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George Perkins Marsh, The Vermont Farmer Who Founded the Environmental Movement

George Perkins Marsh, a little-known Congressman from Vermont, gave birth to the environmental movement in September 1847. On that day he gave a speech to farmers at the Rutland County Agricultural Fair after judging oxen, swine and maple sugar.

In his talk, Marsh previewed his now-forgotten book, Man and Nature, or Physical geography as modified by human action. Modern environmental historians compare it with Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.

They were the two big books of the 19^th century that demonstrated connections between humans and other forms of life.

View of Woodstock, Vt., from Mount Tom

“It takes a real act of historical imagination to understand just how profoundly Man and Nature reshaped American attitudes toward the environment,” wrote environmental historian William Cronon.

George Perkins Marsh

Marsh ushered in a new way of looking at the world, one that understood humans don’t really dominate nature. He inspired the reforesting of the Northeast. He did it by showing how denuded hills and dammed rivers caused erosion and flooding and depleted fisheries.

In his book, Marsh demonstrated how humans connect with nature in unexpected ways. He described how wetlands increased in North America because of a new Parisian fashion. Beavers were nearly extinct on the continent because of the popularity of beaver hats. But then a Parisian manufacturer came up with silk hats, which quickly became the rage. Demand for beaver fur fell off and the beaver population came back. More beavers meant more dams – and more wetlands.

Perhaps of all the people in the world in the mid-18^th century, George Perkins Marsh was uniquely qualified to connect Parisian fashions with the American environment. He was at once a cosmopolitan world traveler and a Vermont farm boy, a scholar immersed in abstractions and a businessman (although not a very good one).

Mount Tom

He was born March 15, 1801, to a wealthy landowner in Woodstock, Vt. His father owned much of Mount Tom. As a boy, George Perkins Marsh watched the clearing and planting of the hills around Woodstock for pasture and fuel. He noticed the erosion, the increased flooding; later in life, he wrote a report about the depleted fisheries.

George Perkins Marsh

As an adult, he tried his hand at businesses that interfered with the environment: a woolen mill that depended on dammed streams, a marble quarry that cut stone from the earth, a farm with sheep that cropped the grass, a lumber dealership. He made a failed investment in a railroad that stripped the land of trees.

Perkins was more successful at politics. He was elected to the first of thee terms in Congress in 1843, where he helped create the Smithsonian Institution. Later he was appointed minister to the Ottoman Empire. During his five years living in and touring the Middle East he observed how man had made barren the once-lush region. He also sent samples of fish, flora, fauna and rock to his friend Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution.

Man and Nature

In 1864, he wrote Man and Nature with little expectation it would be noticed. He was wrong. It was the Silent Spring of the 19^th century, a book that launched the environmental movement. Man and Nature led to passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act, which encouraged homesteaders on the Great Plains to plant trees. It laid the groundwork for the creation of Adirondack Park and the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. It also had a profound influence on environmentalists such as John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

Marsh revised his book several times while serving as a diplomat to the Kingdom of Italy. He spent 21 years in that post, the longest serving chief of ministers in U.S. history.

Today, you can visit his boyhood home in Woodstock at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller State Park. You can appreciate his legacy at the Smithsonian Institution – or simply by enjoying the fall colors of the trees in New England.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy The Birds Best Friend: How Ernest Baynes Saved the Animals and Winnepesaukee Water Wars: Fighting for NH Property Rights in 1859.

We are indebted to George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book) by David Lowenthal and William Cronon for this article. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Royal Rooters Win the World Series for the Red Sox With ‘Tessie’

The Boston Red Sox won their first World Series in 1903 with the musical help of a raucous fan club called the Royal Rooters.

Nuf Ced McGreevey, leader of the Royal Rooters. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

A colorful group of sportsmen, gamblers and politicians, they had their own sports bar and their own team souvenirs, probably the first ever.

The bar and the collectibles sprang from the unique genius of Nuf Ced McGreevey, so called because he ended arguments by pounding on the bar and declaring “Nuf Ced.”

Nuf Ced McGreevey

Nuf Ced’s real name was Michael T. McGreevey. Born sometime in the mid-19^th century, he played amateur baseball. He never made it to the major leagues, probably because of his short stature, but he did get rich.

In 1894, he opened a saloon called “Third Base” because patrons stopped there before stealing home. In 1900, Nuf Ced moved the Third Base to 940 Columbus Ave., nearer to the Huntington Avenue Grounds where the Boston Americans – now the Red Sox – played.

Nuf Ced plastered the walls with baseball memorabilia and photographs of his favorite players: Nap Lajoie, Jimmy Collins, Cy Young, Chick Stahl and Buck Freeman. The Third Base attracted politicians, gamblers, businessmen, ballplayers, Tin-Pan Alley stars and diehard fans.

Coach drivers stopped by the Third Base because Nuf Ced fed pickles to their horses. Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was a regular and a Royal Rooter. So was Joseph “Sport” Sullivan, the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series. Sullivan was rumored to have won $20,000 on the 1903 Series.

Royal Rooters

Royal Rooter Cheering the Boston Americans on with a Drum

Royal Rooters Cheering the Boston Americans on with a Drum. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

McGreevey led a small army of fanatical fans, widely known as the Royal Rooters. Their colorful antics were catnip to the local press. They didn’t just go to the games, they marched in a parade, behind a hired band as they sang a fight song called Tessie. Outside the ballpark they’d harass the opposing team’s fans. During games, McGreevey would dance an Irish reel on top of the dugout, leading the fans in chants and song. Sometimes a Royal Rooter ended up in jail for running onto the field and beating up an umpire.

McGreevey wasn’t a clown, though. He was extremely knowledgeable about baseball. He also had friends among the baseball stars, respected by fans and players alike. In 1908, he was hired as a coach for the Boston team during spring training. He actually sneaked into a posed team picture of the 1903 Americans and Pittsburgh Pirates just before the final game of the 1903 World Series.

Tessie

During that series, the first ever, Nuf Ced took his Royal Rooters to Pittsburgh by train. The Americans lost two of the first three games at home despite the Royal Rooters’ harassment of the Pirates, especially the great Honus Wagner. In Pittsburgh, they won three of the next four games.

The Royal Rooters were given special seats along the third base line for the 1903 champsionship series.

The Royal Rooters were given special seats along the third base line for the 1903 championship series. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

After Boston won Game 7 in Pittsburgh, Nuf Ced hired a photographer to take a picture of the Royal Rooters and had buttons made of the photo. The Royal Rooters wore them proudly on their return to Boston, the first known team-related trinkets. The Americans clinched the series at home with a win.

Pittsburgh star Tommy Leach said the fans won the game for the Americans because they sang Tessie so loud. “It was a real hum-dinger of a song, but it sort of got on your nerves after a while,” Leach said.

Prohibition

The Royal Rooters continued their exploits throughout the oughts and the teens. In 1916, Nuf Ced moved his bar to Tremont and Ruggles Street.

Third Base Saloon, home of the Royal Rooters. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

In 1920, Prohibition forced Nuf Ced to shut down the Third Base — though Babe Ruth’s sale to the New York Yankees may have had something to do with it as well. He donated his collection to the Boston Public Library, and the last Third Base is now the library’s South End branch.

McGreevey’s reopened (not under the original ownership) in 2008 at 911 Boylston St. The punk band Dropkick Murphys re-recorded a version of Tessie. You can hear it here.

We are indebted for this story to Boston’s Royal Rooters by Peter J. Nash. All photos are from the Boston Public Library.

You may also enjoy this story about the 1914 Miracle Team, the Boston Braves, here. This story about the Royal Rooters was updated in 2022.

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New England Gold Hoax of 1898: Greed Meets Moxie

There is, in fact, gold in seawater. And that is the kernel of truth upon which two men from Martha’s Vineyard would build the greatest financial scandal of 1898, the New England gold hoax.

Prescott Jernegan, gold hoax perpetrator

The two boyhood chums, one with connections and the other with guile and charm, would turn the financial world on its ear in 1898. And they put the name Lubec, Maine, on the tips of people’s tongues as they tried to understand how and why the million-dollar New England gold hoax had occurred.

At its essence the whole episode boiled down to simple greed. But in its details, it’s a fascinating story of lust for money overtaking personal principles. The scam showed how even the crudest of tricks can convince people to see what they desperately want to see.

Prescott Ford Jernegan

The idea behind the swindle probably started with Prescott Ford Jernegan. Born in Edgartown, Mass., Jernegan spent two adventurous years as a toddler, along with his sister Laura, on his father’s whaling ship before settling in to life in Edgartown.

Early in life he decided he wanted to be a minister. At 16, he entered Phillips Andover Academy, and at 22 he graduated from Brown College. From there he attended Newton Theological Institution.

Despite his privileged upbringing, by 1896 the 30-year old Rev. Jernegan found himself embittered by the hand life had dealt him. His chosen profession as a minister did not satisfy his idealism.

