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21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods on Sale Now!

Helping cooks make authentic foods

Wondering what to cook for Thanksgiving? Want to make something a little different, yet traditional? 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods has dozens of ideas, from a 1615 recipe for venison to a 1955 recipe for Green Bean Casserole.

This ebook includes the original recipes for the Thanksgiving foods that Americans have eaten over the centuries. The antiquated recipes are followed by updated versions with detailed instructions.

Each set of recipes comes with a fascinating story about how that food got made, who made it or who wrote it down. For example, the author of “Over the River and Through the Wood” also wrote a cookbook. And you’ll find out about the four women who cooked that Thanksgiving meal for over a hundred people in 1621 in Plymouth.

Make a historic meal

You’ll learn how people made old-fashioned Thanksgiving foods back in the day, and how you can make them with modern tools and ingredients. Mince pie with beef. Plum pudding in a bag. Even venison – in a crockpot.

And if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe you want to try roasting a fresh turkey over an open hearth. You’ll find out how to do that, too, in 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods. If not, you may want to try a foolproof method used by a popular television personality in the 1960s and ’70s.

Looking for something new, yet traditional to eat for Thanksgiving?

Can’t eat gluten? Try an Abenaki recipe for corn bread. Looking for a new kind of pie to bring? The delicious Marlborough Pie was once a standard Thanksgiving dessert. Hate turkey? The pilgrims ate oysters, cod and bass, and you can too – the recipes are in 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods.

Learn New England history through food

Did you know the wild turkey disappeared from New England and then came back? It was practically gone when Ben Franklin wanted to make it the national bird. And mincemeat pie – that never would have appeared on the Pilgrims’ table, and not because they didn’t have flour or sugar or raisins. You’ll learn why – and so much more!

Revive old favorites

Remember green bean casserole with onion rings? Marshmallows on top of sweet potatoes? Those neon-colored molded salads? If you’ve lost the recipe for a favorite vintage food from your childhood, you might find it in 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods.

Avoid that argument over politics

If that annoying uncle starts a fight over the latest election, you can change the topic with fun facts from this Thanksgiving e-cookbook. Try asking “What New England town postponed Thanksgiving because of a molasses shortage?” Or you might want to mention that Myles Standish may have owned a cookbook. 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods is chock full of little-known facts to help you change the subject.

About the authors

This book is written by two award-winning journalists, Dan and Leslie Landrigan. As authors of the New England Historical Society website, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history over the past decade. They’ve had two books published, Bar Harbor Babylon and New England’s Hidden Past, which you can buy online or in electronic form.

Dan and Leslie also collect old cookbooks, which is where they found many of the recipes for this e-book. You can buy their first e-book, 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, from Amazon.

Love history?

Then you probably want to join the New England Historical Society community by signing up for our e-newsletter, which comes out once a week. Click here to sign up.

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The Kettle Holes of New England (12 Other States Have Them Too)

You’ll find thousands of kettle holes in New England, but you won’t find them everywhere in the United States. They can be ponds, lakes or bogs, but they always result from an iceberg that calved from a glacier and then melted.

Geologist Robert Thorson calls them “fossil icebergs” in his book, Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds.

Kettle holes came about with the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered much of Canada and the northern United States. The icebergs it left behind got covered with sediment until they melted.

Kettle holes dimple the landscape south of the Great Lakes, Adirondacks and New England mountains. They then end around the 37th parallel along the southern borders of Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia. Thorson calls them a “blue galaxy” within 19 “kettle states.”

Collectively, writes, Thorson, “they form a galaxy of approximately 100,000 blue dots on the American landscape. Ranging from the parched prairies of the western high plains and the foggy, boggy moorlands of eastern Nantucket, this galaxy is widest near the center between Michigan’s upper peninsula and central Indiana.”

America has two famous kettle holes, one mythical, the other with mythical status. They are Lake Wobegon in Minnesota and Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Though fictional, Lake Wobegon is clearly one of Minnesota’s many kettle lakes, wrote Thorson. He has also observed central Minnesota’s kettle holes most resemble the ones in New England.

Thoreau had a spiritual relationship with Walden Pond, calling it “heaven beneath us.” “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” he wrote.

