Shelburne Vt. Archives - New England Historical Society

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Houghs Neck

What better New England place to spend Memorial Day than the Irish Riviera? Wollastan, Nantasket and Hough’s Neck beaches have been popular vacation spots for Irish immigrants since the 19^th century.

But South Shore beaches weren’t only for swimming. In Scituate, the most Irish town in America, immigrants used to harvest red algae – a practice known as mossing. There is actually a Maritime and Mossing Museum run by the Scituate Historical Society. Open Sunday afternoons, it is set in the 1739 residence of Capt. Benjamin James on the Driftway. Exhibits describe the Portland Gale, Scituate’s many shipwrecks, Thomas W. Lawson’s seven-masted schooner and Irish mossing.

New Hampshire Boat Museum

Memorial Day is also the start of boating season and the opening of the New Hampshire Boat Museum in Wolfeboro near Lake Winnipesaukee. The museum features a glorious new display of vintage boats, art from Motor Boating Magazine covers and an exhibit on locally made McDuff engines. For more information click here.

Full Moons

Last week the Full Flower Moon appeared. It’s what the Abenaki Indians called the ‘moonesquam nimockkesos’, or ‘when women weed their corn.’ William Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, Mass., recorded the Abenaki names for the full moons in 1645. Pynchon built a warehouse in what was once Springfield, but is present-day East Windsor, Conn. The area is still known as Warehouse Point. There’s a lot of history nearby, including the Connecticut Trolley Museum, open on weekends this time of year. St. John’s Episcopal Church at Warehouse Point is on the National Register of Historic Places. In nearby Scantic is the Scantic Academy, a historic Federal Style school building that serves as a museum and as the headquarters for the East Windsor Historical Society.

The Abbe Museum

You can learn more about the Wabanaki tribes at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. The museum has two locations: one at 26 Mount Desert Street in the center of Bar Harbor, and a second at Sieur de Monts in Acadia National Park. Its full name is the Robert Abbe Museum of Stone Antiquities, which gives you the idea that its collection includes Native American artifacts from prehistoric and historic times. The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, opened May 1 with a new core exhibit, People of the First Light, which introduces the visitor to Wabanaki culture and history. Four Directions of Wabanaki Basketry features a basket from each of the Wabanaki tribal communities. At the just-opened Sieur de Monts branch, an exhibit presents Abenaki perspectives on St Sauveur, the first French Jesuit settlement on Mount Desert Island.

Barefoot in New Hampshire

Capt. Walter Barefoot was a litigious rogue who spent a great deal of time in courthouses from Boston to York, Maine, during the 1660s and 1670s. He actually lived in Dover, N.H., where he owned a saw mill along the Lamprey River. The William Damm Garrison house in Dover would have been standing when Barefoot was in and out of court. It’s part of a history museum called the Woodman Institute, which was founded in 1916 and includes exhibits on local history and natural history. The museum’s campus has three brick houses of Federal style architecture, including the former home of abolitionist Senator John P. Hale. Among its art and antiques are a saddle in which President Abraham Lincoln rode to review troops shortly before his assassination, a set of samurai armor that belonged to a Japanese delegate to the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Conference and examples of textiles made in Dover.

Americana

Rose Wilder Lane, the only daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, kept her contribution to the Little House books secret. There’s little trace of Rose in Danbury, Conn., her home for 25 years. But not far away in Kent you can visit a pioneer cabin, part of the Eric Sloane Museum, which opened May 13. The museum by the artist of the same name is open Friday through Sunday. Sloan’s collection of early American tools is on display, as is his studio and some of his artwork. The museum also includes an heirloom apple orchard and the remains of an iron furnace.

Like Sloan, N.C. Wyeth illustrated books about America’s past. Wyeth’s son Andrew and grandson Jamie also explored early American themes. In Vermont, Shelburne Museum director Thomas Denenberg on Wednesday discusses the Wyeths—N. C. (1882–1945), Andrew (1917–2009), and Jamie (b. 1946)—and offers new perspectives on these three painters who have shaped the way Americans view their world. For more information, click here.

