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Watertown Mass.

Ellen Robbins, Flower Painter and Perennial Prank Victim

What was it about Ellen Robbins that inspired people to play practical jokes on her?

She made a good living as a flower painter in the 19^th century. Her gorgeous botanical watercolors sold well, in bound books and in frames. She grew up in shabby gentility, helped along by her well-to-do family and friends.

Wildflowers by Ellen Robbins. Chromalithograph. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Summers she spent in fashionable resorts, winters in her Beacon Street studio. Artists more high spirited than she frequented those places, which may explain why Ellen Robbins was the butt of so many jokes. She was prim, temperate, careful. She preferred nature to the social ramble, and she didn’t like displays of wealth, which she considered vulgar.

Toward the end, though, Ellen Robbins got a good laugh on everyone else.

Ellen Robbins

She was born in 1828 in Watertown, Mass., the youngest of seven children. Her father owned a factory, but his business failed and he died when she was two.

She described herself as a plain, sickly child with a lame foot. She grew up poor, but with prominent neighbors and cousins—Maria White, who married James Russell Lowell, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis were both cousins. Her relatives also included a leading family of Watertown, the Thaxters, through whom she would discover the artists’ colony on the Isles of Shoals.

Autumn Leaves, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

As a child, she loved to paint. As the youngest, her sisters played jokes on her. They told her sugared almonds were spiders, which she believed. When presented with the treat, her sisters held out their hands for her almonds, which she gave them.

She attended the School of Design in Boston on the suggestion of her cousin, William Abijah White, an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Then, needing to support her family, she got a series of jobs trying to design prints for textiles., For a time she worked at the Merrimac Printworks in Lowell, Mass., and at the Manchester Printworks in Manchester, N.H.

But she never got the hang of it, so she gave up and went home to Watertown. There she attended Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman‘s School of Design, which taught her what she needed to know about watercolor.

Flower Painter

She excelled at painting watercolors of flowers, and decided to create books of spring flowers as they came. Each book had 20 paintings and sold for $25. Here having wealthy friends and relatives paid off. Cousin Hollis Hunnewell bought one for another cousin, a countess living in Paris. Philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway bought another.

“I now began to feel my good fortune had begun,” she wrote.

Ellen Robbins in her studio, photograph by J. Appleton Brown

She then contributed a watercolor of autumn leaves to an exhibit of amateur paintings. Several people who liked her paintings asked her to give lessons, and so she took a class of seven students. Ellen remembered how Susan Cabot Lowell Sohier brought a melon basket filled with flowers to paint, a Herculean task.

Eventually she began giving private lessons She continued to attract pupils, and after many years she had seven classes a week, at $150 a class. Her students came mostly from Boston’s old moneyed families.

“In my classes, when those came, I lived for two hours each day in the fashionable world; and after hearing of balls and parties, the rest that followed in my simple home was most grateful,” she wrote.

The Cool Kids

In addition to Boston’s elite, Ellen Robbins had entree to an expatriate community of American artists in Rome. One of its members, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, had been a close friend since childhood.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

Hosmer had a relationship with the leader of that expatriate group, the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. When Cushman was performing in Boston, she visited Robbins’ studio and gave her tickets to her shows. She also gave her a recipe for shampoo that supposedly thickened hair. But the shampoo had red lavendar as an ingredient. When Ellen used it to wash her mother’s hair, it turned pink.

Charlotte Cushman by William Page, 1853. National Portrait Gallery.

Another member of Cushman’s group, sculptor Margaret Foley, suggested Ellen sell her paintings through a Summer Street gallery eventually known as Doll & Richards. The gallery accepted her work, which sold out in a matter of weeks. Henry Ward Beecher was her biggest customer.

She took a studio at the corner of West and Tremont streets in Boston, later at 6 Beacon Street. There she made friends with John Appleton Brown and his wife, who had a studio next to hers.

Asters, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

She kept boxes of butter and sausage on the window ledge overlooking Beacon Street. One day she got a postcard from her landlord remonstrating her for putting food on the window ledge. She went next door to share her indignation with Appleton Brown, who made a show of sympathizing with her. But then his mouth twitched and she realized he had sent the postcard.

Travels

Reflecting on her success, she wrote, “My pictures were in great demand, and everything seemed to help me, for I was almost alone in the painting of flowers, and had relatives who were interested in my success, helping in a financial way.”

Another cousin, Henry Durant, who founded Wellesley College, hired her to paint a frieze at Wellesley (now gone).

She then built a studio in Bar Harbor, where she sold her flower paintings for many summers. But Bar Harbor began to attract wealthy swells, so she changed summer venues to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.

Hyacinths, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

There at her family’s hotel, poet Celia Thaxter hosted many artists and literati of the day. Some of them enjoyed playing practical jokes on Ellen Robbins. One night they sneaked a parrot into her bedroom.

Thaxter’s granddaughter remembered how the high-spirited Hassam played another joke on her.

