Late breaking news

Things happen at the last minute in Radio and TV Land.  I just learned that my January interview with New Hampshire Public Radio is scheduled to air tonight, probably on the local segment of All Things Considered at 6:30.  But it’s already up online, accompanied by a nice album of my drawings.  It should be available there forever, so there’s no need to tune to 89.1 on your radio dial—if your radio still has a dial.  Here’s a link.

Relatives and friends will spot a few minor factual errors.  We never lived in California, and my husband never ran a store in Alton.  That was his aunt and uncle’s store in Alton Bay (I drew that, of course), though he did run the soda fountain one day when they were attending their daughter’s graduation in Boston and his family pitched in to keep the store running.  Fox watching the chicken coop it was.

New Hampshire and Massachusetts

 

These pansies are so ready to get out of their plastic market packs and start spreading their roots in the ground.  The bright sunshine creates dramatic shadows around the solid black pots.

Pansy is an anglicized version of the French word pensée, meaning thought.  Pansies make me think of my mother’s mother and her garden.

I have been experimenting with using soft charcoal sticks to make rich blacks.  Then I combine this with translucent watercolors for a contrast. Just a little shop talk.

The city of Boston, Massachusetts fills the skyline in the distance.  Drawn while on Lovells Island in the harbor, the composition details wild ferns and berries in the foreground. Yes, this is a reposting from a few years ago, as we are all thinking of Boston these days.

The thirty four islands in the harbor comprise a national park.  Scheduled boat shuttle services are provided to some of them.  For other islands, you need to arrive in your own boat.

 

The tower of the Hampstead, NH Town Offices is highly ornamented with wooden sculptural details.   The pink cherry blossoms on the tree. and that yellowish green of the brand new leaves spell out spring! 

 The weathervane is modeled after an old fashioned feather pen. 

 

The brick and slate tower of the Plaistow, NH town hall rises from the middle of Pollard Square. Another intriguing weathervane spins atop the peak. 

A little online research for the name Plaistow proved worthwhile.  This town is the only Plaistow in the U.S., but the name is used at least five times in the U.K.  Plaistow, a northeast part of London, suffered severe bomb damage during WWII.

 Last week we drove north to Plymouth, NH to visit the new Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University. The paintings on the walls of the museum enchanted us.

A secondary reason to visit the campus was to discover yet another home of the poet Robert Frost.  The poet and his wife Elinor, also a poet, lived here for a year with their four small children, 1911–1912. A year of teaching allowed the family to save some money.

They then set sail for England, with Frost’s goal of becoming a full time writer.  After three years living west of London, they returned to America.  During those short pivotal years, Frost met other influential poets, as well as found a publisher for his first two poetry books.

The lines and colors of my drawing are soft and floating as an aid to remembering two poetic spirits who lived and breathed here.

It must be disorienting for a British citizen to travel around New England.  Many of the place names sound very familiar.  But the places themselves differ so much.  Plymouth is a large port city on the Channel.  Here in New Hampshire, Plymouth charms as a small, hilly college town in the White Mountains range.

Springfield, NH shares a border with our town.  With a small population of under 1,300 it nonetheless boasts this fine old meeting house (1797), recently restored. The wooden buildings stand tall with their strong granite foundations.

We once enjoyed a talk on local flora and fauna, held at the meetinghouse. On the way home, at dusk, we spied a fine looking moose giving us the once over from a nearby field.  Its eyes glowed in the dark from our head lights.

On the right sits the Springfield Historical Society in the former Center School. After a more modern school was constructed, it became the town library.  Now a new library is attached to the town hall.  All these social units are within sight of each other.

A local policeman approached me while I stood on this spot drawing. I had to explain myself.  I do look suspicious. 

The Mount Caesar Union Library serves the community in Swanzey, NH.  Some of the early  European settlers came from Swansea, Wales. The  imposing structure, with its white wooden clapboards, green shutters, and columns, is found on the map in southwestern New Hampshire near Keene.

Mount Caesar,  a local mountain of 962 feet elevation, takes its name from the freed slave Freeman Caesar.

In Windham, NH, on a slight rise sit these two contrasting buildings.  The clapboarded building houses the town hall, the town offices, the grange, and a meeting place of the American Legion, a veterans group.  The lovely stone edifice, once the Nesmith Free Library,  is now a museum. 

 

Lawrence, Massachusetts was well known for its textile mills, built both in brick and in stone.The rubblestone tower in the center (125 ft) vented the smoke from the Lawrence Machine Shop in the background.  Locomotives were manufactured there.

