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Mount Desert Island

6 Places That Appear in Currier & Ives Prints

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

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

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

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

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

East Rock, New Haven, Conn.

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

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

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

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

East Rock

Here’s what it looks like now:

Mount Desert Light

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

Desert Rock Light

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

Mount Desert Light in 1892

Boston, Mass.

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

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

Here’s a more recent view of the city:

Franklin Pierce Homestead, Hillsboro, N.H.

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

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

Yacht Squadron, Newport, R.I.

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

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

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

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

Here’s how Newport looks today:

Lake Memphremagog, Newport, Vt.

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

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

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

The modern photograph is taken from Owls Head.

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

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6 Historic Stagecoach Stops You Can Visit

The history of New England’s post roads and their stagecoach stops mirror the history of the country. The roads date back to the Pequots who used the trails that grew into the post roads for generations. The same trails carried John Winthrop on his journeys from Boston to Springfield.

Traffic on the roads shrank as King Philip’s War turned them into dangerous gauntlets. They expanded again as the war ended and horses made travel more enticing and the mails more efficient.

The heyday of the stagecoaches in the 1800s really drove a blossoming of the post roads. They grew from the first Upper Post Road into a maze of roads that wound their way into every corner of New England.

These stagecoaches created economic booms wherever they went, bringing commerce as well as jobs. Stagecoach stops, needed every 12 to 20 miles or so, were essential, especially in the early days of the stagecoach era. These inns provided income to their owners, and many others: drivers, ticket agents, coach makers, blacksmiths, stable hands and farmers.

Today, the vestiges of the stagecoach era remain with us. Many of the roads New Englanders travel today were once used by the stagecoaches. And along those roads, some of the old stagecoach stops still serve up food, drink and comfort to the weary traveler.

Here are six still open to the public today, one in each New England state:

Old Riverton Inn

The Old Riverton Inn, one of Connecticut’s many, many stagecoach stops back in the day.

Several years before the American Revolution, stagecoaches and stagecoach stops appeared on the Upper Post Road from New York to Boston, and from Hartford to Norwich and Providence. The war interrupted service, but resumed when it wound down. Stagecoach service expanded quickly on the new turnpike roads and postal routes.

Levi Pease began a stage service between New York and Boston on the Upper Post Road. He got the mail contract for all of New England from the U.S. Congress in 1789. Then he expanded his business into Northern New England and to Albany.

By 1827 Connecticut had 26 stage routes. By then it took only 36 hours to travel between New York and Boston vs. the previous six days. Taverns were generally 12 to 18 miles apart. Drivers announced their arrival at stagecoach stops by blowing on a trumpet.

During the early part of the 19^th century, Connecticut developed the most complex network of toll roads in New England. The state had few centers of wealth like Providence or Boston, and market towns competed fiercely for the trade of the back country. Between 1792 and 1839, 1,600 miles of turnpike road were created in Connecticut. The Talcott Mountain Turnpike was a key part of the route from Hartford to Albany.

Jess Ives opened the Ives Tavern or Ives Hotel in 1796 along the Hartford-to-Albany Route in Riverton, Conn. Today it’s known as the Old Riverton Inn and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It overlooks a wild and scenic section of the Farmington River.

The artist who painted murals on the walls of the Hobby Horse Bar also painted murals for the 1936 New York World’s Fair. The inn features bar stools made of saddles on kegs.

For more information about the Old Riverton Inn, click here.

Coach Stop Inn

The Coach Stop Inn, one of the stagecoach stops along the way from Bar Harbor to Maine’s interior.

Stagecoach lines began regular service between Maine towns after the Revolutionary War. The first stages ran between Portland and Portsmouth, N.H., a journey that took three days in 1787. By 1825, a stage could make the journey between Bangor and Portland in 36 hours.

The Coach Stop Inn in Bar Harbor was built in 1804 for newcomers who came to build homes, farms and ships on Mount Desert Island. Known as the Halfway Tavern, it often hosted sailors in the early days. Patrons would arrive by sea and take a stagecoach from the tavern into Maine’s interior towns.

Wealthy patrons charmed by fresh air, beautiful scenery and hiking trails made Bar Harbor a fashionable summer resort during the Gilded Age. In 1947, a fire that burned much of Maine also destroyed some of Bar Harbor’s hotels and mansions. The oldest hotel to survive the fire is now the Coach Stop Inn, a luxurious bed and breakfast.

For more information, click here.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn

The most famous of the stagecoach stops, The Wayside Inn.

The Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., boasts that it’s the oldest operating inn in the United States. It has accommodated travelers along the Boston Post Road since 1716. Just a few miles down the road from historic Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, it began life 300 years ago as Howe’s Tavern. David Howe ran it as an extension of his own home.

