The Lincoln Squirrel – News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

arts

Photo exhibit of Mt. Misery beavers opens Friday

One of Barbara Peskin’s photos of Mt. Misery beavers.

Images of beavers in their natural habitat on Mt. Misery by four photographers including Lincoln’s Barbara Peskin will be on display in Concord starting on April 24.

“Beaver Life” is a show running through May 24 with an opening reception on Friday, April 24 from 5:00–7:00pm at Wright Tavern (2 Lexington Road, Concord). It’s sponsored by OARS (the Organization for the Assabet, Sudbury and Concord Rivers) as part of their 18th annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival.

Once the Mt. Misery beavers were discovered by Sudbury Valley Nature Photographers club member Jean Fain, she shared her find with three other members (Peskin, Nicole Mordecai, and Phyllis Neufeld), and they returned several times to photograph the animals.

“Barbara has a particular affinity with the Mt. Misery beavers, and has spent many an afternoon with a couple of very friendly Mt. Misery beavers. Spring, summer and fall, we’ve continued to photograph these tail-slapping creatures formerly considered pests and currently considered climate heroes. Come winter, nature’s engineers hole up in their beaver lodges out of view,” Fain said.

The women have also photographed beavers in Lincoln’s Heywood Meadow and the pond behind St. Anne’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church as well as Concord’s Great Meadow. But it was at Mt. Misery that Peskin and Fain met the former program director for OARS, who had the idea to put together the exhibit, Fain said.

“Little did we know that beavers would be having a moment around the time of our exhibit,” she added. Beavers are the focus of the new Pixar movie “Hoppers,” an article in Scientific American, and a new children’s book, When Beavers Move In. To top it off, April 7 was International Beaver Day.

Fain shared some of the information that the photographers learned over the course of their year-long project:

  • Beavers, the largest rodents in North America, are crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk).
  • Beavers are extraordinary engineers. They can hold their breath underwater for up to 15 minutes while building dams with sticks and mud. 
  • Beaver teeth are orange due to their iron-rich coating of enamel. Their teeth grow continuously throughout their life, but gnawing on bark and branches helps trim them down.
  • Beavers slap their tails on the water to signal danger to their fellow beavers. “That sudden, loud slap also signals us humans to step away from the pond,” she said.
  • Beavers mate for life, forming strong, long-term relationships that last until one partner dies. The couple works together to maintain dams, gather food, and raise their offspring (kits).

Putting the pieces together for almost a century

Stewart Coffin at home with some of his 3-D puzzles.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of the Lincoln Review.

Stewart Coffin is a maker. In his 95 years, he’s become world-famous for the three-dimensional puzzles he designs and builds. In his varied career, he’s also been an electrical engineer, a boat builder, a writer, and even a nursery owner.

Coffin’s creations are legendary in the puzzle world. He’s designed hundreds of interlocking 3-D puzzles including striking polyhedral sculptures, ingenious tray-packing challenges, and pioneering examples of interlocking cube puzzles, according to puzzlehub.org. He’s written several books on the topic as well, including Geometric Puzzle Design and AP-ART: A Compendium of Geometric Puzzles (the start of the title is a nod to “the art that comes apart”). He still makes a few puzzles and sometimes sells them to individuals and at events such as the Lincoln Art & Farmer’s Market in December 2025 (and he’ll be back there on April 3).

Puzzle craft led to another item on Coffin’s resume: public speaker. He’s appeared at numerous puzzle conventions and was on an American Association for the Advancement of Science panel of puzzle experts. “His polyhedral puzzles, they’re beautiful three-dimensional sculptures, basically. To create the structure from these bits and pieces of three-dimensional sticks is creating an object of art. You’re not designing it, but you’re creating this art by putting it together,” Jerry Slocum, founder of the International Puzzle Party, told the Andover Eagle-Tribune in 2007.

Coffin came to puzzle-making after starting out building computers for the defense industry at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s but grew disenchanted with that line of work. After he left the corporate world, he began to make a living with hands (and pen) as a woodworker, designer and maker of canoes and paddles, and writer.

He was also a somewhat reluctant businessman in his first Lincoln sojourn, which began in 1964 when he and his wife were looking for a house that could accommodate their young family as well as a workshop. A property on Old Sudbury Road came on the market that included several acres of land and a greenhouse used in the previous owner’s nursery business. They bought the property — but it turned out that the business was in bankruptcy, and some customers who had paid for plants that were never delivered came calling. 

