An Early Down East Orchard Reborn

I went to a tree planting this morning, a perfect activity for a Spring day Down East.  And no ordinary tree planting was this. It was for the recreation of an early 19th century orchard in its original location.  Nothing is too arcane for this Dilettante.

  The Jonathan Fisher House, built to Fisher's own design in 1814.  In foreground, Tim Seabrook gives a planting lesson

The Jonathan Fisher House in Blue Hill, Maine, is the carefully preserved homestead designed and built in 1814 by the town's first settled minister, a 1793 graduate of Harvard, who remains well known today as a folk artist, diarist, farmer and author, entrepreneur, surveyor, and all around Yankee Renaissance man, a rural answer to Jefferson, a true product of the Age of Reason.

 Self-Portrait by Jonathan Fisher, 1824 (Collection of Jonathan Fisher House)

 A Morning View of Blue Hill Village, 1824, by Jonathan Fisher.  The Fisher Farm is visible at the center horizon. (Collection of Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine)

Although the Fisher House has been open as a Museum for 55 years, , the two acre home grounds that survive of the original 300 acre farm were long neglected, and had overgrown with invasive bittersweet, bracken and swamp maples.   As the board of directors started to take control of this jungle, the remnants of stone walls began to re-appear, and the 19th century lay-out became apparent.  Fortuitously, Fisher's hand-drawn map of those two acres survives in the collection of the Farnsworth Library & Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, complete with a chart of the fruit trees planted there originally.   The board of the Fisher House decided  to bring the agricultural  story of the property to the fore, and to recreate the orchard.

 Jonathan Fisher's c. 1820 map of his home grounds, showing orchard and listing varieties (Collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine)

 Fisher's 4 x great-granddaughter, Louise Fisher Abbot, offered to fund the clearing and restoration of the fields, in memory of her three late sisters. (Jonathan Fisher had also had four daughters)  With this generous gift in hand, the Fisher House board was able to proceed with planning.   Enter at this point, the current Congregational minister, Robert McCall, author of the Awanjanado Almanac, who himself maintains an orchard at his parsonage.   He brought to the committee Leslie Cummins and Tim Seabrook of Five Star Nursery in Brooklin, Maine, who have made their life work the preservation and propagation of early varieties of apples grown in Maine.  

 A page from Jonathan Fisher's Sketchbook, c. 1815, showing two apples, believed to be Golden Russets, on a pewter plate (watercolor, collection of Jonathan Fisher House)

Planning commenced.  Fisher's chart was examined, the space available measured, practical considerations like budget and manpower available weighed, and a plan began to take shape.   It was decided that a reduced scale adaptation of the orchard could be achieved.   Amazingly, one huge tree, labeled on the original plan as a 'St. Germain Pear', survived from 1820, and now anchors the new orchard.  

 Detail from Morning View of Blue Hill Village, showing the Fisher Farm, orchard at right center.

Looking toward the house today.  The 200 year old pear tree partially obscures the ell, with a newly planted section of orchard to the right.

An 1888 view of the Fisher Farm from the street.  The pear tree is at left.

Another fascinating feature of the orchard is that Fisher clearly intended it to be ornamental as well as useful (He often ventured from this post on the Eastern frontier to Boston, where he saw urban schemes and the new country estates then being built around Boston, and visited with relatives, including the landscape painter Alvin Fisher).   Radiating out from the parlor windows of the house, splitting the orchard in two, he indicated a fan allee, widening from the house as it took in the spectacular view from his hilltop of Blue Hill Mountain, Blue Hill Village and Bay, and the mountains of Mt. Desert Island in the distance.   This is probably the earliest known planned landscape feature in Maine.   It was considered essential to duplicate this feature, although the view is long since lost to tree growth (and were the trees to disappear today, would focus directly on the rear of a supermarket a quarter mile away between Fisher House and the Harbor.)  

Rev. Rob McCall, Louise Fisher Abbot, and Leslie Cummins of Five Star Nursery plant a cherry tree, descended from the original planted in this spot

For trees, two of Fisher's original varieties, golden Roxbury Russets and a Pippin could be located.  It was decided to also make the orchard a public home for other known pre 1850 (Fisher died in 1847 )varieties that were known to have been grown locally.  Additionally, cherry trees descended from Fisher's original stock of 'English cherries' still existed, handed down from Farmer to farmer around town, and were donated.  Lastly, scion wood was taken to be grafted from the pear tree to ensure future stock.

A cage is then erected around the trees to protect them from Giant Maine Hooved Rats, a marauding pest sometimes more picturesquely referred to as 'deer' by the tourists.

Which brings us to this morning.   The trees were put up for 'adoption', and all were spoken for, and this morning, with apple trees in bloom, members of the community gathered and planted 'their' trees, in the spots where Jonathan Fisher had planted similar ones nearly 200 years ago.  Rev. McCall spoke a few words to bless the trees, and with that, Fisher's great-great-great-great granddaughter helped to plant one of the cherry trees descended from those first ones, in the very spots where the originals had grown.

 Spring, by Jonathan Fisher, 1820 (Collection of Jonathan Fisher House)

For more about Jonathan Fisher's House and art, visit their website:  www.jonathanfisherhouse.org  Their blog:  http://jonathanfisherhouse.blogspot.com/

An entertaining general biography is Mary Ellen Chase's Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson (Houghton Mifflin); or Versatile Yankee, the Art of Jonathan Fisher by Alice Winchester, former editor of Antiques Magazine, (Pyne Press, Princeton University).  A new biography, exploring Fisher's art & life,  by Kevin Murphy of CUNY, is to be published in July by University of Massachusetts Press. http://www.umass.edu/umpress/fall_09/murphy.htm

The Jonathan Fisher House is considered one of Maine's most important historic sites, and contains extraordinary collections.  It may be visited July-October, Thur, Fri, Sat. 1-4, and other times by prior arrangement.

