This real-photo postcard, number 1416, looks north up Main Street from the corner of Elm. When Lois Overton posted it on Facebook in September, with the note "This is dated 1949," it looked familiar, and it sent me back to my own files, because I have run it before. So a tip of the hat to Lois, and thanks to her for the old photographs she keeps posting. They are a pleasure to come across.

Where this picture has been

Before The Curioustorian existed, these puzzles went out every Sunday by email to the Norwich, Thetford and Hartford lists, for the Norwich Historical Society. This one went out more than two years ago, on September 8, 2024. Or rather, it went out twice: the first email that morning linked to the wrong puzzle, the previous week's Union Village schoolhouse, and three of you wrote in before breakfast to tell me so. The correction followed a few hours later.

It was also meant as a pair. The week before, the puzzle was the 1898 village school on the green, now the Lewis House, and this view was taken a few steps away. That's the brick building on the right. The school has since had its own post here, The School on the Green. This one never made the move when the puzzles came over to Substack, so here it is.

Back then it went out in black and white. This time around I had Claude colorize it, and the puzzle is cut from the color version. The original black and white is with the full-resolution images at the end.

The sign on the pole

On the pole at left, above the weight-limit sign, hangs a round sign reading "Emergency Calls" and "A.L.A." That's the Automobile Legal Association, a motor club and an early rival of AAA. (My 2024 email called it the "American Legal Association." It wasn't.) A sign like this marked a place a member could get help on the road.

The ALA also published the Green Book, a touring guide with turn-by-turn directions from town to town, written for an age before numbered highways: "at garage: turn right," or "take the curve between church and cemetery." After that 2024 email, David Fisk of Post Mills offered the Historical Society his own 1926 Green Book, Volume 1, covering New England and Canada. More on that below.

The Green Book did not send its members down this street. The 1920 edition's Trip 216, White River Junction to Bretton Woods, crosses into New Hampshire at West Lebanon and runs north through Hanover, then up the New Hampshire side to Lyme and back across to Thetford, Fairlee, Bradford and Wells River. Norwich gets one parenthesis: "(Across the river for Norwich, Vt.)" It did get an advertisement farther down the same page. The Newton Inn, today's Norwich Inn, promised "electric lights, hot water heat, open fires" and, for the motorist, "garage and supplies."

The same corner today

More from Norwich

A word of thanks

To David Fisk of Post Mills, who gave his 1926 Green Book to the Norwich Historical Society. He offered it the same morning I sent out the correction for the wrong puzzle link, so something good came of the mistake. Thank you, David.

Full-resolution images

The postcard in color and as it came, the A.L.A. sign, the Green Book page and today's view

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Sources

Postcard courtesy of the Norwich Historical Society, colorized by Claude. Route and advertisement quotations from the 1920 Automobile Green Book, Volume I, Internet Archive. Green Book background from the Hopewell Valley History Project's 1924 A.L.A. Green Book page. Present-day view from Google Street View.

The source is the G. W. Bromley atlas of the City of Boston, the fire-insurance style property atlas that shows every building footprint, what it was built of, and who owned the lot. South Boston is plate 31. Two editions matter here: 1910, the neighborhood before the Dorchester tunnel, and 1919, the neighborhood after Andrew Square Station had eaten a block of it.

One thing to know before you look at any of them. Plate 31 is not printed north up. It is turned roughly sixty-three degrees, with north toward the upper right corner. Dexter Street runs very nearly due east and west on the ground, which is why it sits as a diagonal on the sheet. Get that wrong and nothing lines up.

Where to look first

1910, before

The lettering is the sheet’s own engraving, recolored so you can find it. Nothing has been pasted on top.

1919, after

The houses that stood on it are simply gone from the sheet.

The trench in the photograph is the Dorchester Tunnel, which is the Red Line now. Andrew station stands at the end of Dexter Street today, and it opened in June 1918, two years after the picture was taken.

