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Stockbridge Mass.

Rachel Field, Rediscovered on a Maine Island

Rachel Field today is remembered through her children’s book, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, but she also wrote several bestsellers for adults, seven poetry collections and a screenplay for a Bette Davis film that earned three Oscar nominations.

Rachel Field on Sutton Island

She might have lingered in the public eye longer, but she died suddenly at 47, on the verge of fulfilling her most cherished dream.

Eighty years after her death, another writer discovered Rachel Field on Sutton Island off the Maine coast. Robin Clifford Wood and her husband in 1994 bought Field’s long-abandoned cottage. Her things were still there: her wooden sleigh bed, her wicker chairs, her Scottie-dog tchotchkes, a map she bought in Paris in 1920, her books, an embroidered dish towel.

Rachel Field captivated Wood, who spent more than a decade researching her life. She discovered Rachel’s deep disappointments. “There were shadows of loss, heartbreak, secrecy, a sister gone mad, an “improper” marriage, infertility, a child who seemed to disappear,” wrote Wood.

“But Rachel’s story, I was certain, held more than anything a prodigious share of redemption and hopefulness,” she wrote in the prologue to her book, The Field House. “I was certain not only because of Rachel’s work but because I inhabited her space.”

Rachel Field

Her sensibility leaned toward the quaint, the charming, the twee. A Scotty dog named Spriggles. A blue Whippet roadster. A cottage in Maine, full of antique dolls, patchwork quilts and music boxes.

Just what you’d expect from a children’s book writer.

But beneath that Rachel Field was a complex, interesting and very hard-working woman, a Bohemian socialist who fell in love with a gay man. Her best-selling novels and Hollywood success resulted from years of diligence and determination.

People who knew her through her writing were surprised to meet her. Despite her elfin persona in print she was heavyset with masculine features — and self-conscious about her appearance. She wanted romantic love, marriage and children, and for a very long time it looked like she wouldn’t get it.

The Field Family

Born in New York City on Sept. 19, 1894, she was the youngest of five children. However, only she and her sister, Elizabeth, lived past the age of five. Her father, physician Matthew Dickinson Field, died before she reached her first birthday. Her mother, Lucy Atwater Field, then packed up her two daughters and moved to Stockbridge, Mass., the home of her distinguished ancestors.

Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas

Rachel spent her early years in a white colonial house on Main Street that appeared in Norman Rockwell’s painting, Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas. The house was home to the Norman Rockwell Museum for 24 years.

The Fields didn’t have a lot of money. “Her family had enough means to get by and the social status to be accepted into most echelons of the stratified society of her time,” wrote Wood.

Great-grandfather David Dudley Field was a prominent Congregational minister. David, Jr., won election to the U.S. Congress. Another son, Stephen, served on the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. A third son, Cyrus Field, laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean.

Henriette Desportes Field

But a Field in-law interested Rachel the most. Great-aunt Henriette Desportes, a nanny to a French duke’s children, got entangled in a scandal after the murder of the duke’s wife. Henriette fled Paris and married Rachel’s great-uncle Henry. As a child, Rachel used to crack butternuts on her grave.

Early Promise

Young Rachel loved reading, drawing and the theater. She had a gift for memorization and could play Shylock in Merchant of Venice at the age of nine. She published her first story at 16 in St. Nicholas Magazine.

At 15, her mother sent her to Maine to study art with some cousins. “I shall never forget how I was stirred by my first view of the Maine coast,” Field wrote. “I felt an uplift as at no other place, in the firs pointing skyward, the glisten all around me, the old ships from distant ports at the wharves.” She returned year after year.

Her writing skill gave her entree to Radcliffe College, where she joined a program for special students. While at Radcliffe she wrote a play, Three Pills in a Bottle, which community groups all over the country performed at least once a week for decades.

After college she got a job in publishing in New York City doing editorial work for Famous Players-Moving Pictures. She wrote plays and poems in her spare time and submitted them to publishers. Rachel also collected dolls, quilts, music boxes – and friends.

Sutton Island

She had some success, enough to buy an old cottage on Sutton Island in 1922. Field’s best-known lines pay homage to her summer home.

If once you have slept on an island

You’ll never be quite the same.

Lonely and Difficult Years

Rachel Field called the 1920s her lonely and difficult years. She plodded away at her work, producing a dozen plays, eight children’s books, two books of verse and freelance articles and illustrations. But she also coped with health problems. And she supported her mother, her aunt and her sister, paying the bills for Elizabeth’s institutionalization after her nervous collapse.

One day in New York City she popped into an antique shop and bought an eight-inch wooden doll called Hitty. The book that followed, Hitty, the First 100 Years, was a breakthrough for her, winning her the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished book for children the year before.

