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How To Talk Like a Vermonter

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Bernie Sanders does not talk like a Vermonter. True, he’s not good on his Rs. He complains about “millionaihs and billionaihs,” but that doesn’t give him a Vermont accent. He also pronounces coffee as “cawf-fee” – but he still doesn’t talk like a Vermonter.

Sanders clearly talks like a New Yorker (lower middle class Brooklyn Jewish, actually). The tell is the way he says “Vermont” with an ever-so-slight “tuh” at the end.

Bernie Sanders does not talk like a Vermonter

If Bernie wanted to talk like a Vermonter, he would have to say “Vermon’.”

How To Talk Like a Vermonter

Don’t pay attention to the old Newhart sitcom, either. No one in the show talks like a Vermonter. People in Hollywood lump all New Englanders together, and they couldn’t tell the difference between a bus driver from Cranston, R.I., and a lobsterman from Jonesport, Maine.

Fred Tuttle

If you really want to sound like an old-time Vermonter, find a video of Fred Tuttle. A dairy farmer born in 1919 in Tunbridge, Vt., he decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 1998 because it was easier than farming. Tuttle easily defeated his primary opponent, a flatlander who ran in Vermont because it was easier than running in his home state of Massachusetts. Tuttle then lost to another U.S. senator from Vermont without a Vermont accent, Patrick Leahy.

Five Ways To Talk Like a Vermonter

Five key words can make you sound like Fred Tuttle. Perhaps the most important: Cow. (Vermont does not have more of them than people, by the way.)

Vermonters pronounce “cow’ as “ke-ow.” At least the old male farmers do. University of Vermont professor Julie Roberts says that idiosyncrasy is dying out among everyone else.

Then there’s “fight.” They like to turn the I into OI, so “fight” sounds like “foight.” Another one on the way out, according to Roberts..

Mountain: Vermonters do to the T in mountain what they do to the T in Vermont. They kill it. So the Green Mountains become the “Green Moun’ains.” Unlike Keow and foight, moun’ain and Vermon’ are gaining steam among young people.

Barn. Bernie pronounces this the way a Vermonter would: “bahn.” The flat A, as in most of New England, turns “car” into “cah,” “bath” into “bahth” and “dance” into “dahnce.” Bahn boots, along with winter camouflage, suspenders and hunter’s orange hats, form the basis for many a Vermon’er’s wardrobe.

Hockey: You hear this in the rest of Northern New England, too. It’s “hawkey.” Green Mountain Coffee is Green Moun’ain Cawfee. Good luck finding a Starbucks, though. You might try a maple latte at a gas station.

Beer

One way to practice the Vermon’ accen’ is to order a lot of different kinds of beer (bee-uh).

You can get Heady Toppah from Alchemis’, Hahlan from Hill Fahmstea’ Brewery or Brave Little State from Lawson’s Foinest Liquids.

Many zylophiles consider Vermont the Napa Valley of craft beer.

Noted zylophile Homer Simpson discovered a stash of beer in the Vermont woods when he made the classic observation: “Ah, beer. The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

Comedian Rusty DeWees jokes Vermonters don’t measure snow in inches, they measure it in bee-uhs.

Northeast Kingdom

The real, old-time Vermont accent still exists in the Northeast Kingdom — Essex, Orleans and Caledonian counties.

Guildhall, Vt., in the Northeast Kingdom.

The Northeast Kingdom accent is also known as gargling marbles. Older Kingdom dwellers have a distinctive nasal quality in their speech, and they love to elongate vowels. “Cat” might sound an awful lot like “caaat.” “Idea” sounds like “Oideer.”

According to Northeast Kingdom etiquette, Hello is “hoight” and goodby is “boight.” (Hat tip to Charlie and Margaret.) They also follow a back-road waving code. While driving, an approaching vehicle you’ve never seen before deserves a one-finger-off-steering-wheel wave along with a slight nod. A neighbor gets two fingers and a slight nod. Family and close friends get four fingers and maybe even a smile and eye contact. Be careful of the eye contact though, unless you want to engage in a 15-minute truck-to-truck confab on the road. And that would comprise a Vermon’ traffic jam.

Names of Things

So you’ve got your flannel (shirt), your bahn boots and your hunter orange cap and you’ve mastered the back road wave. You’re ready to fit in as a native Vermon’er, also known as a woodchuck.

You have to know certain place names. You pronounce Montpelier as Mon-PEEL-yer, Rutland as RUH-lin, Vergennes as Vurr-JENzz and Bradford as BRED-fud.

If you note the smell of manure wafting from a dairy farm, you might comment on the dairy air. If it were especially pungent, you might exclaim, “Jeezum crow.”

Should you want something sweet, Vermont has sugar on snow during winter – maple syrup poured on snow. It’s one of the five major food groups in Vermon’, along with cheese, beer, bacon and Ben & Jerry’s, according to DeWees. You can substitute a creemee — Vermon’ese for soft-serve ice cream. For a real Vermon’ delicacy, order a maple creemee.

