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Return to the Boat House

14 Friday Jun 2024

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, two new pictures of the boat house on the Seekonk. This was near to Lovecraft’s then home (from his roof “One can see the glint of the Seekonk through the foliage of Blackstone Park”) in Providence. The boat house is the most likely point at which the young teenage Lovecraft would have hired a rowing-boat for an afternoon. Yes, Lovecraft in a boat! He would at times land on the river’s Twin Islands, which are not on all maps but are on some.

I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft in a letter to Rimel, April 1934.

This newly found-on-eBay view shows the Boat Club side-on, and is a view of it I’ve not seen before. Regrettably I can’t get the picture at a larger size.

And here is a very tiny view from the year of Lovecraft’s death, in which we see the jetty from the water as if Lovecraft were rowing away from it.

Compare with the first appearance of “Dagon” with a similar rowing-boat…

It is possible sails were provided with the rowing-boats in Lovecraft’s time, as the Seekonk could be a dangerous river.

Another newly-found image of the boat house is this engraving, possibly done ‘on the spot’ by the look of it, showing the approach to the building along the Blackstone Park shoreline road in winter. The artist is Robert H. Nisbet, who taught at RISD in Providence.

And here we see the same approach in winter with photographic detail, which being somewhat elevated shows the tidal nature of the river.

The Seekonk’s occasional flood-surge was liable to spill over the road, as seen here, and Lovecraft tells us the water was still “salty” that close to the sea. Indeed at one point in the letters he states that the Seekonk was really a bay or inlet, rather than a river at that point. He had nightmares about the draining of the Seekonk here (“the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus”).

Just a little on and around the corner was and still is York Pond, where in summer Lovecraft liked to sit and write on the wooded bluff above the pond.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Blackstone Park

11 Friday Mar 2022

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This week, not postcards but more postcard-like gems from the collection of the Boston Public Library. Here we see Providence’s imminent Blackstone Park, circa the early 1860s. The pictures were in a brochure proposing the establishment of the shore-front park. Blackstone Park was indeed established in 1866, but 40 years later it had become a delight for small boys — since the city had allowed it to fall badly… “into disuse and neglect by the early 1900s”. This was when the young free-range Lovecraft knew the place as a boy, and thought he glimpsed flute-playing fauns in its dappled depths.

I’ve colourised the picture. We have to imagine another 40 years of growth added to this, and trees consequently much larger above the grassy rides and rills. Perhaps some of these watery “brooklets”, as Lovecraft called them, were by then dried up in summer. Since drainage of College Hill and the adjacent shore-line was changed, as the city developed and the local ravines were filled in or blocked.

Here is Lovecraft on the Park, writing in 1918…

Scarce a stone’s throw from the house lie the nearest parts of that beautiful rustick reservation known as “Blackstone Park” — wherein I have been wont to wander some twenty or more years. Here Nature unadorn’d displays a multi-plicity of agreeable phases; ravines, groves, brooklets, thickets, & Arcadian stretches of river-bank — for the park borders on the wide & salty [river] Seekonk. … How beauteous indeed is untainted Nature as beheld in so idyllick a spot as Blackstone Park! … I think this park would explain why such a born & bred town man shou’d possess such a taste for rural musings & Arcadian themes!

Lovecraft occasionally took favoured friends there. Here he is in 1927…

the next day we [he and Cook and Munn] lounged about the Blackstone Park woods beside the Seekonk — agrestick haunt of my earliest infancy, and true genesis of my pastoral soul.

And in the mid 1930s he was sitting on the banks of the Seekonk… “Almost every warm summer afternoon” or else he took a short trip up in the “the fields & woods north of Providence”.

Below we see, from the same Boston collection, Blackstone Park’s grassy water-meadow. Most likely this is the “meadow” marked on one map as being roughly in the middle of the park, and located back across the road from the Boat Club house.

