Category:

Irregulars

The Army of Two: The Massachusetts Girls Who Turned Back the British Navy

The War of 1812 lasted nearly three years. It was fought in four different theatres: the ocean’s shipping lanes, along the American coast, on the western American frontier and the Gulf Coast.

It made heroes, like Andrew Jackson, and changed the political landscape of America by destroying the Federalist Party. But for all that, one of the most interesting stories of the war might be the time two girls turned back the British Royal Navy at Scituate, Mass.

Rebecca and Abbie Bates. Illustration from St. Nicholas Magazine for Girls and Boys.

Rebecca and Abby Bates. Illustration from St. Nicholas Magazine for Girls and Boys.

By 1814, Britain’s Navy engaged a war of harassment along the coast. A ship would zero in on a small town or harbor. Sometimes soldiers would ransack the town for supplies. Other times they would burn the boats in the harbor.

In June and July of 1814, British ships invaded Scituate Harbor three times. They burned some fishing vessels and stole others. The local militia stood guard against any troops intending to land.

The Army of Two

For much of the summer, the militia stood guard, but by September the men had gone home. And that was the state of play one day when Rebecca, 21, and Abby, 15, Bates, daughters of Scituate Light lighthouse keeper Simeon Bates, observed a British ship making directly for the harbor. It seemed that the fears of the residents had come true, but no one was ready to repel the landing force.

With their father away, the Bates girls dispatched their brother to run for help. Then they came up with a plan. As the British ship drew near and began offloading sailors onto barges, the two struck up their fife and drum. Hidden from sight, the two girls sounded for all the world like an approaching army force.

Suddenly, the idea of harassing the boats in Scituate or coming ashore to cause even more damage didn’t seem so appealing. The sailors returned to their ship and departed, leaving a relieved town of Scituate.

Over the years, some questioned the facts of the story, but the Bates sisters never varied from their version of events. Later in life they took to retelling it and providing affidavits attesting to its accuracy.

And over the years, the story has been retold in children’s literature, including an 1874 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls and several books.

This story last updated in 2023.

3 comments 718 views

Cracking the History of the Uncommon Common Cracker

Every so often when you’re looking through a book of old New England recipes, you’ll find one that calls for the common cracker. Well, there are plenty of common crackers around. Saltines come to mind.

But the common crackers these recipes call for are actually a specific type of common cracker. And these days, they’re anything but common.

vermont-common-cracker

If you dropped back in time, say 30 years, you’d know exactly what the recipe needs. Well into the 1970s, the common cracker was ubiquitous throughout New England.

But to get the full picture, you’d need to step back in time a bit further, to the days when fresh bread was not easy to buy and before science took over the business of baking. With preservatives and cellophane and cardboard packaging, today you can commonly eat crackers made anywhere in the world.

But in the early 1800s, that wasn’t the case. Baking science hadn’t evolved so, and the common cracker solved a problem for hungry families needing a staple that would keep for months.

Inventor of the Common Cracker

If you want to figure out who invented the first common cracker, you probably won’t have any luck. They went by many names and many bakers produced them, with small variations in size. The Boston Cracker in Massachusetts, the Portland Cracker in Maine, the Montpelier Cracker in Vermont, and so forth.

American crackers, themselves, first came into existence in Newburyport, Mass. — or so the story goes– in the bakery of Theodore Pearson. There he created pilot biscuits.

Sailors, soldiers, explorers and travelers have carried some variation of cracker with them for centuries, as far back as you can imagine. The Newburyport version of this was called hard tack (among other things).

Hard Tack

Hard tack consists of an unleavened water and flour baked to within an inch of its life. It will last virtually forever. Hard tack produced for the War of 1812 was stored and then brought out for use in the Civil War, for example, none the worse for wear. Soldiers and sailors preferred it only slightly to starvation.

But hard tack soon gave rise (forgive the pun) to more elegant crackers for domestic use. The addition of yeast, a rising period of 24 hours (and more) and a long period of kneading, followed by baking and drying, resulted in a puffy white cracker with a hard thick outer shell. Voila! The common cracker.

Preserved hardtack from U.S. Civil War, Wentworth Museum, Pensacola.

The ingenious yankees had dozens of uses for them. Many involved mashing. They commonly used them as thickeners for soup and chowder or mashed and eaten with milk. Later, they split them, buttered them, toasted them and gave them all sorts of toppings. And when potatoes began to take over the chowder, the crackers shifted to the side for crumbling in just before eating.

The folks at The Food Timeline suggest Artemus Kennedy, a baker in what is now Arlington, Mass., originated the common cracker. Kennedy, their research suggests, began baking the crackers at his bakery founded in 1805. He rode around the nearby country on horseback selling them. But no one knows where he got the idea for them.

