Recent updates

I haven't created any new posts so far this year, but I've added the above closeup of Plymouth Rock to "Monumenta America," and the image of Gallows Hill below to the post on Salem.

Along the river

Here are some Rotographs from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the environs of one of my favorite bodies of water, the little Housatonic River that flows through western Massachusetts and Connecticut, past some of the prettiest scenery in New England, before emptying out into Long Island Sound. These are from an unlettered series, although the numbers on the back (65251, 65254, 65264, and 65271) fit more or less into the numbering range of Rotograph's flashier "G" series views of the same area, if you substitute a G for the initial 6.


The Green River, above, is a tributary.

The image below actually merits a footnote in the history of photography: "Brookside" was the estate of William H. Walker, an early photographic inventor and Kodak executive who is credited with helping develop the film roll-holding system that replaced the earlier glass plates, paving the way for the explosion in amateur photography made possible by Kodak's box cameras. Eventually, Walker and Kodak founder George Eastman seem to have had a falling out, but not before the former's fortune had been made.


Some of the gardens at Brookside were designed by the noted landscape architect Ferruccio Vitale. The estate is now operated as a camp by the Union for Reform Judaism.

I really did go

The Common from Beacon and Park Sts., Boston, Mass, addressed to Mr. Edward D. Fallon, Long Ridge, Stamford Conn., and postmarked in Boston on July 26, 1907. Inscribed by unknown sender (initials possibly "LMS") with the message "I really did go."

According to the Biennial Report of the State Board of Fisheries and Game published in September 1908, an Edward D. Fallon of the same address applied (and was presumably given permission) to stock 200 fingerling brook trout in nearby Mill Pond Stream.

Overall, I like the mood and composition of this one a lot. The coloring of the sky is drawn from the printer's imagination, of course, but judging by the shadows of the two closest figures (if they're not artificial as well) it does appear to be late afternoon. As there's no snow and no leaves on the trees bordering the central pathway (nor on the ground), it might be early Spring. The strolling figures are just dark silhouettes.

Christ Church, Boston

Applying glitter to postcards by hand would have been a labor-intensive process for the printer, but there was a vogue for them, at least until mail handlers reportedly began complaining that the grit cut their hands. This image of a Boston landmark also known as the Old North Church, has received a liberal, if crude, sprinkling.

Newton Upper Falls

Dear Aunt Harriet

Hope this your birthday finds you well and happy with many more.

Best wishes

Ernest

A group of views from a village within the boundaries of the town of Newton, Massachusetts, a few miles west of Boston. As one might suppose, there is also a Newton Lower Falls, but the town includes Newton Centre, Newton Corner, Newton Highlands, Newtonville, and West Newton as well, along with several villages that don't include the name Newton in any form. The stream is the Charles River.

The images below are not identical, though they both originated from the same photographic negative. If you look carefully there are differences in coloring and cropping, which are most evident along the bottom border and in the bushes in the left and right foreground.


Do you have anything like this in Seattle

Ed.

The Strange Afterlife of Henry W. Shaw

Sometimes the most unpromising artifacts turn out to be the ones with the weirdest stories attached to them, and the postcard above is a prime example. I imagine that the name Josh Billings will draw as much of a blank with most people today as it did with me, but two things could be immediately deduced from the caption: that he was once a person of some renown, and that he wasn't really named "Josh Billings." In fact, "Billings" was born Henry Wheeler Shaw in Lanesboro, Massachusetts in 1818. He came from a distinguished political family but after a checkered career settled into journalism, a profession at which he became successful enough that he was photographed in the company of two pseudonymous peers, one a certain Petroleum V. Nasby, now largely forgotten, the other a man who went by the name of Twain. He was known for his pithy "witticisms," many of them in dialect, one of which ("I don't rekoleckt now ov ever hearing ov two dogs fiteing unless thare waz a man or two around") turned out to be singularly unfortunate, given what is reputed to be Shaw's eventual fate.

Shaw died in 1885 in Monterey, California, and as the postcard below indicates, was interred near his birthplace. At least most of him was.


