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Six Places Products Were Made

Back in the day, products were made in New England — a lot of products.

The early cod fishermen and Yankee traders made their fortunes and invested them in mills and factories and railroads. Those investments resulted in what we now call the Industrial Revolution in the United States.

Starting with the first water-powered cotton mill in Pawtucket, R.I., New England clothed a good part of the world for many, many years. New Englanders made clocks and can openers, steam engines and shoes, board games and battleships.

So many products were made in New England that people started attributing technical expertise and inventiveness to ‘Yankee ingenuity.’

Now, as you travel along the highways and railroad tracks you can see the crumbling brick remnants of New England’s industrial strength. If you want a glimpse of what it used to be like to make things, you can visit some restored mills that have been turned into historic parks. Or you can visit New England’s over-financialized downtowns, where once-productive factories and warehouses are now brew pubs, offices and condos.

Mickey Mouse Watch

Part of the Waterbury Clock complex. Photo courtesy Google Maps

Oh, could Mickey Mouse sell watches. He rescued a floundering clock company as well as Walt Disney studios during the Great Depression.

For years the Waterbury Clock Company was one of the biggest makers of clocks in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, known as the Switzerland of America. It also churned out wristwatches during World War I from its huge brick factory on North Elm and Cherry streets in Waterbury.

By the 1930s, the Waterbury Clock Company struggled financially. So did Disney. An ad salesman proposed making and selling the Mickey Mouse watch to save them both. Skeptical company executives – including Walt Disney – decided to try it anyway.

The cheap cheerful watch was just what a depressed public wanted. A Macy’s promotion sold 11,000 Mickey Mouse watches in one day. And by 1957, 25 million Mickey Mouse watches had sold.

In the 1950s, the company took the Mickey Mouse watch off the market and began selling a line of reliable and inexpensive watches. They called them Timex. Today, the Waterbury Clock Company has morphed into the Timex Group, its Waterbury factory buildings nothing but empty hulks. The company started a Timexpo Museum in Waterbury, which traced the company’s history, but that, too, closed.

Bates Bedspread

The old Bates mill, where products were made and people had jobs. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

For decades, the Bates Bedspread made an ideal wedding gift for a discriminating young couple like George and Barbara Bush. In fact, the Bushes posed in a 1948 magazine ad for the coverlet.

Bates for years was Maine’s largest employer. The giant textile mill complex in Lewiston, Maine, opened with one building in 1854 and grew to eleven. In 1940, the company hit on the idea of reproducing colonial-era candlewicked bedspreads like the one George Washington gave to Martha. It was a hit. By the 1960s, it seemed everyone had a Bates Bedspread.

By 1990, demand petered out and cheap imitators took a big piece of the market. The company closed in 2001, its mills now part of the Bates Mill Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places. You can still buy a Bates Bedspread at the Bates Mill Store (904 Main Street, Monmouth, Maine) from former employees who started Maine Heritage Weavers to carry on the tradition.

Monopoly

How ironic that the former Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1888, the Parker brothers started their eponymous company in Salem, Mass., making board games out of an old laundry building. First they made board games like Billy Bumps Goes to Boston, then they introduced ping pong and tiddly winks, and eventually they came up with Monopoly. They bought more land and built a 35,000-square-foot factory, employing 500 people.

Hasbro bought Parker Brothers and therefore Monopoly in 1991. The game is still actually manufactured in a 1960s-era plant in East Longmeadow. Hasbro bought the plant from Milton Bradley and then sold it to Belgium-based Cartamundi in 2015. Cartamundi agreed to make Monopoly in the East Longmeadow factory, at least until 2020.

Prophetically, perhaps, the Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. The old Parker Brothers factory was torn down, replaced by the Jefferson Street apartment complex. The neighborhood now belongs to the Bridge Street Neck Historic District.

Levi’s Denim

Amoskeag Millyard, 1911, where many, many textile products were made

You can’t miss the Amoskeag Mill complex in the center of Manchester, New Hampshire. The city grew up around the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, founded in 1831. The mill yard it grew into the world’s largest cotton textile plant, with sixty-four mill buildings stretching a mile and a half along both banks of the Merrimack River.

