Ghosts of Newport Past - Irish Spirits in Newport

[I published this article on Gather.com last September. I've edited a little to fit Blogger and to fill in some extra information I've come across since then.]

In honor of St. Patrick's Day I'm going to take you on a tour of the two Irish immigrant cemeteries in Newport. The Irish first came to Newport in the 1820s, as laborers building fort Adams and as miners in the coal mines (long ago played out) in Portsmouth on the north end of the island.

The first Catholic parish in Newport was St. Joseph's, located at the corner of Barney and Mt. Vernon Streets. Let the plaque at the cemetery on that spot tell the story:

The cemetery, which was located behind the wooden church, is the oldest Irish cemetery in Newport. By the time I'd come to Newport in 1974 this cemetery had almost literally disappeared. My girlfriend at the time lived right across Mt. Vernon St. from it, and we never knew it was there. The stones had all fallen flat and the grass had grown over them. Nancy and I used to picnic on the vacant lot without ever knowing tha Newport's oldest Irish cemetery was under us.

In the 1990s a young man on his way to earning the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts learned of the cemetery and adopted it as his community service project required for the rank. He gathered a team, and they cleaned the lot, found the stones and started work on returning the cemetery to a more respectable presence. Many of the stones had to be repaired, and local agencies donated the materials and work to create the fence around the cemetery. The current St. Mary's Parish commissioned the Irish Cross which became the centerpiece of the plot. And here's how it looks today:

And here are some of the stones in the cemetery:


















































This stone is very poignant - the infant children of John and Margaret Calahan, who only lived to 10 and 15 months.

These stones are very much like Quaker stones - very simple. They're adorned with symbols and have actual inscriptions on them, which the Quaker stones didn't have, but there's a simplicity to the carving. These were the working poor, and they had no money for fancy stones. In most cases the parish paid for the stones and their carving.

In the late 1840s the potato blight hit Ireland, and the resulting famine brought great waves of Irish immigrants to the US, and Newport was where a great many of them came. By this time there were two parishes in Newport, St. Mary's (now on Spring St.) and St. Joseph's. It had been part of the Diocese of Boston but had been transferred to the Diocese of Hartford, as Boston had more than enough new parishoners to take care of, while Hartford a few in comparison. From 1850 to 1856 the Bishop of the Diocese of Hartford was Bernard O'Reilley, and his brother - Msgr. William O'Reilly - was his Vicar General for all of Rhode Island.

Of course, with this new influx of Irish immigrants, the cemetery on Barney St. would no longer suffice, and a new plot of land was purchased on Warner St. at Kingston Ave. The cemetery today is known as St. Mary's Cemetery:

By now the Irish were well established in Newport, and as you can see the gravestones are much richer and there are many actual monuments.

This triple cross caught my eye; the three Adams sisters.

And this stone for John and Esther Eagan has a feature, shared with many other Irish gravestones, that I found fascinating, the inclusion of the interred's birth parish and county in Ireland.














The showpiece of the cemetery is Msgr. William O'Reilley's monument. There are no dates, just the spire and its carved ornaments, and his name. For being the Vicar General of Rhode Island he's unusually undocumented. He was Vicar General under his brother, bishop Bernard O'Reilley, was interim administrator for the whole Diocese of Hartford on his brother's death at sea in 1856 (Bernard had gone to Ireland to recruit priests) until the appointment of Bishop McFarland in 1858, and remained Bishop McFarland's Vicar General for Rhode Island. But there's no record of him after that; he's not mentioned at all in the records of the creation of the Diocese of Providence under Bishop Hendricken. But he certainly has an impressive monument in the St. Mary's Cemetery.






There are Irish graves in many of the other cemeteries in Newport, but these two are the only specifically Irish Catholic plots in the city. As such they serve as monuments to the Irish presence in Newport.

© 2008 & 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

And a St. Patrick's Day treat!

St. Patrick's Day is never complete without music and dancing, so here's a great video of The Chieftains with the Corrs, dancers, and even some Henson-style big puppets in a wild Irish whoopdedoo that only Paddy and the boys can pull off with such energy and panache!

There's Just One Problem With Crows...

[Note: I published this today on Gather.com as a response in kind to some friends who are involved in a humor-writing exercise.]

