PETERBOROUGH – For Sophia Scott and Katie Cummings, the journey into the relentless swelter of the southern summer was to be one of reconciliation with their husbands – a show of support and, they hoped, a morale booster in difficult times.

It was July 1862, and as the nation plunged ever deeper into intractable conflict, Scott and Cummings, the wives of two decorated Union officers with the 6^th NH Volunteers, sought little more than to provide comfort at a time when they felt their husbands needed them most.

Scott, 32, was already tending to her husband, Lt. Col. Charles Scott, deeply ill with fever at a Newport News, VA, military hospital, when Cummings arrived from Peterborough in search of her husband, John, who’d just made Captain within his division. Only 19 years old and newly married the previous December, Cummings missed her husband greatly and worried about him even more. She would write a letter to her John during her trip south telling of a premonition she’d had that something bad would happen. Cummings’ search for her husband, away with his regiment, was to sadly be in vain; her premonition, however, was another matter, and for both ladies, the visit to Virginia was to be their last.

Closely inspect the Civil War memorial in front of Peterborough’s old Grand Army of the Republic hall, and you’ll see the names of the nearly 50 local volunteers who gave their lives during the darkest chapter of our national story. At the very bottom of that bronze engraving, weather-beaten and tarnished over time, you’ll see the unlikely names of Sophia Scott and Katie Cummings – victims of a tragedy that demonstrated the depth and indiscriminate nature of the war’s grip on communities across the country.

With Lt. Colonel Scott’s health improved by early August and orders to oversee the transport of sick soldiers to a Washington, DC, hospital out of the war zone, Scott, his wife and Cummings – as well as the wife and 5-year-old son of a Nashua soldier, Maj. Obed Dort – boarded the steamer West Point and headed north up the Potomac. On the evening of August 13, the West Point, carrying 279 passengers, was accidentally struck by another steamer headed south, the George Peabody. Mortally wounded, the West Point reached the river bottom in less than 10 minutes, the three women, the boy and 70 others meeting their fate in the dark, rushing water.

Lt. Colonel Scott was found the following morning clinging to the West Point’s smokestack, the only part remaining above water. As he arrived in Washington to recuperate and testify in the investigation into the tragedy, he immediately requested permission from Secretary of War Stanton to return to Aquia Creek, VA, to find his wife’s remains. When Stanton turned him down, citing the ongoing war effort, Scott took it a step higher, visiting President Lincoln at Soldier’s Home to make a personal plea. A deeply fatigued Lincoln initially turned Scott down, as well, but the following morning had a change of heart. A few days later, Scott arrived back in Peterborough to properly lay his wife’s body to rest; Katie Cummings’ father, James, would return with his daughter’s remains a couple of weeks later – both drawing thronged funerals in the town’s old Village Cemetery on Concord Street. Both evidence of a conflict which spared no one.

“This event really crystallized the reach of this war,” says Mike Pride, former editor of The Concord Monitor and a Civil War historian and author. “It was not just about battles, but about the ubiquity of death and the various ways people died. The Civil War was an all-absorbing event for New Hampshire. Every family, every town was deeply affected by it. Every bit as much as WWII, it dominated society, with entire towns coming together to support families who’d lost loved ones.”

As the nation this year somberly marks a century-and-a-half since the opening salvos on Fort Sumter, SC, Granite State communities and historical societies are telling stories, unearthing artifacts, and hosting commemoratives of their own to remind residents that, in a war not often associated with New Hampshire, their state was indeed a pivotal player.

An estimated 34,000 New Hampshire volunteers enlisted for the conflict. Of those, about 5,000 never made it home. Shown here are the 3rd NH Volunteer Infantry and the 306 3rd NH Band (above), both in South Carolina. (Photos courtesy of the NH Historical Society)

New Hampshire’s Civil War landscape, to be sure, is not one of smoke-filled sunsets over battlefields, or villages rebuilt after the ravages of combat. There are no remnants of forts or swords handed over in surrender. The stops on the Underground Railroad are relatively few, and New Hampshire’s entry into the war wasn’t as cut-and-dry a matter as perhaps with other states. “I think it is safe to say that there were mixed feelings in this region about the war,” says Peterborough Historical Society Director Michelle Stahl. “There was a sort of ambivalence about fighting the South up here, because all of the textile mills, certainly throughout this [Monadnock] region, were relying on Southern cotton.”

But in the end, Stahl says, the importance of preserving the Union overrode those concerns. Today, it shows in the hundreds of memorials dotting town commons across the state – all paying homage to the volunteers who, as with every other conflict in our nation’s narrative, were among the first to step forward and give their lives in defense of American ideals and interests. Of the 34,000 men who served in NH regiments during the Civil War – in the cases of some small towns, all but the entire young adult male population – an estimated 5,000 didn’t make it back, either killed in action or succumbing to illness. Vast numbers more returned badly damaged for the remainder of their lives, chronically sick from exposure, trauma and harsh conditions, unable to work or keep a job.

Strawbery Banke’s Stephanie Seacoard, pictured in front of former Gov. Ichabod Goodwin’s mansion in Portsmouth, is among many NH historians putting together special Civil War exhibitions this year. (Photo: David Lazar)

The war had exacted a toll well beyond the battlefield. But just as it produced countless stories of loss and heartache, so too, it offered moments of unqualified heroism, victory, and redemption for Granite Staters. Chalk it up to the state’s tradition of service or its hallmark rugged resourcefulness in times of adversity, New Hampshire’s outsize impact on the conflict is difficult to ignore. As communities from the Seacoast to the Monadnocks and the North Country tell their own unique stories, there will always be certain names that come into focus:

Lancaster’s Col. Edward E. Cross, the fiery career newspaperman who after losing the paper he was editing in the Arizona Territory to a colleague in a duel, returned to the Granite State at the outset of war to command the 5^th NH Volunteer Infantry – a unit long since known as the Fighting Fifth and whose story is chronicled by Pride in the book, “Our Brave Boys.” Known for his trademark red bandanna (in place of an officer’s hat so his soldiers could easily spot him), sharp tongue and uncompromising toughness, Cross earned distinction leading his regiment to unlikely success at Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, before ultimately falling alongside dozens of his men at Gettysburg. “If ever anyone was ready to lead a Civil War regiment, it was Cross,” says Pride. “He had a strong personality, and was very much conditioned for this conflict when he returned to New Hampshire. He would write in his diary that he lived through much of the war not knowing whether he was going to live or die at the end of each day. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I’d better arm myself and be ready for whatever comes.’”

The epic battle between the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama was captured by several noted artists, from New York’s famed Currier & Ives to the French impressionist Edouard Manet. Depictions arrived stateside within days and their publication in major newspapers is credited with boosting Union morale and shifting the momentum of the conflict. (Images courtesy of the U.S. Naval Historical Center).

Concord’s Harriet Patience Dame, a nurse for the 2^nd NH Volunteer Infantry regiment, who became the state’s Florence Nightingale, marching with “her boys” throughout the entirety of the conflict (from 1861-1865) over 6,000 miles and providing vital care and comfort on the front lines to thousands of soldiers through more than 20 pitched battles including Bull Run. Dame repeatedly declined higher government office to stay with her unit. Following the war, she used a $500 gift the state had given her in appreciation for service to build a summer cottage for veterans of the Second at the Weirs on Lake Winnipesaukee.

Peterborough’s Sgt. Osgood Hadley, a member of the 6^th NH Volunteer Infantry’s color guard who saw his entire unit of fellow flag-bearers wiped out at the Battle of Poplar Springs Church (VA) in September 1864. Despite being wounded himself seven times in the head, leg and arm, Hadley fought to keep the regimental colors flying so that Union commanders could determine where their own soldiers were on the field. One of 200 Peterborough men who enlisted, Hadley was among the first recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor and later presented the colors in person to the Governor of New Hampshire.

Portsmouth’s Gen. Fitz John Porter, whose fateful decision as a division commander for Maj. Gen. George McLellan’s Army of the Potomac ignited one of the war’s biggest controversies. Facing a Confederate contingent led by Stonewall Jackson that was six times the size of his own corps, Porter in August 1862 disobeyed his own commander and held his flank, refusing to order an immediate attack on the larger opponent.  When the unit did attack several days later and suffered a defeat at Manassas, Porter was made the scapegoat, resulting in his dismissal and court martial for insubordination. It was a quarter century later that Porter’s decision was determined not to have been cowardice but to have actually saved lives, and in 1886 – all but broken – he received a full pardon.

“One of the reasons people don’t necessarily think of New Hampshire when they think of the Civil War is because it hasn’t been well understood,” says Portsmouth’s Richard Adams, a historian and curator of a Portsmouth Athenaeum exhibition on the city’s immense naval contribution to the Civil War. “There tends to be an emphasis on the Revolutionary War here and on heroes like John Stark, John Langdon and John Paul Jones. But New Hampshire’s and specifically Portsmouth’s role in the Civil War was quite significant.”

Recruitment flyer for the 8th NH Volunteer Regiment (Photo courtesy of the NH Historical Society)

Indeed, Portsmouth alone, with a population of roughly 10,000 in the 1861, sent more than 3,000 of its sons into battle with the full backing and commitment to the cause of then-governor Ichabod Goodwin. But it was the city’s maritime tradition and the construction of one very special boat that was to deal perhaps its greatest impact.

There are many historians who believe the U.S.S. Kearsarge, built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in 1861, may well have turned the tide of the conflict. Commissioned by the U.S. Navy and christened for the famed New Hampshire peak, the Kearsarge launched in 1862 with one purpose: to take out the Confederacy’s most notorious commerce raider, the British-built C.S.S. Alabama, which over the duration of the war had knocked 65 Union trading ships out of commission, sending 55 to the bottom of the ocean. At just 201 feet long, what the Kearsarge may have lacked in size it made up in stealth and in the moxie of its crew. Over the course of three weeks in the spring of 1864, the Kearsarge, helmed by Capt. John A. Winslow, stalked the Alabama off the coast of France. “1864 was not a good year for the North,” Adams says. “Even though there had been victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, people were getting very tired of the war and the price it was exacting on families and communities.”

The events of June 19 would mark a dramatic shift. As the Alabama docked in the waters near Cherbourg – a presence that greatly displeased the French, who’d been backing the Union effort – the Kearsarge made her approach. Virtually every war story has its share of ironies and odd coincidences.  In case of this battle, the captain of the Alabama, Raphael Semmes, had actually been Winslow’s cabin mate aboard the U.S.S. Cumberland during the Mexican War several years earlier, and the two had developed a friendship. On this particular afternoon, that friendship was shelved as the Kearsarge and Alabama engaged in one of the fiercest naval battles in U.S. history. Over the course of 90 minutes, as onlookers lined the seaside cliffs of Cherbourg to view history, the Kearsarge all but obliterated the Alabama, firing mortar after mortar and ramming its sides – while protecting itself by lining its own sides with chains – until the Confederate ship could float no longer. Images of the battle would be captured by renowned artists, from Currier & Ives to Edouard Manet, and published in Harper’s and major stateside newspapers within days. Adm. David Glasgow “Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut, the Civil War hero of Mobile Bay, later declared, “I had sooner have fought that fight than any ever fought upon the ocean!”

After weeks spent on the battlefield in the immediate aftermath of Gettysburg interviewing Union and Confederate soldiers, Gilmanton’s John Badger Bachelder spent the following 30 years chronicling every aspect of the battle through literature and art, becoming the nation’s official Gettysburg historian and a designer of the national park. (Images courtesy of the NH Historical Society).

“I don’t think there’s any question that the Kearsarge victory was a huge morale booster for the North’s war effort,” Adams says. Or perhaps a finer example of the Granite State’s recurring and often unlikely role helping to shape our national story. It is a story New Hampshire residents can see told in countless ways over the coming year, from the Portsmouth Athenaeum’s Kearsarge exhibition and the work of Strawbery Banke nearby to chronicle the Seacoast’s war effort, to the painstaking work and portraiture of Gilmanton’s John Badger Bachelder, America’s official historian of Gettysburg, credited with designing the national park and its breathtaking cyclorama more than a century ago – many of his efforts now on display at the NH Historical Society in Concord. There is the Peterborough Historical Society’s vivid portrayal of soldiers’ valor and the cruel sacrifice faced by families and communities throughout the Monadnock region. And there is, of course, the Civil War storyline as told through bronze and plaster at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, home to one of the 19^th century’s foremost artists and the era’s official sculptor of our national memory.

“I think there’s something in our bloodlines here,” says historian and Strawbery Banke spokeswoman Stephanie Seacord. “Because New Hampshire is the state that made us a nation as the 9^th colony to vote, in 1861 it was again the state that volunteered to keep us a nation… We tend to get engaged up here in these conflicts. It’s an old New England thing.” Something not likely to change anytime soon.

Special thanks to Mike Pride, the Peterborough Historical Society, the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Strawbery Banke, the NH Historical Society, and the NH State Library for their assistance and generosity with this story.

(Photo courtesy of Plymouth State University)

FRANCONIA – The poet Robert Hass tells a story of walking along an old ridge road here one summer afternoon in 1978 and happening upon a middle-aged woman, who’d driven all the way from Texas to visit her grandparents’ farm in this rural landscape of pasture, peaks and clouds.

The woman, who’d spent her youth just down the road in Franconia Village, recalled her summer visits to her grandparents’ place as a little girl, where the air was cooler, the life simpler, and the still snowcapped vistas of Cannon Mountain and Mount Lafayette breathtaking.

And where there was a most unusual new neighbor.

Frost moved to this small farm in Derry, a fledgling farmer and unknown poet. His years there would inform and inspire some of his most celebrated and lasting work in ‘A Boy’s Will’ and ‘North of Boston.’ (Photo: David Lazar; Photo courtesy of Plymouth State University).

The woman remembered riding one day with her grandpa down to Franconia in a horse cart to get some supplies when she saw the strange, unruly-haired, 40ish man sitting on his whitewashed porch, writing in longhand, his fields and chicken coop left unattended. The mailbox out front bore the neighbor’s name in fresh, if crudely painted black letters: Frost.

“Grandpa, who’s that man who bought Joe Hebert’s farm?” she asked. Her grandpa replied, “That is the laziest, most good-for-nothing man who ever moved to Franconia. Come winter, he’ll be down in the village (collecting welfare assistance), and we’ll all be paying for him!”

As fortune would have it, the man studiously scribbling away on his porch managed to escape becoming a ward of the community. And while his farming prowess may not have taken home many blue ribbons over the years, what he picked up in their stead was arguably a great deal more valuable. In the clipped, plainspoken conversations of neighbors, the stillness, stoicism, and simple beauty of rural New England life, Robert Lee Frost was developing a voice uniquely his own – a voice whose clarity and directness, whose reverence for nature and recognition of Americans’ everyday aspirations and struggles would earn him ongoing distinction as his nation’s most beloved poet.

