The woman on the left wears the old New Castle, NH hotel like an epaulet on her shoulder. What appears, at first, to be an outdoor scene shot from a New Castle beach, on close examination, is a painted backdrop. There are brushstrokes in the stormy sky.
“I was looking at this old photo of my grandmother,” Norman Wilson told me in 2005, “and I said–that looks the old Wentworth in the background!”
Norman, a past president of the Brentwood Historical Society, produced this image while I was speaking there about the history of the hotel. He said the photo was taken around 1900 at an unknown location. His grandmother, Alice Willard Wilson (on right), was married in December 1899 at age 19. Norman spotted a wedding or engagement ring on her hand after scanning and enlarging the photo. Her mother, Frances Alice Cushing, may be on the left.
The fascination, for me, is the elaborate studio setting that appears to include real stones, beach sand, and maybe a water feature at the foot of the subjects,” Norman later wrote. Or is all that painted too? I didn’t come across a similar image while studying hundreds of photos for my book, Wentowoth by the Sea: The Life & Times of a Grand Hotel.
The postcard (below) shows guards at the lifesaving station at Jerry’s Point with the Wentworth Hotel in the background. The treeless landscape may have followed severe storms that pulled down hundreds of decorative elms in the Victorian era. This looks like the same view to me.
Does your family have a similar photo? I’m guessing this backdrop was set up one summer at Wentworth Hotel, or was this taken in a photographer’s studio?
Copyright © 2005, updated 2025, J. Dennis Robinson, Harbortown Press, all rights reserved
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