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Waterville Maine

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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Oliver Otis Howard, The Mainer Who Founded Howard University

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard thought he was fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to free any slaves.

Howard had earned the nickname of “the Christian General” for his deep, overbearing piety. His men didn’t always appreciate his hectoring them about the Ten Commandments or the evils of booze.

His moral certainty led him to great achievements and to terrible deeds. He founded Howard University, which educated 150,000 freed slaves. But he later led a massacre of women and children belonging to the Nez Perce tribe because they wouldn’t move to a reservation.

Oliver Otis Howard by Matthew Brady

But sometimes Oliver Otis Howard couldn’t rely on his moral compass. During the Civil War, he faced a puzzling dilemma: Should he disobey orders and allow a fugitive from slavery her freedom?

Oliver Otis Howard

Born in Leeds, Maine, on Nov. 8, 1830, his mother sent him away to live with relatives after his father died when he was very young. He graduated from Bowdoin College at 19, and went on to West Point. A diligent student, he ranked fourth in a class of 46.

In 1856, he was a lonely young soldier stationed in Florida, far from his wife and baby boy. Seeking comfort, he attended a Methodist prayer meeting and experienced a spiritual awakening. He felt a “new well spring within me, a joy, a peace & a trusting spirit.” He sensed God had destined him for great things.

His military career, like the rest of his life, veered from highlight to lowlight. He won the Medal of Honor for leading a charge at the Battle of Fair Oaks, which cost him his right arm. But he suffered ignominious defeats at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. His men started calling him “Uh-Oh” Howard.

Freedmen’s Bureau

After the Civil War he led the Freedmen’s Bureau, a Reconstruction program that helped former slaves. The Bureau had hundreds of agents in the South distributing food and medicine and finding jobs and schooling for the new citizens.

Howard issued an order to divide up land from confiscated plantations and give it to the people who’d worked them as slaves. But while he vacationed in Maine, President Andrew Johnson reversed his order. In the end, anyone who’d received the promised 40 acres and a mule had to give them back.

Johnson viewed Oliver Otis Howard as a fanatic, and he tried to stymie him at every turn. Howard eventually concluded southerners were still fighting the Civil War and wouldn’t change their attitudes. So he turned his energies to education, and he established a school that bears his name today – Howard University. He served as president from 1869-1874.

Howard University

Howard explained the importance of Howard University in his 1908 autobiography. In the South, white people who opposed educating black people wouldn’t permit any room or building for use as a school. From 1865-67, mobs all over the South burned schools and churches used as schools. They flogged teachers and drove them away. A number of times, they murdered them.

Howard University started on three acres in Washington, D.C. Classes began in 1867 with five students, all daughters of the school’s white founders. Though it emphasized teacher training, Howard added a law school, a medical school and a seminary under its first president.

Howard University, 1868

Eventually, black students and faculty would outnumber whites, and Howard today produces more black doctorates than any other university. Alumni include Toni Morrison, Andrew Young, Kamala Harris and Thurgood Marshall.

Founders library at Howard University

Enemies

Oliver Otis Howard’s efforts on behalf of the former slaves earned him plenty of enemies, and they got him charged with corruption in running the Freedmen’s Bureau. After years of litigation the courts exonerated him, but he nearly went bankrupt paying his lawyers. And in 1872, Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For his next act, he moved west to kick Indians off their land. He commanded the Department of the Columbia from Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. His men pursued and slaughtered Nez Perce Indians who refused to move to a reservation.

Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce resistance to Howard’s campaign to remove them from their land.

In Howard’s mind, he tried to do for the Indians what he had tried to do for freed slaves. He was giving them land on which they could lead good Christian lives, only they refused. Finally corralled into a reservation in Oklahoma, many died of disease.

Oliver Otis Howard at Governors Island in 1893.

Howard finally commanded the Atlantic Military Division at Fort Columbus on Governors Island in New York before retiring in 1894 as a major general. Then in 1896 he founded Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., to educate “mountain whites.”

He died in 1909 in Burlington, Vt., on Oct. 26, 1909. He lies buried in Lakeview Cemetery.

Greatly Puzzled

How did Oliver Otis Howard’s moral compass swing so wildly from educating freed slaves to slaughtering Indians?

One incident early in his career illuminates his thought process. He prided himself on following orders, and had difficulty resolving the moral dilemma that created.

Just after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, the 30-year-old Oliver Otis Howard commanded a brigade. He and his men were garrisoned on a farm just west of Alexandria, Va.

First Battle of Bull Run

Abraham Lincoln aimed to quell the southern rebellion without touching slavery. He felt he had to, otherwise the loyal border states might also rebel. Military commanders were to return escaped slaves to their owners.

Howard was entertaining visitors from Waterville, Maine, when a picket guard brought a frightened young woman to him. He described her as “tall straight, healthful and active,” with a boy of about two years old in her arms.

He saw the woman’s terror, and reassured her. In his autobiography, he recounted the incident.

“What do you wish?” I asked. “Sir, I’m a slave woman, and this here’s my child. Let me and my child go free!”

Property?