During his winters in Franconia, Frost would spend countless hours crafting poetry in his prized writing chair by the farmhouse’s old oil furnace. (Photo below courtesy of Plymouth State University; Photo above: David Lazar)

It was a voice that many – including Frost himself – say only New Hampshire could have helped create.

“Frost came to Franconia in 1915, he said, to become Yankee-er and Yankee-er, to listen… to ponder and address the big questions of life in a language ordinary people could understand,” says State Rep. David Watters, a professor of literature at UNH, who for the last quarter century has overseen the Youth Poetry Contest at the Frost Farm in Derry. “He developed the ability to take the common speech of New England and give it the cadence of the King James Bible, to speak to the hopes and joys of life. There was something quintessentially American about it, something other writers of that time weren’t able to do.”

It was an ability borne of observation. And oftentimes of hardship. Frost’s New Hampshire, to be sure, was much like the poet it inspired – complicated. A place of incomparable beauty, close-knit community and literary achievement; and of unforgiving climate, tragedy and loss.

With miles of wooded trails surrounding his property, and breathtaking views of Cannon Mountain and Mount Lafayette from his porch and bedroom window (photo at right), Frost was never without imagery in Franconia to inspire his poems. (Photo courtesy of Plymouth State University)

It is a story that begins nearly 15 years prior to those long afternoons spent on Joe Hebert’s whitewashed old porch; a story that begins on a small poultry farm about two miles south of Derry Village. “It all started in Derry,” Frost once wrote. “The whole thing.” Frost was a young fledgling farmer and little-known poet in 1901 when his grandfather, seeking to give the struggling scribe and his young family a solid footing and honest start, purchased the bucolic 30-acre tract, with its stone walls, birch stands, babbling brook and ample orchards. It was a rough time for the San Francisco-born, Dartmouth- and Harvard-educated Frost and his young wife Elinor. Just a year earlier, they had lost their three-and-a-half year old son Elliot to a sudden bout of typhoid fever, while Frost’s mother that same year had succumbed to cancer. The ensuing depression, particularly for Elinor, was considerable, and the family struggled early on, both emotionally and financially in their upstart farm operation. The couple would lose another child, Elinor Bettina, at childbirth in 1907, and Frost himself would frequently appear withdrawn and subject to bouts of despair.

But in the isolation of their new rural life, Frost also began to find inspiration – in the abundant nature (he was an avid botanist) surrounding the farmstead, in the interactions he would have with neighboring farmers, and in the long walks through the fields and woods he would take with his daughters Lesley, Irma and Marjorie, and son Carol. “Frost famously said that he went out to the Derry farm to face life and death and chose life,” Watters says. “As it happens, it was his time in Derry that really did shape him as a writer, to really discover the beauty of nature and the sound of the human voice here in New England.”

Frost would encourage his children to author their own poetry, publishing a family newspaper showcasing their work. Their walks and their work would, in many cases, spark his own – from the girls’ swinging from birch trees, to the song of the oven bird, picking apples, and the digging up of lilac bushes in their garden. A brook behind their property which dried up each summer was said to have inspired the poem ‘Hyla Brook,’ in which the poet – in what would become a trademark – neither complains nor laments the deadness of the creek bed, but rather speaks to an acceptance of nature’s will and those things we cannot change:

A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

The conversations Frost had with neighboring farmer Napoleon Gay over the stone wall separating their properties are believed to have motivated the landmark ‘Mending Wall,’ in which he dissects the sometimes strange traditions and community dynamic of New England life; while ‘Black Cottage’ was said to have been inspired by his neighbor on the other side, the widow Upton, whose husband had died in the Civil War. ‘Home Burial,’ among Frost’s most emotional works, about the death of a child, was undoubtedly influenced by the loss of Elliot.

After several years at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy, Frost spent 1911-1912 teaching at Plymouth Normal School (today Plymouth State University) before heading to England to publish his first two books. Frost’s home on campus today is a historic landmark, and a bronze of him in his writing chair now sits outside Rounds Hall. (Photo: David Lazar)

Frost’s years in Derry were perhaps his most creative and prolific. They were also his leanest. With no book yet published and the farm a constant struggle, Frost took a job teaching English at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy to make ends meet. There, he immersed himself in academic life, coaching baseball, directing school plays, and quickly becoming a favorite of students for his impassioned and often unconventional lectures. “He was, from all I could tell, a born teacher,” says Bates College literature professor Rob Farnsworth, a former poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia. “Not always the kindest or easiest, but someone who had a great passion for sharing knowledge and inspiring students. He was a character at first, but slowly woke up to the idea that he had a special gift. His was an immediate, natural, spoken voice; a hard-headed, unpretentious skepticism about the natural world. The world could be a fierce place, and he was a fiercely individualized Yankee guy.”

At the behest of his friend Ernest Silver, for whom he’d worked at Pinkerton, Frost went on to teach at Plymouth Normal School (what is today Plymouth State University) for a year from 1911-1912, again winning the admiration of students and colleagues, before the same call that had summoned so many of his literary contemporaries overseas was too much to withstand. In 1911, Frost had sold the Derry farm for a meager $1,100 to help fund what would be a three-year adventure in England. There, he met fellow poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and at age 40, finally published his first two books, the mournful ‘A Boy’s Will’ and the unabashedly pastoral ‘North of Boston’ to great critical acclaim – nearly all of their content written or inspired during his time in the Granite State. As the outbreak of WWI loomed dark and heavy on the European horizon, two things became clear to Frost: 1.) He did not want to see his family marooned for what promised to be a protracted and deadly conflict. 2.) There was still plenty to learn and more to write in the state which had given him his best material.

“I think while other American poets gravitated to England and the culture it offered, Frost saw himself, really, as an American poet,” says retired Dartmouth literature professor and poet Syd Lea, who for 20 years served as chairman of The Frost Place. “It was important for him to be in the region – this was the way he wanted to write. While Eliot and Pound… would have viewed northern New Hampshire as slim pickings, Frost saw it as sort of the last frontier of poetry… There wasn’t necessarily a lot to write about in the traditional sense, but there was the language of common people, and Frost made that his bailiwick.”

By the time Frost returned stateside, his star was well on the rise. The critical success and accompanying celebrity of ‘A Boy’s Will’ and ‘North of Boston’ had surprised even Frost as he and his family arrived at Joe Hebert’s Franconia farm in 1915. Much as he labored to keep his identity under wraps in the mountains where he and his family had for many years summered unnoticed (the clean air a tonic for his chronic hay fever), it was to little avail. Legend has it that once Hebert caught wind of Frost’s newfound fame, his asking price for the farm climbed from $1,000 to $1,200. Frost winced, but it was a price he was willing to pay. It proved worthwhile.

The five years that followed produced some of Frost’s most lyrical and celebrated work in the books ‘Mountain Interval’ and ‘New Hampshire,’ their poetry informed by the hikes along the wooded trails surrounding his property, the interactions and overheard conversations of neighbors and fellow farmers, and the afternoons spent in his writing chair by the old oil heater or peering from his porch at the snowcapped summits of Cannon Mountain and Mount Lafayette. Frost would take Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Ernest Poole on one of his twilight hikes through the stillness of the forest, the novelist recounting their time together in a special November 1946 edition of The NH Troubadour devoted to Frost.

“‘These folks like this. So do I,’” Poole recalled Frost telling him. “‘People say that I hate New York. I don’t. I like it, but I get so worked up down there that I can’t sleep nights. I’m made that way. I grew up on a farm and I like it quiet.’ A cow mooed half a mile away. He smiled. ‘Even that cow’s too much,’ he said. Kipling once told us writers to try to paint things as we see them for the God of things as they are. Slow and deep feeling are the people up in these New Hampshire hills. Slow and deep feeling is Rob Frost – and his verse reveals those mountain people as they are.”

Frost’s time in Franconia produced iconic poems, from ‘The Road Not Taken,’ purportedly inspired by Frost’s close friend and fellow author Edward Thomas, whom Frost jokingly chided for his inability to make a decision – and who was ultimately killed in WWI at the Battle of Arras in France; to ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ The poem ‘Out, Out,’ about a child who dies after a gruesome sawmill accident and the ensuing stoicism of his elders was reportedly prompted by an identical incident in neighboring Littleton. And then there was Frost’s epic poem ‘New Hampshire,’ which at nearly 3,200 words – some humorous, some bittersweet – expressed his affectionate but complicated relationship with the Granite State. The poem helped nab Frost his first Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1924, one of four he’d receive in his career.

While Frost ultimately left Franconia in 1920 to teach college in Massachusetts, Vermont and at Dartmouth – his career producing some 30 volumes and culminating in his reading at age 86 of ‘The Gift Outright’ at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 – the Granite State remained deeply and constantly connected to who he was and who he’d become. Frost and his family would continue to summer in Franconia for 19 years until Elinor’s death from breast cancer in 1938. That same year in a letter to the Federal Writers’ Project for its guide to New Hampshire, Frost wrote: “Not a poem, I believe, in all my six books, from ‘A Boy’s Will’ to ‘A Further Range,’ but has something in it of New Hampshire. Nearly half my poems must actually have been written in New Hampshire. Every single person in ‘North of Boston’ was friend or acquaintance of mine in New Hampshire… My first teaching was in a district school in the southern part of Salem, NH. My father was born in Kingston, NH. My wife’s mother was born in New Hampshire. So you see, it has been New Hampshire, New Hampshire with me all the way. You will find my poems show it, I think…”

Those poems and their author remain a deep part of the Granite State, as well, in the millions of schoolchildren and adults who to this day can recite them from memory; in the countless stories of locals – many apocryphal – of the wooded paths and outsize personalities that inspired their writing; in the thousands who each year visit Frost’s farms in Franconia and Derry, both now restored museums (a dying wish of his) and centers for literary education.

“Frost’s poetry remarkably captured the New Hampshire that people love – the nature, the farmers, the mountains, the basic, simple beauty that we all enjoy,” says Mary Russell, Director of The Center for the Book at the NH State Library. “For a lot of schoolchildren, Frost was the first poet they were able to comprehend and appreciate at even a young age. And he is a poet who continues to speak to them and to all of us today.”

Not a bad fate for a fledgling farmer from Derry.

Special thanks to The Frost Place, Plymouth State University, the NH State Library, The Center for the Book, Robert Farnsworth, Sydney Lea, David Watters and Robert Hass for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Considered the father of the White Mountain School of Art, Thomas Cole first arrived at Crawford Notch in 1828. His final portrait of the area, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (1839), is considered the movement’s greatest masterpiece and hangs prominently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. (Images courtesy of National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian Institution)

CRAWFORD NOTCH – The American artist Thomas Cole gaped both with wonder and trepidation at the beauty and unrelenting rawness of the mountain scene before him.

Cole, a landscape painter recognized as the father of the Hudson River School of Art, had completed a harrowing journey to get to this point, traveling by coach, ferry and finally foot through Franconia Notch to reach what could only be described as the calamitous intersection between humanity and wilderness.

It was the fall of 1828, and just two years prior, the patch of land on which he stood had been the site of one of the nation’s saddest news spectacles – a tragedy that, in the words of Dr. Robert McGrath, art history professor emeritus at Dartmouth, “laid bare the smallness of man and the grandeur, savagery and capriciousness of nature.”

In August 1826, a series of torrential rains had turned the dry, parched slopes of Mounts Willey and Webster into a landslide hazard. Hearing one evening what appeared to be a stream of rock and debris headed their way, the Willey couple and their five children evacuated their tiny cabin at the feet of the massive mounts in an attempt to escape. In a story forever ingrained in Granite State lore, the entire Willey family was enveloped and killed by the landslide – an avalanche that managed to miraculously sidestep their home leaving it untouched.

Much as the Smuttynose murders on the Isles of Shoals would dominate national headlines some five decades later, the story of the Willey House captured the country’s imagination for its sense of tragedy in a remote and unforgiving setting. The story would attract journalists from across the nation, inspire short stories from vacationing authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and, in turn, bring its share of scientists and adventurers to the region.

And artists. Cole, who’d built a following of painters capturing on canvas the pastoral countryside of New York’s Hudson River Valley, had a year earlier traveled to the White Mountains at the behest of adventurer and arts patron Daniel Wadsworth. Now as he stood in the chill of early fall observing the broken tree limbs, the rubble, the wild tangle of untamed mountainside, he saw something new, terrifying and unimaginably beautiful. “The site of the Willey House, with its little patch of green in the gloomy desolation, very naturally recalled to mind the horrors of the night when the whole family perished beneath an avalanche of rocks and earth,” Cole wrote in his diary on Oct. 6, 1828.

And so Cole began sketching, rendering in charcoals and later oils the uncharted landscapes that were up until now foreign to so many Americans and fellow artists. Cole’s depictions of the White Mountains – the culmination of which would come in his 1839 masterpiece A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, now displayed prominently in Washington’s National Gallery of Art – would not merely capture the attention of his compatriots but launch a movement whose thousands of vivid portraits many credit with transforming the region from wooded isolation to the nation’s premier mountain resort for more than 40 years.

Enthusiasts and historians like Richard Hamilton continue to hold portraits by Benjamin Champney and others in their private collections, while Warren Shoemaker at the Jackson Historical Society is creating the North Country’s first permanent museum collection dedicated exclusively to White Mountain art. (Photos: David Lazar)

“I think the capacity of these hills to inspire was utterly remarkable,” says Littleton’s Richard Hamilton, a White Mountain Art collector and historian, who recently launched with fellow enthusiasts a website (www.whitemountainhistory.org) chronicling in narratives and photos the development of the region. “The scenes these artists depicted were breathtaking in their magnitude. I don’t think there’s any question that the resulting school of art is one that stands up to any on the world stage, and in turn helped to popularize this area and open it to tourism.”

Indeed, in the years to follow, Cole’s initial sketches would catch like wildfire, starting all but a wagon trail for regional and fellow Hudson River Valley artists, alongside painters of world renown, to visit the White Mountains and capture the unspoiled vistas of Chocorua, Mount Washington, Echo Lake, Cathedral Ledge, the Flume, and of course, the Old Man of the Mountain. It is estimated that more than 400 artists in all set up camp from the mid to late 19th century in the North Country, their white umbrellas dotting the hillsides and marshes along the Saco River, as most famously captured by American legend Winslow Homer’s 1868 Artists Sketching in the White Mountains.