According to a bit of Monterey lore that John Steinbeck worked into Cannery Row, when Shaw died, the local doctor, who apparently also served as an undertaker, removed some of his internal organs during the embalming process and unceremoniously flung the tripas into a nearby gulch, where they were discovered a boy looking for fishbait -- and by his dog, whom Steinbeck describes as dragging "yards of intestines on the ends of which a stomach dangled."

When some of the local citizens heard of this discovery, and simultaneously learned of the death of "Josh Billings" at the nearby Hotel del Monte, they quickly put two and two together and hastily summoned the doctor.

They made him dress quickly then and they hurried down to the beach. If the little boy had gone quickly about his business, it would have been too late. He was just getting into a boat when the committee arrived. The intestine was in the sand where the dog had abandoned it.

Then the French doctor was made to collect the parts. He was forced to wash them reverently and pick out as much sand as possible. The doctor himself had to stand the expense of the leaden box which went into the coffin of Josh Billings. For Monterey was not a town to let dishonor come to a literary man.

What Steinbeck's source for this gruesome incident was, and whether there was any truth in it, I don't know (it recalls a similar, and also possibly apocryphal, story about Thomas Hardy's heart and a cat), but true or not I suspect that Steinbeck's retelling of it has probably done more to preserve the name of Josh Billings than anything the latter ever penned.

"Hillcrest," Shaw's birthplace, was operated as an inn for a period during the first half of the 20th century. I haven't been able to find out whether it still stands and if so whether it is still regarded as a local landmark.

Keep Your Powder Dry

These two structures, the one above from Marblehead, Massachusetts and the one below from Somerville in the same state, are 18th-century powder houses, once used for storing gunpowder and firearms. The onion-domed Marblehead building was built for that purpose in the 1750s, but the Somerville tower from 1703 or 1704, which looks like it could be employed as a projectile itself, was originally a mill. Both still stand.


The design and location of powder houses reflected the need to keep explosive materials safely away from other structures and the general population, but the buildings also came to have a political role. On September 1, 1774, at the order of British General Thomas Gage, who was jittery about leaving munitions under the control of restive Patriots, the Somerville powder house was raided by British troops and largely emptied out, and as reports of the incident spread, mixed with a fair amount of misinformation, armed Patriots descended on Cambridge and Boston in response. Though the "Powder Alarm" quickly abated, it prefigured the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord the following spring.

There are a handful of other existing powder houses in Massachusetts, including examples at Newburyport (near Salem) and a frequently vandalized one at Amesbury, but most date from the first half of the 19th century. Thus far I haven't come across any record that the Rotograph Co. created images of any of these others, though some of their competitors did so.

Great Barrington

After having spent considerable time dipping our toes in the waters along the Massachusetts seashore, we move to one of the chief towns of the Berkshires in the western part of the state. The monument above, which refers to a 1774 protest by some 1,500 citizens against the so-called Intolerable Acts, is said to still stand outside the Great Barrington Town Hall, below.


According to Gary Leveille's Around Great Barrington (Arcadia Publishing, 2011), the Berkshire Inn, above, "was considered one of the most impressive structures in all of Berkshire County." Originally built in 1892 and subsequently expanded, it was demolished in the aftermath of a 1965 fire. The treatment of the trees in particular in this postcard seems more painterly than photographic, and the architecture of the partially obscured wing at right seems almost Japanese in inspiration.

The postcards above are good examples of Rotograph's high-quality printing, even if the view of the Berkshire Inn is a bit awkwardly framed. The same can't be said for the unfortunate image below, with its crude, arbitrary blotches of rust. It was published by Rotograph as well, but perhaps this was a budget line.

Brant Rock

View cards by their nature tend to depict static scenes, with at most a few distant figures strolling on a beach or in the park, but occasionally you find some that capture more focused activity. Below are two images of a demonstration of lifesaving equipment and techniques by members of the US Coast Guard station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Clusters of onlookers, some with parasols, stand in the background.


