H.P. Lovecraft’s correspondents were sent not only ‘picture postal’ postcards, but also lightweight brochure-leaflets from specific places. As America’s ‘visitor trade’ grew, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lovecraft could pick these leaflets up in stores, museum foyers, YMCA lobbies and the like. Presumably a keen visitor would be permitted to take a handful, if he promised the attendant he would ‘send them on to interested friends’. As Lovecraft became increasingly poor, such small items could have occasionally saved him the cost of buying pictorial postcards.
Above is a 1940 tourist map of the attractions and notable places around the town of Brattleboro. However, the map is identical to that on the reverse of this c. 1930 leaflet…
It may be of use to those trying to follow Lovecraft’s excursions out from the Goodenough farm in West Brattleboro, and the nearby Vrest Orton place. Such overview maps may be especially useful once we get the mammoth volume of Lovecraft’s complete ‘letters to the aunts’, due for publication soon. My guess is that we can probably expect to read there of a good many visits to obscure antiquarian shrines and remote mountain-vistas, all lovingly detailed. Possibly there may also be some mention of the 1927 Vermont floods at Brattleboro, though Lovecraft only saw the floods in pictures…
Lovecraft visited Vermont for the first time in the summer of 1927, returning in the summer of 1928. He did not actually witness the Vermont floods (a real event) [which gave rise to the story “The Whisperer in Darkness”], but they received extensive coverage in newspapers throughout the East Coast, and Lovecraft no doubt heard some first-hand accounts of them from several friends in Vermont including Vrest Orton and Arthur Goodenough”. — S.T. Joshi, A Subtler Magick.
Pictures: the subsiding 1927 floods at Brattleboro.
Readers will recall Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”, opening with lines such as…
… country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging [1927 flood] waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend …
Spurred by finding the above Brattleboro map, I went looking for an update on the conservation and restoration of the Goodenough farmstead at Brattleboro. Apparently the farmhouse has a covenant on it which states that it’s to be preserved intact in its original form. The Goodenough Farmstead Trust began in 2004 and they spent $65,000 on the place in 2006. Most likely on the excellent new roof, to be seen below. The last online report from the place appears to be that of the Lovecraft fan Dakota Rodeo and friends, who visited in summer 2014 and found the house looking good but interior works still ongoing…
Picture: local girls at the farmstead in 2014, visiting for Lovecraft’s birthday.
Also, where exactly is it? Joshi in A Subtler Magick places Orton just outside Brattleboro itself, and states that Goodenough’s farm was “further to the north”. Yet the local historical society has it that Goodenough’s hillside farmstead is on “the Goodenough Road in West Brattleboro”, which would place it west of Brattleboro. Lovecraft himself states that Goodenough… “dwells not much above a mile from Orton’s”, Orton having… “hired a delightful farm some miles out of Brattleboro, in Vermont” (Orton had recently fled New York and the south Windham County house was on a long all-summer lease, not just a week’s holiday-let). Given this, Joshi’s “further to the north” must indicate “to the north” of Orton’s place, not north of the town itself.
While looking for Orton’s actually address I found additional interesting confirmation that that he and Lovecraft would have chimed politically. The author of a 1989 tourist book on Vermont had looked through Orton’s famous mail-order publications and noted their politics…
Vrest Orton, whose tartly conservative political views punctuated the [his] enormously successful mail order catalogue Voice of the Mountains“. — The roadside history of Vermont, 1989.
Voice was issued by Orton’s business the Vermont Country Store, and a collection of his columns were later published as the book The Voice of the Green Mountains: a collection of phillipics, admonitions & imponderables (1979). Orton’s late recollection of Lovecraft, first published 1982, also made a passing remark on Britain’s increasingly sorry state under socialism. This implies that i) his political views had not changed over time, and that ii) his memoir was likely penned some years earlier, perhaps in 1976-79, when Mrs Thatcher had not yet been elected.
But… back to finding the precise location(s) of Goodenough and Orton in the 1920s. If the Goodenough farmstead’s location is the address at which the Goodenough Farmstead Trust is formally registered today (and satellite photography in Google Earth suggests it is, offering the same building layout, roof shape, and arrangement of of the grounds) then that puts it about five miles directly west of Brattleboro itself. This further suggests that Orton’s springwater-fed and oil-lit “eighteenth-century” place may have been in the hills somewhere off Akley Road, about a mile south of the Goodenough farmstead. Orton’s late memoir of Lovecraft actually puts his rented place at “ten miles” from town, but no doubt Orton recalled every hairpin bend and switchback in that tally, as the neighbour’s Ford rattled along the back-roads through the hills. Here is Lovecraft, recalling the journey up into the backroads…
“The nearness and intimacy of the little domed hills become almost breath-taking — their steepness and abruptness hold nothing in common with the humdrum, standardized world we know, and we cannot help feeling that their outlines have some strange and almost-forgotten meaning, like vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live on in rare, deep dreams.”
Picture: Brattlboro is the large town seen along the river on the right of the picture, and Guilford / Old Guilford straddles the road that runs south out of it. The curious line seen marching across the landscape near the farmstead, like an ancient Roman wall, is presumably a forest fire-break to protect the town? Despite being marked on the old tourist map as forest it probably would not have been quite so thickly wooded back then, because there has been massive forest ‘re-growth from farmland’ in the eastern USA since the 1930s, along with a general global greening since the 1990s.
There is a slightly curious place-name puzzle here. Orton’s newspaper report “A Weird Writer Is In Our Midst” (1928) states that Lovecraft’s 1928 visit was at “Guilford”, which the modern maps mark at about a mile and a half south of the centre of Brattleboro. He is “stopping with us in Guilford”, writes Orton in the newspaper. This is apparently confirmed by the title of “Literary Persons Meet in Guilford” Brattleboro Daily Reformer (18th June 1928). And yet Orton’s later memoir of Lovecraft clearly states that the location of the 1928 visit was his rented summer house, near the Goodenough farmstead, and that this was “ten miles from Brattlboro”.
But we know that the “Literary Persons Meet in Guilford” meeting was definitely held at the Goodenough farmstead. The local newspaperman was at the farm in person and reported… “Half a dozen literary persons met for a discussion yesterday at the home of Arthur Goodenough”. Lovecraft himself reported to fellow amateurs that… “there was a literary assemblage of much interest at the poet’s abode”.
The solution to this small riddle must be that, to local people, the place was considered to be part of Guilford. Even though Guilford/Old Guilford was many miles east-away toward the river, through the rolling hills. Indeed, looking more closely at the maps one can see a “West Guilford” area extending out toward the Goodenough farmstead.
Picture: Typical covered bridge and packed-dirt road, of the type then found in Guilford and Brattleboro.