The result was what many have called America’s first art colony, a movement known as the White Mountain School of Art, whose practitioners specialized in giving nature an almost sublime, romantic presence and showing man’s comparative smallness in its face. “It was an instance of taking something that appeared dark and scary and opening it up into something bright and luminous,” says Dr. Catherine Amidon, Director of Plymouth State University’s Karl Drerup Art Gallery and Exhibitions Program. “White Mountain Art was really about America finding its artistic identity.”

And the North Country finding its economic identity. With a roster of artists that included Asher Durand, Frederic Church, William H. Bartlett, Albert Bierstadt, Godfrey Frankenstein, John Frederick Kensett and, inarguably, the leader of White Mountain art, Boston native Benjamin Champney, who kept a North Conway studio for nearly 50 years, the portraits that emerged each year were as close to billboards for regional tourism as one could imagine. Champney, whose studio still stands in front of what is today the Red Jacket resort, would call Kensett’s iconic Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway (1851) “the best advertisement” for the region he’d seen. The canvas was purchased by the American Art Union, an organization whose mission was to popularize American art, made into an engraving, and distributed to some 13,000 Art Union subscribers throughout the country. The great lithographer and calendar printer Currier and Ives went further and published a similar print around 1860. It is believed that this single painting alone by Kensett did more to attract tourists to the White Mountains than perhaps any other.

And arrive, those tourists did. With the explosion by the 1850s of rail travel throughout northern New England, what was once an impossibly long journey by stagecoach to the White Mountains became infinitely more accessible. With Bostonians and New Yorkers attracted by what they’d heard and seen of the region and desperate for a cool, fresh and relatively close escape from the stagnant, sooty swelter of summer in the city, where drainage was all but nonexistent, a market quickly developed. By 1851, the completion of the Atlantic and Saint Lawrence Railroad with a station at Gorham transported travelers to within eight miles of Mount Washington. Horace Fabyan’s Mount Washington House in Crawford Notch now stood where Thomas Cole once stayed in the 1830s, while much larger establishments were soon built in Franconia Notch (the Flume and Profile Houses), in Pinkham Notch (the Glen House), and on even on the unforgiving summit of Mount Washington (the Tip Top House).

At their peak, the White Mountains featured more than 200 resorts, the largest concentration of its kind in the nation. The Profile House, where the current Cannon Mountain Tramway now sits in Franconia Notch, could accommodate up to 900 people. Most hotels burned to the ground, while a few, like Jackson’s Wentworth Hall and Eagle Mountain House still stand. (Image courtesy of Richard Hamilton; photos: David Lazar)

By the late 19th century, there was believed to be a greater concentration of grand resort hotels in the North Country than any other place in the nation, with some 200 hotels, inns, and boarding houses capable of accommodating more than 12,000 guests at any given time. Major hotels each had their own train station and an array of creature comforts considered the standard for their time, from gas lighting to elegant dining, lawn tennis, coaching parades and mountain guides. Businessmen from the city would frequently send their families up to these grand resorts for the entire summer, taking the train up themselves for the weekends. Just as the Isles of Shoals and the Connecticut River Valley would draw their share of summering celebrities, musicians and poets, so, too, did the grand resorts of the White Mountains, with guest lists including names like Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, and the celebrated British novelist Sir Anthony Trollope, who, in his 1862 book North America, would compare the region to Switzerland, declaring “much of this (White Mountain) scenery is superior to the famed and classic lands of Europe.”

The guests would buy art – lots of art. A frequent perk of any stay at a White Mountains resort was an artist-in-residence, a talented painter who was paid to capture in oils and watercolors what guests had experienced during their stays. Artists like Edward Hill at Profile House (where the Cannon Mountain Tramway now stands, capable of hosting more than 900 guests at its peak) and Frank Shapleigh at Crawford House could knock off a portrait of Echo Lake or the Old Man in a matter of hours, Dartmouth’s McGrath says. And while their paintings – which put food on the table, but never brought great wealth – lacked the detail of Champney’s or Bierstadt’s, their contribution was equally significant. “The art of this period did more to open up the White Mountains to tourism than perhaps anything else,” says McGrath, adding that the imagery even served as an effective propaganda tool for the North in the Civil War. “So much of it was word of mouth. Someone would visit a hotel like Crawford House or Profile House and would return home with a souvenir to hang on their wall. Their friends would then invariably see the painting and hear the story of the amazing wilderness they’d just visited. And they’d then want to visit, themselves.”

While nearly all of the grand resorts of that day, built almost entirely from wood, succumbed to fire before it was through, several still stand today, including Jackson’s Wentworth Hall and Eagle Mountain House, Whitefield’s Mountain View Grand, and Bretton Woods’ Mount Washington Resort, the last of the grand hotels to be built.

John Frederick Kensett’s Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway (1851) is credited, perhaps more than any other painting, as being the greatest advertisement for tourism in the region. (Image courtesy of Wellesley College Museum; Photos: David Lazar)

Still, as the 19th century soldiered forward and America’s expansion westward yielded new discoveries, it was President Lincoln’s 1864 bill granting Yosemite Valley to the State of California and the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s that truly opened up the West and the Rockies to tourism and spelled a slow but certain decline in the White Mountains’ allure. Artists like Bierstadt and Edward Hill’s brother Thomas would all but make their careers painting the canyons and jagged, snow-capped peaks whose severity, remoteness and drama made the North Country appear almost tame by comparison.

While the White Mountains would maintain their popularity as a skiing and summering destination for eastern urbanites, the White Mountain School of Art by the end of the 19th century had all but disbanded, as artists moved west or elsewhere to take on the next great tableau.

The legacy of White Mountain art, however, remains indisputable both for its stamp on portraiture and its place in the telling of the American story. Across New England, White Mountain paintings frequently fetch five- and six-figure sums at auction, while hundreds live on in the homes of private collectors and enthusiasts like Hamilton, in the historic estate of longtime North Conway resident Evelyn Woodbury, and in the Littleton Public Library, where the walls wear a series of stunning Edward Hill images like medals.

While Thomas Cole is credited as the father of the White Mountain School, Benjamin Champney was its undisputed leader, living in his North Conway home and studio for more than a half century and producing masterworks like Saco River, North Conway (1874). (Champney image courtesy of Wikipedia; painting image courtesy of NH Historical Society; Photo: David Lazar)

Plymouth State University’s Amidon is today overseeing a project to open a Museum of the White Mountains, the school using a former a Methodist Church in town as the site and benefiting from a dramatic bequest of art, images and artifacts from the estate of lifelong North Country resident and photographer Dan Noel. When complete, the museum will feature more than 8,000 images and objects and an additional 11,000 photos from the now defunct Brown Company paper mill in Berlin, focusing heavily on education from both a historical and scientific standpoint. As NH this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Weeks Act, which safeguarded much of the North Country from indiscriminate logging and created the White Mountains National Forest, the museum will show how art helped to cast a spotlight on the region’s changing landscape both through the timber industry and through the history of water and water use.

On a slightly smaller scale, the Jackson Historical Society is creating a museum of its own, transforming Jackson’s former town hall building into the North Country’s only permanent museum dedicated exclusively to White Mountain art, with at least 50 pieces on display at all times. For the society’s president and longtime art historian Warren Shoemaker, the paintings are as much about great art as they are about a region’s place in time and America’s continued development – from the feral wilderness Thomas Cole first witnessed on that chilly fall day in Crawford Notch to the postcard imagery of Kensett’s, Champney’s and Shapleigh’s canvases.

“What is great about these works is that these artists – many of whom came over from Europe or from the Hudson River Valley – painted exactly what they saw, so that tourists, when they arrived could recognize the scene and go right to where the artist had captured it,” Shoemaker says. “Very little of that has changed. Every one of these paintings will talk to you. They will tell you about themselves: what they are, where they are, when they were painted. They really are timeless.”

As are the mountains, scenery, and people who created and inspired them.

Special thanks to Richard Hamilton, Carl Lindblade, Robert McGrath, Mark Butterfield, Plymouth State University, the NH Historical Society, the Jackson Historical Society and the Littleton Public Library for their assistance and generosity with this story.

Saint-Gaudens spent more than 20 years sculpting in Cornish, drawing inspiration from its abundant nature and solitude. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service).

CORNISH – The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was visibly unimpressed as he traversed the treeless patch of farmland his friend and attorney Charles Beaman recommended for him here in the cold, dismal gray of a March afternoon.

The year was 1885, and Beaman was doing all he could to pitch Saint-Gaudens, quickly emerging as the nation’s most celebrated sculptor, on the value of having a country home to craft a major new commission and, at the insistence of his wife Augusta, raise their children away from the bustle and noise of the big city.

With studios in Paris, Rome and New York, it was along the banks of the Connecticut River, Mount Ascutney’s snow-capped peak in neighboring Vermont a soaring backdrop, where Beaman believed his fellow New Yorker would find just the solace he needed.

Beaman, who’d himself scooped up more than 3,000 acres locally in a recession, was also looking to recruit some new neighbors to his quiet corner of the world.

But Saint-Gaudens, uninspired by what he saw, had all but made up his mind, asking to return to the train and head back to New York. That is, until Augusta – as she often did – put her foot down, and Beaman made the artist an unusual offer. One he couldn’t refuse.

The Cornish arts colony proved a center of American creativity and power, hosting dozens of the artists, performers and even President Woodrow Wilson, who for two summers relocated the White House to the home of American novelist Winston Churchill.

“Saint-Gaudens had recently been awarded the commission to sculpt a standing version of President Lincoln for Chicago’s Lincoln Park,” says Henry Duffy, curator of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. “Beaman, of course, knew this and promised to find him an abundance of what he called ‘Lincoln-shaped men’ from around the area through whom Saint-Gaudens could draw inspiration… He fell for it, and in 1885, began to rent the property in the summers.”

Beaman delivered on his promise. In the hills and farmland surrounding Cornish, Saint-Gaudens – who’d four years earlier catapulted himself into world renown with his memorial of Admiral David Farragut in New York’s Madison Square – found no shortage of men closely resembling Lincoln both in carriage and stature to pose. Lincoln’s son Robert would later call Saint-Gaudens’ bronze sculpture of his father the finest he’d seen, remarking how faithfully it captured his father’s mannerisms, how he wore his clothes and how he stood.

Saint-Gaudens and his wife, Augusta, would transform a treeless plot of farmland in Cornish into a rural retreat of timeless beauty. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service; Photo: David Lazar)

“His was a very simple, honest and direct style of art,” Duffy says. “At a time when most sculptors were creating statues of figures far removed the lives of ordinary citizens – Greek gods and the like – Saint-Gaudens was creating sculptures familiar and accessible to most Americans.”

Over the two-plus decades he sculpted in Cornish, Saint-Gaudens would earn the title of American Michelangelo for the energy and incomparable emotion he incorporated into his hundreds of works – many memorializing America’s Civil War icons. For, in the quiet, natural setting of his Cornish property, the lush garden landscape he created there, and the warmth of the surrounding community, Saint-Gaudens found more than just ‘Lincoln-shaped men’ – he found a place to reflect and create; a place to refine his craft unlike any other in the world, and to discover a side of himself he hadn’t before seen.

Saint-Gaudens’ Little Studio was where the artist created small components of his larger works and also kept his office, which included one of the state’s first telephones. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service; Photo: David Lazar)

Twenty years later, Saint-Gaudens’ secret hideaway would no longer be a secret, as he, like Beaman, sought to share the beauty of this remote region with his friends and contemporaries. That a secluded New Hampshire community would emerge as an artists’ retreat is, of course, nothing new to Granite State history. From Willa Cather’s annual pilgrimage to Grand Monadnock in Jaffrey to the plentiful purple lilacs of Walpole that inspired Louisa May Alcott’s writing, and Celia Thaxter’s parlor of vacationing musicians, painters and poets on Appledore Island, much of New Hampshire’s story over the last century has been written in the quiet escapes and relaxed settings it offered some of the nation’s great artists and critical thinkers. The wooded seclusion of Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony, where Thornton Wilder famously penned “Our Town,” still serves as an incubator for fine art, while dozens of summer stock stages from New London to Lincoln continue to host and churn out, as they have for more than 80 years, some of theatre’s top talents.

Still, it is Cornish that many historians regard as perhaps the grandest – and unlikeliest – of New Hampshire’s arts colonies, a place where dozens of elite contributors to world culture, from painters like Maxfield Parrish and George de Forest Brush to performers Ethel Barrymore and Isadora Duncan and even the leader of the free world, built or rented garden cottages along the Connecticut with hopes of channeling the same inspiration from the rolling hills and vivid blue skies that fueled Saint-Gaudens’ work.

Curator Henry Duffy (top) and Superintendent Rick Kendall greet more than 30,000 ivsitors each year to the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, New Hampshire’s only National Park. (Photo: David Lazar)

“I don’t think there’s any question that Cornish in its day could be seen as a real center and concentration of American power and creativity,” says Charlie Platt, a New York-based architect whose family has been in Cornish for generations and whose grandfather Charles built many of the Gilded Age retreats for well-heeled vacationers that dotted the local landscape, including that of best-selling American novelist Winston Churchill, and Annie Lazarus, sister to Statue of Liberty poet Emma Lazarus.“I think comparisons of the Connecticut River Valley to today’s Silicon Valley are not out of line. It attracted the leading artists of its time, and through them others – writers, editors, journalists and eventually the President of the United States.”

Saint-Gaudens’ $20 gold coin, commissioned in 1904 as a part of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Arts Cabinet, is considered the most beautiful American coin ever created. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

Indeed, the home Platt designed for Churchill, called Harlakenden, caught the eye of arts enthusiast Ellen Wilson, who brought her husband Woodrow to Cornish for two summers to escape the unrelenting swelter of Washington Julys, when the heat all but shut down the city. Wilson in 1914 and 1915 would bring the entire White House apparatus to the area, using neighboring Windsor, Vermont’s post office as a makeshift command post.

In spite of all the attention Cornish’s roster of celebrity visitors attracted each summer, there was never a doubt as to the center of gravity in the Cornish colony. The plot of land Saint-Gaudens initially dismissed as boring, barren and removed had long since been transformed into a property of almost mesmerizing beauty; a rural oasis of hedge mazes, sculpture gardens, fountains and birch tree stands; a place where Saint Gaudens – born in Ireland, raised in New York, trained in Rome, respected across the globe as both an artist and businessman – could create without interruption, experience humanity and nature in its purest form, and eventually spend his final days.

