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Newport

Aaron Lopez, Colonial Newport’s Preeminent Merchant

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Aaron Lopez (1731-1782), a Sephardic Jew, became the wealthiest merchant in colonial Newport, R.I. Unfortunately, the American Revolution devastated his domestic and foreign business. While returning to Newport in the hope of restoring his financial affairs, he suffered a fatal accident.
After a small number of Jewish settlers arrived as early as 1658 in Newport – known for its religious tolerance – Jewish families began arriving in larger numbers after 1750 from Spain, Portugal and other countries. Many of them became well-known merchants in this prominent seaport, including Aaron Lopez.

Aaron Lopez

Aaron Lopez Comes To Newport

Lopez arrived in Newport on Oct. 13, 1752 with his wife, Anna, daughter Catherine, and his brother David. He became a merchant through the guidance of his half-brother Moses, who had arrived in Newport about 10 years earlier. He began his
career as a local shopkeeper and then became a wholesaler through agents in Providence, Boston, New York City and other ports.
In 1756 he opened a candle factory in Newport that relied on spermaceti — a waxy substance extracted from whale oil. As the price of whale oil skyrocketed, Lopez joined a trust — the United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers — in 1761 in an attempt to control its price and distribution among its members.

Anna Lopez and her son, Joshua, by Gilbert Stuart

The British Naturalization Act of 1740 declared that aliens could not legally trade in the colonies. When Lopez applied to become a naturalized citizen in March 1762, his application was denied, supposedly because the colonies had enough residents. However, the real reason appeared to be antisemitism.
On Oct. 15, 1762 he became a naturalized citizen in Swansea, Mass. He was the first Jew granted this certificate in that colony.

Trading Success

By 1765 Lopez had expanded his trading activity by sending five ships to Bristol, England, his first international venture. He hoped to export mainly lumber and whale oil in exchange for dry goods and hardware. The effort, however, financially failed in a depressed market. Further voyages to Bristol, Africa, and the Caribbean between 1766 and 1768 also proved unsuccessful.

A sample of solid raw spermaceti, a spermaceti wax candle and a bottle of sperm oil.

Around 1769, with improving trading conditions, Lopez expanded trade with Europe, the West Indies and South America. For example, fish, rum, wheat and other goods were exchanged for wines, salt and other items in European markets. Factors (middlemen who connected buyers and sellers of cargo and provided other services) greatly facilitated these trading
arrangements.
Trade especially improved with the West Indies, where Lopez obtained molasses and then made it into rum in Newport. Most of the rum was bought by Americans, with the rest sent to Africa in exchange for slaves. Although only a small part of his mercantile business, Lopez engaged in the slave trade between 1761 and 1774.
As his trading activity thrived up to the American Revolution, he had full or part ownership of more than 30 sailing vessels of varying kinds. Thus, Lopez became the wealthiest merchant in Newport, as evidenced by his tax assessments. Meanwhile, the success of Lopez and other merchants had made Newport — along with Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charles Town (Charleston in1783) — one of the leading colonial ports on the eve of the American Revolution.
newport-1730

Newport, 1730. Courtesy New York Public Library.

Aaron Lopez,  Philanthropist

Using his considerable wealth, the “Merchant Prince of New England” bought books for the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, opened in March 1750; became a notable founder of Touro Synagogue, dedicated in 1763, also in Newport; contributed 5,000 feet of lumber for constructing the College of Rhode Island in Warren in 1764, which moved to Providence in 1770 and later became Brown University; and donated land for Leicester Academy in Leicester, Mass.
touro-synagogue

Touro Synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

By 1775 at the onset of the Revolutionary War, both the British navy and American privateers had begun seizing his ships. The resulting British occupation of Newport in 1776 forced Lopez and his family to relocate to Leicester. Needing to earn a living, he opened a retail and wholesale venture that he used to help finance the American cause. Despite legal victories that awarded him some of his vessels seized by American privateers, he never succeeded in restoring his financial affairs.
After several years of living in Leicester, Lopez and his family began a journey back to Newport. Unfortunately, on May 28, 1782 Lopez drowned when his horse and carriage swerved into Scott’s Pond in Smithfield, R.I. He was subsequently buried in the Jewish cemetery in Newport.
Edward T. Howe, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Siena University near Albany, N.Y.

***

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Images: Aaron Lopez, By Unknown – Original publication: unknownImmediate source: http://findingaids.cjh.org/AaronLopez.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39560756. Colonial-era buildings: By Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3969830. Spermaceti and candle By Genevieve Anderson – http://www.marinebio.net/marinescience/06future/wham.htm, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24183274.
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Ward McAllister’s Newport Summers

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In Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island, an invitation to one of Ward McAllister’s summer picnics could make or break a hopeful social climber.

One contemporary aptly described this era as “an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of dazzling wealth, restless endeavor, and rivalry.”[1] American ideas about class were changing, especially in cities. Old and new money mixed like oil and water. The increase in American fortunes necessitated stricter guidelines for social acceptance. Enter McAllister, a controversial figure who coached this evolving class of insecure millionaires in Old World aristocratic customs.

