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Thoreau

Six Famous Artists Houses (Where You Can Stay, Too)

Artists gravitate toward places that inspire them creatively, so you can often find artists houses among splendid scenery or in rural isolation.

Famous artists could often afford large houses, and some have since been transformed into inns and bed and breakfasts.

Artists Houses As Inns

Now every New England state has a house that an artist once lived in, but functions as an inn or an artists retreat.

At two of the artists houses described below you can actually practice your art in the same places Fairfield and Eliot Porter and Norman Rockwell found their inspiration.

So here we bring you six artists houses, one in each state (admittedly, we include an engraver and an architect as artists – but we think they’d agree). If you know of any artists houses where people can stay, please include them in the comments section.

Abel Buell Home

The Abel Buell Home

Abel Buell, apprenticed to a silversmith as a boy, learned his craft perhaps too well.

As a young man, he used his skill at engraving to alter the plates for five-pound notes to plates for larger denominations. Then he printed them. He got caught, and authorities cut off the tip of his ear as punishment.

An uncommonly ingenious mapmaker, he designed the first map of the United States in 1784 and colored it by hand. The map involves enough artistry that we’re putting his house on our list of artists homes.

The first map, by Abel Buell.

He was born in 1742 in Clinton, Conn., when it was called Killingworth. Today his home is a bed and breakfast called the Abel Buell House By The Shore. You can stay in one of two rooms, one with a queen-size bed, one with a twin.

33 Commerce St., Clinton, Conn.

Great Spruce Head Island

Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay (thanks, Google Maps!)

Fairfield Porter, born in 1907 in Winnetka, Ill., bucked the Abstract Expressionist trend during the middle of the 20^th century. He stuck to a representational style despite criticism from other artists. In his paintings, he made ordinary landscapes and interiors seem extraordinary.

Under the Elms by Fairfield Porter

His brother Eliot was a biochemical researcher at Harvard who took up photography as a hobby. Fairfield introduced Eliot to Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged him to work harder. Eliot began to exhibit in Stieglitz’s gallery, and eventually he quit his job and pursued photography full time. The Sierra Club published a book of his photographs with quotations from Henry David Thoreau, and it did quite well. Eliot Porter published more books, and is considered the pioneer of the coffee-table book of nature photography.

When the boys were young, their father bought Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay and built a 12-bedroom summer cottage. The brothers and their three siblings spent summers on the island. Today, the Porters’ niece, Anina Porter Fuller, invites a dozen artists to spend a week on the island working independently in late June or early July. (Here’s her painting of the house.)

Great Spruce Head Island, Deer Isle, Maine

Fidelia Bridges Guest House

The Fidelia Bridges Guest House (thanks again, Google Maps)

Fidelia Bridges created exquisite images of nature in the 19^th century, though people have largely forgotten her. Except, at least, for those who stay at one of the most interesting artists houses, the Fidelia Bridges Guest House.

May, by Fidelia Bridges

She was born in 1834 in Salem, Mass., to Eliza Chadwick Bridges and Henry Gardiner Bridges. Her father died in China when Fidelia was 15, and her mother died three hours before the news of her husband’s death reached Salem. Fidelia’s sister auctioned off the family furniture and sold the house.

Eventually Fidelia got a job as a mother’s helper in New York, where she would later run a school and her own studio. She also worked as a governess to Mark Twain’s three children.

All the while she drew and painted, limiting her subjects to birds and plants.

She moved to Canaan, Conn., and lived quietly, drawing and painting for the rest of her days.

The Fidelia Bridges Guest House belongs to the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Mass.

18 Washington Square West, Salem, Mass.

Inn at Whitefield

Interior at the Mountains, by Emil Otto Grundmann

Emil Otto Grundmann was a German art professor and artist who came to the United States. He got a job as director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he founded the Boston School of art. He taught such artists as Frank Weston Benton, Charles Henry Turner and Edmund C. Tarbell.

Grundmann visited a friend in Whitefield, N.H., in 1879 to paint the White Mountains. He painted the lovely Interior at the Mountains, a view of the silhouette of the Franconia range through the window of his friend’s bay window. The interior includes ‘accessories of genteel tourism,’ according to Robert L. McGrath: a map of Europe, sculptures, prints of Roman monuments and wicker furniture.

Today you can be your own genteel tourist at the house, now the Inn at Whitefield.