  Not a lot is still manufactured in Lawrence, but we were told one mill still exists. Currently a shipping business occupies some of this mammoth building.

My husband’s grandparents immigrated to the Lawrence area from England and Scotland in the early 1900s, drawn by the opportunities provided by the booming textile industry.  One grandfather worked in a woolen mill, now occupied by condominiums and small businesses; the other was employed in a foundry that manufactured machinery for the mills.  We saw a lot of photographs, drawings, and some actual machines in museums here and in nearby Lowell.

Lawrence, Lowell, and a number of other industrial cities in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire got their power from dams on the Merrimack River.  The lake at the bottom of our hill is one of the many sources that ultimately feed that river, further adding to our interest in the industrial history of the area.

On the way back home from a little shopping trip, I pulled over and parked my car on Main Street in Tilton, NH.  This town, in the middle of the state,  is full of visual oddities begging to be captured with pencil and paper.

 The brick corner building spoke to me.  A tour de force of masonry details, arched wooden window trim, cast iron, and decorative urns, the drawing challenge kept me going despite  sandy gusts of wind whipping up the street.  A tangle of telephone poles and wires are reflected in the windows, which really did look purple.

And to continue with the theme of Tilton’s oddities, I’m including a reposting of this drawing I did two years ago.

These statues along the Main Street were donated to the town by Charles Tilton.  On the far left, “Miss Tilton, 1882”, all in marble. Her hand rests on a horse’s head.  Draped in linen-like folds, she wears a crown.

 In the center,  a bronze Squantum Chief scans the horizon.  Beautifully designed and cast, he  wears buckskins and carries a bow and arrows. This sculpture was moved to the side of the main street from its original location in the center.

 On the right, in carved marble stone, stands the Indian Queen. She’s on a pedestal in the middle of the street, with the traffic circling around her.  With a lion’s head draped over her shoulder, and a giant lizard at her feet, she amazes me. Not to mention,  her  strange headdress, an odd skirt, and no shirt at all.

Our little felt Paddington bear sits in our window seat enjoying the view and the sunshine.  Hand sewn by my mother, he is a world traveller. His story tells that he comes from Peru, but with us he’s visited the British Isles and Europe.  Our younger daughter carried him everywhere for a few years.

His coat has shrunk in the wash and his boots have gone missing in some unknown country.  But Paddy still has a smile and a mischievous glint in his eyes.

I remember the day, in a castle in Germany, that our four year old daughter held him up high so that he could take in the wonderful view out of the window. The view that she was too short to see for herself.

New Hampshire

The rough sawn wooden building in Newbury, New Hampshire has the words Sweet Maples Sugar House over the door. It was Maple Weekend in NH and nearby states.  The season for boiling down the collected maple sap doesn’t last long, about 6 weeks.  It coincides with mud season...see the footprints in the soft and oozy dirt?

The sign along the road calls it Ben’s Sugar Shack.  And Ben was there to greet us at the door.  He welcomed us in with Maple Sugar Cotton Candy.  (Other places call it Candy Floss.)  And then there were the other maple goodies to sample and buy...like cakes and fudge and even cheesecake. Yum.

Notice the three tubes on the left coming down off the hill and straight into the tanks inside.  That is the sap from the sugar bush (forests of maple trees) up the hill and flowing sweetly downward  Tree sap is naturally 2% to 4% sugar, and it is boiled down to 67% sugar to become syrup. Forty gallons of sap becomes one gallon of syrup. 

A gigantic stainless steel vat sits just inside the door, boiling down the sap into syrup.  Some of the equipment that controls the process is off to the left.  This is made in Canada by the Lapierre Equipment Company.  This is my family name, and I am proud to see this name there. My branch of the family came down from Quebec to New Hampshire to work in the quarries at about 1900.

Here we have the artist’s point of view, literally.  My morning coffee, my morning cross word puzzle, and our view of the ridge. We are looking northeast, but in the afternoons we watch the sun shining on this treed hillside.  Fabulous colors and moving shapes entertain us.  We really miss the ridge when the leaves reappear in the spring, blocking the view.

Groton, NH, population under 600, is a hilly, rural place.  When a signpost beside this house came into view, we stopped the car to read and investigate.  This simple, yellow painted, wooden house is one of the many homes in New England of writer and religious leader Mary Baker Eddy. 

  Walking around the area, I found the rusty remains of an old mill.  I didn’t find any poison ivy, but I was on the lookout for it. To avoid it, of course.

 

Ossipee is one of the twelve Algonquin Indian Tribes. Some of the towns in NH are named for the Native Americans who lived in these parts. 