“I was trained as an electrical engineer and here I was a nursery man, and I knew nothing about it,” he said. “People said, ‘you can’t let it die; we’ll help you,’ so they helped me and it worked out beautifully.” It also turned out that if they made $500 a year selling plants they could classify their property as a farm, which resulted in a helpful reduction in their property taxes.

Coffin eventually won patents for two of his puzzle designs, including one called Hectix, and he caught the attention of 3M. But the design was so complex that factory workers were unable to assemble them, so the parts were shipped to his Lincoln residence where he, his daughters and neighborhood children all put them together, reportedly making 20,000 puzzles in two weeks. 

Lincoln was a good fit for someone who grew up hiking and camping in the Pioneer Valley and always enjoyed the outdoors. He made many friends in town who were fellow members of the Appalachian Mountain Club and was also part of the farming community — he and his wife raised poultry and grew produce that they sold at a stand outside their house, which was close to Boyce Farm, the Van Leer farm, and Ellen Raja’s sheep farm, which is still in operation. “It was fun and it made everybody happy, so I wrote a book about it,” he said

Tipcart Tales is a sequel to a volume about his early life called Tall Trees and Wild Bees: Memories of Childhood That Never Really Ended. He’s also written poetry, fiction, essays, natural history (Good Earth’s Bounty, illustrated with photographs taken by his father, R.L. Coffin, and Black Spruce Journals, about canoe tripping in the Canadian wilderness) — and most recently, Reflections (2025), which he describes as “looking pensively back and critically ahead.” That title and his other books that are out of print are available as free PDFs on his website (stewartcoffin.com).

After his wife died in 1991, Coffin moved around in eastern Massachusetts. His son in law and daughter, Chris Brown and Margie Coffin Brown (a landscape architect for the National Park Service who’s based at Minute Man National Historical Park), bought the house from him after he donated several acres of the property to the town.

Speaking of history, Coffin has another story: his grandfather lied about his age to join the army and fight in the Civil War. Coffin’s father was the youngest of seven children and had Stewart at age 40. “Add it all together and I may be the last person alive whose grandfather was in the Civil War. I would not be a bit surprised,” he said.

As of September 2025, he’s living in a newly renovated part of the house that gained an addition since he first lived there in the 1960s. In 2003, the state took the Pillar House, an 1845 Green Revival building in Newton, by eminent domain and offered it for $1 to anyone who would move it. Coffin’s daughter and son-in-law plunked down the dollar, moved it to Lincoln piece by piece, and attached it to the Old Sudbury Road house.

The greenhouse, which he used as a utility building and chicken coop back in the day, is now his workshop, but it’s unheated, so in the winter he can only use it on sunny afternoons, “and even then it’s tough because the glue that I use does not set when it’s cold,” he said. Fortunately, he has some indoor space to work in with a picture window where he can watch the voracious birds (he has to fill the feeders twice a day, he said). He’s still writing, and his latest book on woodworking is about to be published.

“In recent years, puzzlecraft has just been one of my many pastimes, which have included control of invasive plants and collecting food donations for the needy. But much of my effort now goes into trying to improve my website, stewartcoffin.com, especially the final chapter, Reflections,” Coffin said. “It is my feeble attempt at trying to help solve some of the many puzzles now facing our country and the world.” 

See the latest Lincoln Review!

The spring issue of the Lincoln Review is now available — and for the first time, it’s free to all, not just Lincoln Squirrel subscribers! Flip through the colorful pages or download a PDF to see work by Lincolnians including Stewart Coffin, Ginny Lemire, Jennifer Morris, Dilla Tingley, Anne Warner, and more. Proudly hosted by the Lincoln Squirrel website.

Dilla Tingley: Lincoln’s queen of quilts

Dilla Gooch Tingley shows some of the pillow she’s made. On the wall behind her is a quilt titled “Portraiture a la Matisse.” Click image to enlarge.

These are not your grandmother’s quilts.

Longtime Lincoln resident and quilter extraordinaire Dilla Gooch Tingley draws inspiration from well-known artworks to craft textiles with wildly varying textures and topics — and often a dash of humor. You see a selection hanging in Bemis Hall’s map room through March, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 19 at 3:00pm.

