USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 18
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But during summer or occasionally in winter on account of bad traveling, they couldn't meet. Again the Social Circle de- clined, and by the end of 1874 faded out.
The Social Circle may have become extinct, but Choco- rua could be trusted to think up something else in its turn. Where now is the Chocorua Cornet Band? Organized in December 1896, the band had sixteen members; and it looks as if its debut was the dedication of Runnells Hall. It was reported to be well uniformed (in what attic trunk can one of those uniforms be found?) and it "discoursed good music." Sixteen cornets discoursing was a stout achievement for little Chocorua. In Runnells Hall they would have been plainly heard. The Effingham Falls Cornet Band had nineteen when it came "with ladies" to the Willow Inn in Tamworth, earlier by twenty years, but perhaps Effingham had been larger.
The Pink Granite Cone in the Lake
The early "summer people" were privileged to find the old order hardly changed, but their impact upon it was slowly to transmute it to something different by many degrees. "All one kind of people" was to be known to the older inhabitants only in nostalgia. Sumner Runnells, the Elder's only son whom he had never fully fathomed (From his diary: "Oh Lord, when will Sumner become a Christian?") but dutifully sent to the New Hampton school, was of the large persuasion of young men whom the west called away. He had been for a time in Iowa as secretary to the governor, then in England for two years, as American consul in Staffordshire, when he joined the powerful Pullman Company in Chicago. He rose to become its president, developing incidentally a national reputation as a public speaker. Every year he brought his children to see their grandmother Runnells, and eventually took the old Sumner Gilman farm by the lake as a summer
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home-a summer resident "born, not made," as he said. When it burned he built an extensive and imposing house on a higher location where his son and three notable daughters enjoyed an English country-house life on a scale not before seen in the community of their origin.
This family was not quite the first to substitute a sum- mer home for the prevalent "summer boarder" idea. Sum- mer boarders were already abounding; nearly every farm near a lake or with a sightly mountain view was "takin' 'em." In Chocorua the first inhabitant to capitalize intensively on this movement was a character always called by his full name of John Henry Nickerson. There was a house, on the sightliest spot of all overlooking the lake, that had belonged to one Blatchford. John Henry built there a house which he began permitting summer boarders to swarm over. John Henry's Clarinda he had first spied when passing with his wagon as she stood in the doorway of the school she taught over Whitton Pond way, and it is reported that seeing her was enough for John Henry. Aunt Clarinda was the soul of his establishment, retaining the affections of her boarders when John Henry's severities might have ruffled them. Her chatty remarks were often punctuated by the expression "Isn't it just conundrum !" There was a large motto in the inn's dining room, "The Lord Will Provide"; the young guests used to say it was lucky, because John Henry never would. When he added a wing to the building to accommodate the streams of visitors beginning to come, they called it the "hot ell," the rooms being "pizen hot." Still, it was John Henry who left one thousand dollars to the church, placing summer-boarder profits where they would surely win him regard in Heaven.
Like many a boarding house in a beautiful setting, this one begot buyers of property. Here in 1874 came Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Scudder for one night on a driving tour from Boston. Next morning, falling victims to the view, they drove down the road a piece and bought the Emery farmhouse. The house was one of the ancient ones put together with pegs, and
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they astonished the neighbors by having it moved uphill away from the road, "interfering with Providence." The story relates that the feat used twenty oxen. From the original Scudders the property passed to the brother Horace Scudder, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and thence, with succes- sive additions changing its character, to his daughter Sylvia now Mrs. Ingersoll Bowditch. To it belongs that "most photo- graphed view in New England" where cameras debouch from cars all summer and fall, to imprint the ever-changing riches of mountain and lakes as caught through the groups of great white birches.