Minister to the Poor

In 1892 Jernegan served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Middletown, Conn. Arthur B. Ryan, a well-known jeweler and city councilor, had heard Jernegan preach and brought him to the church. Jernegan then tried to direct the church toward serving the poor, but his efforts went unappreciated.

First Baptist Church of Middletown today

Early in his tenure, he launched a broadside at the Trinity Episcopal Church in town. That church, he declared in a sermon, had turned away a man at the church door because he wore overalls. It shocked the town.

He went on to employ homeless men to work in the church and declared that the pews in the church would be free. He even eschewed a salary, saying he would accept what the people of the congregation thought his work was worth. That arrangement did not last long, and he soon negotiated a salary.

Jernegan’s constant hectoring of the congregation eventually put him on the outs with the church, and he moved on. He preached for a time in Newburyport, Mass., and in DeLand, Fla. His wife and childhood sweetheart, Betsey Evelyn Phinney, returned to Edgartown. When he visited her there in 1896 he was stricken with typhoid fever.

Ragged Edges

His frame of mind was bleak. He had major money worries. Later he would tell a newspaper: “My health had been at times very bad, and my wife was semi-invalid…

“I had always been hanging on to the ragged edges of things—a man of educated tastes, of delicate health, forced to exist on the pittances of a day laborer.

“All my life I had existed on the husks. I had been patronized by illiterate snobs. I had been underpaid, my mind had become embittered by a thousand acts of injustice.”

As he grew stronger, he began telling friends that he had a bizarre dream while in a fevered state. In the dream he witnessed seawater being turned into gold. And so the seeds of the gold hoax were planted.

The Schemer

Interior of A.I. Namm & Sons, 1898. Brooklyn Historical Society

Charles Fisher was, like Jernegan, a sea captain’s son. Also from Edgartown, he and Jernegan were childhood friends until both went on their separate ways.

Fisher would claim that he left the country to serve in the English Army. His military bearing seemed to support this, and on the strength of his personality he procured a job at the A.I. Namm & Son dry goods store in Brooklyn in 1893 as a floorwalker.

During nearly three years at the store, its manager became convinced that Fisher was a schemer, but a useful one. He would deploy Fisher to look into any suspected cases of employee theft, and invariably Fisher found the truth. He used his style to smooth over disgruntled customers. And though his boss suspected Fisher of dishonesty, he had no proof.

While floorwalkers had no access to cash, they did have the power to approve returns. Soon after hiring Fisher the store noted a spike in returns.

The store manager became concerned that Fisher was approving returns for items that were never purchased (and possibly never existed), with the proceeds coming back to Fisher through an accomplice. The store changed policy and required verification of all returns. The number of returns brought in by Fisher dropped dramatically.

Essentially a Schemer

“Fisher you must remember was essentially a schemer. I think he regarded the daily round of business here as humdrum and monotonous,” the manager told a newspaper. “He always had schemes in his head and seemed to like the excitement of them. He seemed to be fitted for that sort of thing rather than for the legitimate business which requires plodding, persistence and energy.”

Before Fisher quit in 1897, the store manager noticed two other strange things about Fisher. One, he began getting frequent visits at the store from a private investigator, William Phelan. And two, Fisher frequently disappeared for two or three days at a time, and he never talked about his whereabouts.

Fisher’s last visit to A.I. Namm was in early 1898 as a customer. He ordered enough furnishings to outfit a household and had them shipped to Lubec, Maine.

New England Gold Hoax at Full Speed

By the time Fisher shipped the goods to Lubec in 1898, the gold hoax was well underway. William Phelan, the private investigator, would later tell the story of how the scam started. Phelan eventually walked away from it, but not before helping it get rolling.

In the fall of 1896, Jernegan and Fisher approached Phelan about helping in a business proposition they were planning. He was to meet them in Providence and go from there to Niantic, Conn.

Whatever he was or wasn’t, Fisher was definitely a trained diver, and that was key to the plan. Though it sounds preposterous, what he and Jernegan planned was devilishly simple. Jernegan had contacted his old patron from the Middletown church, Arthur Ryan. Ryan, in turn, had contacted businessman A.N. Pierson, in Cromwell, Conn.

New England Gold Hoax Illustration, New York Herald

Jernegan planned to persuade the two men to back an interesting new venture – extracting gold from the ocean. He would take them to the end of a pier. They would step inside a shack, and Jernegan would show them his specially-built zinc-lined bucket. The men would be invited to pour mercury that they themselves had brought for the experiment into the bucket. Jernegan would then lower it into the ocean and activate a battery that he said would produce the current needed to extract gold from the ocean water.

While underwater, Fisher would guide himself to the end of a pier using a copper line he and Phelan had laid along the sea bottom. Phelan would manage the line and Fisher would spill out the mercury in the bucket replace it with mercury infused with gold. Then he would return to shore.

When the bucket was hauled to the surface, the mercury was given back to Ryan and Pierson, and they had it independently verified. It contained gold, of course, and Jernegan had his backers.

Electrolytic Marine Salts Co.

Using Jernegan’s additional connections in Newburyport from his time preaching there, the two soon finished forming their company. Arthur Ryan served as president. Pierson and Jernegan made up the board along with William Usher, owner of a shoe factory in Newburyport, and A.P. Sawyer, one-time president of the National Capital Telephone Company, also of Newburyport. The Electrolytic Marine Salts Company was in business.

Phelan backed out of the scheme, he said. He initially had some trouble getting paid his expenses, but after that he said he simply watched and listened for word of the gold hoax as it unfolded.

The Investors Rush In

With offices opening quickly in New York, London and Boston, the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company announced its plans to the world. The papers were quick to spread the news that the company was accepting investors and that it would soon harvest tons of gold from the sea.

The company created elaborate prospectuses to entice investors, and Jernegan relentlessly pursued investors among his former schoolmates and acquaintances.

Gold hoax prospectus

The money poured in, mostly from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. The company now had to set up shop and start operations. Looking for a place that would avoid prying eyes, they settled on Lubec, Maine. Its extremely high tides and strong currents, they explained, made it the perfect location. There they leased a grist mill, constructed a series of underwater “accumulators” to harvest the gold, and employed more than 100 men.

In Lubec, Fisher simply repeated his act, slipping under the water and salting the accumulators with gold to be brought to the surface. Then it would be analyzed and shipped to the company’s offices in Boston. As the gold continued to come into Boston, the word spread and more investors were induced to buy shares.

Jernegan and Fisher would use some of the proceeds from the gold to buy more that could be “harvested” and shipped back to Boston. They salted away the rest of the money from the gold hoax.

By summer of 1898, the company had taken in nearly $1 million in investor cash. Even counting the costs of the operation the two men were ahead by several hundred thousand dollars. And they planned to continue operations.

Gold Hoax Ends

The gold hoax came to a halt, however, when Phelan sent word that he wanted more money. If he didn’t get it, he said, he would tell what he knew of the company. Jernegan and Fisher didn’t pay, and Phelan made good on his threat, publishing his story in the New York Herald.

By the time investors arrived in Lubec to demand answers about the gold hoax, Jernegan and Fisher had fled. Fisher was never heard from again. Jernegan went to Europe with his wife and son. When contacted there he explained that Fisher had made off with the secret formulas that made the accumulators work. Jernegan said he was chasing down Fisher so he could get the plant back up and operating.

For several months, plant managers in Lubec were so sure of their process that they continued to try to make the machinery work to harvest gold. Before long, however, all activity stopped – except for police inquiries about the gold hoax.

Lubec about a decade after the gold hoax.

Aftermath

A.P. Sawyer of Newburyport probably suffered the most from the gold hoax. An otherwise honest man, he became so despondent about steering friends toward the investment that he died within a week after the scandal broke.

Jernegan’s younger brother Marcus, who he had joined in running the gold hoax was briefly detained. He forfeited all the money in his possession. Jernegan had also sold $800 worth of stock to his sister Laura.

Jernegan obtained good legal advice; his lawyers managed to keep him out of court. He argued that he had taken only his fair share of the proceeds from the gold hoax, and no more, and so could not be charged with embezzlement. And his knowledge of the scheme was not easy to prove. So long as Fisher was missing, Jernegan could claim he was duped.

He traveled from Paris to Austria, and from there, apparently suffering an attack of conscience, sent $85,000 back to the United States to be given to the company’s investors. In his journal, he recalls sending more. In the end backers of the gold hoax were paid 36 cents on the dollar. The money came from company accounts, the funds returned by Jernegan and proceeds from the sale of company assets.

By 1906 Jernegan’s wife had returned to Edgartown, and she divorced him. Jernegan himself spent two years in Washington state before moving to the Philippines. There he became a school teacher and authored several books about the country’s history.

