In a Maine mill town, windows shed light on a once-prominent Victorian artist.

Story by Wendy K. Pirsig / Nov. 7, 2001

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Berwick Academy's Fogg Building, with its many Whitman windows (Berwick Academy)

One day in 1994, while involved with the parents' association at my daughter's school in our town of South Berwick, Maine, I heard someone mention an unusual stained-glass window. It was supposed to be in Berwick Academy's Fogg Memorial Building, a Romanesque landmark completed 100 years earlier to house both the school and the town's library. Dating to 1791 and the oldest school in Maine, Berwick Academy claims among its graduates the author Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Jewett's name was somehow linked with this window.

At Fogg Memorial, its gold cupola presiding from a forested hilltop over a rural valley fast succumbing to suburban development, I asked where to see the window, but nobody knew. I looked around and discovered on the second floor, in a corner of a math classroom, a drab specimen some seven feet tall and the width of the old roll-up shade it was hiding behind. Its dedication, "To the memory of many soldiers and sailors, pupils of this school who fought for their country," was lettered on the glass, along with a verse:

Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,—
'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.

I could barely make out the words, so faded was the paint. In the top section, a white dove spread its wings between a trident and a spear, and in the section below, a swirling blue ribbon trailed from its beak to a wreath of green and gold pieces of rough-cut glass; pieces made to look like jewels, faceted white and polished green, framed the images. A long crack severed the window, and its glass sagged like a curtain. Until that discovery, I'd given little thought to historic preservation, but suddenly there came a voice without reply saying it would be my perdition if I did not save that window.

How had such an ornately crafted Civil War window, with an inscription from Ralph Waldo Emerson, gotten to a small, backwoods manufacturing town near the Maine-New Hampshire line? I learned that in the 1890s the public high school had intersected with the career of an unusual woman artist named Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman. The library's 52 windows on the first floor and Jewett's memorial on the second floor—originally a large lecture hall but now divided into classrooms—had been fashioned in Whitman's studio in Boston, and she had also designed the building's interior.

Sarah Whitman, who died 10 years after her South Berwick commission, is today largely forgotten; her work, scattered about northern New England, goes unrecognized. Born in 1842 in Lowell, Mass., Whitman married a wool merchant and had no children. She apprenticed for three years with Richard Morris Hunt, the most honored American architect in the post-Civil War period, and became acquainted with artist John La Farge, from whom she may have learned the art of stained glass.

She developed a reputation as a portraitist and painter of flowers, and gravitated to the center of Boston's literary and intellectual world, entertaining at her Beacon Hill home and writing for The Atlantic Monthly. Her cover designs for Houghton Mifflin appeared on books by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. A strong advocate for coeducation at Harvard, she designed a number of its buildings' interiors and windows for Radcliffe College when it was formed. She even designed Mount Auburn Cemetery monuments for prominent Bostonians.

One of Whitman's windows (Pirsig)

From the Lily Glass Works, her stained-glass studio on Boston's Boylston Street, Whitman created many of the windows in Harvard's High Victorian Memorial Hall, bold and huge designs that contrast with the delicate pastels at Berwick Academy. The Boston Athenaeum and Trinity Episcopal Church in Copley Square also commissioned Whitman windows. (A memorial window for Bishop Phillips Brooks from Trinity Parish Hall is on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts until Dec. 2.)

She designed the covers for the novels of Sarah Orne Jewett, with whom she developed a friendship, and created a stained-glass window as a gift for the Boston house where Jewett lived. In 1894, Jewett invited Whitman to visit South Berwick and asked her to contribute to its new, state-of-the-art high school.

Whitman had thought a lot about American public buildings, and schools in particular. She deplored the "quick and haphazard growth of towns and cities, the new use of wood as a building material (wholly unsanctified by study), the invention of machinery, and finally, the absence of standards," all of which, she wrote in The Atlantic in 1897, "created a thin, raw, and superficial order of architecture which set at naught the canons of good taste."

Worse still, children raised in these conditions of aesthetic deprivation were not being prepared as artists. In America, she lamented, "even the schoolhouse itself was from the beginning deficient in all the prime elements of educational fitness; nor has its evolution from the cold, barren little shanty of the first days to the large, commodious, well-lighted, and well-aired building of to-day done much towards providing anything beyond material comfort.

"One finds everywhere in our country to-day, manifested in various forms, a longing for the beautiful; a craving for that which is not bread, but which soon or late is found to be essential to certain deep necessities of the human appetite. This is often an unfathomed longing, a dumb demand; but it is very genuine, and makes appeal to all who hope and believe that the time has come for a more liberal and more symmetrical system of education."

Before coming to Maine, Whitman had taken hope from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she had seen ordinary Americans admiring what she considered to be good architecture. "The buildings there rose in accordance with the great principles of harmonious development," she observed. Even "rough and untutored" people loved them; she had talked with an "overworked" Minnesota farm wife who said, "When I saw the Peristyle, I cried." Convinced, Whitman rallied America to action in the name of aesthetic nourishment. The place to begin, she said, was in the "costly, sanitary, and yet cheerless and neglected schoolhouses."

She called upon the nation's boards of education to adopt a holistic approach in public school design. "Especially is there room for loveliness of form and color in the windows of schoolrooms. … Let the windows … instead of being filled with ugly oblong panes, have a simple tracery of lead-lines, with perhaps here and there a bright jewel set in the midst: this would give peculiar pleasure to children, and be in itself an object-lesson in design and in color, obtained at very slight cost."

Berwick Academy's Fogg building (Wendy Pirsig)

Berwick Academy's new building was Whitman's laboratory for these ideas. Its main benefactor was William Hayes Fogg, a Maine native who built a Far East shipping company based in New York City. (When Fogg's widow died, Harvard received his collection of Oriental art and $200,000 to build the William H. Fogg Art Museum.) Fogg and his relatives gave a total of $100,000 for a combined Berwick Academy building and town library; the family engaged Boston architect George Clough and the landscaping firm of Frederick Law Olmsted for the project.

The family also turned to Sarah Jewett, who had reached the top of her career as a writer of novels about rural Maine. For Jewett and the other 1860s Berwick Academy graduates, memories of high school were bound up with the Civil War. The 45-year-old Jewett commissioned her friend Whitman to express the ideal of sacrifice in the lines of Emerson's poem through the memorial window I had discovered in the math classroom.

Today the teacher in that classroom no longer draws down the window shade. Berwick Academy raised the funds to repair all of the building's stained glass and employed Robin Neely of suburban Portland to do the work. Designing and fabricating stained-glass windows is unusual for women, even today, Neely says. And of the war memorial window and its collaborative origin between a woman donor and a woman artisan, she says, "There probably isn't another Victorian window like it anywhere."

Fogg windows under repair (Pirsig)

The window restorations so heightened enthusiasm for campus history that the school tackled other projects as well: saving Fogg Memorial's threatened bell tower in 1998 and repairing other buildings. Marble mosaic flooring and bas-relief sculpture Whitman placed in Fogg Memorial have been restored. Parents are now raising money to restore campus stone walls.

To a school in a drab mill town, Whitman brought some colored glass to satisfy the "longing for the beautiful." Today, I believe, she would understand our desire to safeguard long- treasured objects. She even had an Emerson quote for it that she put in her Atlantic Monthly article. The transcendentalist had told about an item crafted from a waxy substance obtained in the head of a whale, but he'd addressed all the trouble people go through to preserve. "I have seen," Emerson wrote, "a lump of spermaceti carried about by a family through three household movings and a fire, because it was carved in the form of a rabbit."

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