Wind Harp Still Sings 50 Years Later

Aug 01, 2023

By Staff | on August 17, 2023

The legendary wind harp, first erected on the Mattoon Farm in Chelsea, has been reconstructed it twice and now sits on a hilltop at the Owen Farm in Hopkinton, N.H. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

Early summer 1971, a visitor to the White River Valley left a mark on the landscape, the lore of which outlasted its permanence.

That was the year that Ward McCain, a sculptor and student at Bennington College, erected the famous wind harp on a hill above Chelsea village.

The utterly unique piece of art—a towering musical instrument with strings tickled by wind as it gusted through a cow pasture— was viewed with awe by some and bemused skepticism by others, but it became a one-of-a-kind story for decades even though it only held onto its hillside perch for two years.

Nearly 50 years ago, that magical piece of Chelsea history left town and few ever saw it again. But its legend has remained as an unlikely monument to beauty and whimsy in a tiny, straight-laced New England town. It was November 1973 when the famous wind harp fell to the ground.

Harp on the Hill

The wind harp’s creator, Ward McCain, discusses the instrument with a visitor during the harp’s dedication in 1971. (Herald File)

It was 1970 when McCain, a wiry young man with a big smile and a grand plan, brought his idea to Warren Mattoon, who, along with his wife, Anna, presided over the family farm on Densmore Road in Chelsea just off Route 113.

McCain had a friend nearby with a cabin, and he’d been pointed toward the Mattoon farm as an ideal location for the sculpture he intended to build as a project for his instrument building studies.

The Mattoons’ son and daughter in-law Hale and Diane Mattoon, lived at the property next door, and McCain initially stopped by their place to ask permission to build his harp.

Hale pointed McCain to his father, who okayed the request happily.

“It was with a handshake,” recalled Diane Mattoon. “It wasn’t go home and think about it, it was a handshake. I don’t think my father in-law knew what it was going to turn into.”

Over the years, Diane Mattoon became fascinated by the harp being built just up the hill and collected press clippings and memorabilia.

She described McCain as “a nice kid,” about 10 years younger than she and her husband. He quickly made friends with folks in town and people were happy to lend tools to McCain while he toiled away on the hill. He was always certain to return them, she added, another point in his favor with folks in Chelsea.

McCain, with help here and there from friends and locals, dug a foundation, scarfed together a massive piece of oak, he’d brought from Maine for the harp’s principle support, and carefully welded together a horizontal arm from which to suspend the strings.

A long, diagonal piece ran back to the base, supporting the upper arm and giving the 79 strings— made from Boeing aircraft cable— a place onto which they’d be tightened by threaded tuners, bent into curlicues resembling fiddlehead ferns unfurling in the early spring.

Using redwood inlaid with lignum vitae, holly, ebony, zebra wood, and rock maple, McCain made a triangular soundboard running from the outstretched steel arm to the ground and allowing the strings’ vibrations to resonate.

There was no power nearby and the distant pasture was a significant hike from the farm house, leaving McCain to make do with only hand tools and to lug material up with the occasional tractor ride from Warren Mattoon.

He worked from early summer, racing to get the project done, but found he had to stop as the weather got cold and wood glue began to freeze to his hands.

With a pause for the winter, McCain was back at it when the snow melted and by late June of 1971, he was putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece.

The Harp Sings

In a Herald story at the time, M.D. Drysdale described the celebration.

“A succession of vehicles, mostly four-wheel drive machines, climbed up the steep winding track from the Chelsea cemetery to the top of the hill,” Drysdale wrote.

“Included were Chelsea friends, the young people from the valley area and beyond who had helped him, and members of his family.”

A picnic with salami and local cheese and homemade sangria was prepared and Mc- Cain held court, talking about the harp and urging people to hear and feel the eerie music vibrating from the instrument.

That evening, The Herald related, found “more of his young friends and family members gathered around a big bonfire which capped the dedication of the Wind Harp, undoubtedly one of the few ever constructed since the Aeolian harps of ancient Greeks, tuned to Aegean breezes, which produced the siren music that, mythology relates, lured the Argonauts to watery graves.”

The harp seemed to become an overnight novelty that began to draw people to Chelsea.

“Sometimes you could hear it over the hill down to the farm … depending how the wind was blowing,” Diane Mattoon recalled.

McCain, who couldn’t be reached for this article, moved along almost immediately after finishing his harp.

According to a posting he made in a music forum in 2009, McCain left the country to become a Buddhist monk and didn’t hear of the harp again until 2000 when he moved to Nikko, Japan.

He’d left the harp in the care of a young man named Ken Anderson, who had often come to watch McCain work. Anderson would sleep out in the pasture with the harp when the weather was nice and maintained the instrument as well as he could.