Full resolution

Both complete plates, as scanned. They are large files and they reward it: the footprints carry owner names, and you can follow a single lot line across nine years.

Bromley plate 31, South Boston, 1910. 7,913 pixels wide, 5.8 MB

Bromley plate 31, South Boston, 1919. 7,926 pixels wide, 5.7 MB

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Sources

G. W. Bromley & Co., Atlas of the City of Boston, plate 31, 1910 and 1919 editions, and the outline and index sheet from the 1919 edition. Digitized by the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, which places them under no known copyright restrictions.

The 1919 plate at the Leventhal Center

The 1910 plate at the Leventhal Center

The index sheet at the Leventhal Center

One last post about moving buildings. It starts in Chicago, and it ends on familiar ground for many of us.

Nine in one day

Moving a building sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime event. In the nineteenth century it was ordinary. David Macrae, a Scottish minister, came into Chicago by train in 1869, and the first thing he saw on the drive to his hotel was a house coming up the street toward him. He pointed it out to the driver in amazement.

“Did you never see a house moving before?” said he unconcernedly. “No. Do your houses move about like that?” “Wall,” he said, “there’s always some of them on the move.”

The driver was right. “Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine.” Twice his horsecar had to stop and let houses get across Madison Street. People sat at the windows as they went by. One was a double shop, cigars at one end and confectionery at the other, and the shopkeeper stood leaning against the door-post smoking a cigar while his store traveled.

Whole blocks at a time

And it was not only houses. Chicago was built on ground too flat to drain, and it spent years jacking itself up out of the mud: office buildings, hotels, whole blocks at a time. In 1860 a 320-foot row of four- and five-story brick shops and offices on Lake Street went up four feet eight inches on six thousand screws, turned by six hundred men, in five days, with the stores open and the customers walking in and out the whole time. That is the picture at the top of this post.

Strictly speaking, that is a move too. The screwjacks just moved the building in the one direction nobody thinks of: straight up. The year after, five hundred men lifted the six-story Tremont House hotel six feet the same way, with the guests still in their rooms.

Boston did it sideways. In 1869 the city widened Tremont Street and would not pull down the seven-story Hotel Pelham to do it, so the whole brick building was slid about fourteen feet across its own lot. It took three months, and nobody moved out.

The church that walked

Now the one close to home. The Congregational church went up on the Norwich green in 1817, as the center of town was shifting south to Norwich Plain. Soon after, Alden Partridge opened the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy right behind it, the school that became Norwich University. Then in 1852 the congregation picked the church up, moved it a few hundred feet to where it stands today, and turned it to face south instead of west. While they had it in the air, they made it one bay longer.

Nobody wrote down how. Photography had barely reached Vermont, so what survives of the green as it was is this drawing. Count the windows down the side of the church: five. Today there are six.

By the 1860s somebody had brought a camera. This is from out on the parade ground, cadets drawn up by the flagpole, and that is the same church, portico and clock tower, sitting where the move left it and where it still stands. Note the now-hidden views to Willey Hill Road, and to what became the Pierce and Van Arman farm on Union Village Road. And the white fence went between the two academy buildings rather than directly next to Church Street.

That had changed by the time of the picture below.

Once you know that buildings walked, the Upper Valley reads differently. A Greek Revival house facing the wrong way. A hotel with mismatched halves. A church a few hundred feet from where it was built, facing south. Up on Thetford Hill, another one: the Congregational church went up on the town common in 1787 and was rolled off it in 1830, just north to where it stands today, still the oldest meetinghouse in continuous use in Vermont. Some of it is not odd at all. Some of it just moved.

And that is the end of the moving buildings. Next we stay on the Norwich green, because the barracks standing behind the church in that drawing never got to walk anywhere. On a March night in 1866 South Barracks burned to its chimneys, and before the year was out Norwich University had left town for Northfield. So in the end the building stayed put, and it was the university that moved. That is where we pick up.

