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Stratford Conn.

Six Paintings of New England Spring

Artists have probably created far fewer New England spring paintings than of any of the three other seasons. After all, New England has so little spring. The cold gray months morph into mud season and then black fly season. And then, suddenly, it’s the Fourth of July and summer.

And yet New England’s artists have managed to capture what is appealing about the brief New England spring. Maple sugaring. Apple blossoms. Bird’s nests. Brilliant, clear light on sunny days. Romantic moonlit nights.

So here are six paintings of New England spring, one in each state.

New England Spring by Moonlight

May Night by Willard Metcalf. National Gallery of Art.

Willard Metcalf painted May Night, one of his best works, while at the Old Lyme artist colony in Connecticut.

Metcalf was born into a working class family in Lowell, Mass., in 1858. He began painting at 16 and opened a studio in Boston at 18. Early success allowed him to study in Europe for five years.

He then moved around the Northeast, teaching and painting portraits and illustrations. Then he moved to Gloucester, Mass., and devoted himself to landscape painting. His friend Childe Hassam encouraged him to join the Old Lyme artist colony, where he could find high thinking and low living.

May Night depicts the home of Miss Florence Griswold, who founded the Old Lyme colony. In 1907, Metcalf won the Corcoran gold medal for it, along with a $3,000 purchase price. But Old Lyme probably lost its charm for him when his wife ran off with one of his students that year. The painting now belongs to the National Gallery of Art.

Metcalf then spent time at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, where he painted many landscapes of the changing seasons. One critic called him “the poet laureate of the New England hills.”

The Corcoran Gallery held a major exhibition of his work in 1925, the year he died of a heart attack at age 66.

Spring on a Farm

Spring, by Winslow Homer. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Winslow Homer, born in Boston, Mass., in 1837, learned watercolor at his mother’s knee. He apprenticed to a lithographer for a few years, but hated it. For the next 20 years he illustrated life in Boston and rural New England as well as battlefield scenes during the Civil War.

He then moved to New York, but traveled frequently, painting all the way. In the spring of 1878 he produced 50 watercolors, admired for their fluidity and sparkle. Spring, painted on a farm, is one of them.

Homer eventually grew reclusive around 1880. His family owned an estate on Prout’s Neck in Maine, 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. His 1878 watercolor Spring belongs to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

‘As if the year were all springtime’

Still Life with Robin’s Nest by Fidelia Bridges. Private Collection.

Fidelia Bridges, born in 1834, was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. She only painted birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility.

She ‘paints as if the year were all springtime,’ wrote one critic.

Bridges was often lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.

Fidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Her parents’ death when she was 15 impoverished her family, but wealthy patrons allowed her to study art in Philadelphia and Europe.

She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., along the Housatonic River. She also sold her work to Louis Prang, who invented the American Christmas card in Boston. For a time she worked as governess for Mark Twain’s children.

Girl on Rock

Spring by Maxfield Parrish. Illustration for Life magazine, 1922 Easter edition

The landscape of Vermont and New Hampshire inspired Maxfield Parrish in 1922 to create lush, romantic paintings like Spring.

Parrish belonged to the Cornish Art Colony from 1898, when he and his wife built a house in Plainfield, N.H. He downplayed his own abilities, calling himself “commonplace” and “a mechanic.”

He used an ancient technique to paint, starting with a monochrome underpainting and then layering transparent glazes. It made him rich and famous. His 1922 painting Daybreak was the most popular art print of the 20^th century, appearing in one out of every four households.

His painting Spring appeared as the Easter cover art for Life magazine April 6, 1922. Parrish then got sick of painting lissome nymphs in outdoor settings. No more girls on rocks, he told the Associated Press in 1931. From then until his death in 1960 he abandoned illustration and painted landscapes.

Apple Trees in a Meadow

Apple Trees in a Meadow by Edward Bannister. High Museum

Edward Bannister stunned the judges of the art competition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. When he came to receive his gold medal, they were astonished to discover they’d awarded it to an African American.

After winning the prize he prospered as an artist, working out of his studio in Providence, R.I.