Childe Hassam and Appleton Brown greatly annoyed a most temperate fellow artist, Levi’s cousin Ellen Robbins, by sneaking into her studio and filling her Franklin stove with empty champagne bottles. She was not amused when, the next damp day, she tried to light her fire and was choked by smoke.

Celia Thaxter’s garden at the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam

In 1873, she had saved enough to go to Europe with her sister. Again, a wealthy friend helped her out. Two days before she sailed, John Cummings, a wealthy banker, walked into her studio and handed her a letter of credit for a thousand dollars. He told her he wanted her to see Switzerland and Germany.

In London she befriended May Alcott, whose sister Louisa May, had written the blockbuster children’s novel, Little Women.

Ellen Robbins Gets the Last Laugh

The joke was on everyone else in 1893.

Back home in Watertown with her sisters, Ellen, then in her 65th year, fell gravely ill. As she lay in her sickbed, the Young Men’s Republican Club gave a dinner in town. Toward the end of the dinner, the Episcopal minister made some remarks, and ended by pointing to some flowers on the table. He said they reminded him of Miss Ellen Robbins, who painted such realistic flowers. He then added that “she is lying very ill at her house tonight.”

The next day, Ellen’s sister Martha ordered a sewing machine from a man who also worked as an undertaker. He delivered the sewing machine in his undertaker’s wagon. A Mr. Hartwell, who worked in the paper mill nearby, happened to look out the window just as the wagon left the house. One of his workmen had a sister who boarded at the Robbins’ house, and he told Mr. Hartwell Ellen would be the one taken away by the undertaker.

Wildflowers No. 2, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

Mr. Hartman went to tell the minister, who stopped by to pay a condolence call. Startled when he saw Ellen on the sofa embroidering, he said he was pleased to see her looking so well. A stream of visitors followed the next day, all commenting on how happy they were to see Ellen looking so well.

A neighbor, Miss Mary Fitch, wanted to attend her funeral. Mary’s sister heard that a funeral would take place the next day at 2 p.m., and assumed that meant Ellen Robbins would be laid to rest. Mary went to the funeral service, and viewed the remains – of a bald old man wrapped in a shroud. “Oh, how changed,” she said. She soon figured out she’d gone to a stranger’s funeral.

Ellen Robbins lived another 12 years, dying at the age of 77.

With thanks to Reminiscences of a Flower Painter, parts I and II, by Ellen Robbins for the New England Magazine, Vol. 14, 1896. This story last updated in 2022.

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Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett Starts the 1st Scandal in Greenwich

Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett started the first scandal in Greenwich, Conn., over – what else? – infidelity and real estate.

The scandal put her in the midst of a border dispute between the Dutch in New Netherlands and the Puritan English in New Haven Colony.

It was the middle of the 17^th century, and Greenwich was a howling wilderness on the edge of the Puritan colonies. When Elizabeth began living with a man allegedly not her husband, the Puritans could have hanged her for adultery.

But over the course of her eventful lifetime, she found protection from her powerful relatives—Uncle John, governor of Massachusetts Bay, and Cousin John, Jr., eventually governor of Connecticut.

John Winthrop

The Winthrop men probably sympathized with the 30-something mother of six. She had a mentally ill husband and lived under constant threat by Indians, armed Dutchmen and vengeful Puritan theocrats.

Elizabeth Fones

Her life didn’t start out as an adventure. She was the daughter of a prosperous, staunchly Puritan family. She was born in Groton Manor in 1610 to Thomas Fones, a pharmacist, and Anne Winthrop, sister to John Winthrop. Anne Winthrop died when Elizabeth was just 11, and she and her sister Martha helped out in her father’s apothecary. They mixed medicines, ordered supplies and made deliveries around town.

When Elizabeth reached her late teens their wayward cousin, Henry Winthrop, came to live with them. John Winthrop, despairing of his son, had asked if Henry could live in the regulated Fones household after his return from a failed business trip. Thomas Fones, to his regret, said ‘yes.’

Henry drank, gambled, joked and made friends with papists. Elizabeth thought the reckless and undisciplined young man was terrific. Soon they decided to marry. Her father, tired of covering Henry’s gambling debts, didn’t approve.

They tied the knot in a wedding described as ‘tedious’ on April 25, 1629. Two weeks later, Thomas Fones died.

Elizabeth’s sister Martha made a more sensible match, marrying Henry’s serious brother, John Winthrop, Jr.

John Winthrop, Jr.

Two years later, Henry sailed with his father to North America in the Great Puritan Migration. Elizabeth, pregnant with their first child, stayed behind.

Tragedy No. 1

Henry never saw his child. On the day after his ship arrived in the New World, he and some others decided to explore. He spotted a canoe across a river and he tried to swim to it. Halfway across, severe cramps seized him and he drowned.

“My son Henry, my son Henry, ah my poor child,” wrote John Winthrop.

Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake

John Winthrop then urged Elizabeth and his new granddaughter, Martha Johana Winthrop, to sail to Massachusetts and join him. And so they did.

Her prospects seemed to brighten in the New World, where her uncle arranged her marriage to Roger Feake, a mild-mannered, devout goldsmith.

The couple moved to Watertown, Mass., where they began to acquire large parcels of land. Robert served as selectman and as lieutenant in the local militia. His captain, Daniel Patrick, was a blustery, uncouth womanizer with a Dutch wife. Patrick would play a large role in Elizabeth’s life.

John Wintrhop landing in the New World.

Robert and Elizabeth Fones Feake lived in Watertown for nine years, and Elizabeth had three more children.

In 1636, Robert and Elizabeth Feake wrote to John Winthrop, Jr., in Connecticut telling them they planned to move to Wethersfield (then known as Watertown). They were no longer in-laws, as her sister, Martha, had died and Winthrop had remarried. But they were still cousins.

Their plans to move to Wethersfield fell through, as the Pequot War broke out. So instead, for reasons unknown, Elizabeth and Robert Feake, along with their growing family, followed Daniel Patrick to the deep wilderness of southwestern Connecticut.

Patrick may have wanted to leave Massachusetts after the Puritans imposed humiliating punishments for his sexual escapades. Patrick had a Dutch wife and had served with the Dutch military, so perhaps he wanted to be near Dutch New Amsterda. Now New York City, it was then the seat of government for Dutch New Netherlands.

Whatever the case, it was a bad move.

Geography Is Destiny

Greenwich wasn’t exactly in the middle of nowhere. In fact, it was smack in the middle of two colonies (Dutch New Netherlands and New Haven) and an unincorporated settlement. All three wanted it.

It was located just southwest of Stamford, an independent Puritan settlement of about 58 houses. Stamford lay beyond the jurisdiction of the New Haven Colony, whose leaders didn’t claim Stamford for fear of provoking a war with New Netherlands.

In 1640, the Feakes and the Patricks arrived in a small boat in what is now Old Greenwich. The couples then exchanged 20 coats for land with the local Indians—but they only honored the deal with 11 coats.

Elizabeth bought her own, separate piece of property. For more than a century people called it Elizabeth’s Neck.

The Indians viewed the transaction as more of a rental than a purchase, permission to use the land. The English, of course, viewed it as a transfer of property. As usual, that caused problems.

Old Greenwich today

Groenwits

From the start, threats from Indians and the nearby Dutch plagued the two families. So Daniel Patrick and Elizabeth – not Robert – Feake pledged their loyalty to the Dutch in 1642. Robert Feake, described as ‘now sick,’ may have been too far gone to sign it himself.

Greenwich became Groenwits, and it served as the eastern border of New Netherlands.

Elizabeth and Robert Feake had two more children, which they had baptized in New Amsterdam.

Mental Illness

To some of her contemporaries, Elizabeth was a grasping, amoral woman who drove her meek husband crazy by thoroughly dominating him.

Missy Wolfe, in Insubordinate Spirit, wrote that testimony about Robert Feake’s state of mind included a damning statement: “He exhibited a more than ordinary respect towards his late wife, and that he in our opinion was more easily to be seduced by her to do whatever she wished, than what was wise and reasonable.”

According to others, the hapless Feake couldn’t do much at all.

Robert Feake was described as ‘unfit to dispose a plantation’ and ‘unsettled and troubled in his understanding and his brain.’ Several witnesses testified that Robert Feake’s ‘God-fearing heart was so absorbed with spiritual and heavenly things that he little thought of the things of this life, and took neither heed nor care of what was tendered to his external property.’

William Hallett

In 1643, a Dutch soldier murdered Daniel Patrick. Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake and Daniel Patrick’s widow Anneke were left with 11 children to raise in the otherwise unpopulated settlement. Tensions were rising between the Indians and the Europeans. In March 1644 a mixed force of English and Dutch would massacre 500 Indians just 15 miles away. The English in Stamford couldn’t or wouldn’t protect the two families in Greenwich. And Elizabeth found her husband completely useless.

At some point an Englishman named William Hallett showed up in Greenwich. How and exactly when isn’t clear.

But Hallett was neither foolish nor crazy like Elizabeth’s husbands. In fact, he was smart and able. And with permission from the addled Robert Feake, Hallett moved in and took over management of his property. Feake, however, never made his intentions completely clear about what he wanted done with his property.

Elizabeth now found herself vulnerable to the English colonists in Stamford, who had an eye on her Greenwich real estate. So did New Haven Colony.

With Relatives Like These

Two ambitious young men—her son-in-law and her husband’s nephew—handed the Puritan magistrates the tools to seize her property.

The Thomas Lyon house, still standing in Greenwich.

In 1646, Thomas Lyon married Elizabeth’s frail 16-year-old daughter, Martha Johana Winthrop. And Tobias Feake, Robert’s nephew, married Daniel Patrick’s widow. Then Elizabeth Feake and William Hallett tried to sell a piece of property jointly owned by Robert Feake and Daniel Patrick.