Going shopping for those food items means you’re “makin’ groceries.” You don’t face the same kind of traffic congestion motorists in Massachusetts deal with. Instead of traffic reports, Vermont gets foliage reports.

Finally, a couple of Vermon’ expressions: “Had the radish” means done, exhausted, spent, the condition of the many non-working vehicles that decorate Vermont yards.

What most flatlanders call the basement, Vermon’ers call “down cellar.” And in the winter, Vermon’ers embrace “‘chining,” aka snowmobiling.

Vermon’ers also have some words of wisdom for getting through life: “You can’t make a whistle out of a pig’s tail.” and “A gallon of sap is worth one day’s labor.”


Images: Featured image, “Autumn in Barnet” by Carol Highsmith, United States Vermont Barnet, None. [Between 1980 and 2006] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2011630160/. 1936 Vermont Fair Scene United States Resettlement Administration, Carl Mydans United States Albany Vermont, 1936. Sept. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017716276/. Cows By redjar – jared benedict – flickr.com (also published on redjar.org), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13921. Guildhall By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Guildhall, VermontUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29774270. Bernie Sanders By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Bernie Sanders, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87733803. 

Learn how to talk Maine here, To learn how to speak Rhode Island, click here. For New Hampshire, click here. For Boston, click here. And for Connecticut, click here. This story was updated in 2024.

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Theodore Safford Peck, Civil War Hero Who Left No Comrade Behind

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If you ever visit Burlington, Vt.,  and find yourself wandering around the Lakeview Cemetery, you might chance upon what otherwise at first is an unremarkable grave site. You have to walk directly upon it to notice the government-issued bronze plaque placed flat into the ground. It reads:” THEODORE SAFFORD PECK – MEDAL OF HONOR – BVT MAJ GEN CO H 9 VT INF – CIVIL WAR – MAR 22 1843 – MAR 15 1918.”

Theodore Safford Peck as adjutant general of the Vermont National Guard

Those few words sum up the man’s life. They don’t tell the story of his struggles — rejection by the Army four times, surrender, a coward’s label. And they certainly don’t describe the astounding feat of heroism that earned him the Medal of Honor.

Theodore Safford Peck Enlists, Finally

Peck was born in Burlington on March 22, 1843, the son of Theodore Augustus Peck and Delia Horton Safford. The oldest of the five Peck children, he had two brothers and two sisters. A brother and sister died young.

The 1860 Census lists Theodore’s occupation as a clerk. He probably worked for his father, a druggist in Burlington.

The first shots of the American Civil War were fired on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter, S.C. Just under six months later, Theodore Safford Peck enlisted successfully — on his fifth try — in the 1st Vermont Cavalry Regiment, Company K. His rank, quartermaster sergeant, most likely reflected his civilian occupation.

The Battle of Winchester

During his short time with the 1st Vermont Cavalry, the regiment saw action at the Battle of Winchester on May 25, 1862. The battle was a major victory for the Confederates during Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign.

Peck won promotion to full quartermaster sergeant on June 27, 1862, and mustered out of the 1st Vermont Cavalry on the same day. He then joined Company S, 9th Vermont Volunteer Infantry Regiment, presumably as a quartermaster sergeant, on July 9, 1862. It’s not clear why he made the change.

‘Almost Imbecility’

The regiment was organized at Brattleboro, Vt. The army then sent it to Washington without any  real formal training, like most newly formed regiments. From there the regiment went to Virginia. Less than a month after its formation, the 9th Vermont retreated from the Shenandoah Valley to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia in 1863).

Dixon Miles at Harpers Ferry

Unluckily  for the regiment, it had a commander who ranked as one of the most useless and incompetent Union Army  officers: Col. Dixon S. Miles. The army had court-martialed him for drunkenness during the First Battle of Bull Run. For some now unfathomable and unfortunate reason, he had orders to defend the vital Harpers Ferry arsenal.

Confronted by Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson, Miles surrendered his entire force on Sept. 15, 1862. He offered only token resistance. Among those captured: the 9th Vermont and Sgt. Theodore Safford Peck.

A later board of inquiry described Miles’ character:  “incapacity, amounting to almost imbecility [for] the shameful surrender of this important post.”

Labeled Cowards

The Confederates had  marched through Harpers Ferry to Maryland and their ultimate defeat at Antietam. But Jackson had no time to detach troops to guard the huge hoard of Union prisoners. So he paroled them. Parole meant they could return to the Union Army. However, they couldn’t participate in active operations until exchanged for a like number of Confederate prisoners.

Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas, around 1863

Unfortunately for the regiments that surrender under Miles’ command, people labeled them cowards. Though unfair, as they had no say in Miles’ actions, they nonetheless had to live with the fact.