Bannister credited his wife, Christiana, with everything he accomplished. She ran several hair salons and told him to devote himself to his painting. Once his paintings started to sell, they spent summers in a cottage on Narragansett Bay. He often painted en plein air.

In 1890, Bannister painted Apple Trees in a Meadow, a familiar sight during the New England spring.

Bannister died in 1901, and his work fell into obscurity. He has since been rediscovered. Apple Trees in a Meadow now belongs to the High Museum in Atlanta.

New England Spring, Vermont Style

American Forest Scene–Maple Sugaring by Arthur Tait

You may well recognize this lithograph as a Currier and Ives, originally sold as a cheap and popular print but now quite collectible.

Nathaniel Currier started off in Boston but eventually moved to New York. Once he hit on the formula of dramatic scenes of newsworthy events, he was on his way. He teamed up with James Merritt Ives and they expanded into scenes of city life, portraits, politics, boats and landscapes.

The firm made prints from the work of the most celebrated artists of the day: Eastman Johnson, George Inness and Thomas Nast. It also employed its own artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who specialized in sporting scenes.

New England winter scenes proved especially popular. Snow, however, is not unknown during a New England spring.

Arthur Tait, a British-American artist, painted American Forest Scene—Maple Sugaring. Though he lived in New York, we’re choosing to call this a Vermont scene, as it produces more maple syrup than any other state.

Currier and Ives lasted 72 years before going out of business.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Spring by Parrish, Plum Leaves via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0; Robin’s Nest (1863, private collection) public domain PD-US.

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Samuel Smedley, Fairfield’s Boy Commander of the Connecticut Navy

Samuel Smedley captured a dozen British vessels during the American Revolution, but the biggest obstacle to greater glory was the stinginess of Gov. Jonathan Trumbull.

Smedley, the baby-faced captain of the Connecticut Navy brig Defence, had a glorious but brief career in the Connecticut State Navy.

An English brig with captured American ships

Over three years, the Defence captured 12 vessels and brought $500,000 into the treasury of Connecticut. Much of that went to the war effort. But Smedley must have chafed at Trumbull’s refusal to share prize money with the crew the same way it was shared with crews of privateers and the Continental Navy.

And perhaps the Defence wouldn’t have run up on a reef and bilged in Long Island Sound if Trumbull had had a more generous spirit.

Samuel Smedley

He was born March 5, 1753 in Fairfield, Conn., into a prosperous family. Fairfield mariners traded frequently with the West Indies, and Smedley likely grew up on boats.

He married Esther Rowland and had two daughters, Esther and Elizabeth, both of whom died in infancy. The one image of him known to survive shows a baby-faced sailor. When the Defence captured the Admiral Keppel, the captain upon seeing Smedley supposedly uttered an exclamation. ’There is little hope of conquering an enemy whose very schoolboys are capable of valor equaling that of trained veterans of naval warfare.”

Samuel Smedley

When the American Revolution broke out, Connecticut made an easy target for British soldiers and sailors.

The British army encamped directly across the Long Island Sound, and the British fleet tried to control the Sound. So the Connecticut Assembly decided to build a two-ship navy. It bought the Defence and fitted her out for war, and built the warship Oliver Cromwell.

In February 1776, Defence was commissioned in New Haven with Seth Harding as captain, Ebenezer Bartram as first lieutenant and young Samuel Smedley as second lieutenant. Bartram and Smedley had recruited much of the 100-man crew from Fairfield and Stratford.

Four months later, Defence sailed into Boston Harbor with two captured ships and a brig with 330 officers and men from a Highland Regiment. “This event was perhaps about as daring a piece of work that ever happened in the naval history of the Atlantic Seaboard,” wrote Louis F. Middlebrook.

They took the booty to the Admiralty Court, which had to judge whether they’d captured a legitimate prize or committed an act of piracy. The Court ruled the former, and the naval agent sent the supplies for the troops to George Washington’s army, then in New York. The men of the Defence got no reward for their valor, except perhaps bragging rights.

Private vs. Public

Warships had to compete with privateers for crews, which wasn’t easy. Life onboard for the common sailor was disagreeable at best. On top of brutally hard work, danger, foul accommodations and lousy food, he risked violent whippings with the lash. To attract able-bodied mariners, ship captains had to award them with a portion of any prize they captured. Privateers kept nearly all the prize they captured, and typically the crew got half.

