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A Gilded Age Gentleman Farm in Each New England State

During the Gilded Age, the gentleman farm was an important element of the upper-class lifestyle. They served as formal summer mansions and working farms that often supplied produce and dairy products to the owners’ winter residences.

George Washington led the way as the nation’s first gentleman farmer in chief. But the fashion for elegant mansions sitting on landscaped farmland didn’t take hold until after the Civil War.

The Gentleman Farm

Gentleman farms reflected the outsize egos of their wealthy owners during an age of soaring inequality. They sat on large swathes of land, sometimes thousands of acres. Elite architects designed the mansions as well as the farmhouses, barns, carriage houses, greenhouses and follies.

Sometimes business moguls or their heirs used their farms to demonstrate their prowess in agricultural pursuits. They developed prize livestock or managed woodlots scientifically or created vast formal gardens. Landscape designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and Beatrix Farrand sculpted the grounds for scenic vistas, pleasant walks and interesting flower gardens.

The income tax put an end to many of the Gilded Age estates, though a brief perusal of real estate listings shows the gentleman farms may have entered a new heyday. Here, though, are six late-19^th to early 20^th century gentleman farms, one in each New England state.

Eolia Mansion at Harkness State Park

Birdseye view of a Connecticut’s gentleman farm, Eolia.

Stephen V. Harkness had the good fortune to invest silently in John D. Rockefeller’s fledgling Standard Oil Co. His son Edward, clearly a fan of the gentleman farm, built a 42-room mansion on 230 acres overlooking Long Island Sound and named it Eolia.

The family used the estate as a summer retreat and a working farm, which included a prize dairy herd and vegetable gardens. They later added outbuildings, like the teahouse and the carriage house.

Architect James Gamble Rogers redesigned the interior of the Roman Renaissance Revival style mansion to evoke the feeling of the inside of an oyster shell. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand improved the grounds with lush formal gardens.

In 1920, Mary Harkness turned some of the grounds into a summer camp for children with polio. In 1950, she left the estate to the State of Connecticut. For years the house had to be boarded up, but by 1998 it had been restored.

People can rent Eolia for weddings and parties, as well as visit the estate on weekends and holidays from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day.

275 Great Neck Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Isaac W. Dyer Estate

The Isaac W. Dyer Estate in Gorham, Maine.

Gilded Age gentleman farms are increasingly scarce in Maine, but the Isaac W. Dyer Estate survives in a rural section of Gorham.

Isaac W. Dyer and his wife lived in Portland, where he built a large corporate law practice. For many years he served as district attorney, earning a reputation as an old-school conservative. Dyer also wrote a biography of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

He bought the large Greek Revival farmhouse and 126 acres in 1887 and transformed it into a gentleman farm. Eventually he built many of the outbuildings, including sheds, barns, a garage and a greenhouse. Landscapers created a croquet lawn, a sweeping circular driveway and a rare walled garden.

In 1998, the National Register of Historic Places put the Isaac W. Dyer Estate on its list.

The Dyer Estate has shrunk to 6.4 acres and is privately owned.

180 Fort Hill Rd., Gorham, Maine

Turner Hill Farm

Turner Hill Farms, one of several gentleman farms in Ipswich, Mass.

North Shore businessman Charles Rice and his wife Anne Proctor Rice bought 700 acres and a farmhouse on Turner Hill in Ipswich, Mass., just before the turn of the century. They then crossed the Atlantic with their architect, William Rantoul, to check out the gentleman farms in England and Scotland for ideas. The Rices came back and spent the next few years building an immense Elizabethan mansion.

They also built 13 other buildings, including cottages for the butler and gardener, stables, a garage and barns. As many as 50 people worked the farm in the summer to pick produce and fruit and milk the 20 cows. The gigantic house required 22 domestic servants.

The Turners had three children, and during the summer held children’s parties every week for 175 children. Anne Rice, a skilled equestrienne, broke many bones riding over the property, and in 1933 died when her horse threw her. Charles Rice declined and died 10 years later. The LaSalette Fathers bought the property and turned it into a spiritual retreat. The National Register of Historic Places listed Turner Hill Farm in 1982.

Today it functions as a golf club and condominiums. Another gentleman farm in Ipswich, Castle Hill, is less than 10 miles away.

