Late Autumn Getaway: Hildene in Manchester, Vermont

Hildene, photograph by William H. Johnson

Abraham Lincoln never set foot in Vermont, and yet in the picturesque town of Manchester, you can find an impressive collection of Lincoln family memorabilia at Hildene, the estate of the president’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln.

Hildene, one of the homes featured in our newly released book, New England’s Historic Homes & Gardens by Kim Knox Beckius, is a wonderful place to visit any time of year, with hayrides in the summer, snowshoeing in the winter, and tours of the fascinating historic house offered year-round.

In 1902, desiring a country estate, Robert Todd Lincoln purchased 500 acres in Manchester, having vacationed with his mother and brothers at the Equinox Hotel in his youth. Three years later, the 24-room Georgian Revival mansion was complete. Though Hildene was a summer home for Robert, his wife, and their eldest daughter, Mamie, following their deaths, it became a full-time residence for granddaughter Peggy. Peggy and her brother, Bud, were the last of the Lincoln line, and currently the house and its 412 acres of garden and farmland are maintained by the Friends of Hildene.

The house shows the personal touches of the multiple generations of the Lincoln family who inhabited the house for seven decades. Guests to the house can visit Robert’s personal observatory; walk through Mary’s formal garden, planted in 1907 and still featuring many original plantings; and see the Pullman Sunbeam luxury train car, made while Robert was president of the company and installed at Hildene this past summer. Take a look at the presidential memorabilia displayed around Robert’s bedroom, including one of only three remaining stovepipe hats worn by President Lincoln.

As you walk through the entrance hall of the house, take note of the player pipe-organ, a gift from Robert to his wife, Mary. The organ still plays tunes from the 242 original music rolls, which were digitized when the organ was restored in 1980 after forty years of silence. If you visit in the month of December, the pipe organ will be playing carols, as the house is decorated for Christmas in Victorian style, as it might have been when Robert and Mary stayed there for the holidays.

If you go…

 

Hildene
1005 Hildene Rd

Manchester, VT 05254
802.362.1788 

Drive time from Boston: 3 ½ hours
Drive time from Hartford: 2 ½ hours
Drive time from Albany, 1 ½ hours

 

Interested in learning more about Hildene and the Lincolns? Pick up a copy of New England’s Historic Homes & Gardens at one of these recommended bookshops in the area:

Northshire Books, Manchester VT
Misty Valley Books, Chester VT
Bennington Bookshop, Bennington VT

Places to Eat:

Spiral Press Cafe: Grab a book and relax while refueling at this cafe inside Northshire Books.
Christos Pizza: Pick up a slice in Manchester Center.
Perfect Wife: Cozy up to the bar at the Tavern or relax with a nice glass of wine at this Manchester stand-by.
Chantecleer: Looking for a white tablecloth experience in the Green Mountains? Head to this destination dining spot in East Dorset, Vermont.

OR, make a weekend out of it and stay in the famed Equinox Hotel, where you can experience fine dining and hospitality—and where you can take Land Rover off-roading driving lessons or experience the unique British School of Falconry in the Hildene Meadows while you’re there! The Equinox Hotel has a fascinating history in its own right: read here for more details.

A HUGE thank you to Stan Hynds from Northshire Books for these great suggestions!

This post is part of a larger series celebrating the sites included in our latest title, New England’s Historic Homes & Gardens, by Kim Knox Beckius with photography by William H. Johnson. See last week’s post on the William Cullen Bryant Homestead for more fun fall getaway ideas!

Late Autumn Getaway: The William Cullen Bryant Homestead

During late autumn the New England landscape is imbued with poetry; the crunch of decaying leaves underfoot and crisp air and blue skies that mask the howl of winter on the horizon. Despite, or perhaps because of the shortened days, the urge to be outside—for just a wee bit longer—is as strong as ever.

William Cullen Bryant Homestead, photograph by William H. Johnson

Featured in our latest title, New England’s Historic Homes & Gardens, the William Cullen Bryant Homestead makes for a wonderful late autumn getaway that captures and celebrates this essential poetry of the season, which Bryant himself called “the year’s last, loveliest smile.”

Born 217 years ago this week, on November 3, 1794, William Cullen Bryant ascended to the literary world with the publication of his first major poem at age thirteen. Like all of the properties profiled in Kim Knox Beckius’ new book, the William Cullen Bryant Homestead offers a glimpse into what this iconic American’s home life was like. In this case, it’s evident that the pastoral landscape of Bryant’s youth was a great influence on the mind of one of America’s foremost 19th-century poets. So much so that in 1865, after a career spent in New York City as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of  the New York Evening Post, Bryant purchased his former boyhood home (sold out of the Bryant family 30 years prior) and used it as a summer retreat from late July through early September for the duration of his life.

