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Lady Blanche Forsakes Her English Manor for True Love in the White Mountains

One rainy day in the autumn of 1875, a writer named A.A. Smith met Lady Blanche Murphy, the daughter of an earl, on a sidewalk in North Conway, N.H.

She was a “graceful little figure wrapped in a gray waterproof walking with a quick elastic step, the fresh rosy face fair as a flower framed in thick golden brown hair,” he wrote.

Lady Blanche Murphy, courtesy Bartlett Historical Society

Lady Blanche was also a writer. She wrote magazine stories for money because her father had disowned her for marrying a commoner. Her husband found a job in New Hampshire, which is how she ended up on a North Conway sidewalk. Eventually, Lady Blanche would buy a rustic cottage near the shadow of Humphreys Ledge in nearby Bartlett.

The year before she died, she would publish an essay about the first-ever Christmas tree in her adopted town.

Lady Blanche

Lady Blanche was born on March 25, 1845, the eldest of the five children of Charles George Noel. Her father served as a member of Parliament and high sheriff of Rutland. Then in 1866 he succeeded his father as Earl of Gainsborough and entered the House of Lords.

Her mother, the former Lady Ida Hay, was the daughter of an illegitimate daughter of King William IV and his Irish mistress. That didn’t bother Queen Victoria, his niece. The queen agreed to be Lady Blanche’s godmother.

Exton Hall

Her birthday fell on Lady Day. Roman Catholics celebrate it as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus Christ. Her parents gave her the name of Lady Blanche Elizabeth Mary Annunciata Noel.

Before her fifth birthday, her parents publicly announced their conversion to Roman Catholicism on New Year’s Day in 1850. They belonged to the Tractarian movement, which held the Church of England had grown “too plain.” The Tractarians wanted to include liturgy and ceremony from the Middle Ages into the Anglican Church.

Growing Up

Her parents had her privately tutored at home, a baronial mansion called Exton Hall. She learned Italian, French, German and Spanish, and some Latin and Greek. She also traveled through Italy and Germany, trips that she would later describe in magazines when she needed money.

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning met her in her eighteenth year and described his impressions in a letter to her father. “I thought her quick, observant and thoughtful, and in character decided and independent beyond her years,” he wrote. He noted that she had visited Rome and talked about Garibaldi. “[But] she was too truly Christian and Catholic to sympathize in anything opposed either to the faith or to the Holy See.”

Cardinal Manning

Then, in a prescient observation, the cardinal wrote, “Though she had been born and brought up with all the surroundings of the world, and with all the relations and associations which draw other minds under its influence, she seemed to me not only to be unattracted by such influences, but to be repelled by them. I thought I saw a reaction against them and a decided tendency to break through the conventionalities of her life.”

Thomas Murphy

Lady Blanche’s parents hired a handsome young Irishman named Thomas Murphy to tutor their children in music. He played the organ in the Exton Hall chapel, where the family attended daily Mass. Blanche sang in the choir.

A.A. Smith later described Thomas Murphy as a fine musician. “[H]e is sympathetic, cordial, warm hearted in his manners, well educated.”

Americans would find nothing strange, wrote Smith, “that in the hours spent singing together after matins or vespers in the chapel, the glad young voices pouring through the chapel windows, making the old woods ring, the young enthusiastic Lady Blanche and the impulsive young organist fell in love with each other.”

Her father, dismayed and furious when he finally found out, forbade them to wed. The daughter of an earl did not marry a commoner in 1870.

Elopement

Lady Blanche and her unacceptable boyfriend eloped to London in March 1870. After their wedding they sailed for the United States on the Plymouth Rock, landing in New York.

Isaac Hecker

Disinherited and unemployed, the newlyweds tried to find work. According to the story, they had no money, and when they hadn’t eaten for 24 hours Lady Blanche sold her earrings for a loaf of bread. She said it was the best meal she ever had.