381 Lancaster Rd., Whitefield, N.H.

Architect’s Inn Guesthouse

The Archietect’s Inn

George Champlin Mason designed a number of palatial homes in Newport, R.I., including one for himself.

Mason spent his early career trying to make a living as a landscape painter. He published a collection of engravings of Newport landscapes that promoted the city to tourists and vacationers.

Mason switched careers several times, first as a newspaper editor and finally as an architect. He began designing houses in 1858, eventually designing many of the summer mansions in Newport. He also helped found the Newport Historical Society.

After his death in 1894, Belmonts and Vanderbilts lived in his house. Today it’s an inn, known as the Architect’s Inn Guesthouse, decorated with period furnishings and offering fully interactive Murder Mystery weekends.

2 Sunnyside Pl #1, Newport, R.I.

Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

The Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

Before Norman Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Mass., he lived in Arlington, Vt. There he adopted the themes of Americana that have endeared him to millions of his fans.

Rockwell was 49 when he bought a farmhouse in Arlington, Vt., in the fall of 1943. The move to the house, built in 1792, gave him a much-needed restart for his art.

He was more interested in diners, doctors’ offices and schoolhouses than in the landscape.

Today you can enjoy the Green Mountain scenery or the diners and schoolhouses at the Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio. You can even stay in his studio – or his barn. The inn also offers Rockwell Seminars during which acclaimed painters and illustrators give one-on-one instruction in Rockwell’s actual studio.

3587 River Road Arlington, Vt.

Images of artists houses: Emil Grundmann, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Otto_Grundmann#/media/File:Emil_Otto_Grundmann00.jpg; Under the Elms, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10887039

This story about artists houses was updated in 2019.

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The Willey Family Tragedy Starts White Mountain Tourism

When the Samuel Willey family moved to Crawford Notch in 1825, they unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that turned the White Mountains into a tourist attraction.

The mountains were a desolate wilderness in the decades after the American Revolution. Nonetheless, Willey took his wife, five children and two hired men to live in a small, remote house in the mountains. Called the Old Notch House, it had been built in 1793.

During his first year, Samuel Willey and his two hired hands expanded the house. It stood in the shadow of a mountain now called Mt. Willey.

The men turned it into an inn for travelers along the deserted notch road.

Willey Family Tragedy

In June 1826 a heavy rain terrified the Willey family when it caused a landslide across the Saco River. Sam Willey decided to build a stone shelter above the house. He thought the family could find safety there in case of another landslide.

On Aug. 28, 1826, a violent rainstorm caused a mudslide on the mountainside. The Willey family and the two hired men took refuge in the stone shelter. The landslide killed all nine of them, but it missed the house they’d fled. A ledge above the house spared it from destruction.

The Willey Family House

Rescuers found unmade beds, clothes strewn about and an open Bible on a table in the house, and they concluded the family had left in a panic. They found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey, two of their daughters and the two hired hands. But they never found the bodies of the other three children.

News of the Willey family tragedy spread through newspapers and Theodore Dwight’s guidebook, The Northern Traveler. The intact Willey family house began to attract tourists. Then it began to attract artists and writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story about the Willey family tragedy, called The Ambitious Guest.

White Mountain Tourism

Others exploited the tragedy as well. A mountain guide named Ethan Crawford, who grew up in the notch, built an inn. He called it the Notch House, and his brother Thomas ran it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau stayed at the inn.

Eventually the Crawford family gave their name to the mountain pass, previously called the White Mountain Notch.

Samuel Willey’s brother, the Rev. Benjamin Willey, charged for guided tours of the Willey family house. In 1845, a tourism entrepreneur named Horace Fabyan turned the Willey house into a 50-room hotel.

John Frederick Kensett

Thomas Cole, member of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

No painting did more for White Mountain tourism, though, than John Frederick Kensett’s Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway in 1851.

willey-family-kensett-painting-mount-washington

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway

Kensett’s image became the single most effective mid-nineteenth-century advertisement for the scenic charms of the White Mountains and of North Conway in particular, wrote Barbara J. MacAdam as the Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of America Art at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College.

An engraver made a copy of the painting, which was sold to 13,000 subscribers of the American Art Union. Artists copied the painting, and Currier & Ives turned the engraving into a lithograph in 1860. It surpassed images of the Willey family house as the best known landscape view of the era.

Kensett’s other landscape paintings achieved great popularity, partly because he painted newly fashionable resorts like Newport, R.I.