He eventually returned to the United States, living in California and Texas. He had two more marriages, neither stuck, and he returned to Edgartown once to visit his mother. In 1927, he authored the book Man and his God. He died in 1942.

This story about the New England Gold Hoax was updated in 2022.

Images: Middletown Baptist Church By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19412723The gold hoax was one of several that bamboozled New Englanders. Read about them here.

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Child Labor Exposed: The Legacy of Photographer Lewis Hine

A camera made an improbable weapon against the growing evil of child labor in the early 20th century. Then, children as young as five years old worked long hours in dirty, dangerous canneries and mills in New England.

Lewis Wickes Hine, a former schoolteacher, cleverly faked his way into places where he wasn’t welcome and took photos of scenes that weren’t meant to be seen. He traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, exposing himself to great danger. His exertions ultimately received their reward with a law banning child labor in 1938.

Lewis Hine with Michael McNelis, 8-year-old newsboy. Michael had just recovered from his second attack of pneumonia. He was found selling papers in a rainstorm. Philadelphia, Pa.

He was born in Oshkosh, Wisc., on Sept. 26, 1874, and came late to photography. He was a 30-year-old prep school teacher at the Fieldston School in New York City when he got a bright idea: He would bring his students to Ellis Island to photograph the thousands of immigrants who arrived every day. Over five years he took more than 200 plates; but more importantly, he realized he could use photography to try to end child labor.

“There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated,” he said.

Child Labor Committee

In 1908, Hine got a job for the National Child Labor Committee, reformers who fought the growing practice of child labor.

Between 1880 and 1900, the number of children between 5 and 10 working for wages had increased by 50 percent. One in six small children were then mining coal, running spinning machines, selling newspapers on the street or otherwise gainfully employed. They were robbed of an education and a childhood, trapped in a downward spiral of poverty.

Newsies, telegraph messengers and young mill workers were exposed to vice and abused by their employers, their customers and even their parents.

Hartford newsboy Tony Casale, 11, in 1909. He had been selling newspapers for four years, and sometimes until 10 p.m. His boss said his father bit him on the arm for not selling more papers. Said Tony, "Drunken men say bad words to us."

Hartford newsboy Tony Casale, 11, in 1909. He had been selling newspapers for four yers, and sometimes until 10 p.m. His boss said his father bit him on the arm for not selling more papers. Said Tony, “Drunken men say bad words to us.”

Graflax

Over the years, Hine photographed children working in gritty industrial settings that inspired a wave of moral outrage. With a new camera called the Graflex he took photos of child labor throughout New England.

Addie Card, a 10-year-old spinner in the North Pownal [Vt.] Cotton Mill, 1910. Hine described her as ‘Anaemic little spinner.’ Her image appeared on a postage stamp and in a Reebok ad, and she inspired the novel ‘Counting on Grace.’

Hine traveled far beyond the giant textile mills of Lowell and Lawrence, Mass. He went to silk and paper mills in Holyoke, Mass., textile and upholstering plants in Manchester, N.H., a cotton mill in North Pownall, Vt., and cotton mills in Scituate, R.I.

Phoebe Thomas, an 8-year-old Syrian girl, at 6 a.m. She was on her way to work cutting sardines at the Seacoast Canning Co., in Eastport, Maine. Later that day she nearly cut her thumb off.

He went to the canneries in Eastport, Maine, where he saw children as young as seven cutting fish with butcher knives. Accidents happened — a lot. “The salt water gits into the cuts and they ache,” said one boy.

One day in August 1911 Hine saw an 8-year-old Syrian girl, Phoebe Thomas, running home from the sardine factory all alone. Her hand and arm were bathed with blood, and she was crying at the top of her voice. She had cut the end of her thumb nearly off, but her boss sent her alone, since her mother was busy working.

Reluctant Employers

Employers didn’t want their practices exposed, so Hine used subterfuge.

Photo historian Daile Kaplan described how Hine operated:

Nattily dressed in a suit, tie, and hat, Hine the gentleman actor and mimic assumed a variety of personas — including Bible salesman, postcard salesman, and industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery — to gain entrance to the workplace.

Hine might tell a plant manager he worked as an industrial photographer taking pictures of machines. At the last minute he would ask if a child laborer could stand near the machine to show its size. He also interviewed mill owners, parents and local officials, pioneering tactics still used by 60 Minutes.

Cigar factory at 205 Atwells Ave. in Providence, R.I. Hine wrote, 205 Atwells Av., Providence, R.I. "Eight year old boy and ten year old girl are stripping. This room is the living, -sleeping-and-working room and adjoins the store. Nov 23, 1912. Very dirty and ill-kept."

Cigar factory. Hine wrote, 205 Atwells Av., Providence, R.I. “Eight year old boy and ten year old girl are stripping. This room is the living, -sleeping-and-working room and adjoins the store. Nov 23, 1912. Very dirty and ill-kept.”

Hine confronted public officials with evidence and asked for a response. He asked the children about their lives. He told one heartbreaking story about a child laborer who worked in a cannery, so young and beaten down she couldn’t tell him her name.

Russell Freedman, in his book, Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor, wrote, “At times, he was in real danger, risking physical attack when factory managers realized what he was up to…he put his life on the line in order to record a truthful picture of working children in early twentieth-century America.”

Farm Labor

That picture included child labor in rural New England, such as in Connecticut’s tobacco fields and on Western Massachusetts farms. Hine photographed eight-year-old Jack driving a load of hay and taking care of livestock. He was ‘a type of child who is being overworked in many rural districts,’ wrote Hine.

Rural accident in Western Massachusetts. Rural Accident. Twelve-year old Clinton Stewart and his mowing machine which cut off his hand. See Hine Report, August 1915.

By 1912, the NCLC persuaded Congress to create a United States Children’s Bureau in the Department of Labor and Department of Commerce. The Children’s Bureau worked closely with the NCLC to investigate abuses of child labor.

Years of political battles followed, until finally in 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law prohibits any interstate commerce of goods produced by children under the age of 16. President Franklin D. Roosevel t signed it into law on June 25, 1938.

A Typical Fisher Boy at “T” Wharf. Boston.

By then, the public had lost interest in Lewis Hine’s work. He died two years later, broke, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. His son offered to donate his photographs to the Museum of Modern Art, but MOMA rebuffed him. Today, Hine’s photographs of child labor belong to collections at the Library of Congress and the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.

The National Child Labor Committee Collection at the Library of Congress consists of more than 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives.

And today a Lewis Hine award goes to people who have done outstanding work in helping young people.

This story about child labor was updated in 2022. Read about another view of child labor here. All photos courtesy National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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Boston Tong Wars Explode in 1907 Chinatown Massacre

As evening arrived in Boston on August 2, 1907, Chinatown merchants began closing their shops and laundries for the day. Breaking through the mundane clanking and clattering of city life, a firecracker exploded. It was a signal to a crew of 10 thugs – hatchetmen – assembled on tiny Oxford Place to begin the tong wars.

Chinatown in Boston, site of the 1907 tong wars.

After a few short minutes of chaos, punctuated by gunshots and stabbings, the street emptied of people. Left behind were three dead men and many injured, one fatally.

The Chinese tong wars had erupted in a shocking massacre.

Tong Wars

The Boston Police, after making inquiries, developed a theory of the case.

The Hip Sing tong was emerging as a powerful new Chinese gang and stealing territory from the better-established On Leong tong. It tried to recruit members from Boston’s Chinese business community. Facing reluctance, the members of the Hip Sing decided to recruit thugs to carry out a raid. The objective was to demonstrate the need for Hip Sing protection, and to punish some of the On Leong loyalists.

The incident that night became New England’s biggest entry in the history of the tong wars. But it wasn’t ultimately a Boston story. The violence had its roots, oddly enough, in the murky world of New York politics. There, rival tongs had pitted different wings of the New York legal and political establishments against one another.

The tong wars would ultimately slop over into Boston.

The case would eventually reach right to the top. Massachusetts’ industrialist governor and its patrician lieutenant governor would be asked to choose sides: the people of Massachusetts or the Republican powers in New York.

Tong Wars Come North

Boston Police in 1930 in Chinatown post a sign in Chinese warning against starting a Tong War. (Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection).

Boston Police in 1930 in Chinatown post a sign in Chinese warning against the tong wars. (Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection).

The word tong means “meeting house” or “hall.” Chinese-Americans initially formed tongs as sort of civic associations to protect their members from unfair business practices and discrimination and to promote their own business interests. Out of these, however, grew the criminal tongs of the late 1800s and early 1900s. These secret societies specialized in gambling, prostitution, opium dealing and protection rackets. It was a lucrative and violent business.

The tongs started, and were strongest, in the cities of California where the Chinese population was larger. Chinese immigration to the United States began in earnest in the mid-1800s, as Chinese came to the country seeking work as miners and laborers. Twenty-five thousand Chinese lived in the U.S. by 1851; that number increased to roughly 110,000 by 1890.

