Inn, Tom’s of Maine and the Brick Store Museum.

Dracut, Mass.

The historic Old Yellow Meeting House in Dracut.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook sachem who brokered peace in the Merrimack River Valley, spent most of his life on what is now Dracut, Mass.

It was known as Augumtoocooke until Passaconaway’s daughter Bess sold the land in 1665 to Captain John Evered, whose family was associated with Draycot Cerne in northern England. (Evered had earlier been in charge of the execution of Mary Dyer.) The land was sold for ‘four yards of Duffill and one pound of tobacco’ and given the unique name of Dracut.

Dracut belonged to Chelmsford until 1701, when it formally separated. Part of Dracut was set aside as a Praying Town for Christianized Indians. Dracut’s paper and textile mills attracted French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Modern real estate development swallowed much of the town. What isn’t a suburb of Lowell is now part of Lowell, which annexed large parts of the town. Dracut has a population of about 30,000 and still retains some rural landscapes and historic buildings.

Henniker, N.H.

The Mill Pond in West Henniker

Henniker, a bucolic New England town near Concord, prides itself on being ‘the only Henniker on earth.’ It was chartered before the American Revolution and named for British merchant Sir John Henniker, an unusual practice at the time.

Christopher Lenney argued that towns named ‘directly and unequivocally for persons are largely of post-Revolutionary vintage’ in Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England. “The custom was un-English and only became widespread in the 19th century, when antipathy to the practice had broken down.”.

New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth broke with that tradition when he dispensed land grants and charters in Vermont and New Hampshire, naming them after friends in high places to win their support for his westward expansion. Henniker, which received its charter in 1768, had been known as Todd’s Town and New Marlborough until Wentworth decided to name it after his friend.

Today Henniker is home to New England College, Pat’s Peak and the Old Depot No. 6 book barn.

Burrillville, R.I.

The Moses Taft House in Burrillville, R.I.

Burrillville, R.I., broke off from Glocester in 1806 and named itself after a favorite son, James Burrill, Jr. Burrill had established himself as a leader of Rhode Island by the tender age of 34. He had become Rhode Island’s attorney general at 25 and was elected a U.S. senator in 1817. Shortly before he died on Christmas Day in 1820, he delivered an eloquent speech opposing the Missouri Compromise, which banned free blacks and people of mixed race from settling in Missouri. That clause ‘was entirely repugnant to the Constitution of the United States’ he said, because it created separate classes of citizens.

Burrillville originally comprised 60 square miles but lost land to Massachusetts over a border dispute. Now part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, Burrillville once had many mills, now gone or shuttered.

St. Johnsbury, Vt.

St. Johnsbury, Vt.

St. Johnsbury was organized in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in 1790, a time when the un-English custom of naming towns after individuals began to take hold.

St. Johnsbury was named for Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, also known as J. Hector St. John, a French writer living in New York. St. John wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, a book praising American agriculture.

St. John befriended George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and he corresponded with Ethan Allen, who wanted to name the town St. John. The writer suggested St. Johnsbury, realizing that several places already had the name St. John.

St. Johnsbury became a minor manufacturing center where the Fairbanks family made its famous platform scales. By the 1940s, St. Johnsbury was the world’s largest manufacturer of scales, maple sugar and candlepins for bowling.

Today it is a quintessential Victorian industrial town with a large historic district that encompasses the Railroad Street District, Main Street, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum and the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium.

Photos: Dracut Old Yellow Meeting House, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26184431 ;Henniker Congregational Church and Historical Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3380925. This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Loyalist Houses

A Loyalist House was likely to be seized and sold when the American Revolution broke out. Many colonies passed laws that let them confiscate the property of known Loyalists, criminalizing dissent against the war and raising revenue for the war effort.

Many Loyalists fled to Canada or England. The British government compensated some for their loss, but tried to pressure the United States into giving restitution. Under the Jay Treaty of 1794, the U.S. agreed to ‘advise’ the states to return Loyalist property. Some families are still trying to get their property back.

Connecticut took a more lenient approach than the other New England states in confiscating Loyalist houses. It waited until four other states had passed confiscation laws. Local officials also dragged their feet in identifying Loyalist properties.

