Searching for Wampanoag Martha Simon 

To illustrate Washashore, I've been working with both Photoshop and Sketcher to transform 17th, 18th, and 19th century oil paintings into black and white sketches. One of my characters is an elderly Wampanoag woman. After a lengthy search, I discovered an 1857 portrait by the famous Hudson River School painter, Albert Bierstadt, whose work emulated the image I had conjured in my mind. Bierstadt called the painting "Last of the Narragansetts," but he made a mistake. The Narragansetts are an Algonquian tribe from Rhode Island. The woman he painted, Martha Simon, was from Fairhaven, MA, and she was a member of the Wampanoag tribe - the perfect subject for my illustration. A year after Bierstadt painted her likeness, Martha Simon met Henry David Thoreau, who wrote about her in his journal. (You can read his journal entry below.)

Hoping to photograph the original portrait, I drove to Fairhaven's Millicent Library. Although the library itself is absolutely beautiful, the portrait was a disappointment. 

Blackened with age, Martha Simon's face was almost impossible for me to see. Fortunately, one of the librarians was able to track down a postcard of the portrait for me to scan for this blog. 

Here is an excerpt from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, dated June 26, 1856, a year before Bierstadt completed Simon's portrait. When Thoreau wrote this, he was visiting his friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford.

Heard of and sought out, the hut of Martha Simons, the only pure-blooded Indian left about New Bedford. She lives alone on the narrowest point of the Neck, near the shore in sight of New Bedford. Her hut stands some twenty-five rods from the road on a small tract of Indian land, now wholly hers. It was formerly exchanged by a white man for some better land, then occupied by Indians, at Westport, which he wanted. So said a Quaker minister, her neighbor. The squaw was not at home when we first called. It was a little hut not so big as mine. No garden; only some lettuce amid the thin grass in front, and a great white pile of clam and quahog shells on one side. She ere long came in from the seaside, and we called again. We knocked and walked in, and she asked us to sit down. She had half an acre of the real tawny Indian face, broad with high cheek-bones, black eyes, and straight hair, originally black but now a little gray, parted in the middle. Her hands were several shades darker han her face. She had a peculiarly vacant expression, perhaps characteristic of the Indian, and answered our questions listlessly, without being interested or implicated, mostly in monosyllables, as if hardly present there. To judge from her physiognomy, she might have been King Philip’s own daughter. Yet she could not speak a word of Indian, and knew nothing of her race. Said she had lived with the whites, gone out to service when seven years old. Had lived part of her life at Squaw Betty’s Neck, Assawampsett Pond. Did she know Sampson’s? She’d ought to; she’d done work enough there. She said she was sixty years old, but was probably nearer seventy. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands and that peculiar vacant stare, perhaps looking out the window between us, not repelling us in the least, but perfectly indifferent to our presence.

She was born on that spot. Her grandfather also lived on the same spot, though not in the same house. He was the last of her race who could speak Indian. She had heard him pray in Indian, but could only understand “Jesus Christ.” Her only companion was a miserable tortoise-shell kitten which took no notice of us [notice the cat behind Martha Simon in the painting]. She had a stone chimney, a small cooking-stove with fore legs, set up on bricks within it, and a bed covered with dirty bed-clothes. Said she hired out her field as pasture; better for her than to cultivate. There were two young heifers in it. The question she answered with most interest was, “What do you call that plant?”and I reached her the aletris from my hat. She took it, looked at it a moment, and said, “That’s husk-root. It’s good to put into bitters for a weak stomach.” The last year’s light-colored and withered leaves surround the present green star like a husk. This must be the origin of the name. Its root is described as intensely bitter. I ought to have had my hat full of plants.

A conceited old Quaker minister, her neighbor, told me with a sanctified air, “I think that the Indians were human beings; dost thee not think so?” he only convinced me of his doubt and narrowness. 

Excerpt found at http://millicentlibrary.org/henry-david-thoreau-visits-martha-simon/

Monte's Quest

On Saturday morning I participated in a Move to Remove demonstration on Falmouth Green, in the shadow of the First Congregational Church. I had made arrangements to interview one of the other participants, Monte Ladner, after the demonstration.

