Patterns of paper lace, festive birds and flowers, and intricately layered designs first attract a viewer to the historic Valentines in the Archives’ collection. A closer look reveals that some bear a maker’s identifying stamp.
Surrounded by sweeping views of Hadlyme’s meadows and rock-strewn hillsides in a spacious studio created from a former stock barn, New York artist Harry Holtzman (1912-1987) created many of the pioneering modernist works displayed in the Florence Griswold Museum’s exhibition Harry Holtzman and American Abstraction. Stones collected nearby anchor his sculptural compositions quite literally in the Lyme landscape.
When Lyme artists sent holiday cards to relatives and friends, they often shared original watercolors, drawings, lithographs, and woodblock prints.
Like the dramatic red-tinged cliffs of New Haven’s East Rock captured on two canvases in the exhibition Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: An Artist’s Guide to the Universe,[1] Old Lyme’s “mineral kingdom” invites exploration.
Margaret Brown, who was president of the Florence Griswold Museum and the Lyme Historical Society from 1968 to 1974, was a real character. Wearing overalls and real pearls astride her tractor, she loved to mow her lawns and those around the Florence Griswold house.
Amid the recipes, medicinal cures, and obituary clippings pasted into a simple string-bound scrapbook appears a hand-written list of Judge William Noyes’ (1728–1807) slaves. Kept initially by his great-granddaughter Mary Ann Noyes Learned (1818–1875) and later maintained by her cousin Martha Noyes (1833–1874), the scrapbook documents the family’s Negro servants over four generations.
Captain Robert Griswold is remembered as a respected sea captain who owned one of the grandest homes in Old Lyme and whose daughter Florence was the inspiration for the thriving museum that today bears her name. Family letters and the journal of a famous American novelist shed light on his character and his years at sea.
The dazzling displays of Old Lyme’s gardens have captured the eye of painters and photographers for more than a century. Beside village lanes and riverbanks, in formal designs and in cultivated wildness, blossoming gardens brought swaths of color to hotel grounds, country estates, and artists’ dooryards. Postcard views of the flowerbeds, hedgerows, rock walls, and fruit trees at Boxwood Manor became almost a signature image of the town’s scenic beauty in the 1930s.
The gardens that surrounded Old Lyme’s Meetinghouse for more than a century trace the changing needs, tastes, and financial circumstances of a prominent local family. A series of images taken in 1925 by photographer Edna Leighton Tyler (1879–1970) captures the sweeping lawns and luxuriant flowerbeds on Katharine Ludington’s estate. But the land behind her elegant Colonial Revival home had once served more practical uses.
Civil defense efforts in Old Lyme during World War II included preparations for a possible enemy air raid. At the Town Hall volunteers and rescue vehicles responded to a hypothetical attack on March 29, 1942.
Elsie Ferguson, a celebrated Broadway actress and star of the silent screen during the World War I era, settled in Old Lyme in 1955. The gabled front addition to an historic tavern became her final home.
Daniel Chadwick (1795–1855), Lyme’s most celebrated sea captain, was known as the “admiral of the fleet.” When he relinquished command of the Sir Robert Peel in 1853, he had served with distinction as a trans-Atlantic packet ship commander for almost thirty years. Today his stately home with its rooftop captain’s walk recalls his illustrious maritime career. The shocking circumstances of his death are long forgotten.
