On a Saturday afternoon in Cornish, New Hampshire, almost 140 years after an artist came here looking for Abraham Lincoln, my wife, kids, and I find him under some birch trees not far from the Connecticut River. He’s just risen from a chair, and he looks mostly how I’d imagined: gaunt cheeks, chin-curtain beard, fatigued eyes, an expression stuck in contemplation. I just didn’t expect America’s 16th president to be 12 feet tall.

Whether Abraham Lincoln: The Man (Standing Lincoln) is the greatest sculpture created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens—who, owing to the kind of uncanny realism I find all over Lincoln’s bronze face, was one of America’s leading sculptors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—is a matter of taste. Its impact on this stretch of the Upper Connecticut River Valley, however, is inarguable. After a landowning lawyer offered Saint-Gaudens a place in Cornish where he could get away to create his memorial, he left the fetid summer air of Manhattan for rolling farmland, made a studio in a hay barn, and created some of America’s most durable public sculptures in a place that became New Hampshire’s sole national park.

Past small herds of fleecy sheep, barns with metal roofs, and a historic covered bridge linking Cornish with Windsor, Vermont, my family and I turn off Route 12A. We park at the bottom of a meadow and look up a gentle rise toward a bone-white brick building. Its stepped gable roofline, from this distance, looks a little like a symmetrical, super-sized game of Tetris put on pause. After trekking to the Federal-style building’s west-facing loggia, we look beyond our Hyundai toward the breadth of Mount Ascutney, an impossibly beautiful view framed by Ionic columns and dangling grape clusters.

This is Aspet, Saint-Gaudens’s home in Cornish and the axis for the approximately 190 undulating acres of Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park. Past Standing Lincoln, we find the gilded female form of Amor Caritas, overlooking a reflecting pool flanked by an open-air gallery of portrait reliefs. We spy on a portrait workshop led by sculptor-in-residence Davis Fandiño, then wander through meadows, hedges, and gardens, along the way glimpsing some of the 125 or so works here created by the park’s namesake.

Even now, those works carry weight. My third-grader’s questions about the hooded figure in the Adams Memorial—commissioned to honor Marian “Clover” Adams, who took her own life in 1885—spur a heavily calibrated discussion I’m not quite ready for. We pass through hemlock hedges and find a stunning, re-cast high relief of white Union Army officer Robert Gould Shaw and the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the first all-Black regiments to serve in the Civil War. Perhaps the most dramatic piece here is the re-cast of Saint-Gaudens’s first major public commission: Admiral David Farragut, the Union naval officer standing atop a bluestone pedestal, grasping binoculars, and seeming to brace against onshore winds.

By the time the original Farragut monument was unveiled in New York’s Madison Square Park in 1881, Saint-Gaudens was a prime mover in American sculpture. The Dublin-born son of an Irish seamstress mother and a French shoemaker father had talent that was evident from his beginnings as a cameo-cutting immigrant in Lower Manhattan up through his admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1868.

In the mid-1870s, American sensibilities had tired of marble Neoclassical sculptures and idealized depictions of biblical and mythological figures, and caught up to the naturalistic style he brought back from Paris. Along with the slowly growing domestic availability of the bronze that suited Saint-Gaudens’s warts-and-all realism, there was an appetite for public sculptures “that had more contemporary resonance, that were less boldly allegorical,” says Thayer Tolles, Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who’s published reams of scholarly research on Saint-Gaudens. “There was an enormous urge to acknowledge and commemorate the heroes and the martyrs of the Civil War.”

Thanks to the wealth generated through the Industrial Age, there was lots of private work for enterprising artists, as well. After long days in his Manhattan studio alongside a small army of assistants, Saint-Gaudens mingled with Gilded Age tycoons and affluent socialites who hired artists to adorn their massive mansions. “Saint-Gaudens not only excelled at art and was a once-in-a-generation talent; he was also a keen builder of social networks,” Kendall says.