While in New York, Lady Blanche met Father Isaac Hecker. An activist priest, he had founded the Catholic World publication as well as the Paulist Fathers, a religious society of men.

Hecker put them in touch with employers, Thomas with the Kearsarge School for Boys in North Conway and Lady Blanche with magazine publishers. They took their sparse belongings to New Hampshire and boarded with the founder of the Kearsarge School. Thomas taught French and music, and he may have worked as an organist at the local Catholic Church.

Lady Blanche wrote for Father Hecker’s magazine, Catholic World. She also wrote essays on English high life and the English nobility for the Galaxy. Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly published her work, and she drew on her familiarity with Europe to write travel pieces for Lippincott’s.

Lady Blanche also stayed in touch with her family. Soon word got out that the unassuming wife of the schoolteacher received letters addressed to “Lady Blanche.”

Bartlett, N.H.

The story goes that Lady Blanche came into some money and bought a house and a small farm in Bartlett, N.H., a town in the Mount Washington Valley. Either her father relented and sent her an annuity, or an aunt had left her some money.

Bartlett Haystack Mountain

The Murphys did not live together in the house for long. Lady Blanche died after a short illness on March 21, 1881, only 36 years old.

Three days after she died, Bishop James Healey said a Gregorian funeral Mass for her in Portland. Her body was then shipped to England, according to the New York Times.

“Her remains will find a last earthly place in the family’s vault on the estate of her father in Exon [sic], England, and will be placed by the side of her mother, who died many years ago,” the Times reported.

Thomas Murphy moved to a boardinghouse, but kept the farm. He eventually found his way to Boston, where he died. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery.

First Christmas Tree

Just before Lady Blanche died she had written a description of the Mount Washington Valley’s first Christmas tree. It appeared in the March 1881 edition of the London Graphic.

Lady Blanche described the valley as “a backwoods (where) the necessities of cold weather stifle the chance of keeping up the etiquette of civilized life.”

Just before Christmas in 1880, she wrote, “a few of the more travelled individuals in the neighborhood had the bright idea of having a Christmas tree, a novelty in this district where the children had never seen one.”

As an English Catholic, Lady Blanche noted the “puritanical seriousness” of a meeting in a neighbor’s house, held to discuss the tree. “To an outsider, this particular Christmas meeting would have suggested a funeral,” she wrote.

They decided in favor of a tree “to give the children a little amusement” and named a committee of four to set it up.

“[A]n American feature of Christmas trees, which I believe is not known in England, is the ‘Santa Claus’ who distributes the gifts and is required to make jokes and have ready ‘smart’ sayings fitted to the occasion,” she wrote. “We had to choose one among the committee to undertake this part.”

The local men trekked through deep snow to cut down a suitable tree, which they set up in the schoolhouse, she wrote.

The Gods Deliver Lady Blanche

“The men did little but that, and the women spent their spare time popping corn and stringing it bead-like (a very pretty decoration, as the grains of “popcorn” take all sorts of surprising shapes when held over the hot coals) … and otherwise arranging presents.”

Candles and lanterns illuminated the little schoolhouse, and a local woman spelled out in evergreens, “A merry Christmas to all.”

Because the tree was too tall for the room, they stuck the top into a stovepipe hole in the ceiling. “On a bristling crown of stout nails round the hole … hang some of the abundant gifts and ornaments,” wrote Lady Blanche.

The novelty of the tree attracted a crowd. “About 60 more people than the place was built to hold (for a host of strangers beyond the district insisted on coming to witness our modest efforts).

Then the adults called on some children to recite little pieces and sing hymns. Lady Blanche didn’t think much of the practice, calling it ” a foolish habit much in favor in the United States — the gods deliver Englishmen from it.”

In the end, though, she wrote that the Christmas tree did what it was supposed to. “The children were delighted, the tree was a success, and many of the grown people, who also had never seen one, were immensely pleased.”

That Christmas, Lady Blanche had given presents to all her neighbors. When she died, the man who worked for them on the farm was said to have wept like a child.