I met Monte at his car which was parked across the street from the white-fenced green. He was rushing to unload camera equipment from his trunk.

“Unfortunately, I have another appointment,” he said when he saw me. “I was supposed to meet the pastor here at eleven. I’m ten minutes late. He’s taking me inside the steeple to photograph the bell.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the church. “Can I come?”

Just then his cell phone rang. “If this is the pastor, I’ll ask him.”

It was the pastor, and the answer was yes. I helped Monte lug one of his tripods to the church door where Pastor Jonathan Drury waited.

After brief introductions, Pastor Jon guided us up a red carpeted stairway to the balcony. Pausing, he looked down at the main floor and gestured to a pew in the front row, near the pulpit. “That pew was rented by the parents of Katherine Lee Bates. She wrote the lyrics to America the Beautiful.” 

Without waiting for our reactions, Jon turned on his heel and opened a side door to another staircase, rough-hewn and steep, that led to the attic. “If it seems like I’m in a hurry, I am,” he explained as we mounted the stairs. “You’ll want to be up to the steeple and down again before the bell starts to toll at noon. It’s loud.”

“I don’t want the bell to toll for me,” Monte said.

When he reached the attic, he set down his camera bag and donned a mask. “I have asthma,” he gasped. “It’s dusty up here.”

There was more than dust. There were cobwebs and dead flies, pipes and ceiling insulation, broken shutters and loose boards. And, hanging from a post nail, there was a dead bat that Jonathan rather proudly pointed out to us as if he had placed it there himself to spice up the tour.

We stooped low to sidle under old plumbing. We straddled splintered beams. We wound our way along a maze of narrow planks. Finally we approached the foot of a wooden ladder. Its rungs were splintered, its steps worn and misshapen. At the top the ladder was a crawl space, an open wooden hatch, through which sunlight shone.

I went first. Halfway up, Monte handed me one of the tripods. Lifting it over my head, I slid it through the opening. Arching my back to fit, I hauled myself through the hatch after it.

Up yet another ladder, we repeated the same process. And suddenly there hung the object of our quest, alone in the silent, drafty steeple, an upside down bronze cup. At its base, the bell is wider than a hula hoop, and it’s almost as tall as me.

“How old do you think this is?” Monte asked when he climbed through the hatch and began to set up his tripods.

Years ago I had visited Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell with its iconic crack. In comparison, except for patches of green patina and some light brown streaks, this one seemed in pretty good shape.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Monte smiled. “It’s really old,” he said.

“Really old?”

Monte nodded. “Really, really old.”

Pastor Jon, a portly man, had lagged behind us in our trek up the ladders. Now his head poked through the hatch.

“Paul Revere made them to last,” he huffed.

“Paul Revere?” I asked. “This bell was cast by Paul Revere?” So, just as I thought, this bell was older than the Liberty Bell, but only by twenty years.

“It came to this church in 1796,” Pastor Jon said.

“That’s why I wanted to come here,” Monte explained. He picked up his camera and attached it to one of the tripods.

Gingerly, placing my feet carefully on the slanting slate floor, I circled the bell.  Around its upper circumference there’s a somber inscription: “The living to the church I call, and to the grave I summon all.”

According to Pastor Jon, Revere cast the bell mostly from copper and a bit of tin. He added a pinch of silver because he believed that it added a nice tone to the bell’s sound. Metal is ageless, but, like all whom the bell summons, wood isn’t. Revere’s bell is suspended from a rusty iron yoke, and the yoke is attached to a wooden wheel, much like a wagon wheel, that used to swivel to make the bell toll. The wooden wheel, probably the original, is beyond decrepit. Today a hammer strikes the bell.

“I’m switching to a fish eye lens now,” Monte called. “Jon and Ann, move over so you’re standing opposite me.”

“Sometimes I wonder if this bell should be in a museum,” Pastor Jon said as Monte snapped more pics, “but I feel that it belongs here on the Green where so much has happened since Paul Revere’s time.”

How many gatherings had this bell witnessed over the centuries? How many Sunday services? How many funerals? How many community events? I thought of the demonstration on the Falmouth Green that I had just left -  and where I had heard this bell toll at eleven o’clock, not quite an hour ago. And I realized that Paul Revere would have been more than satisfied to discover that Americans’ predilection for resistance has persisted for well over these two hundred years.