As they grew, the immigrant communities established businesses that served both the Chinese community and the Americans. However, the increase in prosperity opened the Chinese to discrimination and criminal harassment by native workers who resented their presence. This situation initially gave rise to the tongs — and to the tong wars.

By 1900, the Chinese population waned after Congress passed several laws that stifled its growth. With few Chinese coming to this country, and many leaving to return home with their savings, the Chinese influx had ended. Except some, of course, wanted to stay. Warry Charles was just such a man.

Warry Charles

At first glance, Warry Charles seemed an odd man to be involved in tong wars. The civic and business aspects of the tongs no doubt would appeal to him. But the criminal ones? The picture was not so clear.

Charles was born in China in 1857 and had come to America via San Francisco and New Orleans as an 11-year-old boy. He was thoroughly Americanized. He attended business school in Nebraska, where he met and married his American wife, Mary Whiting, who came from a prosperous family.

The Charleses moved to New York, and Warry got jobs as a ticket agent for the Santa Fe Railroad and a floorwalker at a department store. He ran a small business selling stoves and hardware.

Charles also had connections to government. He was an official interpreter in the U.S. Customs House, and an officer for the immigration service, enforcing immigration laws among the Chinese arriving in New York.

There are hints, however, that he was also involved in less upstanding pursuits. He ran a poolroom on Darcy Street in New York’s Chinatown. And in 1893, he was arrested for extorting money from Chinese immigrants, threatening to deport them if he wasn’t paid.

The Chinese community accused him of extortion, bribery and using his influence with authorities to push out competition. And there is no doubt he was active in the Hip Sing tong, trying to expand its membership.

What happened in Boston after the Oxford Place massacre resulted from the tong wars in New York.

Gangster Ties

Hip Sing had been started by a flamboyant gangster in direct opposition to On Leong and its longtime leader Tom Lee. On Leong had ingratiated itself with the Tammany political machine, providing information in exchange for police protection.

The Hip Sing tong wanted to shift the balance of power with the help of men like Warry Charles. By 1896, however, Charles’ enemies pressed in on him in New York. After one of them assaulted him, he closed up his pool hall and moved to Boston. However, he left his wife and family behind in New York.

In Boston, he established a laundry that flourished and added several storefronts. And in 1903, with a $400 contribution to open an office, he established a Hip Sing chapter in Boston.

The Hip Sings in Boston

Boston Police examine the latest victim of the tong wars in 1930. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

By the time of the 1907 tong wars in Chinatown, Charles claimed to have curtailed his involvement in Hip Sing. But soon after the killings, police came looking for him.

In rounding up nine of the alleged shooters, police noted at least three carried Warry Charles’ business card. And several of them specifically asked police to contact Charles with news of their arrest.

In New York, where the tong leaders had longstanding relationships with their protectors in government, this may have been standard practice. Perhaps they were letting the authorities know which side they were on in the tong wars.

In Boston, it only raised eyebrows among the police. They began asking around about Warry Charles, and the story they heard was damning.

Suspicion

A series of Chinese-Americans interviewed by police all told very similar stories. Charles, they said, was upset that the Hip Sing was not growing fast enough and he wanted to attack those businessmen reluctant to join. The goal: Frighten them into membership. The result: the tong wars.

Several people gave detailed accounts of Charles’ crusade, including explicit descriptions of money offered in exchange for participating in the attack. Another witness testified that he saw Charles provide the guns to the men involved. Police arrested Charles was arrested and charged with organizing the entire attack.

While the evidence was building, the Hip Sing leader in New York, a man named Mock Duck, took pains to tell the New York press he had retired. He had no involvement in the Boston violence, which he feared would soon spread to New York.

Tong Wars Trial

Back in Boston, a jury made quick work of the case following 33 days of trial. Despite Charles’ flawless English and American mannerisms, he was convicted as the ringleader, with four others, of the Oxford Place massacre. The weight of the evidence against him was overwhelming.

One witness told the jury: “Charles said that he would have to do some killing and make the Chinese businessmen so afraid that all of them would join our society.”

The judge handed down his sentence in March of 1908: Warry Charles would die by electrocution at the Charlestown Prison.

Wife Battles to Save Charles

By now, the Charles story gained an audience. His wealth, in particular, seemed to surprise a society that thought of Chinese as living in ghettos and doing other people’s wash. And his friends, who had stayed mostly quiet during the trial, began stepping up.

Mary Charles, and their son Warren, began a public crusade in support of Charles. Warren, a veteran of the Spanish-American war, was now a police officer in New York. Together they began tapping Warren’s military friends and the Hip Sing political networks in New York to put together a $10,000 defense fund to spring Charles.

And the Hip Sing political machinery sprang into action to help, too. Hip Sing was then providing information to New York’s Parkhurst Commission, a private organization bent on exposing and cleaning up prostitution and gambling in New York.

The On Leongs, meanwhile, were aligned with New York’s district attorney. The records show several cases where the Parkhurst Commission, working with friendly police, would raid On Leong operations. The district attorney, meanwhile, relying on On Leong’s ‘honest’ leader, Tom Lee, would target Hip Sing.

Parkhurst Commission

The point man for the Parkhurst Commission was Frank Moss. A spotlight-seeking criminal lawyer, he led the investigation to free Charles. As appeals and requests for a new trial failed, Charles’s chances for freedom grew slim.

In 1909, three of the men convicted with Charles declined to seek a further stay of execution in hopes of a pardon from the governor. On October 12, they were electrocuted in Charlestown Prison. On Leong members celebrated upon hearing the news.

Charles and another Hip Sing member, Joe Yuen, had made a request for clemency. The governor granted a stay through November so the case could be considered. Charles’ fate now rested in the hands of Massachusetts Gov. Eben Draper and Lt. Gov. Louis Frothingham, who would conduct a hearing on Charles’ request.

While Charles was fortunate that both men were Republicans with political leanings similar to his New York connections, Massachusetts was not known for commuting death sentences. The public had little sympathy for Chinese criminals, even if they were wrongly convicted.

The Final Hearing

Frank Moss took sides in the tong wars.

When Frothingham convened the governor’s council to hear the appeal, Frank Moss took on the task of building the case for Charles. Moss explained that on many occasions in New York Charles had used his Hip Sing connections to gather information about On Leong gambling operations. He said Charles had often provided confidential information that allowed the Parkhurst Commission to break up protected On Leong operations.

When the Boston murders occurred, the On Leong saw a chance to implicate Charles in the tong wars. Working within the Chinese community, they recruited the people who would testify that Charles had orchestrated the massacre.

Witnesses came forward who, only six months earlier, had implicated Charles. Now they said they took money to lie. Most damning, a witness who said he saw Charles providing the hatchet men with guns now said he had made it up.

The bottom line, Moss said, was that Charles’ enemies from New York were getting the Massachusetts’ courts to do their dirty work for them.

When he rested the case, public opinion was divided. The lawyers had not cleared Charles, but they had muddied the waters. Charles’ supporters demanded the governor pardon him.

His enemies said that the governor’s council shouldn’t hear new evidence. It was not a judicial body, and didn’t properly handle witnesses.

In one remarkable passage, one of Charles’ supporters made a showboating statement that he knew who had orchestrated the crime. But he would not name the person.

The council, meanwhile, privately made its own rule under which it intended to operate. It would not recommend pardoning Charles, no matter what. It didn’t intend to stand in place of the jury on deciding guilt or innocence.

So instead, it recommended that Charles’ sentence be commuted to life in prison. Governor Draper agreed, though he carefully noted that he only followed the council’s recommendation.

For his part, Warry Charles expressed disappointment. He had expected a pardon. Still, his supporters insisted, he would fight on for a new trial and parole.

Postscript

The tong wars did not end with Warry Charles. There were several other flare-ups in the years before World War II.

The tongs, in fact, still exist. If you walk through Chinatown (in Boston and elsewhere) and you know how to read Chinese, you will find their addresses. But the bloody tong wars have ended.

Charles never made another bid for freedom. He died in prison in 1915 of natural causes.

If you enjoyed this story about the tong wars, you may also want to read about the New England roots of the Chinese revolution here. This story about the Boston tong wars was updated in 2022.

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NH Senator Convicted of Blackmailing Lester Hunt

A jury convicted Styles Bridges, a U.S. senator from New Hampshire, of attempting to blackmail Wyoming Sen. Lester Hunt. Under the deal, Bridges offered to squelch criminal charges against Lester Hunt’s son if he resigned.

N.H. Senator Styles Bridges (1939)

The conviction occurred in 2016, the crime in 1954. And the jury consisted of an audience at a play built around a mock trial of Styles Bridges, who orchestrated the blackmail attempt of Lester Hunt.

The persecution of Lester Hunt ended in tragedy.