Mr. Henshaw Walley was another Chocorua victim; he brought Charles P. Bowditch. They bought the old Stratton place with the purple doorknob where Mr. Walley came yearly till he died. Mr. Bowditch with wife and children spent three summers with John Henry and Clarinda. Then a murder surprisingly occurred in the neighborhood. In the red house by the water's edge lived a short-tempered man who had ordered off his place the neighborhood boys who would go swimming naked from his beach. They came and swam just the same. He threatened to shoot, they scoffed, and he did shoot and killed one of them, was tried for murder and sent to prison. Hearing that this man's farm was being sold up, Mr. Bowditch hastened up from Boston and bought it in, and thus was established the Bowditch family who have done so much in three generations in Chocorua to preserve every value undefiled.
In any preservation projects Mr. Bowditch had enthu- siastic cooperation from Mr. Runnells. The Bowditch-Run- nells State Forest along the highway is one of their joint benefactions to the region. Hearing at one time that all the timber was to be cut beside the lake, Mr. Bowditch took the next train up to buy and save it. Had he not done so the threat would have recurred many times. These two families were able to establish the unique principle that no shore owner on the lake should erect any building to be visible from
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the water, and more surprising still, that no motorboat be used on that still and lovely expanse. This has made of Chocorua, from the pink granite cone down to the deepest reflection, a prospect which gratifies not only the reasonably infatuated summer owners but thousands after thousands who travel the highway and stop to photograph or bathe.
Through these original summer families came relatives or friends, as Professor William James who acquired the Savage farm, sharing the lake view across the road. He wrote to a friend:
I may ... possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a con- venient and romantic neighborhood. New England farms are now dirt cheap - the natives going west, the Irish com- ing in and making a better living than the Yankees could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of it oak and pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of water, fair little house and large barn, close to a beautiful lake and under a mountain 3,500 feet high, four and a half hours from Boston, for 900 dollars!
Even he could hardly know how his descendants were to soak up the outdoor life and lore. William the second whose wife was youngest of the Runnells sisters still maintains the family house from which the highway was some years ago swerved away, bringing it more privacy. In The James Family by F. O. Matthiessen is a delightful photograph of the two philoso- phers William James and Josiah Royce sitting on a Chocorua stone wall "discussing the Absolute," and the published Letters of William James are full of glimpses of the family summer life.
Henry James, English by habit, made visits to his brother. "The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there ... mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian nowheres, which are the note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old . . . New England scenery." There is a now famous story of how Henry James went for a
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walk: "I had been lost," he reported to John Morley in Lon- don: "had not a peasant emerged from the wood with a bundle of faggots on his shoulder and directed me to the Post." A friend related that walking through the woods to Heron Pond, she was astonished to find Henry James sitting on the bank before her. "That's nothing," said her interlocutor, "at the James's spring I once found Helmholtz the German physi- cist." Helmholtz, we may remind ourselves, invented the ophthalmoscope with which all oculists look the patient in the eye, and through him came the genesis of the radio, per- fected by Marconi.
After William James, followed his brother-in-law William Salter, center of the remarkable Ethical Culture Society in Chicago where thousands came to hear him. He ultimately migrated to a commanding hilltop overlooking Whitton Pond and sold his first house that was next the Jameses.
The present William James had much youthful traffic with these knowledgeable, shrewd, and witty workers dubbed peasants by his uncle, who taught him their skills and left with him a fund of anecdote in the old New Hampshire tongue now almost gone. The portraits from his studio of one or two of these old friends are vivid characterizations, delicately, deeply felt.
Frank Bolles, already mentioned, Secretary of Harvard University, tall, rugged, and red-bearded, had been intensively familiar during vacations with the woods, mountains, and wildlife of this region for some years before he bought the Doe farm at the far end of the lake and built his house there. His books, At the North of Bearcamp Water and Land of the Lingering Snow were the first to celebrate the region with the authority and sensitiveness of the born naturalist. He lived what he wrote:
By the Saco, by the Bearcamp . . . Learn to tread the leaves with fox feet Like the hare to cross the snowdrifts, Learn to burrow like the woodchuck,
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Learn to listen like the partridge, Learn to wait as does the wildcat. ... (Chocorua's Tenants)
and gave the same schooling through his wife to his willing children who grew up to be accomplished botanists and orni- thologists. One became a big-game hunter with her husband in British Columbia, supplying skins to museums. Bolles found friends among the men of the vicinity, as Sumner Gilman and Nat Berry, sharp-set nature-wise men, given to noticing every sign; Bolles scoured the country with them. It is well remem- bered how enthusiastically he played baseball, making a run with the red beard jutting forward.
