Much has been made in recent years of "cultural tourism" and its positive impact on the North Shore economy. Ironically, much of the impetus for the region's tourism industry was provided by men of culture who discovered and popularized it in the 19th century.
In the middle decades of the century, important men of letters began fleeing the heat and bustle of Boston and Cambridge to summer along the quieter, cooler coast to the north. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for example, discovered Nahant in the early 1840s through his in-laws and remained a fixture there for many summers to come. The renowned American poet had already called attention to the region by setting his epic 1842 work, "The Wreck of the Hesperus," off the coast of Cape Ann, although he was a bit confused as to the exact location of the treacherous reef known as "Norman's Woe" that figured so prominently in the poem.
Other literary types of the era, including James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana Sr. and the Concordian Ralph Waldo Emerson chose to summer farther up the coast in Rockport's Pigeon Cove neighborhood. Dana and James T. Fields, the publisher of Hawthorne, Emerson and so many other important authors of the times, ultimately chose the cooling breezes of Manchester in the 1870s. It was the cultured Fields that first used the "by the Sea" appellation lest anyone think he was living in the blue-collar industrial community of Manchester, N.H.
These men and others, like Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who summered in nearby Beverly Farms, helped to popularize the North Shore as a summer destination among their peers, the cultured and educated elite in the greater Boston area. But it was a British transplant, Rudyard Kipling, who really helped put Gloucester on the map.
While he spent little very time on Cape Ann, Kipling set his famous novel "Captains Courageous" in Gloucester and aboard a Gloucester vessel. The story of a spoiled young man forced to grow up during a brief stint aboard the We're Here, "Captains Courageous" was published in book form in 1897 and was both a critical and commercial success.
Cape Ann definitely got its money's worth, in terms of tourist promotion, out of Kipling's classic. "Captains Courageous" would be made into a movie featuring Spencer Tracy, John Carradine, Mickey Rooney and others in 1937. The movie was filmed in Gloucester, and Tracy won his first Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Manuel. Forty years later, a remake of the movie for television would once again put Gloucester in the national spotlight.
A famous actor and a number of equally famous artists would also do their part in helping to draw the "right people" to the North Shore in the early years of tourism. In 1878, Junius Booth, a member of the famous thespian family that included Abraham Lincoln's assassin, opened a hotel in Manchester overlooking Singing Beach. Masconomo House was an immediate smash hit and a "must" vacation destination for the superstars of the Boston theater world and their fans. Naturally, the members of the press followed.
Booth's arrival nearly coincided with William Morris Hunt's "departure" from the North Shore scene. Hunt was a European-trained artist who also happened to be married to the daughter of one of the richest men in Boston, Thomas Handasy Perkins. In the years following the Civil War, Hunt had begun bringing his art classes, composed mostly of wealthy women from Boston's Brahmin community, to the North Shore to paint "en plein air." Hunt eventually bought a piece of property in Magnolia, but spent little time there before his mysterious drowning at the Isle of Shoals in 1879. After his death, Hunt's assistant, Helen Knowlton, continued the tradition of bringing classes to Cape Ann.
Winslow Homer, one of America's most famous and beloved artists, spent the summers of 1873 and 1880 in Gloucester, and his idyllic images of local youngsters berry picking, sailing, fishing and having clam bakes on the beach appeared in popular periodicals like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. The resulting publicity value to the region's fledgling tourism industry was enormous.
A generation later, Maurice Prendergast helped turn the spotlight on the North Shore's many seaside amusement and summer resort areas. The prolific impressionist produced many paintings and works on paper of well-dressed folks enjoying themselves on beaches in Revere, Nahant, Marblehead, Salem and especially Cape Ann, where he frequently visited friends in Annisquam.
"Happy" paintings done by these artists and many of their equally famous peers during summers spent on the North Shore would often be exhibited in important national shows the following winter. For the region's tourism economy, these important shows would become an ongoing source of free advertising.
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Jim McAllister of Salem writes a regular column on the region's history.
