Cape Ann Museum Board of Trustees member William R. Cross presents a lecture and slideshow that examines the architectural significance of the Manchester Public Library in celebration of its 125th anniversary. The first library designed by the New York-based firm McKim, Mead and White, its construction was completed in 1887.  This treasured resource in downtown Manchester was a gift to the town from summer resident Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. Cross details the roots of its design as well as the meaning behind several of its motifs and also places it within the context of McKim, Mead and White’s long tenure as one of the most successful architectural firms in the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Contemporary images of the library by local photographer Steve Rosenthal enhance the discussion. 

Ronda Faloon: 

I want to let you know in case you don't know that currently the Museum has an exhibition on Marsden Hartley and the paintings that he did on Cape Ann in Dogtown. And that exhibit is upstairs on the third floor. So before you leave, if you would like to tour that, that exhibit, I don't think you should miss it. And then there are a number of other galleries that are full of great things. So please take some time after the lecture to walk around and make sure that you pick up one of these pamphlets. It talks about all the scheduled programs that we have related to the Dogtown exhibition, a whole series of lectures and walks in Dogtown. If you've never walked in Dogtown before, please pick one of these up as well. It is my great pleasure to introduce Bill Cross who is a board member here and has been extremely involved in the Museum. He is one of the board members I think who has had, I always say this, Bill, sorry, sort of his fingers in every single aspect of the Museum, he pays attention to the collections, he pays attention to our finances, and is returning to the Museum and sort of resurrecting a Lyceum movement here at the Museum or a mini Lyceum movement by giving a series of talks. Last fall, Bill presented on the Unitarian pastor and writer Cyrus Bartol and talked about the development of Manchester as a summer resort. And this time around, he's researched a wealth of previously unpublished photographs, letters and other material drawn from dozens of private and public resources to uncover the hidden history of the building of the Manchester Public Library. So personally, it's just wonderful to have Bill so integrated into everything that goes on in the Museum and the fact that he also adds scholarship to what we all do here is really a wonderful, wonderful gift to us. So, thank you, Bill. 

Bill Cross – 2:17  

Thank you, Ronda, for those kind words. The Cape Ann Museum is such a special place, and I know that for most of you, it’s a familiar place, but for some of you, today may be the first time or one of the first times that you’ve been here. Marsden Hartley is only one of many major 19th- and 20th–century American painters who had catalytic periods of their professional lives on Cape Ann. The show that has just opened on the top level, curated by Martha Oaks, who’s in the back, Martha can you wave, is a wonderful show and, while I’m glad that you’re here for this lecture, I hope very much that you will after the lecture go upstairs and see the show and come back and see it often again through mid-October when it comes down.  

3:19 

This museum is a national treasure, because of all the great artistic treasures which were made on or about Cape Ann, for which the museum is nationally known. Many of those works are paintings and drawings including almost all of the extant drawings of Fitz Henry Lane and 43 of his paintings if I heard correctly, and the museum also holds important pictures by major figures such as Winslow Homer and John Sloane, and Milton Avery, and other 19th- and 20th-century painters who came here and were shaped by this marvelous place that we are blessed to live in and in some cases visit often. 

4:29 

As I said, most of what Cape Ann is known for is works in two dimensions, but there were also major sculptors here, Paul Manship, a work of his is in the corner in the back of the room, the sculpture of the baby. Walker Hancock, George Demetrios, Charles Grafly, each of whom has sculptures here in this room, are others.  

Cape Ann also has works of architecture that are important, and I would argue that perhaps the two most important works of architecture, speaking strictly from the perspective of architectural history on Cape Ann are the White-Ellery house, a 1710 house owned by the Museum located at Grant’s Circle, and the Manchester Public Library, which turns 125 years old today, and so it’s that occasion that spurred this talk.  