If you want to see one go: in 2016 the Old Stone House Museum in Brownington, Vermont, brought its 1823 schoolhouse home behind forty-four oxen, with some help from a motorized carriage. Here is the video.

Earlier in this series

More Upper Valley

A word of thanks

To Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth, whose photographic files hold both the drawing and the 1860s view, and to the Norwich Historical Society, who keep the church’s own picture and have said plainly in print that very little was ever written about this move. They are right, and it makes the drawing all the more valuable. And to Charlie Buttrey, who pointed me to the church on Thetford Hill.

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Full-resolution images

The drawing of the green before 1852

The church in its new spot, 1860s

The church and North Barracks, about 1895

Lake Street, Chicago

The Hotel Pelham, 1869

Sources

The drawing and the 1860s photograph: Dartmouth College Photographic Files, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, courtesy of Digital by Dartmouth Libraries. The same drawing appears as a plate facing page 111 of Goddard and Partridge, History of Norwich, Vermont, 1905. The view from about 1895: Norwich Historical Society, gift of Richard H. Cummings.

The church’s origins, the contest between Norwich Center and Norwich Plain, the distance it traveled and the bay added while it was in the air come from the Historic American Buildings Survey report, HABS VT-53. A note on the year: the 1905 town history says 1852 in its text and 1853 in a plate caption, and HABS says 1853. I have gone with 1852.

Lake Street: lithograph by Edward Mendel, Chicago Historical Society, public domain. The Hotel Pelham: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, reproduced in Jean A. Follett, "The Hotel Pelham: A New Building Type for America," American Art Journal, 1983, public domain. The eyewitness: David Macrae, “The Americans at Home,” volume II, pages 190 to 192, 1870, public domain. Thetford Hill: the National Register nomination for the Thetford Hill Historic District, and Buildings of New England.

The Chicago figures are the ones the standard accounts of the raising of Chicago agree on. Accounts of the Pelham differ on the distance, from thirteen feet ten inches to thirty; the three months and the fact that it stayed occupied are consistent. The longer version of the method: the whole rig, stage by stage.

Jigsaw for September 5, 2026:
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/white-river-junction-1919

You are looking south down Main Street. The building with the long porch across the front and the pointed towers is the Junction House. Samuel Nutt started it in 1849 by hauling the Grafton House over from Enfield, New Hampshire. Let that sink in for a minute.

This is the 1879 replacement. Than Wheeler renamed it the Hotel Coolidge in January 1925. Later that same month, on the twenty-ninth, an oil heater exploded on the second floor and the building burned, the largest fire ever in White River Junction.

Today's Hotel Coolidge went up on the same foundation over the next two years.

Here is a trick question: which Coolidge did Than Wheeler have in mind? I will leave that one for you.

That open ground in the foreground is the Square, and for most of the nineteenth century it was not a square at all. It was a triangular swamp, and the village used it as a dump. A footbridge ran across it so travelers could walk straight toward the depot. They still had to cross the tracks. The village filled it in and planted it in 1902. The National Register nomination puts the rest in one flat sentence: the space, “originally a shallow swamp and later a tree-covered park, is presently a treeless parking lot.”

Fourteen tracks ran through the Junction at its peak. The day after the fire shown below, the Barre Daily Times argued for a new station built with “subways to the business streets of the village.” One was eventually dug, sometime in the twentieth century, though I have not been able to find out when. It ran from the station to these storefronts, carried the mail in its later years, and was blocked up around 1992. It is still down there. I wrote about it, and about the reader who had been inside, in the Union Station post: https://www.curioustorian.com/p/union-station

Play this jigsaw again: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/white-river-junction-1919

Full-resolution images

The two views side by side.

