OPPOSITE POINTS OF VIEW

In my boyhood, two iconic pictures defined the sense of place and history in our community .  The first was a painting, 'A Morning View of Bluehill Village, 1824' by the Reverend Jonathan Fisher, a Yankee polymath who had come here fresh out of Harvard in 1795 to be the first settled minister of the village.  The other was a late 19th century 'Bird's Eye View' lithograph, published, coincidentally, 100 years after Parson Fisher's arrival.

Fisher's painting is a summary of his life and career in the town.  Although Blue Hill, originally New Andover, was settled in 1762 near the tidal falls at what is now South Blue Hill, the young village at the head of the Bay that Fisher later painted had barely existed before his arrival, but for a couple of houses, and grew and developed in those thirty subsequent years. Fisher's journals carefully record his progress on the painting, including traipsing to the Treworgy farm on the next hill (now known  as Greene's Hill, after later owners), with his homemade camera obscura, to make the first sketches in September 1824, and then note progress on the work until its completion in April 1825.  

Parson Fisher's home-made camera obscura

The village spreads out below the hill, quiet in the morning light.  In the foreground a man (Fisher?) drives a snake from this Eden.  There were probably roosters crowing, maybe hammers and saws working on the boats under construction at the edge of the harbor, but we can't hear those sounds.  All is quiet, frozen in time.  

Detail of the Fisher Farm from A Morning View of Blue Hill

The Fisher House from the same perspective today.

Opposite where he sat surveying the scene, on the top horizon, was Fisher's raison d'etre for choosing this perspective: his own farm, with its tidy orchard, and just downhill to the right, the meeting house where he preached, with the parade ground before it. It is a scrupulously honest picture. In the right middle ground is the Baptist meeting house, to which Fisher, a stern Calvinist, had lost much of his flock when it was founded a few years before. In a village near the Eastern Frontier, far removed from the centers of art, this painting was considered a marvel, and was  revered locally long before it found its way into the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum.  Considered the first true depiction of a Maine coastal scene, it has been published in countless books about American folk art and early 19th century culture.

A late 19th century photograph captures the view originally painted by Fisher

And on the opposite hill, one looks across to the spot (indicated by box) from  which  Fisher painted his view.  The photograph, actually two joined,  is from the series used in the creation of the bird's eye view

The second view was created by an artist using dozens of photographs taken in panoramic perspective, then mechanically re-aligned so as to appear taken from the air--a dozen years before the Wright Brothers would go aloft, and aerial photography become commonplace.  What fascinates and compels me to write about these pictures this morning is that each depicts the view from almost exactly the opposite center of the other--they literally look across to each other. In the bird's eye view, the Treworgy Farm is on the horizon about a third way from the right, and in the Fisher painting, one looks across to the spot that would be directly below the airborne viewer.

Bird's Eye View of Blue Hill, 1896.  For a full-screen version, please click HERE

The village has become quite a different place in the bird's eye view. Fisher's meetinghouse burned in 1842, and was replaced with a new Congregational Church downhill, closer to the center of the village.  The Baptist meeting house has become a church, with a spire echoing that of the Congregationalists.  A main street of stores, with post office and restaurants has grown up at the edge of the harbor.  

The Town Hall, designed by George Clough

A new town hall, designed by the architect son of a local shipbuilder, has just been constructed, Colonial in idea, but its Roman arched frontispiece clearly inspired by the newly popular classical ideas of the great Chicago Exposition of a couple years before.  As with Fisher's painting, a schooner is coming into the harbor, but despite sails, this one has smoke or steam rising from a stack on its deck.  Although Fisher's village still mostly survives, the 20th century is around the corner, and in the foreground is a harbinger of things to come---a big shiny new summer hotel for the newest Maine industry, rusticators.

The hotel, the Blue Hill Inn, was designed by William Ralph Emerson, the Boston architect who practically invented the shingled style of summer architecture favored on the Maine coast, and was the latest marvel of the town, complete with its own electric power plant, and supplanted the boarding houses and modest village hotels of earlier years. The Inn was not a success, and with the removal of a wing, was converted to use as a summer cottage by a new owner, Judge Chauncey Truax of New York, in the early 1900s.  Later, it served as a temporary hospital, and in the early years of the Depression, it went up in flames.

The 21st century is not being kind to the village of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Poor planning, lack of zoning, changing tastes, a little greed, changing economies and myriad other factors are wreaking changes on a scale that is unprecedented in our collective memory.  Change used to be gradual, and somewhat organic (South Street, new home of both roundabout and Dunkin' Donuts, was still a narrow gravel lane as recently as my childhood).  In recent years, the change has come faster, more forcefully, and has been more destructive.  Even as I type this, a rotary is being constructed at the dusty crossroads to the left of the Inn, and a Dunkin Donuts is going up on the inn site, across from the supermarket and Rite Aid drugstore that started the commercial sprawl.  