Hammer & Tongs

As in many New England towns, the Down East village of Blue Hill had a blacksmith shop on its Main Street.  Passersby could see the blacksmith at work over his forge, making utilitarian objects.  By the 1920's, horseshoeing was perhaps not the sure profession that it once was, and the blacksmith who took over the Blue Hill forge, Charles Wescott, was an artisan, and in addition to his own designs, several local artists contributed designs,as well as work commissioned by architects. The forge, renamed Hammer & Tongs, turned out useful and decorative objects, from his own designs and those of local artists.  His work decorated the front of the shop, and though examples of his signs and firescreens and lamps are still to be found in the area, few ever come on the market.  Mr. Wescott died in the 1960's, and after a brief spell under other blacksmiths, the old building by the local millstream became a restaurant, ending 100 years of blacksmithing on the site.  A copy of the Hammer & Tongs catalog survives.  The figure of Pan with his pipes, Wescott's trademark, was originally created for the summer estate of Mrs. Ethelbert Nevin, widow of a famed composer of the late 19th century.

 

Nina Fletcher Little, Decorative Arts Detective

It is snowing fiercely today, so I'm housebound, and torn between cleaning up a gigantic desk mess, or browsing through picture books, I've chosen the books, fully aware that I'll pay later, when the piles on the desk fall over on the floor, or they spontaneously combust.

The book that has most caught my attention this afternoon is an old favorite,  American Decorative Wall Painting, 1700-1850, by Nina Fletcher Little.  You may wonder how the Dilettante acquired his fascination for design sources.  Well, it was as a little lad, sitting inside on rainy days, alternately reading Nina Fletcher Little or the Hardy Boys----when my nose wasn't poked deep into the chic, lush photos of House & Gardens Second Book of Interior Decoration, but that's another post.

This groundbreaking study of early American interior decorative motifs, sometimes beautiful, sometimes weird,  brought the naive, sometimes ambitious,  early American attempts at European style decoration to the fore. She was a prodigious researcher and detective, and for 65 years was constantly scooping herself, discovering another obscure folk artist, finding the design source for an American building. tracing the allegorical history of a piece of a printed textile.  I cannot say it better than this bit of promotional copy for her posthumous collecting autobiography Little by Little :

NINA FLETCHER LITTLE spent over sixty years collecting and writing about New England antiques until her death in 1993. Her "special contribution was to bridge the worlds of American antiques and folk art, bringing the antiquarian's passion for the past to the study of folk art. She combined a keen appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of an object with a determination to discover everything possible about the historical and social context in which it was created -- who made it, when and where, how it was used and by whom. For her there was no contest between object and context: she honored both."

I always looked forward to her many magazine articles, amazed by her resourcefulness and intellect, her new discoveries, and her excellent narrative style, which kept the subject from being dry.  One shared her enthusiasm and sense of discovery, and from her writings, I learned a new way of considering objects and their place in the world, and developed my own curiosity about design sources.

With her husband, Bertram K. Little, for many years the Director of Historic New England , the organization formerly known as SPNEA, she formed an extraordinary and pioneering collection of New England Folk art.  The Littles displayed the collection at their summer home, Cogswell's Grant,  an impossibly romantic 18th c.

 Cogswell's Grant

New England farm hidden away at the edge of the marshes in Essex Massachusetts.  Although 'country' and 'folk art' are two words that can make my blood freeze when spoken of as interior decoration (all those painted goose cutouts, those herbal wreathes, those homespun checks...ugh), the Little's collection was something else, almost spiritual, as displayed in the timeworn old farmhouse.  At their deaths, both in 1990, The Littles left house, farm, and collection  to Historic New England.  Historic New England is also the steward of famous Beauport, a few miles down the road in Gloucester.  The two are well worth a summer road trip, to experience two highly personal presentation of the decorative arts of New England.

A bedroom in the Little's country house, Cogswell's Grant, with the 18th century grained and marbleized woodwork that sparked her interest in early wall decoration.

FOOTNOTE:  Here is one of my own 'eureka' moments.   This is a little painting that I can't live without.  It is a small primitive oil on canvas, very shabby, of a shipwreck, by some anonymous 1850's painter.  I  bought it at the age of 14, at a country auction I attended with my father at a run down Charles Addams-ish Victorian mansion in Hampden, Maine.   The auction was mostly the usual banal carved mahogany furniture and gold bordered china one would expect in railroad president's house.  Sitting outside on the unshaded lawn, getting the worst sunburn of my life on my knees, I watched the usual buffets and gilt mirrors go up, when suddenly, a very dirty stack of small paintings came down from the attic. They were mostly ho-hum Hudson River style landscapes.  This one was on the bottom, and it was love at first sight---the almost abstract composition, combined with sure brushstrokes, skillfully rendered dawn on the horizon, and vividly real storm colors.  For $11.00 the stack was mine.

I'd lived with the painting for 25 years, when, in the course of removing antiques I'd purchased from a house a mile from me, this tattered Currier & Ives appeared folded in a pile of papers in the attic.  Imagine my surprise.  I'd found the source of my painting.