Her prominence increasing, she fell in love with Lyle Saxon, a writer and journalist from Louisiana. Unfortunately for Rachel, Saxon was gay. He rebuffed her passionate advances, wrote Wood. But he didn’t break off their friendship until sometime in 1930 when Rachel must have realized the hopelessness of it all.

“Something must have come about that made the impossibility of the love affair clear to Rachel,” wrote Wood.

At Last

She and Lyle had a mutual friend, Arthur Pederson, a struggling actor from Minnesota, eight years her junior and lacking her social pedigree. Perhaps he appealed to her nurturing instincts. They embarked on a slow-motion courtship that finally culminated in marriage. Rachel, then 40, still held out hope for a child.

Rachel Field and her Scottish terrier, Spriggen.

She won the National Book Award in 1936 for her first adult novel, Time Out of Mind. Universal Studios bought the film rights, giving her real financial security. She and Arthur then began crisscrossing the country between New York and Hollywood. Rachel wrote two more novels made into films. One, All This and Heaven Too, told the story of Great-aunt Henriette Desportes and starred Bette Davis. In 1938, she sold the rights to it for a staggering $52,000 – about a million dollars today. She also wrote the English lyrics to Ave Maria for the 1940 Disney film Fantasia, and made it onto the short list of screenwriters for Gone With the Wind.

In 1939, at the age of 45, Rachel and Arthur adopted a six-week-old baby girl they named Hannah.

By 1941, the Pederson family was firmly ensconced in California, and Rachel sold the Sutton Island house. Then in early November she discovered she was pregnant. Her 47 years of patient toil and of cheerfully overcoming setbacks had come to this: success, financial security, a home, a husband and now a second child.

It all came crashing down. She hadn’t felt well for a while, and in early March began experiencing a great deal of pain. She entered the hospital on March 5, 1942, and doctors found cancer throughout much of her body. They operated, but she died 10 days later of pneumonia.

The Field House

Robin Wood, a full-time mom, credits Rachel Field with getting her started as a writer. She spent 14 years in her Sutton Island house before getting serious about writing her biography. She read her childhood journals, many many letters, her poetry, her plays, her novels and her screenplays. Finally she successfully pitched a story about living in Rachel Field’s house to the Port City Life magazine in 2009.

In 2021, She Writes Press published Wood’s book about Rachel Field. The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine. Part biography and part memoir, it received positive reviews.

Images: Sutton Island By Debivort at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17001647.

This story updated in 2022.

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Agrippa Hull, Race Under British Rule

After decades of neglect the common burial grounds of slaves are now being documented, honored and preserved from New York to Mississippi and beyond. But Agrippa Hull was buried among his white countrymen in a dignified distinct tomb, as the oldest surviving American Revolutionary War veteran in the quintessentially New England town of Stockbridge, Mass.

Agrippa Hull

He travelled a unique road.

Agrippa Hull

He lived during an extremely tenuous time for black people in America. Yet Agrippa Hull seems to have graciously navigated the dark clouds of prejudice. The revolutionaries demanded freedom and independence from colonial rule in a largely white context of self-determination. Yet as soon as he could, Hull took a determined stance by enlisting in the Continental Army. And every surviving anecdote and record confirms that Hull lived magnanimously, served effectively and was remembered fondly.

Today we can barely imagine the circumstances in which Hull lived. In the early 1700s the estimated number of slaves in the Massachusetts colony alone reached approximately 3.5 percent of the total population, or some 2,000. But Agrippa Hull was born in Northampton, Mass., to free African-American parents around the year 1759. Plagued by poverty, they had to give up their son at the age of six. They sent him to live with a family of free blacks that could better care for him in Stockbridge.

Agrippa Hull ultimately achieved a level of prosperity and respect that many other black Americans did not. As a Continental Army soldier, Hull witnessed the social and economic spectrums along which people of color lived in the 18^th century. And he distinguished himself by how he moved along that spectrum during his long lifetime.

Triangular Trade

Discordant views, policies and practices of bondage pervaded the colonies without any central authority over the issue. Slave-trading flourished in Triangular Trade: English traders carried manufactured goods to Africa and sold them there for slaves. Black men and women were bound then shipped to the New World. There the slavers exchanged them for such raw materials as lumber, furs, tobacco and sugar which in turn was exported to re-supply English factories.

People sometimes romanticize freedom of religion as the reason migrants left Europe for the New World. But with the growth of the new nation, people of faith did form coalitions which pressed authorities hard to end slavery. They were guided by the Bible’s Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

James Oglethorpe

In the southern colonies bondage was by no means universally accepted. Consider the policy of James Oglethorpe, the British governor of the colony of Georgia, created in 1732. In Great Britain, Oglethorpe had a reputation as a humanitarian and social reformer because he worked to improve the deplorable conditions in debtors’ prisons. From its inception Oglethorpe outright banned slavery in Georgia as incompatible with British common law. Not until Oglethorpe left Georgia in 1743 did planters and ship owners overturn his policy and introduce slavery.