Styles Bridges

It would be nice to be able to forget about historical characters like Styles Bridges. Unfortunately it’s difficult. The official New Hampshire governor’s mansion bears his name, as does a highway and various other taxpayer-purchased facilities.

An export from his home state of Maine, Bridges came to power in 1934 when he won election as governor of New Hampshire. He moved on to the U.S. Senate in 1937, and rose to the rank of chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

A favorite of William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, he made his mark as an ally of Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy, who orchestrated his famous red scare and lavender scare. Bridges avidly collected rumors and innuendo about his political enemies — and even his allies.

Bridges is probably best known for the quip that he started out one of the poorest men in the Senate and died a millionaire. Even then, politics was a useful business for a man on the make.

Lester Hunt

Still, his sleazy persecution of Lester Hunt ranks right up there as one of his most notable achievements. The events took place in 1953 and 1954. The Senate was controlled by Democrats by a one-vote margin. McCarthy had ripped through Washington like a tornado, and his antics still played well with the public, though he was losing some steam.

Lester Hunt

Today we understand McCarthy’s moral bankruptcy, but in 1954 he enjoyed the support of a wide spectrum of politicians, among them President Dwight Eisenhower and future presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Propaganda cartoon used to fuel Red Scare.

McCarthy could make political stars, so no wonder Bridges wanted to curry favor with him. In 1953, Lester Hunt’s son was arrested in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, on a morals charge. Hard to believe such a thing exists in Washington, but it did.

As a first offense, police charged him with a misdemeanor and asked his father to get his son straightened out. And there the matter stood, until Bridges and Idaho Sen. Herman Welker cooked up a scheme to use the information to get control of the Senate for the Republicans.

Lester Hunt

Lester Hunt, a dentist, won two consecutive terms as governor of Wyoming. He then won election to the U.S. Senate with an overwhelming margin.

A Democrat, he supported low-cost health insurance, the expansion of Social Security and an end to racial segregation in the District of Columbia. He also criticized Joe McCarthy, even sponsoring a bill to let people sue members of Congress for slander.

No wonder the two McCarthy Republicans wanted to undo Lester Hunt.

Bridges and Welker approached Hunt and told him they would have his son prosecuted and publicize the arrest if he didn’t resign. When he refused, they made good on their threat. They bullied the prosecutor, telling him he’d lose his job if he didn’t take the case to trial. And they got friendly newspapers to write about Hunt’s homosexual son and his arrest.

The trial shattered Hunt, and in 1954 he announced he would not seek reelection. He then shot himself in in the head in his Senate office.

Columnist Drew Pearson wrote of the episode:

The incident was one of the lowest types of political pressure this writer has seen in many years.

Author Rodger McDaniel has revived the story in his book, Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins, The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt. The story has also been turned into a play.

This story about Lester Hunt was updated in 2022.

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Murder on the Titanic: Rhode Island Survivor Never Forgot

The chance to board the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic was too great a thrill to pass up for the adventurous young Bertha Mulvihill, and adventure she got. Like all the passengers on the Titanic, the sinking of the vessel gave her a hard look at her own mortality.

More than that, however, it brought her face to face with panic and dishonor, hostility and cowardice and even murder. The tragedy would dampen her adventurous spirit forever. She would from that night on avoid the water, never to sail or even swim again. And her rescue, and the events leading up to it, was a story she would retell for the rest of her life.

Bertha Mulvihill

Mulvihill’s life up until April 11, 1912 had already been an adventure by most standards, and a rather pleasant one at that. She had left her native Ireland as a young woman to live with her aunt Kate in Providence, R.I. After trying different jobs, at 24 she landed a job waitressing at the Perry House in Newport.

She was also engaged to an Englishman, Henry Noon, who had a good job as a master welder at Browne and Sharpe Manufacturing in Providence. Henry gave her three gold treasures: a pocket watch, a bracelet and a cross on a chain.

In the summer of 1911 she travelled on the Lusitania to Westmeath, Ireland, to visit her large family. She stayed through the winter, helping her sister Kitty prepare for her wedding in the spring of 1912. By April, Bertha wanted to go home for her own wedding to Henry. She decided to surprise him and return to Providence, where she would stay with her sister.

Boarding the Titanic at Queenstown

When Bertha heard about the maiden voyage of the Titanic, she didn’t hesitate. She bought a third-class ticket for 7 pounds, 15 shillings (about $1,000 today) to sail from the ship’s last port of call in Queenstown (now Cobh, County Cork). Most of the passengers who embarked with her were third-class Irish immigrants, hoping for a better life in America.

Two of Bertha’s Irish friends boarded with her: Maggie Daly, 30, and her cousin Eugene Daly, a 29-year-old mechanic. Eugene played Erin’s Lament on his uilleann pipes for his fellow third-class passengers as the Titanic sailed from Queenstown. He would later claim $50 for their loss. Salvagers found similar pipes, perhaps his, from the wreck.

Titanic at Southampton docks just before departing

Bertha and Maggie shared a room, sleeping in bunk beds next to the boilers in the lower deck.

What happened next has been told countless times: Capt. Edward Smith plowed through the icy waters 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, ignoring warnings about icebergs. Just before midnight the Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side. The ship’s bell rang three times.

Panic and Confusion

Bertha was nearly thrown from her bed. Eugene came to check on her and Maggie and found them awake and confused. He urged them to get dressed, and they threw coats over their nightdresses. Bertha grabbed the jewelry Henry gave her, her rosary beads and her prayer book. She, Eugene and Maggie climbed to the deck above them, but they couldn’t get to the outer deck.

“Every time we went up a stair they were locked,” recalled Bertha. The doors would be locked until the upper-class passengers boarded lifeboats. Two-thirds of the first-class passengers survived the sinking of the Titanic, but only a third of the third-class passengers did.

Passengers were shrieking and water was coming in. Bertha, Maggie and Eugene reached the top of a passage and couldn’t get out, so they knelt and prayed in the gangway. Bertha saw a sailor she met on the voyage and cried, “We’re lost!” The sailor told them they were in danger and showed them a way to the outer deck.

When they reached the deck, they saw no boats going off. They went to the second cabin deck. Some of the men from steerage were screaming and fighting to get into the lifeboats,

Bertha told the Providence Journal, “Capt. Smith stood at the head of the passageway. He had a gun in his hand.”

“I’ll Shoot”

Suvrviors aboard a lifeboat from the Titanic.

“Boys,” he said, “you’ve got to do your duty here. It’s the women and children first, and I’ll shoot the first man who jumps into a boat.”

Bertha may have been mistaken about the identity of the officer with a revolver. Many survivors, however, said they heard gunshots fired as the Titanic sank. Eugene later wrote a detailed description of an actual shooting.

According to Eugene, a terrible crowd stood about. “Two men tried to break through and he shot them both. I saw him shoot them. I saw them lying there after they were shot. One seemed to be dead. The other was trying to pull himself up at the side of the deck, but he could not. I tried to get to the boat also, but was afraid I would be shot and stayed back. Afterwards there was another shot and I saw the officer himself lying on the deck. They told me he shot himself, but I did not see him.”

Eugene dived into the water and grabbed onto a collapsible lifeboat. Bertha and Maggie jumped into a lifeboat as it was lowered. Bertha described the leap as a distance of three building stories. She broke her ribs when she landed and other passengers jumped on top of her.

The Longest Night

In the overcrowded lifeboat, Bertha was thirsty, nauseous, frightened, wet, cold and in pain.

She watched the lights of the Titanic as the water crept higher and higher and then went out. As the ship began to go dark, she heard two explosions. Bertha recalled the sinking of the Titanic at 2:30 a.m.

“The vessel quivered and seemed to settle,” she said. “Then she leaned over on the other side a little and slowly sank to her grave. I think I heard the band playing.” The Titanic took with her 1,522 lives.

How the Titanic sank. Sketch by L.P. Skidmore on board Carpathia

From the boat she saw Margaret Rice. Margaret, a woman from her hometown in Ireland, stood on the deck of the Titanic, doomed to go down with the ship along with her four boys clinging to her skirts.

The Evil Ice Cake

All through the night Bertha watched as a large ice cake drifted back and forth, irritating her every time it bumped into the lifeboat. According to the Encyclopedia Titanica, she noticed the ice cake that kept ramming the side of the boat. As the night passed, it annoyed her more and more.

The ice cake seemed to follow them, and always hit the lifeboat just below Bertha.

Through the cold hours she came to view the ice cake as some sort of evil living entity taunting her. … Finally just before dawn a smaller “ice cake” floated up and it came between the bigger “evil” ice cake and the lifeboat just as the bigger one was about to make another assault. When the smaller ice cake blocked the bigger one, Miss Mulvihill began to laugh out loud uncontrollably because her enemy had been thwarted.