Sunset at Walden Pond

Following the Kettle Holes

In the early 19th century, New Englanders began migrating west, showing a preference for northern kettle country, wrote Thorson. They left their imprint on the kettle states in architecture, urban design and industry. Cleveland’s Public Square and Detroit’s Penobscot Building provide just two examples.

Minnesota, wrote Thorson, was the only state outside of New England to which Thoreau traveled. When he visited, he noticed that half the people he met came from Massachusetts and the lumbermen all came from Maine.

New Englanders’ attraction for kettle holes made sense since they’d long used them for drinking water, trapping beavers, growing marsh hay for livestock, fishing and hunting, making bog iron, growing cranberries and wild rice and cutting refrigeration ice.

Wondering where there’s a kettle hole in your state? Here’s a short list of them.

The Gift of the Glacier

Anderson Pond, aka Blue Lake,

“The entire Connecticut landscape is a gift of the glacier,” writes Thorson.

The Connecticut River Valley, New England’s breadbasket, was once a tropical salt lake. The glacier then dredged the lake and dammed it to form another shallow one that threw sand onto the shore. The valley drained 12,000 years ago leaving rich soil suited to farming. It also left the kettle holes that dot the landscape around Hartford.

A small kettle hole in Branford helped give birth to American limnology, the science of lakes. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Yale zoology professor, used Linsley Pond in Branford to teach students about ecology, according to Thorson..

The glacier also deepened an old river channel along shat is now the Connecticut shoreline. Then the sea level rose to create deep water harbors from Greenwich to Stonington. Marshes and kettle holes behind the beaches then developed as the sea level slowly rose. One such kettle hole, Anderson Pond in North Stonington, encompasses 57 acres ideal for boating, canoeing or kayaking.

Development threatens the health of Connecticut’s kettle holes, which are highly sensitive to climate change and water pollution. When Thorson wrote his book in 2009, home buyers increasingly looked to freshwater shorelines. They had concerns about rising sea level, increasing hurricane strength and the high cost of flood insurance.

Kettle Holes, a Kame and Blue Clay

Otter Ponds

Kettle hole junkies in Maine can find a series of kettle holes just outside of Portland. The Portland Water District opened the Sebago Lake Land Reserve in 2005 for recreation and admiring kettle holes. They include Half Moon Pond, Otter Ponds and Snake Pond.

Visitors can also see a kame slope left by the Laurentide glacier when it retreated. It also created a ridge of sediment known as the Presumpscot Formation. When the ice sheet melted into streams, the water carried sediment like silt and clay to the ocean. The silt left behind — the Presumpscot Formation — runs from the Maine and New Hampshire coasts inland. Mainers call the sediment “blue clay” and used it for brickmaking in colonial times.

Kettle Holes For Drowning Certain People

Scargo Lake, one of Cape Cod’s biggest kettle holes

Cape Cod has more than a thousand ponds and lakes and almost 500 of them are kettles – “enough to drown every gossip in,” people used to say.

The Laurentide ice sheet began to head south about 25,000 years ago, reaching Cape Cod and the Islands. When it retreated, it carved out a sand and rock formation called a moraine.

Enough to drown every gossip in

Scargo Lake in Dennis is one of the biggest kettles on Cape Cod. It covers 60 acres with an average depth of 25 feet and 1.3 miles of shoreline. It’s been been stocked with game fish since before 1911, when the commonwealth’s Division of Fish and Wildlife first surveyed it. People can swim from Princess Beach, the primary swimming beach.

Many myths and legends have sprung up about Scargo Lake and yes, they involve a Native American princess.

According to one version, Princess Scargo of the Nobscusset tribe fell in love with a handsome young native on his way into battle. He gave her four fish as a token of his love in a wooden bowl. Or maybe he gave her three fish in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

She put the fish in a tiny pond and awaited his return. Only one of the fish lived during a long, dry summer. Her father called together all the women and children to dig a pond “as wide as an arrow’s flight.” The dirt and rocks they dug up formed Scargo Hill, on top of which Princess Scargo could watch her fish and await her true love’s return.

And that’s why Scargo Lake is shaped like a fish.

A Much Photographed Kettle Hole

Lake Chocorua ready for a picture

The surface of Lake Chocorua on most days exhibits a stunning reflection of Mount Chocorua in the White Mountains. That makes it one of the most famous kettle holes in the Northeast and a popular subject for photographers.