England prohibited the keeping of slaves following a 1772 lawsuit known as Somersett’s Case. But outside of her borders hypocrisy ruled. The slave trade was tolerated and English merchants thrived.

Private Agrippa Hull

With the outbreak of war all 13 colonies desperately needed volunteers. The southern colonies, with the exception of Maryland, refused to enlist black men. New England units accepted volunteers regardless of race. Surviving muster roles show Agrippa Hull, at age 18, enlisted as a free black man with the Continental Army. In 2008, the book Friends of Liberty popularized the story of his service.

Continental Army foot soldiers.

Records show Hull as a private in the First Stockbridge Company on May 1, 1777. He was one of an estimated 5,500 men of color (black, native American and mulatto) from throughout the colonies who joined the American war effort. When posted to then-Brig. Gen. John Paterson’s brigade of the First Massachusetts Regiment, Berkshire County enlistment rolls give Hull’s physical characteristics as being “five feet seven inches tall; complexion, black; hair, wool.”

John Paterson

Without weapons training, it was military rank not race which demanded Hull serve Paterson as his valet (or “orderly” or “personal assistant”). In order to carry out his duties he had to depend on the cooperation, if not respect, of other white men of his own rank. In that first year of his service Hull stood by Paterson as he led troops in Saratoga. Then together they endured the brutal winter of Valley Forge to help assure Washington’s glory at Monmouth Court House in June 1778.

Kosciuscko

Later that year Paterson was put in command of the garrison at West Point. There the venerated engineer and tactician Tadeus Kosciuscko worked to fortify that strategic base along the Hudson River. Through interactions between the commander and the engineer, Kosciuscko is recorded as impressed by Hull’s wit and intelligence. As a gesture of goodwill, Paterson reassigned Hull to Kosciuscko’s camp as his valet in May 1779.

West Point ca 1831, from Phillipstown.

Travels with Agrippa Hull

Kosciuscko’s work on the defense of West Point added to his distinction. In 1780 Washington named him lead engineer in support of the southern army. Militiamen rarely served outside of their home region. Yet Hull volunteered to stay by Kosciuscko’s side. Detached from his Massachusetts regiment, he traveled hundreds of miles south into the Carolinas, where the most arduous fighting of the war took place. As the two men traveled farther from New England they increasingly witnessed people’s struggles with slavery.

Spanish Florida offered runaways freedom on two conditions: convert to Roman Catholicism and serve four years in the military. Most who successfully took up that offer settled in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, just north of St. Augustine. There a fort was built, establishing the first legally sanctioned free black settlement in North America. In a counterbid to drive a wedge between abolitionists and slavers and to draw volunteers to their ranks, the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, adopted the Spanish policy of grating freedom to runaway slaves. The British offered emancipation to all who escaped and crossed over to their side.

Upon reporting in the Carolinas, Hull and Kosciuscko joined the battle-worn Americans serving under Gen. Nathanael Greene. Half were undernourished and no longer fit for duty. They then witnessed firsthand the desperate plight of enslaved, barefoot and shirtless blacks answering Lord Dunmore’s invitation, fleeing plantations for freedom. In fact, Dunmore’s scheme resulted in what historians recognized as the largest flight of slaves prior to the Civil War era.

The Battle of Eutaw Springs

In September 1781, another anecdote emerged to burnish Hull’s resume after the Battle of Eutaw Springs. Hull went to assist overworked surgeons laboring to save the lives of some 380 American wounded. And according to MassMoments, “the horror of amputations they performed stayed with [Hull] for the rest of his life.”

Home Again

At the end of the war in 1783 the Continental Army disbanded. To Hull’s great delight, on July 23 at West Point Gen. George Washington himself formally signed and dated his discharge papers. Returning home to Stockbridge, Hull promptly found paid work as a manual laborer in the household of a prominent lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813). Sedgwick was the lawyer who in 1781 argued the case that freed Elizabeth Freeman – the first in which a black woman sued and won her liberty. For all practical purposes the case set the precedent for ending slavery in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Freeman played an important role in ending the slave trade.

In order to qualify for a service pension, soldiers had to submit their discharge papers to verify their time. The patriot Agrippa Hull was so proud that Washington signed his discharge papers he refused to ever part with them. Writing to the pension board on Hull’s behalf, Sedgwick explained that Hull would “rather forego his pension than [give up] the discharge papers.”

By 1785 Hull had saved enough money to buy his own land and eventually became a prominent Stockbridge landowner in his own right. He established his own household and married a woman by the name of Jane Darby. It turns out that Sedgwick negotiated Darby’s freedom too, after she managed to escape her owners.

Theodore Sedgwick

Abolitionist strength and the force of Massachusetts law grew so much that the 1790 census shows no enslaved people in Stockbridge or anywhere in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Yet the colonial legacy of unbridled British commerce in slaves continued to corrupt America for decades.