Several villages make up the town, and I was attracted to the arrangement of these colorful wooden houses in Center Ossipee.  They were all built probably around 1880, when the railroad came to town. The railroad brought summer visitors to the lakes and mountains. Tourism is still a big industry.

The Ossipee Mountains are a nearby mountain range, part of a string of ring dikes.  These are the circular remains of long gone volcanoes.  If you look on a topographical map you can see them.  They look like round, popped bubbles.

Orange, NH is a quiet rural place.  The town, population under 350, used to be called Cardigan after George Brudenell, fourth Earl of Cardigan. Cardigan State Park and Mount Cardigan occupy much of the town’s land.

 If the Earl of Sandwich invented sandwiches, did the Earl of Cardigan create the first front-buttoning sweater?  (Or jumper if you are British.) It is still formally referred to as a cardigan here in the US.

  The  purity and simplicity of the building’s design pleases me.  I had to move around a bit as a caretaker was mowing the grass. You can see a tiny strip that he missed. 

Most towns in NH would call this sort of building a town hall, rather than a town house.  Today they both usually mean town offices.  Most of them probably did start out as meeting halls, the venue for the annual Town Meeting which is a form of local governance common here in New England.  Some towns are so small that the population still fits there, while others have moved on to larger spaces.

The town of Piermont is on, or rather next to, the Connecticut River, the border with Vermont. Town historians state that the name Piermont comes from the Italian word for foothill...piemonte.

 The famed Piermont Round Barn is right next to Route 25, the main road through town.  My driver did a quick U-turn so I could pull out paper and pencil. We both knew that this building needed to be drawn.  And a satisfying quick sketch is the result.

 It is actually octagonal as you can see. Round and octagonal barns were considered to be a more efficient use of the farmer’s time. Less walking between cows. But the new mechanization improvements soon eliminated this efficiency and the design popularity faded.

 

 This drawing of Chesterfield has been resting in my unexhibited collection of NH towns for two years. It is well overdue to put it here on the blog.  I recall Chesterfield as a stone village, or as the only stone village of New Hampshire. The stone, a warm yellow-grey granite, was quarried locally. The building above is the post office. A friendly and informative woman in the library (beautiful stone) told me that the stone buildings replaced wooden ones that had burned.

Vermont, meaning green mountains, usually looks blue to me. These mountains show themselves in the far distance.

South Hampton, NH on the state border with Massachusetts, has a land area of 8 square miles and under a thousand inhabitants. And it is near some much more populated towns. A quiet corner it seems to be. 

 On the left stands the clapboarded town hall and grange. The town library attaches to the side on the right, tucked away out of vision.  The barn on the far right is larger than usual and more ornate than was customary for the time.  Fancy windows, and fancy cupola on the roof.  A man near the barn was watching me very carefully.  I focus so intently on drawing that I usually forget to toss off a friendly wave. 

 The Thompson Hall tower looks over the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham. This Romanesque Revival style building, nicknamed T-Hall, is across the street from the dormitory where I lived during my time at UNH.  For three years, the clock chimes counted out the hours of my days. (My fourth year I lived in France and had to get to class on time without the bells of T-Hall.) 

I am an alumna of the class of 1968, with a degree in Fine Art and French. My father graduated from UNH too; I just don’t remember which year.  The Second World War closed many departments of the university for several years during the 1940s.  The campus was a very vibrant and crowded place after the war, when the professors returned and many students were starting their studies. Or picking up where they had left off years earlier.

The University now has 15,000 students, which is twice as many as during my era.  But the campus looks pretty much the same to me because the new buildings are all along the edges, with Main Street heading right down the middle. 

 The tower doesn’t actually lean. On this extremely warm day, workmen were ripping up the concrete sidewalk with jackhammers right in front of me as I drew. My concentration may have been compromised.

My friend Bev used to play the carillon bells way up in the tower.  One time she invited me to go up  with her. As I recall, she played a piano type keyboard, and the whole campus was treated to her pop tune selections.

 Sandwich, NH is a town of 84 square miles and a population of under 1400. That is a lot of trees per person.  Center Sandwich is one of the three villages in town.

Among  a small cluster of white clapboarded houses sits the unusual Samuel H. Wentworth Library.  An edifice of a rich selection of materials: red tile roof, grey field stone walls, stained glass windows, and lots of shields and heraldry. Its presentation is very old world, but with a modern wing off to the back.  Lovely, old libraries with modern additions, like this one, are quite common here in New Hampshire.