Meanwhile, a poorly dressed, shrill, sallow white woman was ushered in. “That there woman is my slave,” she said. “I have always treated her well, and here she is. She has run off. Now, sir, you must send her back to me, for she is mine. She and the boy, they’re my property.”

I found myself under most stringent orders not to harbor any slave property. The white woman, seeing my embarrassment, became more and more excited, and soon began to use abusive language, directed partially to me, but mainly to her slave.

The woman kept pressing her child to her breast and with her large eyes filled with tears continued to look toward me, repeating: “Oh! my child, my child!”

Howard realized he had to decide the case. He turned to the white woman and said, “There’s your property, take it!” She replied, “But I can’t take it. She’s stronger than I! You must give me a guard.”

That was too much for Howard. He said, “No, no, I will not give you a guard. I will never use bayonets to drive a poor girl and child into bondage.”

Both women went away, and the young fugitive found her way to Washington, D.C., and to freedom. His guests from Maine, ardent abolitionists, chastised him for his hesitation.

What to do with enslaved people presented a quandary until another New Englander, Benjamin Butler, declared them “contraband of war.”

Read Oliver Otis Howard’s account of the incident in his autobiography here. Image of Howard University PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13705310. Founders Library By Derek E. Morton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74173648. This story was updated in 2023.

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Abner Small, Civil War Hero, Imprisoned in Confederate Hell Hole

Abner Small of Waterville, Maine, narrowly evaded capture at the Battle of Gettysburg, only to be taken prisoner of war 13 months later.

He was first incarcerated in Richmond, Va., at Libby Prison, infamous for overcrowding, malnutrition and disease. He survived his ordeal and was exchanged for Confederate prisoners in time to lead his regiment in the last days of the Civil War.

Libby Prison

Battle of Gettysburg

Abner Small was 25 years old when he enlisted in the Maine 3^rd Infantry Regiment on June 4, 1861, according to the Maine Historical Society.

He was mustered out of the 3rd Maine and commissioned an officer in the newly formed Maine 16th Infantry Regiment, famous for its heroism at Gettysburg. The regiment’s delaying action on June 1, 1863, allowed the retreat of 16,000 Union Army troops, but at a dreadful cost. More than 200 were killed, captured or wounded. Only 38 lived to fight another day. Abner Small was one of them.

Maj. Abner Small

After the battle, he wrote how the men of the Maine 16^th prevented the Confederates from capturing their flags – the regimental flag and the Stars and Stripes — as they overran what was left of the regiment:

“For a few last moments our little regiment defended angrily its hopeless challenge, but it was useless to fight longer. We looked at our colors, and our faces burned. We must not surrender those symbols of our pride and our faith.” The color bearers “appealed to the colonel,” Small wrote, “and with his consent they tore the flags from the staves and ripped the silk into shreds; and our officers and men that were near took each a shred.”

He won special notice for his bravery during the battle.

Battle of Globe Tavern

Thirteen months later on Aug. 18, 1864, Abner Small was captured south of Petersburg, Va., at the Battle of Globe Tavern. After he suffered through Libby Prison, he was taken to Salisbury in Rowan County, N.C., then Danville Prison in Danville, Va.

The Globe Tavern. Photo by Matthew Brady.

“Our condition is humiliating, degrading & almost unbearable,” he wrote in his diary on Nov. 17, 1864. He complained of cold, hunger, filth, vermin and illness.

Money helped. The prisoners sold their possessions for Confederate scrip, which they exchanged for food. Small sold his watch and shared the proceeds with his men. Not all officers were so generous. Small complained about those who simply looked out for themselves.

I am sick & hungry & can borrow no money
have no money – by no money neither
can I find the virtue called charity

On Aug. 19, 1864, Abner Small wrote in his diary:

Petersburg Va.

Captd (captured) on 18th with Capt. Conley, Lieuts. Broughton
& Chapman. Confined in lockup (negro prison) with E M (enlisted men)
until 11 A.M. 19th. Moved to island in Appomattox river
Sold watch for 150$ Confed. Scrip. Watkins scout
gave me 10$. While in Petersburg I gave
Lieut. Chapman 20$, Lieut [name erased] 10$
Wrote to Col T [Tilden]

Three Cheers

Abner Small then spent six months in Confederate prisons.

On Feb. 15, 1865, incarcerated at Danville, he learned he and the other prisoners would be exchanged for Confederate prisoners. “The welcome intelligence has at last arrived!” he wrote. “[W]e leave for Richmond for ex[change] on Friday & Saturday. 3 cheers were given…”

The first 200 men in alphabetical order left the prison by railroad on February 17. Small got no sleep that night. He then left the next day, arriving at Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., at 2 p.m. on February 18. The next day, “Enjoyed luxury of hot coffee milked and sugared!” he wrote.

Not until February 22 did he win his release.

Left the southern hell
at 8 A.M. placed our
feet on God’s soil near
Cox’s landing 10 A.M.
got sight of Stars & Stripes
at Aiken’s landing at
11:30 — Left A L [Aikens Landing] in “Geo.
Leary” at 1:30 P.M.
Ham white bread and coffee
issued — 1/2 ra [ration] whiskey.

On February 24, he received $233 for his service during December and January.