Early Bakers

Another early baker who dabbled with the cracker was Josiah Bent, founder of the G.H. Bent company in Milton, Mass., in 1801. The company earned a reputation for making water crackers, which Bent prized for their ability to travel well on sea voyages. Bent’s water crackers are smaller than the common cracker, but he made other products as well. Bent definitely made a lot of hard tack for the government, as did Pearce, and the company revived that recipe for Civil War reenactors a century after the war itself ended.

The G.H Bent factory in Milton, Mass.

Perhaps the best known of the common cracker makers was Charles Cross of Montpelier, Vt., and his tireless horse. Charles and his brother Thomas, originally from New Hampshire, founded Cross Bakers in 1828. The business continuously operated for 151 years, evolving into C.H. Cross & Sons before going bankrupt in 1979. Then the firm and its Cross Crackers moved to Claremont, N.H.

In the early days, Cross used a horse-powered treadmill to run the machinery for his bakery. His horse alternated jobs, one day powering the treadmill, the next hauling crackers for delivery. Over time, Cross grew to have a crew of salesmen traveling throughout New England selling his crackers to stores.

But in his earliest days, Cross packed up the crackers and displayed them in barrels. And this is probably how we most associate with common crackers: stored in a barrel that served as a centerpiece of the country store where they were sold. Visitors to the store would be invited to pull up a seat, crack open a cracker and put a piece of cheese on it. In this setting, men resolved the issues of the day, shared news and settled arguments.

Then the barrels disappeared. And as the humorist John Gould wrote, “everything has been on the skids since the common cracker declined.”

Julia Child

The common cracker had a new lease on life given to it by Julia Child, who gave them her stamp of approval for use with chowder. She became rather famously obsessed with cracking the recipe, which she eventually did.

Should you need a common cracker today, there are two companies still selling them: the aforementioned G.H. Bent, known as the Bent Cookie Factory, which has continuously operated since 1801; and Vermont Common Foods, which wholesales them and has a nice collection of recipes for how to cook with them. The company acquired the Cross cracker equipment, which it uses to make them today.

You can order the Vermont Common Cracker from the Vermont Country Store. Click here. This story was updated in 2021.

Images: GH. Bent Co. By Jameslwoodward – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7907262. Hard tack By Infrogmation of New Orleans – Photo by Infrogmation, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4615956

12 comments 1.3k views

Queen Lill Made Vermont Famous – for Booze and Broads

Today, Vermont tourists are the skiers, leaf peepers, summer visitors and outdoorsmen who come north for the state’s picture-postcard natural beauty and a dose of quaint history.

Postcard of Richford, Vt.

That was hardly the case in the 1920s in Richford, where the town was something like the Las Vegas of its day. It offered ‘booze and broads’ smack on the Canadian border – a spot far enough from the long arm of the law that a speakeasy could prosper with little interference. Poker and drunken brawling were routine complaints in both Richford and Abercorn, across the border in Quebec.

But the complaints didn’t deter the operators of the “line houses” that prospered along the border. At the train station in Richford, there was a steady flow of visitors hopping into cabs to catch a ride to Queen Lill’s.

Queen Lill

Queen Lill was Lillian Minor Shipley, who was born in Richford in 1866. She married A.G. Shipley, a shadowy character who sold patent medicines and had a reputation as a horse thief and a grave robber.

Together they spent their time travelling selling patent medicines and Lill established a brothel in Boston. By 1910, however, they had worn out their welcome. With Boston cracking down on the brothel trade, they returned north to Richford, which had the advantage of being remote, but located on the railroad line and just a stone’s throw from Canada.

The proximity to Canada was crucial to Lill’s business, as prohibition was expanding in America. As more and more of New England went dry, places like Lill’s, that had access to Canadian liquor, prospered. And when prohibition became the law of the entire land in 1920, Lill’s business really took off.

Postcard of the Abercorn House

Travelers who just wanted a drink could take themselves to Abercorn, where the Prince of Wales, International House and the Abercorn House did a brisk business at their bars. Or they could visit a shack by the border crossing, called the Bucket of Blood, for a quick drink. But Lill had the added attraction of women.

You didn’t mess much with the so-called ‘line houses.’ In one case, a civic leader in Abercorn was caught red-handed with dynamite skulking around one of the line houses, intent on putting it out of business (or so he said). He was killed and tied to the railroad tracks (not necessarily in that order.)

Pistol Packin’ Mama

If you wanted women with your booze, you went to Queen Lill’s. Lill restored a three-story hotel that literally straddled the border with Canada. When she had trouble with law enforcement stopping regular deliveries of booze, she had a pipe laid that brought liquor underground to her building where she could bottle it for sale.

