This agrarian character with some settlement mostly farmers and fishers lasted until the late 18th century. In the first decades of the 19th century, noted Salem diarist Reverend Doctor William Bentley documented his trip to Nahant, noting things of scientific and aesthetic interest and also that a trip to the shore could be both healthy and enjoyable.
The second decade of the 19th century saw the discovery of Nahant by the elite of Boston. The change in attitude regarding being near and in the sea, as well as the crowded and unpleasant conditions of the summer in the city, brought people out to stay at simple boardinghouses. They enjoyed the rugged environment and basic fish dinners the area had to offer.
Hotels sprang up in the 1820's, notably the Nahant Hotel at East Point, which could accommodate a number of people in a luxurious manner. Visitors now came from much farther afield as Nahant became known as one of the premier resorts in America. Those who wanted more privacy built 'cottages', which were seasonal mansions to rival Beacon Hill or Back Bay townhouses. Many famous people of the day, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, and Henry Cabot Lodge, soon had residences there. In 1853 Nahant separated from Lynn and formed its own town, partly over the right to serve liquor, since Lynn was a 'dry' town.
The natural beauty of the are was celebrated in the travel literature of the day and in the works of such well-known artists as Fitz Hugh Lane, Thomas Chambers, William Bradford, and Robert Salmon. Maurice Prendergast and the artists now referred to as the Lynn Beach painters continued the tradition.
There were also recreation and amusement parks. First came the Maolis Gardens, a genteel park for relaxing by the seaside where patrons could take a picnic or eat in a restaurant, play on the swings, or observe nature from the vantage point of the 'Witch House'. Later, for those seeking more entertainment, there was the carnival-like atmosphere of the Bass Point area and its midway. A number of hotels, theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, and amusements catered to those looking for an exciting day away or a more extended lively vacation.
All this was possible because transportation had become very extensive. There were at least three piers where steamers brought passengers from Boston, Lynn and Revere seasonally. Horse drawn 'barges' carried people over from Lynn on the hard sand at low tide and after 1849, when the road over the causeway was finished, could run on a regular schedule independent of the tides. The Lynn and Nahant Street Railway connected Nahant with the rail station in Central Square, Lynn, in 1905. This was a summer commuter's dream. Families could live full-time in Nahant while the breadwinner could easily get into Boston by sea or rail.
Although the hotels and amusement parks are long gone, Nahant retains its close ties to Boston. Its proximity to the Hub is ideal for traveling into the city, but because it is isolated in the sea, it still retains a character all its own. Spectacular views of Boston as well as the rest of the North Shore abound and many sea- and shore-based recreational opportunities are easily at hand.
Images of America, Nahant
by Christopher R. Mathias and Kenneth C. Turino
Maurice Prendergast, by 1900 living in the Boston suburb of Winchester, probably came as a day-tripper. To judge from his watercolors (the only documentation of these trips), Prendergast went only to Bass Point. "Over at Bass Point," observed one travel writer a few years later, "the excursion steamers from Revere land and empty upon the beach their loads of merry-go-round riders and imbibers of ice-cream cones. There is a dancing pavilion and a band stand: cafes and all the paraphernalia for what is considered 'popular amusement'." If there were any mistaking the writer's distaste for those excursionists, it is clarified in the next sentence: "But the genuine Nahant residents hold themselves aloof from such frivolity.
The "riders and imbibers" also came for some of the same reasons as those of Nahant's other social world: its natural beauty and its convenience to central Boston. Yet they brought new conditions for having a good time: three competitive hotels offered fish dinners (fried live lobster was a specialty), accompanied by liquor, for which some blamed much of the boisterous behavior they associated with Bass Point. There were, indeed, more active diversions at the dancing pavilions or on the swings and merry-go-rounds that sprung up to satisfy Nahant's newest summer excursionists.
Prendergast sought out Nahant at a transitional moment in its history. Just as he had previously painted Revere Beach in changing times, at Nahant he may have foreseen the burgeoning of commercial entertainment. Prendergast chose to paint a popular resort poised between a genteel past and a rowdy future. Described in 1852 as having "no balls, no hops, no concerts," by 1914 Bass Point had become a spot which a local author denounced as "a menace to the morals of the young.
