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Mount Chocorua

The Kettle Holes of New England (12 Other States Have Them Too)

You’ll find thousands of kettle holes in New England, but you won’t find them everywhere in the United States. They can be ponds, lakes or bogs, but they always result from an iceberg that calved from a glacier and then melted.

Geologist Robert Thorson calls them “fossil icebergs” in his book, Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds.

Kettle holes came about with the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered much of Canada and the northern United States. The icebergs it left behind got covered with sediment until they melted.

Kettle holes dimple the landscape south of the Great Lakes, Adirondacks and New England mountains. They then end around the 37th parallel along the southern borders of Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia. Thorson calls them a “blue galaxy” within 19 “kettle states.”

Collectively, writes, Thorson, “they form a galaxy of approximately 100,000 blue dots on the American landscape. Ranging from the parched prairies of the western high plains and the foggy, boggy moorlands of eastern Nantucket, this galaxy is widest near the center between Michigan’s upper peninsula and central Indiana.”

America has two famous kettle holes, one mythical, the other with mythical status. They are Lake Wobegon in Minnesota and Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Though fictional, Lake Wobegon is clearly one of Minnesota’s many kettle lakes, wrote Thorson. He has also observed central Minnesota’s kettle holes most resemble the ones in New England.

Thoreau had a spiritual relationship with Walden Pond, calling it “heaven beneath us.” “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” he wrote.

Sunset at Walden Pond

Following the Kettle Holes

In the early 19th century, New Englanders began migrating west, showing a preference for northern kettle country, wrote Thorson. They left their imprint on the kettle states in architecture, urban design and industry. Cleveland’s Public Square and Detroit’s Penobscot Building provide just two examples.

Minnesota, wrote Thorson, was the only state outside of New England to which Thoreau traveled. When he visited, he noticed that half the people he met came from Massachusetts and the lumbermen all came from Maine.

New Englanders’ attraction for kettle holes made sense since they’d long used them for drinking water, trapping beavers, growing marsh hay for livestock, fishing and hunting, making bog iron, growing cranberries and wild rice and cutting refrigeration ice.

Wondering where there’s a kettle hole in your state? Here’s a short list of them.

The Gift of the Glacier

Anderson Pond, aka Blue Lake,

“The entire Connecticut landscape is a gift of the glacier,” writes Thorson.

The Connecticut River Valley, New England’s breadbasket, was once a tropical salt lake. The glacier then dredged the lake and dammed it to form another shallow one that threw sand onto the shore. The valley drained 12,000 years ago leaving rich soil suited to farming. It also left the kettle holes that dot the landscape around Hartford.

A small kettle hole in Branford helped give birth to American limnology, the science of lakes. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Yale zoology professor, used Linsley Pond in Branford to teach students about ecology, according to Thorson..

The glacier also deepened an old river channel along shat is now the Connecticut shoreline. Then the sea level rose to create deep water harbors from Greenwich to Stonington. Marshes and kettle holes behind the beaches then developed as the sea level slowly rose. One such kettle hole, Anderson Pond in North Stonington, encompasses 57 acres ideal for boating, canoeing or kayaking.

Development threatens the health of Connecticut’s kettle holes, which are highly sensitive to climate change and water pollution. When Thorson wrote his book in 2009, home buyers increasingly looked to freshwater shorelines. They had concerns about rising sea level, increasing hurricane strength and the high cost of flood insurance.

Kettle Holes, a Kame and Blue Clay

Otter Ponds

Kettle hole junkies in Maine can find a series of kettle holes just outside of Portland. The Portland Water District opened the Sebago Lake Land Reserve in 2005 for recreation and admiring kettle holes. They include Half Moon Pond, Otter Ponds and Snake Pond.

Visitors can also see a kame slope left by the Laurentide glacier when it retreated. It also created a ridge of sediment known as the Presumpscot Formation. When the ice sheet melted into streams, the water carried sediment like silt and clay to the ocean. The silt left behind — the Presumpscot Formation — runs from the Maine and New Hampshire coasts inland. Mainers call the sediment “blue clay” and used it for brickmaking in colonial times.