Ward McAllister

Ward McAllister’s Newport Roots

McAllister held a rapt audience among the exclusive “Four Hundred” in New York, but he held court on Aquidneck Island. Part of his success stemmed from experience. McAllister’s visits to Newport predated the New York crowd by decades. He was so intimately entwined with the city’s 19th-century history that one local newspaper claimed the Georgia-born, world-traveling transplant as “a native Newporter.”[2]

A Ward McAllister picnic at Bayside Farm

McAllister’s childhood summer vacations illustrate a very different kind of Newport — one still on the rise and not yet “the most luxurious and stratified resort in America.”[3] They demonstrate some of the features that attracted early tourists to Aquidneck Island. They also sketch a portrait of a loving extended family, ordinarily scattered hundreds of miles apart, who associated the area with togetherness and refuge. Finally, these summers were formative for McAllister’s later social ascent.

Newport’s “Rise and Fall and Rise” [4]                                        

At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Newport was the fifth largest city in the colonies.[5]  As participants in the Triangle Trade, the port city’s merchants made connections with their counterparts in other colonial maritime hubs, notably Charleston. They dealt in molasses, sugar, rum, slaves and other lucrative goods.

The arrival of 10,000 invading British troops changed everything. The Revolution bled Newport of half of its population and most of its prestige. As historian Jon Sterngass notes, “No city seemed less likely to prosper in the first third of the 19th century.”[6]

Yet it did. A newly-independent United States found its footing, and Americans gained the means to travel for pleasure. Wealthy southerners with pre-war connections to and fond memories of Newport returned to the city, rescuing it from a decades-long economic depression. One of these early tourists was Ward McAllister’s grandmother, Sarah Marion Mitchell Hyrne Cutler.

View of Newport

“The Duchess” [7]

Born in 1761, Sarah was no stranger to vacationing in Newport. Joining other prominent South Carolinians, Georgians, and Virginians, the Marions trekked north to enjoy Aquidneck Island’s congenial social scene, natural beauty and cool climate. Newport saw such an influx of southern families seeking reprieve from summer heat and mosquitos that the resort became known as “the Carolina hospital.”[8]

The death of Sarah’s first husband, Dr. Alexander William Hyrne, left her a widow at 20—and a very wealthy one. This tragic event could have cemented South Carolina as her lifelong sphere of influence. However, Sarah’s periodic visits to the Northeast had proved influential, if not fateful.

Sarah Cutler

When Sarah fell in love with Benjamin Clarke Cutler, the sheriff of Norfolk County, Mass., she knew marrying him would mean moving north. Undaunted, she said her vows in Charleston in 1794 and embarked for Boston, where the couple settled happily. They had five children: Mary (called Eliza), Julia, Benjamin, Jr., Louisa and Francis Marion.[9]

“A Meteor-Like Life”[10]

Each of the Cutler children grew up, married, and moved away. Sarah welcomed her children’s spouses with open arms and cherished the births of her grandchildren. However, she lamented that changing circumstances would force her “to lead a meteor-like life by wandering from one star to another” to see her scattered family.[11]

Louisa moved farthest from her Boston home. She married Matthew Hall McAllister, Jr., of Savannah in 1823. A private lawyer when he married, McAllister rose to become U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia in 1827. He also served as a Georgia state senator in 1834 and mayor of Savannah in 1837. Louisa and Matthew Hall McAllister were married for more than 40 years. They had five children: Harriet, Julian, Matthew Hall III, Ward, Francis Marion and Benjamin.[12]

For Louisa, the distance between Georgia and the great cities of the Northeast, where her siblings had settled, seemed interminable. “I wish I did not love you all so much,” she once wrote to her sister, “as I am to be deprived of your loved society… The kindness of strangers and friends excite[s] my warmest gratitude, but the love of my own is more precious than rubies. I do not love the South, but[,] as it is my home[,] must try to make the best of it.”[13]

Louisa Cutler McAllister at 64

Louisa’s husband was sensitive to her homesickness. Consequently, as Ward McAllister would later write, “this best of fathers sent his family North every summer, with one or two exceptions, to Newport, R.I.”[14] Summers on Aquidneck Island were a salve for the pain of great geographic distance.

“Our Terrestrial Paradise”[15]

Newport’s early tourists typically stayed in one of the city’s many boarding houses. Or they rented cottages on The Point or on Thames Street. Others, like McAllister’s extended family, preferred more space, opting to stay in farmhouses on the outskirts of Newport proper.[16]

The Cutlers, McAllisters, Francises and Wards rented each summer from the Bailey family, not far from Third Beach in Middletown. When the weather cooperated, they enjoyed being outside. Ward McAllister—called “Wardy” in family letters— remembered flying kites and building crackling fires under the stars at Purgatory Chasm, a commanding rock formation overlooking Sachuest (Second) Beach.[17]

Purgatory Chasm

The rock formations of Paradise Valley were another favorite spot. As Ward’s uncle, Rev. Benjamin Clarke Cutler, wrote to a parishioner in Brooklyn:

In this retreat every thing is delightful. This morning I spent alone, rambling over the most glorious battlements of ocean scenery I ever saw. It is a place called Paradise, an immense pile of rocks, affording a view of the whole southern end of this fine island, and of a noble amphitheatre of sea and sky. Around are highly cultivated fields and farms, and near by, entirely sequestered, are groves of forest trees, affording a perfect shade, broken only to give a view of the neighboring ocean. The morning has been peerless; a cool, bracing air from the northwest, a bright sun and a clear sky, relived only by a few silvery clouds. I confess I have not for years been so elevated by natural scenery…[18]

From Paradise to Purgatory by William Trsot

Family letters — full of charming, funny stories of antics, outings, and visitors — capture the happy cacophony of the Bailey farmhouse. After long days exploring the Island’s natural beauty, everyone crowded inside and drifted to sleep on mattresses stuffed with corn husks.[19]

Town and Country

From the 1830s onward, Newport’s renown grew, but its atmosphere remained largely communal. Summer visitors of different backgrounds, regions and social classes sailed, swam and fished together. They might go into town to visit the Redwood Library or attend a theatrical performance. Or they’d dance at the immensely popular “hops” hosted at hotels. Construction of those hotels heralded the crescendo of Newport’s antebellum tourism scene.[20]

Young Julia Ward Howe, Ward McAllister’s first cousin and another visitor to the Bailey farm, captured the resort’s antebellum character, and her family’s place in it. The future activist, writer and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” lyricist observed, “Newport is quite full, visitors flocking from every direction… As for us, we eat, we drink, and sleep abundantly, ride and walk constantly, and are neither important, influential, witty nor wise.”[21]

Refuge from Cholera

In the summer of 1832, family matriarch Sarah Cutler again “united the various branches of her family under one roof.” But this was no ordinary season in Newport.[22] Cholera had arrived in North America.

Carried on westbound ships, the horrific disease struck Canadian ports first and New York City shortly afterward. July and August 1832 saw roughly 2,500 cholera deaths in New York alone. The victims included Lt. Col. Samuel Ward, Jr., Sarah Cutler’s brother-in-law.[23] Those too poor, sick or otherwise unable to flee the crowded city fell victim to this vicious, stigmatizing and rapidly spreading infection.[24] “The accounts from New York keep us in a constant state of uneasiness,” Louisa McAllister wrote to her sister Eliza, who remained in the city, “and we long to gather our dear group at Bailey’s.[25]

Map of the New York City cholera epidemic

Newport was safer than New York, largely due to city officials’ quick enforcement of a strict embargo. No ships could come into port or leave. Even mail delivery paused, triggering increased anxiety at the Bailey farm. However, these precautionary measures proved effective. By the epidemic’s end, only nine reported cholera deaths had occurred in Newport. [26] Those lodging with the Baileys that summer were spared.

Ward McAllister’s New Age in Newport

Even years later, Newport remained central to Ward McAllister’s adult life. In 1852, he married Sarah Taintor Gibbons, whose father had loaned “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt money to buy his first ferryboat. The couple purchased a 50-acre parcel called Bayside Farm. Like the Bailey farm, it was located outside Newport proper and offered gorgeous views of the water. Prior to settling in New York in the late 1850s, the growing McAllister family lived at Bayside for nine months out of the year.

As the Civil War loomed, Newport’s social atmosphere shifted. Despite connections drawn by trade relationships and trans-regional marriages like Sarah Cutler’s and Louisa McAllister’s, southern newspapers urged their readers to shun northern resorts to demonstrate Confederate patriotism.[27] The “Southern contingent” that had fundamentally shaped the early tenor of 19th-century Newport’s tourism industry was quickly outnumbered by the northern elite.[28]

Watching a regatta from Castle Hill

Meanwhile, Newport’s reputation grew. So did the crowds. Fashion drove the center of Newport’s social life into the city limits, first to grand hotels like the Ocean House and, later, to subscription-based entertainment spaces like the Newport Casino and private homes.

Newport Cliff Walk ,1885

The “galaxy of most elaborate country houses” that later came to dominate proud Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive were “walled in” from prying eyes and parvenus “with an almost feudal aggressiveness.” [29] After the Civil War, as historian Rockwell Stenstrud writes, “Newport [became] unrecognizable to anyone who had been away for a period of time.”[30]

Adapting to the Gilded Age

McAllister, more savvy than often credited, remembered the old days. Witnessing Newport’s evolution had primed him to marry the Island’s antebellum charm with the “cutthroat culture” that permeated Gilded Age resort life at his Newport farm.[31] He did it with picnics.