Thomas Lyon and Tobias Feake viewed that property as theirs. They began to spread salacious rumors about Elizabeth and William, claiming they had no right to sell the land. Lyon had moved into the Feake household, and wrote a letter to John Winthrop, his wife’s grandfather, claiming William had gotten Elizabeth pregnant. He also wrote to the English authorities in the New Haven Colony.

Tobias Feake chimed in with the claim that William Hallett did not have a legitimate right to sell the property.

The magistrates in Stamford issued an edict: If Elizabeth wanted to stay in Greenwich and keep her property, William Hallett would have to leave. If she left Greenwich, the Puritan authorities in Stamford would seize her children and her real estate.

Never mind that the English magistrates had no jurisdiction over Dutch Greenwich. And that Elizabeth had divorced Robert Feake and married William Hallett.

Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett

In March 1647, Robert Feake left Greenwich. He made over his property and half his cash to Elizabeth and William, and left for England.

On April 14, 1647, Elizabeth sailed to New Amsterdam to baptize her youngest Feake child, Sarah. She also got a Dutch divorce on the grounds of her adultery. And then she married William Hallett.

Where Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett got married is a matter of speculation. One of William Hallett’s descendants claims four possibilities:

At New Amsterdam in the Church on the Fort by the pastor in 1647.
At New Amsterdam by the Dutch Governor, Willem Kieft in 1647.
In Greenwich by William Hallett, magistrate (Hallett was a Dutch official with the power to marry) in 1647.
At New London by John Winthrop, Jr., in 1648.

John Winthrop, Jr., had stature among Puritans in what is now Connecticut. By 1648 he had already served as governor of the New Saybrook Colony. He would eventually serve as governor of the Connecticut Colony and play a big role in merging the disparate settlements into one.

In July 1648, the governor of New Haven Colony, Theophilus Eaton, told John Winthrop, Jr., that he had directed William Hallett to settle his messy affairs in the English, not the Dutch, courts. Winthrop also found out the Connecticut Colony (then separate from New Haven) ordered the Halletts arrested. The magistrates in Hartford wanted them to appear before them to answer charges of adultery in Connecticut.

Taking Flight

Elizabeth and William Hallett did not intend to comply. Instead, they had already spirited away from Greenwich their children, two cows and their household possessions. They found sanctuary in New London, with Cousin John Winthrop, Jr.

Missy Wolfe in Insubordinate Spirit argues that John Winthrop, Jr., engineered Elizabeth’s divorce and remarriage. As a devout Puritan, he would have had no problem with divorce. Puritans allowed, though rarely, escape from the chains of matrimony, because they viewed it as a civil matter.

Peter Stuyvesant

Peter Stuyvesant took over as director of New Amsterdam in 1647 and seized the Feake-Patrick-Hallett property. Cousin John Winthrop negotiated with him to let the Halletts return to Greenwich to work their land. Finally in 1649 they did return.

Elizabeth wrote a profuse letter of thanks to her cousin, explaining they had finally settled their real estate issues with Robert Feake. He had returned from England and resettled in Watertown.

More Trouble

But the Halletts wouldn’t stay long in Greenwich. The English and the Dutch entered into the Treaty of Hartford in 1650. It created a hard boundary between Connecticut and New York. The treaty reflected diminished Dutch strength vis-à-vis the English. But much of Greenwich, including the Hallett’s property, still lay within Dutch jurisdiction, to the vast annoyance of the New Haven Colony leaders.

The Puritan colonies continued to try to take over Greenwich. Eventually New Haven colony did succeed in absorbing Greenwich.

The Halletts, though, depended on the Dutch for protection from English prosecution. In 1650, the Connecticut Colony issued another arrest warrant for the Halletts.

A year after they returned to Greenwich, they moved deeper into Dutch territory on Long Island, across the East River from Gracie Mansion. Their land—12 acres granted by Peter Stuyvesant–is in present day Astoria near Hellgate.

They sold the rest of their Greenwich property to an Englishman.

New Amsterdam

In New Amsterdam, the Halletts survived an Indian attack and the wrath of Peter Stuyvesant. Perhaps their experience with the Connecticut Puritans had soured them on the religion. Eventually they found the Quaker Way. Stuyvesant, a firm Dutch Reformed Church member, tried to banish them.

Over time, William and Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett amassed a 2,200-acre plantation in Astoria from Bowery Bay to Sunswick Creek.

Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett died in the early 1670s. Her descendants include the painter Robert Feke and Robert Bowne, who started a publishing company that until 2010 was the oldest publicly traded company in the United States.

The End of Robert Feake

Feake in 1647 sailed to England, where he received a pardon from the House of Commons in March 1650 for an unspecified crime,

Then he returned to Watertown in 1650.

By 1660, his mental illness had reached such a stage that the Town of Watertown took care of him. He died in 1663 at the home of Deacon Samuel Thatcher.