The large building with the adjoining tower — the printer seems to have been a bit uncertain about the color of the roof — was not part of the Coast Guard station but is the Union Chapel, which still stands. I believe the Coast Guard building is the one at far right in the image at the top of the page; it was built in 1892-93 and the keeper from then until 1915 — possibly the man with the flag — was Benjamin B. Manter.

There is at least one additional postcard in this sequence, "U. S. Life Saving Crew with Beach Apparatus" (G7302), and there were also monochrome versions of some or all of the cards.

Below is the beach at Brant Rock. The tower at left in the background may be the Union Chapel but I'm not sure.


Around the time these images were created an inventor named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden built a wireless station on Brant Rock, where the first radio transmission for music and entertainment was reportedly broadcast on December 24, 1906. The Brant Rock station is also credited with the first two-way radio transatlantic transmission, with a station in Scotland, also in 1906. Its antenna was more than 400 feet high, so when completed it probably would have been easily visible to anyone in the vicinity of the Union Chapel as well as from the beach.

On the beach

Here's a selection of seaside images moving roughly from north to south along the coast of Massachusetts. Printed in vivid colors with multiple plates that are not always well-registered, some of them seem to hover between the real world and one that only exists in the mind.


If you look carefully at the two images immediately above, which may have been taken on the same day, you'll notice that the colors of the hotel roof and the chalet-like structures lower down change from one postcard to the next.

Fight Fiercely Harvard

Sports arenas don't last forever; even the original, hallowed Yankee Stadium was eventually deemed antiquated, torn down, and replaced, and the shiny new Shea Stadium of my childhood endured for a paltry thirty-five years or so. Harvard Stadium, only a year or two old when the postcard above was created, has managed to survive for more than a century, so maybe it has now reached the point where its very antiquity will ensure its indefinite preservation.

Be that as it may, I can't help but be reminded of this stirring rendition from the inimitable Tom Lehrer:


Since we're in the neighborhood, below is another Rotograph of Harvard, this one showing the university's Johnson Gate, which also survives.


According to an article in the Harvard Gazette:

The gate is named for Samuel Johnston, Class of 1855, who left Harvard $10,000 for its construction. A resident of Chicago, Johnston is described in his 1886 obituary as a bachelor and a "well-known capitalist," and by a fellow member of the Chicago Club as "a short, ruddy faced bon-vivant." A book of reminiscences by one of Johnston's neighbors describes him drinking a toast on the front steps of his house as the Chicago fire blazed nearby.

Monumenta Americana

This granite monument at Plymouth, Massachusetts was designed by Hammatt Billings (1818-1874), an architect and artist whose varied output included the 1846 Boston Museum (demolished in 1903) and the oft-reproduced illustrations for the first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. His original 1855 proposal, according to historian Richard Stoddard, was for "a colossal composition 153 feet high — comprising a figure of Faith 70 feet high on an 83-foot-high pedestal, projecting from the base of which were four buttresses supporting 40-foot figures of Law, Morality, Education, and Freedom." Though the patrons were enthusiastic, construction delays and inflation eventually led to the downscaling of the project to an 81-foot structure incorporating a 36-foot statue of Faith in addition to the smaller subsidiary figures. It would not be completed until 1889, fifteen years after Billings's death.


The National Monument to the Forefathers still stands, but not so another Billings design, shown above and below, for a granite canopy over Plymouth Rock, the much abused and traveled glacial erratic, unmentioned in 17th-century accounts, that Thomas Faunce, a nonagenarian scion of one of Plymouth's early settlers, had fingered as the very stone on which the colonists had first set foot.


Agnes Rothery, whose 1920 book The Old Coast Road recounting a seaside trip from Boston to Plymouth includes a skeptical, if charitable, account of the Rock's history, was one of the detractors of the Billings canopy:

Just as the mind of man takes a singular satisfaction in gazing at mummies preserved in human semblance in the unearthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once massive boulder — now carefully mended — was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, and over it was reared, from the designs of Hammatt Billings, the ugliest granite canopy imaginable — in which canopy, to complete the grisly atmosphere of the catacombs, were placed certain human bones found in an exploration of Cole's Hill. Bleak and homeless the old rock now lies passively in forlorn state under its atrocious shelter, behind a strong iron grating, and any of a dozen glib street urchins, in syllables flavored with Cork, or Genoese, or Polish accents, will, for a penny, relate the facts substantially as I have stated them.

