About
Welcome to the Cornish Colony Compendium, a database of the members and places of the Cornish Colony. This is very much a work in progress, but it will ultimately act as a one-stop resource for understanding the people and relationships that comprised the Cornish Colony.
The Cornish Colony was a loose-knit collection of artists, authors, patrons, politicians, professionals, and others, united by their connection to Cornish, New Hampshire. What started as a vacation home for lawyer Charles Cotesworth Beaman and a country studio for intensive sculpting for Augustus Saint-Gaudens over time shifted to both a collaborative summer artist's retreat and a vacation destination for New York and Boston's wealthy elite.
This project aims to not only catalogue the more than 500 individuals who at one time or another called Cornish home, but to document the relationships that formed the backbone of the community. Social networks created and sustained the community, and it is my hope that through this study, we will be able to more fully understand the myriad familial, social, and professional connections within Cornish – and thereby more fully understand the unusual community that spanned nearly half a century.
-Nicole Ford Burley, August 2020