Ward McAllister, seated with guests at a picnic

Guests included New York’s most powerful families—Astors, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Wetmores. They picnicked alongside diplomats, state and local political figures, and even artists. However, McAllister once commented, “do not for a moment imagine that all were indiscriminately asked to these little fêtes… if you were not of the inner circle… it look the combined efforts of all your friends’ backing and pushing to procure an invitation for you.”[32]

During McAllister’s exclusive summer picnics, Bayside Farm’s rustic white farmhouse and picturesque livestock in the pastures—no matter that they were rented specifically for the occasion— created a “romantic, out-of-town feeling” that seemed like a novelty.[33] Guests feasted on rich delicacies and enjoyed champagne, claret and madeira from McAllister’s meticulously-curated collection. Afterwards, there was dancing in the barn, where a brilliant chandelier hung from the rafters.

Ward McAllister’s picnic table

Between food, decorations, table settings, music and other essential elements for hosting 140 people, one of McAllister’s picnics cost roughly $27,700 in today’s money.[34] The price, as one newspaper editorialized, “makes a plain, hungry, pickle-and-sandwich picnicker… smile.”[35]

A pinnacle example of McAllister blending his early memories with higher social stakes came in 1882. He organized a luncheon for President Chester A. Arthur overlooking Paradise Rocks.[36] To the “commander-in-chief of the 400,” the “noble amphitheatre of sea and sky” that his family had once enjoyed was unquestionably fitting for the commander in chief.[37]

The Last Valley-Paradise Rocks by John LaFarge

Ward McAllister’s Newport Summers

No matter how radically Aquidneck Island changed, McAllister and his extended family could always “make a little visit to Bailey’s and see the dear group in imagination.”[38] The social arbiter’s authority in Gilded Age Newport gains richness when understood as the culmination of generational visits throughout the resort’s 19th-century history. On Aquidneck Island, he and his family created memories, with enduring influence, to last a lifetime.

Ward McAllister at an 1890 picnic


Footnotes and an image guide are in a separate post. Click here to see them.  

Emily Parrow earned her M.A. in History from Liberty University in 2021 and wrote her thesis on Ward McAllister and nineteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island. She currently serves as Manager of Individual Giving at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home, in Lenox, MA. Emily’s thesis can be accessed here: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/719/ 

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History Lover’s Gift Guide: The 16 Best New History Books for the Holidays

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It’s always hard to buy books for book lovers because  you just don’t know if they’ve read them already. But you can’t go wrong if you buy a book just published. So here are 16 of the best new history books for the holidays — focusing on New England, of course.

Ben Franklin wouldn’t have missed any of these new history books

You can buy them with just a click — and help independent bookstores and The New England Historical Society.

The Indispensables: The Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware


Patrick O’Donnell turns five years of research into a fast paced story of the solder-mariners from Marblehead, Mass. Known best for ferrying George Washington over the Delaware, they were a diverse band of brothers who knew they needed to work together in life-or-death circumstances. Led by John Glover, a trusted confidante of George Washington, they served as a highly-skilled special operations unit.

They saved the Continental Army from total destruction after the Battle of Long Island, and they ferried Washington and his army across the Delaware — a near-impossible feat.

Bestselling author Patrick O’Donnell tells a riveting story, bringing new stories to light about the white, black and red men of the Marblehead regiment. (He has written xxx books)

Mighty Storms of New England: The Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Blizzards, and Floods That Shaped the Region


Weather junkies will love this new history book about snowstorms, droughts, heat waves, tornadoes, blizzards and floods. Meteorologist Eric Fisher goes beyond the damage and loss caused by weather events. He also discusses how severe storms changed the course of history. New warning systems, government agencies and technologies developed in their aftermath.

Many New Englanders know Eric Fisher as the chief meteorologist for WBZ-TV and as a contributor to CBS News. He says few places on earth produce such varied weather as New England does. And that, he explains, is why the region breeds one of the highest concentrations of meteorologists in the United States.

Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty


Anderson Cooper’s last name may not be Vanderbilt, but he’s a true scion of the dynasty founded by his great-great-great grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The CNN anchor teams up with New York Times bestselling historian Katharine Howe to write a new history book about his fabled family. Though Cornelius Vanderbilt — the “Commodore” — made his fortune in New York, the Vanderbilts frittered away their money in Bar Harbor, Maine, Shelburne Farms, Vt., and Newport, R.I.

Cooper brings an insider’s perspective to the triumphs and failures of the Vanderbilts. He takes us from the rough-and-tumble wharves of old Manhattan to the ornate summer palaces of Newport. He tells us about the secret Vanderbilts who lived on a floor of the Breakers and reveals that he attended Truman Capote’s famous “Black and White” ball at the Plaza Hotel in utero.

One critic described Vanderbilt as a “smart, soulful, page turner.” Another called it “the most interesting and most human of the books that I have read about the super-rich American families of the 19th century.”

Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy


A new history book from Nathaniel Philbrick is always good news in New England, though this one is a bit different. Philbrick, his wife Melissa and their dog followed the path taken by Washington during his presidential visits to the new nation. So the book reads as part history, part memoir and part travelogue. One reader noted the author and his wife “make pleasant company.”

