New Hampshire, Vermont, & Massachusetts

This summer I’ve been teaching a class in on-location drawing as part of the Adventures In Learning program at Colby-Sawyer College here in New London, NH.  For the final class, I decided to take my students to an experimental garden on the college campus.  The assignment was to make a composition which included plants and trees, rocks, structures and people.  And it only seemed fair to try it myself too. I moved Mount Kearsarge just a little to fit into the picture.  (One of the messages of my class was that it’s OK to do things like that.  You’re not taking a photograph; you’re recording an impression.)

The apple in the tree is on a stamp which arrived in the mail today.  We did a warmup drawing of apples and pears indoors before we walked outside to the garden.  I thought it would be fun to add a small element of collage.

Here’s a link to a page that describes the class in greater detail, along with a few pictures of the class in action.  It was a fun experience for all, me included.

 

It’s another event on the town green. The New London Garden Club hosts an annual Antique Show as a fund raiser.  Forty vendors come to sell their wares under the tents.  They were packing up as I stood on the lawn sketching the array of objects.

 On this occasion each year, the band stand in the center becomes an antique stall.   

The day after the Antique Show, where I worked all day, we headed over to Windsor, Vermont to the Harpoon Brewery Beer and BBQ Festival.  

I had my sketchbook in my lap so no one saw me drawing.  Everyone was listening to the music anyway.

 

Each year I enjoy picking blueberries.  The red bucket is lined with a plastic bag for easy weighing and transporting home. I sat down in the blueberry patch to draw this.

 

Radishes are fun to draw as well as delicious. 

We were in the Boston (Massachusetts) Public Garden last month.  In the center of my drawing is one of the famed Swan Boats. 

 The boat driver sitting behind the swan is pedaling the craft through the water.

 I suspect that many people riding on the swan boat remember doing the same as children. And perhaps they have brought their own children, or grandchildren,  on this day.

The double pontooned swan boats are a Boston tradition since 1877.  A very clever Roger Paget, a boat rental owner,  invented them by combining the public’s keen interest in bicycles with his own fascination with the opera Lohengrin.  In the opera, a knight rescues a young woman by riding a swan.

 

I add three drawings now that give a nod to the waning of summer, the start of autumn and the new school year.

Clarksville, New Hampshire is way up north, near Pittsburg.  This private home is a former school.  It still looks just like as a school.

 

Gilford, New Hampshire is a small town tucked away off the highway.   When I drew this, it was right after school had resumed for the autumn.

 As I drew I could not help but hear the conversations between the children as they walked home from school.  They were laughing and teasing one another and catching up on their summer time away from each other.  It was pleasant to listen to their chatter as I drew. 

 They didn’t see me as I was off to the side and up a little slope.  I drew them as sort of ghost like figures because they had all passed before I could draw them and I drew them from memory.

 

The view of this lake struck me.  Such pretty little islands.  And all those small rocks in the water making a parade. 

This is Middleton, NH.  I drew this in autumn 2012, and the leaves were starting to turn.

 

These bonnets were all lined up at the New London Historical Society.  Theme and variation intrigues me.

New Hampshire

The weekly Market On the Green in New London has started again. There’s a good mix of fresh garden produce and hand made craft items. We are vendors of notecards and drawings and paintings, and this is the view from our tent.  All the art and craft items must be made by the vendors themselves.  If not, it would just be a flea market.  We enjoy meeting people and hearing their stories.

Yesterday it poured down rain.  But when the closing bell rang from the nearby church steeple, the sun came cheerfully out.  Instantly.

The building in the right background with the bell tower holds the town offices.  It was originally a school and  never a church, although it does resemble one.

Stop by between 3 and 6 on Wednesdays from now through early September.  We’d love to see you.

A Swedish style wooden horse in front of Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, NH.  I had a to do some research about red horses from Sweden.  I guess there is no symbolism; they just look charming.  The owner of Polly’s a while ago built one for his grandchildren.  This is a new replacement this year.  The lupine plant to the left shows the scale of the horse.

The pancakes were delicious.

I returned to the town of Lisbon to redraw a scene for my Draw-NH project.  We artists are a picky bunch. The yellow building is now housing for seniors.  The shop behind the green awning sells art supplies.  Surprisingly,  I didn’t stop in.  The view through the ornate wooden porch nicely frames the yellow wooden one and the brick block, 1907.

