603 NAVIGATOR / OUR TOWN
The home of Samuel Wilson, aka Uncle Sam, in Mason
Exploring the Town of Mason Home of Uncle Sam and Little Red Riding Hood BY BARBARA RADCLIFFE ROGERS | PHOTOGRAPHY BY STILLMAN ROGERS
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ncle Sam and Little Red Riding Hood may seem like unlikely neighbors, but they share the hometown of Mason. A historic marker identifies Uncle Sam’s House on Valley Road, and the wolf in the bed leaves no doubt that Pickity Place is Grandma’s House. Samuel Wilson lived in the little red cape farmhouse his father built, leaving Mason at the age of 23 to work in Troy, New York. There, he and his brother established a meat-packing firm, providing food for the army during the War of 1812. Wilson was a gregarious and popular man, called uncle by everyone who knew him. The army required that he stamp U.S. on each barrel of meat shipped to them and — so the story goes —
20 New Hampshire Magazine | June 2022
when a steamboat passenger asked what that meant, one of Wilson’s employees quipped that it meant Uncle Sam. The joke caught on, and Wilson enjoyed increasing notoriety, riding in Independence Day parades wearing a top hat. The first recruiting poster referring to Uncle Sam appeared as early as 1813, but the figure we know today stems from a costume worn (not by Wilson) in a parade in 1851, seen by a reporter who pictured it in a newspaper. In 1938, illustrator James Montgomery Flagg picked up on the recruiting theme in his famous “I Want You” posters. Uncle Sam’s house is a private home, but you can visit Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s house at Pickity Place on
Nutting Hill Road. Her story is less complicated: Artist Elizabeth Orton Jones was enchanted by the little red cottage, where she lived in the mid-1940s. She chose it as the setting for her illustrations of the children’s classic, published by Little Golden Books. When subsequent owners opened an herb farm there, they furnished the bedroom as she pictured it, complete with a wolf in Grandma’s bed. Jones, known locally as Twig, quickly became an integral part of life in Mason, where she collected and edited the material for a town history for the bicentennial in 1968. She was an enthusiastic supporter
