Coastal Chronicle

Joppa Landing, in Newburyport, Mass., once a major China Trade port.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Coastal New England: Its Life and Past, by William F. Robinson, is the best popular history I’ve read of our shoreline and its offshore from Eastport, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn., from about 1500 to the 1980s. This coffee-table tome tells sociological, political, economic and environmental stories with scholarly rigor combined with mass market accessibility and droll (and sometimes dark and snarky) humor, showing the beautiful (such as coastal vistas and artists) and the ugly (wars, slaves, smugglers, drownings, etc.) and the full range between. It has a delightful assortment of illustrations – maps, illustrations and photos.

Upland New England's golden age

Thetford Academy, Thetford, Vt., as seen in a 19th Century woodblock.

‘’The fifty years between 1790 and 1840 were the upland {of New England} region’s golden age. The people who came to push the frontier out of the New England hills during this half-century brought the region its golden age of national importance in many fields, such as politics, invention, and intellectual thought. Most visible was the example it gave of pioneer determination, and what it could do in domesticating the wilderness.’’

“By the 1790s, the whole of New England’s upland region began to take on a homogeneous character. From the affluent hilltop town of Litchfield, in Connecticut, to the modest little communities in Maine and upper New Hampshire, there were solid homes, vistas of cleared land, white churches, and active mills….Academies sprouted up in very country seat: ornate buildings, whose impressive facades promised an Athenian future for our young nation. The academies shared the village center with churches of many denominations – Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal – whose parishioners came north to escape taxes levied to support Congregationalism, then the state religion in Connecticut and Massachusetts.’’

-- From Upland New England: Life Past and Present, by William F. Robinson

The green in Lyme, N.H.