Lisbon, with  a population under 1600, has a lilac festival in May. The main street sports lilac flags from every lamp post.

 After the names of Concord, Chiswick, and Gunthwaite didn’t stick, it was named Lisbon in 1824 after the governor’s friend who was a consul in  Portugal.

Early industries included charcoal manufacturing, mining, and mills along the Ammonoosuc River.  Other facts from the town website:  the Parker Young factory was once the world’s largest manufacturer of piano sounding boards.  And on a divergent note,  New Hampshire’s first ski tow was here.

 

The Silsby Free Public Library and the town offices make a handsome pair of brick buildings on Main Street in Charlestown, NH. Charlestown sits along the banks of the Connecticut River, bordering the state of Vermont.  In 1781, Charlestown briefly declared itself to be part of Vermont due to friction with the New Hampshire state capital of Concord.  The records show that George Washington insisted that the town return its allegiance to NH in 1783. 

The main street is lined with fine examples of architecture worth preserving. Sixty-three buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  I had a very nice stroll along this street while deciding which building to draw.  And a picnic lunch on a bench.

 

The historical society in Dorchester, NH was closed the day I was in town.  But I liked the classical simple design of the former school house.  It is constructed with painted red clapboards. 

This small town is named for Dorchester, England.  At a population of under 400, it is half of what it was at one time.  Its former industries were sawmills, shingles and clapboards, and the production of charcoal.  

Many towns in New England lost half their population in the mid to late 1800s due to westward migration after soldiers returned from the Civil War.

 Franconia, NH is all about the White Mountains. The poet Robert Frost and his family awoke to this panoramic vista each morning from 1915 to 1920.  For twenty more years, they returned for summers. The mail box in rusting tin is labeled “R. Frost”, and the peeling black letters are in his hand.  I remember tracing the letters with my finger when I was there as a young child.

The simple farm house is now a center for poetry simply called the Frost Place.  Nature trails through the woods are dotted with plaques of his poetry.

The Colby Chaise, circa 1825, was owned by New Hampshire’s governor Anthony Colby (1792-1873).  It is a wonderful addition to the collection of the New London Historical Society.  Although it is housed in their large, impressive transportation building, I imagined it outdoors near Mount Kearsarge.

When printed as a note card, this is one of the very few images that winds its way around to the back side of the card.

The carriage was restored in 1937 in Dearborn, Michigan.

The Studebaker Junior is a deluxe wagon made for children by the Studebaker Company in South Bend, Indiana.   It was probably intended to be pulled by a goat or an animal of similar size.  I tried to imagine the day it was new.  Perhaps Christmas morning?  With or without goat?

This small-scale wooden vehicle is in the transportation building in the New London Historical Society Collection, in New London, NH.  It is about three feet (one meter) high.

The Studebaker company made top line wagons for farmers, miners, and soldiers for sixty years.  And carriages for wealthy people.  Then for another fifty years, they made horseless carriages, or automobiles. The company went out of business in the 1960s, but Studebaker fan clubs do still exist.

 And then tonight I said to my husband, “Wait a minute. We have a photo of you, posing in a goat pulled wagon, back when you were four years old.  I wonder if it might have been a Studebaker Junior?”  Comparing the pictures, I now feel sure that it is.

He really wasn’t a wealthy child who had a goat pulling him around.  This was just a photo op near the corner of Beech Street and Trapelo Road in Belmont, a suburb of Boston.  A traveling photographer was taking pictures on the sidewalk—not something you’d encounter every day.  His best childhood friend from across the street also has a similar picture in his archives, and both pictures have shown up on Facebook.

 This drawing is reposted from winter 2010. The fruits, a typical still life subject matter, are a flat background design on the tablecloth.  Artists often draw their tools. These pencils are all pigment, with no wooden casing.  I love them.

 My Adventures In Learning class is coming up in July. This two hour, four session class will take place on the Colby-Sawyer College campus here in New London, NH. We will be doing on location (outdoors) drawing, and many of the students will be using colored pencils.

British Columbia and New Hampshire

One morning while visiting our family in British Columbia, I took a long meandering walk.  A hot, sunny, dry day, it was perfect for sitting on the curb and drawing.  The Cedar Creek Winery in Kelowna spills down the steep hillside to the lake. The plants are staked and wired and ready for this season’s leafy growth, to be followed by the grapes.