More from White River Junction

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Sources

Hero image: postcard captioned “White River Junction, Vt.” above the image and “The north end of Main Street, showing the Square in 1919” below it, publisher unidentified. The hero has been colorized from the black and white card; the colorizer predicts color for pixels that already exist, so nothing in the frame has been moved, added or removed. Second image: the present-day view, from Google Street View, color-balanced and cropped to the postcard's proportions. Third image: the 1911 station fire, which first appeared in our own Union Station post in December 2025; its original source was not recorded. The swamp, the footbridge and the parking lot come from the 1980 White River Junction Historic District nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, quoted on the Connecticut River Joint Commissions heritage pages: https://www.crjc.org/heritage/V11-8.htm . The Junction House and Hotel Coolidge sequence, the fourteen tracks and the tunnel blocked up around 1992 come from the 2018 update to that nomination: White River Junction Historic District, National Register nomination, 2018

Jigsaw for August 21, 2026: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/boat-outing-1889

The Hanover Boat Association went out on the river on a summer afternoon in 1889, and somebody stood on the bank above them and took this.

That is the Ledyard Free Bridge on the right, thirty years old when the shutter opened, and the fourth bridge to stand there after the ferry. By 1913 it carried more traffic than any other of the twenty-nine bridges on the Connecticut River north of Massachusetts. A steel bridge replaced it in 1934, and that one gave way to today’s bridge in 1999. It is worth taking in the details: women in long dresses with hats and parasols, men in a mix of three-piece suits and more relaxed outfits, many in straw boaters, and a crowd of spectators gathered along the far bank. In color you can see it was an occasion, and that the boats were painted red.

Six miles downstream the Wilder Dam went into operation on the first of December, 1950, and raised this whole reach some thirty feet into the still, wide water some call Wilder Lake. The low shoreline here, the little landing, the steps cut down to the water where those boats were put in, all of it is under the river now.

And it rewards enlarging. Thirty-eight people in the boats, one hidden behind a parasol, and another dozen watching from the bank. The uprights are not masts but thin staffs with a crosspiece near the top to carry the bunting, so nobody was sailing that afternoon. There is a small white disc on a birch partway up the bank that I took for a marker or a sign until I looked properly, and it turns out to be a speck of dust that was on the glass when the print was made. If you row, or know old boats, several of these hulls carry a fitting at the stern that I cannot identify, and I would be glad of your eye on it.

One note: you may or may not have seen this before

This began as a listserv email, and for a long stretch that was the whole publication. A photograph, a few paragraphs, sent out to the towns, and then gone. There was no website to go back to.

I did not invent it. Sarah Rooker, the Norwich Historical Society’s director, established the format and asked whether I would like to take it on. I have kept her structure more or less intact ever since: one photograph, what is known about it, and a puzzle to slow you down while you look.

When I started curioustorian.com, the impetus was to create an archive of the historical jigsaw emails to the listservs. I moved those old ones across quietly, a few at a time, with no announcement at all. They have been sitting in the archive ever since. Plenty of you read this photograph when it landed in your inbox in June of last year, and almost nobody has seen it since, because I never gave any of them a proper introduction.

They deserve wider eyes. So I am going to bring some of them back up front, one at a time, with whatever I have learned about them since. This is the first, and there are a number of good ones waiting.

If you would like these to keep arriving the way they always have, you can subscribe below. It is free. And if you spot something in the full-size versions that I have missed, message me.

Play the jigsaw again: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/boat-outing-1889

More from the Ledyard bridge and the river:

Full-resolution images:

In color (the puzzle image): https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/lost-posts-hires/hanover-boat-association-outing-1889-color.jpg

The original black and white: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/lost-posts-hires/hanover-boat-association-outing-1889-original.jpg

Thanks for your support, as always,

Cameron Cross

Sources

Hanover Boat Association outing, 1889, original photograph from the Rauner Library. Wilder Dam operating date from the Hanover Conservancy and the Norwich Conservation Commission; the dam began operation December 1, 1950. Colorization by DDColor, applied without redrawing or altering the original photograph.

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.

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

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.