Upstairs, she re-established her brothel, staffed by both locals and women she knew from Boston. It operated with something like impunity as Queen Lill’s was a popular spot for locals as well as visitors.

Packing a pistol and an outsized personality, when threatened she would threaten right back. And she shared the wealth with local law enforcement, allowing her to generally stay informed in advance of any planned raids. Eventually, as law enforcement became increasingly worried about the influence of organized crime in the line houses, they came in for tougher policing.

In 1925, Lill was finally charged, pleaded guilty and fined $150 for running her operation. But she stayed in business, right through the end of Prohibition in 1933. Then she finally shut down and retired to life on a farm. She was a well-known fixture in Richford and St. Albans until her death in 1941.

This story about Queen Lill was updated in 2022.

8 comments 819 views

When Mark Twain Bombed Giving New England’s First Roast

Mark Twain bombed in a very big way when he poked fun at America’s most august literary lights during a 70th birthday party for John Greenleaf Whittier. He later said he was never in his life so miserable as he was on Dec. 17, 1877, when he delivered an after-dinner speech that fell flat.

Whittier had achieved fame and honor as one of the five Fireside Poets, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They had distinctly American voices, and they were called the Fireside Poets because their poems could be read and memorized by the whole family as they sat around the fire. Lowell, at 58, was the youngest of the group; Bryant, at 82, the oldest.

Several years before Mark Twain bombed in Boston, he looked like this.

Twain had achieved fame as a fresh new voice from the West — too fresh, it turned out.

Mark Twain Bombed

The Atlantic Monthly hosted the dinner in part to showcase the intellectual and literary firepower of its contributors. The magazine had invited 58 distinguished writers. Holmes and Longfellow were there, as was the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, then 74 years old and suffering from dementia. The Boston Daily Advertiser called the assemblage “without doubt the most notable that has ever been seen in this country within four walls.”

The Hotel Brunswick

Twain, who at 42 was much younger than the august group gathered before him, thought he’d have some good-natured fun at their expense. He launched into a story about a lonely old miner in southern California who’d been visited by three disreputable tramps: Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Holmes. The miner described Emerson as “a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed,” while Holmes was “as fat as a balloon” and Longfellow was “built like a prizefighter.”

John Greenleaf Whittier

Twain recounted how the poets quoted apposite selections from their own poetry at the miner, while drinking his whiskey and cheating at cards. “They swelled around the cabin and spouted,” said Twain. Then they fought and made the miner sing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” In the end, he reveals the three tramps are imposters.

The humor lay in the pretensions of the drunken tramps. Mr. Holmes, for example, enters the shanty and exclaims, “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!” When served whiskey, he exclaims, “Flash out a stream of blood-red wine.” The miner tells him he’ll drink his whiskey straight or he’ll go dry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

When the miner discovers the Longfellow imposter making off with his boots, he shouts, “Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with them?” Longfellow replied, “Going to make tracks with ’em; because:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unsmiling

As Twain later told the story, 50 or 100 people attended the banquet.

“Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light first one way and then another—a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people).”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

They listened with attentive interest, he wrote. After the first 200 words, Twain began to expect laughter, but heard none.

Black Frost

“Now, then, the house’s attention continued, but the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the trouble was. I didn’t know.” He went on, he said, but with difficulty. In the end, he didn’t know enough to just give up and sit down.

His friend William Dean Howells also attended the dinner. Howells described the speech as “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe.”

William Dean Howells

“After the first two or three hundred words,” wrote Howell, “those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end.”

Several days later, newspapers across the country reported on the speech. Many proclaimed it in bad taste. The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin claimed sales of Twain’s books had dropped off, and it was even suggested he moved up his planned departure for Europe to avoid the negative publicity.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union even weighed in, passing a resolution objecting to the number of boozy beverages served with the seven-course meal: Sauterne, sherry, Chablis, Champagne, claret and Burgundy.

Smart and Humorous. Or Not.

Twain wrote in his autobiography that he tried to forget about the dinner for years. In 1906, an acquaintance he called “Mrs. H.” wrote to him about it, saying her family found humor in his story about the miner.

Twain dug the speech out of his files, and found it didn’t have a single defect.

“It is just as good as good can be,” he wrote. He called it “smart” and “saturated with humor.” “There isn’t a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere,” he wrote.

Several days later, he looked at it again and called it “offensive and detestable.’ And then he reversed his opinion again.

Whatever it was, the speech was memorable. It is still, to this day, being discussed by scholars and historians.

This story last updated in 2022.

19 comments 608 views

The Boston Pops Orchestra Takes a Sleigh Ride

The much-loved Christmas song Sleigh Ride was written during an August heat wave for the Boston Pops Orchestra. It didn’t even have lyrics until after it hit the pop charts.