The name of the beautiful plant with the abundant flowers is unknown to me. The yellow composite flowers and shiny, holly-like leaves edged in red were everywhere.  In the background is Okanagan Lake. The Bennett Bridge connects the city of West Kelowna with Kelowna itself.

Kelowna is a four hour drive inland, east of the major city of Vancouver.  The trip from the coast involves two mountain passes of over 4000 feet elevation.  In late April, we drove across the passes and through two blizzards.  A week later our return trip via Stevens Pass in the northwest corner of Washington featured bright blue skies and temperatures in the 80s.  Spring had happened!

One day on our visit to Kelowna, we climbed Knox Mountain. Knox is a Scottish surname, and many of the early European settlers here were from Scotland. The view shows another vantage point of the city.

In the foreground, a magpie perches on a rock. The squawky, bold, intelligent birds are members of the crow family.  In flight, bright blue feathers flash along with the black and white.

In fourth grade (age nine), my teacher wrote on my report card that I was a magpie. Magpies do not inhabit the east coast of the US where I grew up.  So I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I understood that it was not a compliment.  I was a bit full of myself that year and was known to talk too much to my neighbors.  For a while, my desk was moved into the corner.

Down the precipitously steep hill you see pines, a bike path, and an industrial harbor with floating logs awaiting the sawmill. And the main downtown with tall buildings, an arena, and a casino. Along the edges of the lake are flattish areas called benches, sites of both orchards and vineyards.  Way in the distance are snow-covered blue peaks.

We spent quite a lot of time with our five year old grandson, doing what boys like to do....throw sticks and play in the sand. No they are not twins, just one busy little boy and his Grandad.

This is Okanagan Lake, and you can see the benches and the vineyards better here than in the last drawing.

Another beach, another play day with our grandson. Here I drew him three times. The town beaches in Kelowna boast playgrounds, trees growing at water’s edge, and of course the views of the mountains.

He convinced me to go down the red plastic twisting slide. Once.

After a lunch with friends in mid April, I fit in time to draw this domestic structure in Greenland, NH, near Portsmouth and the seacoast.  It sits in front of a small triangle of land, a meeting of three small roads.  In the center of the triangle is an ornate bandstand that I considered drawing. But the stately, imposing home won out.  The wooden clapboarded house dates from maybe 1800-1830.  Just a guess.  The putty colored building has an unusual number of flat columns. Green wooden shutters and white brick chimneys complete the façade.

Stratham, NH and the area is sometimes called Antique Alley.  Located in the southeast of the state, the area is heavily touristed.  New Hampshire’s citizens are highly entrepreneurial. Everyone has something to sell by the side of the road. All the items along the curb are for sale.

 This building is the former town hall of Stratham.  It is a late Victorian style, maybe 1890, with a mansard roof.  Very stylish and very French.

 

Here in Madison, NH I was attracted to (read that as “stopped in my tracks”) by the town offices and police station.   The style is Craftsman I think.  It is unusually tall for that architectural style, but I am going by the wooden façade shingles, and the small and varied window shapes. 

 I read online that this building was moved to this site.  That is an admirable skill, and not that uncommon here.  Ox teams, heavy duty sleds, and helping hands were readily available to move buildings on snow-packed roads in the winter time, and they were much more affordable than employing a master carpenter to construct a brand new building.

 

   Last weekend we took a tour of the Spring Ledge Farm here in New London, NH.  The farm, on about 60 acres, is on protected land.  That is, it is preserved as farmland, never to be zoned for housing—occupying prime territory right on the main street of a pretty well-to-do town. The open house tour happens twice a year.  And we never miss it as it is all so informative.  We’ve learned many things there that immediately get put to use in our own garden.

The farm is owned and operated by Greg Berger and a team of people who are very dedicated to their work.  And who employ so much science in the planning, operating, and evaluating of their enterprise. 

 At the end of the tour, we are each invited to take a freebie.  One year it was a bag of alpaca manure.  This time, we chose these gorgeous geranium plants.

 They now sit on our front steps.  Are they talking to each other?  Saying things like “Are you scared?  Do you miss our family of a thousand in the greenhouse?”  I remember seeing geraniums growing wild in the fields in Malta, an island in the Mediterranean.  That fascinates me.  A coddled house plant in one corner of the world is a freely self seeding wild flower in another.

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 Busy Corner 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 family 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.