Why do Washington’s travels matter? Because in 1789 the United States was still a loose, quarrelsome confederation. The former colonists didn’t think of themselves as Americans. Washington, beloved by all, set out to change that. He went from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York and then took a month-long tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.  He ventured onto Long Island and then headed south. Travels with George includes extensive maps, pictures and documents along the way.

The Boston Globe called it “a lively, courageous, and masterful achievement.”

Letters From Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship Between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin


When Helen Keller was eight years old, she and Annie Sullivan visited Boston. There she met a man who would change her life: Joseph Edgar Chamberlin,  popular Boston Transcript columnist. Chamberlin owned Red Farm in Wrentham, Mass., and Keller visited often. So did artists and intellectuals of the day, like Louise Guiney, Fred Holland Day and Edward Everett Hale.

The book tells the story of Keller’s friendship with Chamberlin, who became her literary mentor. It also reintroduces Chamberlin to the public and explores how Keller grew interested in social activism. Letters From Red Farm, written by Chamberlin’s great-great-granddaughter, uses previously unpublished letters and new research.

Disability lawyer Haben Girma called the revelations in the book “stunning.” “The letters from Keller and her friends make her feel even more relatable to contemporary readers,” she wrote.

Bette Davis Black and White


Film star Bette Davis was a Yankee gal committed to civil rights for African Americans. Bette Davis Black and White tells the story of Davis’ outspoken advocacy for civil rights.  It also describes her black co-stars’ efforts to disrupt America’s racial fantasies.

The book analyzes four of her best known films against Americans’ historic attitudes about race. It includes testimonies from Davis’ black contemporaries and letters from her African-American fans,

University of Chicago Press has scheduled the book’s release for Dec. 13, 2021.

Reading the Gravestones of Old New England


Author John G.S. Hanson has walked through many an old New England graveyard and learned a thing or two along the way. During his explorations of old cemeteries he found an incredible range of poetic messages. They express not only emotions, but the culture, religion and literature of their age.

Hanson  identifies the texts and authors that inspired the messages carved in stone. He also interprets the tastes and beliefs of the survivors who did the choosing.

McFarland & Company has scheduled the book’s release for Nov. 5, 2021.

Passing Through the Fire: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in the Civil War


Civil War buffs and fans of Joshua Chamberlain will welcome this new history book about the hero of Gettysburg. It tells the story of his miraculous survival from battlefield surgery after getting hit in the groin with a bullet. While convalescing he considered leaving the Army. His decision to return affected the outcome of the war.

Passing Through the Fire follows Chamberlain’s during his Civil War years, from Maryland to Pennsylvania to Virginia. Author Brian Swartz takes the reader beyond the battlefield as well, reveals the real person behind the legend. He includes photos and maps  not seen by the “average Civil war” student.

“If you have an interest in the Civil War and its leadership this is a book must,” writes one happy reader.

The Isolation Artist: Scandal, Deception and the Last Days of Robert Indiana


Pop artist Robert Indiana had fame and lots and lots of money, but he died alone and uncared for in horrendous living conditions. Born Robert Clark in Indiana, he changed his last name and eventually moved to Vinalhaven Island in Maine. He wanted fame, and he got it with his iconic Love sculpture in 1965.

Indiana had no interest in the business of art, and so he surrounded himself with people to manage his life and career. When he died in 2018, suspicions arose about fraudulent artwork, elder abuse, a coerced will and an inconclusive autopsy.

Author Bob Keyes tells a fast-paced story of an artist’s life that straddled Downeast Maine and the unscrupulous world of high-end art.

Deliberate Evil: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, and the 1830 Murder of a Salem Slave Trader


When a Salem slave trader was murdered in cold blood in 1830, the national press took notice. Not only did  two of the conspirators come from the wealthy and influential Crowninshield family, but Daniel Webster led the prosecution. A young Nathaniel Hawthorne knew several of the people involved in the murder. As always, he observed and took notes.

Edward J. Renehan, Jr., uses previously unavailable source materials about the murder, the investigations, the scandal-ridden trials and the grisly execution at the end. The Chicago Review Press has scheduled its release for Dec. 7, 2021.

Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White

In this new history book, Robert F. Kennedy belongs with Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin and Cesar Chavez. Patricia Sullivan, a civil rights historian, presents Robert Kennedy at the center of the 1960s civil rights movement.

She tells how protests against Jim Crow started out as a political problem for the young attorney general, but then became a moral one. Under Kennedy, the Justice Department battled Southern resistance to voter registration and school desegregation.

Justice Rising is an eye-opening account of Kennedy’s vision and energy drove momentum for change. Until his death, he led what he called “the revolution within our gates, the struggle of the American Negro for full equality and full freedom.”

Historian Douglas Brinkley called Justice Rising “a profound and uplifting account of Robert F. Kennedy’s brave crusade for racial equality.”

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III

George III, America’s last king, got a reputation for stupidity and evil that never went away. Until now. Historian Andrew Roberts shows how revolutionary propagandists like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine gave George a bad rap.

In reality, George was wise, humane, and even enlightened. Unfortunately, he had talented enemies and incompetent ministers, and he suffered from debilitating mental illness and horrible luck. Roberts paints a nuanced portrait of George and describes his forgotten accomplishments.

