Close [ X ]
The Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was the home of New Hampshire's first royal governor in the mid 1700s. John Templeman Coolidge III bought the old estate in 1886 and restored it in the spirit of the Colonial Revival. As a summer estate for the large Coolidge family and their friends, it became the focus of a lively artistic and intellectual community.
Molly Coolidge, Templeman's oldest daughter (later Mary Coolidge Perkins), ran her siblings like a pack of half-wild children--however proper their lives back in Boston--and recorded the idyllic time with her father's new wooden camera. Many of the original photographs in the twice-seen images were hers, as are the quotes from her book, Once I Was Very Young.
