The Persistence of “The Deserted Village,” Part 3

Thomas Moran Contemplates a Studio at Feltville

In December 1876, a Newark Daily Advertiser article proudly made the following proclamation:

The popular interest which has been recently exhibited in works of art in this city is altogether unprecedented. It is usually conceded that in a manufacturing town the cultivation of refined taste is neglected for the accumulation of wealth. But ever since the advent here of Thomas Moran, the distinguished landscape painter, the people of Newark have shown great interest in the exhibition of pictures whenever really meritorious works of art have been placed on view. This fact has induced some liberal spirited citizens to collect a gallery of paintings, the like of which has never been seen outside of the largest cities in this country. The pictures are by the most distinguished American artists, and have nearly all been loaned for the occasion by the artists themselves, who all take a deep interest in extending the love of art throughout the community. In this collection Bierstadt will be represented by two important pictures, Eastman Johnson will have three of his best works, Ed. Moran will send two grand marine views, and McEntee, Gifford, Church, DeHaas, David Johnson, Story, Inness, Miss Odenheimer, and, in fact, all the leading artists, will be represented by works upon which they rely for their reputation.¹

The artist Thomas Moran (identified hereinafter as “Thomas”, for clarity), an immigrant from Bolton, England, who, in 1871, had moved his studio and his family from Philadelphia to Newark, New Jersey, had brought taste and culture to his adopted city. His presence is being credited with bringing “all the leading artists” together for a major exhibition in the proudly industrial city of Newark.

Two years later, Thomas was seeking a permanent location for a summer retreat; a place where he and his family could spend time away from Newark (see section on Newark below). Any space they found would need to have space for painting and drawing for both Thomas and his wife, Mary Nimmo Moran (hereinafter “Mary”), an artist in her own right. A ledger kept by Thomas, now in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, has the following notation about the trip: “Feltville, New Jersey (deserted village), family there with artist friends.”²

Thomas had already brought culture to an entire city. He was a celebrity, one whose pictures in magazines and at exhibitions made people arrange visits to the places depicted. Now he had sketched Feltville, the Deserted Village.

In 1883, an opinion piece by Edwin Lawrence Godkin in The Nation, recognized artists as an advance guard of demand for vacationing in any given spot:

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of American summering than the number of new resorts which are discovered and taken possession of by “the city people” every year the rapid increase in the means of transportation both the the mountains and the sea, and the steady encroachments of the cottager on the boarder in all the more desirable resorts. . . The place is usually first discovered by artists in search of sketches, or by a family of small means in search of pure air, and milk fresh from the cow, and liberty—not to say license—in the matter of dress.³

Would Thomas’ visit draw the crowds there? In showing you the answer, I will take you through what had given Thomas the power to make the fame of a place he had visited.

Who Was Thomas Moran?

Thomas’ family was from Bolton, one of the towns near Manchester, England, to which the Industrial Revolution had spilled over from Manchester, the world’s first industrial town.⁴  Thomas came from a long line of craft hand-loom weavers, who made their livings doing weaving in their homes. Development of the mechanized spinning jenny and the power loom transformed what had been a craft into simply a factory industry. These “laboring-saving” machines had put many crafts people out of jobs, sparking riots and other actions—including “framebreaking”—which involved disabling the factory machines. Framebreaking was a crime, for which the death penalty could be imposed.

A family of seven children, and the scarcity of jobs led to impoverished conditions for Thomas’ family. Ironically, given the future careers in art of a number of his children, Thomas Moran the father only began to consider a move to America after a visit to England by American artist George Catlin, who was becoming famous as for his portraits of American Indians.

Catlin had assembled many of his paintings into what he called his “Indian Gallery,” apparently trying to sell the whole collection as one and had begun what became a lifelong quest to have the US Congress purchase the gallery. In 1840, angry over Congress’ failure to buy the gallery (on perhaps his first attempt), Catlin was in England on part of a European tour, looking for a new audience for the works. It was Thomas’ mother who suggested that it was something about Catlin’s works or one of his remarks which was the inspiration for Thomas’ father to immigrate to the US in 1842. Two years later, when Thomas was 7, the rest of the family joined the father, settling in Kensington, a working-class district of Philadelphia, among a community of similarly displaced textile workers.