In those circles Saint-Gaudens grew closer to Charles Cotesworth Beaman Jr., an arts-loving lawyer who lived in the city. Beaman’s wife had roots in the Upper Valley. During the 1880s, amid the region’s agricultural contraction, he’d been buying up property in Cornish—ultimately more than 1,000 acres—and building out Blow-Me-Down Farm, an estate oriented around a sprawling Shingle Style house. When Beaman learned that Saint-Gaudens had scored a major commission to create a Lincoln monument destined for Chicago (where the original Standing Lincoln remains), he offered up an 1817 house on a farm he owned across the way. “To persuade me to come,” Saint-Gaudens wrote in his memoirs, “Mr. Beaman had said that there were ‘plenty of Lincoln-shaped men up there.’”

Saint-Gaudens found his Lincoln in Langdon Morse, a bearded Vermont farmer across the river in Windsor. And while the old house initially terrified Saint-Gaudens (“… one might have imagined a skeleton half-hanging out of the window,” he wrote), he and his wife, Augusta Saint-Gaudens, quickly grew smitten with Cornish. The artist rented the property from Beaman for six consecutive summers and renovated it, eventually including in its interior an elegant winding staircase and tatami-lined walls. “… The house and the life attracted me until I soon found that I expended on this place, which was not mine, every dollar I earned,” he wrote, “and many I had not yet earned … .” In 1891, he convinced Beaman to sell the property to him at a discount, christened it Aspet after his father’s birthplace in the Pyrenees, and habitually graded and regraded the terrain. In an adjacent hay barn with the assistants who accompanied him, he spent years completing major works that cemented his reputation.

The fact that his name endures is also testament to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, who in 1919 set in motion the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to preserve her husband’s works and the family’s Cornish home. By 1965, that landscape became a National Park Service site, known today as Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park—one of just two national parks devoted to the visual arts, along with Weir Farm in Connecticut. The Saint-Gaudens Memorial remains an ongoing nonprofit partner for concert series, special exhibitions, and other programming. “This is all part of the living legacy of the site,” says Tolles, who is also president of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial.

Years before artist outposts cropped up in places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, Saint-Gaudens became the central figure of the Cornish Colony. Painter Thomas Dewing showed up soon after the sculptor’s arrival. So did fellow painter George de Forest Brush. Dozens more followed in the years and decades afterward: writer and critic Adeline Adams, artists Kenyon Cox and Stephen Parrish, actress Ethel Barrymore, and landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman among them. They scooped up agrarian acres and built houses—many designed by architect Charles A. Platt, himself a Cornish Colonist—to seize the views of Mount Ascutney.

While the Cornish Colony maintained a no-interruptions order of discipline during the day, quitting time was a different story. Beaman, who nudged the colony along by selling some of his outlying parcels, turned Blow-Me-Down Farm into a gathering place, reconfiguring one building into a playroom—the casino, in the parlance of the time—along with a bowling alley. Down the road, the group gathered at Aspet to play nine holes of golf and dip in the swimming pool.

By 1900, after a three-year interlude in Paris, Saint-Gaudens made Cornish his year-round home and embraced all-season recreation, like playing ice hockey on Blow-Me-Down Pond and racing down a toboggan run. It lifted his spirits against serious hardship: an intestinal cancer diagnosis, as well as the 1904 fire that erased his hay barn workspace and everything within it. Helped by assistants, he continued working in the Little Studio, a cavernous replacement that survives at the park today, with clerestory windows and a Parthenon frieze above the entry.

Saint-Gaudens died in 1907, and the Cornish Colony gradually faded—the advent of the automobile meant summer vacations didn’t require seasonal settlement anymore. By the mid-1930s, it was gone. Looking back, it seemed to reach an apogee in 1905, when dozens upon dozens of Cornish Colony members participated in A Masque of “Ours”: The Gods and the Golden Bowl. Penned by the playwright Louis Shipman to honor Saint-Gaudens on the 20th anniversary of his arrival in Cornish, the mythologically themed pageant took place in front of scenery punctuated by a Grecian temple made for the performance. A marble replica of that temple, where the ashes of Saint-Gaudens and his family are interred, stands in the meadow below Aspet, memorializing a moment as well as a movement.