But the Continental Congress decided that the crews of the Navy would only get one-third of a prize. They’d get half for warships or English privateers.

A Bermuda sloop engaged as a privateer

That didn’t work—everyone wanted to work on a privateer. So Congress changed the rules. The crews of the Continental Navy would get half of the proceeds from a merchant ship, and 100 percent for a warship.

Connecticut, however, stuck to the original rule – crews only got a third of a prize. And so its Navy – the Defence and the Oliver Cromwell – couldn’t find enough sailors.

By 1777, 23-year-old Samuel Smedley had risen to captain of the Defence after Harding and Bartram took ill. He found a way to recruit enough men: a rather big lie. He promised them half of any prizes they captured.

Blood in his Eye

The Defence cruised down to the Caribbean and captured four merchant ships between March 12 and April 20, a spectacular success. But when the men learned they’d only get a third of the booty, they mobbed the office of the agent responsible for processing the prizes. The agent had to divide 1,200 pounds among the crew to make them go away.

Smedley returned home to find British soldiers had burned his house during William Tryon’s raid on Danbury. No doubt he had blood in his eye as he tried to assemble a crew.

This time he didn’t try to trick the sailors. Instead, he won a concession from Gov. Jonathan Trumbull: He and his crew would get half the proceeds from a captured vessel for just that one cruise. So they sailed to the Caribbean in the spring and summer of 1778 and took three prizes – another wildly successful voyage.

Smedley pleaded with Trumbull to let him offer his mariners half the proceeds if they captured a merchant vessel on the next cruise. Trumbull refused.

Too Late

The captain of the state navy’s other ship, the Oliver Cromwell, also had problems recruiting sailors. Why would a sailor sign on with the Connecticut Navy, which only offered one-third of a prize, when the Continental Navy and privateers would give them half? Still Trumbull refused to change the rule. Finally, the Connecticut Assembly intervened and voted to give its navy crews half the booty from a prize ship.

But by then it was too late. The Continental Navy and privateers had taken all the sailors. So Smedley sailed the Defence to New London, where Continental Army soldiers manned the ship. The outcome was perhaps predictable. The incompetent pilot wrecked the ship on a reef. Four or five men drowned.

Map of the Long Island Sound. Courtesy Library of Congress..

“I never Emplored my pen in writing more Disagreeable News than at this time,” wrote Samuel Smedley, in a letter breaking the bad news to Trumbull in March 1779.

Revenge — Not

Samuel Smedley’s luck had definitely turned. Still vowing revenge for the devastation wrought by Tryon’s troops, he arranged for command and part ownership of a privateer, the Recovery. Ready to weigh anchor in January 1780, the frozen New London harbor delayed his departure. When the Recovery finally sailed in mid-February, she was overtaken by the British warship Galatea after a seven-hour chase. The British took Smedley and all his men prisoner and incarcerated them in a prison ship in New York—probably more dangerous than combat at sea.

The Americans traded him for a British prisoner, and he and his men found another privateer, the Hibernia. Again Smedley had part ownership. It didn’t do him any good, as the British again captured his vessel 14 days after leaving New York Harbor. He ended up in the Old Mill Prison in Portsmouth, England.

Smedley wrote from prison to his wife on May 25, 1781, describing his condition as ‘cruelly treated, half starved and half naked.’

He managed to escape, probably because his friends bribed a guard to look the other way. Then he made his way to France, where he got a loan from Benjamin Franklin. He also had his portrait painted in miniature.

The American legation needed to find a friendly vessel to carry military supplies for the war effort, and found one, the Heer Adams. They engaged Smedley as master of the ship, and he had an uneventful – for once — voyage to Philadelphia.

Smedley in Fairfield

Smedley went back to Fairfield to rebuild his house. In 1789, he wrote a letter to President George Washington, asking him to nominate him as Collector of the Port of Fairfield. He noted that he had ‘sufferd the Loss of the greater part of his Paternal Inheritance by the Ravages of A Cruel Enemy.’