A Stockbridge Anecdote

Hull’s life showed the absurdity of prejudice. Every surviving memoir describes him as a joy to work with and a man who served the cause of the Revolution with distinction. On February 17, 2015 the Berkshire Edge, a local news and features publication, printed “a favorite Stockbridge anecdote”:

“A haughty man attended church to listen to a discourse from a distinguished mulatto preacher. On coming out of church the man asked Hull, ‘Well how do you like that n[…] preaching?’ To which Hull is to have responded ‘Sir, he was half black and half white; …I liked my half, how did you like yours?’ ”

Gravestone of Agrippa Hull

Agrippa Hull died in 1848 at the age of 89 as the oldest Revolutionary War veteran in Stockbridge. A fresh American flag is placed at his grave every Memorial Day.

The author of this story, John E. Happ, has been immersed in the contrasting narratives of foreign cultures since college in Spain and speaks five languages. His varied assignments in Germany, Switzerland, the Philippines and Japan contribute greatly to his research and perspectives. Happ is a contributing author at the Journal of the American Revolution, has written for the web site The 75^th Artillery C.A.C During World War One and the adventure magazine, Atlantic Coastal Kayaker.

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Mary Antin, Poster Child for Letting Immigrants Into America

Mary Antin wrote a poem praising George Washington just a few years after she arrived in Boston a poor, 13-year-old Russian Jew who spoke only Yiddish. She published her first book at 18. At 30 she wrote a national best-seller that launched her into political circles that included President Theodore Roosevelt.

Mary Antin became famous as a symbol of the immigrant who achieved the American Dream. But she also discovered the dark side to the dream, and that fame doesn’t necessarily bring happiness.

Mary Antin

To some, her rags-to-riches story seemed too pat, too easy. Later in life, Mary Antin hinted at her embarrassment about winning wide acclaim for a slim accomplishment.

“[S]he considered her position a false one and suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence,” wrote Sarah Blacker Cohen.

Mary Antin

Maryashe Antin was born June 13, 1881, to Israel Pinchus and Esther (Weltman) Antin in the shtetl of Polotzk in the Pale of Settlement. The Pale, a western region of Imperial Russia, was crowded with impoverished Jews evicted from the cities. Antisemitism made life dangerous for them.

Map, the Pale of Settlement

The Antin family at first prospered in the Pale, with a large house and servants. As a traditional Jewish girl, Mary Antin received an inferior education to her brother. Later, in a short story, she wrote, “What are daughters worth? They’re only good to sit in the house, a burden on their parents’ neck, until they’re married off.”

When illness destroyed her father’s business, the family ended up living in a room. “We had absolutely no reliable source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects,” she wrote.

Mary Antin and her older sister Fetchke as children

Coming to America

In 1891, her father borrowed money to get to Germany. There an emigrant society helped bring him to Boston. To Mary, America became the Promised Land. Three years after he left, their father sent them a letter saying he’d saved enough money to bring them to America.

Her mother read the letter aloud. “There was an elation, a hint of triumph, such as had never been in my father’s letters before,” she wrote in her book, The Promised Land. “He saw something — he promised us something. It was this “america.” And “America” became my dream.”

In 1894, Mary Antin left for America.

Book cover, From Plotzk to Boston

In a book of her letters (now an audio book), she described how her family traveled in packed, airless fourth-class railroad cars. They encountered corrupt crossing guards and German officials who crudely disinfected them. They were locked in quarantine until finally they took the steamer across the Atlantic and reunited the family in Boston.

Boston Slums

Mary’s father’s attempts to make money failed, and the family moved from slum to slum: Chelsea and Boston’s West and South ends. They lived in gloomy tenements filled with “unkempt, half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners, pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries, the despair of boards of health,” she wrote.

Boston’s South End, from The Promised Land. The original caption read, “Harrison Avenue in the South End ghetto.”

But her father had hope for Mary, frail and clearly intelligent. He enrolled her in the local public school in Chelsea, called the Williams School. Said to be the largest school in New England, it had many non-English-speaking immigrant students.

Mary Antin’s father.

Because she spoke no English, Mary Antin had to wedge herself into a kindergarten desk. After four months, a composition she wrote called Snow impressed her teacher. The teacher sent Snow to an education journal, Primary Education, which printed it. And so Mary Antin determined to follow a writer’s career.

She wrote a poem called “My Country,” which described her thrill at sharing citizenship with George Washington. Then she went to Newspaper Row and found an editor willing to publish it.

Uplifting Tale

Mary learned quickly, and her teachers held her up “as an illustration of what the American system of free education and the European immigrant could make of each other.” Many people wanted to hear that story, and Mary Antin made a career of telling it.

