Heroism preserved in artwork

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New England boasts the workshops of two of America's greatest Lincoln and Civil War monument sculptors, and they are just about 100 miles apart.

Chesterwood, the home and studio of Daniel Chester French, sits in a bucolic valley near Stockbridge, Mass., over which the aptly named Monument Mountain, part of the Berkshires range, peers down.

In Cornish, N.H., Aspet, the home and studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is nestled on a hill overlooking the Connecticut River, nature's dividing line between New Hampshire and Vermont.

Each site is preserved and maintained for the public to enjoy; Chesterwood is a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Saint-Gaudens' estate is a unit of the National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Visitors to these gems of American cultural history will learn how heroic sculpture was created and discover how peace and tranquillity played a role in shaping the lives and works of two men who gave the nation differing but nonetheless equally stirring sculpted portraits of Abraham Lincoln and other heroes of the Civil War.

The beginning

Three-and-a-half miles from quaint Stockbridge, a town brought to life most famously on canvas by Norman Rockwell, who also lived and worked there, one comes upon the place where the gentlemanly French erected his country studio.

There he labored for 35 consecutive summers between mid-May and November, spending the other six months in New York City's Greenwich Village.

He retired to his rural retreat full time later in life. Walking the grounds, it is easy to see why this 120-acre property, a transformed derelict old farm, was near and dear to French and his wife, Mary, his first cousin.

White-tailed deer scamper and frolic, and birds spread their wings above the shaded property while a pleasant breeze playfully tugs at the maples and pines, through which meander paths for leisurely strolling.