I'm not a writer; I came to Gather to share my photography and learn some more about how to take better pictures. So I'm not involved with the Writing Essentials programs, and specifically, I'm not involved with Dame Ruth's Mirthday Monday humor exercises. But a lot of my friends are, and I've been chuckling over the responses to this week's assignment of writing about what makes you angry. It reminded me of a comment I posted on an article by Ina as to why it wasn't a good idea to make her yard a place for Crows to hang out in so that they'd chase away her Hawks. I didn't do that subject nearly enough justice. I'm here today to rectify that.

Now don't get me wrong. I love Crows. Crows are Nature's born comedians; I can't watch them do their thing without cracking up. Crow is one of my totems; I hang out with Crows, we have animated conversations, and we even play together at times. Crows are my buddies, my psychic twins. But I would never, ever invite Crows to make my home theirs. Why is that, you ask? Ah! Time for another Nature lesson.

Crows roost at night. Not as individuals or as little Crow nuclear families, stopping at the nearest tree to rest for the night. Oh no, they roost en masse, all the Crows in a particular territory, all in one place. We're not talking flocks here, we're talking hordes. We're talking "the buffalo blanketed the Great Plains before the coming of the white man" sized populations, literally thousands settling in the trees of one block, maybe two. They descend like an invading army. They are an invading army.

They're noisy. They settle into the trees in the target area around sunset and get to squabbling, fussing, telling jokes and passing them up and down the line, laughing, cursing, and just generally being vocal. And being loud about being vocal. And even after they settle down and drift off to sleep, there are still some holding late-night conversations. Even the sleeping ones make noise all through the night, chortling and chuckling in their sleep, whoofing, sneezing, burping, cutting Crow-farts. A roosting horde of Crows is never silent. And then, about an hour before sunrise, they wake up and hold morning services, chanting to the Crow God, in unison, back and forth, call and response, this group over here taking a chorus, then that group over there. This goes on for an hour, before sunrise, while you're still trying to grab that last little bit of sleep. and at sunrise they scatter to the four winds, yelling and chattering all the way.

Roosting Crows are messy. When they settle onto their branches they start preening. En masse. This lets drop a veritable blizzard of worn out feathers, down, seed husks (food spillage; these guys are really sloppy eaters), dead skin, and Crow dandruff. Unhygenic and indescribably disgusting Crow byproducts fall from the trees in drifts to settle on your lawn, your garden, your outdoor furniture, your house, and your car.

But it gets even worse. Because, you see, Crows crap. All night long. Also on your lawn, your garden, your outdoor furniture, your house, and your car. Unfortunately, not only is this unhygenic and disgustingly filthy, but Crow crap is the most corrosive bodily fluid known to science. It eats the paint right off your car, your house, your nice black wrought iron garden furniture. It'll permanently stain (as in being burnt on) any wooden surfaces like picnic tables, park benches, and cedar shingles. It eats vegetation and renders yard and garden soil acidic, making it unable to support growing organisms.

I've seen whole neighborhoods totally devastated. A one-night stay is disastrous; if they settle in for a week, the place looks like the countryside around the Somme after the invading German armies successfully bombed the allies out of their trenches - burnt tree trunks, shells of houses, cows and sheep feet up in the fields. Its not a pretty sight.

You can take preventative measures. Here in Newport various institutions have installed sound systems which play a "birds in distress" soundtrack here and there in the city, which they turn on about an hour before sunset and play until about an hour after that event. The soundtrack is comprised of clips of various birds screaming in terror, or screaming while being eaten. This gives the impression that this is a very unfriendly environment for birds, and the Crows go look for a less stressful area to sleep. But this is only done around the public parks (so that you'll actually want to sit on the park benches) and various churches and other public venues. If you live back in the residential neighborhoods, you have to fend for yourself. Good luck!

So my advice is - no matter how much the sight of Hawks dining on songbirds offends your sensibilities, DO NOT invite the Crows in to drive them off. The resulting devastation will ruin your life, leave your neighbors in an uproar, and cause your property values to plummet. You'll be the most hated person in your town or city for having opened that particular door. You may even end up swinging from a lamppost. It's not worth it!

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

A Sunday Ramble

A nice, diffused-light day today. It was overcast when I set out and gradually cleared throughout the day. Just the kind of light I love to shoot in - no harsh, bright light and strong contrast, which brings out more detail and color in the subject. I took a lot of "hmmmm, let's see what this will do" shots today, and none of them worked. Oh well. I did get three I thought good enough to share.