The League of New Hampshire Craftsmen began in Sandwich in 1920, and was called at that time Sandwich Home Industries.  

 

Is this an unusual looking building, or what?  It is the North Conway, NH railroad station, built in 1874. I drew myself sketching in the foreground, really just to add some compositional balance. The White Mountains, blue in the summer, peek behind it.

This station would have been the destination for families from Boston, New York, and other big East Coast cities, arriving to spend the summer (‘to summer’) at one of the many Grand Hotels of the era.  So it too was grand.  There was plenty of room for the hotels’ carriages to pull up under the awning in front for the final leg of the journey.

Today the Conway Scenic Railroad operates on two historic rail lines during the summer season. Conway, the gateway to the White Mountain region, is still a very bustling resort area.

Hudson, NH is across the Merrimack River from the major city of Nashua, and also on the border with Massachusetts.  By New Hampshire standards, it is quite a large place with nearly 25,000 inhabitants.  When I was a child our familty drove to Hudson once a year to spend the day at Benson’s Wild Animal Farm. 

I usually don’t draw private homes (unless requested), but I just couldn’t help myself when I glanced at this Victorian one.  The three mailboxes next to the door indicate that this former one family home now has been divided into three apartments. 

Like everything else, architecture goes in cycles.  Tall homes are all back in style. As is towering food in chic restaurants. Vertical is in.

The Nottingham Community Church in Nottingham, NH was built in 1875.  The wooden building features a number of Victorian architectural flourishes, and gingerbread charm. The smaller the village, the more likely a local carpenter designed the building from pattern books and ideas of what was popular in the big cities, and bought much of the trim from the many catalogs of the day. 

 Not an historian or architect, I am a mere artist who enjoys looking, seeing, and recording.  I noted decorative shingles, applied millwork in detailed patterns, and exposed wooden bracing of the roofs. And I did my best to record it on a cold day when I had forgotten my gloves.

Shelburne NH, on the border with Maine, is bisected by Route 2 which goes right across the entire United States (with a gap where Ontario juts down into the US).  The town’s population of less than 400 is smaller than it was 100 years ago. This pattern is common throughout rural New England

  My online research tells me that Shelburne, NH was named for William Petty Fitzmaurice, Earl of Shelburne.  He is remembered for advising King George III to recognize the new country of America.

An amazingly lovely grove of paper white birch trees lines the banks of the Androscoggin River.

Springtime in New Hampshire, Part 2

 

Stopping the car on Main Street of New London, NH, I drew the view over the fields to Mount Sunapee.  On March 12, the snow is only knee deep...therefore spring must surely be arriving soon. The spring skiing on the trails is better than average I hear, due to our recent snowy February.  I really do enjoy winter sketching because you can see through the trees, as well as understand the topography. I call it winter x-ray vision. Yes, there is a fence, a road, a car and a few houses.

Our woodlands here in New England are naturally mixed forests, that is both evergreens and deciduous trees.

Last Sunday, we joined the throngs (550 attendees, a record!) at the Lake Sunapee Region Chamber of Commerce’s 18th annual Chocolate Challenge.  Eleven area caterers competed for honors, each with a delicious confection.  It was lunch for both of us.

We both voted for the dark cake produced by Bistro Nouveau in Grantham.  The presentation was impressive as well as the delicious taste.  I decided to draw the whole precise assembly line process as they were putting it all together. Think dark fudgey cake, perhaps flourless, topped with a ganache rosette. Horizontally balanced was the dark and white chocolate curl.  And a perfect little black fork, stuck in at just the correct angle.  Yum.

They won the People’s Choice Award.

A touch of springtime in New Hampshire

 

The Elkins, NH, Post Office is where we pick up our mail. This building used to be a restaurant, and hungry summer visitors lined up at the side windows for ice cream cones.

 The snow piles are deep this March, but the roads and parking lots are bare except for all the winter-accumulated brown sand.  Some of the sand will just blow away, but most will be vacuumed up by street sweeping trucks in a couple of months.

The south east end of Pleasant Lake is in the background behind the parked car.  By June, the lifeguards will be in place, the little lot crowded, and the small town beach full of swimmers.

Ooh, it was fun drawing these Sherpa-style woolen winter hats and gloves. I just stood there drawing with my small paper and Bic pencil at our town's Colonial Pharmacy, a sort of miniature department store in New London, NH. The tags and hooks are still attached to them as they await owners  All of these extremely warm and beautiful hat/mitten sets are made in Nepal.

A sale of winter clothing is really the first sign of spring here in our little, snowy town.

