Snapshots of Brant Rock: Images of a 19Th Century Resort

Snapshots of Brant Rock: Images of a 19th Century Resort The small, seaside village of Brant Rock and its close neighbor Ocean Bluff have been populated by European Settlers since the 1640s. Both are a part of the larger town Marshfield, Massachusetts, and are two of the town’s ten villages. Each of these communities has distinct characteristics, with Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock notable today for its fishing and lobstering industries. However, from the end of the nineteenth and halfway into the twentieth century, Brant Rock was a thriving resort. Artists are recorded to have visited the village as early as the 1860s, painting the marshes and coast to fit in with the New England pastoral canon. However, with the advent of the camera and its widespread use in the 1890s, the image of Brant Rock was altered from a simple, quiet village to an exciting and stimulating retreat for the middle class. Today, the entire town of Marshfield has a population of approximately 26,000 residents, 1 and Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock is home to one-fifth of that number with 5,200 people. The median 2 age is 48 years old and the average household income is $78,000. In comparison to the larger town with averages of 41 years old and a $94,700, Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock has a slightly older 3 and lower middle-class population. The most common professions in the village are office 4 administrator, food service, and sales. Brant Rock is home to many businesses in the food and retail industries, with five restaurants open year round, an inn, and seasonally open souvenir 1 “Ocean-Bluff Brant Rock, MA,” Data USA, 2017. 2 “Quick Facts: Marshfield, Town, Plymouth County, Massachusetts,” United States Census Bureau, 2018. “Ocean-Bluff Brant Rock, MA,” Data USA. 3 Quick Facts: Marshfield, Town, Plymouth County, Massachusetts.” United States Census Bureau. 4 “Ocean-Bluff Brant Rock, MA,” Data USA. Brown 2 stores and an ice cream shop. Recently, it has also been the shooting location for feature films, including The Finest Hours (Craig Gillespie, 2016), and The Equalizer 2 (Antoine Fuqua, 2018). Beyond the film crews and restaurant enthusiasts, Brant Rock draws in beach-going tourists every summer. These include day-trippers, overnight visitors at the Fairview Inn and Airbnbs, as well as seasonal recreational vehicle owners who spend between May 1st and 5 September 30th at the Brant Rock Blackman’s Point RV park, which opened in the 1940s. Unlike feature films, tourists are not new to Brant Rock. During the nineteenth century, the village advertised itself as a resort, attracting the growing Victorian middle-class as well as artists who took inspiration from the land and people. Advertising materials, paintings, and amateur photography all contributed to the creation of Brant Rock as a resort and each demonstrates the active role the village took in the construction and performance of a new national and social identity. Resorts, The Artist Colony, and Brant Rock Summer resorts began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, as John Sterngass discusses their rise and fall in his book First Resorts. With glamorous hotels and a variety of public and private spaces where the emerging middle-class could perform a new social identity, these resorts provided a crucial space for Victorian vacationers to interact with each other in 6 non-commercial ways. The resort was a liminal space, where visitors could escape the rigid confines of society and explore freedom from strict etiquette rules and this, in turn, enabled 5 “Blackman’s Point Homeowners Association.” 6 Jon Sterngass, First Resorts, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 1, 2. Brown 3 7 broader cultural change. A primary goal of staying at a resort was to see and be seen, which encouraged crowds to follow each other from one destination to another, thus promoting other 8 resorts and locations. John Sterngas argues that resorts shifted to accommodate a new interest in buying leisure 9 with the rise of a consumer culture during and following industrialization. The promotion of activities like horse-racing and casinos indicated a shift from the sensibility of the 19th century to a capital-driven modern society (sensibility here indicates a sort of emotional whimsicalness 10 or an affected sensitivity to one’s environment). Vacationers would take walks and spend time in nature in order to contemplate the environment and feel their place in it. However, the increase in commodity driven activities altered that sensibility, emphasizing cents over sense. Transportation began to play a vital role in the rise of vacationing during the Gilded Age, with 11 trains and steamships providing accessible travel to distant resorts. Both local and national 12 economies became dependent upon tourism, a trend that has held fast in contemporary times. Leisure became a purchasable commodity and the nineteenth century resorts, with their focus on do-nothing activities like promenade walks, irreversibly changed, leaving sensible ways of 13 passing time in the past. Eventually, the resorts and grand hotels became outdated and the shift from public transportation to personal cars favored multiple-stop journeys over vacations 7 Sterngass, First, 4. 