Stories about the harp appeared in newspapers all over—shortly after his Herald story, Drysdale penned a feature story for the Boston Sunday Globe.

In 1972, United Artists released a double-album of music recorded from the harp titled “The Wind Harp: Song from the Hill” (an excerpt can be found online at tinyurl.com/3zyb6vay). The 1973 film “The Exorcist” even featured music from that recording.

The site soon drew people from all over the northeast to see the 27-foot-tall wonder in the Chelsea hills. Most people were respectful and polite in their use of the Mattoon family land, Diane Mattoon said and recalled that her husband, Hale, would often drive people up with his tractor, towing an old manure spreader he’d converted into a trailer.

Some people however, would leave a mess in the pasture, leave fences open, and over time, the harp was vandalized and eventually broke from people climbing on it.

“Horses were loose up there and the heifers—that was the back pasture,” Mattoon recalled. “One day they went up and found the horse’s tail cut.”

Anderson raised money from folks in town to add a steel support post along the harp’s main oak member and that fixed it for a time.

The harp “was up on the bald top of a hill,” Mattoon said. “You could see down into the village. One person who could really see it good was Bill Melvin. And he’s the one who called with the news that it fell over.”

That was November 1973.

According to a report in The Herald at the time, the giant harp tumbled to the ground sometime between 9 and 11 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 4 during a violent windstorm. A photograph shows the fallen harp, the giant vertical column planted into a ball of concrete at its base. McCain had dug a rounded hole and filled it with concrete, hitting ledge before he had hoped. The heavy wind took advantage of the leverage from the harp’s height and wrenched it from the ground.

“Hale said the wind would blow and he could see it wiggling and wiggling until finally she went over,” remembered Mattoon.

Despite the raucousness of the hundreds of visitors, Warren and Anna Mattoon were sad to see the harp go. Though it was not badly damaged when it fell, McCain’s mother had expressed that should it ever be taken down, she’d like to move it to her home in Maine, and that’s just what happened.

According to Diane Mattoon, Francis Ryan, who at the time owned the creamery building at the south end of the village, helped haul the harp to its new home.

Disrepair and Repair

For most in the area, that day the harp left Chelsea was the end of the story, but it turns out the harp’s life went on.

For several years it found a home in Edgecomb, Maine on property that McCain’s mother Margaret “Peggy” Griggs owned.

By most accounts, the location wasn’t so grand as its Chelsea birthplace, but a road wound up the hillside to walking distance from the harp. And the grand instrument still knew how to call out to visitors. Its installation was completed in 1976 and it stood in place for seven years in Maine. It drew people to its mysterious sounds and again, some of the reckless vandalism followed it there as well.

In 1983 the harp was taken apart and laid to rest out on a web of logging roads deep in the woods. It probably would have remained there if not for yet another person drawn to its mystery.

A photo shows MaryAlisa Fortier, then a senior in college, planning the reconstruction of the harp after finding its pieces in 1983.

MaryAlisa Fortier was an art student at the University of Maine in Orono, heading toward graduation in 1984.

The studio art building was called Carnegie Hall, and if students were in the building when it was locked up in the evening, they were allowed to spend the night working on their projects undisturbed.

It was one such night when Fortier was locked into the painting studio, working and listening to radio that a striking sound reached out from the airwaves.

She was listening to a syndicated program called “Music from the Hearts of Space” and they played a piece from the wind harp recording.

Fortier recalled that the DJ had said the music was from a wind harp built in Vermont and that it had been knocked down by a hurricane and no one knew what became of it.

She became fascinated.

A friend confided that they’d seen the harp in Maine before it was disassembled.

“They hadn’t remembered where it was exactly,” Fortier said, “but they remembered that when they saw it the strings were broken … and the soundbox had a big hole in it and it was covered in graffiti.”

Fortier wrote to the radio program’s hosts in California; from there she found Griggs’s name and address and began writing letters.

“She was very helpful,” Fortier said. She was about to visit her son, who was still secluded at the monastery at the time, but Griggs took a list of questions from Fortier and relayed them between the excited art student and the harp’s maker.

“She wrote quite a few letters to me over the time I was in college,” Fortier said. Mc- Cain and Griggs had agreed Fortier could have the remnants of the harp if she could find it, and he passed along suggestions to improve it if she wished to rebuild the harp.

When MaryAlisa Fortier discovered the wind harp in Maine, it bore little resemblance to the storied figure that had sung over the Chelsea hills. (Provided)

“It was like an odyssey.”

Fortier drove from her campus to Edgecomb and the neighboring Newcastle in search for the harp, stopping at libraries and country stores asking if people could tell her where to look for the harp.

Everywhere she went, people told her “they remembered it, but ‘you can’t get there from here!’”

