A study against the weather record
Arthur Wilder
A Woodstock garden
A planted garden, read as summer. What was happening in Woodstock’s gardens that year?
Local garden accountsPainted day unknown
The Nephos method
How this study was read
The method in fullWhat is written
The holder dates this garden view 1884. Matt Powers, the Center’s executive director, reads it as summer. June–August is a comparison season, not a documented execution window.
Untitled. Arthur Wilder. 1884.
Woodstock History Center, Recent AcquisitionsThe gardens suffer very much.
Hosea Doton, 6 July 1884; Fletcher transcript, PDF p. 34
Records of those days
- Hosea Doton’s 1884 diaryDated garden and weather accounts from Woodstock, with travel to Franklin and a later move to Pomfret kept distinct. Published transcription; manuscript not inspected.
- NOAA and Dartmouth coverage checksNearby GHCN files begin too late for this summer. Dartmouth’s older manuscript record remains an archival lead.
Not found or not yet searched
- No dated painting session, work-specific making account or confirmed 1884 Dana House lodging.
- No full local daily instrument series or rainfall total is supplied by these selected diary passages.
Each claim tested
- Does a green garden establish an evenly moist summer? No. Doton praised green grass in June but described severe drought and suffering gardens in July. His garden and the pictured plot are different places.
- Does the diary identify the painted day or sky? No. Summer remains a visual reading; no entry links this canvas to an observing day.
- Does a little rain rule out drought? No. Doton reported 0.3 inch on 5 July and described suffering gardens the following day. The reported accumulation is not a complete daily series.
Verdict
Green growth and water stress both belong to the local account of summer 1884. Doton praised grass in June and described suffering gardens in July. Neither fixes the day or weather of Wilder’s view.
- Partially agreesSummer garden context Growth is documented locally, alongside water stress. This supports context for the visual reading, not a date or a match to the painted garden.
- UnknownThe painted weather and any artistic alteration No documented day, local observation at the plot or account of making the picture.
What this cannot tell you. The diary is an edited published transcription. Observer travel prevents treating every entry as Woodstock weather. Two reported rain amounts have different or unspecified accumulation periods; they are not summed. No open reproduction licence for the museum photograph was found.
The painting
A garden before the later hotel story
A figure bends beside planted rows, with green vegetation, shaded buildings and a pale grey sky. That is Nephos’s reading of the museum photograph. The Woodstock History Center identifies the view as looking from the gardens behind the Lightbourne-Kidder House toward the Dana House and the back of the Standard Block on Elm Street.
The holder calls it Untitled, dates it 1884 and credits Mimi Baird’s donation. See the picture and its caption. No work-specific account establishes whether Wilder painted outside, worked later from a sketch or combined sessions.
A surviving advertisement offers Wilder’s painting and drawing lessons in Woodstock, with rooms over C. M. Marsh’s office. The modern reproducer attributes the crop to the Vermont Standard, 29 May 1884. The crop was read; its full issue and page were not inspected. It establishes the advertised teaching activity, not the making of this picture.
The acquisition caption compresses later hotel history into the picture’s context. The Center’s account of Wilder’s courtship instead dates the marriage to November 1889 and places the couple’s Dana House stay during the transition to the 1892 Inn. That later stay does not establish lodging in 1884.
The date
Summer is a reading, not a sitting
Matt Powers, the Center’s executive director, reads the picture as summer (email to the author, 13 October 2026) and suggests that Wilder might have stayed at the Dana House. Neither is a contemporary date record. The green planting makes a summer comparison useful, but it does not exclude another part of the growing season.
This study uses June–August 1884 as a conditional comparison. The documented object date remains the year 1884. No day is chosen because its weather looks like the picture, and no diary entry is evidence that Wilder was painting then.
A local witness
Green growth, then gardens under stress
Hosea Doton kept a diary while living on Pleasant Street in Woodstock. His dated accounts describe growth, smoky weather, rain and drought. In June he praised the grass; in July he described gardens suffering despite showers. His plot was not the garden in Wilder’s painting.
