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.