Historic Ipswich has fascinating photos of Turner Hill’s early days. Click here to see them.

251 Turner Hill, Ipswich, Mass.

The Fells, John Hay’s Gentleman Farm

The Fells in full bloom in Newbury, N.H.

In the 1880s, New Hampshire farmers were abandoning their land and moving west for better farmland. The New Hampshire state government stepped in and encouraged wealthy families to buy up the properties and turn them into gentleman farms.

John Hay, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and U.S. Secretary of State, answered the call. He bought 1,000 acres of land on the shores of Lake Sunapee in 1888. Hay hoped to establish a summer colony for his group of friends. But then one of his friends, Clover Adams, committed suicide, and Hay abandoned his plan.

Instead, Hay built a rustic cottage and named the property The Fells, a term for a rocky upland pasture. His son Clarence and wife later expanded the cottage into a 22-room Colonial Revival mansion. Clarence wrote a book about it in 1962, called Gardening in Granite. “This is about a rock garden on Lake Sunapee, in the foothills of the White Mountains,” he wrote.

The Hays donated much of the land to the government, and when they died The Fells became a nonprofit organization. The Fells, a preservation project of The Garden Conservancy, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today visitors can hike the forest paths and, in season, visit the house and grounds, which include a rose terrace, a rock garden of rare alpines and a hidden walled garden.

456 Route 103A, Newbury, N.H.

CCRI Knight Campus, Once a Gentleman Farm

Part of the old Knight Estate, now a community college in Warwick, R.I.

The Fruit of the Loom brand started with Rhode Island’s Knight family, headed by Benjamin and Robert Knight. When Robert died in 1912, the New York Times called him the largest cotton manufacturer in the world.

The Knights actually replaced the Spragues as the dominant manufacturing family in Rhode Island. When the Sprague family’s businesses went belly up in the financial panic of 1873, the Knight family bought many of the Spragues’ textile mills, mill housing, company stores and large farms.

The Knight Estate in the Natick section of Warwick was considered the nicest of the Knights’ gentleman farms. It had a large Federal and Greek Revival home and a number of fine farm buildings. Robert Knight used the farm to develop prize livestock.

In the 20^th century, developers bulldozed some of the farm to make way for the Midland Mall. Then in 1964, Royal Webster Knight donated the farm to the State of Rhode Island for a junior college.

Today, the old Knight Farm forms the nucleus of the Community College of Rhode Island. In direct opposition to the ideal of the gracious farm, CCRI built a Brutalist megastructure on the campus to house all educational functions. Some of the original farm buildings still survive. The college uses the manor house as the president’s residence.

400 East Ave, Warwick, R.I.

Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms in Vermont, one of the Vanderbilt gentleman farms.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in history, had many descendants who built elaborate mansions and yachts. Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, chose to create one of the Vanderbilt’s gentleman farms in Shelburne, Vt. Her brother George then one-upped her with the granddaddy of them all, Biltmore, in Asheville, N.C.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course. Architect Robert Henderson Robertson designed 16 buildings, including a stunning Shingle Style mansion. No less a conservationist than Gifford Pinchot advised them on forest management.

The farm began to shrink in 1910, and the next generations of Vanderbilts struggled to keep it up. In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows.

The National Register of Historic Places put Shelburne Farms on its list because of its significance as a Gilded Age ornamental farm.

It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Eolia By I, PostMan1107, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2412245; Isaac W. Dyer Estate By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35570189; Turner Hill Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21986299; Knight Estate By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20439041;The Fells, By The Fells –http://www.gardenvisit.com/assets/madge/the_fells_newbury/600x/the_fells_newbury_600x.jpg, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11155642. This story was updated in 2022.

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Five Extraordinary Midnight Rides in New England

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere took the most famous of all midnight rides in American history. He was famous because Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized him with his poem. Other midnight rides, though, have changed the tide of events.

Not all the midnight rides happened during the American Revolution, though three of them did. Here they are, with two other historic rides thrown in for good measure.

1. William Dawes

William Dawes
took 1 of 2
midnight rides
in 1775.

William Dawes, a successful tanner with a gift for mimicry, got the same instructions on April 18 that Revere did.