That’s me with Pastor Jonathan Drury behind Revere’s bell.

           

Monte’s beautiful photo is posted online. You can view it at Ocean 1047’s  Facebook page.

 As of yesterday, it had 2200 views.

Sea Serpent or Shipwreck?

I love to walk, and when I'm walking I carry my cell phone. Sandwich is a beautiful town, and sometimes I snap a few photos. I walk in my neighborhood. I walk along the canal. I walk from the library, past Town Hall, and over to Wing School. And sometimes I park at the Sand Hill School and walk to the boardwalk. Close to the Sand Hill School, Dock Creek flows under Dewey Avenue and meanders through the salt marsh toward Town Neck Beach. High tide regularly floods the marsh. Low tide exposes rotted wooden posts that project from the mud like the skeletal teeth of a long-deceased  sea serpent or the hull of a decaying shipwreck.

Dock Creek at low tide.

Ruling out sea serpent, I wondered if, perhaps, a long time ago, some kind of ship had sunk in the creek.

Recently while reading my emails, I came across an announcement from Bridgewater State University's Cape Cod campus. Dr. Calvin Mires, a marine archaeologist, was coming to speak at the South Yarmouth campus about shoreline shipwrecks. Dr. Mires investigates not only shipwrecks, but also wharves, seaside communities, and maritime landscapes.

Dr. Calvin Mires offers educational and training opportunities to citizen
scientists of all ages in Massachusetts.

Perfect, I thought. Just the man to answer my questions about Dock Creek. But when I checked my calendar, I realized I couldn't go to his talk. So I emailed him instead, attaching my photo of the creek bed along with an aerial photo of the marsh.

Dock Creek appears under the letters www. 

While I waited for Dr. Mires's response, I stopped by the Wing Fort House on Spring Hill Road, another nice place to walk, and talked to caretaker and  archaeologist Dave Wheelock. 

"Some Sandwich natives think those rotting pieces of wood could be the remains of the Sandwich glass museum's dock," Wheelock said. So that could be how the creek earned its name, I realized. "But others think the wooden posts could be what's left of some old fishing shacks," he added. Both explanations made sense. Dock Creek is close to the site of the 19th century glass museum, and fishermen frequent the area.

A couple of weeks passed before Dr. Mires responded to my email, and he seemed quite interested in my photos. He wrote that a friend had mentioned Sandwich's cultural resources, and he had already visited Sandwich to search for possible archeaological sites. But he didn't discover Dock Creek. "Your photos provide wonderful information," he wrote. "I have some immediate thoughts, but honestly with so little uncovered it is premature to say. I would enjoy seeing these features in the near future."

We arranged to meet early on a sunny morning when the tide was low.

Dr. Mires clambered over the guard rail that separates the road from the creek and strode through the marsh in worn sandals. He located a couple of raised areas and kicked at the flattened marsh grass. Underneath were piles of old bricks. He looked around, surveying the area. "This must have been a dock for the glass factory," he decided. "They probably loaded shipping crates onto small boats or barges that carried the crates to deeper water where larger ships were waiting. The rotted wood structures were probably posts or pilings that held up the dock."

As we were leaving, he picked up a rotting board with a metal piece attached to it. "I can tell you with certainty the age of this piece," he said. "The metal was made in the late 1800s. It was probably part of an old bridge."

I thanked Dr. Mires for his visit, and we talked about a project he's involved with now at Pilgrim Hall, the reconstruction of the 1626 Sparrow-Hawk shipwreck, discovered Orleans in 1862.

According to Pilgrim Hall's website, "After being wrecked in 1626, the Sparrow-Hawk was buried in sand and mud in a part of Orleans later known as "Old Ship Harbor." The timbers were visible from time to time until 1862, when they were uncovered in a great storm. The ancient hull was removed and reassembled."

Another quest for another time? Hopefully, yes.

On the Trail of William Wood, One of Sandwich's Ten Men

There are times when I'm in the midst of writing about history that I wonder why I chose this task. Why didn't I choose to write about someone who's actually living and breathing? Someone like Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Downey, Jr., or even Brad Pitt? 