She later realized she’d spent much of that horrible night playing a mind game with ice cakes. That way, she could ignore the tragedy, the hunger, the cold and a couple of broken ribs.

Rescue

Dawn had just started to break when she saw the lights of the RMS Carpathia way off in the distance.

“I spoke to the nearest sailor about it and asked if it possibly could be a vessel coming to us,” she later told an interviewer. “He said it must be a ship’s light but someone spoke up and said it probably was a boat’s light.

“Then two big green lights broke through the mist above it, and we knew it was a ship coming to the rescue. We cheered and cheered. Some cried. I just sat still and offered up a little prayer and (said to) the blessed mother that if I survived I would name my firstborn child Mary, which I did.”

London newsboy Ned Parfett with news of the disaster

Three days later the Carpathia landed in New York with the 705 Titanic survivors. Henry saw his fiancee’s name on the passenger list in the newspaper. He and Ted Norton, Bertha’s brother-in-law, boarded a train to New York and made their way through the crowds at the dock.

Officials told Bertha and the other Titanic survivors they would have to go to the hospital. Despite her broken ribs, Bertha sneaked away and hid among the luggage. Then she slipped off the vessel and got lost in the crowd. Finally she spotted Henry and crept up behind him, covered his eyes with her hands and said, “Guess who?”

A man on the dock gave her a felt hat, now displayed in a museum in Ireland. Another man gave up his berth on the crowded train to Providence so Bertha could sleep.

Home, Sweet Home

At home she found herself a celebrity, giving interviews to newspaper reporters about her ordeal on the Titanic. She and Henry married in August, four months after her return. A crowd gathered outside her house, and she climbed out a back window to escape them, tearing her veil on a rosebush.

From all accounts, Bertha lived a good life. She and Henry had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood. They lived on Chalkstone Avenue in Providence, then moved to a home on Wyndham Avenue in 1928. Bertha created beautiful gardens around her home.

Base of the World War I monument in Memorial Square, Providence. Photo courtesy LIbrary of Congress.

Henry worked setting the print on large bronze plaques on statues and monuments. You can see Henry’s work on the plate on the World War I monument in Providence.

Eugene Daly survived and moved to New York City. He sent a postcard to Bertha, inspiring speculation among Titanic junkies that he had a crush on her. “Rem. me to be ever you friend,” he wrote.

Henry died in 1945. Bertha died on Oct. 15, 1959, and lies buried at St Francis Cemetery, Pawtucket, R.I.

We are indebted to Hidden History of Rhode Island by Glen Laxton and Encyclopedia Titanica. This story about the Titanic was updated in 2022. Images: Feature image of Titanic By Teufelbeutel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17655915.

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Sandwich, Mass., in 1774 – Setting the Battle Lines for Revolution

To get an idea of how intense the feuding between the British loyalists and the Colonial rebels was in 1774 in New England, you could spend a few hours scouring the history books at the library. Or you could go down to Cape Cod and get lunch and a beer in Sandwich, Mass., at the Dan’l Webster Inn, once the site of the Fessenden Tavern. From there, you could walk the less-than-a-quarter-mile to the old Newcomb Tavern. In 1774, that walk would have taken you directly from rebel territory into loyalist territory. And on the way you could imagine the events of October 10 of that year.

On that day in Sandwich, a mob dragged six of the town’s most well-known men to the town green and forced them on to a scaffold.

Nathaniel Freeman

Days earlier, the six men had attacked a brash, 33-year-old critic of British rule. Now the crowd seemed poised to exact revenge. A judge had already ordered them fined for the assault, but the the rabble demanded more. The attackers were ordered to condemn their own actions, apologize profusely and declare themselves cowards.

The choice appeared clear. Stand up for the British Crown and take the consequences, or grovel. All six men caved. Such was the weakness of support for British rule in 1774 Massachusetts.

Sandwich, Mass., Divided

If anyone had any doubt that Britain was losing its grip on the American colonies, their eyes should have been opened by the public shaming of Benjamin Bourn, John Jennings, Nehemiah Webb, Samuel Smith, Thomas Smith and Samuel Dillingham. Those names are still familiar in Sandwich today.

Nathaniel Freeman, the victim of the attack, would play a significant role in the revolution gestating in town like Sandwich. He was an unlikely man for the crowd to rally around. Freeman, a young doctor, had a reputation as an outspoken Whig and a blowhard.

By 1774, the old system of colonial rule had stalled out in America. Young men looking to rise up in the world found too few rewards to go around.

The issue of British rule divided Sandwich, along with most of America. On the Tory side stood the militant supporters of the king, as well as moderates who believed in British rule, but had some grievances with their treatment.

The Whigs also included a large moderate group. These men and women believed in Whig principles, but feared provoking England. But the Whig extremists, like Freeman younger and with less to lose, pushed the country toward open confrontation with Britain.

Even families had divided loyalties. And in a small town like Sandwich, no one could avoid political debate, especially in the taverns.

The Taverns of Sandwich, Mass.

The Newcomb Tavern, a Tory stronghold, dates to 1693. John Newcomb ran it until his death. Then his widow Bathsheba married Timothy Ruggles, a prominent royalist who would later flee the colonies.

Ruggles had left Sandwich long before 1774 to settle a large land grant in western Massachusetts, and the ownership of the tavern passed to John Newcomb, Jr., also a royalist.

Newcomb Tavern in Sandwich, Mass., today

Less than half a mile away stood the Fessenden Tavern, next to the current Dan’l Webster Inn. Its proprietor, Benjamin Fessenden, was a rebel. He later served on the town’s Committee of Correspondence, the rebels’ shadow government that coordinated the colonies’ activities. Rebels gathered at the Fessenden to make their plans.

The East India Company

By 1774, the debate had turned bitter. In that year, England insisted on propping up the interests of the British East India Company. A collection of wealthy merchants owned it for the purpose of exploiting India’s resources.

Working hand in glove with the English government, the company found it excruciatingly expensive to maintain control over India. The British Parliament came up with a plan to help out this well-connected company while not directly tapping the public till. It exempted the East India Company from paying tax on the tea it exported to the American colonies.

Company portrait of an officer of the East India Company

They wanted to steer customers to the now-cheaper tea of the East India Company and away from competitors. And when the competitors did manage to sell tea, a percentage of their sales would flow through to the government in the form of taxes.

The colonists had seen this taxation strategy before. It gave a competitive advantage to those businesses with the best political connections. But by then the game was essentially up in the colonies.

As an economic strategy, it worked — somewhat at least — in the early days. Colonists could be rewarded with land in return for their labor and consumption of preferred British goods. The local merchants – hand-picked to represent the large companies—could prosper and reliably support the Crown.

But as desirable land grew scarcer and the merchant classes grew larger, more people depended on commerce for their living. As a result, they had less willingness to prop up British businesses at the expense of their own. From this anger grew the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773.

The Boston Tea Party

Provocations

Parliament responded swiftly to the Tea Party in 1774. It ordered the Port of Boston closed and stripped local governments of their power to elect or appoint local officials. Parliament also provided that Britain could remove people accused of a crime to England for trial rather than have them tried in America.

These provocations outraged the young men of Sandwich, Mass. While the older, more settled families might prefer to avoid confronting the King, the younger generation of Whigs, along with some of their more idealistic elders, wanted to fight.

In Sandwich, these hotheads elected Nathaniel Freeman as one of their leaders. He then proved an effective, if abrasive, choice.

In September, the town created a Body of the People to direct the protest. This quasi-legislative body put order to the anger and directed Freeman and others to oppose Britain more directly. In a well-orchestrated bit of political theater, Freeman and a group of at least several hundred supporters took to the steps of the Barnstable Courthouse and blockaded the judge from entering. They declared they were preventing the courts from enforcing British tyranny.

Though not the first courthouse blockaded by protesters, it was an early example of direct action against Britain. The rebels were jubilant. On their way home, they accosted a peddler and demanded he give up any tea he wanted to sell. Finally persuaded that he had none, the rebels went on their way. Upon returning to Sandwich, however, they discovered the loyalists had taken down their liberty pole, erected as a symbol of opposition. (The liberty pole was on Main Street near what is now the Sandwich Public Library.)

Retaliation

It didn’t take long to arrest the offenders, as the usual suspects were easy enough to identify. The rebel faction hauled them to site of the liberty pole and forced them to confess their crimes. Officers in the militia who participated in the event had to resign their commissions and pay damages for the pole.

This insult to the Tories, however, would not go unanswered. They fastened their anger on Freeman and devised a plan.

After several days, the Tories sent word to Freeman that a friend of his needed medical care. Though he suspected danger, he ventured out to visit his friend past the Newcomb Tavern. Upon his return, a group of Tories set on him. Using first a blade hidden in his cane and, when the blade broke, the cane itself, Freeman fought off as many attackers as he could. In the end, however, his attackers outnumbered him. Falling to the ground, they continued to beat him, inflicting a wound to his head that scarred him for life.