Located in Tamworth, N.H., Lake Chocorua owes its pristine water to the lack of development around it. For five decades, the Chocorua Lake Conservancy has worked to protect the watershed with conservation covenants and easements. Forests now buffer the lake, and motorboats are forbidden by law.

New Hampshire boasts two other well-known kettle holes in the world of limnology: Pea Porridge Pond in Conway and Madison and the much-studied Mirror Lake in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.

Rhode Island’s Kettle Holes

Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge, full of kettle holes

In Rhode Island, moraines on Block Island and near Charlestown are about as old as Cape Cod — and as full of kettle holes.

The Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge has plenty of them. Once used for farming, it got turned into a military base during World War II, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station Charlestown. Then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated it a refuge in 1970.

Today shrubs and grassy reclaim the old runways, used as part of the trail network that goes past salt marshes, kettle holes and forests. Birdwatchers love it, as they’ve recorded 310 species of birds within the refuge.

Ninigret belongs to a complex of five wildlife preserves along Rhode Island’s south coast that also include Trustom Pond, John H. Chafee at Petaquamscutt Cove, Block Island and Sachuest Point. The Kettle Pond Visitor Center at Ninigret offers information about all five.

A Spectacular Sight

Kettle Pond, one of many kettle holes in Groton State Forest.

When the Laurentide glacier retreated north, it scraped out yet another moraine in northeastern Vermont. Melting icebergs then filled Vermont’s kettle holes and kettle bogs.

Kettle Pond State Park near Marshfield belongs to seven state parks in Groton Forest. The Civilian Conservation Corps created many of the trails and shelters among the trees.

A hiking trail circumnavigates the pristine waters of Kettle Pond, which, as its name suggests, is a kettle hole. The hiking trail offers a swimming beach, primitive shelters and the call of the loon. Climb nearby Owl’s Head for a spectacular view of the pond.

With thanks to Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds by Robert Thorson.

Images: Ninigret By Greg Thompson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, via Flickr, Public Domain. Cape Cod aerial view NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. Lake Chocorua By Jdahlem21 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5323618. Otter Ponds By NewtonCourt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106790726. Kettle Pond By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60968369. Walden Pond at Sunset by Tim Hettler via Flickr, CC by 2.0.

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Six Fun Facts About New England Olympians

Hundreds of New England Olympians have won, lost and placed in the summer games since they restarted in Athens in 1896.

New England’s colleges, especially the Ivies, produced many, but not all of the region’s Olympians. Some came from humble backgrounds, though a Rockefeller won a gold medal in 1924.

Some parlayed their Olympic fame into sporting careers, while others distinguished themselves in other fields.

Here, then, are six fun facts about New England Olympians.

1. Boston Sent Most of the First New England Olympians

Nine of the 14 Americans who competed in the 1896 Olympics came from either the Boston Athletic Association or the Suffolk Athletic Club of South Boston.

The Suffolk Athletic Club sponsored James B. Connolly, born in South Boston to poor Irish immigrants. He won the first event– the triple jump – thus becoming the first Olympian since the Athenian Zopyrus won the pankration in 385. Or maybe it was the Armenian Varasdates who won at boxing in 369.

James Connolly, one of the first New England Olympians (and one of the first modern Olympians)

He took home a silver medal (gold medals weren’t issued then) and an olive laurel wreath. He almost didn’t make it because a thief stole his wallet on the way to the games.

Connolly went on to have a successful writing career. He published more than 200 short stories and 25 novels, and he ran for Congress twice as a Progressive Party candidate. He lost both times.

The Suffolk Athletic Club also sponsored Thomas Burke in those first games. Burke, a second-year law student at Boston University, won the 100-yeard dash and the 400-yard run. He thus became the first person to win two events in the modern games.

Burke, too, followed a career as a writer. He worked for the Boston Journal and the Boston Post.

2. Margaret Abbott Wins in High Heels

Margaret Abbott never knew that she was the first woman to win an Olympic event.

She competed in the 1900 Paris Olympics, which coincided with the Paris Exposition and was treated as a sideshow. Called the Championnat Internationaux instead of the Olympics, it stretched out over six months and received little media attention.

Margaret had spent her early years in Boston but moved to Chicago when her mother, Mary Abbott, got a job there as literary editor of the Chicago Herald. Mother and daughter both took up golf as members of the Chicago Golf Club. Then in 1899 they moved to Paris, where Margaret studied art with Rodin and Degas. Her mother worked on a travel guide.

