RSW's Diary Comments

Happy Sugar House

• Woodward did not keep records of the pastels he called "chalk drawings."

Editor's Note:

When it comes to sugar houses, of the 27 sugaring paintings we have pictures of, only 13 have sugar houses, there are 3 interior sugar house paintings of the Gray Bros. sugar house, and we know the operators all of them but two. Sugaring (below) is an oil painting. The Happy Sugar House seen to the right is also a pastel but it is unknown if it is the Roscoe Temple Sugar House. There is no telling if either of these are Roscoe Temple's sugaring house because there is no record.

Sugaring, sold in 1993 from a private collection of
the former High Voltage Engineering group collection

An old topographic map of the area.

(Apr. 2026) There are times there is simply no excuse one can make. This painting has been known for a long time. It is named in the exhibition list eight times at some of Woodward's most well known 1930 exhibits: the first Mount Holyoke College show, the 1932 Deerfield Academy celebration, Williston, Northfield, Valleyhead... and no one ever made a page for this pastel painting until now.

Still, there is not much we have to say about it. We did have the idea to search Roscoe Temple's name in the MassLand.com records. There was not much in Franklin County but all the records were in Colrain, MA, and in the vicinity of the Griswold Manufacturing Company (link will open in a new tab). We have several old maps from the University of Texas's collection printed in the early 20th century. There is a capture of the area around what the map cites as "Foundry Village" on the North River, near Lyonsville, and Griswoldville. This is the area of the Temple's sugar house, one of just a handful of paintings made in Colrain.

Unfortunately, It is impossible for us to make sense of these old land records. They rarely name streets or roads. Instead, they read like a mysterious treasure map, '... from the pin of the Griswold Manufacturing Company, 60 paces in the direction of the church...' This was before there was a standardization of records. Below we added just one sample of what we are talking about. All we know is this deed is west and north of so and so's property, and east of so and so's property with the river bordering the south portion...

Deed between Charles A. Smith of Cambridge. MA and Roscoe Temple, February 6, 1918