With thanks to Insubordinate Spirit: A True Story of Life and Loss in Earliest America 1610-1665 by Missy Wolf and to Roger Thompson in Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630-1680.

Images: Images: Thomas Lyon House, By Joshua Koerner – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28725770. This story was updated in 2022.

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Harriet Hosmer, Pioneering Woman Artist

Harriet Hosmer was one of the best known artists — and one of the best known professional women — of her time. She paved the way for women to become sculptors, while commenting on the status of women through her work.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

She was also one of the most independent women of her age.

“I honor every woman who has strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another,” she once wrote.

Harriet Hosmer

She was born Oct. 9, 1830, in Watertown, Mass. Her father, a prominent physician, deeply mourned the loss of his wife and three other children to tuberculosis. He then determined his surviving child would be free and strong. So he influenced her to build her strength by rowing, skating and riding.

The Prince of Wales at Harriet Hosmer’s studio

Dr. Hiram Hosmer supported his daughter’s early decision to become a sculptor. Barred from studying anatomy on the East Coast because of her sex, he sent her to St. Louis to study anatomy at the Missouri Medical College. On one trip west, she won a footrace to the top of a mountain in Iowa. It’s now called Mount Hosmer in honor of her victory.

By 1851 Harriet Hosmer had earned enough commissions for portrait busts to return to Boston and pursue her art.

She then befriended the writer Lydia Marie Child and the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. Cushman planned to give up the stage and move to Rome. In 1852, she took 22-year-old Harriet Hosmer with her.

“I am soul-bound and thought-bound in this land of dollars and cents,” Hosmer wrote.

Strange Sisterhood

Harriet Hosmer at work

In Rome, Harriet Hosmer had many relationships with women, including Cushman’s partner Matilda Hays. She was committed for 25 years to Louisa, Lady Ashburton, a widowed Scottish noblewoman who she called her “sposa.” Hosmer, who dressed like a man, called herself “hubbie.”

When she first came to Rome, Hosmer began studying under leading British sculptor John Gibson. As the life of every party, she played a central role in an expatriate group of artists and writers. Those included Edmonia Lewis, sculptor William Wetmore Story and Henry James. James described a “strange sisterhood of lady sculptors” that included Anne Whitney, whose statue of Samuel Adams stands in front of Faneuil Hall. Also belonging to the group: Louisa Lander, the great-granddaughter of Elias Haskett Derby; and Margaret Foley, the daughter of a Vermont farmhand. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about them in The Marble Faun.

Hosmer was probably the only one of the group who earned enough money from her art to support herself. She worked alone in her large studio, lived by herself and went horseback riding without a male escort.

In 1854 Harriet Hosmer made a career breakthrough: a statue of Puck so popular she then replicated it 30 times. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, bought a copy. Today, her Puck and the Owl at the Boston Athenaeum are on the Women’s Heritage Trail.

Hear Me Roar

Most of her subjects were tragic women from myth and literature.

Zenobia in Chains

Her masterpiece, Zenobia in Chains, sold for about $400,000 in 1859. It is a seven-foot-tall sculpture of a 3^rd-century queen captured by a Roman emperor and paraded through the streets in chains. The dignified, clothed statue of Zenobia is Hosmer’s own commentary on the fear of female power. She now stands in the St. Louis Art Museum.

“Zenobia is one of the most famous – and controversial – objects produced during the “golden age” of American classical sculpture,” wrote curator John Murdoch. “Some critics at the time questioned whether a work of such sublime expression, on such a scale, and requiring such power of hand and arm in the carving, could have been done by a woman.”

Her neoclassical style of art fell out of favor after the Civil War, and she devoted more of her time to turning limestone into marble and inventing a perpetual motion machine.

Thomas Hart Benton by Harriet Hosmer

In 1860, the State of Missouri commissioned her to create a monumental bronze statue of Thomas Hart Benton.

Harriet Hosmer then grew more and more involved in the women’s rights movement, befriending Susan B. Anthony and joining with the Chicago women’s rights group, the Queen Isabella Society. The society commissioned her to sculpt Isabella of Castille for the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

She spent the rest of her life in Chicago and Terre Haute, Ind. Harriet Hosmer died at Watertown, Mass., on February 21, 1908.

Photos: Thomas Hart Benton By Whitebox at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15475106; Zenobia in Chains By Harriet Hosmer – Own work by QuartierLatin1968, 2011-05-27, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15381767.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Mount Auburn Cemetery, a 19th Century Tourist Attraction

In 1846, 16-year-old Emily Dickinson made a rare foray outside of her Amherst, Mass., home to visit the biggest tourist attraction on the East Coast: Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Two years later, an estimated 60,000 people visited the famous pleasure (and burial) ground — a staggering figure for the day. During the 19^th century, Mount Auburn Cemetery ranked with Niagara Falls and Mount Vernon as a popular travel destination. And that was even before many of its famous dead were buried in it.