* * *

Coming soon in paperback! You can order the e-book edition here.

Images: Haystack By Ken Gallager – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92244583. This story was updated in 2024.

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Six Iconic Summer Paintings of New England

New England has no shortage of summer paintings. For centuries, artists have fled cities in summer for the cool air by the seashore or in the mountains. Or perhaps they just took a short train ride from New York or Boston.

They first ventured forth to the White Mountains in the early 19^th century. They explored almost as much as they painted. Later their paintings promoted tourism.

Then summer art colonies began burgeoning throughout New England. In addition to the White Mountain painters, New Hampshire had Cornish and Dublin. Connecticut had Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Massachusetts had Provincetown, the Berkshires, Gloucester and the Lynn Beach Art Colony. Maine had Ogunquit, Monhegan and Skowhegan – as well as every other island and coastal community.

Even tiny Rhode Island and Vermont had their own artist colonies. Vermont had the Dorset painters, and painters favored the South Kingstown hamlet of Matunuck.

So here are six summer paintings, one for each New England state.

The Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but in summertime he ventured to various artist colonies. Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Miss Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.

Hassam, observed the New York Times, was a priest high in the councils of the increasing tribe of American Impressionsts.

Hassam painted The Couch on the Porch in 1914 in Cos Cob. The art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.

One critic wrote that Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s.

Instead of historical scenes or famous people, the impressionsts painted landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life. They relied on natural light, quick brush strokes and a bright palette.

A short train ride took Twachtman’s friends from New York City to Greenwich. Some stayed at his home or boarded at the Holley House, now known as the Bush-Holley House. The colonists included such artists as J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid and Theodore Robinson, as well as writers Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather.

Summer, North Haven

The American Impressionists just loved to paint young women in white dresses outside in bright sunshine. Frank Weston Benson mastered the theme in many of his summer paintings.

Frank Weston Benson, was born in Salem, Mass., and he grew up with a love of the outdoors. As a boy he spent many hours duck hunting in the marshes around Salem.

In 1882, when he turned 21, his parents gave him $2,000 for a trip to Europe. He studied the old masters as well as the work of Claude Monet. When he returned, he established himself as an artist, married and had four chldren, which he frequently painted.

“I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes,” he once said.

He enjoyed success as an artist, winning many medals for his work. During the summer, Frank Weston Benson painted on the Maine island of North Haven, as well as in the New Hampshire towns of New Castle and Dublin. He painted Summer in 1909 using his wife and three daughters as models.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photos-frank-weston-benson-painter-light/

Eventually, critics derided his paintings as “too pretty,” so he returned to his first love. Benson mastered waterfowl etchings, and even designed the second Federal Duck Stamp.

Cape Cod Morning, Truro

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death at 85 in 1967.

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod, creating a number of summer paintings. He explained why he chose the Cape in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous – perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

He loved to suggest the inner life of human beings, something he called “a vast realm.” He also once said all he wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Cape Cod Morning, painted in 1950, is quintessential Hopper. He captures a feeling of tension and isolation, as well as sunlight on the side of a house.

Saco River, White Mountains

In the 19^th century, hundreds of artists traveled to the White Mountains to paint the splendor of what was then wilderness.

White Mountain art started in 1826, when a widely reported tragedy began to attract people to the region. Nine members of the Willey household perished in a landslide.

Then Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, born in 1837 in Portsmouth, N.H., started out as a businessman in Boston. However, he switched to landscape painting full-time, which turned out to be a good career move. A member of the Hudson River School of Art, he specialized in marinescapes. However, he did make painting forays into the White Mountains, including Summer on the Saco (Mount Chocorua).

Second Beach, Newport

There was nothing middle-class about this scene of Second Beach in Newport, R.I. Worthington Whittredge, a late-Hudson River School painter, painted it in 1878-1880. Newport then ruled as a fashionable summer resort for the Gilded Age elite.