Margaret Abbott in her golf togs.

The Championnat Internationaux only allowed women to compete in five sports: golf, tennis, croquet, sailing and equestrianism. Mother and daughter entered the golf tournament held on Oct. 4, 1900, with no idea that it was an Olympic game.

Margaret won the tournament, despite wearing high heels and a long, tight skirt. She never realized she’d won an Olympic game. Only after her death did a University of Florida professor, Paula Welch, figure it out. Welch also served on the Olympic board of directors.

Margaret Abbott returned to Chicago, where she married the well-known humorist Peter Finley Dunne. Her son, Phillip Dunne, also won recognition as a Hollywood screenwriter. She died in 1955 in Greenwich, Conn.

3. Harry Hillman, the Raw Egg Man

A rogue wave washed over the deck of the steamship that carried the US. Team to the 1906 summer Olympics in Athens, injuring Harry Hillman and several other athletes. Hillman suffered a knee injury that Impaired his performance, and he won no medals.

Perhaps he took comfort in the fact that the Olympic Committee didn’t recognize the 1906 games.

Harry Hillman, who became a long-time coach at Dartmouth

It did, however, recognize the 1904 games, in which Hillman won gold medals for the 400-meter race, the 200-meter hurdles and the 400-meter hurdles. And in the 1908 games, also recognized, he won a silver medal in the 400-meter hurdle.

The next year he set an odd world record that no one has broken. He and Lawson Robertson ran a 100-yard three-legged race in 11 seconds.

Hillman went on to coach track at Dartmouth from 1910 until he died in Hanover, N.H., in 1965. As track coach, he urged his hurdlers to swallow raw eggs. He believed them “excellent for the wind and stomach.”

4. Eight New England Olympians From Yale

Elis have won 107 Olympic medals, including the gold medal for rowing in the 1924 Olympics. The team, called the Yale Eight, had two members who had illustrious careers.

Captain James Rockefeller

James Rockefeller captained the team and later led the bank that became Citigroup. His grandson said he took more pride in his Olympic medal than in his banking career.

New Haven native Dr. Benjamin Spock rowed on the Yale Eight as well. Later, as America’s most famous baby doctor, he warned against putting young children into “excessive competition.”

5. Albina Osipowich, Worcester’s Sweetheart

Albina Osipowich was a 17-year-old high school student from Worcester when she boarded a steamship bound for the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. She belonged to the U.S. Olympic swim team, which also included two future Tarzans: Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. When she returned to Worcester weeks later, 100,000 people greeted her and fellow Worcesterite Harry Devine, a boxer who had won a bronze medal. She had catapulted to world fame by winning two gold medals.

The U.S. women’s Olympic swim team. Osipowich is third from left.

Osipowich had so excelled at swimming she trained at the Boys Club, mostly competing against boys. She nearly didn’t make the Olympic team, though, because she came down with the flu just before the trials. But she made it, breaking a world record while winning the 100-meter freestyle and winning the 400-meter relay.

The people of Worcester collected $4,000 for her tuition to Pembroke, then the women’s college of Brown University. In 1930, Brown let her swim in the Colgate-Hoyt Pool, the first woman to do so.

She met and married a basketball player, Harrison Van Aken. They raised two children and until her death in xxx she rarely talked about her Olympic glory.

6. Collegiate Olympians, By the Numbers

New England colleges have produced hundreds of medal-winning Olympians. Through 2016, Harvard students took home 108 medals, with Elis close behind at 107. But they only rank eighth and ninth in the country behind the big California, Florida, Texas and Michigan schools.

Dartmouth has produced 63 medal winners, Brown 37, Boston University 23, Northeastern 18 and UConn 14. Williams and MIT students have each grabbed 12.Those in the single digits include

Middlebury 5
Boston College 3
Holy Cross 2
UNH 2
Brandeis 1
Community College of Rhode Island 1
Emerson College 1

Wondering who those lone winners are?

Brandeis fencer Tim Morehouse ’00 who scored a silver medal with the U.S. men’s sabre team at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Simon Shnapir of Emerson College won a bronze in team figure skating in 2014. His partner, Marissa Castelli, studied at the Community College of Rhode Island.

This story updated in 2022.