The Old Burying Ground in Fairfield. Image courtesy Google maps.

He got the job, which proved more lucrative – and, apparently, more memorable– than his swashbuckling career at sea. His gravestone in the Old Burying Ground reads:

Samuel Smedley Esqr.

late Collector of Customs

for the District of Fairfield

Died June 13, 1812

Aged 59.

With thanks to Exploits of the Connecticut ship “Defence,” commanded by Captain Samuel Smedley of Fairfield, Ct. by Louis F. Middlebrook and Samuel Smedley and Prize Division by Jackson Kuhl for the Journal of the American Revolution. This story was updated in 2022.

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David Wooster, Revolutionary War Hero, Befriends a Freed Slave

David Wooster is known more as the person who gave New Haven’s Wooster Square neighborhood its name than for his heroism during the American Revolution. He’s even less known as an abolitionist.

Centuries after his death, the revolutionary war general got caught up in the Battle of Wooster Square, a conflict over symbols of ethnic and racial pride.

David Wooster

On June 24, 2020, a crew hired by the city took down the statue of Christopher Columbus in Wooster Square, New Haven’s Little Italy. Italian-Americans protested the removal of the statue that symbolized their heritage. As the statue came down, they clashed with black, Native American and Latino protesters who said Columbus represented the evils of colonial conquest.

Two days later, a group of people met with state Rep. Roland Lemar to ask to rename Wooster Square after William Lamson, a black New Haven entrepreneur in the early 19^th century. That did not sit well with the Italian-American community, which submitted a petition with 3,000 names asking to keep the name “Wooster Square.”

Perhaps a closer look at the life of David Wooster would change some minds (or not).

David Wooster

He was born into a well-to-do family in Stratford, Conn., on March 2, 1711, the youngest of six. His Puritan parents, Abraham and Mary, imposed a severe and sober discipline.

Wooster graduated from Yale College and then earned his master’s degree. In his early 30s he commanded the first warship built in Connecticut, the Defense, to defend the East Coast from pirates and smugglers. During his time on the Defense, “the shores of Connecticut were unpolluted by pirate invasion,” according to the oratory on the dedication of his monument.

David Wooster house, now gone.

In 1745, David Wooster married Mary Clapp, the daughter of Yale President Thomas Clapp. They had four children and bought a gracious house in New Haven. The house survived British arson but not urban renewal. The Woosters entertained frequently, employed black servants and kept a phaeton for rides around town.

Siege of the Fortress at Louisbourg

In 1758 David Wooster led Connecticut forces at the Siege of Louisburg. His gallantry earned him the right to bring a ship of prizes and prisoners to France and England. The English feted him, and he was “gladdened with the sunshine of the royal smile.”

He also served six years in the French and Indian War, rising to the rank of colonel. Afterward, New York granted him 3,000 acres of Vermont, but he lost it to squatters. Nevertheless, he prospered. Both he and his wife inherited money, and he earned quick and substantial profit as a merchant.

Yale President Theodore Dwight called him a “brave, generous-minded man, respectable for his understanding and for his conduct both in public and private life, ardent in his friendships and his patriotism, diffusive in his charities and steadfast in his principles.”

A Letter

In 1773, Wooster received a letter from Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet. She had astonished Bostonians with her work. They couldn’t believe a young black slave could write such poetry. Wheatley proved them wrong, and moved to England. There she became the darling of abolitionist circles and tried to publish her first book. So she asked Wooster for help.

She apparently didn’t know him, but knew of him through a servant of his neighbor, a Mr. Badcock. She must also have assumed he would sympathize with her.

Phillis Wheatley , victim of the slave trade.

Wheatley in her letter asked Wooster if he would help sell her first book of poems. John Wheatley, she wrote, had just given her her freedom, and she knew she’d have to make her own way in the world. She asked Wooster if he would use his influence with the gentlemen and ladies he knew to subscribe to her poetry. (Back then, people subscribed to books before their publication.)

“The more subscribers there are, the more it will be for my advantage as I am to have half the Sale of the Books,” Wheatley wrote. “This I am the more solicitous for, as I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & it is the Chief I have to depend upon.”