Among the cloth it produced: denim for the first Levi Strauss ‘waist overalls.’ Strauss and his partner Jacob Davis invented the blue jean when they received a patent for the way they riveted their waist overalls in 1873. Amoskeag shipped its nine-ounce XX blue denim to San Francisco, where Levi’s workers sewed it into blue jeans. Until 1915, the Amoskeag mills supplied all the denim for Levi’s 501 jeans.

After World War I, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company suffered from recession, competition, aging technology and floods, finally closing in 1935. Some textile manufacturing continued in the old mills for a while, but many of the mills were torn down. Today offices, restaurants, college branches, and the Millyard Museum fill the old mill yard.

The Catamaran Sailboat

Products were made here for very wealthy people. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

One of the most talented naval architects in the world was Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, named after the Revolutionary general from his home state of Rhode Island.

After Nat Herreshoff graduated from MIT he opened a boatyard in 1878 with his blind brother, John, in Bristol, R.I. The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company started making steam-powered boats, but during most of its sixty-seven years designed and built yachts for wealthy Americans.

The Herresshoff boatyard built every yacht that won the America’s Cup race between 1893 and 1934. Nat Herreshoff built the U.S. Navy’s first torpedo boats, invented new and efficient marine hardware, developed methods to make light wooden hulls and patented the sailing catamaran.

The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company also built seven catamarans, including Amaryllis and Amaryllis II. The boatyard closed in 1945 after Nat Herreshoff died, but a museum now stands on the former site. There you can see the Amaryllis II, as well as some famous yachts, models and designs of the Herreshoff company.

Fairbanks Scales

Fairbanks scales, still made here on Portland Street in Saint Johnsbury. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The town of Saint Johnsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom once made Fairbanks platform scales and sold them around the world.

Today Fairbanks still makes scales in a long, low commercial building in scenic Saint Johnsbury. And the company still sells them around the world. You’ve probably stood on one in a doctor’s office.

In 1824, Thaddeus Fairbanks, a wheelwright by trade, opened an iron foundry with his brother in Saint Johnsbury. They made and sold heating stoves, plows, and farm implements. Around 1830 he got interested in growing hemp, but ran into trouble trying to weigh large amounts of the stuff from a balancing beam. So he came up with the idea of the platform scale, which used levers to counterbalance the weight. By digging a pit for his contraption and placing a platform on top of it, he could weigh an entire wagon accurately.

The Fairbanks brothers’ company has changed hands several times, its headquarters moved to Kansas City, Mo., and another plant built in Meridian, Miss. But they still make scales in Saint Johnsbury, and if you look around you’ll see the Fairbanks gave the town many of its public institutions.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Maine Peonage Law Sent Men to Jail for Quitting Their Jobs

In 1907, lumber barons persuaded politicians to pass the Maine peonage law to keep lumberjacks on the job. If they quit work, they went to jail.

Maine lawmakers copied from an Alabama law designed to tie workers to their employers . They employers put them into debt and the government put them in jail if they didn’t work it off.

In Maine, the lumbermen needed tens of thousands of men to work in their logging camps, sawmills and paper mills. They needed them to build mills and camps and to drive the logs down Maine’s rivers.

The work was hard and dangerous, even deadly. It required men to spend the long winter in the northern Maine woods.

Winter in a logging camp, 1895

Historian Charles Scontras concluded 342 men went to jail after employers tricked them into accepting lumber work they couldn’t do. Or employment brokers loaned train fare and dumped miles from the camps. Or the company store gave them credit to buy overpriced boots and clothes and other necessities.

“Hundreds of men have been thrown into jail because of this cruel and much abused law,” reported Maine Labor Commissioner Roscoe Eddy.

Maine Peonage Law

One August day in Bangor, Maine, Peter Poulskaw and Nicholas Eilandy took jobs at a logging camp. They had arrived from Poland, had no money and didn’t speak English.