Vermont, on the other hand, eagerly seized Loyalist property in order to pay for the Green Mountain Boys.

Here, then, are stories of six Loyalist houses and their fate during the American Revolution.

Henry Whitfield House

A Loyalist house in Connecticut, owned by Joseph Pynchon on the eve of the Revolution.

When Joseph Pynchon purchased the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, Conn., he was supposedly seeking a relaxing summer retreat. His timing was not good.

The Whitfield House, built in 1639, has the distinction of being the oldest house still standing in Connecticut.

The structure was built by Henry Whitfield, one of Guilford’s founders, before there was even a town in Guilford. Its stone walls helped it serve as a garrison for townspeople. It would later become an investment property for a wealthy English landlord who rented it to tenant farmers. Pynchon bought the house in November of 1772.

Originally from Springfield, Mass., Pynchon inherited substantial wealth. He had Loyalist political sympathies. He also joined the Sandimonians in New Haven, an obscure religious group that originated in Scotland. Not only was he a Loyalist, the Sandimonians were pacifists, giving Pynchon’s Patriot-leaning neighbors two reasons to be suspicious of him.

Fearing persecution, Pynchon sold the Guilford house just a week before the Declaration of Independence was signed, and he spent much of the war in exile under British protection. He returned to Connecticut when the danger cleared and Loyalists were allowed to reestablish ties to their homeland. Among Pynchon’s descendants was Thomas Pynchon, one-time president of Trinity College, and novelist Thomas Pynchon.

As for his summer house, today it has left the family that bought it from Pynchon and is now a museum.

248 Old Whitfield St, Guilford, CT 06437

William Pepperrell House

The William Pepperrell House, Maine’s most prominent Loyalist house.

William Pepperrell led the Siege of Louisbourg during King George’s War in 1745, but his house in Kittery, Maine, predates that heroic maneuver by 63 years.

Pepperrell was the son of William Pepperrell, a fisherman who had lived and prospered on the Isles of Shoals before moving to the mainland in 1680. The senior Pepperrell married the daughter of John Bray, a wealthy shipwright, and went into business with his father-in-law. Soon Pepperrell was one of the richest men in New England and owned most of Kittery Point.

The junior William Pepperrell was born in the house in 1696. He joined his father in business and continued the family’s rise by marrying the granddaughter of Samuel Sewall, one of the Salem witch trials judges.

Pepperrell joined the Massachusetts militia and rose to colonel. It was he who assembled volunteer soldiers for capturing the Fortress at Louisbourg, trained them and financed the expedition. After the fortress fell, King George II awarded him a baronetcy.

Pepperrell served as acting governor of Massachusetts in 1757 and died two years later. His grandson, born William Pepperrell Sparhawk, inherited the house after agreeing to change his name to William Pepperrell. The third William Pepperrell remained loyal to the English king on the eve of the American Revolution. He fled to England with his wife, who died of smallpox on the way in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pepperrell died in London.

Massachusetts deemed the house Loyalist property and put it up for auction. In 1790 the house was purchased by Col. Samuel Smallcorn, and Daniel Frisbee bought some of the property. In 1973 the Pepperrell House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is privately owned.

94 Pepperrell Rd. (Rte. 103), Kittery, Maine

Isaac Royall House

Isaac Royall House.

The Isaac Royall House in Medford, Mass., is one of the few houses in New England that still has slave quarters. The Royalls had the largest number of enslaved people in New England during the 18^th century.

Inside the house is a tea box, said to be among the batch thrown into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.

Puritan leader John Winthrop built the first house on the property along the Mystic River in 1637. It became Charlestown and later Medford. A second house on the property was purchased with 504 acres in 1732 by Isaac Royall, a rum distiller and slave trader from Antigua. He brought 27 slaves with him to Massachusetts. Royall enlarged and remodeled the house between 1733 and 1737, then died in 1739.

Isaac Royall, Jr., inherited the house on his father’s death. He and his family were Loyalists who boarded a ship in Boston as British soldiers marched to the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. They sailed to Nova Scotia and then to England, never returning.

Gen. John Stark then made the house his headquarters. His wife Molly supposedly watched British troop movements from the roof, and George Washington interrogated British soldiers inside.

