Hawthorne's Lenox

By Cornelia Brooke Gilder and Julia Conklin Peters

An account of the famous American author’s visit to a New England retreat. “Anyone who loves the Berkshires will love this book.” —Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

What drew Nathaniel Hawthorne to a remote village deep in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts in 1850? Slip into the fascinating social scene he encountered in the drawing rooms and on the croquet lawns of Lenox’s country retreats. Here, under the benevolent spell of the Sedgwick family, the separate worlds of high-minded Bostonians and high-powered New Yorkers were stitched together by conversation, recreation and even marriage. Nurturing the lively exchange of ideas on everything from art to abolition, Lenox’s cottages played host to a community that enlightened a nation. Luminaries such as Caroline Sturgis Tappan and Oliver Wendell Holmes resume their vibrant lives through the rare photographs and engaging sketches of everyday life in Hawthorne’s Lenox: The Tanglewood Circle, which also includes a delightful retrospective visit from Henry James and Edith Wharton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781614231097

Book preview

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CORNELIA BROOKE GILDER WITH JULIA CONKLIN PETERS

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2008 by Cornelia Brooke Gilder

All rights reserved

Cover design by Marshall Hudson.

Front cover: Croquet game, Lenox. Ellen Tappan, 1866. Daphne Brooks Prout.

First published 2008

e-book edition 2011

ISBN 978.1.61423.109.7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gilder, Cornelia Brooke.

Hawthorne’s Lenox : the Tanglewood circle / Cornelia Brooke Gilder and Julia Conklin Peters.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print edition ISBN 978-1-59629-406-6

1. Lenox (Mass.)--Biography. 2. Lenox (Mass.)--Intellectual life--19th century. 3. Lenox (Mass.)--History--19th century. 4. Dwellings--Massachusetts--Lenox--History--19th century. 5. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864--Homes and haunts--Massachusetts--Lenox. I. Peters, Julia Conklin. II. Title.

F74.L57G45 2008

974.4’1--dc22

2008009761

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

To Louisa Ludlow Brooke

Intrepid traveler and lover of Lenox

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Sedgwicks and the Hive

The Wards and the Bullards at Highwood

Tanglewood and the Tappans

The Hawthornes and the Red House

The Perch and Fanny Kemble

Summerwood and Sarah Starr Lee

Reverend Cook and the Dorrs at Highlawn

Beecher Hill

The Aspinwalls and Woolseys at Woodcliff

The Haggertys and Vent Fort

The Schermerhorns and Pinecroft

The Ellery Sedgwicks and the Elms

The Higginsons and Mahkeenac Farm

The Hoopers and Nestledown

Afterword: Touring Lenox’s Hawthorne-era Houses Fifty Years Later with Henry James and Edith Wharton

Appendix: Literary and Social Neighbors in the Berkshires of Hawthorne’s Day

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Three of us began the research for this book in 1993, and I am the only survivor to see it to publication. My mother, Louisa Ludlow Brooke, had broken her hip. She was confined to a deep leather armchair by the window overlooking Main Street in Lenox, in the old house where she took her first steps as a baby in 1910. Another spryer octogenarian, Julia Conklin Peters (our friend, longtime librarian at the Lenox Library and possessor of a prodigious memory and zeal for research) agreed to come every Thursday to record the histories of local houses—some well-known, many utterly forgotten—depicted in a series of sepia photographs taken in 1886 by a jack-of-all trades from East Lee, Edward A. Morley.

My mother and Judy came from another era. One would prompt the other in our search to know more about Sedgwicks and Schermerhorns, Higginsons, Haggertys and Hawthornes. Having grown up in World War I Lenox, Judy and my mother were precious links to a time that remembered the foibles of Edith Wharton and revered the Civil War widow, Annie Haggerty Shaw. Their hunches and instincts sent me scurrying to wonderful archives at Williams, Smith and Harvard. They wanted to produce a book that would convey the depth of culture in Lenox in the years before its so-called Gilded Age. Their voices speak through these pages. My mother died in 1998, but Judy Peters lived until March 2007 and continued in the avid research and shaping of this book up to the end.