Mount Auburn Cemetery later inspired one of the most famous parks in the world.

19^th Century Tourist Attraction

Mount Auburn Cemetery was originally known (appropriately enough) as Stone’s Farm, 170 rolling acres between Watertown and Cambridge, Mass.

Built in 1831, it was designed by Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn, son of Secretary of War Henry Dearborn and named for Dearborn’s friend Alexander Scammell. He had help from Jacob Bigelow, a physician who thought it unhealthy to bury people under churches. Alexander Wadsworth, cousin of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also helped design it. Later he would be buried there.

Dearborn, a lawyer and horticulturist, designed Mount Auburn as an artful wilderness. It had winding avenues and paths and a tower on top of Mount Auburn for a panoramic view of Boston. The first rural cemetery in America, it had an arboretum and an experimental garden.

Back then, public parks didn’t belong in the American landscape. Mount Auburn Cemetery quickly became a 19^th century tourist attraction. Dearborn intended it that way. The cemetery and garden, he wrote, ‘will present one of the most instructive, magnificent and pleasant promenades in our country.’

Model Park

The rich came by carriage. The working classes came by streetcar. A slew of guidebooks, literature and personal travelers’ accounts then spread Mount Auburn’s fame as a pleasure ground. Today it has a mobile app.

Miscellaneous view of Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing observed the hordes of visitors at Mount Auburn. He also noticed people came to Boston solely to see the cemetery. And he sensed the pent-up demand for public places where people could relax and socialize outdoors.

”The idea took the public mind by storm,” he wrote. Downing recommended Mount Auburn as a model for more public parks. He thought a nation that called itself a republic should encourage people of all social classes to mingle in public places.

“The true policy of republics is to foster the taste of great public libraries, sculpture and picture galleries, parks and gardens,” he wrote.

Downing then died in 1852 in a steamboat accident on his 37^th birthday. But he had paved the way for his partner, Calvin Vaux, and a young Frederick Law Olmsted. They designed New York’s Central Park, Hartford’s Bushnell Park and Springfield’s Elm Park.

Today, tourists still visit Mount Auburn Cemetery to walk winding paths in a picturesque landscape and to seek out the graves of the dead. The famous people buried there include people you’d expect: Nathaniel Bowditch, Robert Gould Shaw and Julia Ward Howe. Some of its inhabitants you wouldn’t expect: Bernard Malamud, Curt Gowdy and Joyce Chen.

Other notables also include Margaret Fuller, Harriet Jacobs, Winslow Homer and both Henry Cabot Lodges.

This story was updated in 2022. Miscellaneous view of Mount Auburn Cemetery By Daderot at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18516143. Featured image also By Daderot CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003519.

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Secrets to a Long Life From Holders of The Boston Post Cane

When the Town of Westmoreland, N.H., gave its Boston Post Cane to 113-year-old Mary Ray in 2008, she was believed to be the third oldest person in the world. Born in 1895 on Prince Edward Island, she was the second oldest when she died two months short of her 115^th birthday. A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, she often ate cake and ice cream after a game.

Mary Ray

Year after year in town after New England town, the board of selectmen presents the gold-knobbed cane to a very old person. It often hapens in the presence of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Often the recipient receives gifts or pins or plaques. A newspaper photographer snaps a photo and a reporter records a witty or poignant comment.

Usually the reporter asks the secret to a long life. The answers then range from luck to clean living to daily exercise. An awful lot of Boston Post Cane holders seem to love the Boston Red Sox.

On May 5, 2011, 100-year-old Ruth Green threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park. The Lunenberg, Mass., holder of the cane, she had seen six Red Sox titles.

Boston Post Cane

Edwin Grozier

The tradition of awarding the Boston Post Cane to a town’s oldest resident began in 1909, when Boston Post owner Edwin Grozier dreamed up the publicity stunt. The Post reigned as the most popular newspaper in New England for a century until it folded in 1956. William Beals founded it in 1831 along with Charles G. Greene, younger brother of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene.

The newspaper distributed the cane to 700 towns in the Post’s circulation area in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. They were made by J.F. Fradley and Co., a New York manufacturer, from ebony shipped in 7-foot lengths from the Congo. A 14-karat engraved gold knob topped the cane.

The towns only loaned the canes. Upon the recipient’s death, they were to be returned to the town. Sometimes that didn’t happen. Two Massachusetts towns, Dover and Watertown, lost the canes for a century before finding them and reviving the tradition. The cane belonging to Lee, Mass., was found in the rubbish in Charlton, Mass., after 50 years. Farmingdale, Maine, recently got its cane back in two pieces, so now the recipient gets a plaque, as do many. Someone stole the Leominster, Mass., cane from the town offices during a renovation project. It later turned up on eBay. The town contacted the seller and ‘reacquired’ it.

Controversies

The Boston Post Cane Information Center has tracked down the canes from 494 towns of the original 700. The site reports several town, such as Florida, Mass., never got canes but made up their own.