About a half mile up Route 12A, Evans Haile climbs over a fieldstone wall and strolls toward a patch of overgrowth concealing a steep, orthopedically costly dive toward farmland below. “I came bounding up,” Haile recalls of discovering this precipice years ago, “and all of a sudden, it was just, Oh. Stop.” The vision that beckoned him, then and now, is in front of us—a bow in the Connecticut River beneath a phalanx of clouds, Mount Ascutney rising above bulging Vermont green. Behind us, there’s a broad view of a two-and-a-half-story Colonial Revival farmhouse with a fresh coat of paint. There’s just one disruption to the shelter-magazine aesthetic, in a clearing to the side: a food truck dispensing shaved ice, a gaggle of families—including my own—sprawled on picnic blankets, and a striped circus tent.

This is Charles Beaman’s Blow-Me-Down Farm in the 21st century, and the tent signals that Opera North, a 43-year-old Lebanon, New Hampshire–based performance company, is in the thick of another summer season here. An hour before a packed performance of the fairy-tale-scrambling Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical Into the Woods, Haile, Opera North’s general director, leads me into the farmhouse. The building has morphed into a 6,000-square-foot backstage, with crew chatting underneath a living room’s exposed beams and the actress playing Cinderella putting finishing touches on wardrobe in one of eight bedrooms. “Here we are, right next to this 18th-century farmhouse, this tent goes up, and magical things happen,” Haile says.

The farmhouse, to be clear, isn’t where Beaman laid his head: after a fire destroyed his gambrel-roofed cottage in 1926, his son William renovated the casino into a main residence by detaching the bowling alley and grafting on a rear addition. Nonetheless, the building represents “one of the earliest substantial houses in Cornish that’s survived,” says Andrew Garthwaite, an Upper Valley–raised partner at Haynes & Garthwaite Architects in Norwich, Vermont. “There are a lot of nice details about the house that make it a handsome place,” like overhanging cornices, gabled dormers, and rosettes and dentil molding in elegant window surrounds. “It’s very neat and solid, in that sort of northern New England way.”

But by 2010, when the National Park Service (NPS) absorbed almost 43 acres of the original Blow-Me-Down Farm estate under the umbrella of Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, the farmhouse had been vacant for a couple of years. It had spent six decades in private hands, and though the Saint-Gaudens Memorial had preserved the building, it had rotting sills, decaying trim, and glazing falling out of the windows. NPS called on nonprofits that could address the needed repairs while resurrecting the property’s creative heritage—in essence, reviving it by placing the Cornish Colony’s arts legacy at its core.

Opera North, which saw in Blow-Me-Down Farm a new headquarters with untapped potential and one of the best available views in the Upper Valley, offered the winning proposal. With NPS’s blessing, the company held a few proof-of-concept summer productions under the big top, from The Pirates of Penzance to collaborations between singers and circus performers, that drew packed audiences. Its 32-year lease of the property became official in 2020. Soon after, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Haile recalls a man in a tuxedo who drove from New Jersey to roll out a picnic blanket and take in Opera North’s socially distant production of The Magic Flute on a temporary 40-by-60-foot outdoor stage. “The arts are not a luxury; they’re a necessity,” Haile says.

After securing donations and grants to finance the rehabilitation, Opera North, under Garthwaite’s guidance, has completed the first phase of work. It was centered on the exterior and entailed mending the trim and siding; reglazing the 12-over-12 and 9-over-9 double-hung windows; and applying a fresh coat of cream-yellow paint matching the original, sourced through an extensive historic paint analysis. The next phases will turn to the interior, where Shingle Style details currently coexist with shag carpeting and other unsympathetic additions, and then on to the scruffy outbuildings and landscaping. “I think Opera North took it over in the nick of time,” Garthwaite says. “The cost of repair was just going to accelerate.”

Beyond serving as a home and backstage for Opera North, Haile imagines a future where the farmhouse is a flexible space that can accommodate corporate retreats and meetings for arts organizations. Ultimately, the property could fulfill a vision that aligns with its embedded history: “a park for the arts that encompasses all sorts of different functionality,” Haile says, “everything from the visual arts to dance to theater to, obviously, music and opera.”