Make your memory fire on all cylinders! Johnny Dixon’s adventures usually take him well into small town New England, be it Massachusetts or Maine or New Hampshire or upstate New York. Bellairs usually crafts a bit of a spin on the small towns, too, so they’re not easily found on the map but you can still get a sense of where the stories occur.
For example, Dixon visits Stark Corners, New Hampshire, in The Eyes of the Killer Robot. It doesn’t exist but there is a similarly named Stark. The Perry Childermass estate in Stone Arabia, Maine, from The Chessmen of Doom doesn’t exist either but the statue of Perry seems reminiscent of the John P. Bowman statue in Cuttingsville, Vermont.
In The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost, Johnny’s friends visit Van Twiller, New York. As before, Van Twiller is not a real town but Bellairs paints it as such:
It was close to three-thirty when they drove into Van Twiller. The downtown part of the town was just a collection of old red-brick buildings grouped around a grassy town square. In the center of the square, on a low pedestal, stood a statue of a fireman and a brown sandstone drinking fountain. Pigeons were strutting in the grass, and people were reading newspapers on benches.
And because Bellairs usually models his fiction on factual sights and sounds I’ve long been curious what inspired this fireman statue and brown sandstone drinking fountain. It seems specific enough for me think it’s out there – maybe not even in New York – but in some quiet town square unaware how it was briefly commemorated in print.
Anyone familiar with firemen statues off the beaten path?
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