The Best Ever! Parades in New England 1788-1940

Every New England town has a parade tradition, according to historian Jane Nylander, who specializes in domestic life in New England from the 1850s to the 1950s. She observes that those traditions tell us much about the culture, both locally and nationally.

Nylander, former president of the  Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, includes nearly 300 photos, some of them quite rare, in The Best Ever! They include the Federal Ship carried in the 1788 Ratification parade at New Haven, Conn., to 1940 when the parade tradition largely ended when World War II began.

It’s Better To Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness


In this instant classic, Seth Wickersham tells the story of the most dominant — and secretive — NFL team ever. Wickersham, a Connecticut resident, is one of the country’s premier investigative sportswriters.

He has covered the Patriots since 2001, when Brady took over as starting quarterback. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously confidential documents, he presents the definitive account of the Patriots’ dynasty. The book is chock full of fresh and revealing information about the team’s two dominant personalities, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

Wickersham explores Belichick’s tactical brilliance, strange work habits, affection for his players and determination to dominate the league. He shines  especially in his portrait of Brady, though, taking the reader from Brady’s childhood in northern California to his split from the Patriots.

Even  for Jets fans, this New York Times bestseller is as hard to put down as a bowl of salted peanuts.

Two Centuries of Maine Shipbuilding

This lavishly illustrated book  begins with the dugout and birchbark canoes made by the Wabanaki and their ancestors. When Europeans began to settle in the 17th century, they immediately began building vessels and never really stopped.

Author Nathan Lipfert takes the reader from the first merchant and fishing vessels, through the great schooners, decline of deepwater sail, the steel shipyards and World War II all the way to the present.  Lipfert, curator emeritus of the Maine Maritime Museum, relies on a trove of resources about Maine’s historic industry. The book includes a bibliography, two appendices, a glossary and hundreds of illustrations.

The Peyton Place Murder: The True Crime Story Behind The Novel That Shocked The Nation


The Peyton Place Murder is not a sequel to the novel Peyton Place, but a new history book about the murder that inspired Grace Metalious to write her sensational best seller back in the 1950s. The murder, though, known as “the Sheep Pen Murder,” took place in Gilmanton, N.H., in the late 1940s.

Author Renee Mallett weaves together the story of Grace Metalious, who grew up poor in Manchester, N.H., and Barbara Roberts, the young woman who confessed to the killing.

This book is for anyone who enjoys reading about true crime and small-town life in new England.

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Disaster in Rhode Island Waters: The USS Bennington

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On the early morning of May 26, 1954, fighter jets started to catapult into the air from the USS Bennington (CVA 20), an Essex Class aircraft carrier. The flight training operations took place at the entrance to Narragansett Bay, 80 miles off Brenton Reef Lightship.

The Bennington, or Big Ben, had left Norfolk, Va. Sailors aboard the ship reported the sea looked like a sheet of glass. At 6:00 AM, the first jet on the starboard catapult failed to launch. But over the next 13 minutes, the port catapult flung 13 jets into flight.

The USS Bennington underway around 1958, after the disaster in Rhode Island.

Then the men on the bridge saw smoke curling up from both sides of the forward flight deck. An alarm sounded with an announcement: “General Quarters, this is not a drill!”

“General Quarters” means every available man must report to his battle station immediately. Soon after the announcement, an explosion thundered below deck. And then another. And then, reportedly, another.

USS Bennington

Big Ben measured 899 feet—three football fields long. Built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Navy commissioned her in 1944.

After World War II, the Navy modernized the USS Bennington with high-powered catapults to launch the new jet planes that had come into service.

On the fateful day in 1954, she had a complement of 2,300 men, commanded by Capt. William F. Raborn.

raborn

Capt. William F. Raborn, later CIA director.

Machinist Jack Douglas Rich had just awakened in his bunk when the General Alarm rang. He smelled the smoke and saw it coming through the vents. Rich threw on his clothes and rushed to his station.

Lithographer Third Class William Kirk was putting on his pants when he felt the first explosion. “It felt like a concussion, a big suction,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “My stomach went up and down, it felt sickening. The deck moved, the whole ship seemed to rock and shake. I went sailing into another bunk rack.” Kirk got knocked down, then ran up the ladder.

Burning Flesh

That first explosion trapped the Damage Control Unit, and all perished before help reached them.

The explosion also killed one of the doctors in the sick bay, but Cmdr. Clyde Norman, the ship’s medical officer, and all hospital corpsmen made it. They would be desperately needed.

“The smoke and smell of burning flesh was everywhere,” recalled Rich.

By 7:25 AM, Norman ordered the already overflowing sick bay moved out in the open on the undamaged flight deck.

The explosions had done most of the damage. The surviving crew went to work fighting fires and rescuing the injured.

At 10:25 AM, the first helicopters from Quonset reached the carrier with doctors, nurses, medical supplies and more corpsmen. The same helicopters would pick up casualties from the ship and ferry them to the Newport Naval Hospital, landing on lawns, parking lots and city streets cleared for emergency landings.