Not all of the first who imbibed Chocorua's summer blessings were associated with Harvard, but most were, or as in the case of Professor James K. Whittemore, with Yale. Professor Chaplin; Professor Francis James Child of English Ballads fame, the greatest living master of Anglo-Saxon, described by Van Wyck Brooks as a cross between a gnome and a red-headed cherub; William G. Farlow, professor of Cryptogamic Botany (it means obscure fructification, but no less obscure to some of us for that ) ; Professor Howard Mayna- dier a while later; and Professor Langford Warren-all of Harvard, each became supplied with a well-located summer home in sight of lake or mountain or both. Also there was Professor Minton Warren of Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology.
Professor George P. Baker, later at Yale, maker of play- wrights and theatre people through his "47 Workshop," arranged a small outdoor theatre on his place where a play was given every summer while he lived. Lighting was by auto headlights and tickets were sold by lantern. Afterward his wife for years invited Chocorua old and young each week for English morris dancing under the lead of lithe and lovely Fifine Peabody.
Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers, popular Unitarian clergyman of Cambridge and prolific producer of well-selling
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books of familiar essays, was author of the saying: "Chocorua may not be as big as the Matterhorn but the principle is the same." "After a dozen summers the attachment became a sort of topographical bigotry," he wrote. "Each valley or upland has its cult. I belong to the cult of Chocorua. To those of our way of thinking there is a defect in every landscape which has not our beloved peak in the background. It is as inevitable as Fujiyama in a Japanese picture. We feel that this is our mountain and that we have property rights in it." The Crothers family had been brought here through the Reverend Edward Cummings, Edward Everett Hale's successor at the South Church in Boston; his son the poet e. e. cummings still lives on the family farm. John Albee was another writer, well known at the time, his wife Helen likewise. Her Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens was the first in the now crowded field of women's garden books. All of these took up properties beyond the Tamworth town line toward Madison, but near enough to be Chocoruaward in association.
More or less introduced by these forerunners there fol- lowed a company representing achievement in the professions, equally devoted to simple life and ways, and now running to three generations on their places. General Thomas Sherwin early secured one of the prime locations, General Charles Loring another; Katherine Loring's mother Mrs. Walter Hines Page built a charming house near by after the war ambassa- dor's death. The Sherwin place passed to Frederick S. Bigelow, editor of the Saturday Evening Post. Two metropolitan clergymen and close friends built on a hilltop they named The Heavenly Hill, the Reverend Percy Stickney Grant and the Reverend Joseph Hutchinson. The Danish consul in Boston, E. C. Hammer, purchased another notable site for a house.
Dr. James R. Chadwick's house was high in spruce woods; on his land the sculptor Truman H. Bartlett built a rough cottage studio, "complete with billiard table and un- limited beer," which was "gathering-place and asylum of a talented circle, including Edwin Arlington Robinson, William
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Vaughn Moody, Daniel Gregory Mason," as described by Ferris Greenslet, then editing the Atlantic Monthly, who spent his honeymoon there. The host, affectionately called a magni- ficent old goat, was father of the more famous Paul Bartlett at whose statue of Lafayette placed in front of the Louvre General Pershing made his memorable exclamation, "Lafa- yette, we are here!"
Other professional men of distinction joined the colony : C. Howard Walker, Boston architect of several of the summer residences, Admiral Elliot Snow, Judge Townsend Scudder and Henry Scott, lawyers, and Thaddeus Rich, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Symphony. Some became owners through marriage, Dr. Franklin Balch whose progeny still claim Choco- rua as theirs, and LeGrand Cannon Jr., author of the historical novel Look to the Mountain which he laid in this spot. "They all formed a loosely knit yet constant society," wrote one who frequented it. If a roster were to cover the guests these families have known, or those who have taken their houses for a season or two, or even guests at nearby inns, modesty would be done for. What else but fame attaches to Hayford's in its early days because of Josh Billings, the humorist whose name was Henry W. Shaw? Even President Conant's name in the Harvard galaxy shed no greater lustre. It is even claimed that Lord Bryce wrote part of The American Commonwealth under Chocorua's inspiration.