Aftermath

Twenty-one years later, Abner Small wrote a history of the Sixteenth Maine Regiment in the War of the Rebellion. He married right after the war and then married again after his first wife died. Small and his second wife had two sons, and he worked as head bookkeeper at the Dunn Edge Tool Co. He became the company’s treasurer, then clerk and eventually corporate officer of the Somerset Railroad.

He died in Oakland, Maine, in 1910.

With thanks to mainememory.net. Photo Detail of Libby Prison by Alexander Gardner. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story was updated in 2022.

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Sumner Davis, The Maine Stagecoach Driver Who Got a $100 Tip

Sumner Davis discovered a way to make money in the stagecoach business that didn’t involve passengers or mail – but it did involve discretion.

Stagecoach in Harrison, Maine

The undated photo above shows the stagecoach in front of the Elm House in Harrison, Maine, a small inland town west of Lewiston and south of Waterville. The stagecoach had left Norway and was on its way to Waterford.

During the early 19^th century, travel from Maine’s Sebago Lakes Region to Portland was a challenge. There were few good inland roads. It was much easier to travel by boat along the coast.

At the outset of the War of 1812, William Sawin started a mail route between Waterford and Portland on horseback. By 1815, he used a stagecoach to take people to Portland, then the state capital.

Sumner Davis, Stagecoach Entrepreneur

Stagecoaches were at first slow and uncomfortable. Passengers were jolted as the wagon bounced on springs over rough roads. But as the population increased, the roads improved. In 1827, Lewis Downing began making the fabled Concord coach with leather straps that caused the wagon to sway. Mark Twain described it as like “a cradle on wheels.”

Eventually, Sumner Davis of Harrison ran stagecoach lines from Waterford to Portland, from Brownfield to Bridgton to Norway. At the peak of the business, he had several stagecoaches and 30 drivers.

Davis made money running errands for his customers, as well as carrying mail and passengers. He learned that discretion paid dividends. According to Ernest R. Ward, in his 1966 book My First 60 Years in Harrison:

One estimable lady in Bridgton, for instance, used to have a gallon of “tonic” delivered to her home each week for which she paid the usual charge and in addition, probably due to the discreet manner in which Mr. Davis took care of her, presented him with a Christmas present of one hundred dollars each year for several years.

This story updated in 2022.

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The Reckless, Impetuous, Headstrong Benjamin Butler

[jpshare]Benjamin Butler was good at many things, but he was best at making enemies. He would become a criminal lawyer, businessman, Army general and Massachusetts governor. When he died, he was worth $7 million. His detractors accused him of corruption, and they were probably right.

Gen. Benjamin Butler

He was full of contradictions. He supported a law creating the 10-hour workday, but he opposed workers’ rights to strike for it. As a congressman he authored a civil rights bill and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allowed the federal government to prosecute the Klan in the South. But as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860 he supported Jefferson Davis for president. He supported workers’ rights to a

Benjamin Butler was born on Nov. 5, 1818, in Deerfield, N.H., and at the age of nine received a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy. He lasted one term because he got into fights. A schoolmate described him as a ‘reckless, impetuous, headstrong, boy.’

He grew up to be a reckless, impetuous, headstrong man who liked to fight.

His father died when he was young, so his mother moved to Lowell, Mass., to run a boardinghouse. He went to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, though he wanted to go to West Point. After college he opened a criminal law practice in Lowell. He married a well-to-do stage actress from Lowell named Sarah Hildreth, and they had four children.

When the Civil War broke out, he was elected a brigadier general in the Massachusetts militia, which was called up to duty. He started out well, quickly securing Annapolis, the seat of Maryland’s government, for the Union. He won the Battle of Forts Hatteras and Clark in North Carolina. He marched on to New Orleans, where he was appointed military governor. He began to make enemies in earnest.

Order 28

Butler was already hated in the South because he was the first to treat slaves as contraband and refuse to return them to their owners. He did do some good in New Orleans while he was in charge. He brought order to the city and donated $1,000 of his own money to buy food for the starving inhabitants. He hired the poor to clean the streets and allowed businesses that transported food to operate. But he also seized the property of Louisianans who refused to pledge loyalty to the Union, which would end up in the hands of a Butler consortium. He censored newspapers and antagonized foreign consuls.

All that was nothing compared to Order 28 of May 15, 1862. It stated any woman who showed contempt for a U.S. soldier would be treated as a “woman of the town plying her avocation” – that is, a prostitute.

He actually had good reason for the order. Women were throwing buckets of their own urine on soldiers of the Union Army, and nothing could be done about it because they were considered respectable. The order ended the attacks on the soldiers without any arrests, but provoked outrage in the North, the South and overseas. Benjamin Butler would forever after be known as Beast Butler.

He was recalled from the post in December 1862. Several military misadventures later, he was ordered home. He resigned his commission.

Benjamin Butler was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1866 and served five terms. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1882 and made an unsuccessful run for president in 1884. He died on Jan. 11, 1893 and was buried in Lowell, where his tombstone reads, “”the true touchstone of civil liberty is not that all men are equal but that every man has the right to be the equal of every other man – if he can.”

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