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Rosewater, Bezoar Stone and Unicorn Horn: Seven Colonial Remedies

Colonial New England had no shortage of illness and no shortage of colonial remedies.

Our forebears left records of suffering with diseases we still recognize, such as smallpox and gout, as well as “pin and web in the eye” (cataracts), “persistent melancholy” and “stomach dross.” They also left records of the remedies for those ills.

Sometimes doctors formulated and administered medicines to treat ailments. And sometimes people made them at home, following recipe books from England.

Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather tried his hand at writing a medical book. Another volume made its way to America from England with the earliest colonists. Called The Queens Closet Opened, or The Pearl of Practise: Accurate, Physical, and Chirurgical Receipts, it purported to be a compilation of cures originally created for the British royal family.

The Doctor’s Visit (Jan Steen, artist)

Here are some of its secrets:

1. Bizarre Colonial Remedies for Fever

Several colonial remedies treated fever. In addition to the ever-popular bloodletting and purging, people would take a salted fish, split it in half and tie one half to each of a patient’s feet. One wonders if the members of the British royal family got special fish.

Bloodletting in 1860, one of only three known photographs of the procedure. Courtesy of the Burns Archive.

2. A Simple Remedy for Plague

Angelica root and wine vinegar together were a simple remedy used to treat the plague. However, people stopped using angelica root for the plague during the reign of Charles II in the mid-1600s. Maybe they found out it didn’t work.

Angelica, one of many herbal colonial remedies

3. Cure for Insomnia

Colonial doctors used aromatherapy to cure insomnia. They advised crushing some aniseed and steeping it in rosewater. Then the insomniac should wrap it in two small pieces of cloth and place them under or in each nostril.

Ben Franklin, a well-known insomniac, may have tried that remedy. He did comfort himself with the now-famous expression, “There will be sleeping enough in the grave.”

Benjamin Franklin

4. Colds and Persistent Melancholy

The colonists had a magic bullet for colds and depression: water of life, or aqua vitae. They had a number of recipes for it. One of the more complex required quite an herb garden, chickens, larks, white bread and treacle — along with sugar and raisins. Yummy!

The recipe called for handfuls of balm leaves and stalks, betony leaves and flowers, rosemary, red sage, tarragon, tormentil leaves, rossolis and roses, carnation, hyssop, thyme, “red strings that grow upon savory, red fennel leaves and root, red mints.”

Then, “bruise these hearbs and put them in a great earthern pot, & pour on them enough White Wine as will cover them, stop them close, and let them steep for eight or nine days.”

Distilling aqua vitae in 1512

It didn’t end there. The recipe further called for adding an ounce each of cinnamon, ginger, angelica seeds, cloves and nutmeg, plus a little saffron, a pound of sugar and a pound of seedless raisins. Then came the protein: the loins and legs of “an old Coney, a fleshy running Capon.” Plus the red flesh of the sinews of a leg of mutton, four young chickens, 12 larks and the yolks of 12 eggs. Plus a loaf of cut-up white bread, and two or three ounces of mithridate, an antidote for poison that had as many as 65 ingredients. Treacle could be used instead of mithridate.

Finally, the last ingredient: “as much muscadine as will cover them all.”

The concoction was distilled over a moderate fire, and then distilled again with more wine.

The instructions then read, “This water strengtheneth the Spirit, Brain, Heart, Liver, and Stomack. Take when need is by itself, or with Ale, Beer, or Wine mingled with Sugar.”

5. Pricey Colonial Remedies for Cataracts

Cataracts were treated by applying a balm to the eyes. Medicine makers thought valuable and rare materials were useful in balms or tonics. So gold, rubies and pearls were common ingredients to be ground and mixed with herbs and applied to the eyes.

Precious metals, some of which were used in eye balm.

No word on the price tag.

6. Deafness

Colonial doctors treated deafness by grinding up the roots of a daisy into a liquid and then putting drops in the ears. Several drops each day for three or four days was the recommended dosage.

Even today, some people drink wild daisy tea for coughs, bronchitis and inflammation. No one seems to know quite how it works, but people aren’t using it for deafness any more.

7. Colonial Remedies for General Health

John Winthrop the Younger doctored many people in Connecticut, where he also served as governor. He often treated people with powdered antimony, a metalloid, and potassium nitrate, or salt. Antimony, also known as kohl, has properties that fall between metals and solid nonmetals. Today people use it in flame retardants, bullets, batteries and microelectronics.