They were among the tens of thousands of men, many immigrants, who came each year to Bangor and Lewiston, Maine. They’d spend a few days in cheap boardinghouses before shipping off to the north woods.

A Bangor employment agent told Poulskaw and Eilandy the logging camp was 3-1/2 miles from Kingman in northern Maine. He gave them cash for train fare to Kingman. When they reached the town, they found out the camp was really 35 miles away.

Maine lumber camp

The Bangor Daily News reported they ‘expected to walk the distance and not relishing the idea had vamoosed.’ Poulskaw and Eilandy were caught, arrested and sentenced to 15 days in jail.

The Maine peonage law stayed on the books for seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Alabama law as unconstitutional. Then in late 1916, the Maine labor commissioner’s report appeared in the Bangor Daily News, calling the law ‘obnoxious.’

“Under its provisions hundreds of men have been convicted and forced to serve a sentence in jail for no offense other than being in debt,” the report said.

The labor commissioner also criticized judges who are ‘anxious to make the sentence satisfactory to the influential lumbermen operating in the vicinity.’

Lumbermen Howl

Maine lumber camp and sawmill

The lumbermen’s reaction to the labor commissioner’s report was swift, sure and anonymous.

The newspaper quoted them calling the report a ‘false alarm.’ The lumber barons claimed only a half dozen men had been prosecuted. They complained the crews were made up of ‘foreigners and the scum of Boston,’ most of whom were unfit for hard work. They complained the men were taken into the woods ‘at much expense and after working two or three weeks have left.’

But they did actually concede they’d tricked the workers into taking the jobs.

The Maine peonage law became the object of national criticism. Labor unions attacked it. The U.S. Immigration Commission called it ‘the most complete system of peonage in the entire country.’

Finally, in 1917, the Legislature repealed the law.

With thanks to Remembering Bangor: The Queen City Before the Great Fire by Wayne E. Reilly. This story updated in 2022.

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Six Historic New England Football Fields

Football, once called the Boston Game, was played on many historic New England football fields since the 19th century. And New England has made many contributions to the development of the sport.

As early as 1827, New England college students played an organized football game. New England jocks formed the first organized football club (there’s a plaque on Boston Common about it). The National Football League also played its first night game in New England.

But even more significant, a New England college was the birthplace of modern football and the modern football stadium.

New England even had an NFL championship before Tom Brady and Bill Belichick joined the New England Patriots – in fact, before they were born.

Here, then, are six historic football fields or their exact locations, one in each New England state.

Yale Bowl

Yale Bowl

Had it not been for an architect named Charles Ferry, the Superbowl might be called something else. Ferry designed the Yale Bowl Stadium as – well, the first bowl-shaped football field.

Fill was used from the field to form an elliptical berm around the stadium. Ferry designed the exterior in a neo-Gothic style, and acid was poured on it to make it look old.

For some reason Ferry failed to include locker rooms in the stadium; Yale football players must walk 200 yards from the Smilow Field Center. They enjoy the walk, but the New York Giants who played there in 1973 and 1974 did not.

The Yale Bowl was finished in 1914 with 70,896-seats and renovated in 2006 with 61,446. No stadium in the United States is older and larger than the Yale Bowl. It inspired the shape of the Rose Bowl, the name of post-season college football games and the name of the premier football contest in the world.

It isn’t just the modern stadium that began at Yale. So did modern football. A former Yale football star named Walter Camp set the rules for today’s game over the course of 15 years in the late 19^th century.

Whittier Field

Hubbard Grandstand at Whittier FIeld

The first organized intercollegiate football game in Maine was played in Lewiston between the Bates team later known as the Bobcats and the Tufts team later known as the Jumbos on Nov. 6, 1875.