In 1806, the estate was returned to Isaac Royall’s heirs. They then sold it and gave part of the proceeds to Harvard, which used it to found Harvard Law School. The Daughters of the American Revolution bought the house in 1908 and turned it into a Loyalist house museum.

The Isaac Royall House opens for tours on summer weekends.

In Stratford, Conn., the Judson House, home to the local historical society, also has former slave quarters. They’re in the basement and part of tours through the home.

15 George St., Medford, Mass.

Mark Wentworth House

The Mark Wentworth House.

Henry Appleton, a merchant, built the Mark Wentworth House in Portsmouth, N.H., in 1763. He sold it the next year to Mark Hunking Wentworth, brother of Royal Gov. Benning Wentworth.

Mark Wentworth’s son John was born in 1737 and attended Harvard with John Adams, with whom he formed a close friendship. John Wentworth II, however, remained loyal to the king.

In 1763, John Wentworth went to London on family business. Uncle Benning had been busy selling land grants in Vermont, but the Lords of Trade awarded the province to New York. They were on the verge of recalling Benning Wentworth when John II intervened, so they gave him the governorship.

John Wentworth returned to New Hampshire amidst pomp and ceremony in 1767. Then he moved into his father’s house, where he complained about its small rooms.

Wentworth served as a popular and able governor until resistance hardened to King George III. When a mob pointed a cannon at his front door in June 1775, John Wentworth and his family fled to the safety of Fort William and Mary. He sailed to Boston about a month later and sent his family on to England. On Evacuation Day he left for Halifax.

The New Hampshire government seized the Loyalist house, but saved the furniture and portraits for the family. In 1797 the house was sold, but 13 years later Ebenezer Wentworth bought it back. In 1911 Dr. Charles Wentworth and his sister Susan converted the house into a nursing home. It now houses Wentworth Senior Living.

346 Pleasant St., Portsmouth, N.H.

Lucas-Johnston House

The Lucas-Johnston Loyalist house.

Tucked among Newport, R.I.’s many historic homes is the Lucas-Johnston house. Augustus Lucas originally owned it. He arrived in Newport from France around 1700 and grew wealthy trading in slaves. Lucas’ grandson Augustus Johnston gave the house greater renown when he lived in it. Johnston , a British official, accepted a position as Newport’s stamp agent – in charge of administering the Stamp Act.

As in Massachusetts, Rhode Island agitators protested vehemently against the Stamp Act. Johnston was hanged in effigy, and a mob drove him from his home into hiding until he agreed not to serve as stamp agent. In July of 1776 Johnston again ran into difficulty when he refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary cause. For that, he was imprisoned for a time.

When the British held Newport during the early days of the war, Johnston served in various capacities in the city. When the British left, Johnston left with them. His house was confiscated. He spent a good part of his life arguing for compensation for his losses due to both the Stamp Act riot and the American Revolution.

Today the Lucas-Johnston House is privately owned.

40 Division St., Newport, R.I.

Marsh Tavern

The Equinox Hotel.

In July 1777 Vermont’s Col. William Marsh made a difficult decision. When the American Revolution broke out, Marsh had joined forces with the Green Mountain Boys. But he decided to switch sides and support the Loyalist cause.

Marsh came to Vermont from Connecticut via New York and settled in Manchester around 1765.

When war broke out he joined the Green Mountain Boys with the rank of colonel. But by 1777 he had grown uneasy by the way the Patriots harassed Loyalist Vermonters, and that prompted him to join forces with British General John Burgoyne.

Following Burgoyne’s defeat in Saratoga, the American military let Marsh return to visit family in Dorset, Vt. before his exile to Canada. During the war he acted as a diplomatic adviser and spy handler for the British. He actively lobbied to have Vermont switch sides and join with Britain.

The Vermont government confiscated and sold Marsh’s Manchester property. Marsh always retained hope that he could recover some of his property, but it did not happen. His name lives on, however, at the Equinox Golf Resort and Spa in Manchester where visitors can dine in the historic Marsh Tavern.

3567 Main St, Manchester, Vt.

Images: Lucas Johnston House By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434670; Equinox Hotel By Rolf Müller (User:Rolfmueller) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1352242. This story was updated in 2022.

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