David handed the property to his son Ezekial – a soldier in Sudbury’s militia during the American Revolution. The Howe family continued to operate and expand the inn until 1861, serving traffic between Worcester and Boston.

The inn stopped operating as a traditional inn in 1861. The owners converted it into something more like a boarding house and dance hall.

But in 1862, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sealed the inn’s place in history. Longfellow visited the building and published his now-famous Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. From that time on, the inn was the destination of tourists and literary pilgrims who wanted to see first-hand the inspiration for Longfellow’s book.

In 1923, the inn took another important step into immortality when automobile magnate Henry Ford bought the property. Ford then began the restoration and expansion that gave shape to the inn’s current configuration.

For more information, click here.

Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern

The Coach Stop, one of New Hampshire’s many stagecoach stops in the early 19th century.

In 1786 the legislature in New Hampshire expanded the system of post roads to travel to four sections of the state. Though the earlier post roads moved mail and people between Portsmouth and some points west and north, only later did the routes reach deep into the western portion of the state.

One such line ran from Portsmouth across the state’s southern tier over to Amherst and back, creating the need for taverns and inns along the way.

Londonderry’s Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern began life in 1810 as the home of the town’s doctor. Later in the 1800s it was maintained as Plummer’s Tavern, located at the junction of two post roads. One carried coaches east and west to Nashua and the other carried traffic north and south to Manchester and Concord. For a map of all stagecoach lines operating in New Hampshire in 1833, click here.

Today the restaurant and inn maintains much of its historical charm, with signs of the original elements of its days as a coach stop remaining intact.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach House Inn

The Stagecoach House Inn, for many years one of the stagecoach stops along the New London Turnpike.

Settlers first came to Wyoming, a historic village in Richmond, Rhode Island, in 1757. Wyoming grew and prospered when the Brand’s Iron Works was founded across the Wood River in Hopkinton in 1787. Sometime around 1800, an inn was built at a strategic crossroads in Wyoming.

Textile mills sprang up in the area, and in 1815 the New London Turnpike opened right past the inn. The new road brought stagecoach riders between Richmond and New London, Connecticut

By 1835, the New London Turnpike – now Route 3 – connected Providence and New London. It proved to be faster and more direct than the Old Post Road, which followed the coastal route. The village thrived, and for many years an inn once known as Dawley Tavern continued as a stagecoach stop.

By the 20^th century, industry began to founder along the Wood River. That, however, allowed Hopkinton and Wyoming to retain much of their historic 19^th century character. The National Register of Historic Places lists almost a square mile of the two villages as the Wyoming Village Historic District. It includes the old ironworks, Greek Revival, Late Victorian, and Federal architecture in both Wyoming and Hopkinton.

Today the Dawley Tavern is called the Stagecoach House Inn at 1136 Main Street.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach Inn

The Stagecoach Inn, a fitting name for one of Vermont’s old stagecoach stops.

At the start of the 19th century, ancient footpaths connected Burlington and Montpelier in Vermont. In 1805, the 36-mile Winooski Turnpike along the Winooski River was chartered to connect the two major towns.

The old Winooski Turnpike turned into U.S. Route 2, the main highway connecting the White Mountains to the Adirondacks. It cuts through Waterbury, the town where Ben and Jerry’s make their ice cream.

In 1826 either a Mr. Parmalee or a lawyer named Dan Carpenter had a structure built on the corner of the Winooski Turnpike and what is now Route 100. The building served as a tavern and inn for travelers and as a meeting place for locals.

By the mid-1800s, a farming family named the Henrys owned the inn. Their eccentric daughter Nettie married an Ohio rubber baron, Albert Spencer. Nettie smoked cigarettes, chewed tobacco and wore a celluloid eyeshade. She expanded and improved the old family house in Queen Anne Style.

Nettie Spencer died in 1947. The home was later run as a rooming house and fell into disrepair. A young couple from Boston bought the property in 1985 and rebuilt the house. Today it’s the Old Stagecoach Inn, a historic bed-and-breakfast in the center of downtown Waterbury.

For more information about the Stagecoach Inn click here.

This story about New England stagecoach stops was updated in 2021. If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about six Revolutionary taverns here.

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The Purple Fire Snowstorm of 1853 – 20 Minutes of Terror Downeast

A snowstorm raged for a full day in Downeast Maine on March 13, 1853, when at sundown the winds suddenly grew calm. The snow continued falling steadily, gently down, and the people of Bar Harbor remarked at the stillness as the night sky darkened.

It was not, it turned out, a good sign. It was the start of the purple fire snowstorm of 1853.

Storm-Tossed Ships Wrecked on a Rocky Coast (National Gallery of Art, Johann Christoph Dietzsch)

More than 30 years later, a writer would recall: “I don’t believe there ever was a worse lot of frightened people in the world than the inhabitants of Bar Harbor were that night.”