In the meantime, Big Ben, whose power plant remained undamaged by the explosion, had gotten underway, no doubt at full speed, back to Quonset Point. Five tugs assisted the USS Bennington in docking at Quonset. Rather than the deck lined with sailors in dress white uniforms, an awesome sight to see, face-blackened sailors with oxygen masks slung over their shoulders lined the deck.

Heroes of the USS Bennington

The fire raged for four hours before the men brought it under control. Petty Officer 3rd Class Francis Both said the engine room, “Looked like hell,” as he pulled dead fellow sailors out of the compartment.

Seaman Bruno Constantini was asleep in his bed when the fire broke out, but he ran to the hanger deck in time to help rescue 10 of his shipmates.

James H. Brown, disregarding his chance to reach safety, instead made his way into harm’s way below and saved the lives of several sailors. He himself received burns and injuries requiring extensive hospitalization. For his action, he received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

Presenting awards for heroism on May 26, 1954 aboard the USS Bennington. Photo courtesy National Archives.

Navy Secretary Charles Thomas gave 178 awards for heroism to crewmen of the USS Bennington on April 22, 1955.

Aftermath

A court of inquiry determined the leaking hydraulic from the catapult system vaporized and ignited, causing the explosions. As a result of this finding, the Navy converted all the catapults on its carriers to steam-driven systems. They further designated the tragedy as the second worst disaster aboard a naval vessel not caused by enemy action in naval history.

When all was said and done, 104 officers and men died in the explosion and 139 others injured. A memorial plaque was dedicated in Newport to those who perished in this incident.

Ironically, the U.S. Navy had two ships named the Bennington in its history.  A gun boat blew up in the first one in San Diego Harbor in 1905, killing 56 men.

Leo Caisse, the author of this story, passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. Leo also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.  This story was updated in 2024.

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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

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During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

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A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

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The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images:  PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six More Artist Homes In New England

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The creative spirit that moves people to sculpt and paint also tends to inspire an interesting artist home. Lucrative commissions in the days before the income tax meant some artists could live in country estates befitting a Gilded Age gentleman.

New England has quite a few artist homes now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

We bring you six artist homes, one in each New England state. They all open to the public, at least seasonally.

Weir Farm

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J Alden Weir studio. You can also visit the artist home on the Wilton farm.

Weir Farm, the home of J. Alden Weir, was a magnet for American artists such as John Twachtman, John Singer Sargent and Albert Pinkham Ryder. It probably helped that the farm was only 20 miles from the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich.

There are two stories about how J. Alden Weir ended up owning the Weir Farm in Wilton, Conn. One is that Weir had a Manet painting that a collector wanted so badly he offered Weir $10 and his farm for it. According to the other, his wife’s family owned the farm.

As an art student in Paris, J. Alden Weir hated the new school of painting known as French Impressionism, until he didn’t. Eventually he became one of the most beloved American impressionist.

He was born in 1852, the 14th of 16 children, the son of Robert Walker Weir, who taught drawing at the Military Academy at West Point.

Weir befriended many other painters, eventually co-founding The Ten, a group of artists unhappy with the conservative U.S. art establishment.

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Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge by J. Alden Weir. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Weir’s paintings are on display in major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. The 60-acre grounds of Weir Farm National Historic Site open every day of the year to visitors. The farm also has an ongoing artist-in-residence program. Look for Weir Farm on the back of quarters issued in 2020.

Weir Farm National Historic Site, 735 Nod Hill Rd, Wilton, Conn.

Winslow Homer Studio

artist-home-winslow-homer-studio

Where Winslow Homer painted and lived.

Winslow Homer, one of the greatest U.S. artists of the 19th century, left the bright lights of New York City for Prout’s Neck, Maine. Then in his mid-40s, he moved partly to be near his family, partly to work in solitude and partly to paint the sea.

His family owned an estate on Prout’s Neck, and Homer moved into the carriage house. He painted the sea in Maine, traveling to the Caribbean during the winter and sometimes to the Adirondacks.

Though he also painted in oil, Winslow Homer knew he’d done something transcendent with his watercolors.

‘You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors,” Homer once said. He hung some of his exquisite watercolors on the walls of the rental cottages. Now they’re in museums or private collections.

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Salt Kettle, Bermuda, by Winslow Homer. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

Maine architect John Calvin Stevens transformed the carriage house into a studio and designed the Winslow Homer house. He took as payment a painting, Afternoon Fog. The Portland Museum of Art bought the studio in 2006, restored it and now offers tours in the summer months.

Winslow Homer Studio, 5 Winslow Homer Rd., Scarborough, Maine

Chesterwood

artist-home-french-chesterwood

The house that Daniel Chester French built in Stockbridge, Mass.

Daniel Chester French, like his contemporary Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was no starving artist. He won lucrative commissions, including one for the Lincoln Memorial, and could afford a summer artist home — an estate, really, called Chesterwood.