Our approach was to study one house at a time, pursuing descendants, diaries and letters and visiting the sites themselves, be they cellar holes or surviving structures. I want to thank special people who helped with specific chapters:

Beecher Hill: Norman Rice and the late Frances Reese

The Elms: Dick and Linda Jackson

Highlawn: Craig Thomas; Ronald Epp; Joan Kaufman, archivist at the Mount Auburn Cemetery; and Kristen Mitrisin, archivist at the American Tract Society

Highwood: John Mason Harding; Johnston Evans; David Sturma, director of Tanglewood facilities for the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and Samuel Thoron

The Hive: Lucinda Damon-Bosch and her colleagues at the Sedgwick Society

Literary and Social Neighbors: Will Garrison and Ellice Gonzalez of the Trustees of Reservations; Polly Pierce; Barbara Allen of the Historical Room at the Stockbridge Library; Professor Frank Kowsky; and Tom Daly, curator of education at the Norman Rockwell Museum

Mahkeenac Farm: Tim Mahoney of Historical Collections, Baker Library, at the Harvard Business School; Cynthia Gould Wilcox; Barbara Briggs Chakravarty; Cintia Boni; Francesca Rucellai Piqué; and Ted and Deanna Collins

Nestledown: Frank Lothrop

Summerwood: David T. Dana III; Finlay and the late Donald MacLean; Mary M. White of New Orleans

Tanglewood: Catharina Slautterback and Pat Boulos of Boston Athenaeum; Bridget Carr, archivist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Woodcliff: Luke and Paul Martin, Bob Coakley and David Vincent

For general help and encouragement we were indebted to Sally and Bill Bell; John L. Brooke and Louisa G. Brooke; Barry Cenower of Acanthus Press; Dr. William Clarke; Cate and Chris Conklin; Bernard Drew; Katie Frisina of the Clark Art Institute; Jonathan Harding, archivist at the Century Association; Robert Herron; Vivi Mannuzza; John Mesick; Norma Purdy, archivist at the Berkshire Historical Society at Arrowhead; Kathy Reilly and the wonderful staff at the Berkshire Athenaeum’s Historical Room; Vickie Salvatore, president of the Lenox Historical Society; Georgia Massucco and her team at the Lee Library; Elizabeth Littlefield; and Kevin Sprague

Special thanks to the kindly Lenox town clerks, Claudia Duby and Jenifer Drumm Picard, for access to the all-important Lenox birth and death records residing in a ponderous safe in town hall; to Amy Lafave and Denis Lesieur at the Lenox Library Association for generous access to wealth of material, both catalogued and uncatalogued, and to everyone at Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum—Tjasa Sprague, the late Joan Olshansky, Tom Hayes and Jeff Follmer—who encouraged these researches and provided Judy and me a venue for a series of slide lectures on one house after another.

I am so grateful to David Dashiell, former publications director at the Mount, who introduced me to The History Press, and to editors Anna Kasabian and Saunders Robinson, who saw this project to completion.

Two special people made unusual contributions, one in the middle of the research process and one in the last three months. The first is Daphne Brooks Prout. It was a thrilling day in 2003 when I first met Mrs. Prout and began looking through the trunk full of her grandmother’s sketchbooks. Ellen Tappan’s enchanting watercolors bring to life the everyday activities in the early Lenox country house and add so much to this book. The second special contributor is Patricia Schley at the David Davis Mansion in Bloomington, Illinois. Just a few months ago, through David Dana, I learned of Pat’s years of work transcribing the correspondence between the Lenox and Bloomington, Illinois branches of the William Walker family. In sharing her precious unpublished material, Pat brought new insights and vivid anecdotes to this book.

Much as I have depended on the knowledge of past and of bygone generations, I could not have succeeded in this project without the practical skills of the present generation, specifically my children. Book writing in the twenty-first century requires mastery of a dizzying amount of technology. Wrenched from the demands of their own lives becoming writers, doctors and pilots, Louisa, Mellie, Richard and Nannina Gilder all stepped in cheerfully with lessons in scanning, formatting, web searching, indexing and rescuing lost material.

Then there is the timeless skill of editing. Both Louisa, on the brink of authorship herself with her own first book, and my husband, George, indefatigable author of some fifteen books, gave hours of their own writing time to pruning, reshaping and smoothing rough places in the text. George’s high standards and his confidence in this project have spurred, inspired and encouraged me all these years.

Cornelia Brooke Gilder

INTRODUCTION

How did the celebrated, but still impoverished, author of The Scarlet Letter happen to come to the shores of the Stockbridge Bowl for a frenzied year and a half of productivity? Who arranged the accommodations for the shy, dependent author and his bluestocking wife and children? Why was Lenox, of all places in New England, an appealing retreat for the Nathaniel Hawthornes?