The signs that something worse was on its way emerged around 7 pm with a rumbling of thunder from the west. Then, as the snow continued, lightning flashes began illuminating the sky.

Purple Fire Snowstorm

The thunder intensified, becoming so strong it rattled the houses. Balls of lightning began streaking down from the sky, rolling along the ground leaving havoc in their wake.

A syndicated account of the storm was carried in newspapers around the country. A correspondent of the Gardiner, Maine, Fountain, writing from Bass Harbor, Mt. Desert, described the storm as ‘awful and sublime.’

“A severe snow storm accompanied by lightning occurred in a part of Maine on the 13th,” wrote the correspondent. “A thunder cloud passed over the place, which, for terrific appearance, exceeded anything ever witnessed here.”

The lightning was purple, he wrote, and sometimes appeared like balls of fire. It came in through windows and doors and down chimneys, while houses trembled and shook to their foundations.

“Mrs. E. Holden was near a window, winding up a clock,” he wrote. “A ball of fire came in through the window and struck her hand, which benumbed her hand and arm. She then, with all in the house, retreated into the entry. Another flash succeeded, and, in the room from which they had retired, resembled a volume of fire, whirling round and producing a crackling noise.”

Many people saw the fire and heard the crackling noises inside their houses, the Fountain reported. Some said the noise sounded like breaking glass.

Injuries, But No Deaths

“Capt. Maurice Rich had his light extinguished, and his wife was injured,” continued the Fountain. “He got his wife on to a bed, and found a match; at that instant another flash came and ignited the match, and threw him several feet backwards.”

A man named John L. Martin received so severe a shock that he could not speak for a long time.

Many people received slight injuries, according to the Fountain.

“Some were struck in the feet, some in the eye; while others were electricized, some powerfully and some lightly,” the newspaper reported. “But what was very singular, not a person was killed or seriously injured, or a building damaged.”

The purple fire snowstorm created a bizarre effect among a cluster of trees, fortunately away from any buildings. The ‘electric fluid’ took them out by the roots and threw them in every direction. Some hung by their roots from the tops of the adjacent trees, their roots up and their tops down.

Truly Awful

The lightning then struck the earth to the depth of several feet and about 10 feet in diameter, and divided into four different directions.

In one direction it made a chasm several feet deep and 370 feet long, ‘lifting, overturning, and throwing out chunks of frozen earth, some of which were 10 or 11 feet long, by 4 feet wide, and hurling at a distance rocks, stones, and roots,’ the Fountain reported.

“The power here displayed was truly awful, and had it fallen on a building, it would have thrown it, with its inmates, into ten thousand fragments,” reported the Fountain.

The purple fire snowstorm also destroyed the masts of several vessels in Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor. It knocked down one man, but didn’t kill him.

New England has no shortage of stories about blizzards and storms, as snow is a part of life. And the purple fire snowstorm lasted only about 20 minutes before it pushed out to sea.

It stayed, however, in the memory of the people who witnessed it forever. In 1884, the New York Times published an article recalling the singular purple fire snowstorm of 31 years earlier.

This story about the purple fire snowstorm was updated in 2022.

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Beatrix Farrand Breaks the (Green) Glass Ceiling

Famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1893 dismissed 21-year-old Beatrix Farrand as a dilettante gardener, but six years later she had risen to the top of the field.

Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Yale University Library.

At 27, Beatrix Farrand had earned a reputation that allowed her to help found the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Her clients had estates in Newport, the Berkshires and Maine, but she also consulted with universities such as Yale and Princeton. She also designed public gardens such as the rose garden at the New York Botanical Garden and the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden.

Throughout her life she insisted on calling herself a landscape gardener.

Beatrix Farrand

She was born June 19, 1872, the only child of a New York society couple. Her rich father, Frederic Rhinelander Jones, had no ambition and loved to have fun. His serious little sister Edith became the novelist known as Edith Wharton. Beatrix’s mother, Mary Cadwalader Rawle, was also rich, but lively and bookish.

Beatrix’s parents’ marriage failed, and then after she turned 10 her father absented himself from her life.

She grew up surrounded by her mother’s women friends and, occasionally, Philadelphia lawyers, soldiers, artists and writers. “Always beautifully turned out, with an awesome briskness of manner,’ wrote Jane Brown in Arnoldia. ”She was formal, not jolly and good fun,” a friend of the family told the The New York Times in 2003.

“She had an elegant reserve, a perfectionism that suffered no fools,” the Times reported.

Reef Point gardens, managed by Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

Reef Point

Beatrix and her mother spent summers at her family’s summer home, Reef Point, on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor, Maine. There she learned to love the outdoors, especially plants and trees. While still a teenager she took over the management of the Reef Point gardens.

Charles Sprague Sargent, who helped Beatrix Farrand with her gardening.