A 17th-century ring with a bezoar stone

Winthrop also wrote he had purchased and shipped powdered unicorn horn from England to treat a variety of aches and pains. He also relied upon the powers of bezoar stones, made of indigestible matter that form in an animal’s intestines. People thought they had magical power to neutralize poison.

As for the unicorn horn, it’s unclear what that actually was.

Thanks to Customs and Fashions in Old New England by Alice Morse Earle. This story last updated in 2024.

Images: Bloodletting photo from The Burns Archive – Burns Archive via Newsweek, 2.4.2011., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90618978. Daisy By Norbert Nagel, Mörfelden-Walldorf, Germany – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14991704. Precious metal chart By Tomihahndorf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1740953.

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The China Trader Who Built the Lyman Estate

The Lyman Estate in Waltham, Mass., commemorates one of the greatest China traders of his age, Theodore Lyman.

Few other memorials, written or in stone, remain of the Mainer who amassed a huge fortune and sired generations of prominent soldiers, scientists and politicians.

Unlike Thomas Handasyd Perkins or Samuel Russell, little has been written about Theodore Lyman. Even in his own time, he doesn’t seem to have had much fame beyond his own business and social circles.

If Theodore Lyman has gone unnoticed by historians, his Lyman Estate has not. Much has been written about the magnificent Federal country estate, the gardens and the oldest greenhouse in America.

Perhaps Theodore Lyman was too busy pruning his apricot trees to bother with getting his name in the paper or having his portrait painted.

Theodore Lyman

China traders in Guangzhou, where factories sold to westerners

In 1830, when Theodore Lyman was in his 70s, a British parliamentary committee investigated the East India Company and the China Trade. A merchant ship captain, A. Coffin, was asked, “Are the Boston merchants trading with China generally considered very wealthy persons?

“They are,” replied Coffin.

“Are you acquainted with Colonel Perkins?”

“I am.”

“Is not he one of the principal merchants in Boston?”

“He is the principal,” said Coffin. “Theodore Lyman has been one of the greatest traders.”

He was born in York, Maine, in 1753, the son of a minister. As a young man he went to work as a clerk in a Kennebunk store owned by Waldo Emerson. He went into business with his boss and married his daughter, Sarah, in 1776. She was 14. He was said to have planted elm trees in front of the store on the day he heard about the Battles of Concord and Lexington.

Sarah had four children and died at 21 in 1784. Lyman inherited his father-in-law’s property and went into shipbuilding and merchant shipping, a rare Mainer who owned his own ships.

“He rapidly accumulated property, not having the liberal and generous spirit for which Emerson was distinguished,” wrote one Maine historian.

China Trade

One of the first American ships to trade with China.

Theodore Lyman went to Boston to seek a bigger fortune in 1786, just as the American Revolution had ended and the China Trade began. He married Lydia Williams of Salem, Mass., in 1786 and had five more children.

Boston had suffered during the American Revolution; the end of the war brought on tremendous prosperity. Americans were now free to trade with China and the East Indies. Boston merchants took advantage of that freedom, shipping specie, furs, ginseng and opium to China, and bringing back tea, silk, nankeen, porcelain and cassia bark. Their fantastic wealth inspired a building boom that stretched to country estates in the Boston suburbs.

Lyman bought gold bullion from the Spanish and sold it to the Chinese at great profit. He sent his ships to the Pacific Northwest to buy furs, then to China to sell them for another enormous profit.

Lyman forbade his captains to mount cannon on their ship, though the seas swarmed with pirates. Capt. William Sturgis ignored him and secretly brought cannons aboard the Atahualpa. Pirates attacked his ship toward the end of a voyage, and he fought them off. When Lyman found out, he charged Sturgis the cost of freight for carrying the cannons.

In Boston, Lyman gave quietly to charity. Shortly after he died in 1839, he was praised for sending a daily supply of milk to 30 poor widows for two years, for three winters sending blankets to the Seaman’s Aid Society and funding the Children’s Friend Society.

Lyman Estate

The Lyman Estate

In 1793, Salem architect Samuel McIntire designed the house that anchored the 400-acre Lyman Estate in Waltham, Mass.