Tenants for one summer in Mr. Salter's house were the musicians Kneisel and Schroeder from the Boston Symphony. They spent all day and every day in a boat on the lake fishing. The neighbors held that they fished in the wrong places, but at the end of the summer heard that they had caught over sixty bass. Some believe that those sixty were the only bass the lake ever contained; some insist the story is quite credit- able. When the Salter house had become Mrs. Buckminster's, the Kermit Roosevelt family occupied it for a season or two. Beloved tenants also year after year in Mrs. Stone's house on The Heavenly Hill were the educator Dr. Simon Flexner and
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his interesting family. He was then Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research at Princeton.
One famous house-guest only may be introduced here, because among his talents was that of the pencil. He could draw a horse with one hand while drawing a cart with the other, thereby enshrining himself forever in the hearts of the Bolles children for whom he displayed this gift year after year. This was Professor Edward Sylvester Morse, universal scientist who had been decorated by the Emperor of Japan and whose collection of Japanese art is in the Boston Art Museum. He wrote his report on the canals of Mars from here. When he gave a lecture on Evolution for the benefit of the Chocorua Library, he stood on a platform over which was the motto "Behold the Lamb of God," perhaps not too much to express his popularity. Said John Henry Nickerson afterward, "Pro- fessor Morse is a good man, and he may say we're descended from monkeys and such, but tain't so." Mr. Nickerson evi- dently knew. Mr. Walker remembered a winter morning, thirty below zero outside, during which he listened before a roaring fire to Professor Percival Lowell the astronomer ex- pounding to Morse the unknown quantity x as an actual entity, Morse not accepting the thesis. Other fires that have witnessed other professional controversies could make a book of remi- niscence by themselves.
The professors were received philosophically by the origi- nal owners of their purchases. Said an old man pleasantly, holding out his hand to a newcomer, "The woods is full of professors now. One more makes no difference." "These big educations are nice, I think," conceded a charming little old lady, "but sometimes"-she was thinking of instances- "they don't have much common sense." "There was a pro- fessor bought a farm," said another, "and he was going to raise cracked corn. So he planted some!" Still another, "There was a city man was going to fix his fence. It went over a big rock, and there he was, trying to nail a board to the rock."
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Almost anything can be laid at the door of the hapless city man.
The families mentioned, and later additions down to date, both summer and year-round, have in common the eternal peak of their affections, each household sure that the view is best from its own particular angle, the subject good for discussion at any time. The Chocorua Mountain Club started by Stuart Chase the economist has cleared trails faithfully for very many years from its small hut on the lakeshore as base.
The Chocorua Library began under the new State enact- ment which enabled towns to institute free public libraries. This was a quite different origin from that of the Tamworth Library in 1796 founded on the early Social Library formula, with all its strictly classic works probed by pioneers who them- selves paid for the exclusive use of the books. In Chocorua subscriptions were collected by Frank Bolles driving from house to house with horse and buggy. By the aid of both local and summer people the library was able to start with five hundred books. As it was endowed, books were free to taxpayers, and have been perhaps one of the welding agencies between city and country dwellers. A thousand volumes were read in the year 1891.
John Henry Nickerson was the first chairman and zealous up to his death for the library. With despondent moustache and amputated finger-ends (mark of the professional sawyer ), seated with his Clarinda in a much enlarged photograph, he gazes into the camera from the wall of the library today with all the solemnity and lurking humor of his kind. No more appropriate founders could be thus beatified. The village has always furnished the librarian and treasurer, Caroline Marston filling this double bill for thirty-six years beginning at fifteen dollars a year, Lucy Weeks thereafter, Thelma Roberts, and then Hadley Mowrer, latest to take over.
When Runnells Hall was built in 1897 to memorialize Elder Runnells, a room was set off to house the library, its
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With the aid of "Aunt Clarinda" John Henry's Chocorua Inn be- came a Mecca for summer boarders from 1865. He was first to turn to account the annual invasion.