He dressed as a farmer so he wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Then he slipped out of Boston through the Neck (now Roxbury) and rode through Brookline, Watertown and Waltham.

Dawes met John Hancock and Sam Adams in Lexington (along with Revere) to warn them of the British plans to arrest them.

Then he went on his way to rouse Concord. Dawes threw off pursuing British soldiers by shouting he’d captured two of them. He had to walk home after his horse threw him and ran away.

A few days later, according to family lore, Dawes walked back to Lexington to pick up a watch he’d lost.

2. John Alfred Poor

Perhaps the most arduous of the midnight rides: John Alfred Poor’s sleigh ride through the White Mountains in a blizzard

John Alfred Poor in 1845 wanted to do something to help the struggling city of Portland, Maine, after the state capitol moved away to Augusta. That something was a railroad from Montreal, which needed an Atlantic port.

In early February 1845, Poor learned Boston agents would appear before the Montreal Board of Trade arguing the railroad should go to Boston. He decided Portland should beat them out.

Just after midnight on February 5, he left Portland in a horse-drawn sleigh. For five days he drove through the White Mountains in a raging snowstorm and sub-zero temperatures. The trip, he said, was like a ‘lurid dream.’

In the end, Poor prevailed and the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad revived Portland’s fortunes.

3. Sybil Ludington

The statue commemorating the 16-year-old girl who took one of the Revolution’s more extraordinary midnight rides.

Sybil Ludington was half Paul Revere’s age and rode twice as far when she alerted the Connecticut militia of the British invasion.

On the night of April 26, 1777, a messenger arrived at the Kent, N.Y., home of Col. Henry Ludington to say the British were burning Danbury. Sybil, just 16, volunteered to alert the militiamen. A good rider, she set out at 9 pm and rode along the lonely roads through a thunderstorm.

Sybil rode from Carmel to Mahopac to Stormville. “Gather at Ludington’s!” she cried. “The British are burning Danbury!” A highwayman tried to stop her, but she fended him off with her stick. At dawn, Sybil returned home, where 400 militiamen had taken their own midnight rides to the Ludington house.

4. Ginery Twichell

Express rider Ginery Twichell was celebrated for beating a train from Boston in New York on horseback

Ginery Twichell rode into legend on horseback in 1846 when he brought news from Britain from a Cunard liner in Boston to the Tribune. The newspapers were in cutthroat competition to break the news: Would Sir Robert Peel be returned as prime minister of Great Britain, ensuring peace over the Oregon question?

The Herald editor arranged for a special train from Boston to carry his messenger; no other train could leave within 15 minutes. Horace Greeley of the Tribune hired Twichell to beat the Herald messenger. On Jan. 23, 1846, it snowed and snowed some more. Twichell got the dispatches, took the train to Worcester, and then rode 10 horses over the 66 miles to Hartford in three hours and 20 minutes.

He took the train from Hartford to New Haven, and then rode another 76 miles between New Haven and New York. He arrived four hours ahead of his rival, becoming a legend (and later a congressman and railroad president).

5. Isaac Bissell

Isaac Bissell, sometimes called Israel Bissell, rode longer and harder than either Paul Revere or William Dawes. Like several other post riders, he had orders to spread the word about the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

He began his ride in Watertown, Mass., and rode all the way to Hartford shouting, “To arms, to arms, the war has begun.” He rode so hard his horse died in Worcester.

A poet and historian, Clay Perry, gave him his due in a poem that begins:

Listen, my children, to my epistle
Of the long, long ride of Israel Bissell,
Who outrode Paul by miles and time
But didn’t rate a poet’s rhyme.

This story about epic midnight rides was update in 2022.

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How John Marin, America’s Greatest Artist, Vanished from Sight

In 1948, Look magazine took a poll of art critics and museum directors to determine America’s greatest artist. John Marin won. But from that pinnacle he soon fell, and now he’s only dimly remembered.

John Marin

For starters, he looked like an aging Beatle.

An admirer described him as having bangs that reached to his eyebrows, pixieish eyes and carefully styled hair that covered his ears. He dressed the dandy for special occasions in tailored suits, high collars and elegant cravats.

