January 2011

In the summer of 1869, two years after the United States purchased Alaska from the Russians and 63 years after John deWolf’s visit, a military expedition under the command of Major General George H. Thomas (“the Rock of Chickamauga”) came to survey the newest American possession. One of the places visited was Baranov’s old post at Sitka, or New Archangel. Thomas’ aide-de-camp. Captain Alfred Lacey Hough, left a diary, which was reprinted in 1949 by the Pacific Northwest Quarterly. In it he recorded the following impression of the settlement as the Russians had left it .

Sitka is situated on a little promontory on Baranoff Island, the promontory running out into the Bay of Sitka, amidst a group of small islands, all of which, when in a state of nature must have been very beautiful to look at, but now they are deformed by this town.

Captain Frederick Marryat in A Diary in America, 1839

“I am sure the Americans can fix nothing, without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; … They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successfui in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning; they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they drop down into the grave.”

Charles Poore in the New York Times, January 13,1959

Thus the work fell into the hands of his son, who fortunately found it wholly congenial. To be engaged in literary labors gave one social prestige in the Boston of that era, and young Charles Francis Adams, who was well-to-do and cared little for the drudgery of legal practice, was not averse to such prestige. His work on the family papers proceeded in several distinct stages.

In the summer of 1936 a young man named Beryle W. Shinn was picnicking on a hillside near San Quentin, California, on the north shore of San Francisco Bay, when he found a metal plate approximately five inches wide by eight inches long. Thinking it might serve to cover a hole in the floor of his automobile, he picked it up and kept it, and only later did he notice that one side was covered with writing. Dr. Herbert E. Bolton of the University of California, to whom Shinn took the plate, then deciphered the inscription:

In the first week of April, 1841, some eight or ten thoughtful, cultivated Bostonians bundled their possessions, their children, and themselves into country-going carriages and drove eight miles to a pleasant, roomy homestead in West Roxbury. Their destination, then known as the Ellis Farm, was later to be called Brook Farm, a name they made famous as the most literary—and, in ways, the least fortunate—of American Utopias. This small band, led by Mr. and Mrs. George Ripley, aimed to establish a self-supporting community whose economy would be based on a union of labor and culture, a hope in which they were doomed to disappointment. But Brook Farm is well remembered for their efforts.