While tours of the home, (deeded to the non-profit Trustees of Reservations in 1927 by Bryant’s granddaughter), are only offered Saturdays, Sundays, and Monday holidays from the last weekend in June through Columbus Day, a trip to the homestead’s 195 acres still offers a great fall outing–and spectacular winter hiking and snowshoeing.

Open daily year-round, the photogenic grounds afford visitors a chance to explore the two-hundred-year-old sugar maple grove described in Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, or to meander along a trail through an old-growth forest along the “oozy banks” immortalized by William Cullen Bryant in The Rivulet.

The lush hills and sparkling streams that were a backdrop for Bryant’s youthful wanderings also seem to have helped to keep Bryant young in his later years. Beckius quotes Mary Dawes Warner, daughter of a caretaker, who recalled that Bryant “never opened a gate. He would walk up to it, put his hand on it, and vault over. I have seen him at eighty years of age go over a four foot gate.”

 

If you go…

207 Bryant Road


Cummington, MA 01026


413.634.2244 

 

Drive time from Boston 2 1/2 hours

Drive time from Hartford 1 1/4 hours 

 

Interested in learning more about William Cullen Bryant, the Pioneer Valley, or want to pick up a copy of New England’s Homes & Gardens? Please stop by these recommended bookshops in the area:

Broadside Books, Northampton

Amherst Books, Amherst

Heritage Books, Southampton

Odyssey Books, South Hadley

Booklink Bookseller, Northampton

 

Places to eat: 

Elmer’s Store, Ashfield

Bread Euphoria, Haydenville

Pages Coffee Bar, Conway

Lady Killigrew Cafe at the Montague Bookmill, Montague

 

P.S. If you love the looks of the William Cullen Bryant Homestead from what you see here, be sure to visit our earlier post for a (free) digital desktop calendar featuring a vibrant fall landscape image and a November calendar.

The 1755 Cape Ann Earthquake

Woodcut engraving of Boston after the Cape Ann Earthquake, courtesy of the National Information Service of Earthquake Engineering

The ground moved today here in New England. Many of us in the Northeast have little to no experience with earthquakes – except for what we hear on the news or what we see in the movies- so it has certainly sparked the interest of the news media and has become the buzz around town.

Not knowing a great deal about earthquakes in this part of the world, I decided to dig a bit deeper.  I learned today that about 30-40 earthquakes strike New England each year, but only a few of those can be felt by people on the ground. Once every 50-90 years, the region is struck by a moderate quake (around a 5.0), much like the one that hit Virginia today (more here).  But in 1755, a much larger earthquake hit coastal New England, causing a great deal of damage.

The historic quake, one of the largest ever recorded in New England, struck the region at about 4:30 in the morning on November 18. Lasting for more than a minute, damage was reported from Portland, Maine to the South Shore of Boston, while it was felt as far north as Halifax, Nova Scotia and South Carolina to the south. Boston, in particular, suffered a great deal of damage, where as many as 1500 chimneys fell down and the gable ends of about 15 brick buildings shattered. Some church steeples tilted and a great deal of debris fell to the streets, making many impassable. With the population greatly frightened by the event, local ministers conducted prayer services and government officials proclaimed fast days, fearing that they had just experienced the wrath of God. (Read more about the history of the Cape Ann Earthquake here.)

The epicenter of the Cape Ann earthquake was actually about 25 miles east of Rockport in the Atlantic Ocean, a spot that has seen a great deal of seismic activity over time.  Interestingly (and scarily) enough, if the 1755 Cape Ann Earthquake were to happen today, the quake would result in billions of dollars in damage and the potential loss of hundreds of lives. The construction of docks, wharves, and other significant land-making projects has made the city fragile in many ways, due to the pressures put onto the local water table.

Hold on tight!

Olmsted, Grundel, and the Remaining Back Bay Fens

By now, anyone who actually cares about Boston’s 19th-century park design has already read Justin Martin’s article “A Body of Water so Foul” about Frederick Law Olmsted and the Back Bay Fens. For those of you who don’t care, or can no longer read articles longer than 140 characters due to a nervous Twitter habit, here’s the 139-character summary: thanks to poor drainage due to filling in salt marshes, the Back Bay smelled very bad by 1878. Frederick Law Olmsted cleaned it up. Yippee!