Drafts of Saint-Gaudens’ iconic works can be found throughout the national park’s grounds and studios, from the Farragut and Adams memorials to the William Tecumseh Sherman Monument and perhaps his crowning achievement, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, which took 14 years to complete and sits on Boston’s Beacon Hill. (Photos: David Lazar)

“Cornish and Aspet House were a haven for Saint-Gaudens,” says Rick Kendall, Superintendent of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. “It freed him. He discovered aspects of life here that he didn’t have access to in the city. It expanded his imagination and his understanding of natural beauty.”

To ascend the long, tree-lined drive and set foot onto the lushly landscaped grounds of New Hampshire’s only national park is to enter an entirely different world – one of art, nature, form and meaning – and to understand the freedom found here. The Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site is as much a museum of the world’s finest sculpture as it is a living, breathing mural of one man’s extraordinary life. Full-size drafts of the same iconic works Saint-Gaudens created for parks and museums across the country can be found throughout Aspet House’s grounds, often appearing to grow out of the landscape. There is the stern, battle-ready Admiral Farragut, whose sleeves and hands were completed with the help of Saint-Gaudens’ mother and brother, and whose commission gave Saint-Gaudens the money he needed to request Augusta’s hand in marriage. There is the bust of General George Sherman (the statue stands at the entrance of New York’s Central Park), a sculpture Saint-Gaudens had to convince the irascible Civil War commander to pose for, winning his consent only after promising to introduce him to Robert Louis Stevenson, writer of the general’s favorite play, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Sherman’s bowtie on the statue is noticeably crooked. Indeed, when Saint-Gaudens asked if he’d like it straightened, he replied characteristically, “I’ll wear it how I damned well please!”

Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert would call Saint-Gaudens’ standing sculpture of his father, crated in Cornish, the finest he’d seen. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

“It is a fine sculptor who is able to capture the human form, but it is an extraordinary sculptor who is able to capture his figure’s emotion and make his audience feel it,” Duffy says. “It has been said of the Sherman sculpture that you wouldn’t want to have coffee with that guy. He looks like he could reach out and grab you by the neck. It is amazing to be able to capture that depth of personality and emotion through an inanimate material like plaster.”

Saint-Gaudens’ preliminary sculptures of Lincoln are said to be the basis for Cornish colony resident Daniel Chester French’s statue enshrined in Washington’s Lincoln Memorial; while his double-eagle $20 gold coin, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt to project American strength, is widely considered the most beautiful domestic coin ever created.

Perhaps Saint-Gaudens’ crowning achievement can be found in the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston’s Beacon Hill across from the Massachusetts State House. Completed in 1897, it immortalizes the commander of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment in the Civil War – the Union’s first all African-American regiment. Saint-Gaudens took more than 14 years to complete the Shaw memorial, initially sculpting only Shaw on horseback, before determining it incomplete without the three rows of infantrymen marching behind him, looks of determination and, no doubt uncertainty, on their faces as they head into the abyss.

If Aspet House is a menagerie of one man’s artistic brilliance, so, too, it is a window into his growth as a human being and his evolving belief in the importance of community. Upon learning around 1900 that he had cancer, Saint-Gaudens – who’d made a considerable fortune as a businessman recreating his sculptures for multiple audiences – shuttered his Paris, New York and Rome workshops, bringing dozens of employees to live and work full-time in Cornish.

Once the nation’s longest covered bridge, the Cornish-Windsor Bridge was travelled by many colony luminaries including summer vacationer Woodrow Wilson, who set up White House operations in the neighboring Windsor, VT, post office. (Photo: David Lazar)

“He took his role here very seriously,” Duffy says. “There was a sense of noblesse oblige, a need to get along well not only with his New York friends, but with locals, as well.” The country seemed to bring Saint-Gaudens back to life after his illness. He took up sports, playing hockey on a frozen pond with his assistants. And while first irritated when they showed him no mercy on the ice, Saint-Gaudens was later grateful to be treated like one of them. One story has it that Saint-Gaudens was crossing the Cornish-Windsor Bridge back into NH one winter day when he saw a group of children playing in the snow, but with just one sled. He told his driver to stop and turn around, returning from Windsor just minutes later having bought a sled for each kid.

After being diagnosed with cancer, Saint- Gaudens would spend his final years in Cornish, looking out his front porch at Mt. Ascutney, sculpting a tribute to his wife Augusta, and being laid to rest in a wooded corner of his property. (Photos: David Lazar)

Cornish also brought Saint-Gaudens closer to his truest love – Augusta. By the door of the Saint-Gaudens site’s new studio, unadorned, hangs a simple bas relief portrait of Augusta, standing on Aspet House’s front porch, Mt. Ascutney in the background. She holds a bowl of sweet peas, her favorite flower, a heart drawn on her sleeve to demonstrate her caring disposition. At her side is a shaggy sheepdog, widely believed to be Saint-Gaudens, a dog who’d once strayed during their marriage but now and forever would remain loyal to her. It was to be his final and perhaps most personal work. Augustus Saint-Gaudens would die in 1907, revered as his nation’s finest sculptor, and laid to rest in a secluded area by the woods of his property. His art and his memory, however, remain very much alive.

“Travelling around the country, Saint-Gaudens still speaks to people,” Duffy says. “There is an honesty and emotion to his work that is timeless. He wasn’t gussying it up, but portraying it as it was. As Americans, we like that. So often, the artist is lost behind the medium or behind the easel. Not here. At a time when so much of our history is fading away, this site remains a time capsule of a remarkable age. It’s a privilege to be a part of it.”

Special thanks to Charlie Platt and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site for their assistance and generosity with this story.

The poet Celia Thaxter, famous for her gardens overlooking the Atlantic, would greet artists in her vine-shrouded cottage next to Appledore House. Thaxter, along with her parents and brothers, are buried nearby on the island. (Photos courtesy of Ann Beattie)

APPLEDORE ISLAND – It is a custom of the sea that when a man pushes off from shore and commits himself to an island life, he renounces the mainland vowing never to return.

Such was the story of Portsmouth’s Thomas Laighton as he and his young family boarded a rowboat in September 1839 bound for the tiny lighthouse on White Island, just ten miles off the New Hampshire coast.

As the tale goes—and sea tales seldom suffer from understatement—Laighton, the assistant postmaster for Portsmouth, had seen his hopes of ascending to chief postmaster unexpectedly dashed by politics. Bitter for his loss, Laighton, a state senator, accomplished entrepreneur, and co-editor of the New Hampshire Gazette (known for his invectives against the ruling Whig party), took the post as light keeper on White Island, swearing off the mainland to begin a new life at sea.

Laighton hadn’t taken the position on a lark. Just a year earlier, he had purchased four neighboring islands to White along the Isles of Shoal: Hog, Smuttynose, Cedar and Malaga.

For it was in the weathered confluence of craggy rocks, all but absent of vegetation, with its endless assault of gulls, bitter winds, salt, froth and foam, its ancient structures clinging to the surface like barnacles, that Laighton saw two things: paradise and opportunity. Some 15 years later, Laighton’s vision, aided by his wife Eliza, sons Cedric and Oscar and his young daughter Celia Thaxter, a budding poet, would be realized in a summer resort recognized as the Eastern seaboard’s most celebrated for its time—a garden refuge of carriage trails, creature comforts, and cool sea breezes that for decades drew some of the nation’s foremost artists, musicians, writers and celebrities. “Thomas Laighton had fallen in love with life on the Shoals, and because of him, many others did as well,” says Ann Beattie, a Shoals historian and past president of the Isles of Shoals Historical and Research Association. “There was no other place like it. There still isn’t.” There are a handful of spots in the Granite State where visitors can reasonably question whether they are still in New Hampshire, or for that matter, on planet Earth. The lunar landscape atop Mt. Washington in the wintertime is one, as is the wooded solitude in the former Indian Stream Republic of Pittsburg on the Canadian border. The Isles of Shoals—those mysterious rocks in the Atlantic barely visible from Portsmouth or Odiorne Point in Rye on a clear summer day —provide another oceangoing example. Indeed, to step off a boat onto Appledore or Star Island is to set foot in a different world—a place untouched by time, undeveloped and remarkable in its isolation. In the scattering of stone and wood cottages, the white clapboard Oceanic Hotel with its enormous veranda, and the iconic Star Island chapel, built in 1800, with its famed codfish weathervane and candlelit windows, one sees life as it’s been on the Isles for centuries—a living, breathing history book, complete with triumph, tragedy, romance, hardship and, yes, murder. “We like to say there’s 400 years of history here in four feet of topsoil,” says Sarah O’Connor, curator of the Vaughn Cottage museum on Star Island. “There’s something for everybody here. If you like history, we’ve got all the history you could ever want here. If you want to just sit and enjoy the ocean view, we’ve got some of the most beautiful views anywhere.”

Now an annual summer retreat for large groups, the Oceanic Hotel on Star Island remains today almost exactly as it was in the 1870s. (Photo courtesy of Ann Beattie; Photo: David Lazar)

Prior to Thomas Laighton’s arrival in 1839, the Isles of Shoals—so-named, as legend has it, for their boundless schools, or ‘shoals,’ of codfish—had been inhabited for more than 200 years. Known until the late 19th century as Gosport, Star Island thrived early on as a fishing village and the world’s premier producer of dunfish, a dried, salted cod that was a staple for oceangoing explorers and deemed superior to similar products from even Iceland and Norway. Gosport’s population would at one point swell to more than 600, with fishermen at times pulling in up to 100 fish per day, some weighing 100 lbs. or more. But life was hard, the aroma of the fish drying out on planks bracing, and the conditions and economics of life at sea unforgiving.
There was also a sense of isolation from the mainland. Shoalers were taxed for services they never saw, and had no reservations about trading with the British as well as the colonies. As the Revolutionary War commenced in 1775, Patriots feared the Isles might serve as a harbor for enemy ships and ordered a complete evacuation. While some families returned after the war, much of the fishing industry had modernized and the Isles never fully recovered.

Celebrated for its hospitality Athenaeum) and seclusion, Thomas Laighton’s Appledore House would become the Atlantic seaboard’s most famous resort destination during the mid-19th century. (Photo courtesy of Ann Beattie)

By the time the Laightons arrived, the Isles were in difficult straits. Still, Thomas saw possibility in their setting—in an age without air conditioning, when most cities in the summertime were congested with the soot from coal- and woodfired factories, the Isles offered a cool respite with fresh air and none of the complications of urban life. In 1843, Thomas moved his family from White Island to nearby Smuttynose and worked to launch a small new resort called the Mid-Ocean House.

Laighton’s Appledore House Bar

Three years later, he’d hire a young boarder named Levi Thaxter—a failed actor with two Harvard degrees—to be a tutor for his children, eventually taking him in as a partner to open a more lavish new resort on Hog Island. The new resort was called Appledore House, and Laighton quickly moved to rename the island after it. In 1848, the same year Appledore House opened, Thaxter, then 23, asked for the hand of Thomas’s daughter Celia, 12, in marriage. The proposal mortified Thomas, who immediately dissolved his partnership with Thaxter and all but banished the suitor. But Celia and Thaxter would go on to marry three years later, with Thaxter’s cultural connections and the clientele of Appledore—names that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, and reportedly Longfellow and Whittier—eventually helping to shape young Celia into one of her generation’s most prolific and celebrated poets. Celia Thaxter spent most of her life on Appledore, its rugged beauty and omnipresent bird life inspiring much of her poetry.

Much as they were 150 years ago, the Isles of Shoals continue to serve as a retreat for artists in the summertime. (Photos: David Lazar)

She would famously live in a cottage next to the Appledore House, with a lavish garden overlooking the Atlantic and hop vines covering her porch so she could privately meet with the artists frequenting the resort. Just as western New Hampshire’s Cornish Colony and Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony would attract some of the 20th century’s greatest creative minds, it was Appledore’s seclusion—not to mention the legendary cooking and hospitality of Celia’s mother Eliza—that made the Isles that era’s premier artist enclave, drawing hundreds of visitors each season. “All of this was pretty heady stuff for a girl who grew up on a rock and now has the world’s greatest artists in her parlor,” Beattie says. “These were artists like Childe Hassam, William Morris Hunt, the pianist William Mason (who would play in Thaxter’s salon daily). To have this kind of creativity all in one place happens once in a generation.”

A former president of the Isles of Shoals Historical and Research Association, Ann Beattie is recognized as one of the Shoals’ chief historians and guides. (Photo: David Lazar)

Across the water, meanwhile, on Star Island, the entrepreneur John Poor was building a vast veranda connecting a series of boarding houses once owned by longtime landowners the Caswell family. The first Oceanic Hotel would open for business in 1873, only to burn to the ground two years later.

Undaunted, Poor, seeking to tap into Laighton’s success, rebuilt the Oceanic in 1876, making it one of the most modern facilities of its day, with a bowling alley, barber shop, mail delivery three times a day, and one of the nation’s first elevators. While Poor’s hotel never enjoyed the exclusivity or affluence of Appledore’s guest list, it still stands today as both a living museum and summer retreat for large groups.

In addition to preserving local wildlife, the Shoals Marine Lab has faithfully replanted and tended to Celia Thaxter’s famed garden. Photo: David Lazar)

Just across the water on Smuttynose, meanwhile, is a monument of another sort. If the Isles of Shoals’ hotel tradition earned it fame as a resort destination, its standing as one of the 19th century’s most captivating crime scenes earned it equal—if not greater—infamy. What is known today simply as the ‘Smuttynose Murders’ has inspired a best-selling novel and film in Anita Shreve’s “The Weight of Water,” to say nothing of countless books and retellings, including an essay by Celia Thaxter herself, titled “A Memorable Murder.”

As the story goes, near midnight on March 6, 1873, two boarders in the home of Smuttynose fisherman John Hontvet were strangled and one hit with an ax. A young Prussian named Louis Wagner who’d worked casting lines for Hontvet was named as the killer by Hontvet’s young wife Maren. According to lore, Wagner had learned that the Hontvets were saving some $600 in their home to purchase a new fishing boat. When he heard that John was away for the evening and that Maren and the two boarders, sisters Anethe and Karen Christenson, were alone, Wagner allegedly rowed all the way to Smuttynose from Portsmouth to rob the house. Maren was found early the following morning shivering by a rock on the other side of the island (Thaxter would reportedly nurse her back to health), while Wagner was found and arrested later that day after having taken a train to Boston. “I think it was the romance of it—three women alone on an island in the dead of winter—that made this story such a national sensation,” Beattie says. “You had people traveling from far away just to visit the island and take home a piece of blood-stained wood from the house as a souvenir.” Since Smuttynose is technically part of Maine, Wagner was tried and convicted up in Alfred, ME, with what many to this day contend was circumstantial evidence and an inadequate defense. Wagner protested his innocence up until the day of his hanging in 1875—a case that led Maine to become the first state to abandon the death penalty, because so many believed he’d been wrongfully convicted. Very little today remains of the Smuttynose crime scene but for a plaque on the island, which remains closed to the public, and a broken ax on display at the Portsmouth Athenaeum—still among its most popular exhibits. Most of the remaining eight Isles of Shoals, however, remain an open book, thanks to the work of the Star Island Corporation and the UNH Marine Docents Program, which offer nature, history and boat tours to thousands throughout the summer.

