Background on Burt V. Brooks
Checking for mail, Greenwich
Burt Vernon Brooks left a remarkable visual record of daily life in the Swift River Valley, Massachusetts, in the years before it was inundated to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Born in Brimfield on May 22, 1849, the son of Benjamin (1813-1888) and Charlotte Emerson Brooks (1813-1895), Burt was raised in a home perched on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. His father, a farm laborer and later farmer, never acquired significant taxable property, even by the standards of his poor neighbors, and the family's fortunes improved little after they relocated from Monson, where they had been living, to the Swift River Valley town of Greenwich in the spring of 1879, according to Quabbin historian J.R. Greene.
Whether in spite of poverty, or because of it, family was a center of Brooks' life and he never strayed far from his parents or four siblings, living with his parents until he was well into his forties and only separating from them when his mother died. Both of Brooks's brothers died young. Abner Shaw Brooks (1841-1863) was only 22 when he was killed in action during the Civil War as a member of the 25th Connecticut Infantry, falling in the Battle of Irish Bend. A younger brother, Orson Francis Brooks, died even younger at the age of six on Aug. 12, 1857.
Brooks' sisters were more fortunate. Anna Mariah (1837-1904), the eldest of the siblings, married a shoemaker, T. Walter Deming (1832-1885) in 1852, and had the distinction of moving the furthest afield, barely, settling in the neighboring town of Palmer. The younger sister, Martha Jane (1838-1912), married twice: first to Miner King, with whom she had two children, and then, in 1876, to a carpenter and English immigrant, William H. Fewell. Through both marriages, at least until her parents' deaths, Martha remained at home. She, her husband, and sons William (who died young) and Edgar, lived with or next door to Burt for over thirty years, even though Greene notes that according to oral tradition, Burt and Edgar despised one another. Even in death, the family remained close. Most of the family's graves were removed together from Greenwich when the Swift River Valley was flooded and they were reinterred in Walter Deming's family lot in Monson's Moulton Hill Cemetery. Abner and Orson share a single stone, as do Anna and Walter, whose stone is inscribed with the Spiritualist motto "passed to spirit life."
Burt Brooks married twice, relatively late in life, with both marriages to much younger women. At the age of 34, he married Gertrude F. Childs (1868-1907), a dressmaker from Dana who was nearly twenty years his junior, and in September 1913, he married Ina Amelia Gamwell (1883-1983), who was nearly 35 years younger. Neither marriage resulted in children. Beyond these simple facts of family, however, many details of Brooks' life remain unclear. Although listed as a farm laborer in the 1880 census, he and his family found income where they could, including taking in boarders to their crowded house. In 1880, they boarded Rispah Chamberlain Powers (1803-1883), an elderly widow who was deemed "demented" (and who had formerly been an inmate at the state asylum in Worcester), and in 1900, he supported an 11 year old boarder who Greene argues may have been a "state orphan." In 1920, he and Ina boarded girls, also apparently orphans or abandoned children, one of whom was later recorded residing at the Lancaster State Industrial School. Greene adds that Brooks oversaw the town poor farm in Dana in 1891-92.
Flexibility in making ends meet was a necessary part of a poor person's life, of course, but Brooks stood out for pursuing an unusual occupation not typically associated with life in a small rural town: art. Precisely when he took an interest in the subject or whether, how, or with whom he trained remains unknown, but by the age of forty, Brooks was making money from his talents, and by 1900, he regularly listed himself as a painter -- or sometimes a landscape painter. His first artistic job probably predated 1887, when the Greenwich Selectmen paid him $35 to produce a map of town, and there are suggestions that Brooks may have taken up photography by the same time. Twenty years later, he was thanked in the town's annual report for presenting "pictures" of the town's schoolhouses, church, and two villages to the local library, and at least some of his surviving photographs can confidently be dated to prior to the turn of the century. He supplemented his income after the turn of the century by selling photographic postcards of Swift River Valley scenery.
As both painter and photographer, Brooks was known for his depictions of the landscape and buildings of Greenwich, but his work covered a broader range, including studio portraits, images of families, farm and domestic animals, work places, and carefully posed "genre" scenes. In his history Quabbin: The Lost Valley, Donald Howe recalled that Brooks cut a striking figure in town, with his high starched collar, bowler hat, and full beard, and that he was "hardly ever seen without his camera strapped to his back." The eccentric artist, Howe records, painted his own coffin during the "violent" flu epidemic of 1918-1919, adorning it with scenes from life in Greenwich.
Brooks was active as an artist well into his 70s, but by the time of the census of 1930, the then-80 year old man was recorded as living alone in a rooming house in Springfield, his wife Ina having moved to Los Angeles. In that census, Burt listed himself as married, while Ina, living with a lodger named John Finch, indicated she was divorced. Whatever the circumstances, Burt reportedly followed Ina to Los Angeles in the following year, toting his painted coffin with him, and he died there on April 24, 1934. Despite his wishes to be buried in his coffin, he was cremated, and the ashes were returned to Greenwich. He shares a stone with his first wife, though his own death date was never inscribed. Ina eventually married a chauffeur, Frederick Weston Finch, and lived in northern California until her death in 1983 at the age of 99.