Sleigh Ride was the work of Leroy Anderson, a Cambridge, Mass.-born composer who wrote many pieces for the Boston Pops Orchestra. Pops conductor John Williams called him “one of the great American masters of light orchestral music.”

Leroy Anderson

Arthur Fiedler had led the Pops for six years when Anderson came to his attention in 1936.

The young Harvard graduate had intended to teach at a language school in Pennsylvania. At the last minute he changed his mind and decided to direct the Harvard University Band.

Anderson had hesitated because he didn’t see much potential in a music career. Fiedler, though, saw Anderson’s promise, and he asked to see his original compositions.

Anderson went on to win many accolades during his life, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and election to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Harvard named its new band headquarters after him and Cambridge named the corner near his boyhood home Leroy Anderson Square.

Sleigh Ride

Anderson started writing Sleigh Ride in August 1946 and didn’t finish it until February 1948. He worked hard to create the feeling of traveling in a horse-drawn sleigh through the snow.

Fiedler loved Sleigh Ride. He scheduled a recording session in 1949 as soon as he was sure the final arrangement was complete. It rose to No. 24 on the Billboard Pop Music chart.

The Pops played Sleigh Ride perfectly, with percussionists producing a whip snap and the clop-clop of horses’ hooves. A trumpet played five bars of a half-valve glissando to produce the whinny at the end. As the piece became a staple of the Pops, a joke developed around the sound effects: musicians would receive carrots rather than roses at the end of the performance.

Leroy Anderson

Only after Sleigh Ride was a hit did Tin Pan Alley songwriter Mitchell Parish write lyrics, beginning with the memorable, “Just hear those sleigh bells jingle-ing Ring ting tingle-ing too.”

The piece has endured, consistently ranking in the top 10 most performed songs written by ASCAP members during the Christmas season worldwide. More than 60 years after it was written, Sleigh Ride was named the most popular piece of Christmas music from 2009-2012. According to Anderson’s biography, the piece has been ‘performed by a wider array of musical artists than any other piece in the history of Western music.’

Tribute

Among those who recorded the song: the Ray Conniff Singers, the Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, The Ronettes, the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Lawrence Welk, the Partridge Family, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, Garth Brooks, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and REO Speedwagon. Johnny Mathis performed the most popular vocal version.

In 1972, the Boston Pops Orchestra paid tribute to Leroy Anderson in a nationally broadcast concert. He guest conducted one piece during what he called the most important evening of his life.

Leroy Anderson House

Leroy Anderson died in 1975. The National Register of Historic Places lists the Leroy Anderson House in Woodbury, Connecticut, where he and his wife lived for many years.

To hear the Boston Pops version of the song, click here. To read more about Arthur Fiedler, click here.

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious cookies. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

Image of Leroy Anderson By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36467649. Leroy Anderson House By JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50841523. This story was updated in 2022.

5 comments 686 views

Holiday Happenings in New England

Amid all the credit-wrecking, hangover-inducing holiday celebrations this year, we hope you manage to set aside a moment or two to enjoy a favorite historical site or look for something you haven’t discovered. New England is certainly the right place for that.

To make the task simpler, we’ve had a look around and pulled together 69 events that will teach, inspire or simply make you think a little bit about where we all come from. What we’ve found is an enjoyable collection of events that evoke everything from simple country charms of years past to the high elegance of Gilded Age mansions.

Some of our favorites:

The Chester Greenwood Day in Farmington, Maine, is a great excuse to poke around western Maine before ski season fills it with visitors. Along the way you can enjoy a local event that honors the man who gave the world earmuffs.

In Newport, R.I., a holiday lantern tour will give you a look at how the early Americans really celebrated Christmas (or didn’t celebrate it).

In Marblehead, Mass., Glover’s Regiment will put on its annual reenactment of Washington crossing the Delaware.

In New Hampshire, the Dinner Theatre’s G.I. Holiday Jukebox in Manchester brings back the sounds of the big band and swing era for Christmas.

In Montpelier, Vt., you can take in an art gallery in the street at the city’s annual art walk and visit the historical society museum for free.

In Connecticut, Christmas offers the perfect time to visit the Connecticut Historical Society for a talk about G. Fox, for those who love department store
history.

These are just a sampling of the events on offer this holiday season, so whatever your taste we hope you find time to get out and enjoy. And we hope this collection makes it a little easier to make plans. We’ve provided it in pdf format, Mobi format (for Kindle Fire readers) and Epub for phone and Apple users.

Please download one (or all), but you must be logged in as a member to do so. If you haven’t yet signed up for free membership, please visit here. If you are a member, but need to login, visit here. And if you’ve forgotten your password, visit here.

1 comment 340 views

Newer Posts

Older Posts