Another Tragedy

Born in Cheshire, Conn., Kensett followed his father into the engraving trade, but tired of it and turned to painting. He bought land on an island off Darien, Conn., and called it Contentment. In 1872 his own life ended in tragedy, when he jumped into the Long Island Sound to save the life of a friend’s wife. Not only did he fail to save her, he caught pneumonia and died a month later.

The Willey family house is now an interpretive center within Crawford Notch State Park.

This story about the Willey family was updated in 2023.

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Frederic Tudor in 1806 Brings Cocktails and Ice Cream to the Rest of the World

In 1805, Frederic Tudor decided to make his fortune by selling ice to people in tropical climates.

Most people thought the 23-year-old was crazy, but Frederic Tudor knew something most people didn’t. His wealthy family had the luxury of an ice house, and he had experienced the joys of cold mixed drinks and ice cream in the summer. He figured he could get the rest of the world addicted to the stuff.

And so in 1806, he launched his business by sending to Martinique a brig full of ice cut from his family’s pond. He told his sales agent to give it away to bartenders.

“A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again,” Frederic Tudor wrote.

His first venture failed, and so did his second, third and fourth. In the end, Frederic Tudor made his millions and revolutionized the way the world ate and drank.

Frederic Tudor

He was born in to a Brahmin family on Sept. 4, 1783, the day after the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution. His father, William Tudor, had studied law in John Adams’ law office, become George Washington’s first judge advocate general and started a lucrative law practice in Boston.

William Tudor liked to live large and followed the new upper-class fashion of drinking alcoholic beverages with ice. His 23-year-old son Frederic seized on the idea of bringing the luxury of ice from Massachusetts lakes and ponds to the tropical masses in the Caribbean.

In 1806, he sent his first shipment of ice to Martinique amid much derision. “No JOKE,” reported the Boston Gazette. “A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.”

Ice turned out to be a harder sell than Frederic Tudor imagined. He was trying to sell it to people who had never once experienced anything cold. They didn’t have ice houses, and they didn’t know how to keep ice from melting. He and his partner – his brother William – lost money on the deal. William dropped out of the business, founded the North American Review and co-founded the Boston Athenaeum.

Failure

Frederic Tudor stubbornly persisted, sending another shipment of ice to Cuba. Again he lost money.

So did his father – in a real estate speculation gone disastrously wrong. Frederic Tudor kept shipping ice, losing money but learning ways to keep ice cold. Sawdust, for example, worked better than straw.

But then Frederic Tudor spent parts of 1812 and 1813 in debtors prison after his business partner swindled him.

He kept going. “Let those laugh who win,” he wrote.

He borrowed money, bought ice in Massachusetts and an icehouse in Cuba and set sail for the Caribbean. “Pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf,” he wrote. Finally, he made some money on his crystal blocks of Yankee coldness.

Smash

Frederic Tudor expanded his business to Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, developing new sales techniques along the way.

He gave bartenders free ice for a year after teaching them how to keep it frozen in a ‘refrigerating jar’ and how to make cocktails like the Smash. He sold ice to Havana coffee shop owners and the keeper of the Tivoli Gardens after teaching them how to make ice cream.

During one mild winter, he faced an ice shortage. So he sent his ship’s captain to take a detour to Labrador and hack off part of an iceberg. Tudor also ventured to the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine to find enough ice to ship.

In 1825 came another big turning point: Frederic Tudor met Nathaniel Wyeth, a hotel owner. Wyeth invented a horse-drawn ice plow that cut ice from ponds far more cheaply and efficiently than the laborious hand labor then used. Tudor hired Wyeth as his foreman and expanded his ice-cutting operation.

Harvesting ice

India

In 1833, Frederic Tudor gambled that a shipment of ice would survive the voyage to India. He was right. The arrival of the ice caused a sensation, especially among the colonial British administrators.

Henry David Thoreau heard about it. He watched as Tudor’s men divided Walden Pond into a chessboard pattern and cut ice into square, two-foot blocks. “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges,” wrote Thoreau.

The same year he sent ice to India, Frederic Tudor, 50, met 19-year-old Euphemia Fenno. They married the next year and had six children.

Ice King

Frederic Tudor finally achieved the success he craved, earning the nickname ‘Ice King.’ At one point he owned ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Ala., Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Sri Lanka and Singapore.

But he had created a market for ice too big for one company to serve. By 1855, 12 companies shipped ice from the Boston area.