In our wintery, hilltop town, the only places the see (and sniff) flowers this week are the grocery store and the florist.  These spring plants are at the entrance to the Allioops flower shop.

New Hampshire

The theme of this month’s posting is verticality.

To start the theme, I chose a side view of Coe-Brown Northwood Academy in Northwood, New Hampshire. The academy is a public high school, originally founded as a private high school in 1867. That’s a rather common situation here in New Hampshire.  Named for two benefactors, the school welcomes students from Northwood and surrounding towns. That’s also common here—economy of scale.

It sure is a vertical old wooden building, with high piles of snow lining the parking lot. The red car is included because it is red, and because it has a Coe-Brown magnetic sign attached to it.  It updates the image to the present times.

The Maplewood Golf Course clubhouse, 1919, in Bethlehem, New Hampshire echoes the shape of the surrounding mountains.

The eastern half of the town is within the White Mountain National Forest.  Bethlehem is one of the many towns in New Hampshire that were, or still are, summer resort towns.  Families came by train to spend several weeks in July and August in the cool, clean, mountain air.  They came from Boston, New York City, and beyond.  Bethlehem had a wooden boardwalk, suitable for evening strolls.  It was known to be virtually pollen free.  Many businesses were formed here to serve the needs of hay fever sufferers and asthmatics.

But the improved road system, availability of private cars, and other social factors put an end to most of the large hotels’ summer business.  Some still survive with creative guest amenities, and of course with the lovely mountain views. Skiing and other winter sports are very important to the economy of the mountain area.

Bretton Woods lies within the town of Carroll, New Hampshire. The large, rambling hotel is the Mount Washington Resort.  It includes summer attractions like the golf course seen here, as well as 101 ski trails.

Many people associate the name Bretton Woods with the 1944 conference which established much of the International Monetary System that we know today.

Mount Washington is the center peak.  At 6,288 feet, or 1,917 m, it is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States.  The peak is located in Sargent’s Purchase, one of New Hampshire many unincorporated land areas. Foot trails and bridle trails abound. As well as a paved road, and a cog railroad too, built in 1869 and going all the way to the summit.  Some years, a car race to the summit is part of the excitement.  A Subaru holds the record.

The mountain, in an alpine zone climate, is known for ferocious and capricious weather patterns.  One day out of three has hurricane force winds.  The main structure atop the mountain is designed to withstand winds up to 300 mph.  Most structures there are chained down.

The Balsams in Dixville Notch, NH sits tightly between water, rock, and sky.  Dixville Notch is not a town but an ‘unincorporated location’.  There are 25 such places in the state, but this one is easily the most accessible and the most well known.  The others are generally uninhabited, mountainous, and accessible only on foot.  I’ll get to them some day, perhaps.

Dixville Notch is among the small New Hampshire places that vie for announcing the ‘first in the nation’ voting results on election day, usually a few minutes after midnight. Last year Obama and Romney tied, 5 to 5.

Contrary to my usual procedure, there was no question whatever about what I intended to draw when I got here.  Usually it’s a wonderful process of discovery, complete with quite a few u-turns, but this one was an obvious choice.  The Balsams and the other surviving Grand Hotels are among our treasures here in New Hampshire.  They date from a very different age, when well-to-do families would come by train for the summer to escape the industrial cities.

Plenty more turrets and peaks in Whitefield, NH.  Concerts from the wooden, latticed bandstand are a summer highlight.  As I drew this from the town green, a few people were keeping an eye on me.   And wondering about my unusual interest in the old commercial block of shops and the landmark band stand.

Whitefield still has a grand old hotel from the heyday of the area, the Mountain View Grand Resort and Spa, recently renovated.  And Weathervane is a repertory company theater in town.

Before posting, I do some research on line about each town.  If Google maps are accurate, the town of Berlin, accent on the first syllable, is a perfect parallelogram.  And my Wikipedia readings also state that Berlin is less than 100 km from Quebec.  And that 65% of the residents are able to speak a language variant called Berlin French.

The mountainous area is heavily forested and, as a result, the European settlers developed logging, and wood and paper industries.  The swift current of the Androscoggin River provided the power for the sawmills and helped move the logs. The people power came from immigrants from Russia, Norway, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, and French Canada. Each immigrant group had its own social services, including churches and meeting places. In the latest census, nearly 100% describe themselves as American.

In my drawing, three churches stand out because they are taller than the trees surrounding them.  The hillside is completely covered in housing. You would see it better had I been there in winter.

