Jigsaw for August 15, 2026: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives/

History and geography are both wonderful at handing one a new perspective. In an earlier post, I pictured this valley first under a mile of ice, and then under Lake Hitchcock, its water halfway up Baker Tower: Lake Hitchcock

Today’s photograph gave me the same kind of time travel.

For a while I just sat with the feeling of the picture. Then I enlarged it, and noticed the tall tree standing out in the meadow, just to the left of the trees on the slope. It was the same tree from a photograph I loved so well I built a whole post around it: Ledyard Bridge, Now in Color. In that post, the tree stands right beside the camera as we look south toward the bridge. But now we are looking north, from the far end of the same view, and there it is again. You can even pick it out reflected in the river.

Stand by the river today and almost none of it shows. The meadow, the lone tree, the open slope have all gone back to unbroken forest. The river has changed too: about six miles downstream the Wilder Dam, finished in 1950, raised this whole reach some thirty feet into a still, wider “Wilder Lake,” drowning the low 1869 shoreline where the fields once ran down to the water. Look closely, though, and the little farmhouse on the point is still there, or one remarkably like it, hidden in the trees just above the new waterline. The two views will never quite line up, and that is the point of them: the quiet river of 1869 against the still lake the dam has made of it, with the old house still keeping watch from the woods.

You can watch the picture itself come back to life below. The routine is always the same: enhance the old scan, colorize it, clean and enhance it again, then frame it. When it was finished, my first thought was not “that is a fine old photograph.” It was, “that is a nineteenth-century painting.”

As it turns out, I wasn’t reaching. Painted in 1865, just four years before this photograph, Jasper Cropsey’s “The Valley of Wyoming” carries the some of the same elements and the same feeling as the view to the bridge: a lone tree framing one side, cattle in the grass, a farm beside a winding river, all in that soft, hazy light.

More from the Ledyard bridge and the river
Ledyard Bridge, Now in Color
Ledyard and Lewiston
Hanover Boat Association Outing, 1889

Full-resolution images:

1869, looking north (the puzzle image):
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/hero-1869-north.jpg

The same tree, looking south:
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/south-view.jpg

The same view today:
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/today.jpg

Jasper Cropsey, “The Valley of Wyoming,” 1865:
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/cropsey-valley-of-wyoming-1865.jpg

The making-of, frame by frame:
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/01-raw-scan-1869.jpg
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/02-enhanced-bw.jpg
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/03-colorized.jpg
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/04-cleaned.jpg
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/ledyard-perspectives-hires/05-cropped.jpg

Thanks for your support, as always,
Cameron Cross

Sources: 1869 and late-1800s photographs courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College (free to use, attribution appreciated). Jasper Francis Cropsey, “The Valley of Wyoming,” 1865, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain). Present-day photograph by Cameron Cross, 2026.

Jigsaw for August 9, 2026: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/gills-store-norwich

This photograph of Gill’s Store, taken in the 1930s, is a favorite of mine. Gill’s took its name from the Gill family, who ran it until Russell Newcomb bought the store in 1955 and renamed it the North Country Store. It finally closed its doors in the early 1970s. The building has been an attorney’s office for years now; I have driven past it thousands of times.

Gill’s looks so inviting here: the two Coca-Cola signs, the Tydol pump on the Main Street side, a delivery truck pulled up to the curb on a bare winter day. But it was only recently that I really looked, and noticed these words on the third Coca-Cola sign: Fountain Service. Gill’s had a soda fountain.

I would be very happy if Norwich still had a soda fountain.

That little sign pulled a hometown “special place” out of memory, and it was not even Norwich I was remembering.

An earlier winter day at the same corner,
a horse-drawn sleigh at the door, the Tydol pumps already in.

The corner store

I lived a few short blocks from a corner store in Johnstown, NY. It was run by a stern older woman whose signature line, delivered to the whole line of boys and girls waiting to buy penny candy, was, “And yours?”

That candy case was a wonder. “Red hot” silver dollars, two for a penny. Little Coca-Cola bottles made out of wax, with a swallow of colored syrup inside. Wax lips and wax mustaches. Bubble gum. Candy buttons, those little dots stuck to a strip of paper. Licorice pipes. On and on.

On the other side of the aisle from the candy was the deep cooler, the chest kind you reached down into, and it held popsicles and fudgsicles and ice cream sandwiches, and those little cones topped with nuts and chocolate that we called Drumsticks.

To the left of the entry, there were comic books and magazines hanging from a wire. Mad Magazine, for instance. And down on the bottom row were the motorcycle magazines, which we were admonished not to look at, but...

But the crown jewel of the place was a three seat soda fountain with a marble counter. When you ordered a soda she squeezed out the syrup, added the carbonated water, handed you a straw, and you sat right there and drank it. The true attraction, though, was being able to order a flavored Coke. A chocolate Coke. A cherry Coke. A lemon Coke. And my favorite, a vanilla Coke.

And let us not forget the baseball cards, and the football cards.

There were plate glass windows on either side of the door.

The store had a name, Wiesner's, and it turns out I am not the only one who remembers it. It was opened in 1932 by the family who built the house and store, and it ran until 1970, when the woman who kept it retired after thirty-eight years behind the counter. Years later her daughter-in-law, Joanne Wiesner, who had worked that fountain herself, wrote of the place: "Many a cherry coke and vanilla coke crossed that fountain." I could not have said it better.

