Charles Beaman

Charles Beaman

Saint-Gaudens NHP Archives

Quick Facts

Place of Birth:

Houlton, ME

Date of Birth:

May 7, 1840

Place of Death:

New York, NY

Date of Death:

December 15, 1900

Place of Burial:

Windsor, VT

Cemetery Name:

Ascutney Cemetery

This New York lawyer and first ever United States Solicitor General is credited with the founding of the Cornish Colony in New Hampshire alongside Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Beaman’s estate, Blow-Me-Down, served as a central location around which a community of artists moved and grew in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Charles Cotesworth Beaman, Jr. was born in 1840 to Reverend Charles Cotesworth Beaman and Mary Ann Stacy in Houlton, Maine. [1] His thesis upon graduation from Harvard Law School in 1865 focused on war acts by marine vessels and the legal ramifications of those acts. He published The National and Private Alabama Claims and their Final and Amicable Settlement in 1871, which led to his becoming part of the tribunal in Geneva, Switzerland to settle the claims made by Confederate ships against US vessels during the Civil War. The head counsel was William Maxwell Evarts of Windsor, Vermont, who traveled to the tribunal with his wife and four of his children. In Geneva, Beaman met and courted Evarts’ nineteen-year-old eldest daughter, Hettie Sherman Evarts.[2]

Charles and Hettie married on August 19, 1874 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Windsor, Vermont. Their permanent residence was New York City, where Beaman had his law practice. They had four children: Mary, born 1875, Helen, born 1877, Margaret, born 1878 and William, born in 1881. The family connection drew Charles and Hettie Beaman back to Windsor, and in 1882 led to their purchase of what is now known as Blow-Me-Down farm across the river from the Evarts estate in Cornish, New Hampshire.[3]

Charles Beaman encouraged development of the community in Cornish by selling friends portions of his outlying land that he purchased in the 1880s and 1890s, a total of twenty-three properties encompassing over two thousand acres. [4] One of the first to accept the Beamans’ invitation to Cornish was the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and his wife, Augusta. Augustus Saint-Gaudens had become acquainted with the Evarts family during their time in Geneva. In 1885, Charles Beaman offered to rent them an adjacent property to his own Blow-Me-Down that he had renamed Blow-Me-Up. After several years of renting, Augustus Saint-Gaudens purchased the property from Beaman and renamed it Aspet, after his father’s home village in France. The Saint-Gaudenses bolstered the Beamans’ social network, and soon the artistic community in and around Cornish grew and prospered into the Cornish Colony. An estimated eighty artists have been documented as owning, living, or participating in the community. [5]

On December 15, 1900, Charles Cotesworth Beaman died of heart failure at his home, 11 East Forty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. [6] A funeral was held on December 18 at Calvary Episcopal Church on Park Avenue. The body was quickly transported north to Cornish, where a memorial was held in the parlor of the Cottage at Blow-Me-Down on Wednesday December 19, followed by another service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Windsor. The Cornish rituals allowed the many friends, family, and workers from the area to mourn the passing of a man who had affected their lives so profoundly. He was buried in Windsor, alongside the Evarts. [7]

Footnotes
[1] Emily Beaman Wooden, The Beaman & Clark genealogy: a history of the descendants of Gamaliel Beaman and Sarah Clark of Dorchester & Lancaster, Massachusetts, 1635-1909 (Rochester: Publisher not cited, 1909), 43-44.
[2] Charles C. Beaman, The National and Private Alabama Claims and their Final and Amicable Settlement, (Washington: W. H. Moore, reprinted in the Michigan Historical Reprint Series, 1871). Further information on William Evarts may be found at http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=E000262.
[3] Census records and marriage licenses for Mary, Helen, Margaret, and William Beaman, are available on Ancestry.com.
[4] William H. Child, History of the Town of Cornish, New Hampshire with Genealogical Record, 1763–1910 (Concord, NH: The Rumford Press, 1910), volume I, 181, 220.
[5] Marion Pressley and Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Cultural Landscape Report for Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Volume 1 (Boston: National Park Service, 1993), 7. Susan Hobbs, “Thomas Dewing in Cornish, 1885-1905” American Art Journal, 17:2 (Spring 1985), 2-32; Christine Ermenc, “Farmers and Aesthetes: A Social History of the Cornish Art Colony and its relationship with the Town of Cornish New Hampshire, 1885-1930” unpubl. Dissertation, 14-16; “Cornish Arts Colony in Cornish and Plain field, NH 1885-1930—National Register Nomination Information: Statement of Historic Contexts,” http://www.crjc.org/ heritage/N08-16.htm (accessed June 28, 2019).
[6] Blowmedown Record, 168. Charles Beaman’s will and death notice is at Ancestry.com. 1900 US Fed census lists Beaman, wife and 3 children living in Manhattan along with Charles’s brother, William S(tacy) Beaman, along with 8 servants, at 11 East 44th Street. The house is no longer standing.
[7] Blowmedown Record, December 18, 1900, 168. Charles C. Beaman is buried in Ascutney Cemetery in the heart of Windsor village.