Kettle Holes For Drowning Certain People

Scargo Lake, one of Cape Cod’s biggest kettle holes

Cape Cod has more than a thousand ponds and lakes and almost 500 of them are kettles – “enough to drown every gossip in,” people used to say.

The Laurentide ice sheet began to head south about 25,000 years ago, reaching Cape Cod and the Islands. When it retreated, it carved out a sand and rock formation called a moraine.

Enough to drown every gossip in

Scargo Lake in Dennis is one of the biggest kettles on Cape Cod. It covers 60 acres with an average depth of 25 feet and 1.3 miles of shoreline. It’s been been stocked with game fish since before 1911, when the commonwealth’s Division of Fish and Wildlife first surveyed it. People can swim from Princess Beach, the primary swimming beach.

Many myths and legends have sprung up about Scargo Lake and yes, they involve a Native American princess.

According to one version, Princess Scargo of the Nobscusset tribe fell in love with a handsome young native on his way into battle. He gave her four fish as a token of his love in a wooden bowl. Or maybe he gave her three fish in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

She put the fish in a tiny pond and awaited his return. Only one of the fish lived during a long, dry summer. Her father called together all the women and children to dig a pond “as wide as an arrow’s flight.” The dirt and rocks they dug up formed Scargo Hill, on top of which Princess Scargo could watch her fish and await her true love’s return.

And that’s why Scargo Lake is shaped like a fish.

A Much Photographed Kettle Hole

Lake Chocorua ready for a picture

The surface of Lake Chocorua on most days exhibits a stunning reflection of Mount Chocorua in the White Mountains. That makes it one of the most famous kettle holes in the Northeast and a popular subject for photographers.

Located in Tamworth, N.H., Lake Chocorua owes its pristine water to the lack of development around it. For five decades, the Chocorua Lake Conservancy has worked to protect the watershed with conservation covenants and easements. Forests now buffer the lake, and motorboats are forbidden by law.

New Hampshire boasts two other well-known kettle holes in the world of limnology: Pea Porridge Pond in Conway and Madison and the much-studied Mirror Lake in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.

Rhode Island’s Kettle Holes

Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge, full of kettle holes

In Rhode Island, moraines on Block Island and near Charlestown are about as old as Cape Cod — and as full of kettle holes.

The Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge has plenty of them. Once used for farming, it got turned into a military base during World War II, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station Charlestown. Then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated it a refuge in 1970.

Today shrubs and grassy reclaim the old runways, used as part of the trail network that goes past salt marshes, kettle holes and forests. Birdwatchers love it, as they’ve recorded 310 species of birds within the refuge.

Ninigret belongs to a complex of five wildlife preserves along Rhode Island’s south coast that also include Trustom Pond, John H. Chafee at Petaquamscutt Cove, Block Island and Sachuest Point. The Kettle Pond Visitor Center at Ninigret offers information about all five.

A Spectacular Sight

Kettle Pond, one of many kettle holes in Groton State Forest.

When the Laurentide glacier retreated north, it scraped out yet another moraine in northeastern Vermont. Melting icebergs then filled Vermont’s kettle holes and kettle bogs.

Kettle Pond State Park near Marshfield belongs to seven state parks in Groton Forest. The Civilian Conservation Corps created many of the trails and shelters among the trees.

A hiking trail circumnavigates the pristine waters of Kettle Pond, which, as its name suggests, is a kettle hole. The hiking trail offers a swimming beach, primitive shelters and the call of the loon. Climb nearby Owl’s Head for a spectacular view of the pond.

With thanks to Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds by Robert Thorson.

Images: Ninigret By Greg Thompson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, via Flickr, Public Domain. Cape Cod aerial view NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. Lake Chocorua By Jdahlem21 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5323618. Otter Ponds By NewtonCourt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106790726. Kettle Pond By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60968369. Walden Pond at Sunset by Tim Hettler via Flickr, CC by 2.0.