      

          I envy authors who write current biographies. They can search the internet for news articles. They can read People magazine with its juicy gossip and glossy, color-saturated photos. And, of course, they can arrange to interview their glamorous subjects in fancy restaurants where they can sit in comfortable chairs and talk and laugh and share numerous bottles of expensive red wines. But after gathering dry facts from dry history books and poring through dusty archive files containing the occasional grainy photo, a historical biographer like me can only get to know her subject by using her imagination. 

          After reading more than a few history books, I still knew relatively little about my subject, William Wood, other than that he was one of the Ten Men of Saugus who founded the town of Sandwich in 1637. There were no cameras back then, and no one painted a portrait of him. He was about twenty when he came to America, and he must have dressed like a Pilgrim or a Puritan. Maybe he looked something like this:

          Not exactly sexy. Definitely not Brad Pitt. But William Wood was an author, and for me, that's cool. He wrote New England's Prospect, and he was also Sandwich's first town clerk. 

          Town clerks write. They record marriages, births, and deaths. It makes sense that the early settlers would have chosen Wood to be town clerk because he liked to write - and he was good at it; he had written and published a book. I knew it would be hopeless to find any artifacts that Wood left behind; something like that wouldn't help me much anyway. But I wondered if I might be able to find a document he wrote. 

          Historic imagination has to be fueled by facts gleaned from documents and artifacts. Documents contain written words. Artifacts are things made by human beings, things like arrowheads and blunderbusses, wooden butter churns and pocket watches, 45mm record players and Model T Fords. Artifacts like these reveal a lot about how things were done at the time the artifact was made. Very old documents are also considered artifacts because historians can learn a lot from them about how things were done during the time when they were written.

          To feed my historical imagination, I visited Plimoth Plantation and talked to the young man who portrays Governor William Bradford in the English village to get an idea of what writing was like in the 1600s. Back then, girls were rarely educated, and those few Pilgrim and Puritan boys who learned how to write used goose-quill pens they made themselves and ink brought to them on ships as they arrived with more settlers from England. Lacking dictionaries, writers were creative spellers, and they formed their letters differently. For example, an f-shaped s was used when the letter s was doubled or used initially. Common abbreviations included wt for with, yt for that, and ye for the.

Plimoth Plantation's Governor William Bradford pens his journal, Of Plimoth Plantation. Notice the ink pot and quill pen.

First page of Governor Bradford's journal. How many misspellings can you find?

Sandwich's Town Hall Annex houses the Town Clerk's office.

          Next I went to Sandwich's town clerk's office on Main Street where some of the oldest documents in Sandwich history are locked in a walk-in safe.

          Sandwich's town clerk is Taylor White. Interestingly, Mr. White has an active interest in preserving town records and making them available to the public through his office. He is creating an electronic searchable database for 75% - 85% of Sandwich's vital records (marriages, births, and deaths) dating back to the early 1650s. He has already finished up to 1885, crosslinking the digital data to images from a book of records published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, an organization that helps family historians. Eventually genealogists will be able to visit Mr. White's office to search for information about their ancestors.

Sandwich's vital records are published in several volumes like this one.

          In the photo below, Mr. White is holding a book of restored documents dating back to 1650. This book contains documents from the early 1650s, when William Wood was living in Sandwich.

Town Clerk Taylor White

          After Mr. White handed me the book of documents, I set it on a side table and began flipping through the pages, looking carefully at the dates. I knew that William Wood sold his Sandwich property sometime in the spring of 1650, so if I wanted to find something he wrote as town clerk, it would have to be dated before then. It didn't take me long to find what I was looking for.

Jan. 4th, An. [in the year]1650  It is agreed upon by the towne to pay unto Richard Bourne 20 shillings... in consideration of his labour and paines that he has taken in businesse concerning the towne... 

          This document most likely was penned by William Wood. Hurrah! 

          Besides imagination, historians are infected by another disease of the mind and heart, and that disease's name is Curiosity. Now that I had found a document written by William Wood, I wondered what his signature might look like. “I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. But most of us also remember that curiosity killed the cat. It can also bring great surprises and deep disappointment. Even though he's not Brad Pitt, I hope you'll continue to read the next installments of my blog to discover what surprises and disappointments were in store for me as I contined to delve into William Wood's life story. 

