Athenaeum frames travel in the 1800s

"Always Delightfully Cool," the current exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum, documents these formative years of vacationing in New England. The collection of 19th-century illustrated train and boat schedules, advertising prints, guidebooks, and maps also reveals the significance of art in the rise of the tourism industry.

Painters and writers were creating interest in the area's natural splendors. New Englanders knew Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1889 tale "The Great Stone Face," Thomas Cole's 1839 painting "The Notch of the White Mountains," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1836 essay "Nature."

Included in the display are lithographs by artists such as Winslow Homer, who apprenticed in one of Boston's esteemed graphic firms; illustrations by Isaac Sprague, the former artist-assistant to John James Audubon; and the first edition of the daily newspaper Among the Clouds, which began publishing from the summit of Mount Washington in 1877.

As more people became interested in pleasure travel, hotels sprang up, steamships were commissioned, and railroads were built at breakneck speed.

John Calvin Smith's 1860s pocket map of the region displays rail lines around urban areas, with stagecoach lines still providing the final rough ride to sites such as the White Mountains and Moosehead Lake. By the end of the century, railroad lines in New England had quadrupled.

During this time the Anderson Brothers of Maine accomplished the daunting task of building a railroad through Crawford Notch to Fabyans Station at Bretton Woods. Railroad companies were numerous and owned real estate companies, resorts, and steamboats such as Lake Winnipesaukee's Lady of the Lake.

Companies vied for passengers by promising luxury experiences. Advertisements touted "Palace Steamers" decorated with oak railings and chandeliers that could carry 560 passengers, and trains with parlor-sleeping cars that could help one avoid "enforced tête-à-têtes with unpleasant traveling companions through the use of separate revolving easy chairs."