In the run-up to the Civil War, American ships carried more tonnage of ice than any other commodity except for cotton.

People had come to view ice as a necessity to preserve food and medicine. When the Civil War broke out, two-thirds of Boston and New York households received ice deliveries every day.

And in 1862, a bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bartenders Guide, with recipes for America’s cocktails – most of which used ice.

Wenham Lake Ice

Between 1844 and the early 1850s, the remarkably pure ice from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts became a fashionable luxury among the British aristocracy. The best London hotels put up signs advertising Wenham ice. It was said you could read a newspaper through a block of Wenham Lake ice two feet thick.

Wenham Lake today

Wenham ice inspired the popularity of cocktails like sherry cobblers and mint juleps in London. No fancy dinner party was complete without it, and Queen Victoria insisted on it.

A competitor to Frederic Tudor, the Wenham Lake Ice Co., had promoted the stuff.

By 1850, Norway and Sweden began to export ice. One ice company bought Lake Oppegaard in Norway and rechristened it “Lake Wenham.”

Aftermath

Frederic Tudor died in 1864, his fortune said to amount to $200 million in today’s dollars. His estate in Nahant, Mass., became a country club. His great-granddaughter Tasha Tudor illustrated nearly 100 children’s books and received many honors for them.

The ice business thrived, with Massachusetts supplying ice around the world from ponds in Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Ayer, Stoneham, Wakefield, Woburn, Andover and Lynnfield.

By 1880, 22 icehouses stored 30,000 tons of ice next to Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain. In Vermont, 5,000 men cut ice on Lake Champlain.

But artificial refrigeration eventually overtook the need for natural ice. The commercial ice maker, invented in 1854, allowed people around the world to make their own ice for cocktails and ice cream.

How To Make a Smash

Dissolve sugar in water in a cocktail shaker; add mint and spirits. Shake well with ice and strain through a fine strainer into a rocks or old fashioned glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish.

Images: Wenham Lake By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029494. Ice harvesting: Cutting the cross sections with a saw–ice harvesting, Conneaut Lake, Pa. Pennsylvania Conneaut Lake, 1907. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018652316/. This story about Frederic Tudor was updated in 2023.

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Nine New England Tax Resisters

Abolition, war and injustice have inspired tax resisters in New England since even before the American Revolution.

And well after the American Revolution, women and people of color took up the patriots’ slogan ‘Taxation Without Representation.’ Immigrants became tax resisters to assert their rights, and

Here, then, are nine New England tax resisters.

1 Vivien Kellems

Vivien Kellems and her brother Edward invented an endless-weave grip that routed and relieved the strain of electric cables. She won a patent for it, and In 1927, she formed Kellems Cable Grips, Inc, in Westport, Conn., to produce and sell the cable grip. The business succeeded.

Vivien Kellems

In 1948, Vivien Kellems refused to collect her employees’ withholding taxes. She said if the government wanted her to be an agent, they’d have to pay her and give her a badge.

Meet the Press interviewed her about her tax resistance in 1948. Eventually she backed down, but from 1965 to her death in 1975 she only sent in blank returns to the IRS.

2 Paul Cuffe

Paul Cuffe was a wealthy mixed race Quaker, the son of a Wampanoag Indian and a free African-American. He lived in Dartmouth, Mass., where he worked and saved and ultimately owned a fleet of ships he used to trade up and down the East Coast.

Before he accumulated his wealth, Paul Cuffe fought in the American Revolution and spent three months in a British prison. In 1780, 21-year-old Paul Cuffe refused to pay taxes to Bristol County because he didn’t have the right to vote. He, his brother and five African-American tax resisters asked the county to end such taxation without representation. In the end he got his taxes reduced.

3 John Wise

John Wise of Ipswich, Mass., had no use for Edmund Andros, the new royal governor over the newly consolidated New England colonies.

On Aug. 22, 1687, John Wise met with fellow citizens of Ipswich and decided Andros had imposed an illegal tax without consulting the General Assembly. Andros had called Town Meeting the next day to select tax commissioners. Instead, Town Meeting self-selected tax resisters. Ipswich issued a declaration against the tax.

Andros had the tax resisters arrested, jailed, tried and convicted. The tax resisters had to pay fines and court costs. But less than two years later, the people of Boston sent Andros packing back to England. They called Andros and the short-lived Dominion of New England a plot of ‘the great Scarlet Whore’ to crush Englishmen under the papist thumb.