Using the year-round research vessel, Gulf Challenger, the UNH Marine Docents offer nature and historical tours of Appledore Island throughout the summer. (Photo: David Lazar)

While Appledore House and Celia Thaxter’s cottage were, sadly, casualties to fire in 1914, the island remains a lasting tribute to a bygone era, with the Shoals Marine Lab—a joint venture of UNH and Cornell University—working to preserve local wildlife and having faithfully replanted Thaxter’s lush garden where it once stood overlooking the Atlantic.

Star Island, meanwhile, has been a destination for church groups, artists, international affairs conferences and others since the Unitarian Universalist Church in 1896 selected the Oceanic as an annual summer retreat. Elsewhere on Star, the stone chapel, immortalized in the poetry of Sarah Orne Jewett, still stands sentry, hosting services every morning and evening by candlelight (including one this past summer for children of U.S. servicemen and women overseas), just as it did more than 200 years ago.

As for the White Island lighthouse for which Thomas Laighton set sail in 1839, its replacement built in the 1850s still stands, secured for many years to come thanks to the fundraising efforts of New Hampshire schoolchildren, known as the Lighthouse Kids, who took it on as a living history project.

The famed White Island lighthouse remains secure for years to come thanks to the efforts of New Hampshire schoolchildren, known as the Lighthouse Kids, who raised more than $250,000 for its preservation. (Photo: David Lazar)

“This is a part of our heritage unlike any other,” Beattie says. “It is a place that has attracted hundreds of people to live at any given time for various reasons, from fishing, to art to tourism. And it has remained a pristine environment— one of the few, it seems, that hasn’t been developed. The more people who know about it, the more will understand the importance of protecting it. All you need to do is travel 10 miles from Portsmouth, and you’re in another world, a sanctuary to get away from it all.”

A good enough excuse, Laighton likely would have argued, to bid farewell to the mainland.

Special thanks to Ann Beattie, the UNH Marine Docents, The Portsmouth Athenaeum, and the Isles of Shoals Steamship Company for their assistance and generosity with this story.

The Star Island Chapel, built in 1800, has inspired art and poetry for centuries, including that of Troubadour reader Nancy Paquin, who submitted this portrait. (Portrait courtesy of Nancy Paquin, Photo: David Lazar)

Since its 1933 opening in Edith Bond Stearns’ barn, the Peterborough Players has helped launch dozens of careers, including film and stage legend James Whittemore, whose final performance was in 2008’s “Our Town.” (Photo courtesy of the Peterborough Players).

TAMWORTH – Francis Cleveland was an accomplished actor in search of steady summer employment when he gathered a group of stage friends one sweltering season, hit the road for his family’s residence in this tiny mountain village, and in the tradition of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, declared “Let’s go put on a show!”

The year was 1931. Times were tight and jobs scarce – stage performers were anything but the exception. For Cleveland, who’d earn Broadway renown during his career as the first ever Stage Manager in the Broadway production of “Our Town” and as Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey,” a fervor for the arts was more than just ingrained, it was as his nephew George puts it today, ‘prenatal.’ As the children of a certain former White House inhabitant and of a lifelong arts patron, Cleveland’s and his sister Alice’s love of entertaining others was an impassioned pursuit.

And so Francis and Alice Cleveland and their band of Broadway friends packed up their props and costumes in pickup trucks, and set about the barns of the North Country and southern Maine, from Plymouth, Tamworth and North Conway to Holderness and Poland Spring, putting on a new show each week and gaining a following that would span generations.

“You would have actors and actresses who over the course of eight weeks would be playing eight different parts in eight different shows,” says George Cleveland. “You could be the footman one week, and the hero the next. It was brutal for the actors, but oh my God, the discipline and experience. And you got to do it in the terminally bucolic village of Tamworth.”

James Whittemore

Eighty years later, the Barnstormers, as they’d become known, continue to entertain thousands each summer, still producing eight shows in eight weeks, and remaining among the nation’s oldest and proudest summer stock theatre traditions. Indeed, to enter the old (albeit winterized and renovated) white grainery on Main Street the Barnstormers have called home since 1935, is to step back in time and to, each week, enter a world of their own making. This summer’s production, for instance, of ‘The Ghost Train’ pays spooky homage to the Barnstormers’ first ever show, using actual train gears placed beneath the floor to recreate the rush of a freightliner screaming through.

“We don’t cut corners,” says longtime artistic director Bob Shea. “We remain very involved in every phase of production, creating every prop, every costume, and every set piece and sound effect onsite. It’s kind of like Boeing, except rather than planes coming down the assembly line, we have plays we’re putting together piece by piece.”

And star by star. Over the last eight decades, the Barnstormers, like so many of its counterparts across the state, has seen its fair share of major players in the summertime, whether it was Joseph Cotton and Katharine Hepburn breezing through while touring with ‘Philadelphia Story’ (Hepburn, not knowing she was in the home of late President Grover Cleveland, would take a look at his portrait in the entryway and famously – and unflatteringly – declare its likeness to President Taft!), or the likes of William Christopher (Father Mulcahy on ‘MASH’), Arlene Francis of ‘What’s My Line?’ fame, or General Hospital’s Emily McLaughlin.

It’s all part of a rich summer tradition that NH Cultural Resources Commissioner Van McLeod says only deepens New Hampshire’s legacy as a quiet, rustic retreat for artists to create some of their finest work – from novelists Willa Cather and Louisa May Alcott to Thornton Wilder, ee cummings, and of course, Robert Frost. And for residents and vacationers alike to, in turn, enjoy it first.

Begun as a theatre troupe that traveled in trucks and played barns throughout the region, Tamworth’s Barnstormers this summer celebrates its 80th anniversary, still producing eight shows in eight weeks, including a revival of its first ever show, “The Ghost Train.” (Photo: David Lazar; images courtesy of The Barnstormers).

“New Hampshire has always been a place of refuge for artists not only in the visual or literary sense, but for those who are performers, as well,” McLeod says. “While we’re often quick to think of the White Mountains School of Art or the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough or the Cornish colony, the town halls and opera houses across the state served as their own venue for some of the nation’s most talented performers to practice their craft in the summertime.”

Indeed, to travel from town to town across New Hampshire is to witness a theatre tradition that dates back more than a century to Vaudeville’s earliest days – one where virtually every town hall and Grange hall was built with a balcony and removable floor seating; where towns like Goreham built its opera house right on the train tracks to accommodate performers and visitors; and Rochester’s featured the state’s only hydraulic orchestra section, capable of lifting an entire audience to view a show.

It is to also witness a summer stock culture that remains as vibrant today as it did nearly 90 years ago when Peterborough’s Mariarden Theatre-in-the-Woods seated 600 and featured up-and-comers like Brian Donlevy, Paul Robeson, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Sugar Hill summer resident Bette Davis. While stages have sporadically sprung up in other states in the decades since, summer stock theatre remains a uniquely New England phenomenon – one which, from its earliest days, capitalized on the region’s status as a cool respite for vacationing city dwellers, and on a deep well of rising and accomplished professional actors anxious for a summer paycheck. In old barns, theatres like the Barnstormers, Whitefield’s Weathervane Theatre, the Peterborough Players and the New London Barn Playhouse found inexpensive (if basic) venues to entertain large audiences, and feature major actors, from “Carousel’s” John Raitt who performed regularly at the Lakes Region Playhouse on Winnipesaukee, to Tony Award winner James Whitmore who began and ended his career with the Peterborough Players.

The Barnstormers

Today, they remain among 21 summer stock stages across New Hampshire (from the Seacoast to the North Country), entertaining more than 800,000 vacationers and locals last year, and in many ways paying tribute to simpler times when a show was a regular part of one’s summer vacation and the computer generating the special effects was a director’s imagination.

The Barnstormers performing

“It’s all about creativity,” says McLeod, who himself founded the Paper Mill Theatre and the North Country Center for the Arts. “It’s easy to be creative when you’ve got a lot of technical gadgetry and million dollar budgets. But in summer stock, where your budgets are certainly anything but, the one criteria by which the audience judges is believability. It really is about telling a story and making it feel real for the people in the seats.”

For nearly as long as the Barnstormers in the White Mountains, the Peterborough Players have been doing just that in the shadow of the Monadnocks, earning a loyal regional following and national recognition as a serious player in summer theatre. Like the Clevelands in Tamworth, Edith Bond Stearns’ decision to launch the Peterborough Players in 1933 came as the child of wealthy summer vacationers who’d fallen in love with the region and were lifelong arts patrons. Stearns’ father had donated the money to build Bond Hall at the MacDowell Colony (where Thornton Wilder famously wrote ‘Our Town’), and when Stearns inherited the family’s 100-plus-acre farm after her mother’s death, it was her friendship with colony co-founder Marian MacDowell that encouraged her not to sell, but to instead open part of the farm as a theatre and proving ground for performers.

The days of a screen covering the entire left side of the theatre to keep bugs out, of horse stalls doubling as dressing rooms, and audience members bringing their own seat cushions and fans on warm summer nights are long gone. In their place is a thoroughly modern, air-conditioned space – though still unabashedly a barn – that has endured because of its connection to the community (locals use the theatre year round, watching the Metropolitan Opera there via satellite in the fall and winter) and ability to attract first-rate performers and directors with quality plays.

“It’s always been an opportunity for performers to gain a tremendous amount of experience in a relatively short amount of time,” says Peterborough Players artistic director Gus Kaikkonen. “Here, they’re able to do the play they’ve always wanted to do and to take part in a quality production outside of New York.”

Over the years it’s a formula that has attracted significant summer talent – actors like William Hurt, Robert Morse, Mary Beth Hurt, NH native and former “NYPD Blue” star Gordon Clapp, and film director Tom Moore – while also serving as a training ground for young actors, actresses and writers. Folks like James Whitmore, a New York native who arrived in Peterborough during the early 1940s in search of experience and summer work. Whitmore would serve in WWII, returning to Peterborough for more roles after being decommissioned. Whitmore was all but penniless in 1947 when he received a Broadway invitation to audition for the role of the Sergeant in “Command Decision.” Stearns, who both believed in Whitmore and in her theatre’s ability to turn out young talent, volunteered to pay for Whitmore’s ticket to New York and to have his roles covered while he was away. Whitmore would win the role and with it a Tony Award, launching a 60-plus year film and stage career that included turns in “Oklahoma,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” and “The Asphalt Jungle” and an Oscar nomination for his performance as Harry Truman in “Give ‘em Hell, Harry!” It was Peterborough, however, that always held Whitmore’s heart. When asked in 2008 at age 86 if he’d consider reprising his own turn as the Stage Manager in “Our Town,” Whitmore reportedly said, “As long as I’m taking sustenance, I’ll be there (in Peterborough).” It was to be his last role.

Just as it has since 1933, the New London Barn Playhouse still rents seat cushions for a nickel, revels in its rusticity, and works as a training ground, teaching performers the ins and outs of both acting and stage production. (Photo: David Lazar; images courtesy of the New London Barn Playhouse).

“You ask us how we’ve been able to last – the support of the town has a great deal to do with it,” says the theatre’s managing director Keith Stevens. “Peterborough is a unique place. It isn’t necessarily a summer destination like other towns with thriving summer theatres that draw tourist traffic. But it is a place with a remarkable amount of culture, and where there is a great interest locally in these kinds of institutions.”

An hour north in the quiet Lakes Region retreat of New London, the Barn Playhouse has been generating significant local interest itself since 1933, helping to cultivate the careers of countless young stars and claiming distinction as the state’s oldest continuously operating summer theatre. Like the Peterborough Players and the Barnstormers, the circa-1820 red barn on Main Street here has evolved quite a bit since its early days when actors would have to exit the theatre itself to reenter on the opposite side of the stage (always interesting, laughs the theatre’s chief historian, when there was a downpour outside and a play was set in the desert); or when a power outage one evening forced the theatre to light the stage with the headlights of a vehicle in the barn’s doorway. Which isn’t to say the Barn Playhouse has donned all the quirks of its age, whether it’s renting out seat cushions for a nickel (the same price as in 1933) to support a long-running scholarship fund, or admonishing patrons using the restroom during a 1989 production of “Singin’ in the Rain” not to flush during the second act because it would cut the water pressure onstage.

New London Barn Playhouse performers working

All, of course, pale to the quality productions the Barn Playhouse has churned out over the years and to a roster of talent it has developed as one of the stage industry’s top summer training grounds. Indeed, when visiting Mt. Holyoke College professor Josephine Etter Holmes launched the Barn Playhouse, it was with the intent of “establishing a theatre group presenting dramas of stimulating artistic and literary merit.” The result has been a company that each summer gives college students and recent grads a solid grounding in set, sound and costume design, along with the ability to star in shows – from “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Hello Dolly” to this summer’s “Hairspray” – ordinarily reserved for performers twice their ages, if not more.

Among the interns to emerge from the Barn Playhouse over the years have been Laura Linney, Taye Diggs, and Oscar winner Sandy Dennis, alongside writers Tom Fontana (“Homicide” and “St. Elsewhere”) and Steven Schwartz (“Godspell”). One intern from 2007 is starring on Broadway in “A Little Night Music” with Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta Jones, while another just finished playing Tony in Broadway’s current revival of “West Side Story”.

“Our mission here is really to nurture young artists,” says Barn Playhouse artistic director Carol Dunne, “to give them a break from commercialism and let them experience theatre as it is supposed to be – created with a tremendous amount of imagination, but not necessarily a lot of money. For a lot of us who’ve been in this business a long time and have worked on and off Broadway, we get more excited here in this little theatre than with the multi-million-dollar productions you’ll find in big cities.”

Judging by the reactions of its audiences, the Barn Playhouse continues to excite them, too, filling seats and sustaining the beliefs of many, like George Cleveland, Van McLeod, Keith Stevens and others that summer stock is a Granite State tradition whose curtain is far from closing. “As you look at history, New Hampshire has always been a place that has fostered artistic development and expression,” McLeod says. “As long as there is the imagination, the inspiration, and the desire from the public, it will continue to be.”

Special thanks to Carl Lindblade, Van McLeod, the Peterborough Players, the Barnstormers, and the New London Barn Playhouse for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Daddy at the organ—Lori Arsenault’s father Tilmon (or “Tilly” to his shipmates) would pass on to his daughter a lifelong love of music. (Photo courtesy of Lori Arsenault).