Here Thomas’ father had found work in one of the textile mills in the Philadelphia area. Author Nancy Anderson credits the Philadelphia public schools with providing Thomas and his brothers (at least, there is no mention of the girls) with education or the beginnings of training which would allow them to choose careers other than textile mill work. Edward, the oldest, having started work at a textile mill, began to teach himself to draw, while still continuing his mill work. He received both instruction and encouragement from the Paul Weber, who had come to Philadelphia having already studied art in his native Germany, and having become prominent by the age of 30, had begun set out to teach developing artists. Edward also was encouraged by Irish immigrant James Hamilton, who had come to art after an early career as a businessman, and was, indeed coming to prominence at the same time as Edward. Edward’s first professional exhibition was in 1854, with four pieces at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He is chiefly known for his maritime paintings, and is one of the “leading artists” mentioned by name in the Newark Daily Advertiser article.

Edward went on to teach art to his brothers, including Thomas, before the latter even finished grammar school. Thomas’ father was pressuring him to work after grammar school, rather than go on to high school. Thomas avoided working at a mill job by securing an apprenticeship with Scattergood and Telfer, a Philadelphia engraving firm. Finding the work tedious, he only remained at the job for about two years, after which he joined Edward in the Philadelphia studio he had already established. Even during his apprenticeship, Thomas had continued to work on his own pieces in any free moment (drawing by gaslight at night, painting when he had free hours during daylight), and had continued pursuing his own self-teaching, help from other artists and with books. David Scattergood, one of the engraving firm’s owners, began to sell some of the small watercolors Thomas had done, and Thomas himself traded his art works for books he needed to further his artistic development.

Notable among the books Thomas used, were instructional books by John Ruskin, including The Elements of Drawing, Three Letters to Beginners, which, among its other suggestions included a suggestion to tracing etched outlines from English Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner, whose work Thomas had already been introduced to by his brother’s friend James Hamilton. Ruskin’s books promoted direct imitation of nature’s ‘vital facts’ as the path to ‘truth.’ He advised students to begin by studying a single leaf and expand their range of vision gradually, avoiding any view that would make a ‘pretty’ picture.⁵

Following Ruskin’s advice to study the facts of nature, during the 1860s Thomas spent a good deal of time sketching along the tributaries to Schuylkill and in forests surrounding Philadelphia. Thomas continued to pursue his own self-directed training, traveling to England in 1862 and to England and the Continent in 1866-7. Each of these trips included not only sessions for study of and copying of works by artists he admired, but visits to the scenes depicted in the works he was studying.

But Thomas did not believe in exact representation of a scene. In one of his most famous quotes, Thomas describes the approach to landscape that he ultimately adopted, where he saw himself not as reproducing the literal truth of any particular landscape, but rather of the “higher truth of the whole.”

The literal truth counts for nothing; it is within the grasp of any one who has had an ordinary art-education. The mere restatement of an external scene is never a work of art, is never a picture. . . ..I place not value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization. Of course, all art must come through Nature: I do not mean to depreciate Nature or naturalism; but I believe that a place, as a place, has no value in itself for the artist only so far as it furnishes the material from which to construct a picture. Topography in art is valueless.⁶

Thomas flourished within “a culture of landscape” which had arisen, which developed hand in hand with the movement of more of the population of the eastern United States into more urban settings, and the opening of more of the continent to exploration and settlement. Patriotic sentiment—including the American narrative of “Manifest Destiny”—was listing towards placing greater value on American art, as opposed to devotion to European art.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

With this increased appreciation for American artists came a power of those artists to create images of places meant to lure people to visit, a power they capitalized on by collaborating with railroad companies, popular magazines, or individual tourist venues. Godkin’s satirical piece may have made it seem like artists were innocently unaware of the fact that tourists were eagerly following them to the scenic places they had romanticized in their art. One has only to look at Niagara Falls to prove that artists knew they wielded their power over tourists through their art.

Niagara Falls, one of America’s early uber-popular tourist destinations, was depicted by numerous artists, generally as a relatively wild, pristine, and unpeopled spot. Imagine the surprise of many tourists who arrived to find hundreds of others like themselves lured there, only to be faced with crowds and vendors hawking cheap souvenirs. Perhaps even worse were the factories and industrial buildings that were allowed to flourish near the falls, and which often obscured the views.

