January 2011

Sunday, October 27, 1782. Mist and intermittent sheets of cold rain shrouded the granite spine of Butter Hill as it stretched west from the Hudson River above West Point toward the distant Shawangunk mountain range. Farmers, working neat, stonewalled fields, watched the storm without noticing anything unusual along the mountain’s crest. At dusk, however, the rain eased and the mist lifted to reveal something new and strange. High on the mountain hundreds of small lights flickered like fireflies. Highlanders were puzzled, then exclaimed, “They’re campfires. It’s the army. Back for the winter.”

They were right. Washington’s northern wing of the Continental Army had marched from its summer camp near Peekskill, New York, to Constitution Island, ferried across the Hudson, then climbed the steep mountain. This night would be the last the army would spend on an open, rain-soaked field. In the morning it would march to nearby New Windsor to build its final winter camp.

The English cherish equally a stunning victory and a gallant defeat. We hear much of Trafalgar and Dunkirk, but a middling affair like Kimberley tends to be forgotten. At first glance this Boer War siege would seem to be the perfect material for an enduring legend: the richest diamond mine on earth at stake, a British garrison holding out for months inspired by the presence of the living personification of Empire, Cecil Rhodes, a relief column punching its way through at the last moment. But it turns out that Kimberley escaped direct assault, and Cecil Rhodes didn’t behave very well, and the relief column was shamefully tardy. And so the single hero to come out of the siege of Kimberley is not a soldier, is not even English; he is a Michigan boy who came to South Africa to build some stamp mills for De Beers.

In “The Newburgh Conspiracy,” the article beginning on page 40 of this issue, author James W. Wensyel makes passing reference to the fact that an awards board at the Newburgh encampment “granted three sergeants purple, heart-shaped medals of valor, the first time in any army that enlisted soldiers were so honored.” He has since provided us with a footnote to that intriguing incident:

“On August 7, 1782, General George Washington established two awards for his soldiers. The first—the Honorary Badge of Distinction—consisted of strips of white cloth to be sewn above the left cuff of regimental coats, one for each three years of honorable service, an award that remained a tradition in the Army for the next two hundred years. Today’s GI s call the diagonal stripes ‘hash marks.’

The teasingly familiar scene above is not, as one would suppose, the work of an anonymous nineteenth-century folk artist. It is a painting done in 1951 by none other than the first lady of American folk art, Jean Lipman, who, for over thirty years as the editor of Art in America and author of countless articles and books on the subject, has done more to make folk art “a major chapter in the history of American art” than any other enthusiast of the genre.

Pennsylvania Past was Jean Lipman’s first painting, and the relatively few done since then have been unknown except to a small circle of friends. One of these admirers insisted last year that she bring fifteen of them out of her attic and into the Wilton Heritage Museum in the Lipman’s Connecticut hometown. As they are now back hidden away in the Lipman attic, AMERICAN HERITAGE was most pleased when the artist consented to their reproduction here.

America has always been not only a country but a dream.—

Walter Lippmann

The river has its source on the western slopes of the continental divide in Yellowstone National Park, flows south through Grand Teton National Park, curves west in a long arc through southern Idaho, then turns north and west for its meeting with the Columbia River, 1,038 miles from its beginnings. The land along its southern arc is called the Snake River Plains, and at the southernmost point of the arc there is a place called the Magic Valley—unsurprisingly, for a kind of magic was done there more than seventy-five years ago.

Few circus people can have done their work in such an unlikely context as these members of Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey. The whole troupe—clowns and elephants, hareback riders and acrobats—has made its way across town from the vast pale-red auditorium of New York City’s Madison Square Garden to mount the show in the courtyard formed by wings C and D of Bellevue Hospital. Between 1910 and 1950 the circus assembled annually under these grim walls to offer the inmates its riotous diversions. A nurse named Olivia Stuart Davis took in the 1919 visit and kept this picture as a souvenir; her granddaughter, Kristen Huntley, sent it to us.

We continue to ask our readers to send unusual and previously unpublished old photographs to Carla Davidson at American Heritage Publishing Co., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020. Please send a copy of any irreplaceable material, and do not mail glass negatives. A MERICAN H ERITAGE will pay $50.00 for each one that is run.

AN APRONFUL OF CARING CIVIC MASONRY SANDTRAPPED THE HEARTS OF NEWBURGH

In “A Bulwark Against Mighty Woes” (February/March 1980) we celebrated the work done by the American Red Cross during World War I—and the fact that this year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the organization. Now reader Priscilla M. Harding of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, offers a sidelight that demonstrates the remarkable dedication of many Red Cross volunteers:

Fraternal Arts,” the portfolio of Masonic symbols we presented in our October/November issue last year, noted that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Masonic symbology “became a common part of the decorative arts, incised into furniture, woven into rugs, shaped into watch parts, blown into bottles, enriching the texture and aesthetics of everyday life.”