The town was home to the Boston Manufacturing Company, which ran a spinning and weaving factory that employed 300. But it was still the country, and there a rich China trader could escape the unhealthy, disease-ridden city.

McIntire designed a beautiful, symmetrical building in the Palladian style with an elegant ballroom. He also designed a summer house for the Lyman Estate. Later generations expanded the house.

The gardens of the Lyman Estate were laid out in 1793 by Theodore Lyman himself and his English gardener, William Bell. Rather than creating stiff formal gardens, Lyman designed a picturesque natural landscape. He dammed a brook to form a lake and grouped trees randomly. No fences for him, no geometric flower beds.

Greenhouse of the Lyman Estate

Horticulture was the rage among the wealthy, who loved to grow exotic imported plants. Lyman built a greenhouse, warmed by a wood fire, and grew lemons, camellias, grapes and apricots.

He also collected and planted native American trees in an ornamental woodland; apricot and peach trees. Sometime around 1820 he planted a copper beech from Europe, one of the first in America.

The Lyman Estate sparked a craze among the Boston Brahmins for picturesque English gardens, and was soon followed by others, like the Gore Place nearby.

In 1803, the town of Coxhall, Maine (then Massachusetts), was renamed Lyman after Theodore Lyman. Much of the town was burned in the Maine fires of 1947. Theodore Lyman died and was pretty much forgotten, except as the founder of the Lyman Estate.

Theodore Lyman’s children, like many offspring of the China traders, reinvested money made from furs and ginseng into mills and factories. The Lymans built Lyman Mills in Holyoke, Mass., employing 1200 people by 1900.

The Lyman family produced Democratic governors, judges, congressmen, ambassadors and mayors, mostly Democratic, as well as a physicist for whom a moon crater is named. The Lyman Estate remained in the family for 150 years. It is now owned by Historic New England and a popular spot for weddings.

Historic New England maintains an online collection of historic photographs of the Lyman Estate. Click here to view them.

Image: Lyman Estate by By Daderot at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003268; Lyman Estate greenhouse By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003261.

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Ten Takes on New England History by Maine Humorist Bill Nye

Illustration from Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States

Edgar Wilson Nye left Maine (he was born in the small town of Shirley) as a small child, but somehow the dry humor that Maine is so famous for stayed with him. Publishing under the name “Bill Nye,” not to be confused with the other Bill Nye. Nye grew up in Wisconsin and launched his career as a humorist there while still serving as a judge and lawyer.

He began publishing a comic newspaper, The Boomerang, which circulated throughout the country. At the urging of publishers, he moved east to Staten Island, publishing a series of highly successful books: “Bill Nye and the Boomerang,” 1881; “The Forty Liars,” 1883; “Bailed Hay,” 1884; “Bill Nye’s Blossom Rock,” 1885, and “Remarks,” 1886.

Illustration from Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States

His last works were and Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States, published in 1894 Bill Nye’s Comic History of England, published in 1896 (posthumously). By 1895, Nye’s work was appearing in numerous newspapers via syndication and he was an active and sought-after public speaker. His income reached well into the tens of thousands of dollars. Nye told friends he was growing weary of his reputation as one of America’s leading humorists because no one took anything he said seriously. He had a goal of transitioning away from comic to serious writing, but he never got the chance. He died at age 45.

By his death in 1896 from meningitis, his health had suffered greatly; he had moved to North Carolina for the warmer climate. Some of Nye’s work would be considered politically incorrect by today’s audiences, but below are 10 excerpts from his Comic History of The United States:

On the increasing number of colonists in the 1620s:

The Mayflower began to bring over quantities of antique furniture, mostly hall-clocks for future sales. Hanging them on spars and masts during rough weather easily accounts for the fact that none of them have ever been known to go.

On the establishment of the Plymouth Colony:

In the fall of 1620 the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth during a disagreeable storm, and, noting the excellent opportunity for future misery, began to erect a number of rude cabins. This party consisted of one hundred and two people of a resolute character who wished to worship God in a more extemporaneous manner than had been the custom in the Church of England.

The Mayflower, laden with antiques, as imagined by Bill Nye.

They found that the Indians of Cape Cod were not ritualistic, and that they were willing to dispose of inside lots at Plymouth on reasonable terms, retaining, however, the right to use the lands for massacre purposes from time to time.