Thomas was persuaded to paint at the falls in 1881, creating fifteen pieces to illustrate Picturesque Canada, a publication which was modeled on one Thomas had earlier been commissioned to illustrate, Picturesque America. These publications were distributed by paid subscription, with installments coming out twice a month, installments ultimately bound into two volumes.

Niagara could be seen as a case study of what not to do. On both the American and Canadian sides, pieces were falling away from the cliff, due to unremitting tourist traffic. Honeymooners, one of its chief tourist groups, found other places to go.

More than ten years before Thomas painted at Niagara, the example set by Niagara was in the minds of some people considering the fate of a far-off place called Yellowstone. This included Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad had been first approved by the federal government in 1860, and construction had begun in 1870, with the final “golden spike” of completion being driven in by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1883. Cooke believed that the Yellowstone region, which would be easily accessible from his railroad line, could be a major tourist attractionattract tourists to the railroad he was hoping to build.

Cooke backed an expedition to Yellowstone in the summer of 1870. On the expedition’s return, Nathanial P. Langford, would-be governor of the Montana Territory, submitted a manuscript to Scribner’s, a prominent illustrated literary magazine of the time. Scribner’s had turned down submissions from previous expeditions, deeming them too unbelievable for publication. This time, the editors believed what had seems so farfetched before , running the article under the title, “The Wonders of the Yellowstone,” in two installments, in the May and June 1871 issues.⁷ In doing so however, Scribner’s rejected the somewhat crude pencil sketches which had been made by a member of the five-man military escort for the expedition, turning them over to Thomas, who was already the magazine’s chief illustrator. Thurman Wilkins indicates that Thomas’ embellished drawings were much improved, but says: “Unfortunately, however, not even Thomas’ imagination was sufficient to lighten the illustrations’ heaviness, loosen their stiffness, and bring them to life or give a sense of the artist’s having been there.”⁸ Regardless, redoing the illustrations ignited Thomas’ interest in seeing Yellowstone for himself. He jumped at the chance to join a subsequent much more significant, government backed expedition, led by renowned geologist Ferdinand Hayden. Langford was once again a member of the expedition, and expected to write a new article for Scribner’s on his return.

Thomas was so eager that to go on the expedition that he was planning to pay his own expenses on the trip. Having not saved much money since his last trip abroad, he needed to secure money from backers. Jay Cooke loaned Thomas $500, and Scribner’s matched the loan (Thomas later observed that it had never occurred to him to ask the magazine to simply pay his expenses).⁹

An interesting article from the website of American Studies at the University of Virginia, 1994-2005, suggests:

Little did Moran realize that he had not only succumbed to the maneuverings of a number of powerful men, but had also stumbled into one of the grandest industrial and political schemes of the Nineteenth century. Jay Cooke wanted Moran’s visual talents to bring pictures of Yellowstone to the East much as Union Pacific relied on Bierstadt’s work to portray Yosemite so vividly for the New York audience who came to see his paintings. Bierstadt and Union Pacific had Fitzhugh Ludlow to capture Yosemite in prose, and Moran and Northern Pacific had Nathaniel Langford. Langford was campaigning to be governor of the Montana territory and had his own economic interests in Yellowstone, but he had also been solicited to write his book by Jay Cooke, who arranged for its publication and coached the author on his many lectures throughout the East—lectures which ended with praises for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s planned track through southern Montana, just above Yellowstone’s North Entrance.¹⁰

Along the way, Thomas micromanaged the photographer who had already been hired for the trip, William Henry Jackson, suggesting where and what he would photograph and helping set up the shots. Apparently both individuals viewed it as a wonderful partnership—Wilkins remarks that “The immediate cooperation between the two began the most effective teamwork between artist and photographer seen in the whole era of the Great Western Surveys…”. Jackson was completely aware that each of Thomas’ chosen photographic venues for Jackson would be used in Thomas’ own art, after the expedition, and thus, Thomas cared very deeply about where and what was photographed.¹¹