What was on the shelves

Look closely at Gill’s and you see it was a drug store as much as a grocery, the painted arrow behind the counter says as much: DRUGS one way, GROCERIES the other. The shelves are a catalog of the American mid-century pantry. Oxydol and Lux and Dreft and Ivory Flakes for wash day. Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and Pep, Quaker Puffed Oats and Puffed Wheat, and Swans Down cake flour for the breakfast table and the baking. A rack of Willson sun-glasses by the register. Ex-Lax and Band-Aid and a long glass case of patent-medicine bottles for whatever ailed you. A case of cigars and a wall of cigarettes. Bread and baked goods stacked under the counter. And out front, Tydol gasoline and Veedol anti-freeze to keep the cars running through a Vermont winter.

When Russell Newcomb bought the store in 1955 and renamed it the North Country Store, the shelves modernized, Star-Kist tuna, canned goods with the prices marked right on them, a beverage cooler. But having a neighbor behind the counter? That stayed the same..

The storefront with its signs “brought back to life.”
The delivery truck is a 1938 Chevrolet.

Gill’s about 1940, a Chevrolet coupe out front. Colors added for illustration
Bonus Puzzle: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/gills-store-1940

Inside Gill’s, the drug-and-grocery shelves and men at the counter

Play the puzzles again: the storefront in black and white at puzzles.curioustorian.com/gills-store-norwich, and Gill’s in color at puzzles.curioustorian.com/gills-store-1940.

Zoom in on the full-resolution images: the storefront, the winter sleigh, the color restoration, Gill’s about 1940, and inside the store.

More Upper Valley stores:

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Sources: Photographs courtesy of the Norwich Historical Society. Store history from the Society’s records (Wendell and Eileen Gill, previous owners; Russell Newcomb bought the store in 1955 and renamed it the North Country Store). Tydol / Flying-A background: Tide Water Associated Oil Company.

“Edward Hopper, “First Branch of the White River, Vermont
1938, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jigsaw for August 1: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/hopper-first-branch

You already know an Edward Hopper painting, even if you have never heard his name. A diner at two in the morning. Green walls, a curved window, three customers and a counterman who are all somehow alone together. That is “Nighthawks,” and it is about as famous as an American picture gets.

“Nighthawks,” 1942. Art Institute of Chicago. Shown here for contrast.

So here is the surprise. The man who painted the loneliest corner in America came north to Vermont across five summers between 1927 and 1938, and in the last two of them he painted a quiet bend of the White River, on a farm about twenty minutes up Route 14 from here.

Hopper first came north in 1927. He and his wife Jo had just sold a painting for the most money he had ever gotten, fifteen hundred dollars, and they spent it on a used car. That car turned them loose on New England. They crossed the Cheshire Bridge from Charlestown into Springfield, wandered the back roads, and Hopper decided that the valleys of the White River were, in his own words, “perhaps the finest in Vermont.”

In 1937 and 1938 the Hoppers boarded on the Slaters’ place, Wagon Wheels Farm, on Route 110 just outside South Royalton. Robert and Irene Slater took in paying guests to get through the Depression, and the famous painter from New York turned out to be an easy boarder. He helped with chores, though by all accounts he was hopeless at milking. When he set up to paint, the cows came to watch. Jo named one of them Susie, “the long lashed luscious chorus beauty of a calf.”

The picture he made there is the one in this week’s puzzle: “First Branch of the White River,” painted in the autumn of 1938. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bought it the next year, and when the curator wrote to ask how it came about, Hopper wrote back that he had sat “in a steep mountain pasture of Slater’s looking down on this stream, so very steep a hill that I had to prop up the front legs of my stool to keep from sliding down.”

He went to that trouble on purpose. Look closely and Hopper is quoting a much older painting. A hundred years before him, Thomas Cole had climbed Mount Holyoke to paint “The Oxbow,” the great loop of the Connecticut River, and founded a whole American way of seeing landscape from a high, precarious perch. Hopper knew it cold, and his sinuous curve of the White River is his own small, quiet answer to Cole’s grand one.

Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke … The Oxbow
1836. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That is the thread this whole series keeps pulling. The Hudson River School painters came north into Vermont and New Hampshire looking for views like this one long before Hopper did.

If you want to stand where he stood, the bend is still there on Route 110, just south of the old Slater farmhouse (here on the map). Fair warning, though. The steep pasture Hopper nearly slid down is grown over now, thick with brush and trees. The exact view he risked his neck for has quietly closed itself off. You can find the river. You cannot quite find the painting.

The book. Almost everything above I owe to one remarkable piece of detective work: Edward Hopper in Vermont, by Bonnie Tocher Clause, who lives part of the year in Royalton and spent years tracking down the precise spots Hopper painted, right down to the ones she drove past on her way to the post office. If this post interests you at all, her book will reward you tenfold. Track down a copy here. It went out of print when its publisher closed, so grab one while you still can.