Martin provides a reasonable summary of the state of the Back Bay in Olmsted’s time, and Olmsted’s radical idea to create a new, better salt marsh on the site; the city of Boston had proposed a “large rectangular storage basin” for the Back Bay. Unfortunately, Martin elides a few key details about the Back Bay Fens more recent history and especially about poor maligned Hermann Grundel, the man who won the competition to design the Fens, only to see his hopes dashed, his hard work ignored! Ignored! only to see Mozart—I mean, Frederick Law Olmsted—take on the project and go on to achieve landscape design glory.

Martin writes:

“To fix up this malodorous mess, the Boston park commission held a contest in 1878, soliciting proposals from the public. There were 23 entries. The less-than-impressive winning submission came from a florist, who suggested simply superimposing an ornamental garden onto the swampland. American Architect and Building News described the design as “childish.”

That “florist” was Hermann Grundel, according to Cynthia Zaitzevsky’s book. If he was a florist, he must have been arranging flowers for giants; in 1878, he designed landscape at Somerville’s 16-acre Saxton A. Foss Park. That park, “situated much below the drainage level of the locality and rapidly becoming prejudicial to the public health, ‘was made to rejoice and blossom as the rose,'” according to the Historical address delivered by Ex-Mayor W.H. Furber, in the High school building, Somerville, July 4, 1876. Since Furber was speaking in the pre-Twitter era, he went on for quite some time; you can read pages more here.

In short, Hermann Grundel, who had already designed a successful 16-acre park on a local site with drainage problems, won a Boston Back Bay park competition that was judged by a panel which consulted… Frederick Law Olmsted. It was Olmsted who convinced the judges to abandon the design due to lack of planning for flooding and to hire him to design the Fens instead. It’s fortunate that it happened, but frankly, the process seems, shall we say, questionable.

When Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux won the competition to design New York City’s Central Park, he had never designed or planted a park. By comparison, Grundel was a seasoned professional who had also been an active member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society since at least 1854. That fact doesn’t necessarily improve Grundel’s design. (I cannot locate Grundel’s plan on the web this fine morning).  Still, we shouldn’t dismiss this “florist” simply because he lost out to a genius. Most of us would.

Martin is also a bit coy about the changes the Back Bay Fens have undergone since 1900. He writes, “The Fens has changed greatly since Olmsted’s day…In some places, those sinuous curves are no longer even visible.” They’re not visible because the city of Boston dumped thousands of tons of dirt on them. Below is a brief pictorial history of the Back Bay Fens.

I can’t post it here, but if you want to get an idea of just how little land Boston had to work with in the Fens, take a look at this 1852 map at the Norman B. Leventhal center at the Boston Public Library. No, the map hasn’t been erased; half of Boston is missing, especially the chunk northwest of Tremont Street.

Now take a look at the Back Bay Fens ca. 1885…

and  today, care of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy.

According to Nancy Seasholes‘s Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land, the city of Boston began filling in the Fens starting in 1904, beginning at the Fens Bridge end of the park (to the south/left in these maps). Some of that fill came from coal ashes, some of it from excavating what is now the MBTA’s Green Line under Boylston Street. As Seasholes writes, “The landmaking moved the waterway from the west to the east side of the park and created the land that is now Roberto Clemente Field.” (emphasis mine) A northern portion of what is now the Victory Gardens was filled in 1910-11 with dirt from the excavation of the Red Line under Park Street.

I don’t regret these changes, any more than I rue the fact that Hermann Grundel’s brilliant floral design was shoved aside for Olmsted’s vision. The Victory Garden is a vital community, and I can’t begrudge the local kids a place to play. I just want to make sure we remember who (and what) got lost at the Fens, and why. The straightest channel isn’t always the best path for water, and the shortest story isn’t always completely true. And anyone can grow up to design a park…even a florist.

May 14, 2011: Sports Walk with Christopher Klein

No American city is as sports-obsessed as Boston. It’s a fact.

On May 14th, join Christopher Klein and the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School Adult Education to learn about the evolution of sports in Boston (its love of sports was hardly preordained).

The tour will cover landmarks in downtown Boston connected to the city’s rich sporting history: learn fun facts like those about a Founding Father who was also a swimming phenom, discover the birthplaces of national sports like football and baseball, explore old haunts of Boston legends such as John L. Sullivan and Francis Ouimet, and stand in awe at honorary statues of city greats like Red Auerbach and Larry Bird. Join Chris on this adventure through Boston’s sport history–and get ready to have your die-hard sports knowledge put to the test!

The tour will meet in front of the Old South Meeting House at 5pm and ends at Faneuil Hall at 7pm. Families are welcome and the tour will meet rain or shine. Be sure to wear comfortable shoes!

For more information (and to register):

Visit Lincoln-Sudbury Adult Education or call 978-443-9961, 781-259-9527

or visit Christopher Klein’s personal website.