He bought the Stockbridge, Mass., farm in 1896, and had a studio built on the property. Then in 1901, he rebuilt the farmhouse. For the rest of his life he divided his time between New York and Stockbridge, but used his Chesterwood estate as his primary workspace.

Born in Exeter, N.H., his family moved to Concord, Mass., when he was xxx. His father befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. Young Daniel took art lessons from Louisa May Alcott’s little sister, May. She encouraged him to study art.

artist-home-lincoln-memorialartist-home-lincoln-memorial

The Lincoln Memorial, courtesy National Park Service.

He launched his career by winning the commission to design the Minute Man statue in Concord.

Other works include The John Harvard Monument, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Mass. Commodore George H. Perkins monument at the New Hampshire State House

The statue of General Joseph Hooker in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation now runs the home as a museum and sculpture garden.

Chesterwood opens weekends in May.

Chesterwood, 4 Williamsville Rd, Stockbridge, Mass.

Saint-Gaudens National Park

artist-home-saint-gaudens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens home in Cornish, N.H.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the center of the Cornish colony, which included about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. President Woodrow Wilson rented a summer White House there, among such artistic luminaries as Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

Saint-Gaudens, born in Ireland, emigrated with his family to New York City in 1848 as a baby. Apprenticed as a cameo cutter, he eventually won lucrative commissions for public statues. Some of his most famous work includes an equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in Central Park, a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Chicago’s Lincoln Park and the gold double eagle $20 coin.

artist-home-shaw-memorial

The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, on Boston Common.

His masterpiece, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, took him 14 years to create. The bronze bas relief commemorates the African-American 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment and its leader, Robert Gould Shaw, who died in battle. Since 1897 years it has stood across from the Massachusetts Statehouse on Boston Common.

Today Saint-Gaudens artist home, studio and gardens belongs to the National Park Service as the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park. The park service has some of his sculpture on display, as well as reproductions of some of his masterpiece.

Saint-Gaudens National Park, 139 Saint Gaudens Rd., Cornish, N.H.

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace

artist-home-gilbert-stuart-birthplace

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, an artist home and snuff mill.

The Gilbert Stuart birthplace is unusual for an artist home, mostly because it’s also a snuff mill.

Gilbert Stuart’s father, Gilbert Stewart, was a Scottish immigrant who worked in the first snuff mill in America. His mother, Elizabeth Anthony Stewart, belonged to a prominent Middletown, R.I., family that owned large tracts of land. The house-and mill had stood in Saunderstown, R.I., for five years when Stuart was born in 1755. Stuart only lived there for six years because his family moved to Newport.

Gilbert Stuart showed early promise and studied painting in England, where he made a name for himself at 26 with his painting The Skater. His work commanded high prices in England, but he spent money carelessly and almost ended up in debtor’s prison.

The Athenaeum, by Gilbert Stuart

His most famous work, the portrait of George Washington, has appeared on the U.S. dollar for more than a century. He painted many famous people of the day, including John and Abigail Adams.

He died in 1828, leaving his wife and daughters so poor they couldn’t afford a gravesite. They buried him in an unmarked grave in the Old South Burying Ground.

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, 815 Gilbert Stuart Rd, Saunderstown, R.I. 

Rokeby

An artist home for several painters, Rachael Robinson Elmer and her parents.

Rokeby, the artist home we chose in Vermont, was also a prominent stop on the underground railroad.

Rachael Robinson Elmer was born at Rokeby in Ferrisburgh, Vt., the granddaughter of Quaker abolitionists, on July 28, 1878.

Her father, Rowland Robinson, was an author and illustrator, and her mother, Anna Stevens Robinson, was a painter. They encouraged her interest in art, and let teenaged Rachael study art in New York City for three summers. She fell in love with New York City as a young girl and moved there after graduating from Goddard College. Rachael continued to take art classes, and Childe Hassam taught her to paint scenes of city life.

artist-home-rachael-robinson-elmer-trinity

Trinity Church and Wall Street by Rachael Robinson Elmer.

Rachael succeeded as a commercial artist and married an older man named Robert Elmer. She painted 12 “Art Lover’s New York” postcards showing famous scenes around the city and published them in 1914. They sold like wildfire, and other artists began producing impressionistic postcards. She was said to have changed postcards forever.

She died in 1919 in the flu pandemic of 1918 at the age of 40.

Today Rokeby is a historic farm property and museum that includes a 1780s farmstead, eight agricultural outbuildings with permanent exhibits, and hiking trails that cover more than 50 acres

Rokeby, 4334 U.S. Route 7 in Ferrisburgh, Vt.

End Notes

If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about an artist home you can sleep in n each New England state here. 

Artist Home images: Weir Farm studio By Noroton – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4960283; Winslow Homer studio By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28919316; Chesterwood by I, Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2414120;  Augustus Saint-Gaudens artist home, By Ser Amantio di Nicolao – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35171636; Robert Gould Shaw Memorial By Carptrash at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27154774; Gilbert Stuart birthplace By Gibbystuart – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40114851; Rokeby By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696.

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