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Six Iconic Summer Paintings of New England

New England has no shortage of summer paintings. For centuries, artists have fled cities in summer for the cool air by the seashore or in the mountains. Or perhaps they just took a short train ride from New York or Boston.

They first ventured forth to the White Mountains in the early 19^th century. They explored almost as much as they painted. Later their paintings promoted tourism.

Then summer art colonies began burgeoning throughout New England. In addition to the White Mountain painters, New Hampshire had Cornish and Dublin. Connecticut had Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Massachusetts had Provincetown, the Berkshires, Gloucester and the Lynn Beach Art Colony. Maine had Ogunquit, Monhegan and Skowhegan – as well as every other island and coastal community.

Even tiny Rhode Island and Vermont had their own artist colonies. Vermont had the Dorset painters, and painters favored the South Kingstown hamlet of Matunuck.

So here are six summer paintings, one for each New England state.

The Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but in summertime he ventured to various artist colonies. Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Miss Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.

Hassam, observed the New York Times, was a priest high in the councils of the increasing tribe of American Impressionsts.

Hassam painted The Couch on the Porch in 1914 in Cos Cob. The art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.

One critic wrote that Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s.

Instead of historical scenes or famous people, the impressionsts painted landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life. They relied on natural light, quick brush strokes and a bright palette.

A short train ride took Twachtman’s friends from New York City to Greenwich. Some stayed at his home or boarded at the Holley House, now known as the Bush-Holley House. The colonists included such artists as J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid and Theodore Robinson, as well as writers Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather.

Summer, North Haven

The American Impressionists just loved to paint young women in white dresses outside in bright sunshine. Frank Weston Benson mastered the theme in many of his summer paintings.

Frank Weston Benson, was born in Salem, Mass., and he grew up with a love of the outdoors. As a boy he spent many hours duck hunting in the marshes around Salem.

In 1882, when he turned 21, his parents gave him $2,000 for a trip to Europe. He studied the old masters as well as the work of Claude Monet. When he returned, he established himself as an artist, married and had four chldren, which he frequently painted.

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

He enjoyed success as an artist, winning many medals for his work. During the summer, Frank Weston Benson painted on the Maine island of North Haven, as well as in the New Hampshire towns of New Castle and Dublin. He painted Summer in 1909 using his wife and three daughters as models.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photos-frank-weston-benson-painter-light/

Eventually, critics derided his paintings as “too pretty,” so he returned to his first love. Benson mastered waterfowl etchings, and even designed the second Federal Duck Stamp.

Cape Cod Morning, Truro

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death at 85 in 1967.

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod, creating a number of summer paintings. He explained why he chose the Cape in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous – perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

He loved to suggest the inner life of human beings, something he called “a vast realm.” He also once said all he wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Cape Cod Morning, painted in 1950, is quintessential Hopper. He captures a feeling of tension and isolation, as well as sunlight on the side of a house.

Saco River, White Mountains

In the 19^th century, hundreds of artists traveled to the White Mountains to paint the splendor of what was then wilderness.

White Mountain art started in 1826, when a widely reported tragedy began to attract people to the region. Nine members of the Willey household perished in a landslide.

Then Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, born in 1837 in Portsmouth, N.H., started out as a businessman in Boston. However, he switched to landscape painting full-time, which turned out to be a good career move. A member of the Hudson River School of Art, he specialized in marinescapes. However, he did make painting forays into the White Mountains, including Summer on the Saco (Mount Chocorua).

Second Beach, Newport

There was nothing middle-class about this scene of Second Beach in Newport, R.I. Worthington Whittredge, a late-Hudson River School painter, painted it in 1878-1880. Newport then ruled as a fashionable summer resort for the Gilded Age elite.

Southern planters had begun coming to Newport to escape the summer heat in the mid-19^th century. Northerners then started to arrive and to build lavish summer cottages. When Whittredge painted Second Beach, Newport was still on the way up. The Vanderbilts, for example, had yet to build two of the most opulent “cottages,” the Breakers and Marble House.

This summer painting shows fashionable people dipping their toes in the water and a horse-drawn carriage at the other end of the beach.