More Upper Valley art history

Three earlier Curioustorian posts on the artists who worked these hills, each with a jigsaw of its own:

• Maxfield Parrish at the Cornish Colony

• Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Little Studio

• Paul Sample’s Beaver Meadow

This week’s jigsaw: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/hopper-first-branch

For the zoomers among you: zoom into Hopper’s First Branch of the White River at the MFA and Cole’s Oxbow at the Met at full resolution.

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Sources: Painting, First Branch of the White River, Vermont, 1938, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (public domain). Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain). Nighthawks, 1942, Art Institute of Chicago, shown for commentary. Research, Bonnie Tocher Clause, Edward Hopper in Vermont (University Press of New England, 2012).

This week’s jigsaw: puzzles.curioustorian.com/lindbergh-springfield-1927

On Tuesday, July 26, 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis at Springfield, Vermont. He had crossed the Atlantic two months earlier and was, at that moment, the most famous person alive. More than twenty thousand people came out to a hayfield to see him, in a state of about 357,000.

He came to Springfield because it had the only real airfield in the state, and it had that because of one man: James Hartness, machine-tool magnate, amateur astronomer, and former governor, who built it and, there being no hotel grand enough, took Lindbergh home to sleep at his own house.

He came to Springfield for the only real airfield in Vermont, built by former governor James Hartness, machine-tool magnate, amateur astronomer and a true Vermont luminary.

Hartness took Lindbergh home to sleep at his own house, a wonder in itself and still an inn today.

The reason you can see the whole crowd at once is that the photographer brought a Cirkut camera, the rotating machine I wrote about this spring. A. H. Bigelow came up from Brattleboro with one because it was the only camera that could hold Lindbergh and the twenty thousand who came for him in a single frame.

Here is the whole field he caught, with this week’s puzzle, the speaking stand, marked inside it.

Want to get lost in it? Open the whole panorama full size and zoom right in, twenty thousand faces, hat brims, and Model Ts, in fine detail. (Or the untouched original, Cirkut seams and all.)

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

How this week’s rabbit hole went

This one started with our almanac quietly flagging that July 26 had something timely relevant to The Curioustorian. Then it grew, the way these always grow, and then it came back down to the one picture above. In case you like the long way round, here is the trail:

1. The almanac hit. A date, a place, and a promising line: “Lindbergh Day, Springfield.” That was the whole of it to begin with.

2. The man who built the field. James Hartness turned out to be the real story: a lathe titan who gave Vermont its first airport, and whose home telescope grew into Stellafane, the birthplace of amateur telescope making in America. That is a whole post of its own, coming soon.

3. The tour. Springfield was one of 82 stops in 1927. Lindbergh gave nearly the same speech in every town and dropped a printed, identical thank-you note from the air on the ones he skipped, telling each place it was specially suited to aviation. He was, in the nicest way, selling airports.

4. The flight itself. On the way in he passed low over Rutland and dropped that note (a local doctor caught it, the Rotary Club framed it), and the Spirit of St. Louis flew right over Hanover and Lebanon on its way to the field.

5. And back to the picture. Twenty thousand people, one afternoon, one machine wide enough to keep them all. Which is where the puzzle came from.

One last thought. When Lindbergh told Springfield that aviation would remake Vermont, he was making a promise the region had heard before. Three generations earlier the railroad had come through and done exactly that, turning river towns into hubs and putting the map itself up for grabs. See the railroad routes of 1854, Union Station, and the Westboro rail yard. The airplane was simply the next machine to promise the same thing.

More on the camera:
what a Cirkut is · a gallery of panoramas · White River Junction, 1915

Sources:

• Photograph: “Lindbergh Day, Springfield, Vt., July 26, 1927,” A. H. Bigelow, Brattleboro, Vt. Library of Congress, Panoramic Photographs collection (https://www.loc.gov/item/2007663405/). No known restrictions on publication.

• Crowd figure, date, and route: The Landmark, White River Junction, Vt., July 28, 1927; The Rutland Daily Herald, July 27, 1927; the Log of the Spirit of St. Louis.

• Vermont population: 1930 United States Census, Vermont (https://vermonthistory.org/client_media/files/Learn/Census%20Records/1930-Census.pdf).

• Hartness and Stellafane: Stellafane / Springfield Telescope Makers (https://stellafane.org)

• James Hartness, American Precision Museum (https://americanprecision.org/profile/james-hartness/).

This week’s jigsaw: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/beaver-meadow

There is a talk this Sunday you will want to catch. On July 19 at 3:00, at the Beaver Meadow Chapel in Norwich, the Historical Society’s director, Sarah Rooker, gives an illustrated talk on the little hamlet of Beaver Meadow and the painting Paul Sample made of it, held right inside the building in the picture. If you are anywhere near Norwich, go.

The little Union Chapel sits in a small valley on Beaver Meadow Road, in West Norwich, with the burying ground on a curious knoll beside it.

The neighborhood built it in 1915, when New York City schoolteacher Margaret Kerr grew tired of the goings-on nearby, with a drunken brawl in front of her house spurring her to rally the community to raise a proper house of worship.

The bell that still calls people to service came out of a Sears, Roebuck catalog.

For decades the chapel ran a quietly remarkable thing called Home Prayers, a mail-order ministry that sent written services out to people who could not get to church, until it reached more than twenty thousand subscribers across eight hundred and fifty congregations.