Merry-Go-Round, Nahant is one of Prendergast's two known watercolors devoted to a mechanical amusement that many referred to as the "flying horses," a title he gave a watercolor exhibited in 1901 at the Boston Water Color Club's annual show and in a special solo exhibition of his watercolors and monotypes at the museums in Detroit and Cincinnati.[4] Around 1900, the approximate date of Springfield's watercolor, Prendergast continued his practice of the mid-1890s of selecting subjects of ceremonial festivity; but his compositions then grew more complex and he introduced diverse man-made structures, such as staircases, fountains, maypoles or merry-go-rounds, as primary elements of his designs. Prendergast owed this new pictorial richness to his 18-month stay in Italy with its significant public spaces created by architecture, especially in Rome and Venice. With this new focus, Prendergast found the carousel at Nahant particularly enticing for the way its circular form shaped his visual field.
Prendergast may have begun his watercolor on the verso of this sheet, on which there are pencil sketches of carousel horses and a bench. Turning the sheet over, he composed his finished work by balancing the large roundabout, which is weighted to the left by the red center pole, with a grouping of four figures beneath a stand of trees at the right. Although the motion of the carousel dominates, the vertical blue stripes on the awning, prominently silhouetted drop rods, and foreground tree trunks impart a stop-motion stability to the piece. Small but significant details reveal how Prendergast transformed his visual environment into art: the tree trunk to the left is bent to reveal a rider and horse, and only one section of the red fence that presumably surrounded the platform is included so that the enclosure does not obscure our view of the riders.
The actual location of the carousel on Nahant is disclosed in a related watercolor, The Flying Horses (Murjani Collection), in which the same carousel is set against a view of the harbor and one of Bass Point's recognizable piers. In Merry-Go-Round, Nahant a viewer may identify its locale only from topographical information, a pictorial device Prendergast had developed while painting in Venice.
By making the setting slightly ambiguous, he enhanced the universality of his subject for some viewers, encouraging them to enjoy an afternoon carousel ride away from the hubbub at Bass Point.
Yet the watercolor might have special meaning to others -- those who knew Nahant and could supply the missing context for this scene of amusement.
Of the many sides of summer pleasure at Nahant, Prendergast chose one of the most innocent, yet one that had clear class identity. He encouraged his viewers to revel in the visual display of multi-colored wooden horses ridden by well-dressed, polite children and adults on a sunlit summer day. Yet, as time-honored and universal as this recreation may seem to us today,Prendergast's image must be understood against the spread of American popular culture at seaside amusement parks in New England. Class distinctions in this work were clear: this was an experience that simulated that of more affluent equestrians, who rode live horses in urban parks and whom Prendergast featured in his contemporary watercolors of Rome's Pincian Hill and New York's Central Park.
Yet, by presenting an acceptable image of working-class leisure, Merry-Go-Round, Nahant displays an attitude toward these new pleasure seekers that would have comforted Nahant's more genteel residents who were among the artist's potential patrons in Boston. Prendergast:s well-dressed riders, decorously astride or even side-saddle, posed no threat to an established order in Nahant or elsewhere.
Merry-Go-Round, Nahant, pleasing to the eye and carrying lightly this charge of social meaning, was exhibited in every prominent memorial and retrospective show in the dozen years following the artist's death. It still retains the frame ornamented with gold and silver leaf and with sgraffito decoration of flowers and leaves at the corners, made by the artist's brother, Charles Prendergast, probably in the 1920s.
2. Agnes Edwards, The Romantic Shore (Salem: The Salem Press Co., 1915), p. 30.
3. George William Curtis, Lotus-Eating: A Summer Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), n.p.; Lynn Item, Aug. 20, 1914, as quoted in Fred A. Wilson, Some Annals of.Nahant, Massachusetts (Boston: Old Corner Book Score, 1928), p. 329.
4. While we cannot be sure which, if either, of the two presently known watercolors of this subject Prendergast exhibited in 1901, (or whether he exhibited a different watercolor with the same title in each of these two exhibitions that year), the one now in the Murjani Collection has carried the title "The Flying Horses" at least since its appearance in a retrospective exhibition in 1960, and so is presumed to be the only one he exhibited in 1901. However, it certainly is possible that the Springfield work appeared under that title in one or both of these exhibitions. There is a work in oil closely related to Merry-Go-Round, Nahant: The Flying Horses (Toledo, Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art), around 1902-1906, in which Prendergast focused in more on the carousel yet kept the diagonal foreground repoussoir of blue wooden benches. These three works, as well as another oil of Nahant's carousel, are included in Carol Clark, Nancy Mowll Mathews, and Gwendolyn Owens, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonn� (Munich: Prestel-Verlag with the Williams College Museum of Art, 1990), nos. 68, 69, 771, 772.