It was very important on an expedition such as this to make every photographic exposure count, since each on represented so much effort. As noted in my previous post featuring Guillermo Thorn, photography in the outdoors was a wild affair. It was even more difficult when there could be no return to an indoor studio to do any of the processing:

In 1871 photography in the field required a pack mule load of apparatus and other equipment, as well as the help of an assistant or two. The primitive wet plate process required the plates to be prepared in an improvised “ darkbox” and developed immediately after being exposed in the camera.”¹²

On return, Thomas provided images not only to accompany the article in Scribner’s by Langford, but also for articles about the fabulous Yellowstone discoveries which appeared in Harper’s Weekly and The Aldine. Thomas’ images, along with Jackson’s photographs also used to illustrate the official USGS report by Hayden to Congress.

For Thomas, the Yellowstone trip was career changing. Using his sketches and notes from the 1871 expedition, along with the photographs of William Henry Jackson that he had so carefully managed, he produced a painting entitled “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,” picturing the lower falls on the Yellowstone River emerging into a massive canyon. The painting is seven feet by nearly nine feet and was met with wide acclaim, and purchased by Congress for $10,000, an astronomical sum at the time.

In the chapter entitled “The Best Possible View: Pictorial Representation in the American West, by Floramae McCarron-Cates, from the 2006 Smithsonian publication Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran, Tourism and the American Landscape, 2006, Ms. McCarron-Cates states, at page 107, “Every schoolchild knew Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellow Stone because it was hung in reproduction in nearly every classroom in America.”

Yellowstone and Exclusion

Hayden’s Yellowstone report was submitted formally through the Secretary of the Interior, who made enough copies of it to allow each member of Congress to have their own; additional copies went to interested government officials and others, for a run of more than two thousand copies total. Hayden’s report successfully persuaded Congress to make Yellowstone into the first National Park, taking its management out of the hands of a state or territory.

And, the language of the eventual Congressional Act stated:

That the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming … is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided, shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom.¹³

Thus, the act allowed federal government control of development within the park, and the ability to include or exclude private money making ventures, whether they be factories (which were clearly excluded) or tourist venues. The mistakes of Niagara would be avoided. But Jay Cooke’s investment paid off handsomely. Cooke’s railroad carried passengers to a station close to the park’s northern portal, and from there, along a newly built connecting track to the park entrance. Additionally, after Langford was appointed as the first Park Superintendent, he approved the building of hotels within the new park’s boundaries by Cooke’s railroad.

On the expedition itself, Hayden had been disturbed by the presence in Yellowstone of people, presumably white, at Yellowstone in search of a “cure” from the waters there. Future visits of these people would be excluded, or at least limited. But Native American people were also excluded. Many different native nations considered the site sacred or had used it for resources. The reservation boundaries for one nation had to be redrawn so that their land could be part of the new national park. It was one more step in a systematic campaign to remove native peoples from lands desired for white people.

Many critics have identified the Native American in Thomas’ Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone as symbolic of a move to make it seem like Native Americans were voluntarily ceding their land to white people. The lengthy but telling analysis on pages 18-19 of Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment by Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock (Princeton University Art Museum, undated), is perhaps the most blistering:

In The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, we see two tiny human figures standing before the sublime spectacle on an overlook in the shadowy foreground. Their small scale with respect to this grand setting emphasizes the Romantic sublimity of the scene, but they also disclose an important political dimension at the nexus of art, ecology, and nationalism concerning Yellowstone. Despite their size, these figures are in many ways the key to the image and its ideological point. Moran accordingly positions them prominently, silhouetted against the much lighter background and at the intersection of compositional vectors formed vertically bye the waterfall and its vaporous plume and diagonally by the start contrasts between light and dark that converge on the pair from each side. At left we see a man wearing a hat, a saddlebag, and other attire of a Euro-American explorer. … Here the explorer appears looking out at the canyon, gesturing as if to allude to the beauty and/or geological significance of the scene. Yet he does so not with pointed finger but rather with outstretched hand—more laying claim to the landscape than indicating any particularity within it. At his right we see an unidentified Native American man wearing a feathered headdress, a bone necklace, a bandolier bag, and leather leggings. He holds a spear and stands with his back to the very scene admired by his white counterpart. In a brilliantly telling detail, Mran renders the two figures pivoting around the central axis of the spear, which each seems to hold, implying their clockwise movement around it, with the Euro-American moving toward and into the scene, and the Native American away from it. This emblematic racial juxtaposition of figures conveys an important didactive message concerning the political ecology of difference at Yellowstone and in early American wilderness conservation generally. Put simply, Moran’s vignette asserts Euro-American possession, knowledge, and aesthetic appreciation of this national park landscape in contrast to Native American dispossession and ignorance. A personification of nature as uncultivated wilderness, the Indigenous figure forms part of the scenery yet is rendered as a stranger in his own land.