5:43 

Leon, could you dampen the lights please. Thank you. Is that all right for everybody? Those lights? If you don’t mind, I’ll hold the questions until the end and am happy to stay as long as people like after the talk to take your questions. This is a collaborative exercise in putting this talk together. I was greatly aided in this process by several people here in the room, first and foremost Steve Rosenthal, whose wonderful photographs are a key part of this talk, and I also spent a lot of time working with Slim Proctor of the long time archivist of the Manchester Historical Museum, and Dorothy Sieradzki who is here as well and an invaluable aid as director of the Manchester Public Library.  A number of other people contributed their time and advice and in many cases allowed me to include their works of art and other artifacts in this talk, so many thanks to all of them, and to all of you for coming here this afternoon. 

7:22 

The Manchester Public Library is as I said a true masterpiece in the heart of Manchester. It was completed in 1887 to the designs of Charles McKim, one of the three partners of the great firm of McKim, Mead & White. It was built at a time of tremendous change in the town, a period in which the town was being transformed into a summer resort attracting people not only from Boston but from New York and other parts of the country. This is a photograph that gives you a sense of the development of the area right around Manchester Harbor. That’s Smith’s Point in the distance in the mid 1880s. One of the summer residents who came in 1871 was Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, here photographed in the late 1870s, who came to create a weekend and summer house for his family on a rocky promontory that he bought from the farmer named Caleb Curtis. Coolidge decided just 15 years after coming to Manchester that he wanted to make a gift to the town, and he decided that the place he would do that would be right in the heart of the town, creating this building we know today as the library. He located it between an existing house on the site of what is now the Sovereign Bank branch, and on the other side, the Congregational Church built in 1809.  A couple of retail properties occupied the site of what is now a large evergreen and a memorial set up on a boulder there.  

We’ll talk about three aspects of this building: first as a multipurpose gift to the town, second as a part of the history of this remarkable firm McKim, Mead & White, and then third and last as a personal expression of McKim.  

The architect won the commission for the building in 1886. The first evidence of the dialogue about it between Coolidge and McKim is in Coolidge’s papers in the fall of 1885, shortly after McKim married Coolidge’s niece, who was the closest friend of Coolidge’s daughter Sallie. This presentation drawing gives you a sense of how well thought through the library was right from the point at which McKim won the commission. As far as we know, he was the only architect consulted, so it wasn’t perhaps a very competitive commission, but, sort of a family deal, but anyway, the building was completed generally as seen in this drawing. The exceptions include the chimney on the left that was removed in the final construction. There’s a chimney that rises from the fireplace in the reading room on the left. The chimney in the center just to the right of the tower was enlarged, and you’ll notice that there is no way to see the Palladian window on the right side, which is obscured by both the perspective and the trees there, and we’ll speak more about the Palladian window in a little bit.  

12:22 

The building was commissioned for three purposes. We think of the building today as simply being a library, but in fact it was built first as a memorial, and this memorial plaque is one of eight yellow marble plaques in the entrance hall, which was a memorial hall a Civil War memorial. It was also a library, of course. Here you see at the opening the front of where the stacks are now, double stacks today but single stacks then. And then the third purpose was as a gathering hall for the Grand Army of the Republic, which was the fraternal organization of Civil War veterans. And so the room on the right with the Palladian window that you see here was the portion of the building dedicated to the Grand Army of the Republic.  

It was an era of memorials. The men who served during the Civil War comprised an enormous percentage of the male population between 16 and 40. As the 70s and 80s wore on, there was an increasing recognition of the enormous debt of gratitude that the country owed them.  That produced a series of memorials around the country. This one by McKim, Mead & White built in New York’s Madison Park as a memorial to David Farragut. The sculpture was by Augustus St. Gaudens, and the elaborate base was done by Stanford White. Manchester had no Civil War memorial of any kind that we know of, and so this central hall was conceived for that purpose. Despite the fact that the town had lost 23 men and about a third of the men who were able to serve based on their age did in fact serve, that was an enormous percentage of the population that served. Half of those 23 who died fell to disease, which was consistent with the population as a whole, and Coolidge felt there was a real need for a way to recall this sacrifice. He wrote that a library, important as it is “for the education of the young, and the amusement of old age. . . . is meant . . . for other objects than education.  We wish to commemorate the dead, the honored dead, who went forth when liberty was at stake, when the country was in danger, and endured the terrible hardships of war to the bitter end."   