Around his pasture Nahants master of the unexpected erected a ten foot slat fence with entrance gate (adults,children). Inside,he planted trees and flower beds, built a restaurant on the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean, a dance hall, a small hotel, several open pavilions, which could be hired for picnics that required cooking, and an ice cream parlor. His men installed sea-saws and swings, one of which was 50 feet high with a collective seat. Flying Horses were added, and a shooting range, a croquet field, bowling alley's, Wheels of Fortune, a 'Punch and Judy show, caged animals and two tame bears. Indians from Old Town, Maine sold blankets and trinkets, and concessions were let to the baloon man, the candy man and the tintype artist.
Was the Fun King in his second childhood ? The teahouse of 'Maolis Gardens' was a temple-like pavilion of marble, tiles and seashells. Nearby was an octagonal fancy of similar construction sheltering a pool in which stood the spouting statue of a boy covered with shells; a third pavilion consisted simply of a tilted circular roof, the Parasol. He blasted a den out of a cleft in the ledge and had a local mason carve a stone lion that glared out from behind the iron bars of its cage. A pointed clay bull menaced little children from its pen under the trees. Everywhere was strange statuary, and on every surface playful paintings, and murals such as the sea serpent, which writhed across a hunded feet of slat fence and appeared and disappeared as one walked by.
Frederic Tudor was eighty when he died in 1864. It was said that he spent no less than $30,000.00 a year the last thirty of his life on his eccentric projects at Nahant. His widow carried on valiantly after the Civil War and is credited with inventing the barge, the horse drawn conveyance for guests familiar to every summer hotel, when she bought a boat-sleigh called Cleopatra's Barge and had it put on wheels to carry passengers from the Lynn depot to Maolis Gardens. By 1882, however, the crowds had shifted to Revere Beach, and the June, when Mrs. Tudor's amusement park opened under the strict temperance management of the Lynn Reform Club, it presented a 'ragged appearance' to a visiting reporter, and the speakers almost outnumbered their hearers.
Before her death in 1884 the Ice Queen willed Maolis to the town of Nahant, but it was more than the taxpayers would support, and they refused the gift, settling eventually for Tudor Wharf. In 1892 most of what was left was removed. Today there remains a single intact monument to the driving, driven Despot of the Ice Trade, who wanted possibly more than all else to be loved by his fellows in masse. This is the Witch House, last remnant of his midway, standing on a private estate near the corner of Marginal Road and Ocean Street. Eight fieldstone columns support the octagonal gabled roof. Time has stripped away most of the weird carved ornaments and doodads, and it broods above the sea, a pseudo-Druidic put-on left there by Nahants most extraordinary, and unfathomable, citizen.
Old Castle was torn down in 1903, ending the fears and hopes of a couple of generations of Nahant youngsters that it was haunted by the ghosts of long-gone revelers.
Credit: Portions from:Bostons North Shore:Joseph E. Garland.
Time and again mainlanders exhorted the town for permission to extend steam, horse or electric railway tracks from Lynn along the sliver of beach to the shores oldest and most hidebound resort. Always the natives and summer people alike, with long memories of the crowds drawn to the Ice King Frederic Tudor's primeval amusement park, Maolis Gardens, and its oddities that infested the heart of the town, demurred, more than content with the controllable influx of foreigners rationed by the Boston steamer and Nahant's peculiar, indigenous, horse-drawn 'barges'. Outmaneuvered for a change in 1905, they gave the Nahant and Lynn Street Railroad a grudging go-ahead, and in a few months the trolleys were clanging out the causeway. Then a spur was looped to the Relay House on Bass Point, and the worst, as far as Cold Roast was concerned, had come to pass.
The trouble was that both the Relay House and the Bass Point House had built wharves in the mid-1890's for steamers to disgorge the overflow of proletariat from Revere Beach's Great Ocean Pier and Lynn, and that meant dance halls, vaudeville, brass bands in the middle of the night and the usual other attractions for the unruly, including bar-rooms. The very real and present presence of the amusement park and its ancillary activities endangered proximate land values. First a tent city of impecunious summerers, then shanties, then camps, then a few small cottages built or bought, and town father and historian Fred Wilson wrote between clenched teeth,'by people of Irish nativity or descent'. And the horrid prospect of the blight spreading...and the fires...and the insurance rates !!!
Bass Point was a thorn in the side of proper Nahant, no question. Some summer Sundays, between the steamers and the trolleys and the automobiles there were 40,000 souls over on the other shore from Sprouting Horn....and how they carried on a southwest wind !!! But the boat service was scuttled by the First War, and the trolleys quit, and the amusements folded, and that was that----to the relief of all Nahant---except for the unpleasantness with bootleggers and bad women around the dance halls during Prohibition.