“I’m most delighted in my work when I can take an artistic subject and reinterpret it in an interesting way,” she says. Many of her quilts are based on famous paintings, such as “The Next Supper,” a takeoff on da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” where the dinner guests are religious figures including Buddha, Ganesh, Jesus, and Mother Theresa.

Then there’s “Windows on Matisse,” a 3×3 arrangement of Matisse paintings with windows, and a collage of works by Picasso. She’s also made quilts based on Inuit art, Escher, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Gauguin, “but Monet is too hard,” she says. Often there’s a humorous twist, such as a piece based on “Luncheon on the Grass” by Edouard Manet — except the gathering of picnickers now includes Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh.

Some of Tingley’s quilts are based on art forms other than painting, such as “Architextural,” a collection of famous modern buildings including the Sydney Opera House, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Transamerica building in San Francisco. As a surprise gift to Ellen Sisco, Lincoln’s assistant librarian who retired in 2014, she made a quilt with some of Sisco’s favorite literary characters and books such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and Wallace and Gromit. Another quilt called “Ex Libris” showing characters including Babar, Humpty Dumpty, and Madeline hangs in the children’s room at library. And decidedly non-literary is “Branded,” an array of brightly colored logos of Cheez-Its, Green Giant, Morton Salt, and more.

Tingley’s quilts aren’t always rectilinear, either. There’s “Damn Everything But the Circus,” whose top has the billowy shape and texture of a circus tent, and a round piece depicting a crying sun called “Sol Says Sorry” (caption: “My life-enabling warmth is causing so much grief — I cry for you”) that was included in the global warming exhibit.

Tingley, who is self-taught, didn’t start out on an artistic path. She earned a degree in physics at Vassar and then worked in a research laboratory in Harvard University’s Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, “though it was clear I wasn’t destined to be a physicist,” she says.

Starting in 1977, she worked at a variety of jobs at Polaroid. “I started as a supervisor on the production line making SX70 film, so I told people I was a film producer. Doesn’t that sound more interesting than saying you worked on a factory floor?” she says.

In 1988, she took early retirement from Polaroid, “and I bought a sewing machine on my way home from my last day of work,” she says. She started by making pillows and eventually graduated to quilts. Her process involves finding interesting fabrics, then sketching a design, cutting out appliques, and ironing them onto pieces of fabric to guide her in cutting. When choosing a subject or theme, she’s guided foremost by practicality. “Generally when I see the image, my first thought is: how easy would that be to render?” she says.

The post-career phase of her life also included working as a business manager for a Framingham youth guidance center and volunteering in numerous capacities in Lincoln including as a member of the Planning Board and as president of the League of Women Voters.

In her former Lincoln home on Laurel Drive, Tingley’s workshop took up most of the basement and featured dozens of cubbies for fabric and a hanging quilt rack that her late husband Fred made for her. She downsized to a Ryan Estate condo after his death in 2022 but still has room on her walls for many of her quilts along with a bedroom repurposed as a workroom. Not surprisingly, her collection of fabrics includes few of the familiar cotton scraps often seen in American quilts. For textures and background, she’s used everything from batik to silk to African mud cloth (“Demoiselles d’Mud Cloth” based on the similarly titled Picasso painting).

In 2004 she organized a group to make a quilt to celebrate Lincoln’s 250th anniversary. It features scenes from Lincoln’s history, including the Lewis Street pickle factory and a boathouse on Sandy Pond, and now hangs in the Tarbell Room at the library. Since about 2024, she’s been a member of the Lincoln Quilters., whose members work on quilts together. They recently exhibited in the Lincoln Public Library and held a silent auction of quilts that raised nearly $8,000 for charity.

Tingley’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibits at the Depot Square Gallery in Lexington, including a 2007 show called “HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming.” Her submissions included the slyly humorous “We Love Our Cars” with colorful background landscapes overrun with cars full of monkeys, and “Venice of Massachusetts” showing a Venetian gondola in front of a State House at the top of Beacon Hill island surrounded by water.

One of Tingley’s volunteer roles is chair of the Council on Aging & Human Services board of directors, and she’s been deeply involved for years in efforts to create a new home for the COA, most recently as a member of the Community Center Building Committee. That work will reach fruition when the community center opens sometime in 2027 — and one of its interior walls will feature the quilt of Lincoln buildings that currently hangs in the living room at Bemis Hall.