For God, for Country and for Yale

Wooster believed ardently in independence from Britain–and for enslaved people. In the war’s early days, Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen got credit for seizing Fort Ticonderoga, but David Wooster helped plan the attack and lent money for it.

In May 1775, the Connecticut General Assembly appointed the 64-year-old businessman a major general of a militia regiment. Before marching off to war, he assembled his regiment on the New Haven Green and led them in prayer. His pastor, Jonathan Edwards, also an abolitionist, couldn’t make it.

Center Church on the Green today

Wooster then led patriot forces in the ill-fated expedition to Quebec and returned home. He received a new command of the Connecticut militia, and he paid his men and officers with his own money. Still, he hoped his country would repay him. So he asked for receipts. But British soldiers burned his house after his death with the receipts inside. His wife ended up in debtors’ prison.

Battle of Ridgefield

Charged with the defense of Connecticut, he got word that on April 25, 1777, British Gov. William Tryon had invaded Connecticut at Westport with 2,000 troops. Tryon’s forces marched 20 miles north toward Danbury to destroy military supplies.

Along what is now Rte. 28, the British ravaged the land. They then burned Danbury.

Troop movements during Tryon’s raid.

Wooster and Benedict Arnold, who happened to be staying in New Haven, responded to the British with 700 militiamen and Continental Army soldiers. The British retreated toward Ridgefield, burning houses along the way.

On April 27, Benedict Arnold barricaded the center of Ridgefield. He received reinforcements, but the British drove them off in a running battle down Main Street. Wooster tried to rally his undisciplined militia with the words, “Come on, my boys, never mind such random shots.” A ball then hit him in the back, severing his spine. A small Masonic stone memorial marks the place where he fell from his horse at the intersection of the Post Road (Route 1) and Patriots Bank.

His men carried him from the field to a nearby house. The surgeon told him he had no hope. Wooster suffered agonizing pain for the next five days. His wife Mary came to his deathbed, but he didn’t recognize her until the end. He died on May 2, 1777.

Condolences

After Wooster’s death, poet Phillis Wheatley wrote a letter of condolence to his widow – one lost to history until rediscovered around 1980. In it, she thanked Mary for selling her poems to their friends. She also praised David Wooster while pointing out the hypocrisy of those who supported independence from Great Britain but not for the enslaved.

“I sincerely sympathize with you in the great loss you and your family sustain,’ Wheatley wrote.

“You will do me a great favor by returning to me by the first oppy those books that remain unsold and remitting the money for those that are sold–I can easily dispose of them here for 12/ Lmo. (12 shillings lawful money) each–I am greatly obliged to you for the care you show me, and your condescention in taking so much pains for my interest–I am extremely sorry not to have been honour’d with a personal acquaintance with you.”

Wheatley also enclosed a poem, one not terribly admired by critics, that lauds Wooster as a martyr for freedom:

He nobly perish’d in his Country’s cause
His Country’s Cause that ever fir’d his mind
Where martial flames, and Christian virtues join’d.

Wooster Square

Long after their deaths, developers built a desirable residential neighborhood around a square named after Wooster. Sea captains and prosperous businessmen bought homes in Wooster Square. Then, following a typical urban trajectory, the neighborhood declined as industry moved in. Then in the late 19th century, Italian immigrants crowded into the old buildings and ran shops and restaurants.

Houses in the Wooster Square Historic District.

In the 1930s, one entrepreneur, Frank Pepe, established F rank Pepe Pizzeria N apoletena on the first floor of Wooster Street.

The city slated Wooster Square for urban renewal in the 1930s, but plans changed by the late 1950s. Postwar prosperity allowed preservation and gentrification to make the neighborhood, once again, a desirable place to live.

By 2004, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called Pepe’s New Haven pizzeria a “thriving community treasure.”

Frank Pepe’s exterior.

And then in 2020, another battle – over a statue and a name.

With thanks to Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 1, edited by David Dabydeen, Sukhdev Sandhu.

Images: Center Church on the Green, By Dicklyon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79216980. Frank Pepe’s By Krista – frank pepe exterior, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38640336. This story was updated in 2022.