Southern planters had begun coming to Newport to escape the summer heat in the mid-19^th century. Northerners then started to arrive and to build lavish summer cottages. When Whittredge painted Second Beach, Newport was still on the way up. The Vanderbilts, for example, had yet to build two of the most opulent “cottages,” the Breakers and Marble House.

This summer painting shows fashionable people dipping their toes in the water and a horse-drawn carriage at the other end of the beach.

Swimming Hole, Arlington

Though born in New York City suburb, Norman Rockwell created the iconography of 20^th century small town New England.

Rockwell’s career followed the Golden Age of Illustration a period of brilliant book and magazine illustration. It ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. Rockwell began his studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1911. Inspired by such Golden Age illustrators as Howard Pyle, Rockwell decided to devote himself to illustration.

For 20 years he worked for Boys Life magazine, living in New Rochelle with his wife and three sons. But by 1938, he needed a restart, so he bought a farmhouse in Arlington. Rural Vermont inspired him to develop into the teller of fictional stories about small town America.

He had no interest in the natural beauty around him. Instead, he sought out diners, dentists offices and schoolhouses.

In 1945, he decided to paint a salesman who takes a dip into a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

Rockwell painted his neighbor George Zimmer, who posed as the salesman. It made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, one of seven for which Zimmer modeled. Many of Rockwell’s summer paintings appeared on Post covers.

Rockwell paid close attention to details. In Swimming Hole, he tells the story of the salesman making a long drive and stopping at a swimming hole. He parks his car and methodically takes off his shirt and tie, hangs it up, lays his glasses on a newspaper and then his cigar on a shoe.

“George Zimmer, my model,” Rockwell said, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.”

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Eight Great Zingers by Bette Davis, Yankee Gal

The legendary movie actress Bette Davis called herself the “Yankee-est gal who ever came down the pike.”

She was born and educated in Massachusetts, married three New Englanders and had homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

Bette Davis in the trailer for Dark Victory.

On screen and off, Bette Davis had an acid tongue and a will of iron. She often played unlikable characters: a vulgar waitress, a crazy recluse, a spoiled southern belle, an embittered former child star. Though she didn’t have movie star looks, her beautiful eyes inspired the 1980s hit song, Bette Davis Eyes (which she liked).

She made 86 movies, won two Academy awards and was nominated for eight more. She married four times, but spent the last 29 years of her life without a husband.

In 1982 at the age of 74, she told an interviewer, “I didn’t intend to become one of those prim New England women who are afraid of sex, didn’t want to reach my present age and not have experienced everything…Now I’m a virgin again but I guess I did all right for a little Yankee girl.”

Bette Davis in Massachusetts

She was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Mass. She attended a boarding school, Crestalban in Lanesborough, Mass., then Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Mass.

Of growing up, she once said, “From the age of six, I have known that I was sexy. And let me tell you it has been hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.”

At Cushing she met and fell in love with Harmon Oscar Nelson, a Massachusetts native she would later marry. Davis claimed his middle name gave the Academy Award statuette its nickname, though most people called him Ham. They wed in 1932, but she made 10 times as much money as he did and the marriage didn’t last.

Bette Davis in New Hampshire

She moved to California and made 22 mostly forgettable films from 1931 to 1934. In one of those films, though, she uttered one of her all-time favorite lines. In The Cabin in the Cotton, she said, “I’d love to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.”

Then in 1934, Bette Davis finally won critical praise playing the frowzy Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage. The next year she won an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as an alcoholic actress in Dangerous.

After finishing Dark Victory and Old Maid in 1939, Bette Davis went to Franconia, N.H., for a rest. She stayed at an inn called Peckett’s on Sugar Hill. There she fell for Arthur Farnsworth, the assistant manager of the inn. She called him Farny, and they married in 1940.

She bought a shack from the Peckett family on a beautiful piece of land and rebuilt it, calling it Butternut Farm. An old barn from Vermont became a lodge for guests.

