Trail Site #1 : Banner Hill
DIRECTIONS: As you drive from 128 toward Rocky Neck above East Main Street, Banner Hill rises up above the left side of the road for a few hundred yards above Smith Cove. You can glimpse Rocky Neck from your car by looking at the harbor on the right as you pass by. The original locations where artists painted are now private property and not accessible to the public.
The high ridge, or bluff, rising above the Smith Cove inlet on the east side of Gloucester Harbor, is called “Banner Hill.” So named after the Wonson brothers raised a flag there at the outbreak of the Civil War, it commands a panoramic scene, with the jewel of Rocky Neck’s wharves and houses sitting in the center of the harbor, framed by the buildings and steeples of the central city beyond. During the second half of the 19th Century and the first decades of the 20th, many of America’s most important artists journeyed to Gloucester to experience the amazing coastal scenery in this fishing port composed of high hills overlooking a protected and deep harbor. Banner Hill afforded perhaps the most dramatic of these views. The Banner Hill vantage point is now private property and not accessible to the public.
Attracted to Gloucester by its reputation for authentic New England beauty, as conveyed in the paintings of famed 19th century artists Fitz H. Lane and Winslow Homer, the preeminent landscape painters of the American Impressionist movement in the 1890s, including Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Frank Duveneck, and John Twachtman, created masterpieces from the perspective of Banner Hill. They were followed in the 20th century by Max Kuehne, George L. Noyes, Leon Kroll, Theresa Bernstein, William Meyerowitz, and Emile Gruppé.
