Last updated: July 8, 2023
Article
Blow-Me-Down Farm and the Country Place Era
Between about 1870 and 1930, some Americans experienced a tremendous growth of wealth and time for leisure activities. Meanwhile, the extension of railroads made long-distance travel faster and easier. During this so-called Country Place Era, many wealthy families established rural estates including the Beaman family at Blow-Me-Down Farm. This article describes their attitudes towards the New Hampshire home and the cultural attraction to rural life by many during this period. The following was adapted from the Cultural Landscape Report for Blow-Me-Down Farm (2022).
decade of Beaman additions and improvements, ca. 1892.
Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park archives
Charles and Hettie Beaman gained their wealth from their families and from Charles’s law practice. Their permanent home was on Twenty-First Street in New York City and, on October 3, 1883, Charles Beaman purchased the old Chase home farm for eight thousand dollars in Cornish, NH. The country place would serve as his family’s seasonal home and be a showcase of rural improvements in the arts and agriculture.1
Hettie Beaman’s father, William M. Evarts, was a country-place pioneer in the upper Connecticut River Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire. In 1843, he married Helen M. Wardner of Windsor, Vermont, and they soon established a seasonal country home there, named Runnemede, which they developed into one of the finest farms in Windsor County.2 While its remote location from their year-round home in New York City was unusual and due to Helen’s roots in the village, the Evarts were following a long-standing tradition among the wealthy to establish country residences as model farms, also known as gentleman’s farms or country places.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the first country places appeared on the outskirts of Boston, New York, and other cities. These estates served both as seasonal residences and as places where agricultural and horticultural experimentations were undertaken for the benefit of rural society. Rural improvement was not, however, the sole motivation behind establishment of such country places. The elite in Boston, for example, also sought to create an identity for themselves founded on positive associations of rural pursuits in British culture among the aristocracy, gentry, and growing commercial professional class. Country places conjured up powerful associations, including the moral rectitude of industry, simplicity, and thrift, as well as retirement from the chaos of urban life.3
Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park archives.
After the extension of railroads and the despair of the Civil War, many wealthy New Yorkers followed the Evarts in establishing seasonal country places in the upper Connecticut River Valley. Among the most prominent was Frederick Billings, a Vermont native who made his wealth in Gold-Rush-era California and returned east to work in New York City. In 1869, he purchased the old Marsh Farm in Woodstock, Vermont and transformed it into a showplace residence and model farm (now Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park). In a speech at the 1864 Windsor County Fair not far from Blow-Me-Down, Billings foretold the reasons that would bring many to the region
Certainly the time is not far off when the people who come to Vermont to dwell in summer homes of their own or homes of others, from the month of May to the month of November, will be counted by the thousands. As the population of our country increases and wealth affords the means of gratifying cost & comfort, the dwellers in cities by the shores of the sea…—the seekers after health, the lovers of nature, the tired who wish for quiet rest…will gravitate more than anywhere else to this north part of New England, to these regions of health and picturesque beauty, to these hills and mountains and limpid streams and silvan rills, in deeper forests, now so many hued & gorgeous colored...4
The idea of creating a model farm and residence to harmonize with the beauty of the natural environment similarly motivated Charles Beaman to purchase the old Chase home farm in Cornish in 1882. He was, like Frederick Billings, motivated by the ideal of improving upon the existing rural landscape, rather than replacing it with something new and foreign. Both men retained and updated the old eighteenth-century houses on their farms, built new buildings according to traditional methods that harmonized with their settings, laid out ornamental grounds, raised choice livestock, and made old fields newly productive. Both also acquired surrounding farms and other tracts of land, many also with antique houses and worn-out farm fields.
looking northwest toward Blow-Me-Down Mill.
Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park archives
Beaman was not a transient resident. Like Billings and many other so-called city folks, he was active in the social and political affairs of the community, which is not surprising given Beaman’s substantial financial investments in the town. This was evident in his support of public amenities, such as his contributions toward the construction of a library in Windsor, the placement of a Civil War monument in Cornish Flat, and the improvement of River Road and its crossing of Blow-Me-Down Brook at the entrance to his estate. Beaman paid for the construction of a substantial stone bridge there in 1888, and also opened his nearby gristmill for community use, which included rebuilding the dam that created Blow-Me-Down Pond.5 According to a 1910 history of Cornish, “Few men, not natives of Cornish, have seemed more interested in its affairs, and have won the love and respect of their townsmen, more than did Charles C. Beaman, Esq.”6
Charles Beaman’s development of Blow-Me-Down and acquisition of surrounding farms began a period of country place development in Cornish that was born of the Beamans’ social circles. They invited friends, many of whom were artists from New York City, to visit Blow-Me-Down. Most rode the train from New York to Windsor, a nine-hour trip.7 Taken with the serenity and beauty of the landscape, many became interested in establishing their own country places in Cornish and adjacent Plainfield. Charles Beaman encouraged development of this community by selling friends portions of his outlying land that he purchased in the 1880s and 1890s, a total of 23 properties encompassing over 2000 acres. According to a 1910 account by local historian William Child, the Beamans’ friends
…saw the charms of the locality—the beautiful river, the mountain view, the verdant meadows, the wood-crowned heights, the pure air and gushing springs of water. Several [sic] of these friends were induced to follow Mr. Bea[1]man’s example, and came and purchased, not primitive land, but estates that had been occupied and improved since the first settlement of the town. To Mr. Beaman, therefore, belongs the honor of being the pioneer and promoter in this movement which has effected so great a change in the social status of the town.”8
One of the first to accept the Beamans’ invitation to Cornish was the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and his wife, Augusta. Augustus Saint-Gaudens had become acquainted with the Evarts family during their time in Geneva; he sculpted a bust of William Evarts in 1874. In 1885, Charles Beaman offered to rent them the old Mercer Farm up the hill from Blow-Me-Down that he had acquired and renamed Blow-Me-Up. After several years of renting, Augustus Saint-Gaudens purchased the property from Beaman and renamed it Aspet, after his father’s home village in France. He and Augusta improved the house, converted the barn into a studio, and developed extensive gardens.
The Saint-Gaudenses bolstered the Beamans’ social network, and soon the artistic community in and around Cornish grew and prospered. At its height prior to World War I, there were approximately forty-seven country places in the community, which became known as the Cornish Colony. An estimated eighty artists have been documented as owning, living, or participating in the community. For many Cornish artists, the rural scenery and tranquility inspired them to design an old-fashioned, informal character to their country places.9
Citation
Footnotes
1. Norman T. Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 427. The Country-Place Era relates to the practice of developing country places, not to a specific style of landscape or architectural design.2. Town of Windsor, Paradise Park Commission, “Lake Runnemede/McLane Parcel Management Plan,” Appendix 1, 1, online report, https://app.box.com/s/19s7ymu5hfib1tveyxjj6g21nwqb60i5 (accessed June 27, 2019). Lake Runnemede in Windsor was created by the Evarts family at their country estate beginning in 1854.
3. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven: Yale, 1989), 22, 25, 33, 106–08.
4. Frederick Billings, Agricultural Speech at the Windsor County Fair, September 1864, Billings Farm Archives, Woodstock, Vermont.
5. William H. Child, History of the Town of Cornish, New Hampshire with Genealogical Record, 1763–1910 (Concord, NH: The Rumford Press, 1910), volume I, 181, 237.
6. Child, volume I, 277; Jenny Fields et al., National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form, “Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site” (Prepared for the National Park Service by PAL, 2012) [hereafter, “Saint-Gaudens National Register documentation”], 15.
7. Child, volume I, 220. 12 Child, volume I, 278.
8. Child, volume I, 278.
9. Marion Pressley and Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Cultural Landscape Report for Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Volume 1 (Boston: National Park Service, 1993), 7. The Cornish Colony is recognized as one of the most important early art colonies in the United States. Saint Gaudens and the painter Thomas Wilmer Dewing were the earliest artists to spend time there beginning in 1885. See Susan Hobbs, “Thomas Dewing in Cornish, 1885-1905” American Art Journal, 17:2 (Spring 1985), 2-32; Christine Ermenc, “Farmers and Aesthetes: A Social History of the Cornish Art Colony and its relationship with the Town of Cornish New Hampshire, 1885-1930” unpubl. Dissertation, 14-16; “Cornish Arts Colony in Cornish and Plainield, NH 1885-1930—National Register Nomination Information: Statement of Historic Contexts,” http://www.crjc.org/ heritage/N08-16.htm (accessed June 28, 2019).