8 Sterngass, First, 266. 9 Sterngass, First, 3. 10 Sterngass, First, 4. 11 Sterngass, First, 264, 268. 12 “Employment in the tourism industry to grow significantly,” International Labor Organization, 2019. 13 Sterngass, 267. Brown 4 14 oriented towards a single destination. Privacy became more desirable with the rise of 15 individualism, virtually erasing the public spaces of antebellum resorts. Jon Sterngass concludes his argument by stating that the nineteenth century resort has turned into the twentieth century pleasure city—like Las Vegas—or the contemporary amusement park—such as Disney 16 World. Brant Rock too was affected by the shift in resorts from do-nothing days towards commodification and the increase of cars over public transportation. However, the little village clung on successfully into the latter half of the twentieth century with its shops, movie theater, 17 and bowling alley. It was only after a spurt of fires in the 1970s that the village has declined in 18 prosperity. While America’s industrialists transformed the way people spent their leisure time, its artists were busy constructing a new national identity, drawing many to the art colonies of New England. The region offered landscapes of rugged fascination and mountains with sublime stature, making it the ideal location for artists and writers to ground a newly constructed 19 American past and identity. This resulted in an economic reversal, shifting sources of income from merchant ports and fisheries to the selling of the experience of an authentic New England village. These functioned as “therapeutic shelters” from the busy urban life middle-class city dwellers faced, as Thomas Denenberg and Amy Kurtz Lansing describe in their book Call of the 14 Sterngass, 272. 15 Sterngass, 272. 16 Sterngass, 275. 17 Cynthia Krussel and Betty Bates, Marshfield, a Town of Villages, 1640-1990, (Marshfield Hills, MA: Historical Research Associates, 1990), 64. 18 Krussell, Bates, Marshfield, 64. 19 Thomas Denenberg, Amy Kurtz, and Susan Danly, Rosenbaum, Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England, (Portland, Maine: Portland Museum of Art, 2009), 10. Brown 5 20 Coast: Art Colonies of New England. As painters began to depict the coast as an escape from urban life and modern difficulties, they made it more appealing to cosmopolites; vacationers became keen to see the realities of awesome landscapes and famous artists at work up and down 21 the New England Coast. The variety of coastal scenes resulted in diverse paintings, from rolling 22 beaches to rocky bluffs. While Denenberg and Kurtz identify Old Lyme, Connecticut; Ogunquit, Maine; and Monhegan, Maine as particularly notable colonies, many existed across 23 the region. Artists used the landscape to forge a distinctly American art style—encapsulated in the Hudson River School—and construct a pastoral identity, a reprieve from the onslaught of rapid industrialization. Brant Rock became a summer resort and an attractive destination to artists during the nineteenth century, although an official art colony was never established there. A variety of materials including postcards, brochures, books, and even academic dissertations were produced, all concerned with the image of Brant Rock and how to make it more accessible to the vacationing population. The Old Colony Railroad Company published a tourists’ guide in 1893 which provides an illuminating description of the village as a resort. A short ride from Marshfield station brings us to “Ocean Bluff,” a settlement of forty or fifty cottages, built along the edge of a bluff and commanding a view of the open ocean as far as the eye can reach. Just after we pass the “Bluff,” we are at another village of cottages, called Brant Rock, although the two are really one village. At this latter place is located the post office, several hotels and a number of stores of various kinds. Brant Rock and its vicinity, including the islands along this section of the sea coast, have long been a great resort of sea fowl; and here the sportsman will not fail to meet an abundant reard. South of Brant Rock is a small harbor known as Bluefish Cover, a superb locality for boating and fishing and a favorite resort for ladies, whose tastes incline them to these 20 Denenberg and Lansing, Call, 10. 21 Denenberg and Lansing, 10. 22 Denenberg and Lansing, 10. 23 Denenberg and Lansing, 11. Brown 6 healthful pastimes. There are probably no out-door sports more fascinating, while visiting our shores, than that of boating and fishing on the beautiful inlets and rivers along the coast in this vicinity, the smooth water being especially adapted to ladies of a timid disposition.

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