Click on the images below to see larger versions with captions.

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Time to send in your creative work for publication

The deadline for submitting stories, poetry, artwork, photos, and other creative work for the next issue of the Lincoln Review is Friday, Feb. 13. Anyone who has a Lincoln connection (current or former residents, extended family, employees, etc.) may submit — for details, click here. Send your stuff to one of the email addresses below to share your work and have it preserved online in the Lincoln Review! Questions? Call 617-710-5542.

Lincoln Squirrel subscribers can see previous issues here. If you’re not yet a subscriber and would like to receive a one-time PDF of the most recent issue, please email lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com.

Barb Rhines, editor (lincolnmareview@gmail.com)
Alice Waugh, publisher (lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com)

Get a colorful printed copy of the 2024-25 Lincoln Review!

Here’s what to get for that hard-to-shop-for Lincolnite. Not sold in stores! 🙂

The four most recent issues (2024-2025, issues #1-4) of the Lincoln Review, our town’s arts e-magazine, are now available in print form as a colorful 48-page booklet bound on high-quality paper. Although the online Lincoln Review is normally accessible only to Lincoln Squirrel subscribers, now you can get your own copy for just $15. These are wonderful keepsakes or gifts and offer a great coffee table read for friends and family. See the sample of issue #1 attached to this email.

To purchase, please send an email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com with your name, mailing address and a note saying how many copies you’d like. Then please send the total due via one of these methods:

  • Venmo: @Watusi-words
  • Zelle: lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com
  • Check made out to “Watusi Words” (not “Lincoln Squirrel”) and mailed to:

Alice Waugh
178 Weston Road
Lincoln MA 01773

Editor Barbara Rhines will be happy to hand-deliver your order to addresses within Lincoln. She’ll be in touch with you to arrange a dropoff time.

Happy holidays!

Barbara Rhines
Editor, Lincoln Review

Alice Waugh
Publisher and Editor, Lincoln Squirrel

News acorns

Bearing witness

On a cold December 30 evening, about 30 people from Lincoln attended a vigil at the ICE facility in Burlington. It was organized by Lincoln Witness, which noted that the purpose of the vigil was to symbolically “shine a light on the injustices being done at this facility.”

Have some holiday laughs with WordsMove Theater

Lincoln’s WordsMove Theater presents “Holiday Stories You Haven’t Heard,” a series of short, mostly humorous staged readings on Christmas and Hanukkah themes, on two dates in Lincoln:

  • Friday, Dec. 5 at 12:30pm, Bemis Hall
  • Thursday, Dec. 11 at 6:30pm, Lincoln Public Library Tarbell Room

See www.wordsmove.org for play and cast details as well as additional performances in surrounding towns.

Touch of Christmas Fair

The First Parish in Lincoln will host its annual Touch of Christmas Fair on Saturday, Dec. 6 from 10:00am–1:00pm in the stone church. Browse decorated wreaths, centerpieces, and other Christmas decorations as well as jewelry from every decade, antiques and collectibles, handmade sweater mittens, stocking stuffers et al at the “re-gifting” table, and a children-only shopping room with free gift wrapping. Santa arrives at 1:00am on a fire truck for photos, and homemade “psalm soup” will be served starting at 11:30.

Musical events at L-S

Cabaret in the Café
Friday, Dec. 5 at 7:30pm, L-S Regional High School Café
Enjoy this annual Cabaret Concert in an intimate musical setting featuring a cappella groups, vocal soloists, symphonic and concert jazz ensemble, and jazz combos. Admission is $5. L-S Friends of Music will have snacks and beverages available for sale.

Pops Concert
Thursday, Dec. 11 at 7:30pm, L-S Regional High School Kirshner Auditorium
The L-S Music Department presents their annual Pops Concert featuring the concert and symphonic bands, orchestra, concert choir, and chamber singers. This family-friendly concert is free and open to the public. Concessions will be sold during intermission. The concert will air in both Sudbury and Lincoln on Comcast channel 9/Verizon channel 32 and will livestream here.

Wreath-making at deCordova

Come to a workshop to make a holiday wreath from array of lush evergreen boughs on Saturday, Dec. 6 from 2:30-4:00pm inside the deCordova Museum. All materials provided. Click here to purchase tickets.