Fessenden Tavern

Again, as in the case of the liberty pole, the criminals were easy to find. And the local judge adjudicated their case the next day, fining them and sending them home.

The attack on Freeman was hardly the first such skirmish in Sandwich. Previously, well-connected men had attacked others for their loyalties, but they were lightly punished because of their status. In the case of Freeman, they may have thought they were entitled to the coddling that others had received. They were wrong. The rebels decided that the court’s ruling was insufficient, and they dragged the six men to the scaffold where they faced their humiliation.

The message was clear. The six men might just as easily have been hanged. It was a dangerous time to be a Tory in Sandwich, Mass., and getting more dangerous every day.

Aftermath

Nathaniel Freeman went on to greater exploits during the Revolution itself. In 1775 he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He served in the Massachusetts militia, becoming a brigadier general by 1781, and led troops in Rhode Island. He fathered 20 children, one of whom went on to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

He never stopped his outspoken pursuit of liberty, taking part in notable feuds with both Tories and moderate Whigs. And it appears he settled several scores with his attackers. As a member of the Committee of Correspondence, he investigated local loyalists. As a legislator he enacted the legislation in 1778 that banished a host of notable Tories from the commonwealth. Of his six attackers, Nehemiah Webb was banished and John Jennings went to prison for disaffection to the popular cause.

Though he had tangled with several Bourns, and several were expelled from the colony, Benjamin Bourn, the ringleader of the attack, apparently remained in Sandwich.

Not a Meek Man

Freeman’s prickly reputation remained intact long after his death. Though his service to the country was appreciated, Amos Otis, in writing his Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families, recalled Freeman. He described him as “a man of talent, very decided in his opinions, and impetuous in action. Like all men of such a temperament, he made many enemies. The Tories denounced him, in the bitterest of bitter terms. These denunciations never affected his reputation as a man or a patriot, but other causes did. He was not a meek man. He would not tolerate the least opposition, and consequently made many personal enemies. Among the aged who knew him, few speak in his praise.”

Nathaniel Freeman is buried in Old Town Cemetery, just a stone’s throw from the Newcomb Tavern on Grove Street.

This story about Sandwich, Mass., in the Revolution was updated in 2022.

In addition to sources identified in the article, this post owes much to Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, Lorenzo Sabine, and The History of Cape Cod: The Annals of Barnstable County, and of its Several Towns, Frederick Freeman.

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John Cheever: Reluctant New Dealer on the Way to Fame

John Cheever, the sadly elegant chronicler of New England WASPdom, spent a year working for Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. He spent the next 40 years trying to forget about it.

John Cheever

Cheever belonged to a group that survived the Great Depression as employees of the Federal Writers’ Project. They put together the American Guide Series of books. Some, like Cheever, would go on to become America’s most important 20^th century writers.

Cheever claimed he couldn’t stand “twisting into order the sentences written by some incredibly lazy bastards.” Harsh words for a staff that included Saul Bellow, Kenneth Patchen, Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel and Zora Neale Hurston.

The real reason he hated the job was his shame at going on relief. His once-prosperous Massachusetts family had been ruined financially. “Poverty depressed him,” wrote his daughter Susan.

From Prosperity to Poverty

Cheever, born in 1912, was descended from an old Yankee family. Expectations for a life made easy by a trust fund weren’t out of the question. For most of his childhood he lived in an 11-room Victorian house in the best neighborhood in Quincy, Mass. He claimed his father owned a shoe factory, which is doubtful; more likely, he invested the family’s wealth in the company and succeeded selling shoes to retailers.

New England’s shoe industry was moving south, though, and his father lost his job. His mother opened a small gift shop in downtown Quincy, which her son called “an abysmal humiliation.” His parents separated.

Cheever’s writing would reveal a keen sense of what his old New England family had lost. He lovingly bathed his prose in details such as the polished silver, the fragrant linen, the cocktails on the terrace and the sound of someone rolling the tennis court. Cheever set his stories in boarding schools, country clubs and summer cottages on the sea. He peopled them with headmasters and shipyard executives, cooks and gardeners, lawyers and ladies who wouldn’t allow beer cans on the dinner table. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, he romanticized wealth while exposing the corruption behind it.

John Cheever, Dropout

Young Cheever dropped out of high school after he won a short story contest sponsored by the Boston Herald. At 20, the last of his father’s money disappeared and the family lost its house to foreclosure. Cheever moved into a Beacon Hill apartment with his older brother, but soon decided to get out of town. For the next few years he tried to make a go of it as a writer, dividing his time between Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, Manhattan, Quincy and Lake George, N.Y., where he worked as a caretaker.

By 1938 he was broke, living in a six-by-eight furnished room in New York’s West Village and subsisting on stale bread, buttermilk and raisins. He wrote an elegy to New England’s economic decline, which had affected him so personally. Scott Donaldson in his biography quotes a book review Cheever wrote in The New Republic: “For the glorious seaboard of the China trade means to most of us now a four-way turnpike and a few brilliant old women and the main stem girls in Portland and empty harbors and fugitive mill towns and the smell of the tourist camps and a cretin at the gas station.”

No Gravy for Her

WPA Guide

Cheever accepted a $50-a-week job at the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. From 1935 to 1939, the Project employed about 5,000 people a year as writers, editors and information gatherers. Its purpose was to present a vision of America showing the people, history and culture of each state.

The job meant Cheever had to move to Washington, where he rented a room in a boardinghouse and dined with fellow government employees. One woman at the table made it a point to criticize the WPA. Cheever listened in silence and pretended to be deaf when she asked him to pass the gravy.

He hated Washington: the dreary bureaucrats, the Southern accents and the nakedness of the social climbing. He later included a character in his novel The Wapshot Chronicle who kept a chart of his social progress. It displayed his 18 dinners in Georgetown, with his hosts listed and graded according to their importance.

The New York City Guide

In November Cheever agreed to help finish The New York City Guide, which meant returning to the Lower West Side. His coworkers included Richard Wright, who would later write Native Son, and Beat poet Kenneth Patchen. Cheever wore button-down shirts, a gray flannel suit and affected a patrician accent.

Happy to be back in New York, Cheever combed the city, observing the night workers returning home, the bums on abandoned piers, waitresses at Child’s, tourists aboard the Staten Island Ferry. His careful studies of humanity on the Lower West Side would find their way into The New York City Guide and into his later fiction.

He was unsettled, though, by the controversies swirling around the New York office. The original director was a one-legged poet named Orrick Johns, whose appetite for liquor and sex got him into trouble. One night, he was steering a pretty employee toward his apartment for a tryst when her boyfriend encountered them. The boyfriend knocked him out cold, poured brandy on his wooden leg and set it on fire.

The New York office employed a few Communists, which attracted the attention of Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cheever’s return to New York coincided with the Dies Committee’s attacks on the Writers’ Project.

By May 1939, the New York Guide was finished, and Cheever quit after one year on the job.

1958 National Book Award winner

Short Commute

Cheever wiped the Federal Writers’ Project from his memory after he left, according to Donaldson. His Republican parents were probably ashamed of their son going on the dole, and he was probably ashamed of it too. In 1980 he ran into Jim McGraw, a colleague from the Project he hadn’t seen in 40 years. McGraw said it was a long time since he had seen him since the Writers’ Project. Cheever’s response: “I don’t want to talk about it.”

In 1946, married and with a young daughter, Cheever was living in a New York City apartment building near Sutton Place. He could barely afford it. Every weekday morning he put on his good suit and hat and rode down the elevator with the other men in the building. Except Cheever went to the basement, stripped to his underwear, and typed his stories on a makeshift desk. At the end of the workday, he put his suit and hat on and rode back up in the elevator.

Working for the Federal Writer’s Project must have been like getting caught in his underwear.

What Happened Next

Cheever would go on to write short stories for the New Yorker during the magazine’s golden age. He won recognition as one of the most important short story writers of the 20^th century. Critics called him the “Chekhov of the Suburbs.” He is credited with capturing the suburban ennui that inspired Ordinary People, American Beauty and Mad Men. It’s no accident that Ossining, N.Y., was the home of Don and Betty Draper; it’s where Cheever lived until his death in 1982.

In 1995, The New York Times called The New York City Guide “one of the ten best books ever published about New York.”

We are indebted to Scott Donaldson’s John Cheever: A Biography, and David A. Taylor’s Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project and, of course, to The Stories of John Cheever. This story was updated in 2022.

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George Washington’s Submarine: The Turtle, Made in Connecticut

New York Harbor — September 6, 1776, 11 p.m. At the foot of Whitehall Street in New York City, where the Staten Island Ferry departs the city today, two whaleboats slipped silently into the water under a moonless sky. Thus they launched the first military mission ever undertaken by a submarine. It was called the Turtle.