More signs of Spring: the Pussy Willows are starting to sprout catkins. I saw these alongside the road on Ruggles Ave. and ended up having to tramp through some brambles to get a good macro shot of these.











I caught these Mute Swans in mid-preen out on Gooseneck Cove at low tide. This is one of those instances when I took a lot of shots trying to get a decent pose. I was trying to get a shot with both of them having the curved neck. Out of close to 15 shots, this was the only one that fit what I wanted.







Finally, I took this shot looking north up Gooseneck Cove from Ocean Drive. A nice long-focus shot looking over a sinuously curving and recurving stretch of water.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

All the little birdies go "tweet, tweet, tweet..."

I went down to the Cliff Walk today to see what was going on in the coastal world. Mostly what was going on was Song Sparrows. The Cliff Walk is the hang-out for Song Sparrows in Newport, and starting in mid-March the air is full of their song. They perch on anything - fences, tree limbs, Beach Rose bushes, you name it - and let loose. It never ceases to amaze me that all the joggers hit the Cliff Walk in the Spring and Summer with the ear buds of their iPods firmly plugged in their ears. For Pete's sake unplug and listen to some real music! Anyhow, I got lots of shots of Song Sparrows today, and these are the two best.

At the south end of the Cliff Walk is Bailey's Beach, 2/3 belonging to a private, very exclusive beach club called the Spouting Rock Association, and 1/3 a public beach which we all call "Reject Beach." I couldn't help taking a picture of the cove the beach sits on; look at that blue! My goodness, it almost looks tropical. Heh, heh! I wouldn't jump in, though; the air temperature was around 42ºF/5ºC, and the water temp was 38ºF/3ºC.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Back to Birds

So, after all the four-legged creatures yesterday, we're back to birds today. I was out walking today and took 49 pictures altogether, and three made the final cut. Which is about par for the course. I took about 10 shots of a Belted Kingfisher down on Hazard Rd., but none of them worked. Also some Mallards on Gooseneck Cove off Hazard Rd., but none of the shots were particularly interesting, and besides, I think I've inflicted enough ducks on you. On the way back into town, though, I got lucky. On Ledge Rd. I heard a familiar whistled here, here, here, and sure enough. looking up I spied a Tufted Titmouse hopping about high up in a tree. So I pulled out my telephoto lens and got to work. I got 4 or 5 shots before he took off, and two of them were pretty good, so I've included them both below. After that, going up Bellevue Ave. I spied a Crow pulling bits off a broken tree branch, so I stopped to watch a shoot pictures. He'd pull some, then look at me and converse some, then go back to pulling. I took a bunch of shots, but the one below is the best.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Theme Thursday - Animal

Heh, heh! I just know you guys are expecting more birds from me! Nope! I actually do have pictures of critters other than birds, and today is the perfect excuse to share them here. It's a nice mix of domestic and wild creatures, I think.

This Llama lives on the Hammersmith Farm in Newport. Hammersmith is an extension of the Swiss Village Farm Foundation, which gathers, protects, and preserves heritage breeds of farm animals. The llamas actually serve a purpose beyond preservation - they protect the sheep and goats from coyotes. They have quite a kick, and no self-respecting coyote will be dumb enough to mess with that!









This Shetland pony is part of a herd on Hammersmith Farm. When these cute little buggers wander up to the stone fence, traffic stops on Harrison Ave.; everybody pulls over to come pet the little cuties. But... DO NOT FEED THEM! The SVF Foundation is very strict about this. But petting is fine. This little guy wasn't gonna let me stop. That look is one of reproach because I stopped petting to take pictures.













Yes, friends and neighbors, Eeyore is alive and well on Hammersmith Farm. This fella wasn't much bigger than the Shetlands.













This young White-Tailed Deer was wandering around in the salt marsh on Gooseneck Cove last Summer. When I first saw him, he was trying to play with a Great Egret, who was really annoyed at being interrupted while poking around for a meal on the mud flats. When the Egret finally flew away, the deer noticed me and got curious. Not curious enough to come too close (I still had to get this shot with the telephoto), but certainly curious enough to walk back and forth to eye me from several different angles. This was a yearling, so I may have been his first experience with a human, hence the cautious curiosity.