Helpful Link for the Curious:

For more on early 17th century penmanship: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mosmd/pilpen.jpg 

Why the Wrong Spelling Can Sometimes Be Right, or How Mapmakers Collaborate

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And then, in 1507, Martin Waldseemüller did his best to map it.

"A Map of the World According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci," 1507

Waldseemüller's map is huge, 54 x 96 inches, and it's famous, not because he was the first to try to draw the world, but because he wrote the word America on the continent we call South America. Waldseemüller obviously had no idea how big North and South America actually are, but he got a lot right compared to past mapmakers.

How did Waldseemüller figure out how to draw his map? He wasn't a surveyor, he didn't have satellites or a GPS, and he had never travelled very far from his homeland, Germany. But he studied maps drawn by others and listened to explorer's stories.  In particular, he paid attention to a story told by explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who proposed in a letter that the lands Columbus discovered were a “New World, because none of those countries were known to our ancestors . . . I have found a continent in that southern part more populous and more full of animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa.”

Fast forward a hundred years, and along came John Smith, an Englishman who earned his fame in Jamestown, Virginia, explored the New England coast, and mapped New England from Maine south to Cape Cod, among other accomplishments. To draw his map, Smith probably used a compass, astrolabe, sextant, and a lead line to measure ocean depth.

astrolabe

compass

sextent

John Smith's 1616 map, New England Observed

Before William Wood's 1629 voyage to Salem, historians believe he probably saw and studied John Smith's map, and then in 1634, he drew his own.

As far as we know, Wood never drew any other maps, and he probably wasn't a surveyor or mapmaker. So how did he draw such a relatively accurate map? I didn't have a clue until one day when I happened to randomly enter the title of Wood's book, New England's Prospect, into a google search bar. Fortunately, I mispelled the title, omitting the apostrophe and s, and this is what I found: New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, a periodical, it turned out, that's available only in a few places, including Brown University. A few days after I made that accidental spelling mistake, I drove to Providence, Rhode Island to do some investigating.

John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI

Interior, John Carter Brown Library

I called ahead, so it didn't take long for the librarian to deliver this booklet to me.

And inside, this is what I found:

Map of Boston area drawn by unknown surveyor for Governor John Winthrop, 1633,
with notations written by the governor.

"A map of considerable importance in understanding the early toponymy [place names] of eastern Massachusetts is Governor John Winthrop's manuscript plan of the Bay Colony plantations, apparently drafted in 1633 and thus probably the basis for the noted William Wood map in New England's Prospect of 1634. The Winthrop plan depicts the overlap between native and English settlement with great accuracy. Clearly shown are the Indian wigwams on the Mystic and Neponset Rivers with the Puritan plantations set along the Charles River from Boston to Watertown," wrote Professor Arthur J. Krim.

I like to imagine the people William Wood met in his travels. Was Prof. Krim suggesting that William Wood met with Governor Winthrop and looked at his map before drawing his own? It seemed to me to be so.

Governor John Winthrop, 1587 - 1649

For more about Martin Waldseemüller's map: 

http://cartographic-images.net/Cartographic_Images/310_1507_Walds.html 

For more about John Smith: 

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/john-smith-coined-the-term-new-england-on-this-1616-map-180953383/#OXIxbhPMuP27qcRo.99

John Smith's map: 

https://www.penobscotmarinemuseum.org/pbho-1/collection/john-smiths-map-new-england-1616

For more about Governor Winthrop's map: Narrative and Critical History of America by Justin Winsor, Vol. 3, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1884, note on page 381. (Professor Krim referred to Winsor.)

https://archive.org/stream/narrativecritica03wins#page/n0/mode/1up

The Cratchets at Plimoth Plantation

Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim from the TV cartoon Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol came to mind today while I was visiting Plimoth Plantation. Remember Tiny Tim's wooden crutch? It looked like it was cut from the forked branch of a tree.

I visited the Pilgrim village because I was trying to get an idea of what life must have been like for Sandwich's founding fathers, William Wood in particular. When Wood left Sandwich in 1650, he sold his house and land to James Skiffe. According to the deed, Wood's property included "...one barne and staules for cattle adjoined thereunto together with... upland and meadows, tilled or untilled, fenced or unfenced... and also all the dounge and mannure alreddy made..." Wood was a farmer who, like most farmers of this time, kept animals like sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, and cattle. He also owned eight acres of marshland between his house and what is today Town Neck Beach.

