MacDowell: The Farm Where Silence Became a Gift

The arts colony on the hill above Peterborough began with a composer who was dying and a wife who refused to let his idea die with him.

Edward MacDowell was one of the most celebrated American composers of the late nineteenth century, among the first Americans to achieve serious recognition in European musical circles. In eighteen ninety-six he and his wife Marian bought Hillcrest Farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, as a summer retreat. The New Hampshire hills, MacDowell discovered, gave him something the concert halls of Boston and New York could not: silence, solitude, and the uninterrupted hours that serious composition requires. He believed the tranquility of the farm had enabled him to write some of his best work.

By nineteen oh-six, MacDowell was gravely ill, suffering from a neurological collapse that would kill him in nineteen oh-eight. Before he died, he told Marian his wish: that the farm become a place where other artists could experience the conditions under which he had thrived. He wanted to give them what Peterborough had given him.

Marian MacDowell spent the next quarter century and more making that happen. In nineteen oh-seven she deeded the farm to the Edward MacDowell Association and welcomed the first residents, sculptor Helen Farnsworth Mears and her sister, the writer Mary Mears. She raised funds through lecture tours and piano recitals well into her eighties, traveling the country to secure donations for an enterprise that had no model and no guarantee of success.

The model proved itself. In the century since its founding, MacDowell has supported thousands of artists. Works created at the colony include Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Leonard Bernstein's Mass, and Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Dozens of MacDowell works have won Pulitzer Prizes or equivalent honors.

The colony no longer calls itself a colony: it is now simply MacDowell, reflecting a broader mission. But the hillside studios in Peterborough, each one set apart in the woods for silence and uninterrupted work, are still doing exactly what Edward MacDowell imagined when he asked his wife to carry something forward.