He was the youngest of six children, and as he said in these remarks, “I stayed at home.  I look back to it with regret; but my brothers joined the Union Army, and one of them laid down his life at the battle of Chickamauga.  His name stands engrossed in the Memorial Hall at Cambridge.  

16:40 

So, the hope was to create something which, while modest in size, would have some of the dignity of other memorials.  The building was also and second a library, and as a library, was a part of a real building boom.  Today we associate the construction of libraries with Andrew Carnegie, but in the 1870s and especially the 1880s, there were a number of libraries built without Carnegie’s help, among the most admired of them by Henry Hobson Richardson such as this one in Quincy. Not all libraries were built to the standards of Richardson and were particularly disliked by the librarians, who found themselves running up an awful lot of stairs, which seemed to make for pretty inefficient use of space and creating grand halls that weren’t especially effective for the purposes of a library. And so in the 1880s, William Frederick Poole, a man who had been the head of the Boston Athenaeum and had worked as the director of the Chicago Public Library came up with an idea for a new style of small-town library, and he found himself in short order as the key juror for a competition for a library in East Saginaw, Michigan, a competition into which both Richardson and McKim, Mead & White entered. 

This is the Richardson proposal, which you can see compares pretty closely to the plan that Poole had just published, so Richardson clearly knew how to please a customer, and presumably the other architects competing for this East Saginaw, Michigan, commission did, too, including McKim, Mead & White. But both the McKim entry and the Richardson entry were rejected, and we don’t have any record of what the McKim entry looked like other than inferring it based on Poole’s plan published in ’85 and Richardson’s work of ’86. But if you look at the plan of the Manchester building, it actually is pretty similar to the plan that Poole put together just two years earlier with the entrance in the middle of the stacks on the left and so we can deduce that in some ways, even though this is the first library building that McKim, Mead & White built, it is something of a retread of another library they had designed shortly before for a different commission  

20:43 

Poole was adamant that the stacks should be tidy and well-ventilated and that there should be a lot of air above them, and he would be horrified that we now have double stacks in the library.  With a lot of books published since 1887, at some point an addition to the Manchester library is warranted, but until that happens, it’s quite a bit more cluttered than when it was created. 

The third purpose of the library as I mentioned was as a gathering place for the veterans of the Civil War. Coolidge in his remarks on the purpose of the library said the GAR room, meaning the room closest to the church, is “reserved for soldiers who came through the war without losing their lives, and the least we can do as long as they live is to give them a comfortable room where they can meet to talk over old stories, to shoulder the crutch, and show how fields were won, and to assist one another by sympathy and good feeling. He said that he was making his gift that it may prove an incentive to study, that our children in acquiring knowledge may at the same time learn from its walls lessons of devotion and patriotism.”  

A local cabinet maker, William Wheaton, who had served as a sergeant in the 45th regiment and spoke at length at the dedication of the library, noted that there were 110,000 Union troops who died in battle or due to wounds, just over 224,000 died of disease, and almost 30,000 in rebel prisons, and he recalled in 1887, shortly before his death, having recruited not only many friends and neighbors but essentially 100% of his employees—he had about a dozen employees in a furniture making factory in Manchester—he recruited all of them to serve with him. He recalled their sacrifice and wrote a poem, which was quite long, and I won’t read you all of it, but it included the phrase that “the lesson taught in sacrifice and treasure, hearts and lives should still endure while manhood lives or liberty survives.” And as these men began to die off during this period, there was a greater sense of need to find a way to gather and recall a key moment in their history and the history of our country.  

