Although New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Washington now supply the bulk of the country’s commercial crop, the Concord grape did indeed get its start in Concord, Massachusetts. Gold-leaf artisan, horticulturalist, and Concord resident Ephraim Wales Bull (1806-1895) spent years working with 22,000 seedlings before finding a vine worth keeping — a derivative of a wild […]
new england
You know autumn has arrived in New England when boxes of tangy-sweet Concord grapes start showing up at local markets and farm stands. In fact, these dusky-purple orbs are so fragrant, you can smell them before you see them. Their growing season is brief, so enjoy them now, either straight from the vine or in […]
Slip a nice bite of golden Parmigiano-Reggiano into your mouth and you’ll know why it’s considered the king of Italian cheeses. Dense, firm, and filled with crunchy, crystalline specks, it has an intense, sticky richness layered with flavors of caramel, salt, warm spices, and brown butter, adding depth to pastas, salads, and fruit desserts, including […]
Decorating with maps is a wonderful way to display your favorite destinations in your home. Here’s how to use maps as wallpaper. It’s easier than you think!
Massachusetts
Sterling, MA: Davis Corn Maze
You’ll need a few supplies with you while getting lost in Davis’ Mega Maze in Sterling, Massachusetts: sturdy shoes, sunblock, snacks, and either a keen sense of direction or a horseshoe in your pocket. Visitors start by viewing a three-minute introductory movie; then the trek through the labyrinth begins … Each year, this three-dimensional, eight-acre […]
Magazine
Toot Your Own Horn
When Skip Healy was a child, he often visited the grounds of Rhode Island’s Varnum House Museum (with its extensive military and naval history collection) to sit on a stone bench and play his fife. Today, he’s the curator and runs a fife- and flute-making shop in the carriage house. “Fifes and pipes are the […]
Magazine
Drum It Up
You don’t expect to find Caribbean music in New England, let alone a crafter of Caribbean instruments. But that’s exactly what we’ve discovered in Eric Rollnick. Eric has been creating pans (melodic instruments made from steel drums, hammered out of 55-gallon barrels) since 1992, after extensive travel and study in Trinidad and Tobago. The pans […]
Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut Hurting economically at the outset of the Civil War, the small towns of backcountry New England swelled the Union army with new recruits. Casualties were overwhelming, with some towns losing most of their young male populations. Postwar New England experienced a deep sense of loss that transformed its […]
20 percentage of Vermont’s trees that are sugar maples — explaining in part the golden-orange and red hues of the state’s foliage season 107 number of years that Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut — oldest burger joint in America — has been cooking hamburgers 2 Babe Ruth’s favorite room at the Cranmore Mountain Lodge […]
Magazine
Global Warming and Fall Foliage
Here in northern New England, the color comes on slowly, almost furtively. The first leaves turn — on diseased and dying trees — in late July, unbelievably, amid the suffocating lushness of high summer. By mid-August the early sumacs and swamp maples have joined in, and the slide is on despite the heat. Autumn‘s rapidly […]
Magazine
A Letter to Our Readers
This is my 28th autumn at Yankee. for each of those years, the editors have talked for hours about how to best capture on our pages this most singular of New England’s seasons. Can we do it just with photographs? Can words give our readers a sense of the color marching up the hillsides; the […]
Magazine
Blowin’ in the Wind
The answer, my friend, is a wind chime by Goose Rocks Designs. Each stained-glass mobile not only delights the ears with its lyrical sound, but also pleases the eyes. Choose from 62 models, ranging from contemporary designs (named after Maine locations) to New England icons such as sailboats and trees. Pictured is Baxter ($69), one […]