Bird's eye rendering of the new Dunkin' Donuts

As to the Fisher homestead, it is preserved as a museum, its original orchard replanted a few years ago (for an article about the Fisher Orchard, click HERE.) But, now only a thousand feet from a car wash and a new commerical parking lot with clear development intentions, the Fisher house's integrity and isolation, which lasted for most of the 20th century, is clearly coming to an end as it approaches its 200th anniversary.

On another note, the photograph below, from the George Stevens Academy on-line student paper, 'The Procrastinator', both sums up the local ambivalence about the arrival of Dunkin' Donuts, and on a more personal note, brings the Dilettante up short, for 43 years ago he was the editor of that school's paper, then called 'The Eagle's Nest'.  At that time it was a mimeographed four-sheet (my great contribution was sharper stencil graphics), and the slick advances in technology and content make me feel very, very old indeed.

Photoshop image of Blue Hill Mountain from GSA Procrastinator, credited to William Hilliard

As for Jonathan Fisher, a current exhibit at the Farnsworth Art Museum explores Fisher's ongoing fascination with the natural world in his art and writing, culminating in the book, 'Scripture Animals' (1833).  Click HERE for more.

ANOTHER SIDE OF MAINE: An Early Carpenter's Simple House

As one approaches our town on Route 15, one rounds a bend along the shoulder of the 'mountain' and drives past a grove of beech trees, barely changed in my lifetime (but for the addition of an unfortunate steel storage building), that marks the beginning of the downhill descent to the village. After a long road trip, it is the moment that one knows one is home.  At the left is Mountain Road, and on each corner an early house.  The uphill corner is occupied by an elegantly conceived cape with an octagonal entry porch, and dormer with arched window above, the down hill corner by an old yellow farmhouse, now the headquarters of the local land trust, stewards and protectors of the front slopes of the mountain above.

The road downhill from Mountain Road to the village, c. 1900

This yellow house, also unchanged in my lifetime, is happily kept so by the Trust,an admirable echo of their policy on the 5,000 acres of land they steward on our peninsula. But appearances can be deceptive, and the house, which appears at first glance an ordinary Victorian farmhouse, is actually much older, a remodeling of a tiny Federal era house, and it holds several secrets.

It was built around 1815, on what would then have been a lonely bare hillside, by a housewright named William Carleton.  Built into the slope, its lowest level is thought to incorporate an 18th century cabin already on the site.  This space contains an early kitchen, unused and barely touched for most of the 20th century, in effect a time capsule, shreds of mid-19th century wallpaper clinging to the simple red-painted sheathing underneath.  The 1810's were a moment of prosperity in the hardscrabble 19th century history of our village---several of the elegant, Federal style houses there, with their lovely doorways were built in these years---but it is clear that Mr. Carleton did not  share in this prosperity.  

In an early  building contract, Mr. Carleton agrees to finish two rooms and upper and lower halls of a house for $34.53.

 

Early photographs of Mr. Carleton's own home bear evidence of a hard New England life----one thinks immediately of Ethan Frome, or the poorer villagers and farmers of William Dean Howells or Sarah Orne Jewett novels.

This first photograph probably dates from the 1880s, and shows a house untouched by time, already old, faded, worn. 

It is interesting (to me at least---you the reader will either have to ride along or jump out of the car now) to zoom in closer and contemplate the many details in this next picture.  At the windows hang simple panels of fabric, one drawn up to let in light and air.  There is no screen at the open window.

In front of the house, stands an elderly man, likely either Mr. Carleton or his son, wearing the costume of more than half a century before, tricorn hat and homespun jacket.  Behind him sunflowers grow in front of the small-paned windows with wavy glass. To the left of the vestibule, a complicated homemade gutter is seen, ending in a wood spout whose high placement suggest that a rain barrel would have been placed below it to collect water.

There is a huge woodpile stacked in anticipation of a long Maine winter.

The shed rested on the enormous granite slab that formed the ceiling of the enclosed underground spring, probably cut and hauled down from the mountain above.  Notice the 'make-do' nature of the siding---narrow claboards, wider boards, and finally, split cedar shingles

The small shed at ground floor level harbored a secret, quite unlike anything else I have ever seen in an early house.  Down a flight of stairs to an underground level, one finds oneself in a tiny chamber.  The walls are blocks of rough cut granite, the ceiling a granite slab which would have been the floor of the shed above, perhaps once used as a still room or buttery.  The floor of this underground underground chamber is another slab of granite, with a hole in the center, giving access to an underground spring.  However utilitarian its purpose, this cool, damp, quiet space is as mysterious as a Druid cave. (and for the life of me, I cannot at the moment find my photo of it, lost somewhere amongst the thousands).