Her bestselling book, The Promised Land, offered up a romanticized version of the immigrant’s assimilation and rise through public education.

In the book, Mary found a way to glorify their South End tenement on Wheeler Street, which ran crookedly between brothels on Corning Street and a saloon on Shawmut Avenue.

“I delighted in the moonlike splendor of the arc lamp just in front of the saloon,” she wrote.

Boston Public Library

She also rhapsodized about the hours she spent reading and dreaming in the Boston Public Library. “That I who was born in the prison of the Pale should roam at will in the land of freedom was a marvel that it did me good to realize. That I who was brought up to my teens almost without a book should be set down in the midst of all the books that ever were written a miracle as great as any on record. That an outcast should become a privileged citizen, that a beggar should dwell in a palace–this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung,” she wrote.

Her patriotism would later cost her her marriage.

First Book

Mary’s sister Frieda went to work at 14, which allowed Mary to attend Girls’ Latin School, Boston’s premier public prep school for girls.

Assembly at the Girls’ Latin School

Lina Hecht, a Jewish philanthropist, took notice of Mary Antin. Hecht arranged to have her letters about her journey to America translated from Yiddish and published. So in 1899, 18-year-old Mary published her first book, From Plotzk to Boston. (The printer misspelled the name of her home town, Polotzk.) The precocious scholar-immigrant thus achieved local celebrity.

Marriage

Mary’s life took another turn on a field trip with the Hale House, a South End settlement house sponsored by Edward Everett Hale.

The trip was led by Amadaus Grabau, who studied at Harvard and worked at the Boston Society of Natural History. Their attraction to each other may have seemed unlikely – she, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who wrote poetry; he, an American-born son of a Lutheran minister who studied geology. Not to mention the 11-year difference in their ages.

Amadaus Grabau

They married on Oct. 5, 1901. She was 20, he was 31. Her marriage outside her faith cost her some friendships, though her family stood by her.

Mary had dreamed of going to Radcliffe. But after marrying Grabau she followed him to New York, where he had gotten a job as a professor of geology at Columbia University. They lived in university housing on Morningside Heights and then in Brooklyn, a far cry from the dingy South End tenements she knew in Boston.

Mary attended Columbia Teacher’s College and Barnard, but didn’t graduate. They had a daughter, Josephine Esther, on Nov. 21, 1907.

At Columbia, Grabau had a reputation as a loner and a workaholic. His marriage to a 20-year-old Jewish immigrant writer and his failure to develop friendships with his colleagues marked him as an outsider.

Mary Antin, Celebrity

Then in 1912, when Mary was 32, she published the wildly successful The Promised Land. It made her a celebrity. Former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote her letters. He credited her — along with Jane Addams and Frances Kellor — with lighting a fire under him to support women’s suffrage.

Mary Antin in 1916

Mary sent her daughter to boarding school and embarked on a national lecture tour about immigration. On Dec. 12, 1912, 1,000 people came to listen to her at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Then from 1913 to 1918 she lectured on “The Responsibility of American Citizenship,” “How You and I Can Serve Our Country” and “The Public School as a Test of American Faith.”

Her goal was to prove that immigrants could become good American citizens during a time of rising anti-immigrant feeling.

By the time her lecture tour ended, World War I broke out – in Europe and in her home.

World War I

Despite virulent anti-German sentiment during World War I, Grabau didn’t hide his attachment to the German culture. That contributed to the loss of his job at the university and to the end of his marriage.

Their daughter, Josephine, remembered their battles during World War I. “We fought the World War right in our house in Scarsdale. Mother was for the Allies and Father was for the Germans. Mother hung the Allied flag out her study window and Father put the German flag out his study window. They fought the war upstairs and downstairs, into the attic and into the cellar. It was too much for me and I fell apart. They saw what they were doing to me and finally agreed to separate for my sake.”

After they separated, he moved to China, where he played a key role in establishing Chinese geology. Along with expatriates and Chinese academics, Grabau recruited and trained Chinese geologists and set up institutions devoted to geology. He never reconciled with his wife, and he only returned to the United States once for the 1933 International Geological Congress.

Decline

Their separation marked the beginning of Mary’s decline. Her third book didn’t have nearly the success of The Promised Land. She wrote no fourth book. She withdrew from her friends and family, and suffered from health problems – both physical and mental.

Mary spent several years at the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Center in Stockbridge, Mass. From 1922 to her death in 1949, she checked in and out of the Gould Farm, a healing community for people “experiencing emotional and psychiatric vulnerabilities” in the Berkshire mountains.

In 1930 she wrote to a friend, “I have so little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever go I trail storm clouds of drama around me.”

Mehar Baba.

She eventually followed of Meher Baba, an Indian mystic who claimed he was the avatar. Baba stopped speaking on July 10, 1925 and communicated using hand gestures or an alphabet board for the rest of his life. He traveled to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he enjoyed the attention of celebrities like Gary Cooper and Tallulah Bankhead.

Antin then followed Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian clairvoyant who founded another esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy.

The End

She died in 1949 of cancer. By then, The Promised Land had gone through 34 editions. The book opened with a bold statement: “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over.”

But perhaps Mary Antin had wanted more than to be an assimilated immigrant. “One of the best novels I never wrote is called The Unwilling Celebrity,” she wrote in a letter. “It deals with the embarrassment of a woman who never succeeded in reconciling a large measure of public recognition with her insufficient achievement.”

With thanks to Sarah Blacker Cohen in Mary Antin’s “The Promised Land”: A Breach of Promise in Studies in American Jewish Literature, Winter 1977-78.

Also Keren R. McGinity in The Real Mary Antin: Woman on a Mission in the Promised Land, American Jewish History Sept. 1998.

And to Alan Mazur, A ROMANCE IN NATURAL HISTORY; THE LIVES AND WORKS OF AMADEUS GRABAU AND MARY ANTIN.

This story updated in 2021.

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Is There a John La Farge in Your Town?

You just might be living near a John La Farge window if you live in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, and in any other New England state you might at least find a painting.

Who’s John La Farge, you might ask?

John La Farge

Born March 31, 1835 to French emigres in New York City, he graduated from Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland. He then went to Newport to study with William Morris Hunt. There he met and married Margaret Perry, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin and granddaughter of Oliver Hazard Perry. He bought a house in Newport, though his travels, business and mistress kept him away from it half the time.

His friend H.H. Richardson commissioned him to paint murals at Trinity Church, but his easel paintings didn’t sell enough to pay the bills. He began to experiment with stained glass. He won his first commission for a window from friends at Harvard, who wanted a stained glass window to remember the Civil War Dead at Memorial Hall.

Stained glass making was in a sorry state, and La Farge labored to create the same effects of medieval cathedral windows. He layered complementary colors of colored glass, and later worked with opalescent glass—glass with a milky opaque or translucent effect. He even used mottled glass that others might reject as flawed. La Farge began to work directly with a glassmaker to get saturated but subtle colors.

Detail from Butterflies and Foliage at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston by Lori L. Stalteri. Creative Commons (CC By 2.0)

His connections with wealthy homeowners won him several commissions for stained glass windows. He drew from wildly different artistic styles: early Venetian, Buddhist, Islamic, Greek or Roman art. His windows created an exotic, opulent effect, just what Gilded Age millionaires wanted.

His friend Henry Adams, wrote “La Farge alone could use glass like a thirteenth-century artist…

In conversation La Farge’s mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

(Read about his rivalry with Louis Comfort Tiffany here.)

Battle Window at Harvard’s Memorial Hall

You can see for yourself what Adams meant in many New England cities and towns where La Farge’s work is on display.

Connecticut

Bridgeport: New Britain Museum of American Art, oil on panel, Lady of Shallot

Hartford: Wadsworth Athenaeum, water color, Water Lily and Moth

New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, windows from the Resurrection Promise Church

Maine

Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Athens (stained glass window); Tokio Geisha Dancing in the House of Our Neighbor, Nikko, gouache; Meditation of Kuwannon, watercolor.

Rockland: Farnsworth Art Museum–Japanese Fisherman, Study of Sunlight,

Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art– Agathon to Erosanthe (Votive Wreath)

Massachusetts

Boston: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a watercolor, painting and drawing collection and the stained glass windows, Morning Glories, Peonies Blown in the Wind

Boston College McMullen Museum of Art– Christ Preaching, St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul

(West Roxbury): Emmanuel Episcopal Church, The Angel Holding a Lyre (or The Harpist)

(Jamaica Plain): St. John’s Episcopal Church Decorative Window

Trinity Church: Presentation of Virgin in Temple, Resurrection of Christ, Vision of St. John: Ieposolyma the New Jerusalem, Wise Virgin, murals

Cambridge: Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Athena Tying a Mourning Fillet, Battle Window, Cornelia – Mother of the Gracchi, Virgil and Homer, several paintings, Fish and Dawn in the Harvard University Art Museum

Manchester-by-the-Sea: Emmanuel Church, memorial stained glass window

Medford: Grace Episcopal Church, Rebecca at the Well

Methuen: First Church, Congregational, The Resurrection (Colonel Henry Coffin Nevins Memorial Window)

Newton: Grace Church, Memorial Window for Lizzie Shinn

“Angel of Help” in the Unity Church in North Easton, Mass.