4 Abby and Julia Smith

In June of 1869 the tax collector in Glastonbury, Conn., asked two elderly sisters to pay their road tax early, which they did. Abby and Julia Smith were then surprised when the town accidentally billed them for the tax again in October.

Cow Resting in a Meadow, by George Allen Newell

When they asked that the town correct the matter, the tax collector refused. When they tried to enter Town Meeting to raise the issue, they were turned away. Their taxes went up again. The Smiths grew convinced that Glastonbury only raised taxes on properties owned by women, and that they couldn’t delay payment because they were women.

They became convinced that modern women needed a vote, and decided to become tax resisters until they could vote. When the town seized seven cows in lieu of payment, the cows became a cause celebre in the suffragist movement.

5 Henry David Thoreau

Naturalist Henry David Thoreau ardently opposed slavery and blamed the government for it. He called the government ‘an agent of corruption and injustice.’

He believed individuals had the right to disobey the government when it forced them to do something that violated their conscience.

Henry David Thoreau

“I cannot for an instant recognize as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also,” he said.

In July 1846, Thoreau was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax. He believed (wrongly) the tax financed the Mexican War, fought to expand slavery into the Southwest. He’d stopped paying the tax in 1842, but the sheriff held off for a few years. Someone paid his tax, but the sheriff kept him overnight. When he released him, Thoreau didn’t want to go.

Three years later Thoreau published his 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience, which inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandes Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in their campaigns of nonviolent, passive disobedience to protest unjust government actions

6 Abby Kelley Foster

Before Susan B. Anthony advocated for women’s rights, Abby Kelley taught her how to do it.

Abby Kelley, also an early advocate for abolition, had tremendous organizational and speaking skills. She built a network of regional anti-slavery newspapers and raised the money to support them.

Abby Kelley Foster

People hated her for her uncompromising views and for speaking in public — something respectable women didn’t do in 1838. “She was an outcast from society,” said the minister Theodore Parker in 1855. “Other women hated her; men insulted her.”

Abby Kelley married Stephen Foster, an abolitionist who shared the platform with her in Seneca Falls. They bought a house in Worcester and called it Liberty Farm. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad and a haven for fellow reformers. They refused to pay property taxes on the farm because Abby didn’t have the right to vote, and the county seized the farm. Friends bought it back for them.

Liberty Farm is now a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

7 25 Greek Tax Resisters

Twenty-five Greek immigrants in the Maine mill city of Lewiston became tax resisters in 1907, probably as a ploy to have some influence over the police department.

The Lewiston police began demanding protection money from Greek street vendors. They also arrested Greeks for violating Prohibition and keeping their businesses open on Sunday.

The Greeks then refused to pay the $2 poll tax. One of the first Greek immigrants to arrive in Lewiston, James Matis, said only a Greek constable could collect the poll tax from the Greek people. “I know all the Greeks here and I am sure that they would pay if I told them to,” he said. Matis received the nomination for constable.

8 Dr. Benjamin Spock

In 1968, 458 writers and editors including Dr. Benjamin Spock became tax resisters when they took out full page newspaper ads refusing to pay a proposed 10 percent Vietnam War surtax. From wiki: In 1970, five Harvard and nine M.I.T. faculty members, including Nobel laureates Salvador E. Luria and George Wald, announced that they would be resisting taxes in protest of the war.

Dr. Benjamin Spock

Dr. Spock had already been arrested, and a court would soon try and convict him for urging young men to resist the draft. A higher court overturned Spock’s conviction.

The surcharge passed, but neither Spock nor the other tax resisters went to jail. In fact, only two people ever went to jail for tax resistance. Most went to court on related charges, such as failure to file or fraudulently claiming too many dependents, according to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

9 Isaac Glasko

Isaac Glasko was a successful blacksmith in Griswold, Conn., so successful he at one time employed 10 people. He built a water-powered trip-hammer forge that produced superior farm and carpentry tools.

Glasko was born in Rhode Island to parents of mixed race. Each was part African and part Indian. Because the state classified Glasko as black, he could not vote.

In 1823, Isaac Glasko and a friend asked the State of Connecticut to exempt them from taxes because they couldn’t vote. Unsurprisingly, the Legislature rejected their request. Glasko never did get to vote. He died in 1861, 15 years before an amendments to the Connecticut Constitution allowed black men to vote.

