Route 6, Eastham: The Crossroads of America
(This excerpt first appeared in Southern Indiana Review)
I didn't have high hopes for my visit to Terre Haute. Comedian Steve Martin called it "the most nowhere place in America." Mr. Martin, who owns two Edward Hopper paintings, might be surprised to know that Terre Haute's Swope Art Museum is home to Hopper's Route 6, Eastham. But then, the town surprised me at every turn, maybe partly because my first dealing with someone from there was a museum employee e-mailing back about where I might interview residents who knew the painting, "Most people in Terre Haute have never been to the Swope. It's really out-of-towners like you who know about our collection."
I arrived at dusk on a Saturday night and headed for the one local brewpub, hoping to find some people to interview, even if they didn't know anything about art. To bypass a long wait, I accepted a seat in the smoking section. In the booth across from mine sat a wiry young man with a goatee, smoking a cigarette and wearing a loose-fitting yellow button-down shirt. He nodded in greeting as if we had met before. His tanned female companion flashed a flirtatious smile beneath dark eyes. I covered my confusion and aloneness by digging into my Caesar salad.
When the man left the table, the woman leaned over and asked with a foreign accent, "Can I ask what you are doing in this town?"
When I explained why I was there, she said, "My husband is an art curator."
I wondered, "At the Swope?" Nope. He returned and explained that he worked at a local college, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He introduced himself as Matt and his wife as Alexandra. She excitedly told him I had come to see the "Edward Hooper" at the Swope. He ignored her mistake.
"Are you from here?" I asked him.
"Born and raised. I left though and came back. I can tell you all about this town." He sidled forward and drew hard on his cigarette, obviously eager to share his views.
"Route 40 through town was the National Road, and Route 41 followed the Wabash River, so Terre Haute became known as the 'Crossroads of America.' Eugene V. Debs was born here and began the American Socialist Party here. Because of that, Terre Haute has a larger liberal contingent than its neighbor cities. In the 1920s, it became known for prostitution and gambling. Mob guys from Chicago would vacation here. Vice was the major local industry. Then in the sixties, some local ladies decided to sweep the city clean. Since the 1970s, it has been less plagued by vice, but also less patronized by business. Now," he concluded with another long drag on his cigarette, "Terre Haute isn't so much isolated as forgotten."
"You're obviously not from here," I said to his wife.
She again looked down and batted her eyelids. "No. I am from Colombia."
Matt interjected, "We met in California: one of my times away. When we wanted to start a family, we came back here. Grandma's baby-sitting right now."
Matt rolled his eyes when I asked about the art scene in town. "The town's most famous painter was a realist watercolorist named D. Omer Seamon. He chose as his nickname, of all things, 'Salty'. Salty Seamon's wife was the only previous curator at Rose-Hulman, so I'm mostly in charge of where to hang the huge selection of Seamon watercolors the college owns."
Alexandra nudged Matt, and he said sheepishly, "We have to go back to put the baby to bed. Grandma's about at her limit."
I drove back to my motel and retired, marveling that the first resident I interviewed was in the arts and wondering what surprises I would find sightseeing the next day. I started at the obvious place: "The Crossroads of America," the brass sign at Wabash Avenue and Seventh Street. Circling outward from that, I learned that Terre Haute was home to two theaters Hopper would have loved: the 1922 Indiana and the 1914 Hippodrome--the oldest surviving vaudeville theater in the U.S. I also discovered half-numbered streets (7½, 10½) and Square Donuts, which actually serves square donuts.
Terre Haute's unique museums included one devoted to the child victims of Nazi doctor experiments and one honoring the hometown author of Indiana's state song "On the Banks of the Wabash," Paul Dresser. Dresser's brother Theodore Dreiser never Americanized his name or attitudes and wrote epic novels detailing the perversions of capitalism. Hopper read Dreiser's books and called them "a little too Midwestern" but later said they were "all right."
Dreiser's fellow enemy of capitalism, Socialist Eugene V. Debs, lived in a tiny white-sided farmhouse here that was now a museum nestled uncomfortably beneath the towering rust-marked concrete dorms of Indiana State University. Debs ran the activist railroad union, and he refused to support World War I. But that didn't hurt his candidacy in the next election of 1920, when he garnered nearly a million votes while jailed for those pacifist activities.
After passing the factory where Clabber Girl baking soda is made (founded by Herman Hulman, whose largesse earned him co-billing at Rose-Hulman), I parked downtown and wandered the streets, deserted on a Sunday morning. Everywhere stood examples of the adaptability of America's small towns. Lawyers worked out of old restaurant spaces. A former retail storefront had been converted to a bookstore in whose display case rested a book of Hopper reproductions, as if a mysterious hand had foreseen my visit. I headed to the Swope and the Hopper that had drawn me here.
Sheldon Swope, a jeweler and real estate developer who fought in the Civil War, left his fortune to establish an art museum in his adopted hometown of Terre Haute. The Swope Museum of Art opened in 1942 and claims to be the second-oldest United States institution devoted solely to American art. The museum's first director, John Rogers Cox, was a painter himself, born in Terre Haute and educated in Philadelphia. He wisely focused the museum's modest purchasing power on contemporary American paintings and sculptures, where bargains were easier to find. The very first painting the new museum bought was Edward Hopper's Route 6, Eastham. One frugal man bought the painting of another. (The critic Frank Getlein observed Hopper at an art event in New York City slunk in a chair eating handfuls of hors d'oeuvres. When he spotted Getlein staring, Hopper muttered, "This would be my supper.")