North Easton: Unity Church, Figures of Wisdom The Angel of Help – Helen Angier Ames Memorial Window

Quincy: Crane Memorial Library, The Old Philosopher, The Angel at the Tomb

Salem: First Church, Faith and Charity

Springfield: George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Rebecca at the Well

Stockbridge: St. Paul Preaching at Athens – Reverend Samuel P. Parker Memorial Window, The Annunciation

Wellesley: Wellesley College, Houghton Chapel—Memorial windows

Whitman: All Saints’ Episcopal Church

Williamstown: Thompson Memorial Chapel, Williams College, Abraham and an Angel

Peacock by John La Farge

Worcester: Worcester Art Museum, Peacock Window; (moved from Mount Vernon Congregational Church) Angel at the healing waters of Bethesda, Christ with Two Pilgrims

New Hampshire

Manchester: Currier Museum of Art– Sunrise in Fog over Kyoto, watercolor

Rhode Island

Lincoln: Christ Church

Newport: The Breakers, skylight

Channing Memorial Church, Christ Leading the Soul Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Newport Art Museum: Trompe l’Oeil Curtain

Newport Congregational Church: Ceiling Paintings

Peonies Blown in the Wind, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (created for Newport mansion of Henry Marquand)

Our Lady of Mercy Chapel Decorative Windows, Madonna, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. John the Evangelist

Providence: Cathedral Church of St. John, The Wise Virgin

Providence: Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Angel of the Adoration

With thanks to Stained Glass in New England: A Digital Guide; and Art of an Opaline Mind: The Stained Glass of John La Farge by Julie Sloan and James Yarnall. This story was updated in 2022.

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Henriette Desportes Leaves the Scandals of Paris for a Stockbridge Minister

By the time she died in 1875, people knew Henriette Desportes as a minister’s wife in Stockbridge, Mass. But behind that staid image was the story of a scandal that helped topple the King of France.

Henriette Desportes was a French girl, born illegitimately in 1813. By 1840 she had been educated at French boarding schools, developed a talent for art and traveled to Britain where she worked as a governess before returning to France.

L to r, clockwise: Henry Field, Charles Theobold, Fanny Theobold, Henriette Desportes.

Henriette Desportes, Nanny

At age 27, in 1841, she found work with the family of a French duke, Charles Laure Hugues Théobald. Her job was to be nanny to the duke’s children. But the duke’s wife, Françoise Altarice Rosalba Sebastiani, thought more was going on.

Fanny and Theo had nine children. They ran through a string of nannies until Henriette Desportes arrived. She would last six years at the job. But Fanny accused her of alienating the children from their mother. What’s worse, she believed Theo and Henriette were having an affair.

Descriptions of their marriage tend to flatter one at the expense of the other depending on the teller of the tale. Supporters of Theo paint him as a harassed figure, putting up with a wife with an explosive temper. He endured her pepperings of long letters that alternated between complaining and apologizing.

Supporters of Fanny describe Theo as distant, uncaring and unfaithful to his wife. Fanny put up with much of his misbehavior, they say, until the affair between Theo and Henriette became public knowledge. This so scandalized her, she had no choice but to force Theo to fire Henriette the nanny.

The evidence of an affair between Theo and Henriette Desportes is circumstantial. She wrote long, emotional letters to him after being fired. And he did pay for her rent for a time after her separation. But the letters reveal no smoking gun, and he urged her to move on and meet people.

Murder

All this might have gone into the history books as just another tumultuous marriage among the aristocracy, but for the events of August 17, 1847.

Duke Theo and Duchess Fanny had traveled to their Paris home. On that morning, the servants awoke to sounds of a struggle, and they discovered Fanny dead. Someone had stabbed and bludgeoned her. The logical suspect: her husband. The duke was in the house, armed with a pistol.

He said that an intruder came into the home and attacked his wife. He tried to repel the prowler. Theo showed signs of a fight, but could not explain anything more about the assailant. A servant said she witnessed the duke washing blood from his hands.

The police arrested the duke, and he awaited trial in a special court that handled matters involving royalty. Henriette Desportes, meanwhile, got swept up in the affair. Police arrested her and charged her with some sort of involvement in the crime.

Theo faced limited choices. He could confess, he could stand by his story or he could blame Henriette. Instead, he chose option 4: Suicide. He went to the grave declaring his innocence. With no husband to prosecute and no evidence against Henriette Desportes, the police dropped the case.

Abdication

France, in 1847, was in the midst of a financial crisis. Wealth had accumulated at the top of society for decades, while poverty was rampant. This double standard, the critics said, extended beyond money and into the justice system. Some suggested the duke had been allowed to swallow poison to avoid disgrace to the royal families of France. Still others insisted that he hadn’t died at all. Authorities let him fake his death and slip away, they said.

In 1848, France’s King Louis Philippe I faced a full-on revolt. Aware of the precedent for the French citizenry dealing roughly with its royal class, Louis quickly abdicated his throne – handing it to his nine-year-old grandson. The boy, showing he had as many brains as his grandfather, fled the country as well, setting the stage for the rise of Napoleon III.