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Johnny Appleseed, The Real Reason He Wandered

Johnny Appleseed wasn’t quite a New England version of St. Francis, wandering the countryside in rags, scattering apple seeds and befriending woodland creatures.

Oh he did wear rags, he did love animals and he did bring apples to thousands of people. And he certainly roamed the newly settled frontier.

But he did it to make money selling apples for hard cider.

And Johnny Appleseed died a wealthy man.

John Chapman birthplace in Leominster, Mass.

Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Leominster, Mass., on Sept. 26, 1774. You can hardly miss him if you visit the city. His birthplace has a granite marker and a billboard, streets and schools bear his name and a wooden statue of him stands in City Hall.

He only lived in Leominster a few years, though. His mother died when he was very young, and his father moved to Longmeadow, Mass., and remarried. Along came 10 half-siblings, and Johnny and a half-brother left the crowded house around 1796.

At that time, New England farmers began to head west in great number, looking for better soil and bigger farms. Life on the frontier wasn’t easy, and often farmers only had hard cider to quench their thirst for an alcoholic beverage.

Photograph of John Chapman in the 1840s.

Johnny Appleseed saw his opportunity. He had a knack for predicting where the next wave of settlement would go, and he began to plant apple trees in anticipation of the next settlers.

He didn’t scatter seeds for orchards, but planted nurseries — in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Johnny Appleseed eventually traveled as far as Ontario, Illinois and West Virginia.

Once he planted his nurseries, he built fences around them. Then he hired someone to take care of them and returned every year or two to check on his trees. The caretaker sold seeds and saplings.

He wandered because he had to to buy up inexpensive land before the next group of customers settled the frontier.

Apples

The apple industry created the myth that Johnny Appleseed brought a healthful, delicious fruit to pioneer farmers.

Johnny Appleseed

In truth, his apples had one purpose, and it wasn’t to make pies and crumbles. Farmers could only make hard cider from them.

Johnny Appleseed’s apples didn’t come from grafted trees, but from seedlings. Henry David Thoreau once wrote that apples from seeds were “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.”

Eight years before he died, the financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his wealth. Nevertheless, Johnny Appleseed died a rich man, owning more than 1,200 acres of prime real estate.

Bit of a Loon

Parts of the Johnny Appleseed myth do have elements of truth to them, though. He did dress in rags, sometimes even in old coffee sacks with holes cut in them for his head and arms.

Stamp.

He did it because he followed the Swedenborgian religion, and believed that the more he suffered in this world the more happiness he would experience in the hereafter. According to his obituary, he ‘submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter.’

Johnny Appleseed often stopped in frontier cabins to spread ‘some fresh news from Heaven.’

According to Harper’s magazine, he once lingered to hear a longwinded preacher speak to a crowd of people from a stump he used as a lectern.

The preacher urged his listeners to give up extravagance.

“Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher asked

Exasperated, Johnny Appleseed put his bare foot on the stump and said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!”

Folk Hero

Johnny Appleseed shared his trees with Native Americans during his travels, and converted some of them to his religion. They in turn taught him how to heal with herbs and plants, and even hostile tribes left him alone.

He had some other eccentric beliefs, which at least one biographer attributes to a kick on the head from a horse. For example, he thought it cruel to ride a horse or chop down a tree.

Gravesite of John Chapman.

He also liked to give ribbons to small girls and entertain small boys by walking on hot coals.

Eventually his travels brought him a reputation as a healer and a folk saint.

Johnny Appleseed died around 1845, though the exact date of his death is disputed. He left his valuable nurseries to his sister.

Today, an annual Johnny Appleseed Festival draws an average of 10,000 people – held in the fall, of course, around the time of the apple harvest.

Read more surprising apple history along with historic apple recipes in the New England Historical Society’s 29 Historic New England Apple Recipes. Available now in paperback.

With thanks to MassMoments. Image of Johnny Appleseed gravesite, By Rochelle Karp – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21439692; Apples by By Leslie Seaton from Seattle, WA, USA – Newtown pippins, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33880381. This story was updated in 2023.

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6 Famous Franco-American Writers from New England

Let’s face it, Franco-American writers never receive their due. They tend to get pigeonholed as regional writers, and they can’t take advantage of their differentness the way African or Hispanic writers can.

New England’s Franco-American writers, though, have had a huge impact on literature and philosophy. That, at least, should be obvious from the six Franco-American writers listed here.