TAMWORTH CONGREGATIONAL . CHURCH and BARNSTORMERS THEATRE
WONALANCET UNION CHAPEL
OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HELP (R.C.)
CHOCORUA COMMUNITY CHURCH
Chocorua
five hundred books by then doubled or trebled. The oratory of the occasion pledged that "in this house no act shall ever be tolerated which would be offensive to Elder Runnells if he were here," a provision that may be a bit hard to maintain as to library books, as years have rolled on and American publishing has dropped its Puritanism. A certain modernity entered the library room the following year when it was voted to sell the wood stove and purchase an oil stove, the librarian to use her "discression." On the fiftieth anniversary there were five thousand books, and the problem of space reared its head, never yet solved. As with anything where the people have given of themselves and their money, the Chocorua Li- brary has been personal to the community throughout its life in a sense that differs from institutions otherwise organized.
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Wonalancet _From Birch Intervale to Wonalancet
WONALANCET, like Chocorua village, was not born with its present name. When Kate Sleeper Walden became the first postmaster of Birch Intervale in 1893 the Post Office Department requested the name be changed to avoid confu- sion with the summer resort Intervale farther up the railroad. Mount Wonalancet was a round domestic hump on the near side of the Sandwich Range which had the air of belonging exclusively to the little community below. It had been called by Lucy Larcom "the bright cone of perfect emerald" and named by her after the benevolent chieftain, son of Passa- conaway, and his name was transferred to the hamlet as well.
Tamworth village has its Parson Hidden, South Tam- worth its Larkin Mason, Chocorua village its Elder Runnells. Wonalancet has likewise a central figure in its story whose hand almost fashioned its very fabric. A mere hard-working woman would not ordinarily have had so profound an effect on her surroundings, but it must be remembered of Kate Sleeper that since Bradbury Jewell she was practically the first outsider of either sex when she settled in this pocket of the hills in 1890, as well as the first inhabitant with a talent for organizing, and further, that she was a woman of excep- tional charm and originality no matter in what society she might be placed. Her grandfather had been editor of the Boston Transcript, and young as she was, she had worked as a Boston reporter. Her successes were the more impressive be- cause of her disarming blond frailness which seemed to belie forcefulness completely. But she had a titan courage; she
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met head-on her multitudinous problems whether personal or mechanical, asking neither quarter nor sympathy. With all this when over eighty she once confessed that she had always been afraid; every time she had to walk down the road after dark, she was in terror of "the cut-throats that I saw lurking behind every bush." Yet she seconded her man in his will to see the far places of the earth, and carried on without him for periods of years. When in 1890, by tradition eighteen years old but apparently nearer twenty-five, she took the notion to stay and live in this back country where she had come to get well, she rose out of her hammock in Lucy Blake's orchard near Tamworth, to look at farms and buy one. Arthur Walden, then a precocious youth a few years younger, whose father's second wife was Miss Sleeper's relative Grace Gordon, drove her about on the search, contributing his sage advice. The Reverend Treadwell Walden, his father, rector of St. Paul's Cathedral on Tremont Street, Boston, was already acquainted with the region and soon had his summer home here.
The Reverend Treadwell was a severe self-centered clergyman of the old school. He had lived three years in England and preached at Westminster Abbey and other famous churches, and was much conditioned by the fact. He was born in the town of Walden, New York, which his father had founded. They were of direct descent from Israel Walden of Portsmouth who brought the name from England before 1680. Thus Arthur Treadwell Walden was of the eighth generation since the titled forebears were left behind.
Son never resembled father less. The boy Arthur had been raised in Minnesota where a married sister lived. He was placed in the Shattuck Military Academy there, and loved to recall his vacations spent as a free-lance boy hobo through- out the west, adventure then as always being the key to his existence. His brother Lionel, of a different type altogether, had betaken himself to Paris, where he became a distinguished painter. Up to 1908, he and St. Gaudens were the only Ameri-
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can artists to have received the Ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
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