Unable to take part in active combat, the 9th Vermont and Peck were sent to Chicago as guards for Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas. Theodore Safford Peck won promotion to full second lieutenant on Jan. 8, 1863. Two days later, the regiment was finally exchanged.

Still not fully trusted, the regiment went to guard Confederate prisoners at City Point, Va. That assignment lasted only a couple of weeks before the necessities of war sent them south to the garrison at Suffolk, Va. There they joined Wardrop’s Reserve Brigade, 7th Army Corps, Department of Virginia.

As soon as the 9th Vermont arrived in the spring of 1863, Gen. James Longstreet’s Confederate forces embroiled them in the Siege of Suffolk, Va. It lasted from April 13 to May 4. The Union Army held the garrison, but Longstreet’s troops had managed to forage for supplies during the standoff.

James Longstreet

After helping raise the siege, the 9th Vermont took part in several small actions.  It then went to New Bern, N.C., remaining in the area for several months and taking part in small actions.

Newport Barracks, N.C.

Near Newport, N.C., the Union Army held a small outpost that guarded a railroad trestle bridge, a key link in the supply routes between East Coast ports and New Bern, N.C. The Union had won the Battle of New Bern in 1862, which enabled it to control the North Carolina coast.

The advance of the Gunboats up the river to New Berne, N. Carolina.

On Feb. 2, 1864, Confederate forces overran the Newport Barracks. Two thousand Confederate infantry, 400 cavalry and 14 artillery pieces outnumbered the 750 Union troops at the barracks. The Union soldiers retreated. Company B and Company H, commanded by 2nd Lt. Theodore Safford Peck, had orders to guard the rear of the retreating forces.

Two bridges over the Newport River formed the only line of retreat for the Union soldiers. They also formed the only line of advance for the Confederates. Lt. Peck had orders to hold the bridges until the Union forces had crossed and then fire them. The Roster of Vermont Volunteers During the War of the Rebellion…Deeds of Valor, describes what happened.

“The left of the Union line lay near the river, while the right was in the woods, and commended (sic) by First Lieutenant Theodore S. Peck Company H, Ninth Vermont Infantry. The line was continually pressed back by the enemy, and made eleven different stands before reaching the Newport River, over which there were two bridges, one a railroad bridge and the other a county bridge…”

No Turpentine, No Cavalry

Peck had been promised turpentine and tar, along with a cavalry contingent to support him, would be waiting at the bridges. They must destroy the bridge at all cost.

“Lieutenant Peck made a desperate fight all afternoon, and had been the farthest out toward the enemy the entire time, holding them in check until they had broken through the line on his left. At this time the Union troops had mostly crossed the railroad and county bridges…while Lieutenant Peck’s rear guard was hotly engaged with the Confederates, who were close at his heels.”

When Peck sent a man to check the bridge, he reported back that he found no supplies to burn the bridge and no cavalry anywhere.

Medal of Honor

“Lieutenant Peck, leaving one-half of his men with their officers, fighting the enemy, ran with the other half down the hill to the bridge, determined to destroy the same, if possible. Finding that some of the planks were not spiked down, he had these torn up, and being fortunate in finding plenty of dry grass…he had the same placed in readiness for burning the bridge, then ordered his men, who were fighting, to stop firing and rush across.

His men instantly obeyed the order, though the enemy came forward on the run, killing and wounding some of them. As soon as the men crossed the bridge they started firing on the enemy, while others ignited the dead grass.

“The Confederates brought up a battery, and poured in grape and canister. In the rush, Sergeant Charles F. Branch was wounded and left behind, a fact which, instantly it became known to Peck, caused him to rush back across the now burning bridge, to the sergeant, and half carrying him in his arms, succeeded, in spite of a shower of bullets and shell and in momentary danger of death…”

They succeeded in destroying both bridges in the face of overwhelming enemy fire. While the river was narrow, it had high bluffs and was deep, and the Confederates could not ford it in time to halt the Union retreat. Then-2nd Lt. Theodore Safford Peck won the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. Peck was promoted to first lieutenant on June 10, 1864, and to  captain on March 11, 1865.

More Fighting

The 9th Vermont remained in the New Bern area until September 1864, when it went north to join Ulysses S. Grant’s army at the protracted siege of Petersburg and Richmond, Va. The siege actions included a formal siege and a series of individual battles. The 9th Vermont fought in several of them. Peck was wounded in action during one battle, the Battle of Fort Harrison.

Fort Burnham, Virginia, the former Confederate Fort Harrison. Federal soldiers in front of bomb-proof headquarters.

The wound must not have been too serious since he remained with the regiment, which then fought in the Battle of Fair Oaks.

Immediately after the battle, it was sent to New York City to guard against possible rioting during the upcoming presidential election. It then returned to the Richmond siege lines and took part in the final assault on the city on April 2, 1865.

Battle of Fair Oaks, by Currier & Ives

Captain Peck marched with the 9th Vermont as one of the first to enter and occupy Richmond.

After performing various occupation duties around Virginia, he mustered out with the rest of the regiment on Dec. 1, 1865.

Marriage and Money

Returning to Burlington, Theodore Peck began a career in insurance, and in 1869 he founded T.S. Peck Insurance. In time, it would grow into one of the largest insurance companies in Vermont. It is still in existence in 2023.

T.S. Peck

Peck was also involved in local businesses and served on the board of directors of several Burlington manufacturing companies.

In 1879, he married Agnes Louise Lesslie from Toronto, Canada, in Manhattan, New York at her uncle’s residence. They had one daughter, Theodora Agnes Peck.

Grand Army of the Republic program for an encampment in 1900

Like most Union Civil War veterans, Theodore Peck remained active in the Grand Army of the Republic. He served as president of the Society of the Army of the Potomac at the time of his death. He belonged to many civic organizations. They included  the Society of Colonial Wars, General Society of the War of 1812, Military Order of Foreign Wars, the Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Ethan Allen Club, Algonquin Club and the Lake Champlain Yacht Club. A Freemason, he served as grandmaster of the Vermont Lodge for 10 years.

Later Life of Theodore Safford Peck

Unlike most Civil War veterans, however, Theodore Peck remained a part of the military. From 1881 to 1900 he served as its adjutant general in the Vermont National Guard as a brigadier.

His relationship with the military remained firm. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to the West Point Board of Visitors. He also commanded the Medal of Honor Legion (now the Legion of Valor). And he received an honorary degree  in 1896 from Norwich University in Northfield, Vt., then a military school second only to West Point.

Grave marker of Theodore Safford Peck

After a full and active life, Brevet Maj. Gen. Theodore Safford Peck, Medal of Honor, died on March 15, 1918 in Burlington from heart complications.

William E. Utley has an M.A. in Military HIstory from Norwich University. Theodore Safford Peck is his 3rd cousin, three times removed.

 

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Northern New England Has Gores – Who Knew?

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There are small numbers of people in northern New England who live in oddly-shaped geographical areas or “gores. ”

They prefer a relatively isolated, rural, existence in seasonal or permanent homes, surrounded by forests, mountains, bodies of water and a few neighbors.  They are willing to pay for limited governmental services funded mainly by the state.

Unlike the southern New England states, incorporated local units of government do not encompass all of the land areas in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.  Various unincorporated entities – including gores – constitute the remaining area.

The Gores of Northern New England

A gore is a piece of irregularly shaped land left over from original surveying efforts in the 18th and 19th centuries to plot town boundaries.  They exist only in Maine and Vermont and may or may not have any residents.

In Maine, somewhat more than half of the total land area of the state is designated as “unorganized territory.”  It consists of 429 unincorporated “townships” and several coastal islands that extend across the 16 counties of the state.  Eight of these townships are gores, located in four counties.  Three of them (Coburn, Gorham, and Massachusetts) are in Franklin County. Three are in Somerset County (Blake, Misery, and Moxie). And there are one each in Lincoln County (Hibberts) and Penobscot County (Veazie).

The Maine Legislature is the “local governing body” for the gores and the rest of the unorganized territory.  It approves the budgets of the state agencies and any counties seeking funds for services derived from a state-administered property tax.  Services provided include waste disposal, law enforcement, fire protection, ambulance services, animal control, road maintenance (except private roads) and land use to limit development.

The Coburn Gore border crossing from the Canadian side.

Maine Gores

Four Maine gores have seasonal and/or permanent residents.   Population counts are difficult to ascertain as the U.S. Census does not provide them.  Moxie Gore has the largest area (19.96 acres) and the largest population (estimated at over 100). It’s known for its waterfall and whitewater rafting opportunities.  Coburn Gore is mainly noted for its U.S.-Canadian border crossing.  Misery Gore has Moosehead Lake for its attraction.  Hilberts Gore has one resident of long duration among its fields and woodlands.

Map of Misery Gore near Moosehead Lake in Maine

Beyond gores, the unorganized territory also includes townships designated by name (e.g. Bancroft) or number (e.g. T13R16WELS) and those termed a grant, island, patent, purchase, strip, surplus or tract.

Vermont Gores

Vermont has four gores:  Avery’s Gore, Warner’s Gore or Grant and Warren’s Gore are in Essex County.  Buels Gore is in Chittenden County.  Only Warren’s Gore and Buels Gore have residents.  In Warren’s Gore, a Board of Governors of the Unified Towns and Gores oversees the gore. It also appoints a supervisor who can act as truant officer, constable, treasurer, tax collector and town clerk.  In Buels Gore, the governor appoints a supervisor.  In both gores, residents pay a state property (education) tax and a municipal tax that can be used for certain assessments or town services (e.g. emergency fire or rescue services).

Vermont also has five unorganized towns – Averill, Ferdinand, Glastenbury, Lewis and Somerset. The Board of Governors oversees them since they lack enough residents to qualify as an incorporated town.

Grout Pond and Glastenbury Mountain

And the Rest…

Historically, New Hampshire also had gores, but none currently exist.  However, it has eight grants, seven townships, six purchases and four unincorporated locations that resemble gores.

Barring a significant upsurge in population leading to annexation by a neighboring town(s) or creation of a new town, these gores will remain as remnants of bygone times.

Edward T. Howe, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Siena College near Albany, N.Y.

Images: Moosehead Lake By Dennis Redfield – originally posted to Flickr as Moosehead Lake, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8733277, and Glastenbury Mountain by Andy Arthur via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Also By Richard Coté – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34635193. This story was updated in 2024.

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New Release: ‘Eat Like a President’ in Paperback and Ebook

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If you really want to know what a president was like, find out what he ate. That’s what Leslie and Dan Landrigan did with the six presidents from New England. The authors wrote the New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President: 30 Recipes from the White House to Your House, which tells you about the presidents’ families, their servants, their friends — and how they struggled to run the White House and the country at the same time.

You’ll find some surprises in Eat Like a President.  Calvin Coolidge, for example, loved to play practical jokes on the servants. Chester A. Arthur indulged in fine dining despite having a fatal kidney disease. John Quincy Adams had a passion for Madeira wine.

Other presidential preferences won’t surprise you. The revolutionary presidential couple, John and Abigail Adams, served distinctly American food. Franklin Pierce, the backwoodsman, preferred comfort food from his native New Hampshire. And Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy loved fancy French cuisine.

The book also explores the historic setting in which the food was made and served. Each president grappled with America’s defining conflicts over freedom and equality. How they treated their servants revealed a lot about their attitudes toward servitude and slavery. Abigail Adams hated the Constitutional compromise that allowed slavery, and she hated watching enslaved servants toiling just outside the White House. She treated her own servants like family. Then, more than a century later, Calvin Coolidge tried to pass an anti-lynching bill and took his ill African American wine steward with him on an Adirondacks vacation to improve his health.

You’ll get a fuller picture of the difficulties a president faces from Eat Like a President. Among pressing cares about war, disaster, legislation and re-election, they still have to meet with hundreds of people every week – and feed many of them. A presidential couple still must host a state dinner even if their child is dying. A president has to spend hours shaking hands even when his enemies are killing his infrastructure bill. In the midst of all that, the first couple has to try to make the White House presentable.

You’ll also get a fuller picture of the presidential couples and their times just from what they ate and drank.  Jane Pierce, a teetotaler, came from a cold roast Boston family, while Franklin, an alcoholic, grew up in a tavern. They didn’t appear together publicly very often.

Calvin Coolidge loved the Vermont pickles of his modest boyhood.  People even said he looked like he was weaned on one. And yet he also enjoyed Chinese food, a cuisine embraced by aspirational middle-class city dwellers. Coolidge was both.

In the reckless 1960s, the Kennedys served tumblers of Cuba Libres at their White House Twist parties. Those were prosperous times, and the Kennedys — Jackie especially — spent lavishly. At one party they served 10 pounds of caviar in a gold bucket.

Finally, Eat Like a President describes where the presidents ate – in the White House. The first couples had to keep improving the building as America grew in power and prestige. In 1800, Abigail Adams furnished a drafty, unfinished 36-room house; 162 years later, Jackie Kennedy turned a 132-room mansion into an elegant showplace.

In the book…

Let’s face it, food is a fun way to learn about history. And history is a fun way to cook food.

In this book you will get step-by-step instructions on how to make 30 different kinds of presidential food in a modern American kitchen. The foods range from fairly simple colonial fare to fancy French dishes preferred by the Kennedys and the Chinese entrees the Coolidges loved.

You will also get an engaging account of each president’s White House years, with historical background and context. High school students might find it a compelling way to learn about American history — and American cooking.

Just click here to buy the ebook, here for the paperback.

About the authors

Dan and Leslie Landrigan are the authors of the New England Historical Society website. Over the past decade, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history. They now live on an island in Maine, where they do a lot of cooking for themselves.

This books is the fourth in a series about historic foods. The others are 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods, 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, and Historic Italian Christmas Cookies, all ebooks available 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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Calvin Coolidge Takes on Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray

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Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray had pretty much run the White House the way she saw fit since she began her reign as the building’s major domo in 1909.

Then Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace, suddenly moved in during the summer of 1923, after President Warren G. Harding died in office. But Elizabeth Jaffray had no reason to think anything would change.

Elizabeth Jaffray

The Coolidges had never lived large before. They moved from an $8-a-night hotel suite to the White House. Before that, they’d lived in a $36-a-month duplex in Northampton, Mass.

Managing a large staff of servants would prove one of the president’s most vexing responsibilities. At least to some of the servants.

Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray as the head servant had come to view the presidents who came and went as mere transients. She lived in a permanent suite on the second floor overlooking the North Portico.  Or at least she thought she had a permanent residence. Until Calvin Coolidge came along.

Elizabeth Jaffray

Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray was used to dealing with the first lady. So it came as quite a shock when the president began showing up in the White House kitchen.

He instructed the servants on how to cut meat, counted the hams and he inspected the ice box. He gave tips on economizing.

Official White House portrait of Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge was also a fussy eater who complained about the size of the pancakes. He said the cooks didn’t know how to make a custard pie and the corn muffins weren’t up to snuff.

Perhaps worst of all, he made Mrs. Jaffray run the daily menu past him.

White House seamstress Lillian Rogers Page wrote that she “was going out of her mind from the shock of it.”

Mrs. Jaffray couldn’t stand Calvin Coolidge, and after she left she retaliated with a tell-all, Secrets of the White House, published by Cosmopolitan magazine.

She began the chapter on Coolidge with, “He is a light eater.” And then she went on to describe how he rarely talks or smiles. She wrote that he seldom goes to the theater, he never plays games and he has more clothes than any President in the past five administrations has had.

“Never before has a President taken such a keen and active interest in small domestic affairs,” she concluded.

For his part, Calvin Coolidge had no use for Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray. He called her “Queenie.”

Another Detractor

Head usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover joined Elizabeth Jaffray in running down Coolidge in his own tell all, Forty-two Years in the White House.

Hoover called Coolidge the “least interesting” of the presidents he’d known, and he’d known them from Benjamin Harrison to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Coolidge, he wrote, was fussy, irritable and prone to sudden rages over trifles.

Hoover described how an admirer once sent the president two dozen chickens. Coolidge had them penned in Teddy Roosevelt’s former mint patch. When served at dinner, the chickens had an unusual minty flavor.

“We never knew whether he selected the mint bed on purpose or not,” wrote Hoover. “If he did, it was in keeping with many other odd things the president did.” Among those oddities: He had a pet raccoon named Rebecca that he took on evening walks. He rode a mechanical bull in his bedroom for exercise. On his last day in the White House, he refused to leave until a missing rubber was found.

Hoover also didn’t care for Coolidge’s breakfast meetings. He often held them with members of Congress, but he rarely said anything during the meal. Invited guests often declined, wrote Hoover.

“Those who did come would arrive rubbing their eyes,” he wrote. “It was always embarrassing at the beginning, for everyone looked to the president to start off conversation and he never did. The fruit course would be eaten before a word was said.”

Another Side of Calvin Coolidge

The servants called the president “Smily” because he almost never did. They called First Lady Grace Coolidge “Sunshine” because she brought it into their lives. She often bridged the gap between her socially inept husband and the servants.

grace-coolidge

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait. Both she and her husband were Salem witch trials descendants.

Together, the Coolidges formed warm (if unequal) friendships with some of the White House servants. On weekends, they’d take dinner cruises on the presidential yacht. They loved the food served by the steward and encouraged him in his restaurant endeavor after they left the White House. He in turn sent Calvin a birthday cake every year.

When the wine steward, Albert Brooks, fell ill, they took him on an Adirondack vacation with them because they thought the mountain air would help his health. It didn’t, and when he died, Coolidge was distressed. He called Brooks “one of the finest men in Washington” and “my cherished friend.”

The steward on the yacht, Lee Ping Quan, was Asian American. Albert Brooks was African American. And Coolidge strongly supported civil rights.

So he had a reason for disliking Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray.

One of her first acts on arrival back in 1909 was to segregate the servants. Until then, the black and white servants ate together. She ordered the white servants to eat at one table, the black servants at another. When they rebelled, she threatened to fire them all. Frightened of losing their jobs, they acquiesced.

The New York Times reported favorably on her innovation.

Exit, Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray

How, exactly, the Coolidges engineered the departure of Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray is probably lost to history. But a record does exist of Grace secretly recruiting Ellen Riley to take over. A Coolidge friend who owned a high-end department store in Boston had recommended her because she managed the store’s cafeteria.

When Mrs. Jaffray left in 1926, Ellen Riley stepped in.

The Coolidges treated her like family. Coolidge liked her so much he gave her a raise and taught her the combination to the vault that held the gold and silver service. They invited Riley to change her clothes after state dinners to attend the musicales that followed. She also joined the Coolidge family watching White House movies.

Riley thought Coolidge was hilarious. She described how wild animals would appear on the screen, and the president would urge his dog, Rob Roy, to “go for them.”

Other servants thought him pretty funny too. His bodyguard, Edward Starling, wrote that he had an insatiable appetite for pranks. He liked to pretend there was a bug in his food. When the butler leaned over to investigate, he’d say to Grace, “I thought butlers weren’t supposed to eavesdrop.”

After he left public life, Coolidge was asked about his greatest disappointment as president. “The White House hams, they would always bring a big one to the table,” he said. “Mrs. Coolidge would always have a slice and I would always have one. The butler would take it away and what happened to it afterward I never could find out.”