Mark Your Calendar

This year the Providence Preservation Society’s annual Festival of Historic Houses features modern living spaces in the city’s prized historic homes and gardens. The 2016 Festival takes place on June 11 beginning at 10 a.m., on the north end of Benefit Street, known as Providence’s “Mile of History.” The Preservation Society was formed on that mile 60 years ago to save the architecturally significant neighborhood from demolition—a major milestone in our America’s preservation history.

New this year, visitors can go to other neighboring cultural organizations as part of Explore Historic Providence day. They can also celebrate PPS’s 60th Anniversary at Cheers to 60 Years, a free open house from 4-6 p.m. following the Festival. Click here for more information.

Photos: Abbe Museum photo By AbbeMuseum – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia; Houghs Neck By Sswonk – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia.

Chances are good you’ve encountered the work of Frederick Law Olmsted more than once in your lifetime. You’ve probably set foot in his parks or on his school campuses, or maybe you read his magazine. Quite possibly you also had some interaction with the Red Cross.

Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent

Olmsted was born in Hartford on April 26, 1822, to a modestly prosperous family. He worked as a seaman, a farmer, a surveyor, a social reformer and a journalist. Then he found his niche as a landscape architect. He also helped found the weekly magazine The Nation.

Olmsted co-designed Central Park, headed the first Yosemite commission and led the campaign to protect Niagara Falls. He designed the U.S. Capitol Grounds and planned both the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” of green space.

The list goes on. He designed Elm Park in Worcester, Mass., considered by many to be the first municipal park in America. He also designed the 735-acre Forest Park in Springfield, Mass.

Groton School, campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm

His firm designed dozens of academic campuses, including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, the Groton School, Berwick Academy, Pomfret School, the University of Maine and Phillips Academy. They also designed Shelburne Farms in Vermont, Providence Butler Hospital in Rhode Island, Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts and Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Conn.

Olmsted Goes South

Frederick Law Olmsted spent five years traveling the South for the New York Times (then the New York Daily Times), reporting on the slave economy.

He didn’t like what he saw. Olmsted concluded the cotton monopoly did more harm than good. He then reported that slavery made the slave states inefficient and backward. His observations had a big impact on the national debate about slavery.

Central Park in 1901, lower end of the mall

Then he co-designed Central Park with Calvin Vaux – the largest public works project in the country. When the Civil War broke out, Olmsted became executive director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He administered medical relief, setting up field hospitals and hospital ships. Olmsted also distributed food and hospital supplies along the entire battlefront.

He had an almost maniacal belief in system and organization, for which he received much criticism.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Planner

Witold Rybczynski credits Olmsted with pioneering the concept of planning in a big industrializing country. “This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood,” wrote Rybczynski. In A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, Rybczynski quoted Olmsted’s mentor.

“He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious,” wrote the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows.

“[His critics] think him impracticable, expensive, slow — when he is only long-headed, with broader, deeper notions of economy than themselves, & with no disposition to hurry what, if done satisfactorily, must be thoroughly.

Olmsted designed Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn.

Rybczynski also offered an anecdote that demonstrated Olmsted’s farsightedness. Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, wrote him a letter five years after the Civil War. Meigs, who respected Olmsted, asked his advice in landscaping national cemeteries.

Olmsted then replied the cemeteries should be designed to establish dignity and tranquility. He warned Meigs to avoid the current fashion for elaborate and artificial gardening because it would disappear.

To create a sacred grove for the war dead, he recommended just two things. First, building a simple wall to enclose the cemetery. Second, he told Meigs to plant trees indigenous to the cemetery’s region. To save money, he should plant nurseries next to the cemeteries. And if land weren’t available for nurseries, he suggested planting seedlings between the tiers of graves.

Olmsted died on Aug. 28, 1903, and is buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Central Park By …trialsanderrors – Lower end of mall, Central Park, New York City, 1901, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11159061. Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn., By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56543924.

Shelburne Vt.

New England Places To Visit Now That It’s Memorial Day

Full Moons

Barefoot in New Hampshire

Americana

Mark Your Calendar

Frederick Law Olmsted Plans A Cemetery or a Hundred

Olmsted Goes South

Frederick Law Olmsted, Planner

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