On the right is almost exactly one half of the back side of the City Hall.  The brick buildings line the main street. A metal industrial building and a waterway in the foreground are part of the paper making factories. Or were.  The paper industry is gone now.

Jackson, NH is a lovely resort town in the White Mountains.  It was once named Adams, in honor of President John Adams, then renamed Jackson to honor President Andrew Jackson. The town has decided to stick with this one, rather than honoring each president. (Joke.)  Every town I read about in New Hampshire has had several names in its relatively short life.  Some have had five or six. 

Jackson Falls is a great place to draw, and I wasn’t the only artist there. In 1847, artists of the White Mountain School in nearby North Conway began to come here to take lessons and haul easels and paints around to sketch the scenic spots.

Over four hundred artists were known to have come here in the early 1800s, prompting tourists to arrive to see the beauty for themselves. In the latter half of the century, some artists had studios in the hotels.  By the end of the century, many of the artists had moved west to paint the Rocky Mountains in the western part of the US.

Winslow Homer made a well known painting of the painters.  Artists Sketching In the White Mountains now resides in the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art.  You can see it on line (click).

I didn’t know this when I arrived with my paper and colors, and I was surprised to see artists all over the place.  Every little bump on the rocks in my drawing is an artist.  We are all keeping the tradition going.  

It is not easy drawing a steep waterfall, standing at the top and looking down.  All I could do was show the water currents splashing against the rocks and a little water in the air.

Wildcat Mountain may be the name of the peak you see here.

Randolph has a very small population, under 300, but a wonderful view of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. It is named for the senator John Randolph of Virginia.

  On my first trip to Randolph I couldn’t decide what to draw.  So we went home, and studied the atlas and map.  Sure enough, the main thing to draw there is the topography.

My composition includes the cross-continental US Route 2 highway and a sort of meandering minor parallel road. I imagined the bird’s eye view of the two roads, but drew the land forms accurately.

Benton,  a small town with a population of less than 400, is almost entirely surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest.  The Appalachian Trail crosses through the town. This hiking trail covers approximately 2200 miles (or 3500 km) in length, starting in the state of Georgia and ending in Maine.

Senator Thomas Hart Benton is the namesake of this small community. (His great nephew of the same name was a prominent painter.)  The senator’s life story, as I read it online, is hair raising.  And he is one of eight senators profiled in John F. Kennedy’s book  Profiles In Courage.

This is Benton’s town hall and offices.  Plain colored and simply shaped, the building was constructed during the austere days of WWII.

The very ornate wrought iron fence across the street and up a steep hill is from a very different era. Encircling a old grave yard, it made a good contrast.

Benton was once home to NH State Sanatorium. The clear mountain air was thought beneficial to people with tuberculosis.

Ellsworth, NH, population under 100, is not too easy to find, but the residents probably like it that way.  A sign, not drawn, warned of a 15% grade hill. It sure was. Our car is parked on the sandy shoulder, not falling off the edge of the road into a ditch as it appears to be.

The combination town hall and school house, painted wood, was built in 1814.  The bulletin board on the outside of the building gives a voter list for the town.  7 Democrats, 7 Republicans, and 57 undeclared voters. Undeclared voters are usually called independents, and boy are they ever.

As I drew, I sat on a bench on the front lawn of the St. John of the Mountains Interdenominational Church.

Warren, New Hampshire was named in 1770.  In the town center are the customary town hall, library, church, school, and a playground off in the background.

But what every visitor remembers, or comes to see, is this Redstone ballistic missile mounted on a base right next to the above mentioned buildings. It is of course non-functioning.

The missile was given to the town in 1971 by Henry T. Asselin in honor of Senator Norris Cotton.  It is a very, very odd thing to find in a little town, but I felt I had to draw it. Missiles like this and maybe this very one  were positioned in NATO bases in Germany during the Cold War. I had to look up the dates of the Cold War: 1947 to 1991.  It was all about the Western Allies and the USSR facing off in Eastern Europe after WWII.  The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of the end of this period.

It’s common to encounter identically named towns throughout the New England states, usually tracing back to where the original settlers came from in England (or in some cases to an earlier settled part of New England).  Warren is one of the few whose name appears in all six of the states.  Thanks to artist friend Carol, from a very old New England family, for this tidbit.  Can anybody name some other such towns?

This lovely urban block of stores sits in downtown Lancaster, NH.  It is located on the Connecticut River, which is the state’s border with Vermont. Fertile, flat meadows along the river provide good agricultural soil.