But almost from the beginning, Bates has had a football rivalry with the Bowdoin Polar Bears, one of the oldest college rivalries in the country. It started when a Bates player wrapped the college’s garnet-and-white scarf around Bowdoin’s statue of a polar bear. Bowdoin players wrapped their black-and-white scarf around Bowdoin’s statue of a bobcat. But Bates students have soaked the scarf in gasoline and set it on fire after a football win.

Bates fans call their opponent “Blowdoin,” “Harvard rejects” and “plantation boys.” Bowdoin students taunt “dirty Lews,” referring to Lewiston’s poverty. Both sides call the other “safety school.”

All Bates-Bowdoin games take place on Bowdoin’s historic Whittier Field, which opened in 1896. It features a track where Olympic champion Joan Benoit Samuelson trained.

Boston Common

Amateur football played on Boston Common 1909, photo by Lewis Hine. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In the 18^th century, football started out in the United States as something like the medieval European sport of mob football. The game had unlimited players, and one of its few rules disallowed manslaughter and murder as ways to move the ball.

By the 19^th century, mob football moved to college campuses as an intramural sport. Each college played by its own rules. A Harvard tradition known as Bloody Monday started in 1827, with the freshmen playing the sophomores. Winslow Homer illustrated the game in an engraving called Class Day at Harvard University in 1858. The game often ended with injuries, so college administrators finally banned it.

By then, another version called the Boston Game grew popular at East Coast prep schools. It used a round, inflatable ball introduced in 1855. Graduates of Boston’s elite prep schools formed what some consider the first organized football club. They called it the Oneida Football Club.

The Oneidas played pickup teams from 1862-65 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members of the club dedicated a small stone monument on the Common that claims it never allowed a point. The inscription reads, “On this field the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865. The Oneida goal was never crossed.”

Dartmouth College Green

Football on Dartmouth’s green

In 1867, Dartmouth had its own version of football, called Whole Division. Seniors and sophomores played juniors and freshman in chasing after a ball. Every ambulatory student played the game.

Nine years later, three Dartmouth students put up rugby-style goal posts on the campus green for football games. The Dartmouth administration didn’t sanction the game and tore down the goal posts by commencement. One of the three students, Lewis Parkhurst, later donated the money for Dartmouth’s main administration building, Parkhurst Hall. The football team would later be called Big Green.

Dartmouth played its first intercollegiate football game against Amherst College in 1881, by a touchdown. The score: 1-0. That auspicious start for Big Green came before a crushing 53-0 loss to Harvard in 1882 and an even worse loss to Yale in 1884 by a score of 113–0.

The Cycledrome

The Cycledrome in Providence.

Providence Steam Roller was the first New England team to won the NFL championship — in 1928. The Steam Roller – not the Steamrollers – was so named as an unstoppable force of athletic prowess. It played in a stadium built for bicycle races called the Cycledrome.

The team was founded in 1916 by Providence Journal staffers, a judge and a real estate developer. It soon became a regional powerhouse and was considered the best independent team in the country. The Steam Roller began playing NFL teams in 1924. It did so well against them the owners decided to join the NFL in 1925. In 1928 the Steam Roller won the NFL championship with the best winning percentage in the league. Each player got a gold watch.

A peek into the Steam Roller’s finances in 1927 showed one of the team’s major expenses was 15 percent of the gate receipts to the Cycledrome. The NFL took 1 percent of gate receipts, visiting teams took $2,475 and the players – all of them — earned $1,972 in salary. That left the team almost $6,000 in the black that year. Financial difficulties eventually doomed the team at the end of the 1931 season.

The Steam Roller made history in 1929 in a November game scheduled against the Chicago Cardinals. A storm made the field unplayable. They decided to play a night game three days later on Nov. 6 at nearby Kinsley Park, which had just gotten lights. The ball was painted white and 6,000 people came to watch.

The two football fields are now parking lots. The Cycledrome is a parking lot and a Peter Pan bus station between I-95 and Rte. 1. Kinsley Park is a parking lot at the corner of Kinsley and Acorn streets.