Schoolgirls used to hang around the Carol Reed shop in nearby Littleton, hoping for a glimpse of their local celebrity. She treated her young fans graciously. “I’m the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived,” she once said.

Farny died three years after their marriage, and she came less frequently to New Hampshire.

Doing It Right

A strong-willed perfectionist, Bette Davis battled movie studios for good scripts and quality productions. In 1937, Davis sued Warner Bros. to get out of her contract. She lost, but the studio then accommodated her wishes. She then made some great movies with Warner Bros.: Now, Voyager, The Petrified Forest and Jezebel, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress.

Along the way, Bette Davis earned a reputation as a bitch. Once she described herself as a ‘legendary terror,’ insufferably rude and ill-mannered.

It didn’t seem to bother her.

“If everyone likes you, you’re not doing it right,” she said.

Bette Davis in Maine

Bette Davis won an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in the 1950 film All About Eve, which won six Academy Awards. It also co-starred Davis’ fourth and last husband, Gary Merrill.

Merrill, born in Hartford, had attended Bowdoin College and loved Maine. After he and Bette Davis married in 1950, they bought a five-bedroom home in Cape Elizabeth. She called it ‘Witch Way.’

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill

Throughout the 1950s, they lived on Witch Way with two children they adopted and Davis’ daughter, B.D., with her previous husband, William Sherry. B.D. later wrote a tell-all, My Mother’s Keeper, portraying her mother as an abusive alcoholic.

Of parenthood, Davis said, “If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.”

Both Merrill and Davis actively supported the Maine Democratic Party, and Merrill helped Ed Muskie win his race for governor in 1958. Her films during the 1950s often premiered to large crowds in Portland. But the marriage soured, and they divorced in 1960.

Old Broads

“Old age is no place for sissies,” Davis once said. She was no sissy, though, and continued to make movies and appear on television into her 80s. She made her last film, The Wicked Stepmother, at the age of 81, and then continued to appear on television talk shows.

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”

For years, Bette Davis feuded with another Hollywood movie queen, Joan Crawford. Crawford upstaged Davis several times and stole actor Franchot Tone from her.

In 1962, they appeared together in a comeback vehicle for both of them: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Davis had a Coke machine installed on the set because Crawford’s late husband had served as Pepsi’s CEO. Crawford retaliated by wearing a lead belt during a scene in which Davis had to drag her across the floor.

“There may be a heaven, but if Joan Crawford is there, I’m not going,” Davis said.

Bette Davis died of breast cancer in France in 1989 at the age of 82.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Miraculous Rescue of Dorothy Sparks in 1942

On July 20, 1942, Dorothy Sparks went for a cookout with friends in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The plan was to grill some steaks and beat the heat with some hiking and some swimming.

As the group walked along the banks of the Swift River, in Albany, near the Kancamagus Highway, one noticed that Dorothy was not with them any longer. After they waited, thinking she was bringing up the rear, the group retraced steps back up the river bank to Rocky Gorge, where they had last seen her.

Not only had they not found Dorothy Sparks, the group quickly began to share a grim hunch. Even in deep summer, water pours over the 15-foot falls at Rocky Gorge with a deafening thunder. Water at the foot of the falls churns ferociously as it sends the Swift River on down its way.

After a couple of probing attempts to see if Dorothy was injured or perhaps washed up on the banks, the group dispatched a party to town to summon help.

Dorothy Sparks Goes to College

Rocky Gorge

In 1942, Dorothy was 24. She had a newly minted degree from the University of New Hampshire. From the suburbs of Philadelphia, Sparks had been active in the Alpha Xi Delta sorority. In college she stood out as an athlete. She swam, skied and was active in the Blue Circle, the university’s outing club. She had joined the club in a hike to the top of Mount Cardigan.

