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
Rufus Porter was raised on Moose Pond in today’s Bridgton, northwest of Sebago Lake and thirty-eight miles from Portland. In 1804, when Rufus was twelve, his father enrolled him at Fryeburg Academy in Fryeburg, Maine. This private day and boarding school, established in 1792 and still in operation today, was about nine miles west of Porter’s home.