Athletic Park

An early University of Vermont football team

At the intersection of Intervale and Riverside roads in Burlington, Vt., is a highway plaque marking the site of Athletic Park. It was located on the streetcar line between Burlington and Winooski. The University of Vermont’s football team played there from 1887 until 1906.

Vermont’s football history is otherwise limited. Only two players in the NFL even attended college in Vermont: Washington Redskins receiver Pierre Garcon played just one season at Norwich University before transferring, and Seattle Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka graduated from Middlebury College.

Vermont high schools have produced only three NFL players: Joe Shield, Jason Foster and Bob Yates, according to the Burlington Free Press. Shield didn’t produce a single statistic in just three games for the Green Bay Packers in 1986, and Yates never started a game in five seasons as an offensive lineman for the Boston Patriots from 1961-65.

The third, Jason Foster, a former Tampa Bay Buccaneer, was known for receiving a 5 on the Wonderlic test, the second lowest score in NFL history. Wonderlic is an intelligence test in which a score of 10 suggests literacy.

Photos: Yale Bowl BBy Parkerjh – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103979446. This story last updated in 2022.

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Happy St. Jean Baptiste Day! Live Free and Eat Poutine!

Many Americans view Bastille Day as the big French holiday, but for Franco-Americans from Canada it’s St. Jean Baptiste Day on June 24.

The holiday dates to medieval Europe, not coincidentally near the summer solstice. It started as a pagan celebration of midsummer. In the 6^th century, the French king Clovis Christianized the holiday to celebrate the birth of St. John the Baptist, precursor of Christ and the light of the world. From then the French monarch would light huge bonfires on the night of June 23.

French Catholics continued to celebrate St. Jean Baptiste Day when they came to North America. A pious festival, it featured religious processions in the street. But the celebration lost its importance when the British conquered New France.

St. Jean Baptiste Day Revived

Then in 1834 a newspaper editor named Ludger Duvernay organized a grand patriotic banquet in Montreal on June 24. ‘O Canada’ was sung publicly for the first time at the 1880 St. Jean Baptiste banquet.

By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, St. Jean Baptiste Day featured processions in Montreal, Quebec City and Little Canadas in the United States. In 1930, for example, the Willimantic, Conn., L’Union de St. Jean Baptiste celebrated its 50th anniversary with a three-day festival in late June.

A carillon flag waved on St. Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec

Today, Francophone New England celebrates St. Jean Baptiste Day with music, food and dance–at least in disease-free years.

Celebrations–Or Not

In Lewiston, Maine, for example, the Franco Center often holds a FÊTE de Saint Jean Baptiste Concert: “It’s All About Love,” on the afternoon of June 24. Though canceled in 2020, the event resumed in 2021 with an invitation for all to BE French Canadians. Marie-Line Morin planned to sing songs of love, like Plaisir d’Amour, I Dreamed a Dream and Bring Him Home (from Les Misérables).

Manchester, with one of New England’s preeminent Little Canadas, has an entire Franco-American Day, at least in years free of pandemics. As part of the celebration, the city stages Poutinefest – a competition among restaurants for the best poutine. For the uninitiated, it’s a traditional comfort food of French fries, cheese curds and gravy. The winner gets to raise the Ceinture de Championnat/Championship Belt. The event was scheduled to take place on Oct. 15, 2022.

Winooski, Vt., also celebrates French Heritage Day in normal times. The town has held it in mid-July with music, food and a tourtiere contest. The Winooski Historical Society Museum and the Heritage Winooski Mill open as well.

Lowell, Mass., celebrates its Franco-American heritage with a French Mass and a week-long festival, Franco-American Week. After a hiatus in 2020, the event resumed in 2021. It usually includes church suppers, a French Canadian documentary film, French music and bingo in French.

And in Southern New England

Rhode Island canceled its 2020 French Heritage Festival in September in Woonsocket (click here) because of the pandemic. No word yet on whether it will resume in 2022.

St. John the Baptist is also one of the two patron saints of the Freemasons (St. John the Evangelist is the other). In Connecticut, Freemasons celebrate June 24 with a special dinner.