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John William Sterling, a Well-Respected Man With a Secret

John William Sterling was a corporate lawyer during the Gilded Age, a conservative, upper-class businessman, the kind of man the Kinks describe as “a well-respected man about town.”

John William Sterling

In 1911, his name and resume appeared in Distinguished successful Americans of our day. From it we learn he graduated with honors from Yale College and Columbia Law School. He advised railroad barons in building and dismantling railroads, and he served on the boards of nine large banks and gas companies. Appropriately for a man of his stature, he devoted his time to philanthropy—prestigious charities, the kind people noticed. Eminently clubbable, he belonged to the exclusive Metropolitan, Union and American Yacht clubs.

Like the Kinks’ well-respected man, John William Sterling lived in a world built around punctuality. A Wall Street Journal correspondent described him as, “almost taciturn, and excessively devoted to his profession. He sat before his desk every morning, not later than eight o’clock, and was usually the last one in the office to close the desk and go home.”

That same correspondent also noted he had an unusual relationship that was ‘often spoken of and commented upon.’ That relationship was with a cotton broker named James O. Bloss.

John William Sterling

He was born in Stratford, Conn., on May 12, 1844. His father, also John William Sterling, was captain of the Splendid, one of the largest clipper ships during the China Trade. His mother, Catherine Plant, belonged to a prominent Stratford family; her father, David, served as a U.S. congressman and as the state’s lieutenant governor. His parents both had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower.

Sterling Homestead

He studied at Stratford Academy, where he probably knew another young man who would lead his entire life as a bachelor, James Buchanan Mitchell. Graduating as class valedictorian, he entered Yale as the Civil War broke out.

Jonathan Ned Katz, a historian of human sexuality, notes in an essay that Sterling slept with Mitchell at Yale. His journal in September-October 1862 records: “I slept with Jim Mitchell last night an.” Katz suggests they had an ongoing relationship, as Sterling and Mitchell both chose to attend Columbia Law School.

Sterling and classmate at Yale.

His sleeping with Jim Mitchell may not have aroused much comment, wrote Katz, or at least it didn’t arouse much suspicion about what went on.

At Yale, Sterling belonged to Skull and Bones. He graduated with honors from Yale in 1864 and then from Columbia Law School in 1867 as class valedictorian.

Soon after his admission to the bar that year, he met a young cotton broker about his own age, James O. Bloss. Bloss also came from an old New England family, though he grew up in Rochester, N.Y.

Three lines of poetry clipped from the New York Times and pasted into the back of his Commonplace Book suggest Sterling’s feelings toward the man he called “Blossy.”

Once more I give me body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote those lines in his poem “In Guernsey / To Theodore Watts.”

In 1872 John William Sterling and James O. Bloss went house-hunting, and they settled on 21 West 25^th St. They would live together for nearly 50 years.

Partners

John William Sterling rocketed to the top of the then-burgeoning corporate world. He went to work as a clerk in a New York law firm and made partner in 1870. Three years later he had his name on the door as a partner in Shearman & Sterling. He advised another close friend, James Stillman, chairman of the board of National City Bank, then the nation’s largest. (Stillman’s great-grandson, Whit Stillman, is an Academy Award-nominated film director.)

Sterling also advised William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil and H.H. Rogers, whose firm merged with Standard Oil, as well as railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

He once said the ideal client is ‘a very wealthy man in very great trouble.’ His clients paid him handsomely for his advice, and he made a fortune.

The Sterling mansion, now a community center

In 1886, Sterling built a stately mansion, Sterling House, in Stratford, presumably a weekend house he shared with his sisters. Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Sterling mansion, now the Sterling House Community Center.

By 1890 he and Blossy moved uptown to 221 East 47^th St., where they had four servants. Eventually they moved to 912 Fifth Ave., overlooking Central Park.

Neuroticism

Sterling clearly valued his reputation as a man of means and prominence in society. And so as Katz points out, ‘his contravention of society’s marital standard, and, perhaps, its sexual proprieties, would have been a profound source of conflict and anxiety.’

