Artist-Inventors and Itinerants in America. Once called the “Yankee Da Vinci,” Rufus Porter was an itinerant portrait painter and muralist, a publisher and author, an inventor of mechanical improvements, and an impresario who engineered an airship that promised to fly gold rush prospectors from New York to California in three days.
Rufus Porter, Art, and Enterprise in Portland, Maine
Around 1800, Rufus Porter (1792–1884) and his family moved from Boxford in northeastern Massachusetts to Pleasant Mountain Gore in Maine, which remained a district of Massachusetts until Maine achieved statehood in 1820. Like thousands of other Massachusetts residents, Rufus’s father, Tyler Porter (1757–1842) took advantage of land made available by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War.