In the early 20th century, the rise of photography made many things possible, and 'real photo' postcards of one's home, printed directly from glass negatives, were very popular. Miss Kate Carleton, the spinster daughter of the house, posed for her postcard, sitting in a Model T with an unidentified gentleman.  Against the shed is a buggy, soon to be obsolete, and beside them, a horse, clearly contemplating the new contraption that will soon render him obsolete.

When we zoom in on this photograph, we find that Miss Carleton, aunt of the village doctor, holds a large plump cat in her lap.  One doubts that the cat remained for the drive, and the wild expression on the man's face could be interpreted either as madness or 'let me out, of here,  neither the old lady or the cat know how to drive and she's got a gun'.  In these two photos, 20 or 30 years apart, we have spanned a century from Mr. Carleton in his tricorn hat to his granddaughter behind the wheels of a mode of transportation that he could not even have imagined when he built the house.

Footnote:  The town's first settled minister, Jonathan Fisher, also worked as a surveyor to supplement his meagre pastoral stipend.  This is his survey of the Carleton property.  Interestingly, no structure is shown,  raising the question whether it is not true that there was an existing 18th century cabin, or if it was thought so insignificant as to be not worth indicating.

Photographs from the collection of the Blue Hill Heritage Trust

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.

Waiting for Summer--Follies in New England

Winter is almost over, even in Maine--knock on wood--and thoughts are turning again to outdoor pleasures

The tradition of a folly or gazebo as a garden retreat, goes back at least to the gardens of ancient Rome.  Here in New England, with our short summers, the idea of a shady retreat, a place to enjoy a cool refreshment on a warm  afternoon holds great appeal..  A summerhouse or gazebo is a pleasant spot from which to contemplate the garden or view, and simultaneously, can be beautiful feature or eye catcher in the landscape.

A rare few survive from the 18th century here in New England.  They are usually enclosed, and though made of wood, and on a smaller scale, recall their cousins on grand estates in England.  It was not unusual for these structures to be placed on a small artificial 'mount' in the English after European fashion.  Unlike England, with its large preserved country estates, America has always been a country on the move, and most of the earliest that survive do so because they have been moved from their original settings. 

An early survivor is the 1766 summerhouse from the garden of Abraham Redwood in Newport RI, erected long before that seaport city became the most luxurious resort of the gilded age.  In the 19th century, it was moved to the grounds of the exquisite Palladian library that he endowed in the mid-18th century, the first library in America. The chaste octagonal facade is of wood, rusticated and surfaced with sand in the paint to emulate stone.

 

 

At the Isaac Royall house in Medford, Massachusetts, was this grand affair topped by a statue of Mercury,  built in the mid-18th century, on an artificial mount that hid an ice house below it in Capt. Royall's pleasure grounds.  By the early 20th century, his grounds were swallowed up by development, and all that survives of the structure is single arched window frame.

 

The most exquisite to survive from the 18th century is the Derby summerhouse, designed by the great Salem, Massachusetts carver/architect Samuel McIntire for Capt. Derby's summer farm in Danvers Massachusetts in 1795.  Elias Hasket Derby was a merchant of great wealth, the Donald Trump of his day, but obviously  with far better taste.  Topping the roof were carved figures representing the Reaper (as in Harvest, not Grim) , and the Milkmaid.  A young lady who visited the estate in 1802 wrote of going upstairs to the room above, “The air from the windows is always pure and cool and the eye wanders with delight over the beautiful landscape below…The room is ornamented with some Chinese figures and seems calculated for serenity and peace.”

The Endicott family enjoy their re-located summerhouse.

In the late 19th century, the summerhouse was near ruin, and development pressures were closing in on the Derby farm.  Derby's great-granddaughter, Mrs. William Crowninshield Endicott, rescued the it, seen on its original foundation in the upper photo, and had it moved to her nearby country estate, where it still graces the rose garden designed for it, now open to the public.

Okay, now bear with me for a second,  for you know how I like all the dots connected, and  this part requires your full attention. Already in the garden of the Endicott estate was a gazebo built in 1840 by Mrs. Endicott's grandfather, Joseph Peabody, from whom she inherited the estate.  Upon the death of her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Endicott, Jr., a nephew inherited the Peabody gazebo and moved it to his property on Martha's Vineyard, where it sits to this day.  In 1989, the Danvers Historical Society erected a replica of this structure, above, in the original location.   Email me if you need a re-cap.  As I've mentioned before, we really like moving buildings around here in New England, and sometimes a playbook is required to keep it all straight.