His dress fitted his role as a Modernist painter who brought European-style painting to America. For 25 years John Marin dominated the American art scene with his startling watercolors. His work bordered on abstraction, but remained rooted in nature. He never abandoned his subjects: New England landscapes, the Manhattan skyline and especially the Maine seacoast.

Stonington, Maine. 1923.

Marin loved nature, country people and artists. He hated intellectuals, sophisticates, critics and scholars – the people who voted him America’s greatest artist and then quickly forgot him.

John Marin

His mother died nine days after he was born on Dec. 23, 1870 in Rutherford, N.J. His father took him to live with his grandparents and their two unmarried daughters in Weehawken, N.J. He stayed with them for 30 years.

His father wanted him to study business, so he attended the Stevens Institute of Technology for a year. Then he apprenticed as an architect. His aunts knew he hated it and pressured his father to let him go to art school.

His father relented. At 29, John Marin entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and later studied at the Art Students League in New York.

Mount Chocorua by John Marin, courtesy Harvard Art Museum.

Then in 1905, like many American artists, John Marin went to Paris. He supported himself selling etchings of French landmarks to tourists. He also started playing with watercolors after he fell in love with the work of James McNeill Whistler, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse.

Painting, he wrote, was ‘a sort of mad wonder dancing.’

Late Bloomer

In Paris, John Marin encountered Edward Steichen, a photographer working as an art scout for Arthur Stieglitz. Stieglitz, married to Georgia O’Keefe, owned a New York art gallery that showcased avant-garde art. Steichen sent Stieglitz some examples of Marin’s work, and Stieglitz became his champion. From then on, Marin’s paintings sold well until his death.

Stieglitz told John Marin to handle his subjects more abstractly, to use his brush more freely. Marin said he already did. The retort was typical Marin. He was mefiant – defensive.

He once took a train to Princeton to talk to some students. As he got off the train he commented on the conversations he’d overheard: “I disapproved of everything they said.”

At 40, John Marin returned to the United States. He married Marie Hughes in 1912, had a son and bought a house in Cliffside, N.J. He loved his little family, won enormous prestige for his work and led a calm, happy, unadventurous life.

Maine

John Marin hated what he called ‘city critters.’ So in 1914 he spent his first summer on the Maine coast, where he found inspiration in the rocks, the water and the trees. Until his death in 1953, he spent every summer but one on the Maine coast in Phippsburg, Stonington and Addison. He bought a lobster boat and a house on Cape Split, and he painted the White Mountains, the Berkshires and the Atlantic Ocean.

The Sea.

“Seems to me the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms — Sky Sea Mountain Plain,” he wrote. “To sort of retrue himself up to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these you have to love these to be a part of these in sympathy. One doesn’t get very far without this love.”

Vanished

When John Marin died in the fall of 1953, large, abstract expressionist oil paintings held center stage in the art world. Marin had all but disappeared.

In hindsight, art critics offer several explanations. One, he worked in watercolor, an evanescent medium so fragile that curators rarely put them up for permanent exhibit.

Two, the delicacy of watercolor yielded to the fashion of large, so-called action paintings. “By 1950, ferocity was in, delicacy was out,” wrote art critic Paul Robert.

Thirdly, Marin insisted on rooting his art in nature, and abstraction completely took over the art market.

In 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported John Marin, ‘has in recent years fallen into something not far removed from obscurity.’ But that year the tide began to turn. Art museums in Atlanta, Chicago and Portland, Maine, held retrospectives of the work of John Marin.

Exhibit guide for 1956 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Today you can see his paintings at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art and the Arkansas Arts Center.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Mt. Chocorua, Fair use. Stonington, Maine, Public Domain. The Sea, Public Domain. Sunset, Public Domain.

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Six Autumn Paintings of New England (And How They Look Today)

New England’s fall foliage inspires so much imagery we were pretty sure we could find six autumn paintings of New England. Then we thought we could identify each location and find a current photo, with help from Google Maps, Wikipedia and our own archives.

Sure enough, we found a painting of an identifiable scene in each New England state – all beautiful, of course, and all of autumn. We even found photos of the subjects of some of the six autumn paintings from the artist’s vantage point.

Here then are six autumn paintings of New England, one for each state.