The passages below come from Scott Fletcher’s published transcription, hosted by Pomfret Historical Society, which holds the diaries, and also by Hartford Historical Society. Fletcher notes minor spelling and punctuation changes. The original manuscript has not been inspected. These are selected examples, not a count of sunny or rainy days.
| 1884 | Doton’s words in the published transcript | What the passage supports |
|---|---|---|
| 6 June | the weather was dry and smoky. Transcript, PDF p. 30 | Descriptive conditions; no cause of smoke is inferred. |
| 9 June | It began to rain a few minutes before two o’clock p.m. Transcript, PDF p. 30 | A reported rain event; no daily amount is supplied here. |
| 13 June | Where it is cut it seems to be very green and thrifty and in a very healthy condition. Transcript, PDF p. 31 | This describes grass; the same entry reports frost nearby and no frost injury in his own garden. |
| 4 July | the ground is very dry. Transcript, PDF p. 34 | Doton describes his own garden, not the Lightbourne-Kidder plot. |
| 5 July | A rain this morning. 3 tenths of an inch and the wind is changed. Transcript, PDF p. 34 | A reported morning accumulation; the collection period is not specified. |
| 6 July | The gardens suffer very much. Transcript, PDF p. 34 | The entry describes severe drought despite showers. This is his assessment, not a measured drought index. |
| 13 July | The amount of rain since yesterday noon is 0.57 of an inch. Transcript, PDF p. 35 | The accumulation begins at noon on 12 July; it is not a 13 July daily total. |
| 6 August | The garden is extremely dry and the potatoes are drying up. Transcript, PDF p. 39 | Only the garden passage is assigned to Woodstock. The entry describes his departure for Pomfret; its night rain and evening sky are not treated as Woodstock readings. |
The measurements
Rain is not the opposite of drought
Doton reported 0.3 inch of rain on the morning of 5 July, then described suffering gardens on 6 July. A shower did not, in his account, end the water stress. His 0.57-inch report on 13 July explicitly begins at noon the previous day.
| Entry | Amount | Period |
|---|---|---|
| 5 July | 0.3 inch | Reported morning rain; collection start and end unspecified. |
| 13 July | 0.57 inch | Since noon on the previous day; end time unspecified. |
The builder parses these amounts from the quoted phrases. They are not summed into a month or summer total. Missing diary measurements are not zero rain, and the weather at the painted plot remains unknown.
Where the observer was
A diary that travels
The transcript has 92 dated entries in the comparison season. That is document coverage, not a complete series of local weather observations.
Doton visited Pomfret on 3 June, travelled to Franklin, New Hampshire, on 17 June and returned on 30 June. On 20 June, he explicitly did not yet know how a storm had affected Woodstock. The warm, clear or rainy weather in his Franklin entries cannot simply be moved to the painted village.
He moved to Pomfret on 19 July and later visited Woodstock. The 6 August passage above concerns his Woodstock garden before his afternoon return to Pomfret. Its night rain and evening sky are not used as Woodstock observations. No instrument location, observer schedule or continuous exposure is reconstructed from these movements.
The instrument search
Why no local rainfall rank appears
The downloaded NOAA files for Woodstock, Hanover, Norwich and Strafford begin after the comparison season. That does not mean no earlier observations survive. Dartmouth documents an older manuscript record, but a usable summer 1884 scan was not retrieved.
The retained station candidates
| Station | First archive month | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Hanover USC00273850 | 1884-11 | No summer 1884 rows in this file. |
| Woodstock USC00439984 | 1892-10 | No summer 1884 rows in this file. |
| Norwich USC00436020 | 1892-09 | No summer 1884 rows in this file. |
| Strafford USC00438105 | 1893-01 | No summer 1884 rows in this file. |
| Burlington USC00431072 | 1883-12 | 34 summer rain entries are marked missing presumed zero; retained as null, not dry days. Not used as local garden weather. |
Burlington is a separate regional record. NOAA’s P flag means a missing value presumed zero; those entries cannot establish dry days. No distant station is substituted for Doton’s garden, and no modern normal or historical rank is manufactured from these incomplete comparisons.
What the comparison changes
The garden does not stand for a whole summer
Green vegetation is compatible with the local account of summer 1884. It is not evidence that the whole summer was moist or mild. Doton’s diary adds the labour and water stress that a single garden view need not show.