Above we also see the edge of the “meadow” area in winter flood, in the context of the Boat House and the shore road. The river Seekonk often flooded over, and thus the meadow would have been seasonally a boggy salt-meadow in its lowest section. It’s quite possible that this Boat House was the point from which the young Lovecraft set off on his solo rowing expeditions on the Seekonk. It was then a difficult and somewhat dangerous river to be out on in a small boat. Yet he became skilled enough with his boat and the river currents to land on the mud-squelching “Dagon”-like ‘Twin Islands’, so rarely shown on maps. Here is an exception.

This was the landscape of water and mud and washed-in sea-things which stirred his early nightmares of a drained Seekonk, and to which the genesis of his “Dagon” can be traced.

Modern seekers can note the boathouse and the site’s current drainage channel here on the right of the current map. It’s my recent composite of a 1972 bird’s-eye picture I found and a modern outline map of the Park. By 1972 the trees were crowding in. If the river’s salty winter over-wash has since been kept out, then I’m guessing they may have now fully colonised the old meadow.

Friday Picture Postals from Lovecraft: The Seekonk and Blackstone Park

17 Friday May 2019

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The lower Seekonk shoreline does not seem to have been much photographed for postcards, and there are few postcards of it online and only one of York Pond itself (after the grading and extraction works). This is the largest I have of this particular card.

Here’s H.P. Lovecraft on the Park and shoreline…

“Scarce a stone’s throw from the house lie the nearest parts of that beautiful rustick reservation known as “Blackstone Park” — wherein I have been wont to wander some twenty or more years [i.e. since about age eight]. Here Nature unadorn’d displays a multiplicity of agreeable phases; ravines, groves, brooklets, thickets, & Arcadian stretches of river-bank — for the park borders on the wide & salty Seekonk. The Seekonk is call’d a river, but in truth ’tis but a bay or inlet. The river proper doth not begin till four miles to the north, where (changing its name successively to the Pawtucket & the Blackstone) its fresh streams flow over the mill dam at the Great Bridge of the city of Pawtucket. How beauteous indeed is untainted Nature as beheld in so idyllick a spot as Blackstone Park! […] I think this park would explain why such a born & bred town man shou’d possess such a taste for rural musings & Arcadian themes!

Here’s a Blackstone Park sketch made by Whitman Bailey in 1916. Looking down a sylvan path and ride, toward the glinting of the distant Seekonk.

The young Lovecraft also had a view of the Park and the Seekonk from his home…

“The roof of 598 Engelstrasse is approximately flat, and in the days of my youth I had a set of meteorological instruments there. Hither I would sometimes hoist my telescope, and observe the sky from that point of relative proximity to it. The horizon is fair, but not ideal. One can see the glint of the Seekonk through the foliage of Blackstone Park, and the opposite bank is quite clearly defined.”

One can glimpse a house with a flat roof and just such a view here (from The southern gateway of New England, 1910). The picture-maker looks across at the shore ride, from near Red Bridge…

The shoreline structure seen here is the Boat Club boathouse, thus by looking at maps one can see that the house glimpsed in the trees is likely to be one of those lining Lovecraft’s Angell St.

As one can also see above, the shoreline road was relatively low. No attempt seems to have been made to preserve the shore drive from being covered by the inevitable ten-year winter flood-surge. Indeed, Lovecraft dreamed of such things, but weirdly inverted and horribly revealing rather than covering…

“I was standing on the East Providence shore of the Seekonk River, about three quarters of a mile south of the foot of Angell Street, at some unearthly nocturnal hour. The tide was flowing out horribly — exposing parts of the river-bed never before exposed to human sight. Many persons lined the banks, looking at the receding waters & occasionally glancing at the sky. Suddenly a blinding flare — reddish in hue — appeared high in the southwestern sky; & something descended to earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence shore near the Red Bridge — about an eighth of a mile south on [of?] Angell Street. The watchers on the banks screamed in horror — “It has come — It has come at last!” — & fled away into the deserted streets. [Blind panic ensues] By this time the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus.” (1920)

There evidently were floods but the natural inundations of winter were brief, expected and subsided. In summer he would often sit all day on the surviving southern bluff above York Pond, reading and writing. In 1927, a letter was headed as from… “High Wooded Bluff Above the Seekonk River – a mile East of 10 Barnes St.” He sometimes even shared his childhood haunt with close friends. Here is an instance from 1927…

“the next day we [he and Cook and Munn] lounged about the Blackstone Park woods beside the Seekonk — agrestick haunt of my earliest infancy, and true genesis of my pastoral soul.”

