This fine postcard evokes the rural world in which the wife of Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather, and later Lovecraft’s mother, came of age. A small public library, barely bigger than a chicken-coop, with a chicken-yard to one side. Possibly eggs were sold for a nominal amount, as an enticement to children to join the library. The location is North Scituate which is about six miles west of the very centre of Providence. Robie (known to Lovecraft as ‘Rhoby’) — Robie Alzada Place (1827–1896) — is the one who gives the place the connection to Lovecraft. S.T. Joshi, in I Am Providence, notes of her…
Of Whipple Phillips’s wife Robie [married Jan 1856] very little is known. Lovecraft states that she attended the Lapham Institute (cited by Lovecraft as “Lapham Seminary”) in North Scituate, Rhode Island … but does not supply the date of her attendance.
Lovecraft explained the somewhat convoluted family line, to Moe in a letter…
These [ancestors] marry’d, respectively, Stephen Place and Jeremiah Phillips — and in the next generation Sarah’s daughter Rhoby Place (nam’d for her aunt) marry’d Rhoby’s son Whipple Phillips …. these espoused cousins becoming my mother’s parents.
The Lovecraft family ‘Commonplace Book’ contained much information about Robie’s Place family and ancestors at nearby Foster, R.I. de Camp’s biography of Lovecraft, perhaps leaning on oral evidence that has not come down to us, has…
In 1855, he and his younger brother James fell in love with two local girls, Robie Alzada Place and her cousin Jane Place. Said Whipple to James: “You take Jane and the farm, while I take Robie and go to Providence to seek my fortune.
The newly married couple then lived a few miles further west, at Foster, in the homestead built there by her father Stephen Place and in which Robie had been born. (Lovecraft’s mother was also to be born at the Foster house). One might then suspect that the unmarried Robie had regularly travelled the few miles from Foster to North Scituate for her schooling. But a little research reveals a new data point. It was a boarding school with large boarding facilities for girls, and she may thus have been staying there in the week and then going home at weekends…
Her most likely attendance dates centre on circa 1845-50, with Lovecraft himself suggesting from “1845” in one letter. The school would have been known as the “Smithville Seminary”, here seen circa 1900 and with the frontage much unchanged. One assumes a school library matching that of the town itself, and perhaps with some connection between the the two libraries.
Did Lovecraft ever visit? He certainly passed through the general district at his leisure on his 21st birthday. Since he had treated himself to an epic all-day tram (‘car’) ride. This first sent him out of Providence and…
riding westward through the picturesque countryside of my maternal ancestors” (letter to F. Lee Baldwin, 1934)
On his return from New York his family history researches may have taken him there in pursuit of memories of Robie and her schooling, and especially her astronomical work. We know that in the mid 1920s, after returning from New York, he made several long and intensive ‘gleaning’ expeditions to Foster and Greene and roundabouts in search of family history.
However, he may not have found much. By 1923 the Institute had passed through several hands and the old Baptist records and yearbooks had undoubtedly been removed to Baptist archives. By 1923 it had become established as the Watchman Institute, though there were bad fires there in 1924 and 1926 and “both wings burned down” according to one history. One has to wonder if there was much there for Lovecraft and his aunt to glean circa 1926-28, other than a brief stroll past the smoke-stained frontage and around the charred grounds.
But Lovecraft might have learned something of the texture of the old life, in Foster and North Scituate, nearer to home. Because his near-lifelong Providence barber came from North Scituate, and one thus imagines that the barber’s memories of the place and its gleaming ‘school on the knoll’ came up from time to time in the barber’s chair…
Had my hair cut yesterday by the same old barber who removed my flowing curls in 1894. He’s a good old R.I. Yankee of the 7th generation of North Scituate settlers.” (May 1926)
There was also a fine new observatory in North Scituate, albeit 75 years later and private. Lovecraft’s “The September Sky” newspaper astronomy column (1st September 1914) concluded by noting the opening of the then-new observatory there…
Of particular interest to Rhode Islanders is the opening of Mr. F. E. Seagrave’s new private observatory in North Scituate, about two miles north of the village. The building stands on an eminence 342 feet above sea-level, free from the smoke and lights of the city, and commanding a magnificent view of the celestial vault.
The observatory had formerly been on 119 Benefit Street, Providence, but there appears to be no evidence of the young Lovecraft being invited to visit the new one on Peeptoad Road. But Robie might have done so, and before the building of the observatory there. Robie had been a Baptist, but that did not then preclude also being an astronomer with a substantial library and presumably a telescope to match. Lovecraft told Moe in a 1915 letter…
My maternal grandmother, who died when I was six, was a devoted lover of astronomy, having made that a speciality at Lapham Seminary, where she was educated; and though she never personally showed me the beauties of the skies, it is to her excellent but somewhat obsolete collection of astronomical books that I owe my affection for celestial science. Her copy of Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens is today the most prized volume in my library.
Robie’s Smithville Seminary was itself on a knoll, perhaps good enough for observing. But back in circa 1845-55 (before the building of the observatory), could Mr. Seagrave’s apparently excellent 342-feet high observing hill have also been one regularly visited by parties of local amateur astronomers — Robie among them?