Unfortunately, Dorothy and the outdoors didn’t always get along, and she was a bit of a daredevil. In 1940 she had shattered her leg skiing in the White Mountains, in the women’s slalom race. That accident put her in the hospital for a week and triggered a lengthy recovery. But it looked like her misadventure on the Swift River would be even worse.

Help Arrives

It took nearly two hours to get help to the Rocky Gorge. State Trooper Kenneth Hayward arrived along with the deputy coroner, a group of forest rangers and utility workers who had been in the area. The local undertaker also made the trip.

After quickly scouring the area, the rescue team reached the same conclusion as Dorothy’s friends. She was most likely submerged in the roiling waters at the foot of the falls.

Trooper Hayward probed at the water and struck on something solid. Then a piece of cloth emerged. It was pink, the same color as Dorothy’s bathing suit. Someone else thought they saw a hand in the churning falls.

Certain Death

Now the group of rescuers was certain Dorothy Sparks was dead in the water beneath the falls. And they were just as certain that they weren’t going to leave her there. The river, however, was too strong to let them fish Dorothy out.

To retrieve the body, the rescue party concluded they would have to move the river. And that’s what they did. Working upstream, the rescue team built a makeshift dam and forced the river to overrun its banks and bypass the falls.

With the waterfall held back and reduced to a trickle, Trooper Hayward again went to work with a grappling pole. After some effort, he hooked something. He saw a hand coming to the surface of the pool beneath the falls. Hayward reached into the water and grabbed the hand. To his amazement, the hand grabbed him back.

A Grateful ‘Corpse’

Finally, the rescuers and Dorothy’s friends would find out what had happened. Three hours earlier, Dorothy said, her daredevil nature had gotten the better of her. She had bet herself that if she took off her shoes she could skip across the rocks in the river above the falls and come out on the other side.

Midway across the river, Dorothy slipped and fell in. Before she had any chance to act, the Swift River, true to its name, shot her over the falls. But beneath the falls she managed to position herself at the rear of a cave behind the falls that held a tiny pocket of air. There she waited until rescuers found her.

As she entered the ambulance for a trip to the hospital, Dorothy gave trooper Hayward a thank you hug. It was the only time, he would later recall, he had been hugged by a corpse. After her recovery, Dorothy would go on to become a teacher and then a school principal. She died in 2017.

Thanks to: Readers Digest, The Riddle of Rocky Gorge, UNH The Magazine of the University of New Hampshire and The New Hampshire. This story was updated in 2024.

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Six Famous Artists Houses (Where You Can Stay, Too)

Artists gravitate toward places that inspire them creatively, so you can often find artists houses among splendid scenery or in rural isolation.

Famous artists could often afford large houses, and some have since been transformed into inns and bed and breakfasts.

Artists Houses As Inns

Now every New England state has a house that an artist once lived in, but functions as an inn or an artists retreat.

At two of the artists houses described below you can actually practice your art in the same places Fairfield and Eliot Porter and Norman Rockwell found their inspiration.

So here we bring you six artists houses, one in each state (admittedly, we include an engraver and an architect as artists – but we think they’d agree). If you know of any artists houses where people can stay, please include them in the comments section.

Abel Buell Home

The Abel Buell Home

Abel Buell, apprenticed to a silversmith as a boy, learned his craft perhaps too well.

As a young man, he used his skill at engraving to alter the plates for five-pound notes to plates for larger denominations. Then he printed them. He got caught, and authorities cut off the tip of his ear as punishment.

An uncommonly ingenious mapmaker, he designed the first map of the United States in 1784 and colored it by hand. The map involves enough artistry that we’re putting his house on our list of artists homes.

The first map, by Abel Buell.

He was born in 1742 in Clinton, Conn., when it was called Killingworth. Today his home is a bed and breakfast called the Abel Buell House By The Shore. You can stay in one of two rooms, one with a queen-size bed, one with a twin.

33 Commerce St., Clinton, Conn.

Great Spruce Head Island

Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay (thanks, Google Maps!)