A surprisingly fine example of Hopper's work, Route 6, Eastham was newly cleaned when I saw it. (The Swope's building also had just undergone extensive renovations. Echoing the museum employee's warning, one of the out-of-town construction crew called the Swope "one of the best-kept secrets around.") Slightly larger than two feet by three feet, the painting shows a white clapboard farmhouse on a flat stretch of highway. Such New England farmsteads are nicknamed for their buildings: "big house-little house-back house-barn." The apparently pastoral subject is given a dark undertone because the farm is devoid of people or tools and the scene is dominated by the paved highway. A triangle of pale yellow wildflowers at bottom implies that the viewer stands across the highway. The conflict is whether to appreciate the simple beauty of the outdated farmstead or head down the long bleak modern road.
I asked the fiftyish woman sitting at the museum's front desk if she was from Terre Haute. She folded her arms across her turquoise T-shirt, which was draped with a lightweight lilac sweater. "I'm from here, but left." The Crossroads of America seemed to be the crossroads of its residents' lives, as many people who left here returned. "Married military." She spoke in clipped phrases after bouts of silence during which she withdrew deep into herself. "Lived in California, Hawaii, and the Far East. I came back because my parents were in failing health. Fully intended to move back to California, but it didn't happen that way. So I'm here. And lo and behold liking it," she said, raising an eyebrow. Apparently Terre Haute can surprise even the natives.
"Do you know much about art in general or this Hopper painting?"
She narrowed her eyes. "I actually majored in Art."
"Is this anything like how you paint?"
"No. I got hooked on flowers. Flowers and artichokes. I especially like the feeling of isolation in Hopper's spaces, especially when he puts people in them. A lot of visitors think it's a regional piece, from the local area."
"Do you think people in your community are as isolated as Hopper's characters?" I asked.
"Absolutely not. I thought I would feel that way when I came back, but I don't. I wouldn't feel isolated except maybe in Siberia. We have a lot of culture that comes in to Terre Haute; we have a lot of culture that exists in Terre Haute. Earlier in life, I had to have the excitement of big towns; now, I prefer small towns. My kids don't live around here. I like the proximity to the airport. I can be anywhere I want to be in a short time. I like that you can drive so many places, and there are so many neat areas around here. As an example, we went up to see Ernie Pyle's home and museum. You look at that house and you see a Hopper subject."
I left her to her duties and went to see the rest of the collection. Though the museum was small, and whole time periods and art movements that would be given a wing or a room in other museums were here given only a wall, the collection held several pleasant surprises. The Swope's Grant Wood painting Spring in Town was chosen to represent Wood in the Whitney Museum's 1999 survey of twentieth-century American art. Robert Motherwell's excellent Caprice #4 is named for the caprice that produced a beautiful spray of pitch black on a field of pure white.
I was not familiar with Gordon Samstag, but his painting titled Young Man Desires Position caught my eye. It shows a young man in a dark suit slumped into a chair with his portfolio at his feet. Samstag said it was an art school classmate who dropped by after a day of frustrating calls on artist wanted ads. "The title," Samstag said, "was intended to point out the twist to which the art student is subjected after leaving art school." Hopper was subjected to the same "twist," working illustration jobs after art school and not becoming appreciated as a painter until he was forty.
Back in front of Route 6, Eastham, the demographically pure family had materialized: man, woman, son, and daughter. The father was wiry and tanned with a full beard on his creased face beneath a seed company cap. The small wife had pasted a smile beneath her quickly blinking eyes. The parents introduced themselves as John and Linda and the children as Joy and True. I told them about my project and asked if they were from Terre Haute.
"We're much more rural than Terre Haute," the dad answered.
"So that looks like your house?" I joked.
"Well, it kind of looks like where I grew up," he conceded.
"What do you think of this piece?"
He squinted at it. "You can tell he likes his subject; it's all clean lines and bright colors."
I was surprised at how succinctly he articulated the allure of Hopper's paintings that a lot of art critics had wasted a lot more words trying to explain.
"I see here," he continued, "a mind that sees in rural lifestyle advantages but also an intellectual loneliness. It's a combination of an attraction and a repulsion. There's obviously something about Hopper's art or person that you are intrigued by," he mused, turning to me.
Nodding emphatically, his wife assured me, "I can see you're going to have quite a spiritual brotherhood with the paintings of Edgar Hopper."
I hadn't realized before visiting Terre Haute how susceptible Hopper's simple name was to variations like hers and Alexandra's from the night before.
"It's nice to have friends," John summed up, shepherding his family out the front door. "Even when they're dead."
John's wording startled me. I hadn't thought of my journey as chasing Hopper's ghost, but maybe he was right. I wouldn't have been surprised to find Hopper's ghost wandering Terre Haute; I found so many other surprises here. Like in Hopper's paintings, it is astounding how much can be revealed by even a seemingly simple scene. A lot more is going on than you would guess at first glance at this "nowhere place."