And finally, we have this Green Frog in one of the swamp pools in the Audubon Center in Bristol, RI. I was hiking on the East Bay Bike Path last September, and the path passes through the Audubon Center. I always stop at this point and go walk down their boardwalk into the center of the salt marsh, but this pool lies along the bike path, and I kept hearing the short, characteristic bark of these frogs, so I went looking. And there it was, posing for a shot!




And to wind up this little Theme Thursday excursion, I'll continue my habit of adding a YouTube video. This week it's the adorable Miss Shirley Temple singing "Animal Crackers In My Soup" from the movie Curly Top.

Photography © 2007 & 2008 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Playing On a Rainy Day

It was raining today. I went out to do some errands, but it wasn't a good day to hang around outside taking pictures, so I came right home after the errands were run. But I didn't neglect the camera. I decided to play with food instead. I set up a still life with the veggies I bought yesterday, and are at this very moment simmering on my stove in a nice tomato sauce. This was the result:

Of course, me being me, I couldn't just leave it at that. I did some playing in Photoshop and got creative. I ended up with this faux painting:

There you have it, some rainy day amusement!

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Glimpses of Spring

I know a lot of people have had their flowers blooming for a bit now and have been flooding the blogosphere with celebrations of Spring. But here on the New England coast Spring comes a bit more slowly and a little later. The ocean holds the heat of the Summer and keeps us a bit warmer in the Winter than those farther inland (and so often when it snows in Providence and Boston, we get rain here in Newport), but by this time of year the ocean has cooled down considerably (water temperature today is 39º F/4º C) and successfully holds off the onset of Spring. Of course, this is why we're a Summer resort - that slow-to-warm-up ocean keeps us cooler in the Summer and brings us all those poor, urban escapees from the city heat.

But we are finally getting some signs of Spring, and I found some on the way to the grocery store this afternoon.






One of the definitive signs of Spring coming around here is the return of certain migratory birds, and the House Finch is one of them. I saw my first House Finch of the year today on Rhode Island Ave.














Of course, we have Cardinals all year long, but now the males are singing their vast song repertoire instead of the short, shrill chip, chip they scold us with in the Winter months. This one sang to me for quite a bit, and stayed right there in his tree, determined not to be chased from his territory.














The early Narcissi are starting to come up, most notably the Crocuses, but here I found the Crocuses scattered among some early Snow Drops.











But the surest sign of all that Spring is just around the corner, for me, is the blooming of the Witch Hazels in a garden along Old Beach Rd. Technically, Witch Hazel is supposed to bloom in October, but these always bloom in late February and early March every year. Most of the trees bloom yellow, as in the shot below, but they have one tree that blooms red, seen to the right here.

Ayuh! Spring is right around the corner. I'll miss Winter, and all my exotic Winter waterfowl who will be leaving soon. But Spring means that all the Egrets and Herons and Ibises will be coming back, and the Ospreys will be building their new nest on the broadcast tower at Toppa Field and in the trees and platforms in and around the salt marshes in the south end of town. So I'm finally getting ready to let go of Winter and welcome Spring.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Sight & Sound - Reflections

A new feature, something like my Thought for the Day posts, but using music rather than words to illustrate the photography.

The music: "Reflect Like a Mirror, Respond Like an Echo" by A Produce, from his 1995 CD White Sands, On the Trance Port label. A Produce now records on the Hypnos label.

Photograph © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

A Saturday Surprise

Something that I've been trying to achieve for quite some time finally happened today - I managed to get a decent photo session with a Nuthatch. Specifically, a White-Breasted Nuthatch. These little guys are quite plentiful here in Newport, especially in Winter, but they're very quick, restless, and unpredictable. Which makes them very difficult photographic subjects. But today while I was wandering about town with the camera, I heard the very characterist call of the Nuthatch (listen here) while walking down Shepard Ave. near Salve Regina University. I looked up in a big Sweet Gum tree in front of me and there it was, hopping around in its characteristic upside-down position and digging in the bark of the tree for goodies. I planted my feet, raised the camera, and started shooting. I probably took close to 12 shots; here are the four best.

And now for something completely different!

