Before Webster Cottage became a museum, it was home to Prescott Orde Skinner, Professor of Romance Languages, and his wife Alice. Alice was an avid collector of antiques, particularly sandwich glass and silhouettes. Under her maiden name, Alice Van Leer Carrick, she published books about her adventures in antique collecting. The Next-to-Nothing House tells of her early effort to furnish her modest home with antiques from our region. It includes many photographs of her home which will look familiar to anyone who visits Webster Cottage. Carrick’s Beginner’s Luck series includes books about her collecting trips abroad.
As her expertise grew Carrick never forgot that buying antiques was a risky business. She called collecting “the one respectable form of gambling.” In Mother Goose for Antique Collectors Carrick rewrites the nursery rhymes as cautionary tales with a trash-or-treasure theme. While Old Mother Hubbard gets rich from selling her cupboard, Mary is destined to remain poor. She had a little lamp, but before she knew its worth, she had paid the junk man to take it away.
And then there’s a rhyme which may still resonate with Hanover residents today:
Rummage in your woodsheds,
Comb your attics clear;
Bring all your rubbish out.
The tourist season’s here!
T.J.O.
-12/2016
Mary Ann Hayward’s essay on Alice Van Leer Carrick, the famous antique collector who was the last resident of Webster Cottage.
Mary Ann wrote this essay in her independent study course with Dr. Mary Kelley of Dartmouth College in 1982 as part of the MALS program. Mary Ann was born in Hanover in 1936 and was a graduate of Hanover High School. After college, she taught English at the high school and at Orford High School. She left for Boston, but returned again to serve on the school boards from 1978 to 1984. She married and had three sons. After a time in California, she again returned to Hanover for her remaining days and died in 2020.
Her take on Alice Van Leer Carrick is a wonderful one. She called her “a spirit in the hills” and focused on her time at Dartmouth College, 1901-1930. Alice was born in 1875 in Nashville, Tennessee, but moved with her family to Somerville, MA for her father’s work. As an older person, probably in her twenties, she met Prescott Orde Skinner as part of a social group in Boston. Skinner completed a master’s degree, taught at Harvard and then went to Dartmouth to teach Romance languages. He married Alice in 1901 and they lived in Hanover. Alice recalled when she got to Hanover she thought Dartmouth a “small church school.”
Now, read the full essay to see how Alice built an empire of publishing and lecturing from the tiny “next to nothing house” called Webster Cottage.