Fairfield Porter, born in 1907 in Winnetka, Ill., bucked the Abstract Expressionist trend during the middle of the 20^th century. He stuck to a representational style despite criticism from other artists. In his paintings, he made ordinary landscapes and interiors seem extraordinary.

Under the Elms by Fairfield Porter

His brother Eliot was a biochemical researcher at Harvard who took up photography as a hobby. Fairfield introduced Eliot to Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged him to work harder. Eliot began to exhibit in Stieglitz’s gallery, and eventually he quit his job and pursued photography full time. The Sierra Club published a book of his photographs with quotations from Henry David Thoreau, and it did quite well. Eliot Porter published more books, and is considered the pioneer of the coffee-table book of nature photography.

When the boys were young, their father bought Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay and built a 12-bedroom summer cottage. The brothers and their three siblings spent summers on the island. Today, the Porters’ niece, Anina Porter Fuller, invites a dozen artists to spend a week on the island working independently in late June or early July. (Here’s her painting of the house.)

Great Spruce Head Island, Deer Isle, Maine

Fidelia Bridges Guest House

The Fidelia Bridges Guest House (thanks again, Google Maps)

Fidelia Bridges created exquisite images of nature in the 19^th century, though people have largely forgotten her. Except, at least, for those who stay at one of the most interesting artists houses, the Fidelia Bridges Guest House.

May, by Fidelia Bridges

She was born in 1834 in Salem, Mass., to Eliza Chadwick Bridges and Henry Gardiner Bridges. Her father died in China when Fidelia was 15, and her mother died three hours before the news of her husband’s death reached Salem. Fidelia’s sister auctioned off the family furniture and sold the house.

Eventually Fidelia got a job as a mother’s helper in New York, where she would later run a school and her own studio. She also worked as a governess to Mark Twain’s three children.

All the while she drew and painted, limiting her subjects to birds and plants.

She moved to Canaan, Conn., and lived quietly, drawing and painting for the rest of her days.

The Fidelia Bridges Guest House belongs to the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Mass.

18 Washington Square West, Salem, Mass.

Inn at Whitefield

Interior at the Mountains, by Emil Otto Grundmann

Emil Otto Grundmann was a German art professor and artist who came to the United States. He got a job as director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he founded the Boston School of art. He taught such artists as Frank Weston Benton, Charles Henry Turner and Edmund C. Tarbell.

Grundmann visited a friend in Whitefield, N.H., in 1879 to paint the White Mountains. He painted the lovely Interior at the Mountains, a view of the silhouette of the Franconia range through the window of his friend’s bay window. The interior includes ‘accessories of genteel tourism,’ according to Robert L. McGrath: a map of Europe, sculptures, prints of Roman monuments and wicker furniture.

Today you can be your own genteel tourist at the house, now the Inn at Whitefield.

381 Lancaster Rd., Whitefield, N.H.

Architect’s Inn Guesthouse

The Archietect’s Inn

George Champlin Mason designed a number of palatial homes in Newport, R.I., including one for himself.

Mason spent his early career trying to make a living as a landscape painter. He published a collection of engravings of Newport landscapes that promoted the city to tourists and vacationers.

Mason switched careers several times, first as a newspaper editor and finally as an architect. He began designing houses in 1858, eventually designing many of the summer mansions in Newport. He also helped found the Newport Historical Society.

After his death in 1894, Belmonts and Vanderbilts lived in his house. Today it’s an inn, known as the Architect’s Inn Guesthouse, decorated with period furnishings and offering fully interactive Murder Mystery weekends.

2 Sunnyside Pl #1, Newport, R.I.

Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

The Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

Before Norman Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Mass., he lived in Arlington, Vt. There he adopted the themes of Americana that have endeared him to millions of his fans.

Rockwell was 49 when he bought a farmhouse in Arlington, Vt., in the fall of 1943. The move to the house, built in 1792, gave him a much-needed restart for his art.

He was more interested in diners, doctors’ offices and schoolhouses than in the landscape.