A fellow blogger whose blog I follow - Holly Friesen at The Roaring Inside - is a very talented painter, and today she posted pictures of a gallery show she's involved in. One of her friends in the show, a sculptor with whom she's also collaborated, is named Luis Paniagua. Well it just so happens that I'm a fan of a Spanish musician whose name is also Luis Paniagua, who records on the Spanish NO-CD Rekords label and the Silentium Records label (which I can't find a web presence for). I guess Paniagua is a more common name than I'd thought! In any case, I told Holly I'd post one of my Luis' musical works here for everyone's enjoyment. The piece is called "El Regalo II" and it's from his 1997 CD Saltando Amarras.

And that, friends, is today's post.

Photographs © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Cliff Walk Odds and Ends

I walked about half of the Cliff Walk today, part of my "scenic route" to the library and the grocery store. As usual, the camera came along for the ride. I didn't take many pictures; I concentrated on things that stuck out and caught my eye while walking.

I don't know. It was just the placement of these three cones on this Scotch Pine next to the Chinese Tea House that caught my eye. They're so asymmetrical and yet still perfectly balanced, something all of us photographers strive for when composing a shot.











I've been playing with slower shutter speeds and the effect on moving objects, and one of my goals is waterfall shots (here on Aquidneck Island we don't have much in the way of waterfalls). So today when I got to the little beach at the end of Marine Ave. I noticed that the snowmelt had created a beautiful little cascade over the rocks down to the beach. I pulled out one of my ND8 neutral density filters to damp down as much of the light I could, and got this shot with a 1/20 sec. shutter speed.













Finally, I saw these bushes with dried flower bracts still intact poking through the fence behind Beechwood. I put the camera in macro mode and started shooting. This is the best shot of that little session.









See, there's no way to get away from it; whenever I walk out the door and go somewhere, photography always happens!

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Theme Thursday - Glass

Glass: clear, reflective, colored; drinking glasses, bowls, flat sheets, mirrors, windows; bottles, decorative items, holiday tree ornaments. We use glass for so much. Here are some images I've managed to put together.

Still life with glasses. Yes, this is a sampling from my collection. What can I say; I worked in a Dansk Factory Outlet for 11 years, I stocked up!

An antique patent medicine vial. It contains water from Gooseneck Cove and sits on my altar representing the element Water.

















A Victorian-style stained glass decorative light my father made. He did some really great stained glass pieces in his retirement.













The vial again, this time in a still life with seaglass set on a mirror and in front of another mirror. This was an experiment last Summer playing with reflections.

















My glasses, artfully posed. It's a wonder this thing is in focus; I almost literally can't see without my glasses, so taking this picture was a real trip!







As with last week's Theme Thursday post, I'll leave you with another blast from the past courtesy of YouTube - "Heart of Glass" by Blondie. Yeah, i had a real thing for Debbie Harry. Heh, heh! I still do.

Photographs © 2008 & 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Today Was a Good Day for Birds

Today was a good day for seeing birds. This last late Winter snow seems to have brought them out. A lot of the seasonal migratories are coming back now; the salt marsh by Gooseneck Cove was full of the sound of Redwinged Blackbirds, and I saw an Eastern Towhee way back in the underbrush in Ballard Park. And of course the Black-Capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, Nuthatches, and Downy Woodpeckers are all over the place and really, really vocal and active. I got lots of pictures today, but these three are really the only ones that came out well enough to share - a Chickadee, a fat and sassy Robin (it had no fear of me at all, just flew up to that rock and tried to stare me down), and a Gray Catbird. All three were shot in Ballard Park.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Scenes from the Macro-World - Gifts from the Earth

Mother Gaea buries many treasures for us to find. There are some that we place great monetary value on. But there are other, simpler treasures buried in the earth as well, treasures that may not shine like diamonds or glow like gold but have a homelier beauty that draws us. These seashells and this necklace of raw amber and wood and turquoise are among those humble gifts from the Earth which may very well be worth more than diamonds or gold.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Scenes from the Macro-World - Playing

I follow the [Occasional] Picture of the Day blog, and this morning I stumbled across Matt's post about building a "macro box". It looked good to me, so I followed the link he provided to the full instructions on how to build one for $10 or less on the Strobist blog. Then I made one. My only problem is I don't have a detachable flash, so I had to make do with the strongest light I have around here. I think the next time I play with this I'm going to use two lights, one to each side of the box, and see if that helps.

Anyhow, here are the results of today's play: a Laughing Buddha figurine, a Ganesha figurine, and a bud vase.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger