Ancestors

Shown above is the so-called "Conus" of Marietta, Ohio, one of the hundreds if not thousands of substantial mounds and other earthworks built by the inhabitants of eastern North Americans before the arrival of European settlers. Many of these sites were long ago ploughed under, but this one survives, in part because of its sheltered location in a cemetery, and in part because, according to archaeologist George R. Milner, the town's citizens made a point of preserving it.

Over a century and a half ago, Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis singled out the citizens of Marietta for special praise for preserving their mounds, while lamenting the loss of what would have been "striking ornaments" in other cities. In fact, the early settlers of Marietta were so proud of their mounds that they dignified them with Latin names.

Squier and Davis were the pioneering archaeologists whose 1848 report for the Smithsonian Institution, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, provided the first scientific survey of the earthworks. Like many of their contemporaries, they assumed them to be the work of some vanished people, since the region's Indians were deemed too "primitive" to be capable of such accomplishments. George R. Milner's The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of North America (W. W. Norton, 2004) is a good recent overview.


Despite the inscription on the postcard above, the Standing Stone Monument in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania is not "an Indian relic" but a memorial to a relic. A history of the monument can be found in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1910).

A famous Indian landmark on the right bank of a creek of the same name, on the Kittanning trail, at the site of the present Huntingdon, Huntingdon Co., Pa. The "standing stone" is described by John Harris (1754) as being 14 ft high and 6 in. square, and covered with Indian pictographs. It was highly venerated by the Indians, and is supposed to have been erected by one of the tribes of the Iroquois. After the treaty of 1754 the stone was carried away by the Indians. A similar one was erected on the same spot, which soon became covered with the names and initials of the Indian traders who passed by...

Rev. Dr William Smith, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, laid out a town on the site of Standing Stone in 1767, to which he gave the name of Huntingdon, in honor of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (England), who had made a gift to the university. The old name, however, clung to the place for years afterward. Nearly all the traders and military officers of the 18th century use the old name.

The Handbook doesn't mention that the second stone was eventually destroyed (a piece is said to have been relocated to the Huntingdon County Courthouse). The third-generation monument shown in the postcard was erected in 1896 as part of a centennial commemoration of the incorporation of the Borough of Huntingdon. The fate of the original stone, with its mysterious "pictographs," is unknown. The recipient of the Standing Stone postcard, incidentally, was one Forney Gilliam of Ardmore, Indian Territories (now Oklahoma). Gilliam seems to have operated a small store in Ardmore; his solicitation for magazine subscriptions can be found in the Daily Ardmoreite for November 19, 1906. Either as part of his business or as a hobby (quite likely both), he appears to have been a quite active exchanger of postcards. (He also published at least one, a crudely printed black-and-white view of the Ardmore's Main Street.)


Finally, above is "the Devil's Den," a rock ledge in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, which one source indicates was believed to have been used by Indians as a place to store dried fish. There must be countless numbers of sites in the US with an equally hazy folk memory of use by the original inhabitants of the land. There are a number of other Rotographs of Newton Upper Falls, so perhaps they will be the subject of a future post.

The inscription, by the way, reads "Serg't I wish you would try and Send me Perry's Address he is a former member of your Co and a very good friend of mine. Sergt Regan." It was mailed to a Serg't E. R. Gross in Attleboro, Mass.

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.

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.

I looked for your beans

This alarmingly livid postcard, depicting a disturbingly phallic monument amid what appears to be tropical greenery, is in fact an upright Victorian tribute to the wife of the second president of the United States, Abigail Adams, who is said to have watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from this elevated vantage point in neighboring Quincy. According to Wikipedia, "The cairn was erected June 17, 1896, by the Adams Chapter of the Society of the Daughters of the Revolution."

During reconstruction of the monument in 2008 a time capsule was uncovered containing a parchment declaration, a book, and some newspapers; it was replaced with another capsule containing CDs and flash drives, which, I suspect, will be far less accessible to anyone who may find them a century from now than if they had simply reburied the original documents.

The recipient of the postcard was Mrs. George O. Williams of South Peabody, Mass. I don't know whether her sister ever found her beans.