Thomas, according to Thomas Moran scholar Dr. Sandra Pauly of Gilcrease Museum, notes that Thomas rarely included figures in his paintings. So what was his intent here? Thomas’ painting was clearly very intentionally executed, with the artist matching colors precisely to the notations he had made along with his sketches during the expedition. The scene itself was not rendered exactly as it might have appeared in one of Jackson’s photographs, rather elements were very consciously selected and placed. Thomas explained this in George Sheldon’s American Painters, published by D. Appleton in 1881:

Every form introduced into the picture is within view of a given point, but the relations of the separate parts to one another are not always presented… My aim was to bring before the public the character of that region.

Thomas was skillfully sending messages to his viewers. 

Check out the figures in the painting for yourself: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/BgGVMnQig7OMJw?hl=en.

Thomas Moran and the Deserted Village

With all that context in mind, we turn back to the “Deserted Village” of Feltville. In 1878, Thomas Moran and his wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, were searching for a place which could be a permanent summer retreat—where they could establish a home and studio, away from Newark, where they were living during the rest of the year. As noted above, one of the places they considered was Feltville, the Deserted Village.

While at Feltville, Thomas did the drawing seen here, a moody sketch of an old mill fading into blank space at the edges of the paper, and titled it “Feltville.” To me, it screams “deserted village.”

While an old mill was a far cry from the pristine wilderness of Yellowstone, Thomas had previously shown an interest in industrial scenes. As early as 1861, he had sketched at Manayunk, an industrial town on the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, and he sketched other industrial scenes from time to time in his career. Indeed, such sites too were places to which tourists regularly made trips, which were often seen as picturesque, and likely, did not have the same associations with the viewing of factory smoke that we may have.

Thomas and Mary went on from Feltville to visit another possible location for a summer home/studio, in East Hampton, Long Island. Here, the Morans were joined by members of the Tile Club:

The Tile Club was a group of 31 “notable New York painters, sculptors and architects—including Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, J. Alden Weir, Joh Henry Twachtman, Ehilu Vedder, Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur Burdett Frost, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White—who met together between 1877 and 1887. The club met for the purpose of camaraderie, painting on ceramic tiles, and traveling together on group excursions and sketching trips. They banded together to promote, in America, issues and concepts about aesthetics and the fine and decorative arts that were prevalent within the British Aesthetic Movement. But the club also championed American art in general—and did much to popularize plein air painting and the Impressionist style.¹⁴

I love that these elite painters all bonded over painting on ceramic tiles, which I do not think has quite the same artistic cachet. The group only lasted a decade, but in 1878, when the Morans were seeking their summer retreat, the group was only a year old. The Morans stayed at the Gardner’s Hotel as guests of the Tile Club.

The picturesque and diverse scenery in and around East Hampton—including beaches, something Feltville had none of, and which Thomas loved, coupled with the camaraderie of the other artists, proved to be irresistible to the Morans. Thomas, in particular, sketched extensively on that first visit, filling the rest of the sketchbook he had begun in Feltville. Thereafter, for many years, the Morans’ permanent summer residence was East Hampton.

So, there is every reason to believe that the sketch entitled Feltville, seen here, and any other sketches done at or around Feltville, were never contemporaneously exhibited or seen in a magazine.¹⁵ The old mill that screams picturesque deserted village stayed in the sketchbook.

What would have happened to Feltville, if Thomas and Mary had not chosen East Hampton as their summer residence? More specifically, what would have happened if Thomas had taken the time to turn one or more of the Feltville sketches into a finished work, and put it into public circulation, either in exhibitions, or perhaps in some travelogue article.