But it took until 1927 for the last of the Civil War veterans to die, and the provision from the beginning was that when the last did die, the GAR hall would become a part of the library. The Grand Army of the Republic would close its chapter in Manchester.  

24:48 

The second aspect of the talk that I wanted to share with you is the role of the building as an important part, albeit a little known part, of the history of this extraordinary firm, McKim, Mead & White, which 

was for an important period of our country’s history, especially from the death of Richardson in 1886 to the death of McKim in 1909, the greatest architectural firm in the United States. It was the most prolific, meaning it built the highest number of buildings, employed the largest number of employees, and had the greatest influence through the enormous number of people who left McKim, Mead & White to go and found other architectural firms. You see in the center here McKim, who was something of an academic, Mead who was really the business guy, and White who was the impulsive and the brilliantly decorative figure that created a lot of the interior finish of the buildings.  

When we think of McKim, Mead & White, we often think of the late Imperial period of the firm’s work, much of it tragically destroyed in the 1960s and deeply inspired by the studying of antique architecture. McKim, Mead & White built many major commercial buildings during this period and has left its mark in many city centers, and had a large practice creating summer houses.  One of them, this great one, which was torn down in the 1950s, stood in Manchester, built for Coolidge’s son.  

Their clients were among the most powerful men in the country, and they were generally men, among them Pierpont Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt. Much of what we see and know of the White House today is the creation of McKim, Mead & White. So when you see the president on television in the east room, you’re looking at an environment which was the creation of Charles McKim.  

While the Manchester building is modest in scale, as the first of the 17 library buildings that the firm built, it deserves wide recognition.  It is a real jewel of a building and was completed in the year that the firm won the commission for certainly the greatest library that it ever built, which is the Boston Public Library. That might just possibly be the single greatest work of any kind that the firm created. And there are parallels between the two libraries, this small but fine one built for about one percent of the cost of Boston Public Library, and that truly great one.  

28:52 

This anteroom through which you enter the library was once significantly darker in feeling.  These glass doors distort that almost claustrophobic sense that it was intended to have, and the reason for that is that you could enter through that small dark space into a light-filled space as in Boston and enter a room which in miniature resembled other major rooms that the firm would build, such as this cross-vaulted wall on the left in Boston and this cross-vaulted hall on the right in New York. It’s hard to get a complete sense of that feeling in the central room of the library today, but in the course of researching for this talk, we came across the drawing on the lower right, which shows there was once a skylight on the outside of the building, which fed light into a second skylight on the ceiling of the central barrel-vaulted hall, and what that meant was that as in Boston, when you enter the hall, you have this rush of light that comes into the space that was strictly memorial in its purposes.  

In that same space, there was and is a Tiffany window, which was dedicated at the opening as a surprise and an expression of the town’s gratitude to Coolidge; it’s dedicated to Coolidge and included in it this tiny detail. It’s only about four inches tall, but this ship and the French phrase below it represents a kind of a signature for the firm, vogue la galere was the firm’s motto and is almost impossible to translate accurately, and I fear I’ll offend someone who has better French than I do, but the gist of it is sort of an elegant way of saying keep on keeping on. Keep the galleys rowing and keep going no matter what.  

The library is also notable in that it hearkens back to the beginning of the firm. At the time of the triumphal opening of the Boston Public Library in 1895, McKim wrote a letter to his friend the sculptor Daniel Chester French and said, “This is the world of disappointment, and one has to learn to be a philosopher, a fact which you doubtless found out. The really halcyon days are those when we get our first job and wonder where the second is coming from.” And this was one of the first jobs that McKim got. This is the house built for Frances Lee Higginson, Prides Crossing. It is the only other building by McKim Mead & White to survive on the North Shore. And the firm did have its beginnings building houses, and quickly, those houses grew to be pretty grand and morphed into lots of other commissions as well.  

33:03 

So there’s this one, which was built shortly after the Higginson house for James Gordon Bennett in Newport and animated by the playful spirit which also shaped houses on the North Shore, including this one, built by Peabody and Stearns, Kragsyde, the greatest Shingle Style house, tragically torn down in 1930. McKim’s work benefited also from study that he had made of First Period structures such as the Farnsworth house, which they studied over the course of a sketching trip that McKim and White made with Robert Swain Peabody in the late 1870s on the North Shore among other places, and you see those studies showing up in the work that they did in the late 1870s and 1880s. They also studied the English arts and crafts movement, this unbuilt house in Rhode Island, and had a great debt to the man who employed both McKim and White -- White for much longer than McKim, this remarkable architect Henry Hobson Richardson, garbed here even more remarkably. Richardson’s influence is visible in several aspects of the building, and it is perhaps the most Richardsonian of all McKim, Mead & White’s buildings. The stonework certainly, but also McKim and his colleagues were aware that they were building their first library, building as it were on the foundations that Richardson had laid through his great libraries—this one in North Easton.  

The building was designed in a transitional period for the firm when McKim, Mead & White was working with some forms of geometric massing, which, in an example like the Short Hills Casino on the right, seemed almost to come out of the pen of Adolph Loos or other architects after the First World War. They’re expressionistic. And part of the way that they were able to create these bold geometric forms is that they had clients that gave them a lot of latitude to experiment, and as Slim Proctor said to me, it’s amazing what you can do when you need not worry about insulation because you’re only using it in the summer, nor worrying about the inconvenience of where you put the kitchen because you have employees who can ferry the food around. So they had some great clients as well as some great work and a lot of latitude that the clients gave them. 

36:46 

The Manchester building looked both forward and backward. It looked back, as McKim was eager to explain, to French medieval architecture and Renaissance architecture, but particularly he stressed the impact on his work, especially on this building, of a trip that he and Saint Gaudens and White had made in the summer of 1878, which you’ll see memorialized shortly. This is a photograph that White took on the right when they were on that trip together, and McKim especially credited a visit to a little town on the northwestern corner of Brittany for one of the inspirations for the library. In addition, though, it

looks forward. It looks forward to the colonial revival buildings the firm became famous for immediately after creating the Manchester Public Library, and among those precedents are church spires, as an example this Connecticut church spire, the photograph you see on the right, which bears some resemblance to the cupola at the top. And the cupola itself, which we may take for granted, is a strange thing to find on an otherwise somewhat medieval building, but McKim was harmonizing with the environment in which he was constructing the building, with the church next door, and he was also paying homage to architectural tradition in New England, and to one particular cupola, was designed by Coolidge’s great-uncle, the great architect Charles Bulfinch, architect of the State House in Boston. On this church in Pittsfield, which you see drawn on the right in the 1930s just before it was torn down, Bulfinch built a cupola, which closely resembles the cupola on the library. So it may have been that it was kind of a gentle nod that McKim was making to not only to Bulfinch but to Bulfinch’s great nephew, who was the building’s donor.  

And then, in addition, McKim was well aware that the Manchester Congregational Church was right next to the library, designed to the pattern of Asher Benjamin and with the Palladian window both on the west façade and as Steve Rosenthal has figured out also on the east façade behind the pulpit—that east façade’s Palladian window was taken down early in the 20th century, but at the time that McKim designed the library, not only would you see a Palladian window on the west façade of both buildings, but standing on Church Street, you would see the Palladian window on both sides, one on the library and one on the rear of the church. So, McKim was employing this classical element in recognition of it being used by his neighbor.  

Last, the building includes a wonderful clue to the firm’s future and it’s quite a subtle clue, but in the Nubian marble plaques, which were carefully selected for memorial hall, are several fossils, and the fossils are of chambered nautiluses. As you may know, the chambered nautilus was, starting in the Mannerist period and continuing to the present day, a powerful symbol. The father of the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was both a physician and a poet, wrote a poem which begins, entitled “The Chambered Nautilus,” which begins, “This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign / Sails the unshadowed main,— / The venturous bark that flings / On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings / In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, / And coral reefs lie bare, / Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. / Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; / Wrecked is the ship of pearl! / And every chambered cell, / Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, / As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, / Before thee lies revealed,— / Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!”  