His mother was said to be happy her son didn’t inherit his father’s love of the sea. Actually, he had more than a touch of hydrophobia. He had a ‘deep-rooted antipathy to the ocean,’ wrote John Anson Garver in a biographical sketch of Sterling. He didn’t even like to take ferries, and never traveled abroad.

Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary to Yale after 1899, recalled that Sterling wouldn’t go to bed until the housekeeper poked the closet with a stick and looked under the bed to make sure there were no burglars. He had iron bars on his bedroom window and an iron door with an electric lock he controlled with a button by his bedside. Bloss slept in the room with him and his valet in an adjoining bedroom.

In Harriman vs. Hill, author Larry Haeg describes Sterling as a chain-smoking, fast walker with a fear of public speaking and a penchant for scheduling meetings at odd minutes, like 3:17 p.m. He ate dinner in the same chair at the same table six nights a week at the Union Club.

He also locked his office at work and always paid for his investments in cash. That made him a very wealthy man.

A Strange Postscript

John William Sterling died suddenly in Canada on July 5, 1918. He left $18 million to Yale and the rest to Blossy, who he named as executor of his estate.

That caused a bit of trouble. Bloss died five months later, on Dec. 15, 1918, without having completely executed the will.

Further, Sterling had died before he could execute the will of another wealthy man, his friend James Stillman, who died March 15, 1918. And Stillman had been named executor of the estate of James Gordon Bennett, who died May 14, 1918.

The first three men who died left $75 million.

Eventually Yale got its money, the largest bequest to a university up to that time.

Sterling’s gift was used to build Yale’s Law School, the Divinity School quadrangle, a School of Medicine, the Hall of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Memorial Library. He also endowed the Sterling professorships, who have included such notables as William O. Douglas, Wilbur Cross, Harold Bloom, Edmund Morgan and Paul de Man.

With thanks to Jonathan Ned Katz, “An Understanding…Held Them Together“

NRHP: Sterling Homestead By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/6439034575/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44722867; Sterling House Community Center By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/all-towns-and-cities/stratford-ct/stratfordsterlinghouse.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29522854. This story was updated in 2023.

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Fidelia Bridges, The Lonely Painter Who Found Joy in Nature

Fidelia Bridges often felt lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.

During her lifetime, she was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. Though now largely forgotten, she earned renown among the artists of her time.

Fidelia Bridges limited her subjects to birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility.

She “Paints as if the year were all springtime,” wrote one critic.

Fidelia Bridges

Fidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Like another Salem artist, Frank Benson, she loved the outdoors.

She was born May 19, 1834, to Capt. Henry Gardiner Bridges and Eliza Chadwick Bridges. Her father carried a set of Shakespeare’s works with him on his voyages and was an accomplished carver. He is said to have brought back many curios for what is now the Peabody-Essex Museum. The family lived at 100 Essex Street, now known as the Fidelia Bridges Guest House.

When Fidelia Bridges was 15, her father died while overseas in Whampoa. He was buried in Macao, China. Her mother died three hours before the news of Henry Bridges’ death arrived in Salem.

Fidelia’s oldest sister Eliza taught school and cared for her orphaned younger siblings, including Elizabeth and Henry. Their father’s death forced Eliza to auction the family furniture and move to a smaller house.

Fidelia studied drawing during her convalescence from a long illness. Then, to support herself, she got a job as a mother’s helper to a successful Quaker merchant, William Augustus Brown. Brown moved his family to Brooklyn, N.Y., and Eliza, Elizabeth and Henry followed Fidelia.

Eliza started a school in Brooklyn, but died of tuberculosis after two years. Fidelia and her sister Elizabeth took up the running of the school.

Discovering Art

Fidelia Bridges had befriended Anne Whitney, an acclaimed artist who designed the sculpture of Sam Adams in Boston’s Dock Square. Whitney encouraged her to pursue her art and, with the Browns’ financial help, she studied art in Philadelphia with William Trost Richards. Richards, renowned for his realistic paintings of the White Mountains, took Fidelia under his wing.

She opened her own studio in Philadelphia, and collectors began to buy her work. In 1865 she returned to Brooklyn, establishing a studio on the top floor of the Browns’ house with Anne Whitney and Whitney’s companion, Adeline Manning, a painter from Boston.