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Reflections of Old Lyme by Guy Wiggins

We naturally turned to the village of Old Lyme in New London to find an autumn landscape painting.

Old Lyme was the site of an artist colony, arguably the largest and most important in the United States for 20 years from about 1900. It started when Florence Griswold and her sister Adele fell on hard times, as had New London. The Griswold sisters began to rent rooms to boarders in their family’s old Georgian home. When New York artists learned about the picturesque seaside town, they flocked to Miss Florence’s art colony.

Guy Wiggins, who painted Reflections of Old Lyme, was one of the youngest members of the Old Lyme art colony. He painted with his father, Carleton Wiggins, also a landscape artist. Guy Wiggins was better known for his paintings of New York skyscrapers in winter.

The painting was in the archives of the Caldwell Gallery in Hudson, N.Y.

Today, the Old Lyme Art Colony lives on as the Florence Griswold Museum (open from May through October), and Old Lyme has regained its prosperity.

Old Lyme today, courtesy Google Maps.

Mount Katahdin

Mount Katahdin by Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, was a renowned Modernist artist who painted manly, rugged scenes of fishermen, mountains and rocky seashores. He often painted Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain in Baxter State Park.

He moved to New York to embrace Greenwich Village Bohemianism, then in 1901 began a pattern he would repeat throughout his life: He left New York for Maine for the first of many summers. Hartley would forever bounce between the city and the country, tiring of one, then the other. In 1937, after a long stint in Europe, he returned to Lewiston, declaring he wanted to become ‘the painter of Maine.’

He made no money and almost abandoned art at the age of 29. Then he got a job as a handyman as a utopian community in Eliot, Maine, and continued to paint. He decided to continue as an artist after he put on a successful one-man show at the home of one of the community members.

Mount Katahdin

Marlborough Street, Boston

Frederick Childe Hassam, a New Englander through and through, painted many landscapes of the region throughout his life. Born in the Dorchester section of Boston in 1859, he was related to Nathaniel Hawthorne on his mother’s side.

Despite an uncle’s offer to send him to Harvard, Hassam dropped out of high school at 17 and got a job at Little, Brown & Co. He then worked as an engraver and an illustrator, until 1893 when he had his first solo exhibition of watercolors. The next year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to stop calling himself ‘Fred’ and use his middle name instead. Hassam often painted the Isles of Shoals when he visited Thaxter at her salon there.

Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam painted in Massachusetts in Gloucester and Provincetown, and at Connecticut art colonies in Cos Cob and Old Lyme.

He married Kathleen Maud Doane in 1882 and moved to Boston’s then-tony South End. Hassam began painting Boston cityscapes – an unorthodox choice at the time.

Later, Hassam painted cityscapes in Paris and New York. He died in 1935, and for years he was considered one of the abandoned geniuses of American Impressionism. He was rediscovered in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his paintings sold for millions.

Marlborough Street in 2017

Mount Washington

Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington by Albert Bierstadt

More than 400 artists painted landscapes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire beginning at the turn of the 19th century. They wanted to promote the region and sell their paintings. It worked. Their dramatic images of a mountain wilderness attracted tourists from northeastern cities, especially in the summertime.

Albert Bierstadt was known for his paintings of the American West and considered a member of the Hudson River School. He was born in Germany in 1833, but his family moved to New Bedford in 1850. He studied art in Boston, and developed an interest in topography. It was natural for him to be drawn to Mount Washington, the tallest mountain on the East Coast.

Bierstadt studied painting in Germany for several years before returning to New Bedford. He painted Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington in 1858 just as he was getting noticed as an artist. The next year he headed west. There he was inspired to paint the large landscapes that gained him enormous popularity.

Mount Washington today. Not much has changed.

Sakonnet Point, R.I.

A Breezy Day: Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, by Thomas Worthington Whittredge, courtesy Amon Carter Museum

The Great Hurricane of 1938 destroyed nearly all the buildings in the seaside village of Sakonnet Point in Little Compton, R.I.

Thomas Worthington Whittredge got there many years beforehand. Like his friend Albert Bierstadt, he was a member of the Hudson River School of Art. Like Bierstadt, he was famous for his paintings of the West.