43:16 

The chambered nautilus was a symbol of particular interest to architects because it contained the Fibonacci series, the golden mean. You can see the geometry of the golden mean here in this diagram and even more clearly pronounced here. It was rediscovered in the 16th century and it became especially a symbol of a divine order underlying all things, expressed best in classical architecture, so if you look carefully at the design of the Parthenon, it along with a lot of other things, like the Mona Lisa’s face, has this Fibonacci series embedded in them, and there is a kind of harmony, a geometric harmony, that is underlying these great works of art, and so this was discovered and much loved by architects and became a symbol for the divine order expressed in classical architecture, which McKim, Mead & White 

became the great exponent for here in Boston as an example and later in so many other places, including the Columbia University campus, which the firm designed. 

Last, the building is a personal expression of McKim as a man, and it came out of another commission. I mentioned earlier that the commission for the library was sort of a rigged deal in the family, and that was because in June of 1885, McKim had married a woman who had a couple of years earlier commissioned the house from him with her sister, and that was Julia Appleton, who, like her sister, was orphaned at a young age, and the two girls were effectively taken in by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge and his wife, who was the sister to their father, the second of their two parents to die. And in the course of building the house for the two sisters in the Berkshires, McKim fell in love with one of them, and so on the same morning in June of 1885, the two sisters were married. First, Alice, the other sister, married George von Lengerke Meyer, who was later a great donor to Christ Church in Hamilton and the chapel there given by his family. And then, so the first wedding, Alice’s wedding, was in the church, the physical church in the Berkshires. 45 minutes later, the second wedding happened in the house that McKim had designed for the two sisters. That was because he had been divorced and so not permitted to be married in the church. And so the two sisters were married in June of ’85, and this house became McKim’s own house, and it was a place of great emotional resonance for him, but his wife died in January of 1887, less than two years after their wedding.  

This window is perhaps the best-known memorial to her designed by John La Farge and commissioned jointly by Alice and by McKim, and it stands on the right side of the nave of Trinity Church. It is inspired by a detail from Titian’s painting in the Accademia in Venice of the presentation of the Virgin Mary at the Temple. McKim was unable to speak of his wife but had a profound shock in her death, and a single sheet, a letter found in his handwriting, now at the Library of Congress, reads, “No one knows, no one can know, what she has been to me. To have been able to give my life for her would have been the slightest service I could seem to have rendered her.” And he buried himself in work upon her death with this massive commission of the Boston Public Library coming just a little over two months after her death.  

49:05 

This building, which was already underway at the time of her death but completed after her death, contains another, more private memorial to her than the famous window at Trinity Church, and it’s a kind of a coded memorial. This is the screen in the library which originally separated all the stacks from the reading room, so it’s on the left side as you enter the library and includes at the top of the screen the Appleton family crest and motto, which can be translated “difficult yet fruitful.” And Julia Appleton’s initials on the left and McKim on the right, JA and MK. And it includes some other verses as well, several of them. This one on the left above the arch is a phrase in Latin that can be translated, “To love the living wife is a delight. To love a dead one, a sacred honor.” It is borrowed from a remarkable fellow named Kenelm Digby, seen on the left here, who was husband to a famous beauty of 17th-century England, Venetia Stanley, who died at 33, so like Julia Appleton, died young, and he, his first impulse upon his wife’s death was to commission van Dyck to create a painting of her on her death bed, and his second impulse was to create a bronze bust of her with this Latin phrase inscribed beneath it, which he would place in the bedroom.  