It is easy to be unsympathetic in regard to any form of fetishism which we do not share. And while the bare fact remains that we are not at all sure that the Pilgrims landed on this rock, and we are entirely sure that its present location and setting possess no romantic allurement, yet bare facts are not the whole truth, and even when correct they are often the superficial and not the fundamental part of the truth. Those hundreds — those thousands — of earnest-eyed men and women who have stood beside this rock with tears in their eyes, and emotions too deep for words in their hearts, "believing where they cannot prove," have not only interpreted the vital significance of the place, but, by their very emotion, have sanctified it.

It really makes little difference whether the testimony of Thomas Faunce was strictly accurate or not; it really makes little difference that the Hammatt Billings canopy is indeed dreadful. Plymouth Rock has come to symbolize the corner-stone of the United States as a nation, and symbols are the most beautiful and the most enduring expression of any national or human experience.

Around the time Rothery's book appeared, the canopy was in fact demolished and replaced by a more sober McKim, Mead, and White structure that still stands. A few elements were salvaged; in particular the sea shells on the top of the structure were relocated to the grounds of the Monument of the Forefathers. Ungainly and garish as it may have been, the original canopy seems to have had a certain offbeat charm, and I suspect it would be better appreciated now, had it only survived.

Below are some other Rotograph postcards of historic Plymouth, beginning with Alexander Parris's 1824 Pilgrim Hall Museum, which continues to operate.


The Samoset House above, a hotel built in 1846, burned down in the late 1930s, but the Harlow House below still stands.


The message space on the front of the postcard above is awkwardly truncated (remember that at this time only the address was permitted on the back); apparently the company wanted to preserve the lower right-hand corner of the scene.


The Old Colony shown here may be the ship of that name operated by the Fall River Line, which ceased operations in 1937.


Sources: Stoddard, Richard, "Hammatt Billings, Artist and Architect," Old-Time New England Volume LXII, No. 3 (January-March 1972), pp. 57-79. (PDF)

The Old Coast Road was published under Agnes Rothery's pen name, Alice Edwards.

Cape Tragabigzanda

Here are a series of Rotograph images of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the peninsula to which Captain John Smith once gave the outlandish name that is this post's title, in honor, he claimed, of a Greek woman who had aided him during his captivity in Turkey. Sadly, Smith's tongue-twisting onomastic flourish was overruled in favor of the more prosaic "Cape Ann."


The above images are relatively conservative in their coloring; not so the pair immediately below, for which the printer pulled out all the stops, creating a psychedelic seaside world as alluring as it was unreal. Brilliant streaks of orange and purple flare above the horizon. These are by no means "merely" documentary images; they are miniature, bizarre works of fantastic art.


The rock formation shown above, dubbed "Old Mother Ann" and sometimes compared to New Hampshire's now-fallen "Old Man of the Mountain," was the subject of an 1892 book by the formidable Ada C. Bowles, a Gloucester native who became a leading suffragist, temperance campaigner, and ordained Universalist minister. In a capsule biography written while she was still alive, we learn that

She was born in Gloucester, Mass., in 1836. She grew up with a passionate fondness for the sea and is, as she has always been, equally at home either in or on the water. She is an expert swimmer, and her undaunted courage and rare presence of mind have enabled her upon different occasions to rescue persons from drowning.

Nature gave her a sound mind in a sound body, and her early life among the rocks of Cape Ann gave her the well balanced physical development which resulted in a perfectly healthy womanhood.

Among her other talents, "Mrs. Bowles is possessed of remarkable mechanical dexterity and handles a hammer and saw as cleverly as a rolling pin."


The Colonial Arms, above, burned on New Year's Day, 1908. The other hotels shown on this page are also apparently long gone.

Sources: Tolles, Bryant Franklin, Summer by the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels 1820-1950, University Press of New England, 2008.