 Cattle near a Gate, Saltholm 

by Theodor Philipson (1840 - 1920)

Having seen English paintings of cattle grazing by the sea, I was curious to know if farmers like Wood allowed their cattle to graze on the marsh.

In the village's fort, I met Bill Rudder, who seemed to know lot about the village's cattle, and he recommended that I search through Plimoth Plantation's website to find the 1627 Plimoth Colony Division of Cattle that names each one of the colonists, adults and children, the cattle they owned, and often the name of the ship that transported each of the cattle. Thus, "The fourth lot fell to John Howland & his company Joyned to him his wife To this lot fell one of the 4 heyfers Came in the Jacob Called Raghorne." (Jacob was the name of the ship and Raghorne the cattle's name.) And "The eleventh lott ffell to the Governor Mr William Bradford and those with him, to wit, his wife To this lott fell An heyfer of the last yeare wch was of the Greate white back cow that was brought over in the Ann..."

"Did cattle actually graze on salt hay?" I asked Bill. 

"Yes," he nodded. "If fact, because the cattle would sink in the marsh mud, farmers would attach wooden shoes to their hooves."

Bill Rudder, Plimoth Plantation's Manager of Historical Built Landscapes

Turns out Bill has been working at Plimoth Plantation for twenty years, and he manages the construction of the historical landscapes there. He happened to be touring the village with a high school student who would soon be taking on the role of eighteen year old Mary Buckett who eventually married Pilgrim George Soule. I was happy to join them as they wandered through the Pilgrim's houses. 

Rose the Red Devon Heifer

"What kind of houses did the earliest settlers build during their first difficult months and years in America?" I asked Bill. But he didn't answer right away. First he showed Mary and me a house that was built with a standard construction method. Then he showed us an example of reverse construction. It wasn't until we found Rose, the village's red Devon heifer, in a fenced-in pasture that Bill showed me what I was looking for by pointing out Rose's rude shelter. 

"That's the kind of building most settlers lived in during their first year," Bill said. "Some constructed wigwams like the natives. Some built lean-tos. But this was built using cratchets that are pounded into the ground."

"Cratchets?" I asked, thinking of Bob and Tiny Tim Cratchit.

"Cratchets," Bill nodded. "Tree trunks with natural forks at the upper end. The Y of the fork is used for support." 

In the photo below, you can clearly see the post on the left corner that's holding up a crossbeam and another cratchet that supports the roof's ridge beam. Do they look like Tiny Tim's crutch? I thought so. I also thought it must have been awfully uncomfortable for William Wood and the other early settlers as they adjusted to their new home.

Rose's Shelter

More Photos of Harvard's Houghton Library

HERE'S A QUOTE I FOUND AT THE hARVARD gAZETTE'S WEBSITE WITH SOME OF MY PHOTOS:

( HTTP://NEWS.HARVARD.EDU/GAZETTE/STORY/2013/09/HOUGHTONS-HEROES/ )

"S
tepping inside Houghton Library on the south side of Harvard Yard feels far more like entering a museum than a typical library. Behind the mesh, glassed-in displays, and roped-off rooms, Houghton Library is the primary repository for rare books and manuscripts at Harvard. Exhibitions are common here and have included the personal effects, notes, books, and other objects of interest from authors such as Copernicus, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Edward Lear, Dante Alighieri, Tennessee Williams, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Miguel de Cervantes, and Lewis Carroll. Although the items are protected from touch, a lovely intimacy with the books and artifacts can be achieved. Walking through Houghton’s rooms, each piece of history tells its tale as it is carefully and thoughtfully displayed for the viewer to experience. One could visit many times and find something new each time within the depth of Houghton’s materials."

A portrait of Herman Melville

    One view of the reading room. That oil painting on the right is an amazing portrait of Theodore Roosevelt.  
               

This is a hologram of Mr. Houghton himself with a model of the library.

A meeting room with displays.

This another view of the reading room where much research takes place. It's where I viewed New England's Prospect.