Whittredge was born in 1820 in Ohio, and studied painting in Europe with Emmanuel Leutze. Leutze used Whittredge as a model for George Washington and his steersman in his iconic painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Worthington Whittredge painted A Breezy Day–Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, sometime around 1880. Four years later, Sakonnet Light was built. Preservationists made sure the historic lighthouse is still there.

Sakonnet Point. July 2012. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Bob Slater’s Hill, South Royalton, Vt.

Bob Slater’s Hill by Edward Hopper, courtesy Huntington Museum of Art

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

He is mostly associated with Cape Cod, Boston’s North Shore and New York City, but he spent some little-known time in and around South Royalton, Vt. He visited first in 1927 and then in the latter 1930s.

Hopper painted two dozen known works of Vermont, all watercolors and mostly ignored until rediscovered and assembled in an exhibit recently. Many of the scenes he painted then haven’t changed much.

Wagon Wheels Farm, July 2019. Image courtesy Google Maps.

There is actually a book and an entire blog devoted to Finding Edward Hopper in Vermont, both by Bonnie Tocher Clause. Of the painting Bob Slater’s Hill, she writes,

From the window of the upstairs guest room on Wagon Wheels Farm, Edward and Jo Hopper looked out over another South Royalton hill — Jigger Hill, or “Bob Slater’s Hill,” as Edward dubbed it. He recorded his fascination with the changing light and shadows in a watercolor, a striking study of contrasting views, near and far… In Bob Slater’s Hill and others of the Vermont watercolors, Hopper captured the particular shade of yellowish-green that’s a harbinger of fall in Vermont.

It isn’t clear to us which hill is “Bob Slater”s” or “Jigger” Hill. But today a historical marker stands in front of the old farm, with the message, “Tourists Accommodated 1937-1942.” It notes that the Hoppers stayed there, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt (not at the same time).

Image of Mount Katahdin By TJ aka Teej – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091663. This story was updated in 2021.

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Irving Greenwood, Shaker Brother, Buys a Cadillac

On Aug. 6, 1920, Shaker Brother Irving Greenwood brought a new Cadillac home to Canterbury Shaker Village. It was a beauty, he wrote in his diary.

A 1919 Cadillac

The Cadillac arrived 146 years to the day after a poor group of immigrants led by Mother Ann Lee landed in America. The Shakers by then had grown and prospered, with 18 Shaker villages in New England, New York, Ohio and Kentucky.

Though the Shakers embraced a simple farm life, they were not averse to labor-saving devices. In fact, they invented some, including a washing machine.

Irving Greenwood lived at Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, N.H., for 53 years until his death in 1939. He recorded in his diary how the Shakers changed and adapted as their number dwindled. He was often the agent of that change.

“The persistent image many have of Brother Irving is a photo that shows him relaxing and listening to his homemade radio, while his beloved dog Dewey (1920-1930), a gift from the Union Village Shakers, rests at his side,” wrote Stephen J. Paterwic in Historical Dictionary of the Shakers.

Irving Greenwood Arrives

The main dwelling at Canterbury Shaker Village.

Irving Greenwood – Ervin Elmer Greenwood on his birth certificate — was taken to Canterbury Shaker Village, 12 miles north of Concord, N.H., by his grandmother and two Shaker sisters. It was Sept. 18, 1886, and Elmer was a month shy of his 10^th birthday. He came from Providence, where his mother had died when he was six years old and his father couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take care of him.

When he arrived, the 94-year-old Canterbury Shaker Village had declined to about 100 members from its peak of 300 in 1850. Women far outnumbered men. The village had 73 females and 28 males, leaving plenty of heavy lifting for men, including Irving Greenwood.

From the time he was 17, Irving Greenwood kept a diary. “Worked at the barn” was his first entry on Feb. 20, 1894. There were many others like it: “Begin sawing wood in dooryard today.” “We boys all help the sisters pick apples in the blacksmith shop field.” “Help shingle.” “Plant corn, beans, peas & beets. Plant squash in the tanning house field upper side.” “Stamp 10 dozen butter boxes with our stamp.”