The circa 1900 era urban architecture appeals to me for its exuberance and flourishes. Isn’t the curved roof line great?  Benches, planters, and carved wooden bears rounded out the scene.  The shops looked enticing from across the street.  There were few people about.  I think it was the July heat.

This blistering heat nearly wilted me while sketching this.  The weather and temperature are two memories that always return to my mind when I look at one of my drawings.  Other memories that flood back include the news and music on the radio and what I ate for lunch.   A reuben sandwich I think ...

Horizontality is the theme above.  And I include it as a break from the main theme of the posting.

We drove up and around steep hills in this small town, following our noses.  They, the noses and the roads, led us to this overlook of South Moat Mountain, 2,770 feet in elevation.  The Darby Field Inn in Albany, NH provided a great view.

Before doing research, I assumed Darby Field was a place name. It turns out that Darby Field (1610-1649) was a man well worth remembering. On the NH coast in Durham, he ran a ferry service across Great Bay to Newington. One day in 1642 when he was 32, who knows why, he decided to climb Mount Washington. He left journals describing the walk of many days to the mountain, the ascent, and precise details of the topography all the way to the top.  He was the first European to climb it and it seems likely, the first person ever.  The local Indian tribes thought it was an unwise idea to climb this mountain (sensible people), but a few did make the trek with him.

Many people of course have now climbed Mount Washington.  Alas, many hikers have died trying, because of its horrible weather patterns, like whiteouts. This summer, I plan to go again.  On the train, again.

Newport, NH has a week long winter carnival, the longest continuously operating one in the country they say.  We went with the express purpose of attending an indoor event featuring a local humorist and storyteller, and with my idea to sketch figures out on the town green turned skating rink.

It had snowed heavily the day before, and the snow plow people piled the snow into one big mound.  The children found it a lovely unexpected snow mountain to play on. The winter tableau in black and white emphasizes the figures and the motions.

I like to draw people in the wintertime.  Everyone has big feet (boots), large hands (mittens), and over-sized heads (woolen hats).

New Hampshire

This month’s visual essay starts with some very nice brick buildings.  The warm color of red brick has always appealed to me. This structure is in the town of Pelham, on the border with Massachusetts.

For years and years, my memory of Pelham, NH meant the place I went to Girl Scout camp in the 1950s.  Camp Runnels is still there, providing summer fun for girls ages nine to twelve or so. Sadly, unable to pass my swim badge, I couldn’t earn my boating badge in the rowboats.  Maybe that is why we own two kayaks now, and no rowboats.  Paddling, not rowing is the way to go.  And our recreational kayaks are more stable than rowboats anyway.

I thought this was the Pelham Library because, well, you can see why.   But it is the former Pelham Library and now the Pelham Historical Society.   A newer library building sits elsewhere in the town.

The arch, the shadows, and the gorgeous garden in the front called its attention to me immediately.

The small town of Hinsdale, NH occupies  the southwest corner of the state.  At the junction of Massachusetts and Vermont. The red brick building is the town hall, built 1900 in a time of prosperity. The dwarfed yellow building is a wooden post office.

The town mill, now demolished, was named Newhall and Stebbins.  They made lawn mowers and grass trimmers until 1962. These very useful items are now manufactured elsewhere.

Nearly every town in New Hampshire had a mill. Or many mills.  Most still exist in some form.  It takes a lot of effort to tear down one of these well built brick and granite structures.  And when the mill goes out of business, the townspeople need to find new occupations, or leave the area. Many New Hampshire towns have a lower population now than they had one hundred and fifty years ago.

Winchester NH is just to the east of Hinsdale.  There is a road that follows along the NH/Mass border.  It makes traveling from one town to the other nice and easy.  Interested folk sometimes ask how I decided the order in which to do my Draw-NH project.  Frequently the answer is practical rather than artistic.  Many times, it was a matter of what towns connect together easily to maximize my time to get back home by dark.  In some cases, I did draw in the dark if I ran out of daylight.

This drawing is a composite of views of two buildings that are next door to each other, the library and the town hall.  The town hall, the tower to the left, was built in 1880.  And the very ornate library followed in 1890.  Enjoying the architectural flourishes on each so much, I drew both. 

The town was named in honor of Charles Paulet, 3rd duke of  Bolton, 8th Marquess of Winchester (UK), and constable at the Tower of London. The Pennacook Indians lived in this area before the English settlements.

I may return for the annual Pickle Festival in September.

Fitzwilliam, NH, also in the southwest part of the state, has a lovely town green, many drawable buildings, and an agreeable ambiance.  That was the trouble.  I started a composition three times. From three different directions.  Uncertain how much to put in, or leave out, or even what angles to use.
 