Today you can enjoy the Green Mountain scenery or the diners and schoolhouses at the Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio. You can even stay in his studio – or his barn. The inn also offers Rockwell Seminars during which acclaimed painters and illustrators give one-on-one instruction in Rockwell’s actual studio.

3587 River Road Arlington, Vt.

Images of artists houses: Emil Grundmann, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Otto_Grundmann#/media/File:Emil_Otto_Grundmann00.jpg; Under the Elms, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10887039

This story about artists houses was updated in 2019.

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Samuel Bemis Takes America’s First Landscape Photo in the White Mountains

Samuel Bemis was a Boston dentist who bought one of the first cameras in America in 1840 and took the first known landscape photographs. He abandoned photography, turning his enthusiasms to other nutty and not-so-nutty interests.

According to his obituary, he was “not as odd as might be expected, yet sufficiently so to distinguish him from the ordinary run of men.”

Samuel Bemis

Samuel Americanus Bemis was born in Putney, Vt., in June 1793, to Samuel Bemis and Hazadiah McWain. By the time young Samuel came into the world, his father had married and divorced three times. But Samuel, Sr., did not marry Samuel, Jr.’s, mother. Instead, he chose to give her cash.

Young Samuel Bemis did learn how to make clocks and watches from his father, who apparently passed his mechanical aptitude to his son. He moved to Boston at 19 and got a job as a clockmaker.

Samuel Bemis made a tool for his dentist friend, Z.B. Adams, that supposedly pulled teeth painlessly. He also made improved false teeth. Eventually he gave up making clocks and turned to dentistry in 1822.

His practice must have been successful because he could afford the expensive new hobby of photography. He could also take annual summer vacations to New Hampshire.

A New Hampshire barn in 1840, by Samuel Bemis.

Jacque-Louis Mandé Daguerre

In 1833, Bemis took his first vacation to the White Mountains, just seven years after the Willey Family tragedy started attracting tourists to Crawford Notch.

He stayed at Ethan Allen Crawford’s Old Moosehead Tavern. Every subsequent year, Samuel Bemis vacationed in the White Mountains and befriended the Crawford family.

In 1840, Jacques-Louis Mandé Daguerre sent a sales representative to Boston to give talks on his new camera and equipment. Samuel Bemis attended the lectures and listened avidly. He bought one of Daguerre’s cameras on April 15 for $52 and 12 plates for $2 each. So photography started out in America as an expensive hobby.

Four days after buying the camera, Samuel Bemis made his first daguerreotype in Boston. In June, he headed for the White Mountains and made daguerreotypes – the first known landscape photographs in America.

He dabbled in photography for three more years. But he never excelled at it, because he didn’t properly process the images. Today, the George Eastman House displays Samuel Bemis’s camera equipment, his original bill of sale and some of his images.

In October 1843, Samuel Bemis gave up photography for other hobbies. His papers, some of which the Conway Public Library hold, reveal his many interests. They include art collecting, fly fishing, fine dining, construction of the Tenth Mountain Turnpike, ice house management techniques, timber thieves and genealogy.

Lord of the Valley

Samuel Bemis then bought land that included most of Crawford Notch. Shortly after he moved to New Hampshire, his true love spurned him. He threw his energies into building a granite mansion from stone quarried on his property. It took him close to a decade to finish the house, made completely of stone.

The house still stands today as the Notchland Inn.

The granite mansion that Bemis built

He earned the nickname ‘Lord of the Valley’ during his lifetime, partly because of his habit of naming geographical features after himself. In the White Mountains you will find a Bemis mountain, lake, brook, road and ridge.

Samuel Bemis did name Frankenstein Cliff after his friend Godfrey Frankenstein, an artist who painted the White Mountains.

During his lifetime, he invested in several railroads and died a wealthy man in 1881. Bemis left all his property to George Morey, his friend and farm manager.

With thanks to whitemountainhistory.org.

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