Louis Philippe

All This and Heaven

But what of the nanny Henriette Desportes? She moved to the United States and met a young minister from Stockbridge, Mass.

Henry Martyn Field was nine years younger than Henriette. He came from an accomplished family of four brothers, all of whom would distinguish themselves in law or business. Henry was also a writer and editor, as well as a respected minister.

He took a liking to Henriette Desportes. Henry had travelled in France in 1847 and 1848, and was delighted by the country. After Henriette migrated to New York, in the wake of the scandal, she went to work as a school teacher.

Henry and Henriette married in 1851. They divided their time between New York and East Springfield and Stockbridge, Mass. By all accounts they had a happy marriage and a respected place in society.

Henry remarried following Henriette’s death in 1875. And the story of Henriette’s harrowing Paris life might have faded into history, but for Henry’s great niece, Rachel Field.

Rachel Field and her Scottish terrier, Spriggen.

The Story Lives On

Rachel was a writer. She wrote successful children’s books and plays, as well as adult fiction. She loved New England, and her first novel, Time Out of Mind, told the story of a Maine village wrestling with decline as the age of sail gave way to modern shipping.

For the second novel, in 1938, she chose to update and retell Henriette’s tale under the title, All This and Heaven, Too. The novel was a best seller and established Rachel as a national author. Though airing the family’s dirty laundry raised some eyebrows, it paved the way for her continued writing success.

In 1940, All This and Heaven, Too was made into a film starring Bette Davis. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, but lost. Critics faulted it for being over-long at 141 minutes. Today the film has an 83 percent positive rating at movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes.

This story about Henriette Desportes was updated in 2022.

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Stockbridge Steps Into a Norman Rockwell Christmas Painting

Every year for two hours at Christmastime, the town of Stockbridge, Mass., turns itself into a Norman Rockwell Christmas painting.

The Town of Stockbridge, Mass., has reenacted Rockwell’s 8-foot-long painting, Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas, for nearly three decades as part of its annual holiday celebration.

For two hours, the street is closed to traffic. As in the painting, vintage automobiles line up across from the red brick Town Hall, Williams and Son Country Store and the 240-year-old Red Lion Inn.

Local Models

norman-rockwell-christmas-painting-santa

An iconic Norman Rockwell Christmas painting, ‘The Truth about Santa.’

Some of the people in the living Norman Rockwell Christmas painting once modeled for him. Recently retired police Chief Rick Wilcox posed as a Boy Scout for Rockwell when he was a kid. He didn’t make it into a painting, but his brother did. His grandfather posed for the clerk in Marriage License, but Rockwell went with someone else (Jason Braman, who owned the town’s department store).

Young Scotty Ingram posed as the boy devastated by the discovery of a Santa suit in his father’s drawer. The Truth About Santa appeared on a Saturday Evening Post cover in December, 1956. Ingram’s whole family posed for Rockwell.

The painter found his iconic Santa while on vacation in upstate New York. John Malone hosted Rockwell while he swam, fished and relaxed on his porch. Malone became a father figure to Rockwell and a perennial model as Santa.

Stockbridge

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/norman-rockwell-christmas-painting-malone.jpg

Rockwell’s iconic Santa

Stockbridge’s Main Street hasn’t changed much since Rockwell moved there from Vermont in 1953. He was 59 years old, a well-established artist with the Four Freedoms, Rosie the Riveter and dozens of Boy Scout calendars and Saturday Evening Post covers behind him. He would live in Stockbridge for the next 25 years until he died in 1978 at 84.

Upon his arrival in Stockbridge, he set up his studio above the meat market. He knocked out the window and replaced it with a $5,000 picture window that gave him a steady northern light. In Stockbridge Main Street, there’s a Christmas tree in that window.

The modern recreation isn’t exactly the same as the scene in the Norman Rockwell Christmas painting. He painted a nightscape, and the reenactment takes place in the afternoon. The Red Lion Inn was closed; in real life, it’s open in the winter now.

Two Eras

The cars aren’t exactly the same – but then again, Rockwell painted cars from two different eras. He started the painting in 1956, but stopped work on it for a while. When he took it up again in the ‘60s, he put two small late-model cars next to the ‘50s models he’d already painted. He didn’t finish Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas until 1967.

That was the year WBAI-FM first played Arlo Guthrie’s recording of Alice’s Restaurant – which mentions the real restaurant Alice Brock ran in Stockbridge. The police officer in the song, Chief William J. Obanheim, had actually posed for Rockwell for his painting The Jury and a small pencil illustration for an insurance advertisement.

The painting now hangs in the Norman Rockwell Museum just a few miles outside of town.

In 2020, the town didn’t gather for the Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas event because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The town did gather during the first week in December 2021 and again in 2022.

Norman Rockwell, Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas, on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

This story about the Norman Rockwell Christmas painting was updated in 2022.

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