The contrast cannot date the painting to June rather than July or August: plant condition differs between gardens, and the making date is unknown. It also cannot establish that Wilder altered the sky or idealized the garden. What survives is a particular view, a catalogued year, and dated accounts of changing conditions in the same village.
The photograph is not reproduced here because an open licence was not found. Open the Center’s painting beside these records.
Sources
Every source on this page
Diary excerpts are checked against a fingerprinted text extraction of Scott Fletcher’s published transcript. The two rain amounts are parsed from its words. Receipts distinguish original downloads, extracted text and authored provenance notes. The director’s words are quoted from his email. A fingerprint preserves the version used; it does not validate its interpretation.
- Matthew Powers, Recent Acquisitions (Woodstock History Center, March 2021)
sha256 3fda4c6e9ff8c678aabdaec0bb0006dd9cd69c029e6fafbc97506e475a457d00 - Text extracted from the acquisitions article
sha256 c8abd71d7dc7cb06cc9adb468f5db83f5dee8f8303115e5bf19a5cb4b32d0ddb - Jennie Shurtleff, Letters from Juliet (Woodstock History Center, September 2021)
sha256 5d86cf7269226fec107c996458fd7a65e4ead4e51a24d642f2d00106aa1c95a3 - Text extracted from Letters from Juliet
sha256 dee5bdff729fffe1200fb826b0b6da8595e923dbeaf57b888fa84a70231dc767 - Hosea Doton, Memorandum for 1884, transcribed by Scott Fletcher
sha256 f2fa359d0197049cbecb656b05a9a235db597fff7ee7a21e5b94b9e903ffbed8 - Text extracted from Fletcher’s 1884 Doton transcript
sha256 d6fd171365d66897936eb6bb50a2282e0a284ae5fe7921c1cb14a2d9fae71511 - Pomfret Historical Society, Hosea Doton Diaries
sha256 5514f1636d99213bd807d29bc12c10c810631cd9ee2d1345436981c169bb898d - Hartford Historical Society, Hosea Doton Diaries
sha256 854a463c8e57860793890d89e87b20df19737bc0054b570d81ad87efc828a5fc - Elisha Lee, Woodstock’s Artist and Innkeeper (13 March 2023)
sha256 17afd77e0e1177fbb233aa631a12fbf7ea581e33996d5daf2afb3ac6a56744d0 - Arthur B. Wilder teaching advertisement; crop attributed to Vermont Standard, 29 May 1884
sha256 1df3a6d9a6169470408b4118ebfbf76218c5142110ee9d819c647d11bb3e9d14 - Email from Matt Powers (13 October 2026), advertisement transcription and Nephos visual reading
sha256 b9e267e26a09e4c2c3f17877abcdbdce1983e07446a529ae3ed79bc8b94f771a - NOAA GHCN-Daily station metadata
sha256 428eabc955883187935bce283766d5646e3ed7484b92eb0803874c0e8dd9b342 - NOAA GHCN-Daily format and flags
sha256 0e4e6f0e6947cf1add884c328a01760f31c56ef5fb86b85ed57dd5dc4c4aeaa6 - NOAA GHCN-Daily dataset description
sha256 e9ecae0f0de3a252c02c974997897cb9f73315f8d65f2c615486808838e375fe - Dartmouth Physics and Astronomy Weather Archive
sha256 155f254905d8755541cfd33b528d5943cbabd10982c1677f8fd675d7872be69c - NOAA GHCN-Daily, Hanover USC00273850
sha256 87a5545fad07ca90c67f5f5772df63b8ea71aefcf5fea9c526a6437a9a1d4085 - NOAA GHCN-Daily, Woodstock USC00439984
sha256 4f512cbe1fc71e6fc1b113b3013586b9c3f24be71906901e910f35efc7f428cb - NOAA GHCN-Daily, Burlington USC00431072
sha256 d8d8730a7d6c9be4164a7331c9339f7de0c5bd1cf206ddb6a194aa2c6bfc40b2 - NOAA GHCN-Daily, Norwich USC00436020
sha256 7dae3fcaeb55710e4e88a6e21d5e00abb5578638de8345b2615d0eb49c750d14 - NOAA GHCN-Daily, Strafford USC00438105
sha256 5121578950835297cc0a02ba7e5cba922474f50788cabcbd25867cd24b2a55bc