In 1939, Norwich’s own Paul Sample, Dartmouth’s longest-serving artist-in-residence, painted this exact spot. His “Beaver Meadow” hangs today in Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, and it is one of the most admired canvases of the American Scene.

Paul Sample, “Beaver Meadow,” 1939. (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.)

Here is the painting on its own. You can put it together as its own puzzle here:

https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/sample-beaver-meadow

So come Sunday and hear the whole story where it happened. If you cannot make it, the Historical Society’s earlier program on the painting is recorded here.

Want a closer look? Full-size images to zoom in on: the chapel and cemetery, the congregation, the chapel head-on, and Sample’s painting.

Cameron Cross

Images: chapel, cemetery, and congregation, Norwich Historical Society (c. 1920s). “Beaver Meadow,” Paul Sample, 1939, courtesy Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Historic photos colorized by The Curioustorian.

This week’s jigsaw: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/lewiston

We are looking east from Lewiston, Vermont. That’s the last covered Ledyard bridg.

This post started out as a chance to see a beautiful summer scene that most people have never seen, and then to show you a related post. Once again, the rabbit hole opened.

The picture came from the Rauner library as a blue picture, a cyanotype. I asked for a black-and-white version, because I clearly wasn’t going to post that blue one as a puzzle. The black and white was fine, but then, why not make it more “realistic”? Why not a “true-to-life” rendition of what is now a black-and-white photo, and bring it back to life? See the image strip below.

I noticed the building in the middle horizon and realized that is the former Hanover High School (originally also housing the grammar school, both actually built on Allen Street.)

The school itself, up close. Photo by Howard Henry Harrison Langill, the Dartmouth Photographic Studio; Rauner. (Same Langill as our West Lebanon & White River Junction post.)

Here it is on the map, so you can see exactly where it stood:

There it is (blue arrow), "High School," right on Allen Street, in the 1928 Hanover map. See the original post and the full map.

Now the other striking thing. Beyond the Ledyard Bridge, to the left of the road heading up into Hanover, there is a huge sandbank that looks freshly excavated. And I realized that sandbank was lake bottom. See the post below about the lake, whose level once rose as high as the clock on Baker Tower. Baker Tower, of course, did not exist ten thousand years ago.

👉 The Lake Hitchcock post

Here is the same view, more or less, that I stood and took yesterday from about where the old photographer stood. The story of Lewiston’s demise is a sad one. Time marches on.

July 9, 2026

From an even earlier time. You can see Baker Tower in the left distance.

And West Wheelock is not finished changing yet. Here is what it will look like a few years from now: Dartmouth's rendering of the two new residence halls rising at 37-39 West Wheelock, due in 2028. Built of brick, as it happens, just like the old school on the hill.

37-39 West Wheelock as it will look when finished. Rendering courtesy Northstar Project & Real Estate Services / Dartmouth; architect Elkus Manfredi. Project page.

Feel free to share this post if you are so inclined.

Thanks for reading, as always,

Cameron Cross

More related posts and puzzles

1. Ledyard Bridge, Now in Color — the same crossing, seen from the river.

2. Hanover Boat Association Outing, 1889 — a summer row on the river below.

3. 1928 Map of Hanover — up the hill, where that road is heading.

   ---

SOURCES
Main photograph: “Ledyard Bridge Old 1,” 1899, Dartmouth College Photographic
Files, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; colorized by The Curioustorian.

School building photograph: Howard Henry Harrison Langill (the Dartmouth Photographic Studio, Hanover), Rauner Special Collections.

1928 map detail: from our own 1928 Map of Hanover. School history: History of Hanover, N.H. (1886).

Glacial Lake Hitchcock and the Baker’s-clock-face water level: “Hanover in the Ice Age,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, November 1957; see also our Lake Hitchcock post.

West Wheelock rendering: courtesy Northstar Project & Real Estate Services / Dartmouth (architect Elkus Manfredi), 37-39 West Wheelock project.

Jigsaw for July 4: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/four-score-and-seven

This week, America turns 250, and naturally we look back to the founding. So it is worth remembering perhaps the most famous example of a nation looking back at itself. It did not happen on the Fourth of July, and it was not written in 1776.

Abraham Lincoln delivered it on a cold afternoon, November 19, 1863, on a Pennsylvania battlefield where a few months earlier thousands had died. He spoke for barely two minutes. He was fifty-four and looks older, the war written all over his face.

Here is the thing most people miss. The Gettysburg Address is itself a looking-back. Lincoln opens by reaching all the way to 1776. “Four score and seven years ago” is eighty-seven years, and 1863 minus 87 lands exactly on the Declaration of Independence. He was not counting from the Constitution. He was counting from the promise.

And then he does something quietly visionary. He does not treat that founding as finished. He calls the country a nation “dedicated to a proposition,” and a proposition is something you set out to prove, not a thing you already own. The proposition was that all men are created equal, words set down in 1776 by some men who owned other men. Lincoln knew the distance between the sentence and the country. He did not pretend it away. He called the work “unfinished,” and he handed it to the living.

That is the optimism buried in a speech given over fresh graves. A nation is not a finished thing to be guarded. It is a goal to be reached for, generation after generation, no matter the cost. The founders wrote the proposition. Everyone since has been asked to further it.

Here is the whole of it, 272 words, worth every one.

The Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And no, he did not scribble it on the back of an envelope on the train, whatever you were told in school. Here is the proof, in his own hand.

Page one of the earliest draft, on Executive Mansion stationery, in ink, written in Washington before he ever boarded the train. So much for the envelope on the way to Gettysburg.

Page two. There are five drafts in Lincoln’s hand. The speech is spare because he cut and cut, not because it fell out of the sky. A man who thought the country itself was unfinished work was not about to leave his own sentences unfinished either.

The men who wrote “all men are created equal” did not live up to it. Neither, fully, have we. Lincoln’s answer was not to lower the bar but to keep the country dedicated to reaching it. Two hundred and fifty years on, that may be the most useful idea the founding ever produced.

Cameron Cross

Sources: Lincoln portrait by Alexander Gardner, November 1863, Library of Congress. The Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s hand (Nicolay copy), Library of Congress. Declaration of Independence, U.S. National Archives. All public domain.

Jigsaw for June 28, 2026:https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/true-to-the-declaration

“The American Declaration of Independence illustrated. An idealistic call for emancipation of the slaves. Borne aloft by an eagle holding two American flags is an aerial carriage similar to the basket of a hot-air balloon with two occupants: a black man who is a freed slave, his broken shackles falling to the ground at left, and a white man who proclaims, "Break every Yoke; let the oppressed go free." The eagle, like his counterpart on the arms of the United States, has wings spread and holds olive branches in his left talon. Here he also holds oak branches in his right. Above his head is a burst of light with the verses: "My rays, where'er on earth they strike, / Fall on the black and white alike; / That government alone is free,/ Which blesses all alike like me. The flags have the mottoes "All Men Are Created Equal" and "Stand by the Declaration." Below the carriage is a large crowd of people of all ages. Prominent are a Union soldier, a newsboy hawking the Boston "Herald" (left), and a free black man. Longer verses appear to the left and right of the carriage, espousing on moral and historical grounds the emancipation of the slaves. One reads: A man is a man howe'er dark his skin, /A heart that is human is beating within, / God regards not his colour – and neither should we, / Then unchain' the Negro – and let him go free.”

Source:
https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/YC2004665361/The-American-Declaration-of-Independence-illustrated

From an excellent New York Times essay about the words of the Declaration:

”The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.

This week’s jigsaw: https://curioustorian-cattle-boat-1910.netlify.app

Nine men squint at the camera on the deck of a cattle boat in June 1910, somewhere between Boston and London. Six of them are Dartmouth students working their passage to Europe. Two are English cockney crew. The young man behind the camera, Malcolm R. Lovell, had just graduated from Williston Academy and was on his way to see the world before college.

He never learned the six students’ names.

In 1910, signing on as a cattleman was a cheap way for a Dartmouth man to reach Europe. You showed up at the Boston or Montreal docks in your roughest clothes, signed on as an “ordinary seaman,” and for the next ten or fourteen days you fed, watered, and shoveled up after six hundred British-bound steers. The pay was nominal. The point was the passage. Many students did it.

A 1925 Dartmouth man, Charles Haywood, wrote it up for the Alumni Magazine in 1956. His cattle foreman, a “little gray-headed man with a red nose, a lush mustache and a hatchet,” boomed up and down the decks shouting “England this day expects every man to do his duty.” Bunks were coffin-sized. The cattle got seasick at the same time the men did.

Lovell kept his negative for almost fifty years. In December 1959, writing from Coral Gables, Florida, he mailed the photograph to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine under the heading “Who Are They?” He guessed the six students belonged to the classes of 1912, 1913, or 1914, and asked any reader who recognized a face to write to him. He offered to mail prints to any of the men still living.

We don’t know if anyone wrote back.

Sixteen years later, eight men from the Dartmouth class of ‘27 made the same kind of crossing. Half a century after that, the six still living were all serving as Alumni Fund class agents for their class. Their head agent wrote one line about his old shipmates: “Right fine people, these cattlemen.”

If you recognize a great-grandfather here, the Dartmouth Library would love to hear from you. So would I.

Cameron Cross

Sources:

Photograph by Malcolm R. Lovell, June 1910. Held by Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.

Charles F. Haywood ‘25, “Cattle Boat,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1956.

Erwin B. Paddock, “1927” class notes, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May 1980.

Dartmouth held its first graduation in 1771. And I’d always heard the line: Wentworth had a road built so he could go to Dartmouth’s first graduation.

Not quite true. For that first commencement, in August 1771, the road didn’t exist yet. Governor Wentworth and a party of about sixty had to come by a wildly roundabout route: north to his estate at Wolfeboro, then down through Haverhill, camping by the open road several nights in a row. It was that miserable trip that sent him home determined to cut a near-straight route from his Wolfeboro estate to Hanover — the Wolfeboro Road (you’ll also see it called the Governor’s Road) — which wasn’t finished until the second commencement, in 1772. So he did build a road for Dartmouth. Just not in time for the graduation everyone gives it credit for. Parts of it are still town roads you can drive today… but that’s a whole other post.

In my mind I’d always pictured Wentworth’s party as part of something smaller ceremony but still traditional and solemn — caps and gowns and such. The reality was rougher: a brand-new college in a clearing, four graduates handed plain slips of paper (the trustees lacked a quorum to grant real degrees), and a governor who’d basically just been camping.

And it’s easy to forget what that clearing was for. Dartmouth’s 1769 charter named the “education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes,” and the “Indian” stayed woven through the college’s traditions for two centuries — right down to the Sachem Oration, a commencement-season fixture that ran into the 1960s before quietly retiring along with the rest of Dartmouth’s Indian symbolism. More to explore about Dartmouth’s commitment to their charter.

The ceremony did grow up. By June 1953, President Eisenhower stood at Dartmouth’s commencement and told the graduates “Don’t join the book burners” — a quiet jab at Senator McCarthy that made national news — before a crowd of some 10,000. Forty-odd years later, in June 1995, Bill Clinton gave the address out on Memorial Field — which seats about 11,000 today, down from roughly 22,000 in its bigger days — in a soaking rain.

Which brings me to this week’s two photographs. Both come from the Bema — Dartmouth’s outdoor amphitheater in the pines — at ceremonies around 1910: straw boaters, women in long white dresses with parasols, men in dark suits and high collars. The figure standing on the rock with his arms raised, in the larger one, is giving the blessing. Back then the Bema hosted both graduation itself and Class Day, and I can’t tell you for certain which one each photo caught.

Play this week’s two puzzles → — two photos, so two puzzles; scroll past the first to find the second.

Today the Bema is still there in the woods on the north side of campus, a beautiful calm place amidst a busy campus and town. But the seniors graduate down on the Green.

Full-size images, if you’d like to study them: Photo 1 · Photo 2

Cameron Cross
for the Norwich Historical Society

———

Sources — Photographs: Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth (PhotoFiles). Eisenhower’s “book burners” address: Dartmouth. Clinton’s 1995 commencement: The American Presidency Project. The Governor’s Road: Rauner Library. The Sachem Oration: Dartmouth Archives.

Somehow I managed to make two posts last week,for a reason that made sense at the time. There was no second puzzle. Until now.

Jigsaw for June 7, 2026: Stockholm, Sweden, 1950 At a congress of physiologists, scientists from around the world being arranged for their conference group portrait.

I put all of the Vermont town panoramas together in a video. No soundtrack yet; play your own.

Thanks for reading,

Cam

Jigsaw for May 30, 2026: White River Junction, August 1915

The full panorama, looking north from the south-facing hillside above town:

Original Photo for saving or zooming
(Library of Congress, no known restrictions on publication)

Note the brick building with twin towers, slightly left of center. That’s the Junction House. It was renamed the Hotel Coolidge in 1924 and burned three months later. The Hotel Coolidge we know now is its 1925 replacement.

At the far left of the panorama, the cleared hillside drops down to where I91 now crosses over the White River. (For more on that view: West Lebanon and White River Junction and Part 2.)

I had it colorized; some people will prefer it. The white line down the middle is where the rotating lens passed itself mid-arc. (More on that strange camera here.)

This is the first of a small project. Between 1912 and 1917 a Brooklyn photographer named Henry Barreuther made at least eighteen of these of Vermont towns, plus a Connecticut and Massachusetts handful. The Library of Congress has kept them all, and we’ll be working through them this summer.

Next week, a follow-up on the strange camera itself.

Cameron Cross

for the

Norwich Historical Society

You may have already seen a Cirkut panorama without knowing it. The cabinet-sized device that produced this whole genre — group portraits like the one above, sweeping views of railroad yards, even hundreds of soldiers in a single frame — was patented in 1904 by William J. Johnston and built by the Folmer and Schwing division of Eastman Kodak. The halo is an artifact from the original scanning. The original print had no halo. And no, it’s not a wormhole into the space/time continuum.

Here's what one looked like:

A clockwork motor rotated the whole camera on its tripod. A slit at the back of the lens housing exposed a vertical column of film at a time, while a reel of long, paper-backed film fed past the slit, synchronized with the rotation. One squeeze of the bulb committed you to the entire sweep. You could not stop mid-arc.

The film came out in inches, not millimeters. Five, six and a half, eight, ten, even sixteen inches wide. The Library of Congress holds a 1906 Cirkut of Washington that runs twenty feet.

The Cirkut survived in commercial use into the 1940s. You can still see a working one occasionally, like in this 1950 setup in Stockholm:

The format had quirks. A person who moved during the sweep smeared. The classic trick was for the assistant to walk along behind the rotation, so they appeared at both ends of a group portrait. And if the sun was on one side of the arc, that side blew out the exposure. The Cirkut did not edit. It recorded the long, awkward, beautiful truth of what it saw.

The Cirkut took countless famous American panoramas — class photos, military reviews, baseball teams, town views. One example of that work is in this week's puzzle: a panorama of White River Junction, August 1915, photographed by a Brooklyn man named Henry Barreuther.

For the full rabbit hole: Cirkut on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirkut_(camera)), and the enthusiast site at cirkut.org.

Cameron Cross

for the

Norwich Historical Society

Jigsaw for May 24, 2026: Ledyard Bridge, Now in Color

View looking south at the Ledyard Bridge probably in the later 1800s. This was originally a “pre-Curioustorian” email-only puzzle, over a year old. I had it colorized; some people find it more engaging. Probably not Historians, though!

Note Mt. Ascutney in the far background and Lewiston just to the right of the bridge.

I found the now-wooded location by reconnoitering. (Or is that “connoitering” since I was doing it for the first time?). It’s on a dramatic knob just west of the railroad crossing on River Road in Norwich.

Worth noting: stand there today and you see exactly nothing of the bridge. The trees have closed the view entirely. Mother Nature bats last.

Original b/w Photo

For more on the Ledyard Bridge, see Dave Calloway's excellent post in the Norwich Times.

Cameron Cross

Jigsaw for May 17, 2026: Capt. Alden Partridge

Dave Callaway has a wonderful deeper look at his hiking prowess at the Norwich Times, starting on page 17

Stylized painting that hangs in the Norwich University Library in Northfield. Based on an 1842 lithograph. Behind him are the North and South Barracks on the original Norwich, Vermont campus. The Marion Cross School sits about where the North Barracks were (left).

If you live in Norwich, you know the name Alden Partridge. He founded the school that became Norwich University, and on its own that would be enough for one historical marker. But the more you read, the more Partridge there is. He had been superintendent of West Point. He served in the Vermont legislature. He spent his life arguing that a free republic should be defended by trained citizens rather than a standing professional army. To borrow Whitman’s line, the man contained multitudes.

Today I want to talk about just one of them: Partridge the walker.

His reputation as a pedestrian was prodigious, and I will admit I never quite appreciated it until I watched the recent Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution.

What stayed with me was not just the battles. It was also the walking: the sheer distances ordinary people covered on foot, because before the railroads that was simply how you got anywhere. Partridge took that everyday skill and pushed it to an extreme. For instance:

1. He walked the 110 miles from Norwich to Williamstown, Massachusetts, climbed Mount Greylock, and walked home again. The whole 220-mile round trip took four days.

2. In his mid-forties, he made the round trip to the summit of Mount Monadnock and back: 152 miles in three days.

3. On another outing he covered 300 miles round trip, finishing with a 64-mile push on the final day.

4. He once led a corps of pack-laden cadets from Norwich to Manchester and back, more than 150 miles, covering 45 miles on one of the days. Teenage boys, on foot, keeping his pace.
   
   Dave Callaway has a wonderful deeper look at his hiking prowess at the Norwich Times, starting on page 17. He includes an account of a casual hike from Norwich to the top of Mt. Ascutney and back….all in a single day.
   
   As I said: multitudes. This won’t be the last we hear of Alden Partridge. There is a great deal more about him than I ever realized.
   
   Thanks for reading!
   
   Cameron Cross

Jigsaw for May 10, 2026: The Rover

It’s the time of year when we’re seeing bicycles everywhere as cyclists are eager to be back in the saddle after being sidelined during the ice and snow.

I was curious as to how the bicycle has evolved since its beginnings, and was delightfully fascinated by what I found.

The term “Penny Farthing” came from the British coins of the era: the penny was very large and the farthing very small. However, this is more of a modern term. During their heyday they were known simply as “Bicycles.”

I started here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny-farthing

http://www.barthaynes.com/the-history-of-the-penny-farthing/

During this time, penny-farthings, also known as ordinaries or high wheelers today, were only for the upper middle class and high society. Many bike clubs in Britain were extremely picky when it came to who they admitted. All members of leagues needed an official recommendation from a current member and a costly uniform.

In 1878, Albert Pope began to manufacture the Columbia bicycle and did so successfully for two decades in America. After this, the penny-farthing trend died down and gave way to John Kemp Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle of 1885 (see puzzle) that more closely resembles the modern bicycle.

The penny-farthings are now a symbol of the Victorian era and a milestone in the launching of cycling as a sport. They are intriguing, and I hope to ride one someday.

Or not.

I have a feeling I might have a similar experience as Mark Twain had:

“When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it, then comes your next task — how to mount it. You do it in this way: you hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the tiller with your hands. At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg, hang your other one around in the air in a general and indefinite way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off. You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say tiller because it is a tiller; “handle-bar” is a lamely descriptive phrase). So you steer along, straight ahead, a little while, then you rise forward, with a steady strain, bringing your right leg, and then your body, into the saddle, catch your breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that, and down you go again.”

Some local photos:

Also of interest:

Pictures of an Aroostook County man’s homemade one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede

https://roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/jkstarley/

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/top10facts/855278/Ten-facts-Penny-Farthings-supper-club-event-London-high-wheel-bicycle

Early penny-farthing riders in American were known as “Wheelmen”.

Nearly seventy car makers began as bicycle manufacturers: Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC, to name a few.

The world record for distance ridden in an hour on a penny-farthing is 23.72 miles set in 1891.

Thomas Stevens was the first person to cycle across the United States on a penny-farthing, completing the journey from San Francisco to Boston in 1884. Whew!

Thanks for reading, as always.

Support your local historians!

Cameron Cross
for the
Norwich Historical Society

Jigsaw for May 3, 2026: St.-Gauden’s Little Studio

After my Maxfield Parrish post, I wanted to turn to his friend and Cornish Colony inspiration, Augustus St.-Gaudens.