1. Jack Kerouac, Franco-American Beat

Jack Kerouac

Born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Mass., on March 12, 1922, he was the son of Franco-American immigrants. Kerouac’s father was a printer who lost his shop in a flood; his mother worked in a shoe factory.

French was his firs language, and he didn’t learn to speak English until he was six. He started writing his masterpiece, On The Road, in French.

He grew up a serious student and a devout Catholic. As a child he was told his family motto was “Love, Work, Suffer.” Before his death at 47 on Oct. 21, 1969, he published more than a dozen books that earned him a devoted following. Critics called him “the voice of his generation,” and On The Road became the bible of the Beat Generation.

2. Jean de Crevecoeur, American Farmer

Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur was born in 1735 in Normandy to the Count and Countess of Crevecoeur.

John Hector St. John

He migrated to New France in North America at the age of 20, serving in the French and Indian War as a surveyor.

He then moved to New York when the French lost to the British, took the name John Hector St. John and married an American woman. St. John subsequently bought a farm in New York State and wrote about life in the American colonies. His book, Letters from an American Farmer, is still in print.

He befriended Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen, who suggested the town of Dunmore, Vt., rename itself St. John in his honor. St. John suggested adding the ‘bury’ to differentiate the town from the one in New Brunswick. He died in France in 1813.

3. The Dark Themes of Robert Cormier

Robert Cormier was born Jan. 15, 1925 in a tight-knit Franco-American community known as French Hill in Leominster, Mass. He spent the rest of his life there. When growing up he looked out his classroom window and saw his house on fire. The nun made him recite a rosary before he could run home.

Cormier graduated from Fitchburg State University and worked for 30 years as a reporter for the Fitchburg Sentinel.

Robert Cormier

He also wrote 13 young adult novels and 100 short stories that made him famous. The New York Times described him as a nice, quiet family man, but he wrote novels with themes so dark that people thought them too disturbing for teenagers.

Lists of the most frequently banned books usually include Cormier’s, The Chocolate War. Novels like I Am the Cheese and We All Fall Down deal with abuse, mental illness, violence, revenge and betrayal.

4, Scandalous Grace Metalious

Grace Metalious led a short tragic life that began in 1924 on the largely Franco-American West Side of Manchester, N.H. Born Grace de Repentigny into a poor family, she married George Metalious, a school teacher in Gilmanton, N.H.

She was a lousy housewife who drank, swore, wore baggy jeans and cheated on her husband. Grace Metalious rocketed to fame with her first novel, Peyton Place.

Grace Metalious

Peyton Place described the hidden seamy side of a small New England town. The critics panned it, but the public loved it – except for Gilmanton, N.H., on which Metalious based the book.

Peyton Place became a staple of American entertainment as a movie, a sequel and a nighttime television soap opera. Fame made Grace Metalious rich and reckless. She burned through millions of dollars and then died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 39.

5. Henry David Thoreau, Franco-American Transcendentalist

Most people know Henry David Thoreau for Walden, his account of his two years, two months and two days living in a simple cabin in the woods. But his essay Civil Disobedience, with its message of nonviolent protest against an unjust government, perhaps had a bigger impact than Walden. It influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

He also wrote more than 20 volumes of poetry, journals, books and essays. His writings about nature inspired the environmental movement.

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., in 1817, to John Thoreau, the son of French Protestant immigrants, and Cynthia Dunbar, of English descent. He never married and often didn’t have a job. When he did, he taught school, surveyed or did odd jobs for Ralph Waldo Emerson.

His influence endures beyond the other members of the Transcendentalist circle that included Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing.

6. Will Durant and His Better Half

Will Durant and his wife Ariel wrote the 11-volume Story of Civilization, one of the most popular works of history and philosophy ever. He was born in North Adams, Mass., to Franco-American parents who came to America as part of the Quebec diaspora. Ariel was born in Ukraine and migrated to the United States at the age of three.

Will studied at Jesuit schools in New Jersey, where he flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. He then met his wife while teaching her at the Ferrer Modern School in New York. He quit his job to marry her when she was 15. She roller skated to their wedding at City Hall.

Will and Ariel Durant

They won the Pulitzer Prize for the 10^th volume of Story of Civilization, and President Gerald Ford awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They died within two weeks of each other in Los Angeles in 1981.

Image: Robert Cormier By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3988962.

This story about Franco-American writers was updated in 2022.

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