In a letter of 1934 he remarks…

Almost every warm summer afternoon I take my work or reading in a bag & set out for the wooded river-bank [on the Seekonk] or the fields & woods north of Providence — spending the time till dusk in one or more favourite rustic spots.

A year after Lovecraft passed away, a terrific natural flood struck Providence…

This must surely have also swept up the Seekonk and around his cherished wooded bluff in Blackstone Park, but understandably there seems to be no photo made of the Park shoreline at that time. Evidently the foliage and wildlife of the ponds at that point must be used to such occasional inundations.

The Seekonk: Lovecraft afloat on the Seekonk

17 Friday May 2019

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H. P. Lovecraft was once something of a waterman on the Seekonk River, seen above in a Whitman Bailey drawing made on the Poe-haunted west shore at Blackstone Park…

“I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft letter to Rimel, April 1934.

The islands are locally known as Cupcake Island and Pancake Island, indicating their respective shapes. Though these may be modern post-1945 names. There appears to be no vintage photograph, sketch or postcard of them, available online. But one can see them on this map…

They can also be seen on some of the earliest maps of Providence, c. 1650…

From where and how would the young Lovecraft row? One imagines that, once old and strong enough to row alone on a large river, he might have been allowed to take out a row-boat from the Boat Club boathouse (opened c. 1884). The name of his grandfather probably still had some sway with Club, and he might have avoided the sort of hire-fee he could have had to pay at Red Bridge. The boathouse can be seen here…

The residential house seen through the trees is one in Angell St., so that indicates Lovecraft’s proximity to the boathouse. The boathouse had an interesting gothic look from a certain angle…

Lovecraft must have been no puny stripling at this time, for the Seekonk could be a dangerous river and the city Report noted that a rescue crew patrolled the river on Sundays and holidays circa 1912. Today the Brown University men’s rowing team notes that…

The Seekonk is known for its difficult rowing conditions, particularly heavy wind and waves, as well as a strong current.

Thus perhaps we can assume a Lovecraft who was aged 14 or 15, circa 1904 or 1905? Lovecraft might not have encountered the Brown rowing team’s twice-daily training (they apparently had another boat-house nearby). As evidenced by the statement… “The Brown Alumni Monthly has been for years in favor of the resumption of rowing at Brown” (1915), implying that the team might have been moribund for a number of years prior to 1915.

In his row-boat experience, and the island encounters amid the shifting sediments, do we glimpse the personal roots of his famous story “Dagon” (July 1917)? His nightmare of the Seekonk River draining away to reveal primal ooze was recounted in a letter of May 1920 (“the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus”), but Lovecraft called this a “typical dream” — thus there may have been similar pre-“Dagon” dreams. Indeed we know there were, as he later wrote of “Dagon” that… “I dreamed that whole hideous crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!” If this latter dream was of the drained Seekonk or not, must now remain unknown. But the likelihood is that it was.

The flow of the river was probably faster then, because its main flow was in a far narrower and shallower navigation channel of 12 feet, this being “the deep channel” referred to by Lovecraft. Only in 1927 did a U.S military dredging project dredge a longer and deeper… “3.4-mile-long channel, 16 feet deep” all the way from East Providence to Pawtucket. “The channel is 150 feet wide from the Red Bridge to an area opposite Goose Point where it widens further to 230 feet.” (U.S. Army, Seekonk River Navigation Project).

His ‘considerable’ rowing experience on the Seekonk may also help explain his extreme delight in the header illustration he had in Weird Tales, for “Dagon”, since he would then see in it not only an illustration of the story, but also a reflection of his own experience of rowing on the Seekonk…

Presumably such things were cast off along with his bicycle, which he ceased using altogether in the summer of 1913, long past the point when he was expected by local convention to shed such boyish activities. As his family descended into poverty, he may anyway have lacked the hire-fee for such a boat.

See also: the mysterious river island in “Dreams in the Witch House”…

She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. […] He [later] rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.