A trip back to the start of summer vacation
"There are three wants which can never be satisfied," Emerson once wrote: "that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, 'Anywhere but here.' " As "Always Delightfully Cool" charmingly demonstrates, a large and popular industry grew up in New England during the 19th century determined to prove Emerson wrong on that last count.
The exhibition, which runs at the
The word "vacation," in the sense of an extended leisure trip, did not enter general currency in American English until after 1850. "Always Delightfully Cool" shows how quickly the term took hold. This was an age that predated air conditioning but now had railroads and steamships. So there was both a strong inducement to seek cooler climes and the means to do so.
New England offered ideal conditions for the nascent leisure-travel industry. Besides having a relatively large and affluent population, it offered travelers both seashore and mountains. Regular steamship service to the North Shore from Boston began as early as 1817, and the White Mountains were commonly referred to as "the American Alps."
"Always Delightfully Cool" includes maps, sheet-music covers, guidebooks, timetables, and the like, as well as engravings, drawings, photographs, and lithographs. The best-known artists here are Fitz Henry Lane and Winslow Homer, with a lithograph and engraving, respectively. Frederic Edwin Church, though not represented in the show, figures in it, nonetheless. Bar Harbor, once dismissed as a "barren and almost worthless waste," flourished in the years after the Civil War - thanks, in part, to the impact made by Church's paintings of Mount Desert.
The show's concerns are less aesthetic than historical: the way New Englanders' summertime habits and their attitudes toward leisure evolved over the course of the 19th century. Not that some things haven't remained constant. A lithograph shows the layout for a proposed development on Cape Ann, at Pigeon Cove, from the early 1870s. A few changes here, a few changes there, and it could grace a brochure promoting a Florida retirement community.
Nahant was one of the first resort destinations, thanks as much to its proximity to Boston as its scenic setting. "Nahant House," a lithograph from the mid-1850s, shows a particularly impressive hostelry there. Established in 1823, it later expanded to accommodate up to 500 guests.
The North Shore was tonier than the South Shore. Nahant, for example, never became a day destination, as Nantasket Beach did. Only an hour away from Boston by either train or boat, it was "a grand place for 'a good time' in a democratic way," a guidebook declared.
Then even more than now, perhaps, leisure travel exhibited a fundamental conflict between popularity and exclusivity. Popularity meant more people paying - while exclusivity meant fewer people paying more. What's striking about these images is how rarely they emphasize people, and certainly not people in crowds. Instead, hotels, ships, railroad cars dominate. It's a world that emphasizes what and where rather than who. Travel as yet was such a novelty that the idea of personalizing it, as is done today, seemed irrelevant. The cool that was always so delightful back then meant the temperature. Now, of course, it refers to something quite else.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