Eventually, Fortier was able to track down the site through land records, got in touch with the new owners, who were building a house on the property and got permission to look in the woods for the harp.

Not wanting to venture into unknown woods on her own, Fortier borrowed a Doberman named Vicky from a friend and drove 200 miles down every weekend for a month to walk through the labyrinth of logging trails.

“I was determined to find it,” she said. “When I found it,” she added, producing a tidy stack of photographs, “it did not look like a harp at all. It was a pile of rotted wood and twisted metal.”

The heavy steel arm at the top of the harp had been cut into two pieces and ants and other insects had spent years feasting on the wood.

She spent days studying the pieces and pulled together a plan. Fortier went to a lumber company in Orono and convinced them to donate a truck and driver to haul the pieces back to the college campus, but learned a week before graduation that it could not stay there into the summer.

Undeterred, she loaded the pieces into an old Chevy pickup and, with another friend, drove the dangerously overladen truck to her parents’ home on Orr’s Island in Maine where the harp’s components would sit for the next five years.

Eventually, Fortier got married, and in 1993 purchased a piece of land in Gilmanton, N.H. There was no hill, but she thought if she logged it so the trees funneled the wind through the land, she could rebuild the harp.

And rebuild she did.

Every wooden piece of the harp had to be discarded, the metal painstakingly broken free of a decade of rust. The main arm of the harp was so badly bent she had to drive her Jeep over it repeatedly to straighten it.

Fortier hand-hewed a 26-foot long piece of white oak she found on the property to serve as the harp’s main vertical support. She learned to weld so she could repair the metal arm, which holds the strings aloft. She buried a steel beam in a concrete foundation to hold the whole thing upright.

It took years of nights and weekends, but in 2000, new strings were strung and the harp sung again for the first time since 1983.

MaryAlisa Fortier sits on a bench built into the wind harp’s soundboard on a hilltop at the Owen Farm in Hopkinton, N.H. (Herald / Tim Calabro)

Its Final Home

For 19 years, the harp played quietly in Fortier’s back yard, and few knew it. Friends and family members might pay a visit and neighbors may have heard the siren song on the wind, but Fortier did not advertise that her place was home for the famous wind harp.

Life went on. Fortier’s husband died and eventually she decided to sell the land and move to Concord. But she couldn’t leave the harp behind.

Having stood for nearly two decades, the harp was showing signs of wear from bugs and the weather.

That meant another rebuild would be necessary when she found a new spot.

And she found the perfect spot. Her cousins own a large farm in Hopkinton—the Owen Farm—and Fortier spent lots of time there growing up. A camp for kids is held on the Owen Farm each summer and youngsters learn to ride horses and work with farm animals. And it boasts a hilltop pasture in site of the house where the harp could sit and play its song.

This time, rather than doing everything by hand on her own, Fortier had a small army of friends and family to help out.

Neighbors from Gilmanton— professional house movers—lent their expertise to migrate the harp south to Hopkinton.

Rather than digging the foundation with a shovel and buckets, they brought an excavator and poured concrete.

Patty Ruth Owen and her husband Derek, who own the farm, would drive out with a six-wheeler and tinker away at the lower levels.

Derek Owen had saved a long metal pole that had been used to hang lighting for a baseball field. That came in handy to replace the ant-eaten oak post Fortier had made by hand.

Another cousin, Joab Owen, runs a woodworking business on the farm and he worked with his fellow carpenter, Charlie Austin and Fortier, to reconstruct the sound board and tension the strings.

Just like in her initial reconstruction of the harp, Fortier also added a wooden bench inside the sound board.

“It is the best place to be,” she said. “The cows love it too, they go in there and stand in it.”

For the past three years, the harp has become a mainstay of the farm. Fortier lives just 15 minutes away and visits frequently. The Owen Farm has a circular guest house that they rent out to visitors, and it has a splendid view of the harp and the hills beyond.

The harp became such an important part of the farm’s life that Derek Owen was buried nearby when he died in October 2020 so visitors to his gravestone can hear the soft song of the harp.

“It’s at last where it seems to be … in the perfect place,” Fortier wrote in an email this week. “It’s always protected on private land, but people are allowed to visit when they politely request permission.”

Joab Owen and the farm also operate a fund for the maintenance of the harp and people are welcome to make contributions.

More than 50 years old now, the harp continues to sing its song. Fortier, who spent 40 of those years seeking out and rebuilding the harp now feels a sense of completion, she said.

“It’s just to be enjoyed by as many people as possible and here it won’t get destroyed. They watch over it very well,” she added.

“It feels like it’s at home here.”

Those who would like to visit the wind harp may find the Owen Farm online at owenfarm.org.