In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, he writes of the “sanitarium at Canton” and going to “… that Canton madhouse, and [then] together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth.” Canton, Massachusetts, is about twelve miles south of the city of Boston. And about two-thirds of the way from Providence to Boston. At circa 1900 there was, however, no madhouse or even a disease sanatorium there.

But the presence of Canton Junction on the Providence – Boston train line suggests Lovecraft knew it, at least from the train windows. There is a large viaduct which carries the train, and Lovecraft would have enjoyed sweeping views across the Canton topography. He must have been across it many times.

Longest and tallest railway viaduct in the world, when built in 1835.

Interestingly Canton is about two miles east of Walpole, and of course Walpole is also the name of the father of the gothic novel. There was however no asylum at Walpole, Mass. Looking at the list of train stations on the line, and the map, Lovecraft may have been able to see East Walpole in the distance, across the marshland, from the Canton Viaduct.

There was however a large and real asylum at Foxborough (aka Foxboro) (opened 1893, closed 1976), originally the state’s treatment asylum for chronic alcoholics. Foxborough was two train stops before Canton, on the Providence to Boston line. It’s thus not impossible Lovecraft knew that asylum from the train window, as it was likely within sight as the train passed.

Train line passing alongside the asylum site, Foxboro station just a quarter mile south. (With thanks to the ghost-hunter who identified the laundry building of the site, and thus gave me my bearings).

A blogger who has investigated it talks of a road approach through marshlands made of “cranberry bogs [that] looked like blood pools”. He also usefully notes… “After 1905, the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates went through a gradual transition to a psychiatric institution”, which another source states was due to the alcoholic inmates constantly escaping in search of drink. Thus by the time Lovecraft came to write “Innsmouth”, it was indeed a general “madhouse”.

What of “my poor little cousin” in “Innsmouth”? I assume he was loosely modelled after Lovecraft’s beloved-and-lost cousin, Phillips Gamwell. Thus Gamwell’s home in Cambridge, Mass., might be the place to look. But I can find no asylum or sanitorium there.

There was also the large official Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane, at Worcester, which may have formed a mental model for Lovecraft. It certainly looks like the sort of place many readers will have in mind.

What of Canton, Ohio? No madhouse there. The nearest was Massillon which is eight miles away, and also the main Ohio state asylum at Columbus some 130 miles from Canton…

But my feeling is the Foxborough asylum was the inspiration for the Lovecraft called the “Canton madhouse”, knowing that readers in his circle who knew the Boston – Providence railway line would make the connection with Foxboro madhouse (four miles south, on the train track, from Canton).

Lovecraftians will also recall Lovecraft’s planned but never written ‘Foxfield’ stories. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). Also to be found in Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos. For those unable to pay the prices now asked for either of these, The Lovecraft Encyclopedia usefully summarises the essay… “it indicates that Foxfield is east of Aylesbury and Dunwich and northwest of Arkham.”

This week’s ‘Picture Postal’, from the Providence Magazine, the local Board of Trade magazine in 1915. This was the ‘early view’ Lovecraft was referring to in a letter written after he visited the Shepley Library in Providence in 1923. I thank Ken Faig Jr. for the identification.

there is one monstrous fine drawing of the town in 1762 […] precisely what I had long wish’d to see

Thus the Curator was not being snide or fobbing off Lovecraft, when he suggested that he could have a copy… if another was found to exist in the archives. It was not an antiquity, and the archives might indeed have a duplicate copy of a liberally-dispensed magazine from less than a decade ago. Or there might be duplicate prints of such a modern item.

It’s possible Lovecraft may have seen the more expansive un-cropped version, and in a less harsh contrast…

His use of the word “monstrous” perhaps even indicates he saw the original large sheets, meant to be transferred by tracing to a stage backdrop.

This week in my regular ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ slot, a picture via the archives of the Rhode Island School of Design. A side-on look at College Street on College Hill in Providence, as Lovecraft knew it in spring 1936 when he lived a little further up the hill.

Illustrator and Club member Helen M. Grose offers a postcard view across the street toward the Handicraft Club. This was a place well known to Lovecraft’s aunt and her friends. Lovecraft’s aunt lived here in 1927, and he sometimes harked back to its earlier days in letters and called it “the old Truman Beckwith house”. He enjoyed its “old-fashion’d terraced garden” and we know he took his friend Morton round it when he visited. Probably other visitors too, if he felt they would appreciate it. At Christmas 1933 Lovecraft was even to be found cheerily listening to carols sung in the Club’s courtyard…

… a stroll half-way down the hill to hear the carol-singing at the old Truman Beckwith mansion.

This 1936 drawing seems to confirm that (by mutual agreement and common sense) the university students traditionally used only one side of the street, while the residents had the other. Note also the upper ‘monitor’ roof section with small windows, looking similar to the one on Lovecraft’s last home at the top of the hill (he had access to it, and Brobst managed to work out how to open its door to the outside roof/railing).

The Club was one of thousands of examples of the tradition of free association, in what some have called the ‘little platoons’ of civic society. No permission from the state / church was required to establish or run a group of like-minded people of proven interests and skill. Nor did the state regulate who could or could not be admitted to membership, or require onerous and disfiguring accommodations to ‘the legal regulations’ etc. Not did the state send secret police to monitor the Club’s exhibitions for political correctness. Things were very different elsewhere in the world in 1936, where many people found themselves hurrying quickly through the murderous springtimes of the new political religion of Soviet Socialism or its heresy National Socialism.

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.