Free Black Tide by Brendan DuBois Page B

and like most of the few cities in state, its life started as a mill town, with tall red brick buildings along the riverbanks, the flow spinning the turbines that milled cotton into cloth, and which also powered the machinery for making leather hides into shoes. From 1838 to 1846, when the mills arrived the town's population went from less than 100 to more than 10,000. There is still a large French-Canadian population in Manchester, made up of the descendants of many of those first workers in the city's mills, who came here from southern Canada or the towns in the northern part of the state, such as Berlin. In some of the city's bars and taverns, the term "Canuck" still guarantees the start of a brawl.
    While the French-Canadians sweated and bled in the mills, a number of families became quite rich, and the smart ones spread their wealth around into shipping and timber and banking. The not so smart ones suffered and crashed when the mills closed during the first part of this century, when the competition from Southern mills proved to be just too much. An old story, one that's still being written today in places such as Juarez and Guadalajara. One family which prospered was the Scribner family, and one of their foundations set up the Scribner Museum of Art, located only a few minutes away from the downtown of Manchester. While the downtown has some high-rise buildings --- high for New Hampshire --- it's only a matter of a few blocks in either direction before you come to residential neighborhoods, and it was in one such neighborhood that I located the Scribner Museum of Art this late Wednesday morning.
    I parked my Range Rover across the street from the museum and walked over. There was hardly any traffic and the day was hot, with a heavy haze in the air. I wore shiny new brown loafers, a short-sleeved white shirt and pressed chinos, and there was a tan reporter's notebook sticking out of my back pocket. The Scribner Museum was two stories high and made of stone and exposed brickwork. The grounds were landscaped with some trees and shrubbery and crushed-stone paths. There were long Roman-type columns at the front entrance to the museum. On each side of a pair of great wooden doors at the entrance was a stone mosaic showing medieval knights, swords in their hands, the points aiming downward to the soil.
    Inside the Scribner Museum was a coffee-table-sized box of glass and wood that had a sign asking for donations, and I slipped a five-dollar bill into an opening at the top. I was about fifteen minutes early for my appointment, so I made a quick walk through the two floors of the building, and even though I felt the museum was probably just an attempt by the Scribner family to resolve its guilt over how they had treated their mill workers, I was fairly impressed at what I saw.
    While there wasn't much space to be offered on its two floors, the museum did give a quick read of some major artists and epochs. There was a room of French Impressionists, including two Monets and a Matisse, and there was also a gallery on the second floor devoted to early New England furniture, from Chippendale chairs to some massive hutches and clothes chests. Another room showed early American portraits of stiff-necked men and women who lived in this state at the turn of the nineteenth century. One long display of silver showed some items from Paul Revere and his descendants, and there was even a wing of modern art and sculpture, with two Picassos and a portrait by Georgia O'Keefe and a small mobile by Calder.
    I'm sure that anyone with a passing interest in art who's been to Paris or New York or even to Boston would have a fit of giggles about spending some time in the Scribner Museum, but in a state with a single major daily newspaper and only one commercial statewide television station, I thought it did a fairly respectable job of giving a brief overview of what art had to offer. The museum this day held a mixed bag of visitors: a few elderly ladies