PORTSMOUTH – Michael DiNola Jr. remembers being summoned to the living room, and even at 9 years old, knowing something was wrong. The living room, after all, was a place reserved for special occasions, and DiNola had been following the news and knew the admiral had already been to the house to meet with his mom.

It was April 1963, and just days before, DiNola Jr. had been with his dad – Michael Sr., “Dinty” to his shipmates – in the garage of their Rye home, carving, sanding, and painting by hand the Indian Head neckerchief slide he’d wear for his Cub Scouts Blue & Gold banquet. A short time later, Michael DiNola Sr. boarded the U.S.S. Thresher in Portsmouth, the pride of the nuclear Navy, as its Lieutenant Commander for sea trials off of Cape Cod.

It was a voyage from which he and his shipmates would never re-emerge.

“I can remember we were driving home from the banquet and mom had shut off the radio,” DiNola Jr. says. “As soon as we pulled into the drive, two neighbors pulled in to let us know the ship had gone missing… All of us had, of course, been paying attention to the story as it was developing, so when my mom pulled us into the living room, we sort of knew what was next. I just remember telling my mother at that point, ‘I’ll take care of you.’ I got a job that summer washing dishes for $1 an hour, and have worked ever since.”

This marker and plaque outside the Albacore Museum in Ports- mouth is one of several memorials nationwide to the men of the U.S.S. Thresher. (Photo: David Lazar).

For the DiNola family, and an entire region whose livelihood centered on the fishing and shipbuilding industries, the loss of the Thresher to the depths of the Atlantic was a tragedy beyond description. In all, 129 men – officers, enlistees, civilians, dads, husbands, brothers, friends – would perish when a suspected leak in a salt water joint shorted out the submarine’s electrical systems and prevented the submarine from resurfacing.

It was the kind of tragedy that wasn’t supposed to happen. Built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the nation’s longest-operating (and arguably its finest) shipyard, the Thresher was the lead ship in a new class of Cold War-era fast attack nuclear submarines, introducing a level of technology, speed, stealth, and comfort never before seen – “the Cadillac of its time,” as one former crewmember described it, “a stainless steel palace, so unbelievably modern compared to the ships other countries had at that point in history.”

“I think if you were to draw a comparison today, you might look at the Challenger,” DiNola Jr. says. “The Thresher was one-of-a-kind, ahead of its time. The dedication of the people in the shipyard was amazing. The engineering that went into it was glorious, pushing the limits of known science and technology. Onboard you had the best and brightest the U.S. had to offer. Every man aboard was the best of the best, all of them dedicated to ensuring the ship was sound.”

The Thresher, seen here during her fitting at Ports- mouth Naval Shipyard, would be the world’s most advanced underwater vessel. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Thresher’s official launch and this past April 10, the 47th anniversary of its sinking. It is an event marked each year by a solemn ceremony near Portsmouth Harbor, one of prayer and reminiscences by family, former crewmen, the former shipyard workers who built, outfitted, and maintained the ship; one punctuated by a family’s tossing of a wreath into the Piscataqua and the scattering of 129 rose petals to signify the lost.

For Hooksett’s Kevin Galeaz, a former sub vet himself who has helped organize the memorials since 1999 as a member of the Thresher Base, United States Submarine Veterans Inc. (http://www.thresherbase.org), they are as much a service for the living as they are a tribute to the fallen. “What these families and that community went through was unbelievably traumatic,” Galeaz says. “And so our mission is to maintain the memory of the Thresher and its crew through the families of those who died and to ensure that future generations always remember.”

Prior to her sinking, The Thresher would set new standards in the Cold War era for technology, comfort and stealth. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

To understand that memory is to understand a culture that for more than two centuries produced some of the U.S. Navy’s finest vessels, shipbuilders, and sailors. Since colonial settlement, NH and Maine forests provided lumber for wooden boat construction – first for British ships, and eventually during the Revolution for the Raleigh, built in 1776 as the first vessel to fly an American flag into battle. Established in 1800, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard would prove an essential cog to powering the U.S. Navy, producing hundreds of ships critical to the nation’s war efforts through the 19th and 20th centuries. The first American submarine – the L-8 – was built in Portsmouth during World War I, with the yard employing more than 25,000 at its peak during World War II and turning out an additional 70 submarines, including a record 4 launched in one day. They were vessels with names like the Finback, which rescued a young pilot named George H.W. Bush in the Pacific; like the Archerfish, which sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano, the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine; and like the Swordfish, the first nuclear-powered sub built at the base in 1957.

The Thresher was to be one of those ships. Launched in July 1960, it heralded a new era in shipbuilding, replacing dated technology and cramped quarters with a level of sophistication, efficiency and spaciousness previously unseen. DiNola Jr. can remember his dad taking him and his younger brother for lunch aboard the ship while docked in Portsmouth and marveling at the gadgetry, while others remembered taking spouses on evening cruises in the waters near the harbor. “There was never trepidation on my dad’s part,” DiNola Jr. says. “I can remember him saying to all of us that the safest place you can be on this earth is in a submarine.”

Thresher patch. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

Indeed for nearly three years, the Thresher lived up to that billing, recording few problems during routine sea trials or shock trials, the latter of which required the equivalent of 20,000 lbs. TNT to be detonated underwater within 180 yards of her 278.5-foot hull. And so it was on April 9, 1963 that DiNola Sr., a career seaman, along with 11 more officers, 91 enlisted men, and six military and civilian technicians set sail for the waters off the Cape Cod coast for a post-overhaul trial, the submarine rescue ship Skylark in tow.

Micheal DiNola, Jr., seen here with a scale model of the Thresher, is work- ing with Washington officials to erect a national memorial in Arlington Cemetery to his father and others lost by the nuclear Navy. (Photo: David Lazar; inset: Official photograph of the U.S. Navy).

The Thresher was about 220 miles east of the Cape at 7:47 am, when she began her descent to test depth, the depth to which a sub can dive and maintain the integrity of its hull (the Navy keeps that actual depth classified, though it is generally believed to be around 1,000 feet). At 7:52, Thresher leveled off at 400 feet and reported back to the Skylark after the crew inspected for leaks and found none. Around an hour or so later, Thresher had reached 1,000 feet and was inching along slowly, descending in slow circles, her transmission quality notably declining.

What exactly happened next remains a matter of educated conjecture. At 9:09, it’s believed that the Thresher probably suffered the failure of a joint in her salt water piping system, springing a leak and shorting out one of her electrical panels. This would have in turn caused a shutdown of the nuclear reactor, with a subsequent loss of propulsion. Under the command of Lt. Commander John Wesley Harvey, it is believed that the ship attempted to blow its ballast tanks in an effort to resurface. Harvey’s transmissions with the Skylark, while garbled, remained remarkably calm. Those ballast tanks, however, were prevented from blowing because the ship’s high-pressure air flasks were plugged with frozen moisture. As the ship’s engine room flooded with water, it likely began a further descent, tail-first. By 9:17, Harvey – barely audible – reported that the Thresher had exceeded test depth. A minute later, at a believed depth of 1,300 to 2,000 feet, the Thresher is believed to have imploded, her remains settling gently some 8,400 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic.

The effect on the surface was devastating. “The impact on the area was huge,” DiNola Jr. recalls. “So many people worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. It was the largest employer in the area, and pretty much everyone knew someone on that boat or who’d worked on it.” DiNola Jr., now 56, can remember the line of neighbors along Cable Road in Rye who passed boxes from one to another to help his family move into a new home across the street from where they once were.

This plaque, now owned by Micheal DiNola, Jr., came from a nearby Kittery, ME, steakhouse which routinely marked the launch of new ships from Portsmouth. (Photo: David Lazar).

Lori Arsenault, whose father Tilmon – or Tilly to his shipmates – was the Thresher’s chief engineman and had taught her how to play the organ and to love music, was 8 at the time of the tragedy. “I don’t know if my (older) brother realized what was happening, but I didn’t. The phone kept ringing… and someone from the Navy was trying to reach my mother, but she was at a PTA meeting with my sister,” Arsenault says. “As soon as she got home, my brother went out to meet her. When I went into the kitchen, my older brother and sister were huddled together with my mother and they were all crying. That is when I knew, and I started crying, too.”

For John C. Riemenschneider, the tragedy hit in a different way. Riemenschneider had been a first class storekeeper aboard the Thresher for its first 34 months at sea before transferring out to another sub, the U.S.S. Jack, just 18 days before the final voyage. Riemenschneider remembers taking a light-hearted $2 bet from his best friend and fellow crewmember Jack Hudson that he wouldn’t be called up for the sea trial. Hudson, of course, never made it back to pay him. “At first, you didn’t believe it happened,” he remembers. “You believed they were on some sort of secret mission… But then the reality sets in. It’s a hard thing to comprehend. To lose that many friends at once, it’s unbelievable. A lot of us lived in Navy housing, and all of a sudden, so many of them are gone. My daughter was six years old at the time, and most of her friends were the children of those seamen. All of a sudden, all of their dads are gone. Personally, I would have to say it was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me, outside the loss of my wife.”

Riemenschneider, now 74 and living in Lebanon, ME, would serve on two more submarines before retiring from the Navy and then work on an additional 18 Trident subs as an engineer with Westinghouse. Like DiNola Jr. and Arsenault, Riemenschneider faithfully attends the memorials each year with his daughter to pay his respect and honor his friends. “That was the only trip that the Thresher made to sea without me,” he says. “I was on that boat for 34 months. You just don’t know… I’m not a particularly religious person, but I pretty much believe that I’m on a train ride, and when God punches my ticket, that’s my time to go… I just try to do the right thing everyday so that when it is my time, I can make sure I’m going to the right place.”

Just as there is no shortage of heartbreak to be found in the story of the Thresher, so, too, there is salvation. For, in the wake of the tragedy came an aggressive set of safety regulations – known as SUBSAFE – that is single-handedly credited with preventing a similar loss in the decades since. Whereas from 1915 to1963, it’s believed that the U.S. Navy lost one sub every 3-5 years due to non-combat causes (some have suggested the Thresher’s fatal flaw had to do with the design specs of the time, which called for brazing joints instead of welding them), the SUBSAFE program, administered by the Navy, has provided maximum reasonable assurance that subs’ hulls will stay watertight, and that they can recover from unanticipated flooding

Thousands lined the streets of Portsmouth in April, 1963 to pay respect to those lost aboard the Thresher. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Galeaz.

“If you want to know why I’m involved, it’s because of the fact that every time we go down, we come back up,” says Galeaz, who served on a ballistic sub from 1975-1982. “It is a miracle and an achievement we directly owe to SUBSAFE and to the men who gave their lives aboard the Thresher. We lost a lot of good guys when that submarine went down. I think all of us are driven by the conviction that we don’t ever want to see it happen again.”

The losses incurred by the Thresher are scattered across the country, as are memorials – from a marble stone at a post office in Eureka, Missouri, to a monument outside the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, CA, to a song by the Kingston Trio, “The Ballad of the Thresher,” and, here in Portsmouth, where a stone memorial and plaque outside the Albacore Museum honors all who were lost. DiNola Jr., meanwhile, is working with officials in Washington to try and erect a memorial to the Thresher and the entire nuclear Navy in Arlington National Cemetery.

“We have to understand the people in the military and their dedication to protecting our rights and our nation, and the sacrifices that go with that,” DiNola says. “We have to understand the dedication of the men working in that shipyard and on that boat to be the best at what they do. The loss of the Thresher was horrific. But what we came away with were ways to make us safer as a nation in the nuclear age.”

The Thresher would carry aboard her 129 officers, enlistees and military and civilian technicians at the time of her sinking near Cape Cod in April 1963. (Image courtesy of Kevin Galeaz).

And, says Arsenault, who maintains her own online memorial to the crew of the Thresher (www.ussthresher.com), a greater understanding of the costs of war. “I would like people to walk away knowing and feeling tremendous loss, not just for me and my family, and other Thresher families, but for… the influence these kind of men could have had on the world around them,” she says. “These are men who knew how to live in an itty bitty space and get along. Even under tremendous pressure, they knew how to manage themselves with calm…. These men were not daredevils, but skilled and caring of each other, their families and their communities.

“There is something in this for every person who has even a tiny seed of love in them,” she continues. “For Thresher families, ours is not a trauma of abuse, hatred, or neglect, but a trauma of love. The good news for everyone to know is that love is forever. On that alone we can rely.”

And thanks to the passion of their families and their supporters, it is a story and a sacrifice none of us will soon forget.

Special thanks to Kevin Galeaz, Michael DiNola Jr., Lori Arsenault, John C. Riemenschneider, and Mary Morin for their assistance and generosity with this story.

The original crew of the Mt. Washington Observatory includes (from left) Alex McKenzie, Bob Monahan, Joe Dodge, and Sal Pagliuca. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

PINKHAM NOTCH — Joe Dodge was a young outdoorsman with a marriage to the mountains and an outsize affection for extreme weather when he and three fellow trekkers ascended the carriage trail to the summit of Mt. Washington in pursuit of history, science, and public service. The year was 1932. America was plunged in Depression, and Dodge—who’d cemented a reputation constructing a hut system for hikers across New Hampshire’s North Country—was undaunted by the snowcapped slab of granite that lay ahead. Instead, he believed in the value the notoriously hostile summit held in the field of weather observation and public education. So with little more than borrowed weather instruments and enough food, coal and curiosity to survive the journey, Dodge and his friends Sal Pagliuca, Bob Monahan, and Alex McKenzie scaled the 6,288-foot peak that fall to reopen a tiny weather station last run by the U.S. Army’s Signal Service in the 1880s. They would enter a completely different world up there—and over the course of the coming years, the record books as well.

The stone-walled Tip Top House was lone of two simple hotels that served summit visitors from the 1850s into the 1870s. The Tip Top House still stands today, operated as an historic site by Mount Washington State Park. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

On April 12, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were in the midst of a legendary crime wave, Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” was the #1 movie in America, and in Pinkham Notch, a large ridge of high pressure was barreling across Mt. Washington’s icy summit, violently rattling the windows of the team’s tiny outpost and pushing their instruments to the brink of endurance. By the time it was over, Dodge and his team—subsisting on a $500 grant from the state’s Academy of Science—had recorded wind gusts of 231 mph, the strongest ever observed by humans. “There was no doubt this morning that a super-hurricane, Mt. Washington style, was in full development,” Pagliuca wrote in his logbook. “‘Will they believe it?’ was our first thought. I felt then the responsibility of that startling measurement.” The storm would last just one day, but the legend and Granite State tradition it created live on three quarters of a century later in an institution and landscape like no other—a place that proudly declares itself “home of the world’s worst weather.” The Mt. Washington Observatory has indeed evolved beyond the tiny shack Dodge, his team and five felines occupied in those early years to become a world-class facility, the only permanently-staffed mountaintop observatory in the Western Hemisphere, with a mission based in research, observation, and education. “Joe [Dodge] was always very interested in public education, particularly with respect to Mt. Washington,” says Jack Middleton, a Manchester attorney who served as an observer in 1952 and went on to ask for Dodge’s daughter’s hand in marriage. “It was a spectacular geographic feature, it was home to some incredible weather, and the summit itself is such a unique place. The flora and fauna you find up there are actually replicated in Greenland. You would have to go a long way to find anything like it.”

Sal Pagliuca (left) and Alex McKenzie take advantage of good weather in 1932 to strenghten the guy wires holding the roof anemometer on the Mt. Washington Observator y. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observator y).

In the midst of constantly emerging technology and methods of gathering weather, the summit itself has remained remarkably the same in the 75 years since Joe Dodge’s perfect storm—a subarctic and often unforgiving climate above the clouds, a sort of no-man’s land in the cold season where winds can regularly top 100 mph, snow falls each month of the year, temperatures can fluctuate between 60° F in the summer to -50° F in the dead of winter, and thick rime ice (or wind-blown frozen fog) can coat surfaces at a clip of six inches per hour. Mt. Washington observers—whose measurements of temperature, humidity, and wind speed are routed directly to the National Weather Service— jokingly pride themselves on being called “the world’s worst weather observers” or some of its “highest paid meteorologists.” As such, the summit is a place that has always lent itself to real-world research. The Army Signal Service would, of course, use the summit throughout the 1870s and 1880s to offer forecasts to merchants, ship owners, farmers and others whose livelihoods depended on the weather; while the Air Force would use it some 60 years later—as WWII was closing and the Cold War was escalating —to research the effect of icing on airplane wings in the event of flights into frigid Russian airspace. Advertising companies used the summit’s high winds to test the endurance of their signs; while as early as the 1950s, inventors were bringing contraptions to the top of the mountain to research the conversion of wind into energy communicate on short wave radio at bands that hadn’t been discovered before.

Above the 4,000-foot tree line, Mt. Washington shifts from wooded rusticity to a stark palette of black and white, every surface shrouded in fog, snow and rim ice. (Photo: David Lazar.)

“It has always been a platform, a place for people to do research on what would work in adverse weather conditions,” Middleton says.

The Observatory first occupied by Dodge, Monahan, Pagliuca and MacKenzie dated back to the weather bureau of the U.S. Army’s Signal Service in the 1800s. (Photos courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

It’s also a place where visitors can enjoy views, depending on fog, of more than 90 miles in any direction, from the Atlantic, to the entire Presidential Range, the Monadnocks, and the Adirondacks. First climbed in the 17th century, the summit was named in 1784 for General, not President, George Washington. “So esteemed was he at that time that the highest peak in the colonies was chosen to bear the name of our greatest war hero,” the Observatory’s curator Peter Crane says. “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” And first in tourism. Each spring, summer and fall, more than 250,000 hikers, tourists, and bumper sticker-seeking motorists make the ascent up the Mount Washington Auto Road, the same dramatic, winding ribbon of roadway (built in 1861 as a carriage trail) that brought Dodge’s team and before them, the Signal Corps, to the summit. The ascent is breathtaking, arguably more so in winter, when the road is closed and access is offered through the Observatory’s winter DayTrips and EduTrips via snow tractor—a program that provides an exclusive window into the Observatory’s inner workings and to the region’s most arresting vistas. About 2,000 people reach the summit in the cold season. It is a terrain that above the 4,000-foot tree line transforms from wooded rusticity to a stark palette of black and white, every tree and surface shrouded in snow, fog or rime ice; a terrain that magnifies man’s smallness in the face of nature. At the summit itself, the landscape can border on polar or downright postapocalyptic— from the Cog Railway (Sylvester Marsh’s spectacular 1869 contraption for transporting tourists up the mountainside) to its rebuilt stage office (still chained to the ground), and the Tip Top House (the stone lodge built in 1854 that for many years housed Observatory employees), no structure is spared a burial in rime ice. But for the occasional hiker, tourist, or Marty, the Observatory’s celebrated feline mascot, signs of life are all but nonexistent.

In the winter, the Mt. Washington Observatory offers special DayTrip and EduTrip tours to the summit via snow tractor, led by historians like Peter Crane, an accomplished trekker who’s scaled every 4,000 foot summit in the Presidential Range in every month of the year. (Photos: David Lazar).

“Our education programs really try and connect people with a place that is otherwise incredibly remote,” says the Observatory’s executive director Scot Henley. “For New Englanders and people from abroad, this is that one crazy outlier they see on their weather reports—the 32 degree reading when every other place around it is 72. It gives them the opportunity to experience that one digit on the map, to meet our meteorologists, and to find out for themselves, ‘What exactly can Mother Nature dish out up there?’” In the years since Dodge and his team observed their world record windstorm, Mother Nature has apparently dished out even worse weather elsewhere. This past January, the world learned of a 1996 tropical cyclone off the northeast coast of Australia that reports suggest reached wind speeds of 253 mph. The news, while a blow

Then as now, observers atop Mt. Washington have always experimented with new instruments for measuring weather, including this heated thermometer in 1937. (Photo courtesy of the Mt. Washington Observatory).

to the pride of Granite Staters who’d enjoyed the exclusivity of such an unlikely honor, was tempered, they argue, by the fact that the Australian cyclone was not observed by humans. For retired observers like Goreham’s Guy Gosselin, who scaled the mountain in 1961 and personally endured the ferocity of 184 mph winds, that’s no small distinction. “It is truly an eye-opening experience,” says Gosselin, who retired in 1996 as the Observatory’s executive director. “The weather was awesome in the dictionary sense… it also takes a lot out of you. You’re in a constant battle with wind and temperature. At times, you pretty much have to crawl along. “I don’t think you can leave there without an appreciation for the experience of being in a very unusual climate,” he continues. “It doesn’t make any difference what the weather happens to be whileyou’re up there. It’s always going to be a very different environment… Joe Dodge’s first love was the weather. The Observatory and the work it has been able to accomplish remain a great tribute to him and his vision.” It is a vision—and a view—that, thanks to Dodge and his fellow trekkers, will continue to connect visitors with awe and wonder for generations to come.

Each tourist season, more than 250,000 visitors make the hike or drive to the Mt. Washington summit. In the (winter, those numbers drop to 2,000. The cold season transforms the summit into one part winter wonderland, one part lunar landscape, affording views of up to 90 miles and an experience like no other in New England. Structures, from the stage house of the Cog Railway, to the radio towers of WHOM and WPKQ are buried in rim ice, rendering them all but unrecognizable. (Photos: David Lazar)

McAuliffe, who taught social studies at Concord High School, won national admiration for her everwoman appeal, infectious enthusiasm, and out- of-the-ordinary field trips with her students. (Photo: David Lazar)

CONCORD – Bob Veilleux looked up at the crisp, cobalt sky and knew something was wrong well before the voice on the loudspeaker confirmed it so.

The date was January 28, 1986, and Veilleux, a popular veteran science instructor at Manchester’s Central High School, was among dozens of educators on hand to view history from the bleachers at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. For Veilleux, the moment was to be especially proud. This, after a national competition named him New Hampshire’s alternate for Concord High School social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe as the first educator to go into space.

Seventy three seconds into the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, Veilleux’s heart and that of the state and nation leapt from its collective chest. “Several of us science people in the audience knew the sequencing wasn’t right – the separation wasn’t supposed to happen that early,” Veilleux says of the eventual explosion that turned the blue morning sky into a cascading umbrella of white and orange. “You saw cheers turn quickly to tears… That’s when the voice came over speaker announcing, ‘There appears to have been a major malfunction.’

“There are tragedies that occur in all of our lifetimes – moments we live with for the rest of our lives,” he continues. “This was certainly one of them.”

Derry’s Alan Shepard caught the world’s attention in 1961 as the first American in space, and ten years later as the oldest man on the moon at age 47. (Photos courtesy of McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center)

Next January will mark a quarter century since the Challenger disaster; 25 years since Americans and Granite Staters of every generation and background united in grief after investing unprecedented hope and emotion in the first private citizen – someone just like one of them –selected for what was billed as “the ultimate field trip.”

For Veilleux, now a part-time educator at the newly expanded McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, January 2011 will be a time for him, fellow educators, and visitors to reflect and pay special tribute to McAuliffe’s memory and legacy.

It will also be a time, they hope, for visitors to see, realize and appreciate one tiny state’s unexpectedly immense role in the history of spaceflight.

With less than a quarter of the population of the Houston metro area alone – dubbed the nation’s Space City because of the Johnson Space Center – New Hampshire residents have never let their state’s small stature keep them from looking to the heavens and thinking big.

From a series of trailblazing astronauts to the region’s only aerospace museum and companies that have changed the way NASA engineers approached exploration of the stars, the Granite State has enjoyed a long and, at times, unlikely connection with the cosmos.

No exploration, of course, can begin without citing McAuliffe’s fellow namesake on the Discovery Center entryway – the first American in space, Derry’s Alan Shepard.

Born in 1923 to a prominent banking family on East Derry Road, Shepard had grown up inspired by the adventure and daring of Charles Lindbergh – the first to cross the Atlantic by air – and a desire to one day pilot his own aircraft and make history. “Nothing could stop Alan from flight,” says Richard Holmes, Director of the Derry Heritage Museum, where an entire room chock-a-block with photos, street signs, dolls, documents, literature and life-size cutouts is dedicated to Shepard. “He just had this sense of adventure from the time he was young, whether it was kite flying or sailing on Beaver Lake. He had a newspaper route just so he

(Photos courtesy of McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center)

could save money for a bicycle to ride over to Grenier Field.”

At Grenier Field in Manchester, Shepard would earn money sweeping floors, so he could pay the pilots there for flying lessons. He’d go on to serve his country during WWII aboard a naval destroyer and earn his pilot’s wings in 1947, flying several tours from aircraft carriers. Twelve years later, Shepard was among the nation’s top 110 test pilots invited by the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration to join the space program. On May 5, 1961, as church bells rang and fire sirens sounded down Broadway in Derry to mark the occasion, Shepard launched into orbit, helming the Freedom 7 mission.

“It was a huge thing,” Holmes says. “America in 1961 was space crazy. We had this competition with the Russians, and there was just this feeling that communism would take over because they were the first in space. But Alan turned out better than Yuri Gagarin… He even made the cover of Archie Comics – if that’s not success, I don’t know what is!”

Indeed, to visit Derry today is to see a witness shrine to its favorite son, from the stretch of I-93 that passes Derry,

dedicated in 1963 as the Alan Shepard Highway, to the Pinkerton Academy high school football team – the Astros – and the state legislature’s eventual decision to proclaim Derry the state’s official ‘Space Town.’ “There’s a certain pride in a small town like ours of letting the world know that we exist,” Holmes says. “This was an incredibly important moment for us as a community.”

Derry Heritage Museum Director Rick Holmes dedicated special room at the museum to Alan Shepard’s historic accomplishments. (Photo: David Lazar)

In the years after his first historic flight, Shepard would overcome Meniere’s Disease, a debilitating condition afflicting the inner ear, before walking on the moon for the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 at age 47, the oldest man to do so. While he spent much of his remaining years in Houston, locals say Shepard’s true home never changed, evidenced by his frequent flights into Grenier Field to visit his mother and his practice of tipping his wings as he flew over Derry.

Twenty five years after Shepard’s inaugural orbit, another New Hampshire resident, Concord’s Christa Auliffe, would make history of her own, winning a national competition among 11,500 teachers to become the first educator in space. McAuliffe’s feat came at a time when public support for funding the space program was in decline, and NASA needed a way both to humanize and spark new interest in its efforts. McAuliffe – who’d herself grown up watching John Glenn’s historic flight and dreamed of going to space – would do just that, with her everywoman appeal, unflagging enthusiasm, easy smile, and penchant for out-of-the-ordinary field trips with her students. “Just having me fly is a very clear message that space is accessible,” she would say. “You’re taking an everyday, ordinary person on board the space shuttle and flying her. It means something because we are teachers, and teachers are approachable people.”

Concord High School social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe helped revive national enthusiasm for NASA, before her tragic death in the Challenger disaster in 1986. (Photos courtesy of McAuliffe- Shepard Discovery Center)

“For her to make the selection from tiny New Hampshire was a huge deal,” says Dave McDonald, educational director at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. “One thing that keeps coming through is that she was a super educator. She was a person who just loved people, and people loved her back. Her thing was that she was just an ordinary citizen – and of course, she was anything but ordinary – and that she was taking the ‘ultimate field trip.’”

McAuliffe was selected in July 1985, and soon underwent a battery of training in Houston to prepare for the Challenger mission. From the Challenger, McAuliffe, one of seven astronauts aboard the mission, was to conduct several lesson plans for her class and thousands of others across the nation via satellite. “The hope for NASA was to get the average person interested in space, and Christa’s natural charisma managed to generate tremendous appeal both nationally and internationally,” Veilleux recalls.

Veilleux, an astronomy teacher who’d developed a close collegial relationship with McAuliffe in the months leading to the launch, was sitting behind her family the morning of January 28, 1986. Investigators in the months and years following the disaster would determine that a faulty O-ring – a piece of rubber designed to prevent leaks – failed in the frigid air that morning. “That shuttle should have never taken off that morning,” Veilleux says. “It was way too cold outside.” Veilleux watched as shock turned to intense grief – a feeling echoed in classrooms and millions of households – as much of the world witnessed the event live on television.

(Photo courtesy of McAuliffe- Shepard Discovery Center)

“The mood up here in New Hampshire when we returned was utter disbelief,” he recalls. “There was so much pride in Christa being the teacher to represent all of us. There was an incredible amount of hurt. The city and the state seemed to just shudder and hold it in.” On the Thursday morning after the disaster, a memorial service was held in front of the State House, where

Veilleux read a prepared message from teachers. McAuliffe’s remains would be laid to rest in Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord. In the years following the Challenger tragedy, her name would grace some 40 schools around the world, while every year since 1986, the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Nashua has devoted itself to the use of technology in all aspects of education.