At the end of the Civil War, she studied art in Rome for a year. American artists then had to go to Europe to study great works of art because the United States had no public collections. Fidelia traveled with Whitney and Manning, who belonged to actress Charlotte Cushman’s circle of expatriate American women.

Back in the USA

Fidelia returned to the United States in 1868, where she exhibited her watercolors of flowers and birds at the National Academy of Design. She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., where the marshes and meadows along the Housatonic River gave her much to paint.

In 1881, she began working for Louis Prang, the Boston printer who popularized the Christmas card in America. She continued with Prang until 1899. In the meantime, she worked as a governess to Mark Twain’s three children.

By 1890 she was living in Stratford, Conn. Two years later she moved to Canaan, Conn., where she lived in a cottage on a hill that overlooked a stream. Notable American Women, 1607-1950 described her thus:

She soon became a familiar village figure, tall, elegant, beautiful even in her sixties, her hair swept back, her attire always formal, even when sketching in the fields or riding her bicycle through town. Her life was quiet and un-ostentatious, her friends unmarried ladies of refinement and of literary and artistic taste who she joined for woodland picnics and afternoon teas.

She wore black in the winter, gray linen in the summer.

May, courtesy Boston Public Library

She visited her brother Henry in England. He had become a tea-taster in London and collected Asian art. Her paintings developed an Oriental cast, with asymmetrical composition and blank backgrounds.

She died May 14, 1923, and was buried in the Mountain View cemetery in Canaan, where a bird sanctuary was named after her. For years afterward, her friends put wildflowers on her grave on Memorial Day.

In New England, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Peabody Essex Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art exhibit her paintings.

This story about Fidelia Bridges was updated in 2023.

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Igor Sikorsky: From Kiev to the U.S. to the Wild Blue Yonder

In the spring of 1913, word leaked out about a four-engine airplane being built by Igor Sikorsky. Many people believed it wouldn’t get off the ground. When newspapers reported the plane did leave the ground after a 2,300-ft. takeoff run, people thought it was a hoax.

Sikorsky’s Russky-Vityaz

The most weight ever carried by an airplane up until then was 1,323 lbs. Sikorsky’s four-engine airplane weighed 8,818 lbs.

Igor Sikorsky

Sikorsky was born on May 25, 1889, in Kiev, Ukraine, to a family with a noble Polish and Russian background. When he heard about the Wright brothers’ first flight, he decided to devote his life to making aircraft. He went to Paris to study aviation. Then he returned to Russia to design airplanes.

Igor Sikorsky in 1914

In 1910 he flew an airplane of his own design, but had to crash land when his engine failed. He discovered the engine quit because a mosquito in the gasoline got sucked into the carburetor. That convinced him of the need for a multi-engine airplane that could fly even if it lost one engine.

He then built the four-engine biplane called the Russky Vityaz. It had an enclosed cabin, a washroom, upholstered chairs and a balcony for passengers. Not only did he prove it could fly, he showed a passenger could walk around the cabin without causing problems.

The Russian Revolution forced him to emigrate to the United States. He worked as a school teacher and eventually joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island. He also taught at the University of Bridgeport.

In 1923, he established the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corp. on a Long Island farm with backing from composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, among others. In 1929 he moved the company to Stratford, Conn. The company manufactured flying boats like the famous S-42 that made transatlantic flights for Pan Am.

Sikorsky on the cover of Time magazine 1953

Finally, a Helicopter

In 1939, Sikorsky realized a lifelong dream by building the first viable American helicopter. The design formed the basis for the Sikorsky R-4, the first mass-produced helicopter launched in 1942.

The Sikorsky S2 Skycrane lifting a house

Sikorsky received many awards and accolades before his death on Oct. 26, 1972, in Easton, Conn. He recalled in 1967 how America had inspired him.

As a youth, I was impressed by the skyscrapers that were taller than anywhere else, by the railroad system that included more miles of rails than the total of the rest of the world. I was inspired by the achievements of such men as Edison, Ford, and others, and in my case particularly, the Wright Brothers.

This story updated in 2022.

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