A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

In 1855 Whipple purchased a general store in Foster and ran it for at least two years; he then presumably sold the store and its goods, probably at a substantial profit, thereby commencing his career as entrepreneur and land speculator. At that time he moved a few miles south of Foster to the town of Coffin’s Corner, where he built ‘a mill, a house, an assembly hall, and several cottages for employees’;³ since he had purchased all the land there, he renamed the town Greene (in honour of the Rhode Island Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene). It is remarkable to think of a twentyfour-year-old essentially owning an entire small town, but Whipple was clearly a bold and dynamic businessman, one who would gain and lose several fortunes in his crowded life.

One particular financial collapse, in 1870, led to the selling of the Place homestead in Foster and a move to Providence. Whipple settled initially on the West Side of Providence—the western shore of the Providence River, site of the present business district—since his business offices were in this general area. In connection with his various businesses he travelled widely in Europe, particularly France (he attended the Paris Exposition of 1878), England, and Italy.

By this time Whipple Phillips was clearly a man of substantial means, and, aside from building the house at 194 Angell Street in 1880–81, he undertook what was to be his most ambitious business enterprise: the establishment of the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company in Owyhee County in the southwest corner of Idaho, ‘which had for its object the damming of the Snake River & the irrigation of the surrounding farming & fruit-growing region’.⁴ Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, has performed a remarkable feat of excavation in supplying the details of his enterprise, and I can do no better than to summarize his findings.⁵

The company was incorporated in Providence as the Snake River Company as early as 1884, with Whipple as president and his nephew Jeremiah W. Phillips as secretary and treasurer. Initially the company dealt in land and livestock, but shortly thereafter Whipple shifted his attention to the building of a dam—not over the Snake River, as Lovecraft erroneously believed, but over its tributary, the Bruneau River.

Work on the dam began in the autumn of 1887 and was completed by early 1890. Whipple purchased a ferry in 1887 and established a town near the ferry on the Snake River, naming it Grand View. He also built a Grand View Hotel, to be managed by his son Edwin. At this point disaster struck. On 5 March 1890, the dam was completely washed out by high waters, and the $70,000 spent in constructing it was lost. A new dam was begun in the summer of 1891 and completed by February 1893.

Whipple was, of course, by no means permanently at the site; indeed, he appears to have visited it only occasionally. We shall see that, when he was not in Idaho, he was spending considerable time and effort (especially after April 1893) raising his then only grandchild, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

The Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company suffered some sort of financial difficulties around 1900, and on 12 March 1901 the company was sold at a sheriff’s sale in Silver City. Whipple Phillips was one of five purchasers, but the total property value of the company had been assessed on 25 May 1900 at only $9430. The final blow came in early 1904, when the dam was wiped out again. Lovecraft states that this second disaster ‘virtually wiped the Phillips family out financially & hastened my grandfather’s death— age 70, of apoplexy’.⁶ Whipple Phillips died on 28 March 1904; after his death three other individuals bought out his interest in the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company and renamed it the Grand View Irrigation Company, Ltd.

It is clear that the Owyhee project was Whipple’s principal business concern during his later years, although no doubt he had other interests in Providence and elsewhere, as his wide travels suggest. He did, however, certainly lose a good deal of money in the Idaho venture. Nevertheless, the picture that emerges of Whipple Phillips is that of an abundantly capable businessman—bold, innovative, and perhaps a little reckless—but also a man of wide culture and one who took great concern in the financial, intellectual, and personal well-being of his extended family.

Lovecraft’s elder aunt, Lillian Delora Clark, attended the Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts, for at least the period 1871–73. Lovecraft states that she ‘also attended the State Normal School, and was for some time a teacher’,⁷ but her attendance at the Normal School has not been confirmed. Lovecraft was proud of the artistic skills of both his aunt and his mother, and claimed that Lillian has ‘had canvases hung in exhibitions at the Providence Art Club’.⁸