The ornate metal fountain in the park is beautiful and delicate, so I decided to focus on that. To the left of the fountain is the unusual grey and white clapboarded house.  My notes tell me that the middle window, and the door too,  is indeed asymmetrically positioned.

Franklin, NH. is a town quite near to us. It was formed in 1820 from acreage from four neighboring towns. Named for the statesman Benjamin Franklin, its motto is “Three River City”.  Here the Pemigewasset and the Winnepesaukee Rivers merge to form the Merrimack. River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean down in Massachusetts.

Water from was the source of power for the Industrial Revolution here in New Hampshire and in northeastern Massachusetts, which brought my husband’s grandparents here to the US over 100 years ago.

The history of the town includes the usual long list of mills:  saw mills, grist mills, fulling and yarn mills, doors sashes and blinds, woolens, hosiery, and paper.  Do any of them still exist?  I don’t think so, but most of the buildings are being reused to new purposes. The town has a splendid library, as well as a combination opera house and town hall.  And a hospital. 

This large metal wheel is sited on Main Street as a sort of memorial to the times of the mills and the mill workers.  Across the street to the far right, you can see the Winnepesaukee River Trail.  And a non-functioning, but structurally impressive, rail road trestle.

This drawing and the next were done at the time of our visit to the Tarbin Gardens in Franklin.  The ten acres of gardens are carved out from the deep woodlands, by a British woman and her son. They are still there creating more gardens every year.  Above, an outdoor room called Three Pines, is one of my favorites spots.

And spots is a good word for this sun and shade dappled space.  To me, the trees, bushes, bench and my husband look solidly planted on earth.  The grass, sun spots, and pathways look like they are floating. That may or may not be a pleasant effect.  This is the sort of light and shade scene that I seldom attempt.  The shadows and patches of light confuse the eye rather than clarify the space.  But, you may like it. This is my Claude Monet moment.

Nearby,  the formal garden awaits you. The straight path leads to a bench for contemplation.  The differences in scale, meaning the large urn in the foreground, and the small size of the hanging plants in the background create a sense of depth and space. The viewer has the chance to walk right into the scene.  And rest a while.

The rail road bridge in Dalton, NH crosses the slow moving Connecticut River into Vermont.  It was very peaceful here.  Hot and sunny.  I remember all that, as well as the birds chirping in the grass.

I really enjoy drawing bridges.  My brother, a bridge expert, may want to tell me the name of this kind of bridge design.  This is the Connecticut River in Stewartstown, NH.

There’s a very thin slice of Vermont on the other side, and next comes the Canadian border.  We could see the border station a short way down the road. But we didn’t have our passports with us. The border requirements are much more formalized now, since 2001.  The border up this way used to be very informal, even running through the library in one town.

We were in Thornton NH in the summer heat of August when we drove by this wooden building.  The sign says Benton’s Sugar Shack, run by four generations of the family.  Scattered around the ground were all sorts of wooden antique syrup making implements.

In the last days of winter, in March, the sap in the sugar maple trees begins to flow.  After puncturing a hole in the bark of the tree, the running sap is captured in buckets or more modern plastic hoses.  And boiled down to make maple syrup  That is all there is to the process.  Just a lot of boiling and knowing when to stop.

 Forty liters of sap produce one liter of syrup.  And it is a health food containing all sorts of minerals and anti-oxidents.  Doesn’t that make you want to whip up a batch of pancakes or waffles? Or drink it straight.

Most of the world’s maple syrup and sugars come from Quebec, Canada.  The rest comes from New England (NH, Vermont, and Maine) and other northern states.

Through my imagination, I changed the summer-green maple tree into its glorious autumn foliage. And I left much of the paper white to help us all imagine the winter snow.

I may have long lost cousins in Quebec who make maple syrup, as well as the stainless steel vats and other necessary equipment.  The delicious syrup we buy in NH comes from the Lapierre Maple Farm of St. Ludger, Quebec, Canada.

Yellow flowers on a cold February day.  For me, they just called out to be drawn, and captured in my memory, and maybe yours.

The bowl was painted by our younger daughter when she was in her early twenties.  Her favorite shape is a spiral. She has never told me this.  I know this from observation. There are spiral shapes and designs all over her house. And her wedding dress had beautiful organic spiraling plant tendrils, all in cotton embroidery. And some sparkly sequins, and pearls too.

The flowers were extras from our local hospital.  It was my day to make flower arrangements for the residents of the Clough Center, New London, NH,  an extended care facility which is attached to the hospital.