Hands To Work

General view of Canterbury Shaker Village

The Shakers had a motto: “Hands to work, hearts to God.” They worked hard. Shaker brothers tended the dairy herd and farmed. Shaker sisters made fancy work to sell – sewing, knitting, weaving, baskets and boxes. The Shakers then took the merch to New York and Boston before Christmas, resort hotels in the White Mountains and on the seashore in summer and in Florida and the Carolinas in winter. Today Shaker baskets, boxes and furniture are highly collectible.

The Canterbury Shakers also sold applesauce, butter, maple syrup, herbs and seeds, and published a Shaker periodical.

Their hard work paid off. Canterbury Shaker Village had 3000 acres, a dairy herd, a library, an infirmary and many other buildings, including the largest frame barn in New Hampshire.

Each community was organized into a family that included brothers and sisters and the children for whom they cared. They were celibate, though. They had to replenish their numbers with orphans, foster children and adult converts with their children. “We make you kindly welcome,” was another motto.

Children could leave when they turned 21 — or become a Shaker brother or sister. The Elders decided when an adult convert or child who reached 21 was spiritually ready for that.

Irving Greenwood chose to stay. He learned how to tend a herd of dairy cattle, plow, drive horse teams and run the sawmill.

He was a natural engineer. “In 1910, he wired the village for electricity,” wrote Pateric. “He also built a power plant. Whether it was water pipes or machinery, Brother Irving seemed to be ready with a solution.”

He became a trusted leader of the community as it shrank and adapted to changing times. His diary tells of very old Shakers dying and of young boys leaving. Eventually the Canterbury Shakers had to hire help to work their farm and livestock.

The Shakers Change

Irving Greenwood recorded how the Shakers adapted to the outside world in other ways. Until the turn of the century, they wore plain, handwoven clothing they made themselves. Then the brothers began to buy their clothes and women bought fabric for dresses.

On July 13, 1891, he wrote, “I go to Belmont in the eve. Buy some straw hats for the boys & sneakers for Arthur.”

The sect had originally been called Shakers because of their vigorous dancing during worship (it shook out sin), but they no longer danced by the time Irving Greenwood arrived in 1886.

Shakers dancing out sin

On Jan. 18, 1895, he wrote in his diary, “Discontinue kneeling after meals.”

That year, a relative of Irving’s friend Henry Hathaway bought a bicycle both Irving and Henry used. In the early 19^th century the Shakers would have forbidden a personal recreational item. When they caught on to the bicycle craze, the Shakers made machine-knitted bicycle stockings to sell.

The Shakers did get to have fun. Music was an important part of their lives, and the sisters often put on musical entertainment for the community.

A Shaker friend of Irving Greenwood was named a trustee to handle the community’s business affairs. Sometimes Irving went with him on business trips to New York or Boston and attended the symphony, the opera or the theater. He also went to auto shows.

Road Trip

Irving Greenwood took his first trip in the Cadillac on Sunday, May 4, 1919. He drove his Shaker brothers and sisters in it to doctors’ appointments, on sales trips and buying trips, to concerts in Boston and on errands like buying ice cream.

He bought another Cadillac from the factory in Michigan in 1920 and drove it back to New Hampshire. On Aug. 1, 1920, he reached Cleveland. He washed the car, got lunch and made reservation for a boat ride.

And then he drove to a streetcar suburb called Shaker Heights, just east of Cleveland. Two railroad moguls had built the community on the remains of an old Shaker village. Little was left, save for the ruins of an old gristmill and the mill ponds the Shakers had built.

Shaker Heights across from a lake built by Shakers.

Irving Greenwood wrote, “Go out to Shaker Heights that used to be North Union. There is nothing to show there was ever a Shaker Village there.”

Irving Greenwood died after suffering a stroke in 1939. The Shaker population of Canterbury had fallen by half. By 1950 it was down to 16. The last Canterbury Shaker died in 1992.

Images: Shaker Heights By Spencer – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4434434. This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read Household Tips from Shaker Village, a special for members of the New England Historical Society.

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The Rise and Fall of the New England Motel

The family-owned motel that flowered along New England’s roads after World War II has grown increasingly scarce. Today, there are one quarter as many independent motels as there were in the year John F. Kennedy became president.