According to the site, the Town of Barre, Mass., in October 2015 presented canes to Bess E. Difley and Warner F. “Bill” Smith, the only two recipients known to be born on the very same day — July 29. 1914.

John Smith, first Boston Post Cane recipient in Grafton, N.H.

In Hudson, Mass., two people born the same year got into a fight over who should have the cane. The selectmen wrote to the Boston Post, asking what they should do. The newspaper told them to do what they wanted, so they retired the cane. Then Hudson brought it back in 2004 and gave it to Col. Adelbert M. Mossman, 96.

In the early 1970s, Hampton, N.H., retired the cane. Selectman Ashton Norton called it too much of a pain. “We were having problems with people in nursing homes, and there was no way to find out who was the oldest or who was a native,” Norton said. “Then we’d give the cane out, and we’d get complaints that we didn’t give it to the right person. It got to be so much trouble the board decided to leave it in the town office building.”

Fear of the Cane

“People started to fear getting the cane,” said Hampton Town Clerk Jane Kelley. “The cane would be given out, and within a week, that person would be dead. It was awful.”

Nantucket put a stop to the tradition around 1998, when it became clear the cane was not a good omen for its residents.

In April 2006 the Bow, N.H., Board of Selectmen extended the time between the death of a Boston Post Cane holder and awarding the honor to a new citizen from 45 days to 60 days, ‘for respect and grievance purposes.’

In Unity, Maine, several people declined the cane because they didn’t want their neighbors knowing their ages.

Patten, Mass., gave the Boston Post Cane in 2006 to Lillian Perry Wheaton, age 96, at their Pioneer Days celebration. Lillian refused to take it home with her because she considered it bad luck.

Longevity Secrets

Others enjoy receiving the cane, especially if they get a party in their honor. As her 108th birthday approached in September 2016, Mary Cousins of Deer Isle, Maine, said she didn’t know the secret. “All I know is that I’m here, and I’m very thankful and happy for that.”

Cane holders often credited their longevity to work, genetics, God’s will, friends, family and exercise. In March 2011, George Barner received the cane from Kennebunk, Maine, at 102. He attributed his long life to playing tennis and not smoking. Gordon Maddix of Berwick, Maine, forced himself to walk every day.

When Virginia Day Zimmerman of Monson, Maine, received the cane, she still swam every morning from Memorial Day to her birthday at the beginning of October.

Florence Brayson in Exeter, Maine, shared the secret to a long and happy life: Keep your mouth shut and mind your business. Anne-Marie Veilleux, 99, of Jay, Maine, said she never let anything bother her. Myrtle Mileage, of Mexico, Maine, said, “I just do as I please. I hear only what I want to hear.”

In 2009, Foxborough, Mass., passed its cane to Harry Cederlund, age 100. He said he lived long because he ate well, didn’t smoke or drink and left the window open at night to let in fresh air.

But take heart, smokers and drinkers. Lillie Young Weissenberger received the cane in 2011 in Washington, Maine, at 94. Asked if she drank or smoke or caroused, she smiled and said, “Oh, yes. We hung around with racing people, remember. We did all of that!”

Boston Post Cane: Not Funny

Some Boston Post cane holders demonstrated it’s never too late to get started.

Maude Thomas of Falmouth, Mass., received the cane at age 108 in 2010. She worked as an office manager at an architectural firm in Boston into her 80’s, enrolled in Harvard University and received her degree at age 75.

Doris “Granny D.” Haddock got the cane by Dublin, N.H., at age 95. She became famous when she walked across the continental United States between the ages of 88 and 90. She then lived another five years after receiving the cane.

Goffstown, N.H., gave the cane to May Gruber on her 100^th birthday in 2012. She had led the Pandora knitwear company, run a 10K at age 65 and held a sign during the Occupy Wall Street protest at 99.

Becket, Mass., gave its cane to Margaret Peg Lynch, a sitcom pioneer who created the Ethel and Albert comedy series. When she got the cane, she thought about doing a show on Ethel and Albert getting older. But, she said, she couldn’t think of anything funny.

This story about the Boston Post Cane was updated in 2023.

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New England Places To Take Mom on Mother’s Day

Everyone knows about historic New England places like the Freedom Trail or Robert Frost’s Farm. But the New England Historical Society can take you to historic sites that you may not even realize are historic.

Loammi Baldwin House next to a portion of the Middlesex Canal

Even a modern-day restaurant may have a story to tell of long ago. Take, for example, a Chinese restaurant in suburban Boston. Sichuan Garden in Woburn, Mass., is in a former Federal-style mansion that was once the home of Loammi Baldwin, a Revolutionary War veteran. The Baldwin apple was named after him, but even that wasn’t his claim to fame. He built the Middlesex Canal, once a major commercial waterway. Remnants of the canal, which opened in 1803, can be seen right near the restaurant. Or visit the Middlesex Canal Museum 20 minutes away at 71 Faulkner St. in North Billerica.