This book is the story of the cultivated community that drew Hawthorne from Salem, Massachusetts, to Lenox in 1850. The cast of characters—the talented and hospitable Sedgwick family, Fanny Kemble, Caroline Sturgis Tappan and Samuel and Anna Ward—were members of a network of friends who arranged and supported the Hawthornes’ move to the Berkshires. The histories of these families and their houses in Lenox are combined with captivating watercolors depicting everyday life by Hawthorne’s chief benefactor, the artistic Caroline Tappan and her daughter Ellen of Tanglewood.

In the spirit of The House of the Seven Gables, the great novel that Nathaniel wrote under Mrs. Tappan’s roof, the stories of these Lenox houses are entwined and intriguing tales. Some had a succession of owners; some were lived in by generations of the same family. Many, like Hawthorne’s humble Red Cottage and the Woolseys’ elaborate Woodcliff, are only memories; others, such as Highwood and the Elms, survive though altered by subsequent owners. The gabled Tappan house on the Tanglewood property and the Higginsons’ Mahkeenac Farm, next door, are the two most unchanged survivors of this era.

Forty years before the lionization of Lenox in the Gilded Age, these Italianate- and Stick-style villas were grand for their day. They were all built between 1845 and 1865, at a time when American city dwellers gained wealth and mobility to build country places.

Coming here as a boy, novelist Henry James remembered it as a brilliant and generous landscape. At this time Lenox was the county seat of the Berkshires. The hilltop village was no insular backwater. It was known for its sophisticated and long-established professional community. The judges and lawyers at the courthouse were equally at home in Boston courtrooms; the students at the two well-known private schools—the Lenox Academy for boys and Mrs. Sedgwick’s girls’ school—came from prominent families from Boston to St. Louis.

The intellectual colony in Lenox revolved around a salon of the illustrious Sedgwick family—clerk of courts Charles Sedgwick; his wife Elizabeth, the school’s headmistress; and his sister Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a leading novelist. The Sedgwick place was well named the Hive. Here short-term visitors, including African American writer Frederick Douglass, poet William Ellery Channing and artist George Inness, mingled with new celebrity property owners like actress Fanny Kemble and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. Ralph Waldo Emerson complained when his Transcendentalist friends abandoned Brook Farm and Concord, Massachusetts, to build substantial country houses in Lenox, but he endorsed its enlightened atmosphere by entrusting his precocious daughter to Elizabeth Sedgwick’s school.

In this elevated retreat, the separate worlds of high-minded Bostonians and high-powered New Yorkers were stitched together in conversation, recreation and even marriage. Lenox’s country houses were places where new thoughts from abolition to art, literature to liberty, were exchanged in drawing rooms, on piazzas, over croquet and in rowboats on the Stockbridge Bowl.

The Tappan family drawings make this community of friends vivid and real. These charming sketches and watercolors by Tanglewood’s owner Caroline Tappan and her daughter Ellen have been reunited here from various repositories: the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection and the Lenox Historical Society. The most important trove comes from a trunk of sketchbooks owned by today’s descendants of the Tappan family.

One hundred and fifty years later, the relaxing pastimes depicted in these watercolors—the picnics, the boating, the hikes—still go on, in a modern guise. They occur on Tanglewood’s thronged lawns and on remote trails in the old Woolsey Woods, now called Kennedy Park, making Lenox—for local residents and far-flung visitors—a cherished place.

THE SEDGWICKS AND THE HIVE

On arriving in the Berkshires in May 1850, Sophia Hawthorne felt embraced by members of the Sedgwick family. She wrote her mother, They seem to delight to make happy; and they are happy as summer days themselves.¹

If it is possible for a single family’s hospitality to create an enduring summer resort, it happened in Lenox. Here in the dining room of a simple frame house on a muddy village street, influential Bostonians and New Yorkers fell in love with Lenox under the spell of conversations with Charles and Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick and Charles’s celebrity sister, Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

The visitors came to pay court to the novelist Catharine or to entrust the education of their teenage daughters to her sister-in-law Elizabeth, who ran a school in her house. But it was the gregarious and kindly Charles who toured the countryside with them, stayed alert to available property and helped the out-of-towners with the paperwork of real estate transactions. From his desk in the courthouse, today’s Lenox Library, this legendary clerk of the Berkshire County Court shaped the town’s future as a summer colony of country-loving, wealthy, urban families.

As a young married man, Charles Sedgwick (1791–1856) came to Lenox reluctantly. The youngest son of Stockbridge’s distinguished judge and politician Theodore Sedgwick, he subscribed to the deeply held family view that Stockbridge was nearly equivalent to heaven and Lenox a dubious upland purgatory. He and his young wife Elizabeth (1801–1864) could not remain in the gracious old family house on Main Street in Stockbridge, whose lawns still run down to the banks of the Housatonic River.