I have visited his home Aspet many times. Like many of Parrish’s works, it always seems like a place with its own reality.

I first chose one of his famous works as the puzzle subject. Then I found the photo of his studio, which works perfectly for a jigsaw puzzle: striking individual pieces that combine to become a work of art in itself. No expanses of sky, vegetation, or background.

In 1885, Saint-Gaudens first rented what had been the Blow-Me-Down Farm. Seven years later he purchased the property, naming it after his father’s birthplace in France. Over the next 15 years, he transformed it into a thriving estate with gardens, a swimming pool, bowling green, and studio spaces where he created major works. He even developed a 9-hole, "cow-pasture" style golf course.

His year-round residence began in 1900.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens died in 1907, just after finishing the designs for the $20 Saint-Gaudens Gold Double Eagle coin. His widow, Augusta (!) Saint-Gaudens, established the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to maintain the site. It opened to the public in 1926.

Discover more: Interactive Map of Saint-Gaudens’ work
and Visitors' Photos, a sampling from TripAdvisor

Thanks for reading…

Cameron Cross

Puzzle for April 16, 2026: Daybreak

Maxfield Parrish created dream-like idyllic worlds. He often began with a photograph of a staged scene using family and friends.

And to think he did a lot of his work as part of the Cornish Colony, right here in Plainfield, NH.

I always get a kick out of proudly proclaiming
“Winston Churchill lived at the Cornish Colony!”

No, not that Winston Churchill.

Learn about the "father" of the Colony, Augustus St. Gaudens

Enjoy these other paintings in the same vein:

Learn more:

• Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park

• “Daybreak” on Wikipedia

• Many more works by Parrish
  
  Thanks for reading. Volunteer at your local historical society!

  
  Cameron Cross

Jigsaw for April 19, 2026 Phineas Gage

Many of us have heard of Phineas Gage and his famous construction accident in Cavendish, Vermont.

The gist of the story is that he survived an iron bar going through his head. That alone has fascinated people around the world and generated scholarly articles for over 170 years.

I had always pictured a man with a bar sticking out the top and bottom of his skull. But the reality is that the tamping iron blew completely through his head and landed several yards away. Phineas was helped (not carried!) into a cart, and brought into town.

Shortly thereafter, a Dr. Edward Williams arrived to find Phin. Gage sitting upright on the piazza of Mr. Adams’ hotel with a hole through his skull, calmly telling bystanders what had happened to him.

I remembered him quoted: “I’m going to need some doctoring.”

The actual line was: “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” By his own account, he never even lost consciousness.

The follow-up story, as most of us learned it, is that he survived but his personality was forever changed. He became irascible, unlikable, and “indulged at times in the grossest profanity.” But looking into it again now, it turns out those accounts were written by Dr. Harlow twenty years after the fact. And the change didn’t last his whole life.

In the years that followed, Gage worked at the Dartmouth Inn’s livery stable in Hanover, living in Lebanon. In 1852, he was recruited to work in Chile, where he drove a six-horse stagecoach on a 13-hour, 100-mile journey over rough mountain roads from Valparaiso to Santiago.

He stayed for nearly eight years, until the railroad came through. He returned to live with his parents in San Francisco, and died of epilepsy complications the next year, in his 36th year.

If you’re steady enough to handle a six-horse team on mountain roads in South America for that long, you’re probably pretty much in control of your faculties. The myth of a permanent change of character, repeated until quite recently, did him a disservice. What he went through looks a lot like what doctors see in brain injury patients today: impulse problems, a shorter fuse, difficulty reading social cues.

There’s a lot to read about Phineas Gage.

To explore further, visit some of my sources:

• Phineas Gage’s Story — University of Akron

• Harvard Neuro Blog discussion

• “Then Again” VTDigger

• Phineas Gage’s Great Legacy — NIH PMC

• Phineas Gage — Wikipedia

• A few chapters of Malcolm Macmillan’s “An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage,” the definitive scholarly book

• Extensive archive at Harvard

• Everything You Know About Phineas Gage Is Wrong
  Some new facts, including his time P.T. Barnum’s “freakshow “museum in New York

  
  Phineas was born in Lebanon, injured in Cavendish, recovered in Lebanon, worked in Hanover. I think of him every time I drive to Okemo.
  
  Finally, a psychology professor and his students made a stop-motion Lego movie recreating the accident.
  
  Of course they did.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Support the Curioustorian

Cameron Cross

Voluteer at your local historical society.

Jigsaw for April 12, 2026: Dublin Corner

This week’s puzzle features a colorized postcard c. 1907 showing the intersection of Justin Morrill Highway and the Old City Falls Road looking southwest. This was known locally as “Dublin Corner.”

As detailed in John Freitage’s wonderful article, some thought it may have been a little cluster of Irish settlers. John spoke with Suzanne Lupien, who farms with draft horses. She told him that the hill heading toward Vershire on Old City Falls Road was so steep that wagons needed to put on an extra team of horses. Hence “Doublin’ Corner.”

Seeking to verify, John asked around.

And that little building still standing on the corner? It was once Frank West’s tinsmith shop — the Strafford Historical Society tells its story.

Thanks to John Freitag for the inspiration, and you for your interest and support.

Cameron Cross