If Mom likes Chinese, think about taking her to the Sichuan Gourmet in nearby Billerica. Or to any one of the town’s 50 restaurants. Billerica experienced an extraordinary baby boom when the War of 1812 broke out. The 90 families in the town produced 1,043 children, or 11.6 children per family. Can there be a more appropriate New England place to celebrate Mother’s Day?

Well, perhaps so … Portsmouth, R.I., Cambridge and Watertown, Mass., come to mind. Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, came up with the idea for Mother’s Day, though she thought June 2 would be the ideal date. She and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, had a summer home in Portsmouth called Oak Glen. It’s now on the National Register of Historic Places. Though the house is a private residence, there are plenty of other historic sites in Portsmouth (as well as 38 restaurants, a vineyard, topiary garden and polo). Portsmouth, which celebrated its 375^th anniversary two years ago, boasts a Revolutionary War fort, a home where the Marquis de Lafayette stayed before the Battle of Rhode Island and the training facility where John F. Kennedy learned about his PT Boat.

But we digress.

Mount Auburn Cemetery

We thought of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown because that’s where Julia Ward Howe is buried – along with Nathaniel Bowditch, Charlotte Cushman, Fanny Farmer, Dorothea Dix, Francis Parkman, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Winslow Homer and Edwin Land – to name a few. Mount Auburn isn’t just a cemetery, it’s also a National Historic Landmark, a botanical garden, an outdoor museum of art and architecture, and an important habitat for urban wildlife. The cemetery is credited with starting the American green space movement. If the weather’s good, it’s a gorgeous place for a tranquil stroll, as there are miles of roads and paved paths.

As long as we’re thinking about Julia Ward Howe, we can’t forget Boston, which is where Howe and Gridley lived for a while on Beacon Hill. It’s also a great place to stroll if Mom doesn’t like hills, and there are lots of places to eat. The Howe-Gridley home at 13 Chestnut St., still a private residence, is on the Women’s Heritage Trail.

Sweet Pea Restaurant in Riverton, Conn.

If Mom’s into antiques, she might be into a trip to the Village of Riverton in Barkhamsted, Conn. There the Hitchcock Chair Co. is still making chairs, after a hiatus or two since Lambert Hitchcock started his factory on the Farmington River in 1818. Riverton has a historic district that includes a post office, the Riverton General store, Sweetpea’s Restaurant, Still River Antiques, Greenwood Glass Blowing Studio and Gallery, the Riverton Inn and the Hitchcock Chair Store.

Or how about Old Sturbridge Village? On Mother’s Day, all moms are admitted free. The museum’s village gardens feature medicinal plants used by mothers during the early 19th century, while village households and shops offer insight on parenting back in the day. There’s a prize drawing for two handcrafted gold leaf candle sconces worth $500. Old Sturbridge is also hosting a Mother’s Day brunch, with a children’s station as well. Click here for more.

Judith Sargent Murray

Judith Sargent Murray, born in Gloucester, Mass., is another Mom who could be honored with a visit. She was inspired by ideals of equality and empowerment that spawned the American Revolution. She was a prolific writer who compiled her writing into a three-volume set purchased by George Washington, John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren. Though she only had one daughter who lived to adulthood, she was responsible for educating 12 children. Late in life, she moved to Natchez, Miss., to be with her daughter and was pretty much forgotten after her death in 1820. It wasn’t until 1984 that 20,000 letters she’d written and copied were discovered in a Mississippi plantation house. Historians are still trying to digest them all.

Sargent House Museum

Gloucester is in itself worth a trip, with its picturesque waterfront, seafood restaurants, Cape Ann Museum, Eastern Point neighborhood and settings that appeared in the film The Perfect Storm. You might want to wait until Memorial Day weekend, when Murray’s home — now the Sargent House Museum – opens Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The high Georgian style house has paintings by another famous member of the Sargent family, John Singer.

If you’re a fan of John Singer Sargent (we certainly are) his paintings can be viewed at the Isabella Stewart Garden Museum, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Worcester Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the RISD Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Currier Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Mark Your Calendar

Revolutionary War re-enactment at the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum

On Saturday, May 14, take a journey through the life of a colonial soldier at the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum in Wethersfield, one of the prettiest and most historic towns in Connecticut. Revolutionary War re-enactor Anthony Riccio will demonstrate how a Continental soldier fired a musket as the finale to the museum’s “Revolutionary Soldier” Digging Deeper Tour. Riccio and Sal Carmosino will show how to use the contents of a typical soldier’s haversack, including a canteen, sealing wax, dice, flint, gunpowder horn and mouth harp. You’ll learn how the army developed under the leadership of George Washington, who stayed at one of the museum’s four colonial homes during the American Revolution. The Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum even has a restored colonial privy where George Washington may well have sat. For more information, click here.

Photo of Mount Auburn Cemetery by Swampyank at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0; Photo of Sargent House Museum by Doug Kerr on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0 By Wikipedia.

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