She also had the good fortune to meet Charles Sprague Sargent, director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. He was perhaps the only person at that time who was willing and able to help her enter the exclusively male world of landscape architecture. Sargent, a stern and aloof Brahmin, appreciated Beatrix Jones’ knowledge and enthusiasm for plants.

Flowering trees at Holm Lea. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

On their trips between New York and Maine, Beatrix and her mother stayed at the Sargents’ Brookline home, Holm Lea.

Frederick Law Olmsted

In October 1893, the Sargents took Beatrix Farrand to Chicago to see Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape settings for the World’s Columbian Exposition. The next summer they took her and her mother to see Olmsted’s gardens at the Biltmore estate in North Carolina.

Olmsted, then at the height of his fame, commented that Beatrix was ‘inclined to dabble in landscape architecture.’ The slight was widely quoted in landscape architecture circles.

The Arnold Arboretum in 2005.

After her visit to Biltmore, she stayed at Holm Lea for a summer, studying at the Arboretum. Sargent took her to see H.H. Hunnewell’s rhododendron collection at his home in Wellesley, Mass. He also took her to Frederic Law Olmsted’s home office – when Frederic Law Olmsted was away. There, Beatrix saw how designers sketched layouts for gardens on tracing paper over site surveys. She saw as well how they made plans for planting by referring to a card index describing each plant.

Clashing Azaleas

And she returned Olmsted’s slight (which she probably never heard) by recording in her notebook some badly arranged shrubs and clashing azaleas in pinkish blue and bright orange. (Anyone can visit Olmsted’s home office now; it’s now a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service.)

That fall she arranged for private tutors from Columbia University’s School of Architecture to teach her technical drawing and surveying. During a trip to Europe she studied formal gardens and the natural landscape. By 1897, Sargent had found her first job: thinning trees and remodeling plants on a garden slope. At 25, she was on her way, working from the top floor of her mother’s brownstone on East 11^th St. in New York City.

Farrand designed this rustic bridge in a birch grove at the Herbert Livingston Satterlee house, Bar Harbor. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

As a woman she was excluded from public projects, but she managed to find private clients among her family friends in Bar Harbor. Her Aunt Edith Wharton also helped with her connections. She designed the rustic bridge and the birch grove pictured above for the Herbert L. Satterlee estate in Bar Harbor.

White House garden designed by Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1913 she designed the East Colonial Garden at the White House for the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. It was replaced by the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.

Aerial view of Harkness Memorial Park.

She designed the Italian, Oriental and cutting gardens for Eolia, the Waterford, Conn., estate of wealthy philanthropist Edward Harkness. Harkness left Eolia to the state of Connecticut in 1950. It is now open to the public as Harkness Memorial State Park, and the 42-room mansion can be rented for weddings and parties.

Maine Undertakings

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Another philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hired her to design plantings that framed vistas and bridges along his 45 miles of carriage roads, now part of Acadia National Park. Much of her work was destroyed by fire in 1947. Above is the Duck Brook Bridge, spanning Duck Brook between Witch Hole Loop and New Eagle Lake Road in Bar Harbor.

Beatrix Farrand remained single until she was over 40. In 1913, she married Max Farrand, chairman of the Yale History Department.

Max and Beatrix Farrand set up Reef Point as an educational institution, but attracted few students. She used the grounds as a laboratory for her plants, studying soils and finding ways to protect tender plants.

By 1955, Max Farrand had died and she couldn’t find an institution willing to undertake the expense of maintaining Reef Point. In 1955, she ordered the house torn down and gave away her plants, keeping some of her favorites. She gave her library of 2,700 books and her herbarium to the University of California at Berkeley.

Charles Savage, an artist and innkeeper, took most of the plants, building the Asticou Azalea Garden and Thuya Garden in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Both are now open to the public.

Asticou Azalea Garden.

Garland Farm

Beatrix Farrand then moved six miles down the road, to Garland Farm, owned by Lewis Garland, her driver and handyman. His horticulturist wife Amy supervised the Reef Point gardens. She built an addition to the house that included a room for Clementine Walters, her companion and caregiver.

She lived at Garland Farm until her death on Feb. 28, 1959.

Garland Farm had two private owners until 2004, when the Beatrix Farrand Society bought the farm. It is open to visitors on Open Days and by appointment. The Society renovated the barn as an educational center for workshops, lectures and other programs.

With thanks to Lady into Landscape Gardener: Beatrix Farrand’s Early Years at the Arnold Arboretum by Jane Brown in Arnoldia. The photo Arnold Arboretum – Aug 2005(b) courtesy of Daderot at Wikipedia. The photo of the Asticou Azalea Gardens “Asticou Azalea Garden 2003 1” courtesy of Dudesleeper at Wikipedia. This story about Beatrix Farrand ws updated in 2022.

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