Swimming Hole, Arlington

Though born in New York City suburb, Norman Rockwell created the iconography of 20^th century small town New England.

Rockwell’s career followed the Golden Age of Illustration a period of brilliant book and magazine illustration. It ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. Rockwell began his studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1911. Inspired by such Golden Age illustrators as Howard Pyle, Rockwell decided to devote himself to illustration.

For 20 years he worked for Boys Life magazine, living in New Rochelle with his wife and three sons. But by 1938, he needed a restart, so he bought a farmhouse in Arlington. Rural Vermont inspired him to develop into the teller of fictional stories about small town America.

He had no interest in the natural beauty around him. Instead, he sought out diners, dentists offices and schoolhouses.

In 1945, he decided to paint a salesman who takes a dip into a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

Rockwell painted his neighbor George Zimmer, who posed as the salesman. It made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, one of seven for which Zimmer modeled. Many of Rockwell’s summer paintings appeared on Post covers.

Rockwell paid close attention to details. In Swimming Hole, he tells the story of the salesman making a long drive and stopping at a swimming hole. He parks his car and methodically takes off his shirt and tie, hangs it up, lays his glasses on a newspaper and then his cigar on a shoe.

“George Zimmer, my model,” Rockwell said, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.”

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Seven Fun Facts About E.E. Cummings

Many school kids have a special affinity for e.e. cummings, who wrote about the circus and got away with funky punctuation, made-up words and no capitalization in his poetry. Young ladies, too, are drawn to his lyrical love poems, some of the best in the English language.

He loved to mangle that language like the cartoon character Krazy Kat. He even wrote an introduction to the first collection of the Krazy Kat comic strips.

E.E. Cummings. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Yet Cummings’ experimental poems weren’t just kid stuff.

When he died in 1962, critics acknowledged him as an important 20^th century poet. “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader,” wrote critic Randall Jarrell.

E.E. Cummings

He was born into a prosperous, intellectual Unitarian family in Cambridge, Mass. Like another New England poet, Robert Frost, he had a farm in New Hampshire. Throughout his life he found refuge at Joy Farm in Madison, near Mount Chocorua.

He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard, signed up to drive an ambulance during World War I and then wrote a critically acclaimed novel.

In 1923 his first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, came out. He wrote more books of poetry in the 20s that established his reputation as an avant-garde poet. Over his lifetime he also wrote 2,900 poems, four plays, two novels and essays. He also painted and drew.

For most of his life he lived in a small apartment at 4 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. “the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place … meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.”

He had two short marriages as a young man, then fell in love with a model, Marion Morehouse. They lived together for 30 years, until his death.

He died on Sept. 3, 1962 and is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.

Here are seven fun facts about e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, if you prefer. He used both.

1. Cambridge Roots

His childhood home in Cambridge at 104 Irving Street was across the street from the house Julia Child would later live in. Cummings’ home was the first in Cambridge to have a telephone (a hand-cranked version, that is).

The E.E. Cummings house in Cambridge

He was born Edward Estlin Cummings, named after his father, on Oct. 14, 1894. Everyone called him Estlin. His loving, well-to-do family encouraged his creativity as a child and supported him financially as an adult. He had a happy childhood, capturing its essence in his most famous poem, [in Just-].

When the world is puddle-wonderful

The little lame baloon-man whistles

Far and wee,

And Betty and Is’bel come dancing…

And the goat-footed baloon-man

Whistles

Far

And

Wee.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, two Fireside poets, had also lived in the city and died within a decade of Cummings’ birth. Before TV and radio, people read poetry for entertainment in family settings – hence “fireside.” – and schoolchildren memorized poems in school.

Poets were celebrities, rock stars even, back then. Estlin Cummings wanted to be one from his early childhood.

2. He had a beloved African-American teacher

He attended the Agassiz School, a public school run by Maria Baldwin, the African American principal and early civil rights leader. The school now bears her name. About Baldwin, he wrote, “From her I marvelingly learned that the truest power is gentleness.” She called him a most loveable little boy.