In Concord, meanwhile, what began in 1990 as the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium dramatically grew last year with a 33,000-square-foot, $15-million expansion to become the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. Today, the center features the only interactive, hands-on exhibition of its kind in the world on black holes. “The Discovery Center is the perfect memorial to honor Christa, because it has, in fact, become New Hampshire’s premier field trip destination,” McDonald says. “If there is something we want children to leave with, it is a little more insight about each of these American heroes… We also want them to leave feeling good about their home state. Christa and Alan were extraordinary firsts in our history, and should be points of proper pride for New Hampshire.”

Built as a lasting memorial to her work, the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord was expanded last year to become New England’s only aerospace science center. (Photo: David Lazar)

As, he adds, should several other notable New Hampshire residents whose encounters with the stars are chronicled at the center – astronauts like Manchester’s Lee Morin, a medical doctor and Captain in the U.S. Navy, who in 2002 embarked on the 13th Shuttle mission to the International Space Station; astronauts like Hanover’s Jay Buckey, Pelham’s Rick Linnehan, and Portsmouth’s Rick Searfoss, who in 1998 took part in NASA’s 16-day Neurolab mission to study the effects of gravity-loss on the brain and nervous system – a mission informally known as “the New Hampshire flight.”

“To say we had three people from a tiny state with just 1.5 million people was quite a feat,” says Buckey, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School who served as a payload specialist aboard Neurolab. “I think it’s safe to say we had the highest per capita representation for one state on one flight. All of us had very different connections to New Hampshire. And all of us were extremely honored to represent our home state.”

Searfoss, an aeronautical engineer who logged more than 39 days in space, has since retired from NASA service, while Linnehan, a veterinarian, continues to serve, having now logged more than 59 days in space, including six spacewalks. Buckey, who returned to medicine, helps to lead the Discovery Center’s public education efforts, including an annual statewide astronomy bowl.

Just as Granite State residents have taken giant leaps for mankind, so too have several of its companies, whose inventions have enhanced the way NASA engineers approach space travel – companies like Keene’s Timken, whose split ball bearings are now used on the space shuttle’s main engine; like BAE systems of Nashua which created the computers for the Mars Rover in 2004; and like Hanover’s Creare, Inc. which created the cryocooler for the Hubbell space telescope in 2002.

And then there’s Shepard himself, whose time spent training for his inaugural spaceflight yielded an unlikely invention. Often locked in a capsule for several hours on end without the ability to exit, duty was not the only thing that called for Shepard. Nature did, as well. And so was invented the modern diaper,

Pelham’s Rick Linnehan, Portsmouth’s Rick Searfoss, and Hanover’s Jay Buckey with NH-shaped maple candies aboard NASA’s 1998 Neurolab mission, believed to be the largest concentration from one state ever on one spaceflight. (Photo courtesy of Jay Buckey)

which replaced the standard cotton filling with a polymer called sodium polyacrylate – a crystal that could absorb up to 300 times its weight in water. It’s a feat Veilleux demonstrates almost daily to schoolchildren, filling up one plastic cup with water, another with crystals, combining the two, and then suspending the mixed product upside down over one brave volunteer’s head. The head remains dry, since the water has become a gelled solid.

“It’s funny to see all of the New Hampshire connections,” Veilleux says. “Even the one true scientist who went to the moon and the last man to walk on it, Harrison Schmitt – I had an opportunity to meet him and found out tha

t his grandparents…. were from Claremont!

“Each of these things gives you a little bit of pride to be from this state,” he continues. “We may be small in some ways, but we’re mighty in a lot of others. There’s a lot of Yankee spirit up here, and people aren’t afraid of taking chances, rolling up their sleeves, and doing big things.”

Thanks to McAuliffe’s and Shepard’s sacrifices and the education efforts still under way, it is a legacy likely to last a very long time.

Special thanks to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, the Derry Heritage Museum, and Dr. Jay Buckey for their generosity and assistance with this story.

Retired science teacher Bob Veilleux, a part- time educator at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, was chosen as McAuliffe’s NH alternate for the ill-fated 1986 Challenger flight. (Photo: David Lazar)

PITTSBURG – Richard Blanchard was a young dad still adjusting to his duties as a newly deputized sheriff in the Great North Woods when he awoke one crisp October morning in 1835 to a rap on his farmhouse door and a warrant for his arrest.

The men waiting outside had come from just across the Canadian border in the town of Hereford, an act of retaliation for Blanchard’s arrest late that summer of a Canadian man who’d owed debts to a nearby general store. While that same Canadian—who’d managed to escape following an ambush on Blanchard’s deputies—watched on, Blanchard finished his chores, bid his wife and children farewell, and took just enough time for word of his arrest to trickle out before heading off into the autumn woods with his captors.

Signs announcing Pittsburg as the site of the Indian Stream Republic are among the first things visitors see as they drive into town, and among the last remaining reminders of the tiny democracy. (Photo: David Lazar)

For Blanchard the events of the next 24 hours in the surrounding, unforgiving patchwork of lakes and tree-lined hills would make for the ride of his life. They would also mark the beginning of the end of one of New Hampshire’s and the nation’s more interesting historical footnotes—a shortlived experiment in democracy known as the Indian Stream Republic.

So-named for the Connecticut River tributary that formed its southeastern border, the Indian Stream Republic was a nation within a nation—an independent state that resulted from, of all things, a surveying slipup, as British and American negotiators in 1783 scrambled to draw up a truce to the Revolutionary War and draw firm borders dividing U.S. and British territories. The 1783 Treaty of Paris would define this particular section along the Canadian-U.S. border as coming at the “northwesternmost headwaters” of the Connecticut River. There was just one problem: those headwaters had any number of tributaries, from Indian Stream to Perry and Hall streams, making that northwesternmost point a debate among settlers and local leaders on both sides who sought to claim the land as their own.

(Photo: David Lazar)

The result was a nearly 300-square-mile patch of remote, rugged and pristine wilderness, an undefined area atop New Hampshire roughly the size of New York City’s five boroughs and whose population density even today (at 3.1 people per square mile) is dwarfed by the world’s least densely populated nation, Mongolia. For 40-plus years after the Treaty of Paris, the Indian Stream territory existed as a sort of legal no-man’s-land, a place where Canadian and U.S. authorities had little if any jurisdiction or taxing power and where new settlers—including a handful of debtors seeking escape from obligation—arrived each year with little more on their backs than an axe, a few sacks of provisions and the hope of finding new opportunity in the virgin forest.

“Like the Gold Rush where people left everything they had on the east coast for the chance at something better, people came here with nothing but the want and wish of better living,” says lifelong Pittsburg resident Roy Amey, a descendant of one of the Indian Stream Republic’s first leaders, John Haynes. “For a time, it was very hard. One summer, there was actually four or five feet of snow. There was no food, no grain, their animals starved. Overall, it was a pretty bleak outlook when these folks moved up here. I think when you look around today, though, we did all right.”

The Indian Stream Republic comprised a nearly 300-square mile patch of rugged, pristine wilderness, noted for its tree-lined hills and the Connecticut Lakes. (Photo: Raymond Mazalewski)

Indeed, to drive today through the lush and still largely raw forestland and lake country that make up modern day Pittsburg is to witness the handiwork of those early settlers—a hardscrabble lot who made a living clearing trees and building roads, cultivating farms and raising livestock, logging and burning wood for potash fertilizer (the chief industry—in fact, a large overturned iron potash kettle for a time served as the territory’s jail), and constructing schoolhouses and public buildings through volunteer labor. Now, as then, it remains a place of proud self-sufficiency; a place where life can be hard in the cold season, but where neighbors feel a sense of obligation to pitch in and do things themselves as a community rather than having it done for them.

In the decades following the Treaty of Paris, the Indian Stream territory quietly prospered, as more families moved in and settled. Crime was relatively rare and most of the necessities of life were produced at home, with bartering common, payment of debts a matter of honor, and methods of commercial and financial transactions little known. As the 1820s drew to a close, however, local officials both in Canada and New Hampshire—seeking to boost revenue and authority —began to test their limits in the territory. Both would impose taxes on Indian Stream inhabitants, with Canadians going so far as to charge duties on goods brought into the territory and to attempt conscripting residents into the Canadian army. For all of this, the residents—or Streamers as they were known —received little in return.

A surveying slipup by British and U.S. negotiators following the Revolutionary War would leave an area roughly the size of New York City’s five boroughs in limbo. Confusion came from where a small patch of the U.S.-Canadian border was to be. (Images courtesy of the NH Historical Society Library and Wikipedia Commons)

By 1832, with no sign of relief, the 60 or so families living in Indian Stream came to a decision. At a meeting held on July 9 of that year, dozens of Streamers—still in their work clothes—packed the Center School House, demanding change and ultimately approving a declaration of independence and constitution by a 56-3 vote for what was to become one of the world’s tiniest nations. The hope: that such a compact could last until the British and the Americans finally resolved their border dispute over the territory. The constitution for this new, tiny nation atop New Hampshire would look remarkably similar to that of the United States, guaranteeing Streamers the right to self-governance, religious freedom, life, property and happiness. Later amendments guaranteed the right to free speech, election and debate; a swift and fair trial; and protection from double jeopardy, cruel and unusual punishment, and unwarranted searches and seizures. From that meeting also sprung a simple three-branch government, consisting of: an elected five member executive council; a general assembly consisting of all males over 21 years of age with three months residence in the republic, which could overturn a council decision on a 2/3 vote; and a judiciary whose decisions could ultimately be appealed to the executive council.

“If you look at this from a historical standpoint, the people of this territory were working, perhaps subconsciously, within the bounds of precedent set by the American Revolution to declare their independence,” says Jere Daniell, a retired Dartmouth historian who helped author and edit perhaps the most definitive history of the Indian Stream Republic. “And for a while, it worked. It should be noted that this was never intended to be a permanent arrangement.” And it wasn’t. For a little more than three years, the Indian Stream Republic churned as a tiny engine of democracy. Elections for executive council were held regularly each March. By 1835, Indian Stream had 69 families and 414 inhabitants living in relative prosperity, with each head of family possessing 100 acres of land and more than 1,500 acres under cultivation.

Little, however, could stop the winds of unrest building along the Republic’s northern and southern borders, as Canadian and New Hampshire authorities began to tire of an independent nation living in their midst and made concerted attempts to establish jurisdiction within the territory. A fracture would develop within the Republic. Some Streamers—including one of its first councilors, Luther Parker—urged their government to align with New Hampshire and the protection and stability it offered. Others sided with Lower Canada, as chief magistrate from Hereford, Alexander Rea, appeared frequently to try and drum up local support for incorporation into Canada. It would be a series of cross-border raids and arrests in 1835, beginning with Parker’s apprehension for allegedly threatening a Canadian debtor in his general store, and culminating in Blanchard’s, that would spell the Indian Stream Republic’s unceremonious end.

Officers would bring Parker to Canada and then release him from custody almost immediately—the arrest, more than anything, a symbolic attempt by Rea to assert Canadian authority within the Republic’s borders. For Blanchard, the story would be different. For in the time it took him to say goodbye to his family and finish his chores on that crisp October morning, word would spread to friends and later allies in the neighboring NH towns of Colebrook and Stewartstown. A posse of more than a dozen men gathered, tracking Blanchard’s captors down that evening just beyond the Canadian border on horseback, ambushing them and securing the young deputy sheriff’s release. The following day, members of that same posse, fueled by rum and retribution, appeared at Magistrate Rea’s house in Hereford with their own arrest warrants for him and Blanchard’s captors. A street brawl ensued. One overzealous member would split Rea’s straw hat with his saber and another would fire a pistol in his direction, before the mob took the magistrate into custody and brought him back across the border to Canaan, VT.

As the group arrived in Canaan and the effects of the alcohol began to wear off, the men quickly realized the magnitude of what they’d done, having assaulted a magistrate in the exercise of his functions and carried him into captivity in a foreign country. Rea was immediately released back to Canada. A line, however, had been crossed. As word spread in the days following of an insurrection brewing in Indian Stream between pro-Canadian and pro-NH inhabitants and a possible incursion by Canadian forces, NH Governor William Badger decided to disregard ongoing U.S.-British border negotiations and dispatch the 24th regiment of the state’s militia into the Indian Stream Republic to restore order.

So fell the curtain on one of the world’s tiniest democracies, as Streamers, seeking the protection NH offered, ceded authority to the state. Five years later, Indian Stream would be incorporated as Pittsburg, today New England’s largest town in land area. In 1842, the British, seeking to rid themselves of any more headaches along the disputed border, would give up millions of acres of territory—including Pittsburg—to U.S. negotiators in the Ashburton Treaty.

How history judges the Indian Stream Republic rests in the eyes of each storyteller. For some, like bestselling author Jeffrey Lent, who used Indian Stream as the setting for his 2002 landmark novel Lost Nation, it is a fable of man’s imperfection. “I think it is ultimately a story of a people who are urged to change something and take authority into their own hands, in the hopes of achieving societal order,” says Lent, who recently moved with his family to Pittsburg to film the motion picture version of Lost Nation. “It is a story of great aspirations and potential. It is also a story of human failing. Not failure in a negative sense, but as with so much of human experience, a situation that, despite best intentions and efforts, was altered by uncontrollable events.”

Author Jeffrey Lent (left) and film producer Chris Alexander are now in production of Lent’s Indian Stream-based novel, Lost Nation. The pair hopes to use the film to launch an annual Coos Film Festival and movie studio in nearby Colebrook. (Photo: David Lazar)

As for Roy Amey, who has committed much of his life to preserving Pittsburg history, he just wants to make sure the story continues to be told. “I think it goes to show what people can accomplish when they are left alone because they know they have to do it themselves,” he says. “They didn’t need a big government. They got off the trail by the Connecticut and all they had were the woods. And for a time, they made it work. “The legacy question I can’t answer,” Amey continues. “But I do think everyone needs to know where Pittsburg came from. When Lost Nation came out, it opened the eyes of the whole town. People came from far and wide to learn more about it… Someone’s got to keep talking about it and reading it and making sure the younger people coming along know about it, too. Because this is a major part of who we are.”

Thanks to Lent and veteran film producer Chris Alexander, it is a story that will live on through the silver screen, and may indeed stretch far beyond, as the pair enters serious talks to launch an annual Coos Film Festival at the Balsams in nearby Dixville Notch and a movie studio in Colebrook. “We’re not just coming in to shoot a movie, we’re coming in to build a new template or model for industry in the North Country,” Alexander says. “We believe there’s an entire population up here of people with the interest, the knowledge, and the talent to make a contribution and really help to rebuild this region.” And, in the process, keep an important piece of history alive for future generations.

Special thanks to Jeffrey Lent, Chris Alexander, Roy Amey, Jere Daniell, the Balsams, the NH State Archives and the NH Historical Society Library for their generosity and assistance with this story.