McIntire also designed a smaller, no less exquisite summerhouse for another member of the Derby family, now also traveled from its original location.  It remained on the Derby, later Beebe, farm in Wakefield until moved to the grounds of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, where its setting on a small artificial mount has been carefully recreated.

 This late 18th century landscape painting by the Reverend Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine shows a typical New England town, probably Bucksport, in the background, while in the foreground, a family enjoys tea by a domed gazebo.  It is likely that this gazebo never existed there, but is an artistic conceit inspired by an English print.

High Street in Newburyport, Massachusetts, is one of the handsomest streets of New England, lined with grand three story Federal mansions.  In the early to mid-19th century, a local tradition of lattice summerhouses, often with 'gothick' touches arose, and several examples are still in situ.  Here, above and below, in early photographs published in 1917 in Architectural Review are two of them.

The New England tradition of save and recycle is at work here.  The octagon feature on the roof of example above in Newburyport was the originally the sounding board over a pulpit, salvaged when an early meeting house was being remodeled.

In rural New Ipswich New Hampshire, an impossibly light summerhouse is at summit of a mount, framed by an allee of maples, at Forest Hall, built as a wedding present for Charles Barrett and his bride.  Those of us who can happily sit through Merchant-Ivory costume dramas will remember this as the location for The Europeans.

A Gothic Revival summerhouse in a garden at the childhood home of artist Waldo Pierce, friend of Hemingway, in Bangor, Maine.  As the neighborhood deteriorated in the mid-twentieth century the gazebo was rescued by the Hutchins family, and moved to their estate at the edge of town, where it improbably, dreamily, appeared as an exotic apparition above I-95 for many years, but is now, I believe, lost.

In Belfast, Maine, sits the magnificent Joseph White house, a Greek Revival masterpiece by Calvin Ryder.  The house sits on a pie shaped lot at the juncture of two streets, and at the apex of the triangle, anchoring the street corner behind a classical iron fence, is this romantic example from the 1850s.

A leitmotif of the Victorian age was that more was never enough, and here we have a  gazebo as observatory tower seen in the 1880's on the J.S. Potter estate in Framingham, Massachusetts. Potter was a self made businessman, and his garden was a veritable amusement park of garden structures.

By the late 19th century, there were conflicting view on landscape design in New England---the Arcadian  ideal, as espoused by Frederick Law Olmstead was one.  It can be seen in this example, with grotto under, designed by the great man himself at Moraine Farm, built for the Phillips family in the 1880s.

Another trend was European style grandeur and formality, ever the means to display wealth.  The apogee was reached with this pair of French classical limestone tea houses in the formal garden of The Elms in Newport, Rhode Island, designed by Horace Trumbauer for coal magnate Edwin Berwind. This photograph from a 1931 National Geographic shows the high level of maintenance that once characterized these estate gardens. A quarter century separates these structures from the Olmstead teahouse at Moraine Farm.

In Bar Harbor, Maine, the natural and the classical were brought together by this domed gazebo, situated in a carefully groomed naturalistic landscape recalling the paintings of Claude Lorrain.  Although built of wood, this lovely structure improbably survived the 1947 forest fire that consumed the other buildings on the estate where it stood, including the enormous main house designed by R.H. Robertson, a mere two hundred feet away.  This picture was taken in 1971, showing the effects of 25 years of abandonment in grounds gone wild.   I believe the gazebo no longer exists.

In the early 20th century, artist turned architect Charles Adams Platt, back from Italy, electrified America with a new sort of garden, based on Italian precedent, less grand and formal than the French beaux arts, gardens and house fully integrated with the rooms of the house.   The garden with which he made this auspicious debut was at Faulkner Farm, the Sprague estate in Brookline, Massachusetts.  The summerhouse at the terminus of the dream-like formal garden, embraced on either side by a pergola, was one of the most admired of its day.

 

 Live or Memorex?  Will the real McIntire summerhouse please step forward?

And finally, we travel more than full circle, back to Newport, Rhode Island.   A mere two blocks from the Redwood garden house where we started, this tea house was designed by architectural historian Fiske Kimball, later director of the Philadelphia Museum,  for Miss Martha Codman on the grounds of her summer home, Berkeley villa.   In case you're rubbing your eyes in disbelief, and about to say, 'That stupid Dilettante, he's inserted the wrong picture", guess again.  It  is a copy of the Derby summerhouse by McIntire.  Miss Codman was also a descendant of Derby, and a family feud was precipitated when she copied the summerhouse for her own garden without the permission of its owner, her cousin Mrs. Endicott.

Actress Jane Pickens, later Mrs. Walter Hoving, purchased Berkeley Villa from the estate of Martha Codman.Here she is seen in front of the doppelganger teahouse, with butler in the background waiting to serve afternoon tea.

photograph by from Town & Country,