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 one the tree stands right beside the camera as we look south toward the bridge. Here 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.