Discovering Dublin

BY BARBARA RADCLIFFE ROGERS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY STILLMAN ROGERS

In the nearly half-kilometer of bookshelves that cover the walls of my home and office are several yards of books on New England, most of them on New Hampshire. Many are long out of print, a few are bone-dry town histories, but most lead to a few hours of browsing whenever I pull one from the shelf.

“Dublin Days” is one of those, a lighthearted combination of history, village life, gossip and the reminiscences of the town’s long-time storekeeper, postmaster and selectman, Henry Darracott Allison. A fair part of the book relates to an especially interesting period in Dublin’s history when the town was both a noted art colony and the summer home for prominent figures in government, business and other endeavors. This included, for several summers in the early 1900s, the British Embassy.

The art colony drew not only artists and writers, but luminaries in other fields who were drawn to the intellectual and cultural climate of Dublin summers. The first boarding house opened here in 1840 and the first summer “cottage” was built in 1872 for a Boston family. Others followed and the community grew to include notable (and wealthy) Bostonians and others.

The lure of Mount Monadnock and the clear, cool country air attracted outdoor enthusiasts and later inspired artists and writers. By the turn of the 20th century, those who returned regularly, along with their house guests, formed a who’s-who of the arts and government.

Artists John Singer Sargent, Abbott Thayer, Barry Faulkner, George de Forest Brush and Rockwell Kent worked and played here. Mark Twain, poet Amy Lowell, novelist John P. Marquand, actress Ethel Barrymore, Amelia Earhart, Admiral Richard Byrd, ambassadors, at least one cabinet member and President William Howard Taft all spent time in the “cottages” that sprang up around Dublin Lake and along the surrounding hills.

Local families found opening their farms to paying summer guests and working on their estates more profitable than sheep farming, which had long since replaced trying to wrest a living from the scant soil.

In “Dublin Days,” Henry Darracott Allison recounts personal experiences with many of these summer guests, to whom he delivered groceries. Allison was an interesting character himself. His fine penmanship reached the point of calligraphy and he was in great demand to create diplomas and award certificates. When he died in 1963 at the age of 94, his grave in the Town Cemetery was marked by a bronze plate imbedded in a rough field stone. Across the top of the plate lies his inscribed, elegant signature.

The cemetery, on a slope overlooking Dublin Lake, reveals much about Dublin’s early history — with the stone walls of the Town Pound at one corner, and signs identifying the land as the location of the original town center. The first settlers came in 1753 but didn’t stay; a hardier lot arrived 10 years later, and Dublin was incorporated in 1771. Winds sweeping across the lake made the original town site uninhabitable —

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