Where to cool off a hot public life

At The Fells

1905 postcard

Excerpted and edited from an article on The New England Historical Society Web site.

“John Hay called himself ‘the winner of all life’s prizes.’ He had fame, wealth, family, accomplishments, friends—and The Fells.

“John Hay was one of President Abraham Lincoln’s two secretaries, or ‘Lincoln’s boys.’ He also ran the New York Tribune, the biggest and most influential U.S. newspaper of its day. He served as secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. And as a member of an elite literary circle, he wrote bestselling fiction and poetry.

“On top of all that, he married an extremely rich woman.

“They had homes in New York and Washington. But the stress of being a rich, famous, successful statesman and journalist could get to be too much. So in 1891, John Hay did what wealthy gentlemen did: He built a summer home in the cool northern countryside, along Lake Sunapee, in New Hampshire.

“He called it The Fells….”

To read the whole article, please hit this link.

‘No light like it’

Cheery fall foliage brightens the cliffs of Buttermilk Falls in Gulf Hagas, Maine. Gulf Hagas is sometimes called “The Grand Canyon of Maine’’.

— Photo by Andythrasher 

“She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.”

— Joe Hill (born 1972, in Hermon, Maine), American novelist and a son of famed Maine writer Stephen King

xxx

"And there, next to me, as the east wind blows in early fall, a season open to great migrations, are those lives, threading the air and waters of the sea, that come out of an incomparable darkness, which is also my own."

— John Hay (1915-2011), in The Way to the Salt Marsh: A John Hay Reader. He was a celebrated nature writer who lived much of his life in Brewster, Mass. (on Cape Cod) and Bremen, Maine, which is on Muscongus Bay.

The southwest tip of Muscongus Bay at the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse.

In Brewster: Linnell Landing Beach, on Cape Cod Bay.

'Debris of civilization'

On Nauset Beach.

“Under its shifting sands, the Great Beach {Nauset Beach, on Cape Cod} hides the wrecks of a hundred ships or more, the debris of civilization.’’

— From “Stranded,’’ by John Hay, in the Autumn 1992 issue of Orion magazine.