Lower Mill and Storehouse / Harrisville, New Hampshire

 

 

As the Society works to make more of its collections accessible to the public using new technology, it launches a new format for sharing images of its artifacts and documents online.

The Society is pleased to present 56 drawings and watercolors of New England mill towns by Marian Cannon Schlesinger, originally exhibited at the Society's museum from June 2008 through May 2009. 

As mill towns grew up across New England they became a prominent feature of the landscape of the region and became the genesis of industrialization in America, supporting the marketplace and fueling the economy for more than a century.

Marian Cannon Schlesinger is a landscape and portrait painter, as well as author and illustrator of children's books.  She was born in Franklin, New Hampshire, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She created views of 27 mill towns as they looked in the 1970s and 80s.
  

Read more about the exhibition and the artist.

In recognition of Black History Month, a new special issue of Historical New Hampshire entitled Ending Slavery North and South will appear by early February in members' mailboxes.  Three informative articles reveal the often forgotten but meaningful roles played by New Hampshire people -- black and white, men and women, famous and obscure, abolitionist and anti-abolitionist -- in the evolution of the antislavery movement from Revolutionary times to the Civil War.  

The so-called "first emancipation" took place in the northern states starting in the late-18th century, developing out of the colonists' struggle for freedom from the British and their growing awareness of the inconsistency of "contending so earnestly for liberty" themselves while denying it to others.  Yet when 20 Portsmouth-area slaves petitioned the legislature in 1779 to be given their freedom, a decision on this important subject was avoided, most likely out of concern that freeing New Hampshire's slaves would have a negative effect on the union of the 13 rebellious states. 

A pair of wood engravings

representing slavery versus freedom, used in the late 1830s above the masthead of New Hampshire's main abolitionist newspaper, the Herald of Freedom, published in Concord from 1835 to 1847.  

By the 1830s many men and women in New Hampshire, where slavery had become practically non-existent, felt compelled to fight for the end of slavery in the South, seeing their battle as a continuation of the achievements of the American Revolution. Others in New Hampshire "revered the founders" for different reasons, admiring the practical compromise on slavery that the Revolutionary leaders had forged to keep North and South united for so long.  For the latter, preservation of the Union was paramount.

This special publication, richly illustrated with the petitions, pamphlets, slogans, images, and newspaper headlines that were employed by antislavery advocates -- and with contrasting resolutions adopted in community after community by the anti-abolitionists -- will enable readers to better understand conflicting viewpoints that were so strongly held that they sometimes led to mob action, riots, and even arson.  Historical New Hampshire is a benefit of membership in the Society.  To our members, we say thank you!  To others, we invite you to join today and receive this special issue.