Ella M. Cram diary, 1900

Series of manuscript travel diaries, the first diary written by Ella M Cram of Keene, Essex County, NY, while she traveled, July 2 to August 11, 1900 from Ashland, NH, to Boston, Fall River, and New York, thence by steamship to England, where she spent much time in London before moving on to Antwerp, Belgium, Brussels, and Paris (where she toured the 1900 Exhibition), after which she returned to Britain, whence she sailed for the United States on the S.S Lucania--the second and third diaries, expanded by her soon thereafter from the first into fuller narratives, one of her entire trip, the other displaying what she had learned of buildings and gardens she toured in Paris and Versailles. As suggested by the quotation printed above as our subhead, Cram was an active questioner; and her diaries combine details she herself discovered, and her opinions, with data well chosen from (we guess) her Cooks brochures and Baedekers. Ella Cram took this trip abroad in the company of one Mrs. CDT, with whom she left Ashland, NH, on July 2 1900, on the 8:20 AM train for Boston, MA where she admired the subway, shopped at R.H. White's department store, took in a variety show at Keith's theater, and admired "New South Station" as she and Mrs. T departed for Fall River. At Fall River they took the steamer Priscilla for New York city. Touing New York on the third, Cram and Mrs. T sailed the next day for England on the American Line's SS St. Louis. In London they stayed at the First Avenue Hotel, Holborn; and Ella soon discloses her interest in all things French by concentrating on macabre relics of the French Revolutions at Madame Tussaud's. Whether in London, Paris, or Versailles, Ella Cram recorded visiting many of her era's major tourist sites (much less so in the other cities she toured). Many of the more enduring buildings, public spaces, artwork, and notable gardens (now seemingly timeless elements of these places--but some of them new when Cram saw them) especially captured her attention--as did the lives of unfortunate royals. But many a passage locates Cram with considerable immediacy in the cities she toured as they existed in 1900. Cram's scribbled endpaper notes, diary entries written currente calamo, and slightly later expansions of the entries most important to her--all work together to tell careful readers a great deal of what travel diaries alone seldom tell us: something of how fully engages tourists' minds work first to note and then to reconstruct their travel experiences.