I wonder if Nancy Townsend, the woman who owned the village at the time, hoped for just such a chance. It was during one of the periods of her ownership of Feltville¹⁶ that Guillermo Thorn had produced his stereographic tourist photographs of Feltville. Just two years later, Nancy must have arranged to rent one or more of the cottages at the village to Thomas and his artist friends. There is little chance that Nancy did not know how Thomas’ paintings and drawings of Yellowstone had been a major factor in its becoming the first National Park, and an important tourist destination on the Northern Pacific Railroad. Feltville, though not as spectacular or big was significantly nearer. Perhaps Nancy hoped Moran would bring Feltville enhanced tourist attention.

Perhaps she was also counting on how much more accessible Feltville was to tourists. It must be remembered that a trip to the attractions of the West, including Yellowstone, was not for the faint of heart Indeed, Thomas took his wife Mary Nimmo Moran, also an artist, with him on a subsequent trip to Yosemite, which left Mary so exhausted that she never again accompanied Thomas on the long western trips, which invariably required traveling through rough terrain on horseback. Frederick Law Olmstead, the famous landscape architect, remarked, after a trip to Yosemite, that tourists “arrived in the majority of cases quite overcome with the fatigue and unaccustomed hardship of the journey. Few persons, especially few women, are able to enjoy or profit by the scenery and air for days afterward … and many leave before they have recovered from their first exhaustion and return home jaded and ill.”¹⁷

But it was not until their transfer to Gilcrease Museum that any of the sketches of Feltville were seen by the public. The village remained “deserted,” for yet awhile.

Newark as Deserted Village Character, an Introduction

In doing my research for this post, I found the drawing of Newark, N.J. by Mary Nimmo Moran, Thomas’ wife, which is seen here. Mary had had her first public exhibit a year before the Feltville trip, and surely sketched at Feltville along with Thomas. If her sketches still exist, they are locked away in the collections of the Gilcrease Museum, which is under reconstruction. Including this sketch of Newark allows me both to introduce one of Feltville’s forgotten women, and to introduce Newark. So many of the people who visited or lived at Feltville in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were from Newark, that I have come to think of Newark as a character in the Feltville story, a character which will appear again in future posts. Stuart Galishoff has covered the dark side of being a manufacturing town in his book, Newark The Nation’s Unhealthiest City 1832-1895

Newark emerged from the Civil War an industrial giant. More than half of its wage earners in 1880 were employed in industry. Several new industries achieved prominence, including chemicals, electrical machinery, and smelting and refining, revealing a shift form workshop to factory and from consumer wares to capital goods . Commercial institutions followed industry, helping to balance the economy. In the words of Newark’s official biographer, it was “an age of giants, an age of daring entrepreneurs who established great businesses, and of inventors” … ¹⁸

Newark was indeed an industrial city, as Mary’s drawing of the city, with its prominent factory, artistically belching out smoke, demonstrates. We know now how its industrial past has left pollutants in soil, air and water, still threatening the health of its residents. But in the late nineteenth century, when the impacts of the industrial byproducts into the environment were perhaps less well understood, the city had a multitude of other reasons for being unhealthy.

The insalubrity of American cities during the nineteenth century and the worsening sanitary conditions occasioned by industrialization, immigration, and rapid growth are graphically revealed in Newark’s public health history. Once noted for its handsome thoroughfares and majestic elms, Newark became a vast cesspool of human and animal excrement and industrial wastes. As privies, stables, slaughterhouses, tenements and smokestacks multiplied, the shadow cast by sickness and premature death lengthened. From 1832, when it suffered its first major epidemic, to 1895, when a bacteriological laboratory was established by the board of health, signaling the start of a healthier era in the city’s history, communicable diseases were rampant. Epidemics of cholera aroused the most concern, but it was the silent endemic diseases, notably tuberculosis, pneumonia, and the diarrheal diseases, that caused the greatest mortality. ¹⁹

A summer resort would allow the Morans to get away from these problems, made worse by summer heat. Future posts will examine the push-pull Americans experienced trying to justify a time away from their labors, since being busy was both godly and patriotic. Thomas and Mary, in a way, had fewer philosophical problems to face, since they were, in a way, pioneering a “working vacation.”