Photo: PoutineBy Yuri Long from Arlington, VA, USA – road_trip-9349.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19029778. Carillon flag by C.P. Champion via Wikipedia. Poutine in featured image By Camelia.boban – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62105616. This story was updated in 2022.

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Pass the Tourtiere, C’est Le Reveillon!

For many, many years, le reveillon was the way Franco-Americans ushered in New Year’s Day in New England’s Little Canadas.

Berlin, N.H., millworkers’ homes. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The reveillon is a long, late dinner preceding a holiday. Tourtiere is central to the meal. The celebrated meat pie, cooked and eaten during the shortest days of winter, often accompanies traditional Franco-American foods such as peas or pea soup, head cheese, croquignoles and ragout.

During the first half of the 19^th century, when the first wave of immigrants arrived, New Year’s Day exceeded Christmas in importance. On January 1, Franco-Americans exchanged small gifts, and children found presents under the tree or near the manger in the parlor. Sometimes their parents told them the presents came from le Pere Noel (a skinny version of Santa Claus) or l’Enfant Jesus.

Family and friends visited each other over the holidays, which stretched from Christmas Eve to January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany or la Fete des Rois. Franco-Americans would go to house parties in their neighborhoods in Nashua, Berlin and on the west side of Manchester, N.H. Other cities with vibrant Franco-American neighborhoods included Lewiston and Biddeford, Maine; Warwick and Woonsocket, R.I.; Fall River and Lowell, Mass.; St. Albans and Burlington, Vt.; and Bristol and Waterbury, Conn.

Historian Yves Roby noted that New Year’s was often a sad day for the Quebecois newcomers who worked in the mills. Because it wasn’t a federal holiday, the reveillon was replaced by a regular work day. Sometime before World War II, a Franco-American millworker complained,

Next Monday (January 1st), while our brothers and other relatives in Canada are celebrating New Year’s Day, we shall be going about our daily occupations.

Holy Day of Obligation

The Roman Catholic parish was central to life in New England’s Little Canadas, and New Year’s Mass was central to the holiday.

On the last Sunday of the year, the local church auctioned off unrented pews and parishioners elected new churchwardens, known as marguilliers.

St. Ann’s Church in Woonsocket, R.I.

Catholics celebrate the ‘Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God’ as a Holy Day of Obligation on New Year’s Day. At the end of the New Year’s Mass, the outgoing officer, along with an altar boy or the sexton holding a lighted candle, led his successor to the marguilliers’ pew.

Sometimes parishioners made a special door-to-door collection for the poor on New Year’s Day.

Many Franco-American families gathered before the reveillon for a solemn and emotional moment. They came to the home of the grandparents or parents, and the oldest son asked for the blessing. In The French-Canadian Heritage in New England, Gerard Breault wrote in 1986,

Everyone knelt before the grandfather who gave a benediction similar to that of the priest at the end of mass. As he made the sign of the cross over everyone, or each individual, he said: “Que Dieu vous benisse au nom du Pere et du Fils et du Saint Esprit. Amen.”

Always the tourtiere.

Then, wrote Breault, the blessing was followed by the classic Franco-American New Year’s wish: Je vous souhaite une bonne et heureuse annee, une bonne sante, et le paradis a la fin de vos jours! , or

I wish you a prosperous and happy New Year, good health, and eternal bliss when you pass on.

After the blessing, everyone stood up, kissed or shook hands and wished each other good fortune.

The Reveillon

Not quite a reveillon: Franco-American potato farmer and his family eat dinner in Wallagrass, Maine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Le reveillon, translated, means ‘the awakening.’ For some, that signifies a religious awakening. For others it means staying up all night for neighborhood house parties during the holiday season.

In the early 20^th century, Franco-American families in Winooski, Vt.., celebrated New Year’s with le reveillon. They ate tourtiere, head cheese, pea soup, pickled beets, roast beef and dumplings boiled in maple syrup. For dessert, they had pies and fudge. But always the tourtiere.