So on the left is that Latin phrase, and on either side of the screen, these caricatures of the, then the husband and wife. The husband looks remarkably like McKim on the right, and the wife in a big ruff collar looks to me remarkably dead. On the right side is the phrase that is in English and looks at first to be a piece of pure Victorian sentiment: “There’s not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee.” It looks like a piece of pure Victorian sentiment with these flowers underneath them. He realized that it was written, by the way, it’s credited, strangely, you can’t quite read that, but it’s credited to a poet by the name of Wardsworth, W-A-R-D-S-W-O-R-T-H, and you’ve never heard of Wardsworth for good reason. There is no poet of that name, and I think that the, that the error was not one of unintentional inscription or mis-inscription but was an example of the sort of joke McKim, Mead and White really enjoyed, even in this memorial setting, and it, this frieze, “There’s not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee,” comes from a strangely not a poetic ode from a husband to a wife but in fact from an homage that Wordsworth wrote to this man, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who was leader of the Haitian slave revolt, and at the time that Wordsworth wrote this in 1802, he was rotting in a French prison, having surrendered to Napoleon, and he would die less than a year later after being tortured by Napoleon. Nobody knows for sure what Toussaint looked like, by the way. The print on the right is from his lifetime, but there wasn’t a good record made. The portrait on the left has been rediscovered very recently and is not absolutely 100% for sure of Toussaint, but this is as good as we’ve got to give you a sense of him.  

54:44 

You might wonder why in the world there is a reference to the leader of a Haitian slave revolt in the Manchester Public Library, but in fact, at the time that McKim was working on the library, he was also working on perhaps the greatest memorial in our whole country, the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, dedicated to the leader of an African American regiment and completed with McKim’s great friend Augustus St. Gaudens just a few years later. McKim was the product of a couple for whom the emancipation of African Americans and their integration into society was the great cause of their, of their lives. James Miller McKim, former Presbyterian minister, was in fact in Great Britain at the time of McKim’s birth raising funds for the abolitionist cause. His mother was a Quaker who accompanied John Brown’s body to its burial and seven years later wrote on a tear-stained letter now in the Library of Congress. This was the abiding focus of his parents, and while McKim didn’t seem to have a great passion for the cause of American Blacks, he surely understood how much of a force it was in his parents’ lives.  

And then, last, over the arch, this open book, its pages blank or, as a descendant of Coolidge’s daughter, who I mentioned earlier, and who was a classics professor, has suggested, perhaps its pages waiting to be written on by, by the two lovers. And below that book over the arch a Latin translation of a well-known phrase written by Thomas Carlyle, which was uttered frequently in its original English, “Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless.” This is a line from a poem which Carlyle wrote called “Mason Lodge.” He attributed it, interesting, to Goethe, his hero, but he really wrote the whole poem himself and it became especially well known from 1865 when he used it in an address of the University of Edinburgh, and included with a poem, including his speech with his poem, and I’ll read to you in closing, because it seems that the entire poem, particularly the last line, is very apt in the work that McKim poured himself into at this moment in his life, his moment of deepest grief. And so, it seems an appropriate way acknowledging the crosscurrents in the building to close.  

Carlyle wrote, “The future hides in it / Gladness and sorrow; / We press still thorow / Naught that abides in it / Daunting us,—onward. / And solemn before us / Veiled, the dark Portal / Goal of all mortal; — / Stars silent rest o’er us / Graves under us silent. / While earnest thou gazest / Comes boding of terror, / Comes phantasm and error, / Perplexes the bravest / With doubt and misgiving. / But heard are the Voices, -- / Heard are the Sages, / The Works and the Ages: / ‘Choose well; your choice is / Brief and yet endless;’ / Here eyes do regard you / In Eternity’s stillness; / Here is all fulness, / Ye brave, to reward you. / Work, and dispair [sic] not.” Carlyle closes his speech as I close mine: One last word: Wir heissen euch hoffen / We bid you be of hope. Please Goethe, forgive my accent. Adieu for this time, Carlyle says, as do I. Thank you.  

Q&A