No one will probably ever know whether he was joking or not.

 *  *  *

Learn more about Calvin Coolidge’s time in the White House — and about the other five New England presidents. Click here to order your copy. 

 

 

 

 

 

This story was updated in 2024. 

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Polio Makes Its U.S. Debut in Vermont’s Otter Creek Valley in 1894

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In June of 1894, a strange nervous disease attacked several children in Vermont’s Otter Creek Valley. It started as a summer cold, but then it paralyzed its unlucky victims. After a few weeks, people in the valley began hearing about deaths from the mysterious ailment. By the end of July, the valley filled with dread as the disease took victim after victim, seemingly at random. Then finally a 37-year-old country doctor figured out what afflicted Otter Creek Valley: polio

Charles Caverly was the right person in the right place at the right time to diagnose the disease that would maim and kill tens of thousands of U.S. children over the next half century.

 

Otter Creek

Summer after summer, polio returned in great waves, striking first in the Northeast and then moving westward. It struck randomly – in the city, in the country, among rich and poor, healthy and sickly.  Like AIDS in the second half of the 20th century, polio in the first half was lethal, incurable and favored a specific group of victims – children.

It would take six decades before Jonas Salk developed the first safe vaccine against polio. But the process of eradicating the disease began with Charles Caverly and the large body of data he collected in Vermont.

Charles Caverly

He was born in Troy, N.H., on Sept. 30, 1856, to an old New England family. His great-great-grandfather, Philip Caverly, served as a soldier in the American Revolution.

He went to local high schools, prepped for college at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, N.H., and graduated from Dartmouth in 1878. He then attended the University of Vermont School of Medicine, and then studied for 18 months at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

Charles Caverly

Caverly began practice in Rutland in 1883, in association with Dr. Middleton Goldsmith.

“He was a quiet, cultivated man, with a singleness of purpose which was striking, a lack of pretense which was always charming, and an ability which was perfectly evident,” wrote Robert W. Lovett, who knew him.

But Caverly was more than a country doctor. He had a passion for public health, and by 1897 he served as president of the Vermont State Board of Health. He also taught hygiene and preventive medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.

Polio Strikes the Otter Creek Valley

The first polio cases appeared in the middle of June in Rutland and nearby Wallingford. Until mid-July, it prevailed in Rutland, then other nearby towns began reporting cases.

Caverly sensed the new disease had created a feeling of uneasiness among Vermonters. In late July he decided to investigate the outbreak systematically. He reached out to all the physicians in the area who had patients affected by the disease. Caverly identified 123 cases from June 17 to September 1. All but six were within the Otter Creek Valley, which was only 15 miles wide and 30 miles long.

The investigation, he wrote, “soon convinced me that this region had been affected by an epidemic of nervous disease very rarely observed.”

Some Polio Cases

Caverly then described some of the cases he’d seen.

The first case was a three-year-old American boy, healthy, active and strong. He grew feverish and cranky and had stomachache. After three days he lost the use of his legs. At the end of 10 days, he began to walk by holding on to chairs. Then in three weeks, he could walk again.

The second case was similar: A sturdy, 3-1/2-year-old Irish boy had a high fever and incontinence. On the third day, his legs were paralyzed. One leg improved, the other not so much, and after 10 weeks he could walk, but had spinal curvature.

Case 93, a two-year-old American boy, got stomachache, fever and rash. After a few days, his legs were paralyzed. He didn’t improve much after two months, Caverly reported.

Case four was a six-year-old boy taken with convulsions while playing in the street. They lasted nine hours, along with a fever, vomiting and excessive sensitivity of his extremities. The boy died after six days.

Polio died out in September, but not after 132 people, mostly children, had come down with it, and 18 had died.

Caverly Figures It Out

Caverly took careful note of the strange disease. Boys, for example, were more likely to get it than girls. Some died early, some recovered with no paralysis and some were permanently disabled. He saw a 70-year-old man with polio. He saw it in horses, dogs and chickens.

Caverly decided the mysterious disease had to be one of two things: cerebro-spinal meningitis or poliomyelitis. He sent the brain and spinal cord of a chicken to doctors in New York. One said it was cerebro-spinal meningitis, but two others said it was polio. Polio it was.

History of Polio

Polio was not unknown before it ravaged Otter Creek Valley. Sir Walter Scott, born in 1771, contracted it as a child and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Sir Walter Scott. Note the cane.

In 1789, British doctor Michael Underwood came up with the first clinical description of polio. He noted “the debilitations of the lower limbs” in children. Doctors called it “teething paralysis” or “infantile paralysis.” They would occasionally see isolated cases.

But because polio didn’t reach epidemic proportions, doctors, including Charles Caverly, didn’t think it contagious.

Polio, actually, is extremely contagious. A virus, it enters the body through the digestive system by droplets from the nose and mouth and by contact with contaminated feces. But the overwhelming majority of people who get it – 98 percent – don’t show symptoms.