Early agricultural success of New Englanders:

Money-matters, however, were rather panicky at the time, and the people were kept busy digging clams to sustain life in order to raise Indian corn enough to give them sufficient strength to pull clams enough the following winter to get them through till the next corn crop should give them strength to dig for clams again. Thus a trip to London and the Isle of Wight looked farther and farther away.

Puritan pastimes:

During dull times and on rainy days it was a question among the Puritans whether they would banish an old lady, bore holes with a red-hot iron through a Quaker’s tongue, or pitch horse-shoes.

On the Opening of “witch hunting season.”

The year 1692 is noted mostly for the Salem excitement regarding witchcraft. The children of Rev. Mr. Parris were attacked with some peculiar disease which would not yield to the soothing blisters and bleedings administered by the physicians of the old school, and so, not knowing exactly what to do about it, the doctors concluded that they were bewitched. Then it was, of course, the duty of the courts and selectmen to hunt up the witches. This was naturally difficult.

Fifty-five persons were tortured and twenty were hanged for being witches;

“Be you a witch?” asked one of the judges of Massachusetts, according to the records now on file in the State-House at Boston.

“No, your honor,” was the reply.

“Officer,” said the court, taking a pinch of snuff, “take her out on the tennis-grounds and pull out her toe-nails with a pair of hot pincers, and then see what she says.”

It was quite common to examine lady witches in the regular court and then adjourn to the tennis-court. A great many were ducked by order of the court and hanged up by the thumbs, in obedience to the customs of these people who came to America because they were persecuted.

On his home state of Maine’s early history…

A visitor seeking refreshment at Bar Harbor.

Shortly after the landing of the Pilgrims, say two years or thereabouts, Gorges and Mason obtained from England the grant of a large tract lying between the Merrimac and Kennebec Rivers. This patent was afterwards dissolved, Mason taking what is now New Hampshire, and Gorges taking Maine. He afterwards sold the State to Massachusetts for six thousand dollars. The growth of the State may be noticed since that time, for one county cost more than that last November.

In 1820 Maine was separated from Massachusetts. Maine is noted for being the easternmost State in the Union, and has been utilized by a number of eminent men as a birthplace. White-birch spools for thread, Christmas-trees, and tamarack and spruce-gum are found in great abundance. It is the home of an industrious and peace-loving people. Bar Harbor is a cool place to go to in summer-time and violate the liquor law of the State.

On the Puritans and their taxes…

Having banished Roger Williams and Mrs. Hutchinson to be skinned by the Pequods and Narragansetts over at Narragansett Pier, they went on about their business, flogging Quakers, also ducking old women who had lumbago, and burning other women who would not answer affirmatively when asked, “Be you a witch?”

Then when Roger began to make improvements and draw the attention of Eastern capital to Rhode Island and to organize a State or Colony with a charter, Plymouth said, “Hold on, Roger: religiously we have cast you out, to live on wild strawberries, clams, and Indians, but from a mercantile and political point of view you will please notice that we have a string which you will notice is attached to your wages and discoveries.

Afterwards, however, Roger Williams obtained the necessary funds from admiring friends with which to go to England and obtain a charter…

On the New England Colonists’ contribution to the capture of Cape Breton…

King George’s War, which extended over four years, succeeded, but did not amount to anything except the capture of Cape Breton by English and Colonial troops. Cape Breton was called the Gibraltar of America; but a Yankee farmer who has raised flax on an upright farm for twenty years does not mind scaling a couple of Gibraltars before breakfast; so, without any West Point knowledge regarding engineering, they walked up the hill, and those who were alive when they got to the top took it. It was no Balaklava business and no dumb animal show, but simply revealed the fact that brave men fighting for their eight-dollar homes and a mass of children are disagreeable people to meet on the battle-field.

On Dictionary publisher Noah Webster’s darkest secret…

I might add, though I dislike to speak of it now, that Mr. Webster was at one time a member of the Legislature of Massachusetts. I believe that was the only time he ever stepped aside from the strait and narrow way. A good many people do not know this, but it is true.

On the Puritan influence in Boston…

Salem and Charlestown were started by Governor Endicott, and Boston was founded in 1630. To these various towns the Puritans flocked, and even now one may be seen in ghostly garments on Thanksgiving Eve flitting here and there turning off the gas in the parlor while the family are at tea, in order to cut down expenses.

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