A New England paradox

The grand summer resort hotel Wentworth-by-the-Sea, in New Castle, N.H., in 1892

Inside one of the world’s largest factory complexes, the Amoskeag Mills, in Manchester, N.H., around the turn of the 20th Century

“{By the last quarter of the 1800s} tourists sought out the isolated or remote parts of New England, looking for an imagined world of pastoral beauty, rural independence, virtuous simplicity and religious and ethnic homogeneity. In these years, a trip to New England came to mean an escape from the conditions of modern urban industrial life, the very life New Englanders a generation earlier had been praised (and sometimes blamed) for creating.’’

From Inventing New England (1995), by Dona Brown