As a boy, E.E. Cummings wrote a poem every day. His trademark: no space after a comma, began at the age of 14.

His first published poem appeared in 1910 in the Cambridge Review, a monthly magazine by the city’s high school students. The last line, about the retirement of his teacher, read,

“Than that which fits you best–our faithful friend.” But the printer left off ‘you.’ From then on, Cummings had an inordinate distrust of typesetters. “Later in his life he would become the bane of printers, insisting on galley after galley that he would examine with extreme care, correcting the most minute mistakes,” wrote his biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno.

3. He spent time in a French military prison

E.E. Cummings spent 3-1/2 months in a French military prison. He had joined the French ambulance corps during World War I. A bureaucratic mix-up left him in Paris for five weeks, and he fell in love with a French prostitute.

E.E. Cummings in 1917

Cummings and his friend, William Slater Brown, wrote letters home that included comments opposing the war. The French military arrested him in 1917 and incarcerated him in a large room. His father protested vigorously and got him out of prison.

From that experience he wrote a novel, The Enormous Room, published in 1922, to critical acclaim.

4. He had Daddy issues

His father worked as the pastor of the South Congregational Church and as a lecturer at Harvard. He also served as secretary of the Boston Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Penal Aspects of Drunkenness and a supporter of the Watch and Ward Society.

His father was a large, powerful man, athletic and aggressive. Estlin, on the other hand, was small, uncoordinated and as a teenager had bad acne. His father often said, “I’d never give a penny to a son of mine who drank.” Estlin drank, but he got more than a penny over the years.

His daddy issues caused him to start rebelling against his father while at Harvard. He drank whiskey sours, visited burlesque shows and wrote erotic love poems. Once he parked his father’s car in front of a bordello.

5. Cummings was a Republican

Though he wrote avant-garde poetry and lived a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, he registered as a Republican and supported the anti-Communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Patchin Place in Greenwich Village

He visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and criticized the poverty and squalor under Stalin. Susan Cheever wrote, “He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism…” He hated the Kennedys and refused an invitation to the White House from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

6. Estranged from Daughter

His first wife, Elaine Orr, abducted their daughter and he didn’t see her for more than 20 years. Cummings had an affair with Elaine while she was married to Scofield Thayer. She had Cummings’ child, Nancy, in 1919, but her husband was okay with it. Thayer gave Nancy his name and supported her.

Elaine divorced Thayer to marry Cummings in 1924. They stayed together all of two months and divorced after nine.

Elaine told Nancy that Thayer was her father, that he was dead (he wasn’t), that he was crazy (he was).

Elaine shuttled Nancy across the Atlantic and around Europe, putting her in the care of nurses, governesses and boarding schools. Nancy on her own she discovered the poetry of E.E. Cummings. During World War II she worked in Washington, D.C., as a typist and a linguist, and met and married Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson.

Joy Farm n New Hampshire

Nancy’s mother-in-law invited her to stay during the summer at her summer home near Mount Chocorua. Cummings, nearby at Joy Farm, invited her for tea but didn’t disclose their relationship. She agreed to meet him again in Greenwich Village to have her portrait painted, and felt herself falling in love with him. Finally he told her the truth.

7. Dirty Dancing

He admitted his addiction to striptease and burlesque while delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. When living in Greenwich Village he frequented the burlesque show at Minsky’s National Winter Garden to see his favorite stripper, Cleo. As a Harvard undergraduate, he went to the burlesque show at the Old Howard Theater in Boston’s Scollay Square. In Paris, he dated a prostitute named Marie-Louise. He wrote articles for Vanity Fair in 1925 and 1926 defending burlesque as “art which is alive.”

Drawing of a dancer at Minsky’s

We relied on several fine biographies of E.E. Cummings, including E.E. Cummings A Biography By Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno; E.E. Cummings By Catherine Reef; Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings By Richard S. Kennedy; e.e. cummings: a life by Susan Cheever.

Image: e.e. cummings house in Cambridge By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22922253. This story was updated in 2021.

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