Ironically, polio emerged at a time when advances in public health had gotten diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and diphtheria under control. Many scientists believed improvements in cleanliness and hygiene had succeeded too well. In dirtier times, they thought, infants developed mild infections but fought them off with the help of maternal antibodies. That immunized them against more severe attacks of the disease. But improved sanitation delayed children’s exposure to it, leaving them more vulnerable to the severest form of polio.

Polio Returns Every Summer

After Otter Creek, polio appeared in Europe. In the Northeast United States, it began to return every summer, at first sporadically and then with a vengeance. By 1905, the medical community realized the contagiousness of the disease. Public health authorities closed swimming pools, canceled county fairs and tacked quarantine signs on homes where the disease had struck.

In the summer of 1910, a severe epidemic of polio hit North America, killing 2,500. It hit Massachusetts hard, especially in Springfield. Another terrible outbreak struck Vermont in 1914, concentrated in the northern half of the state. The mortality rate neared 25 percent, and 226 victims were left with varying degrees of paralysis.  The state Board of Health realized it had to do something. Charles Caverly persuaded an anonymous benefactor to make a generous donation for the prevention and care of polio.

Children at a polio clinic in France. Courtesy NARA.

The state decided to hold free public clinics in the infected areas where victims could go for treatment and care.

Robert Lovett, a doctor engaged in that effort, described how patients were given braces and crutches. Therapists helped train their muscles, exercised their withered limbs and gave them massages. Family members were taught how to massage and exercise polio victims.

“Thus it happened that from being the first state in which the disease occurred in epidemic form, Vermont also became the first to undertake on a statewide scale the after-care of the victims of infantile paralysis,” wrote Lovett.

The 1916 Outbreak

The worst was yet to come. In 1916, a wave of polio struck without warning a Brooklyn neighborhood called Pigtown. Twenty-four hundred people died in New York City, 80 percent of them children under five years old.

Courtesy March of Dimes

As the terrifying disease traveled beyond New York, cities and towns in the Northeast began to bar outsiders. Armed policemen patrolled train stations and roads to make sure no strangers crossed the borders. Parents told their children not to play with anyone they didn’t know, share their ice cream cone or go swimming. In New York, people blamed dogs and cats for spreading polio. They killed 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs.

In Vermont, Charles Caverly continued to monitor the polio outbreaks. He wrote reports loaded with data about polio outbreaks in his state. They included the distribution and timing of cases, ages of victims, type of house they lived in, the soil around the house, quality of the sewer facilities, water supply, family history, the number of cases in railroad towns.

But then in 1918 polio took a back seat to another disease – influenza. Among the many thousands killed by the flu pandemic was Charles Caverly.

Lovett credited Caverly with first seeing the need to understand polio. “Dr. Caverly did not live to see the disease against which he had fought so long and so untiringly really conquered and the fear of future epidemics removed,” wrote Lovett. “[B]ut he did live to see many of the victims of infantile paralysis in Vermont well on the road to happy, useful, and in some cases normal lives, and to know that real contributions to the knowledge of the disease had been made by those working in cooperation with the State Board of Health under his presidency.”

FDR

In 1921, a wealthy, influential 39-year-old named Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio. Five years later he founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, after the waters he’d taken for therapy. Later it was renamed the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP).

Franklin Roosevelt taking a therapeutic plunge in Warm Springs, Ga.

Then in 1938, five years into his presidency, Roosevelt kicked off the NFIP’s March of Dimes campaign to raise money for polio research. The public sent 2,680,000 dimes to the White House.

Many scientists had already started work on a vaccine or a cure for polio. In the United States, scientists conducted research at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Cincinnati.

During the mid-1950s, Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh tested a polio vaccine. In April 1955, banner headlines announced the great news: tests had proven Salk’s vaccine successful.  The government then mobilized a massive public health effort to vaccinate every child in America. By 1991, polio was eradicated in the Western Hemisphere.

Polio, The Beginning of the End

Sara Jones had gotten the disease at two years old, one of the first Otter Creek Valley victims in 1894. Polio had paralyzed her legs. For the next 20 years she dragged herself around her North Ira farm. Finally, a doctor operated on her feet so she could wear shoes. The next year she got her first pair of crutches, and in 1955 she got her first wheelchair.

On Jan. 5, 1956, Sara Jones attended the NFIP’s kickoff of its national fundraising campaign on the side of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont. The Dartmouth Outing Club built a snow sculpture of Dr. Jonas Salk, and Olympic gold medalist Tenley Albright figure-skated for attendees. At night, a torchlight parade was held, and a monument shaped like a dime was dedicated to those first 132 victims.

With thanks to The “New Disease” strikes the Otter Creek Valley by Edward Neuert and to Infantile Paralysis in Vermont.

Images: Otter Creek By Chumash11 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73732544. This story updated in 2023.

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