“Reveillon had to have tourtiere. That was a must,” Claire Chase, 91, told the Burlington Free Press in 2011.

Then came the late-night parties, called veillees.

There were sets carres – traditional dances — often accompanied by a fiddler, an accordionist, or maybe a piano, a mandolin, or a mouth organ. Family and friends would sing traditional songs like Minuit Chretien and Alouette. Maybe they’d have a glass of dandelion wine.

The traditional reveillon began to vanish after World War II. Today, even the last vestiges are disappearing.

With thanks to The French-Canadian Heritage in New England by Gerard J. Brault and Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities by Yves Roby. Tourtiere by Mack Male. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Franco-American flag By Robert Couturier (image JPG), Ec.Domnowall (modifications & vectorisation SVG) – francoamericanarchives.org, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15705488. St. Ann’s By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18819427

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A New Age Retreat in Eliot, Maine, Saves the Career of Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley called himself ‘the artist of Maine.’ He was a renowned Modernist artist who painted manly, rugged scenes of fishermen, mountains and rocky seashores.

Mount Katahdin Maine First Snow by Marsden Hartley

But at a time when he considered abandoning art, it was an eccentric New Age community run by a woman in Eliot, Maine, that saved his career.

Marsden Hartley

Born in Lewiston, Maine, on Jan. 4, 1877, Marsden Hartley was the last of nine children born to English parents. His mother died when he was eight. His father remarried and his family moved to Cleveland in 1892. He studied art first in Cleveland and then moved to New York to study and embrace the Bohemianism of Greenwich Village.

Marsden Hartley by Alfred Stieglitz, 1916

Beginning a pattern he would repeat throughout his life, in 1901 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. He declared then that he wanted to become “the painter of Maine.”

He had moved to Lewiston before, in the fall of 1906. Then 29, he hoped to earn a living teaching art. He rented a studio and sent out handmade announcements, but he had few takers. Worse, his paintings didn’t sell. He had so little money he thought about giving up art for journalism.

A friend suggested he contact the Congress of Religions, a utopian community at Green Acre in Eliot. Green Acre, a former shipyard, was run by Sarah Farmer for the purpose of promoting peace, religious unity and, later, the principles of the Baha’i faith. Farmer raised the first known Peace Flag, 36 feet long, on an 85-foot flagpole.

The Inn at Green Acre

Green Acre

Hartley got a job as a handyman at Green Acre, putting up tents and doing odd jobs in exchange for room and board. He was treated as more than the hired help, and engaged in discussions about Eastern mysticism with the residents. He also talked about literature: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Blake.

Marsden Hartley’s summer at Green Acre helped crystallize his views that landscape represents the earthly and the transcendent in human nature. Perhaps more importantly, he met a wealthy patron.

The former Sara Jane Thorp was a timber heiress and the widow of Ole Bull, the famous Norwegian violinist and composer. She followed the Swami Vivekanande. When she left nearly all her estate to the Vedanta Society, her daughter challenged the will, claiming the Hindus had driven her insane.

Mrs. Bull also extended her generosity to artists, including the Green Acre handyman. She held a one-man show of Marsden Hartley’s work at her home. His supporters from Green Acre attended, and the exhibit was a success. Best of all, he earned $90 from the sale of his paintings.

Lobster Fishermen by Marsden Hartley

Success at Last

That success convinced Marsden Hartley to soldier on with his art, which he would do until his death in 1943. He is considered one of the foremost American painters of the first half of the 20^th century.

The Peace Flag is still raised in Eliot, Maine. Green Acre is now a year-round Baha’I school operated by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Marsden Hartley by Stieglitz By The Metropolitan Museum of Art – http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ap/web-large/DT6731.jpg, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56215414. The Inn at Green Acre By Sisay Borga Sabera – Sisay Borga Sabera, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64792699. Lobster Fishermen By The Metropolitan Museum of Art – http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ap/web-large/DT6731.jpg, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56215708. Fishermen’s Last Supper Public Domain.

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