Read “Common Sense” with Minute Men

Join the Lincoln Minutemen for their next book club event, a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, on Sunday, Dec. 14 at 2:30pm in the Lincoln Public Library’s Tarbell Room. This short pamphlet (c. 50 pages) was first published anonymously in January 1776 and quickly became one of the most widely read and influential texts in the colonies, making the case for independence. It is widely available in libraries, bookstores, and Amazon.com, and you can also listen to it on Hoopla or Audible. 

Coming up from the library

Ompractice: Peace in the Pause with Reggie Hubbard
Sunday, Dec. 7, 7:00-8:30pm (Zoom)
This beginner-friendly class offers space to slow down, breathe deeply, and find balance during one of the busiest and most stressful times of the year. To register, sign up for an Ompractice membership here using your library card. Ompractice provides Lincoln Library patrons access to hundreds of live and on-demand wellness classes.

Craft Supply Swap: Gift Wrapping Edition
Saturday, Dec. 13, 12:30-3:30pm, Reference Room
Do you have gift wrap supplies that you’ve loved for years but are hoping to swap them out for something new? Bring them to the library to swap for new-to-you supplies! Donations are not required to participate. Anything donated should be enough to cover a shoe box, we will not be accepting paper scraps. No registration required.

Chris O’Connor and Mike Bradley of Fortune’s Favor.

Fortune’s Favor at next LOMA

Fortune’s Favor, an acoustic folk duo from New Hampshire (singer/songwriter/guitarists Chris O’Connor and Mike Bradley), will be the headliner at the next Lincoln Open Mic Acoustic (LOMA) on Monday, Dec. 9 from 7–10 p.m. in Bemis Hall. LOMA is a monthly open mike night event with mikes and instrumental pickups suitable for individuals or small groups playing acoustic-style. Come and perform (email loma3re@gmail.com to sign up) or just come listen to acoustic music and spoken word. Free admission.

Donate gift cards for needy seniors

Each year, the Council on Aging & Human Services visits needy seniors to spread some holiday cheer and offer $10 gift cards to stores such as Market Basket, Walgreens, and CVS. Stop by the “giving tree” in the Bemis Hall lobby to take a specific gift card request to fulfill, or bring a grocery/pharmacy gift card of your choosing. Please have gift card donations in by Friday, Dec. 12.

Boy Scouts selling Christmas trees

Lincoln’s Boy Scouts are selling Christmas trees of various sizes as well as wreaths on Saturdays and Sundays from 9:00am–6:00pm across from the police station while supplies last. Be aware that the tree lot may close during heavy rain, and that sales are cash only.

Contest invites ideas to replace porta-potty at Gropius House

The portable toilet next to the original Gropius House garage, which has been repurposed as a visitor center. (Photo courtesy Kubany LLC)

Historic New England has launched an international design competition to “reimagine the arrival experience” at Lincoln’s Gropius House. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus Dessau, the competition invites proposals for a permanent public restroom and redesigned visitor center.

Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, designed the house as his family residence while teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Completed in 1938, he intended the house to serve as both a private residence and a teaching tool, illustrating Bauhaus principles of functional design and the integration of architecture with the surrounding landscape. In 1979, Gropius’s widow Ise donated the home, complete with original furnishings, artwork, and personal belongings, to Historic New England. Gropius House opened to the public in 1984 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000. In the years since, it has become one of the most visited sites under Historic New England’s stewardship.

One problem for the thousands of people that visit each year, though — calls of nature require a visit to a portable toilet next to the house’s original garage, which is now used as a visitor center. The competition participants are invited to propose “creative, contextually sensitive solutions that integrate seamlessly with the site and architecture, while enhancing visitors’ sense of arrival and connection to the landscape.”

In keeping with Gropius’s design philosophy, entrants are encouraged to “experiment with new materials, technologies, and ideas that challenge conventional design thinking.” The competition encourages interdisciplinary teams that may include architects, landscape architects, graphic designers, industrial designers, and other professionals.

There are two parallel competitions, one for practicing design professionals and another for architecture and design students. Submissions will be reviewed by a jury of academic architects, curators, and architecture critics. Winners will receive a cash prize, as well as inclusion in the Gropius House archives and an exhibition at the property. The submission deadline is Feb. 6, 2026, with winners announced on March 27. For submission requirements and additional details, visit gropiuscompetition.info.

This is an edited version of a press release from Kubany LLC and Historic New England.