Hearthside Village, Bethlehem, N.H. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The vintage motel and the tourist court do still exist in New England, though you might have to look for them. Some got run-down and seedy after interstate highways bypassed them. They’ve become a standing joke in popular culture as “no-tell motels” or “the Bates Motel.” The Simpsons featured a motel called the “Sleep-Eazy Motel,” with burned-out lights that read “Sleazy Motel.

“The business marches along a depressing decline from nightly vacation rates to weekly apartment rents,” wrote a motel historian.

Many motels and tourist courts have been torn down to make way for suburban sprawl. But some still do survive as neat, clean, affordable havens along New England’s mountains and beaches.

But how did the ubiquitous roadside motel rise – and fall – so fast?

Tourist Camps

The motel started out as a “tourist camp,” a space in a farmer’s field or along a body of water where motorists could pitch their tents. But from the very beginning, the federal government played a big part in the evolution of the motel.

Teddy Roosevelt got the ball rolling in 1901 when he told Congress he wanted free campgrounds on public lands.

A public campground near Acadia National Park.

His cousin, Franklin, created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, which built campgrounds around the country, including two at Acadia National Park. As with other campsites on federal lands, they provided picnic grounds, tent space, restrooms and running water.

“The first public campgrounds in the United States were nothing more than large, dedicated clearings, free of trees, within which to concentrate groups of tourists,” wrote Martin Hogue in A Short History of the Campsite.

Then along came the trailer, and with it a bad reputation. People complained about the loose morals, the littering and the noise that “tin can tourists” brought with them. One postcard described the tin can tourists as having “one shirt and a $20 bill — and they didn’t change either.”

Cabin Camps and Tourist Courts

The Coastal Motel, Wells, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The cabin camp emerged as America’s highway network grew along with the population. According to Smithsonian Magazine, farmers and other businesspeople would make deals with an oil company, put up a gas pump and built a few shacks. The cabin camps weren’t exactly luxe. Often dingy, they usually lacked running water or electricity.

But other roadside amenities, such as Howard Johnson’s restaurants, began to proliferate, adding to the allure of automobile travel.

Interior of the Howard Johnson’s in Niantic, Conn. Photo by John Margolies,, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

By the 1930s a homier alternative became popular: the cottage court, also known as the tourist court. More expensive than the cabin camps, they had indoor plumbing and electricity. They were mom-and-pop affairs, with a shared lawn and cottages decorated with standard themes.

Motels didn’t always accept all comers. For African-Americans, travel was a challenge. Many carried the Negro Motorists Green Book, a guide to accommodations that didn’t threaten embarrassment or danger.

Rise of the Motel

The Snyders’ largest motel in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Meanwhile, the first so-called motel, or ‘motor hotel,’ opened in 1925 as the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

After World War II, the growing middle class demanded more and more roadside lodging as the federal highway system expanded. People built motor courts at a furious pace. By 1947, there were 22,000 motor courts in the United States.

Bar Harbor

The motels that sprang up in Bar Harbor, Maine, demonstrate the great economic leveling that took place during most of the 19th century. The town changed from a Gilded Age resort for millionaires into a middle-class tourist destination.

After the 1947 Maine fires wiped out many of the Bar Harbor mansions, cottage courts and motels replaced them.

Mount Desert Island Cabins, one unit, Bar Harbor, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Throughout the United States, 50,000 motels and motor courts served motoring tourists by 1951.

Golden Age of the Motel

The Little Village Motel on the Berlin Turnpike

The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the motel. Mom and pop added color televisions, swimming pools and the Magic Fingers vibrating bed. Neon signs advertised their amenities along strips of road like the Berlin Turnpike in Connecticut, along the Massachusetts coast, on Route 1 in Maine and in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

The industry peaked in 1961, with 61,000 motels in America. Today, there are perhaps a quarter of that. The mom and pop motel fell to motel chains like Holiday Inn and Best Western, then to discount hotels like Hampton Inn and Marriott.

Colonial Park Motel, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Meriden Conn. Photo by John Margolies,

But many still cherish the retro comfort and convenience – not to mention the individuality – of the mom-and-pop motel. Some preservationists want to see them saved. Hartford Courant writer Dennis Barone, for example, argued the Berlin Turnpike should be named an official scenic road.

This story about the New England motel was updated in 2022.

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