One of the most lethal and effective weapons of modern war started out that night as a wooden keg that looked like two huge turtle shells strapped together. And that’s what people called it: the American Turtle.

The 1st Turtle Mission

With only a few hours of experience navigating the submarine, the one-man captain/crew inside prepared for a preposterous mission. Ezra Lee, of Lyme, Conn., was to submerge the vessel under the water using the same basic water ballast system used today.

Once submerged in his airtight cocoon, he planned to take the submarine four miles into the harbor. He would use a propulsion system that consisted of oars and a treadle-powered screw propeller mounted on the bow of the ship. Then he would maneuver the tiny vessel aside the 64-gun frigate H.M.S. Eagle.

Nearly hemmed in on Manhattan, Continental Army Commander-in-Chief George Washington hoped the destruction of the Eagle, Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, would help him hold the city.

The plan was straightforward. Using a screw that could be activated from inside the submarine, Lee would attach an explosive device and timer to the hull of the ship, pedal away and watch the ship explode.

On the night of the planned attack, the two whaleboats towed the American Turtle as near to the target as the men dared. With the help of the ship’s inventor David Bushnell, Lee sealed himself inside, flooded the ballast chamber and descended beneath the surface. He found the currents stronger than he expected. It would take two-and-a-half hours before he reached the Eagle, undetected.

The Science of Warfare

1800s Sketch of the American Turtle

The idea of the Turtle was inspired by another discovery that Bushnell witnessed while a student at Yale. A group of scientists working with black powder found they could successfully detonate it under water. The men immediately understood the applications for this knowledge.

With war breaking out in 1775, Bushnell set about building a submarine to attack the British ships then blockading Boston Harbor. Working at shipyards near his home in Saybrook, Conn., Bushnell began perfecting the mechanics behind his boat. In 1775 or 1776, Bushnell approached George Washington with his plan.

Washington funded the development of the vessel and provided material support. He would later recount, however, that before the attack on the Eagle, he had his doubts.

Washington’s Doubts

“Although I wanted faith myself, I furnished him with money, and other aids to carry it into execution,“ Washington later wrote of the Turtle. “I then thought, and still think, that it was an effort of genius; but that a combination of too many things were requisite, to expect much success from the enterprise against an enemy, who are always upon guard.”

Though Bushnell tried to keep the device secret, the people of Lyme and Saybrook knew of them.

Loyalist sympathizers informed the British Navy about the development of the Turtle, though they had few specifics as to Bushnell’s progress.

By the time the Turtle was operational, 1775 had turned into 1776. The British Navy had been expelled from Boston and sailed to New York Harbor, where it moored in the North River. Bushnell changed his target to New York.

Technological Marvel

As Lee cranked his way through the waters of New York Harbor, he controlled an ingenious craft. Just seven feet long and six feet high, the submarine consisted of hollowed-out oak banded together with steel. It was sealed with cork and pitch, and topped with a brass cap fitted with an air exchange so fresh air could be drawn inside while the submarine was near the surface.

The brass cap – a precursor to the modern conning tower — had glass portals so the pilot could watch where he was going while on the surface. Once submerged, the pilot would use a barometer to determine his depth and a lead sounder attached to a cord to sense the sea bottom. He also used a compass illuminated by foxfire, produced in certain decaying fungus. With a pump to draw in and expel ballast water, the craft could raise and lower itself to whatever depth the pilot chose.

The Turtle Had Firepower

The weaponry was no less complex. The Turtle carried three bombs, each with a timing mechanism developed by Bushnell and his colleagues. One was set to go off six hours after being armed, one eight hours after arming and the third 12 hours. The sub was outfitted with a screw that was to be augured into the side of the target vessel. The explosives, carried on the outside of the submarine, could be detached from the sub and attached to the vessel by hanging them on the screw. The action of detaching them from the submarine would initiate the timers.

Benjamin Franklin, who consulted on the project, concluded that the explosives contained three times as much powder as needed to destroy the largest ship afloat.

Using a system of oars rigged to the top of the submarine and the treadle-powered prop, the submarine could reach three knots. Armed and ready, Lee had propelled himself next to the unsuspecting Eagle.

Change of Plans

Portrait of Ezra Lee

Before Lee even entered the Turtle, the mission had already encountered a huge setback. Bushnell’s brother had originally been the designated pilot of the ship. He had made extensive training runs and used the intricate controls skillfully. Shortly before the mission, however, he fell ill – too ill to manage the exertions of powering the submarine.

Lee, who signed on to support the mission, was tapped to fill in just a few days earlier. He had little chance to train, but Bushnell – already exasperated with delays – wanted to wait no longer.

So, with light already showing in the sky, Lee arrived at the Eagle early in the morning of Sept. 7 after his two-and-a half hour journey underwater. He wasted no time in getting to work setting the explosives as he had practiced. But neither he nor Bushnell had anticipated the hull of the Eagle: It was sheathed in copper. The screws on the Turtle could not penetrate the hull.

After two tries, Lee, undoubtedly exhausted, decided he had to retreat. Making his way back across the harbor in the lightening sky, however, British officers observed him and put a boat in the water to chase him down.

The Great Explosion

With Lee pedaling and paddling furiously, the British gave pursuit. Fearing his capture, Lee released the charged explosives into the water in hopes of inflicting at least some damage. With his navigation equipment failing, Lee needed to keep surfacing to set his course.

The British grew suspicious of the odd craft they were pursuing. Suspecting they were being led into some sort of trap, they turned back. Lee was able to signal his comrades, who towed him back to land.

The charges Lee had set loose later exploded, sending columns of water surging into the sky. Franklin was correct in his estimation. The magnitude of the explosion astounded the British. As a precaution, they relocated their fleet outside the mouth of the harbor. And the first military attack by a submarine was in the history books.

The Turtle Sinks

The Americans tried two more times to use the Turtle, unsuccessfully. The British then sank the sub, though not in the water. They destroyed a vessel that carried it. Bushnell recovered it, but he attempted no more missions.

He turned his attention to developing mines that could be deployed in waterways. And he took part in the siege at Yorktown as a captain in the Corps of Sappers and Miners.

Lee went on to fight with Washington’s army in Trenton, Monmouth and Brandywine. At Brandywine, according to one story, the British shot away his sword handle and several balls penetrated his coat. He returned to Connecticut after the war and died in 1821 in Old Lyme.

A Curious Ending

Bushnell had a more curious ending. Following the war, he travelled to France. He attempted for many years to find backing for his submarine with the hope of improving it. But people viewed the submarine, at that time, as too experimental and not a likely success. Some even ridiculed the idea.

Modern replica of the American Turtle, George Washington’s submarine.

Frustrated by failure and low on money, Bushnell changed his name to Bush and moved to Georgia around 1795. A classmate helped him win a position as a schoolmaster, and he settled in Warrenton and practiced as a physician. For 40 years he lived there, his whereabouts unknown in Connecticut. He was only discovered upon his death when his will directed that a search should be made in Old Saybrook for any heirs.

The Turtle itself ended its life as scrap, its metal components used in the construction of clocks. Many replicas of the vessel have since been built. Though the submarine was not truly converted to a successful weapon until the mechanical age, people today view the Turtle as a military marvel.

This story about George Washington’s submarine was updated in 2022.

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The Winnipesaukee Water War and the 1859 Fight for NH Property Rights

On Sept 28, 1859, James Worster led 50 angry farmers, mill operators, loggers and laborers in a vain effort to destroy a 250-foot dam that controlled the outflow of Lake Winnipesaukee. The dam regulated how much water flowed into the Merrimack River and powered the cotton cards, the spinning frames and the power looms of the enormous textile mills in Lowell and Lawrence, Mass. It was just one battle in the Winnipesaukee water war that had gone on for years.

Lake Winnipesaukee by William Trost Richards. Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

People would call the attack on the dam and the fight that broke out afterward the Lake Village Riot. Lake Village now exists as Lakeport, a neighborhood of Laconia, N.H. In 1858, it belonged to neighboring Gilford. A growing commercial hub, it had shops, a foundry, a machine shop and mills powered by the water that flowed from Lake Winnipesaukee to Opechee Bay.

That dam and the powerful out-of-staters behind it had damaged the farms and businesses of the Lakes Region. Fed up with the out-of-state corporations, the New Hampshire men then vented their anger with axes and iron rods.

The Lake Company

The would-be dam destroyers faced a formidable opponent: a hydraulic empire known as the Lake Company, owned by powerful Massachusetts manufacturers. Their giant mills needed hydraulic power to operate their machinery. The mill owners, known as the Boston Associates, had already reshaped the Merrimack Valley with dams and canals. By 1850 they controlled 45 miles of the Merrimack River and produced more waterpower than in all of France.

Amoskeag millyard, 1911

Still they needed more. And so they set up the deceptively named Winnipissiogee Lake Cotton and Woolen Manufacturing Company of New Hampshire, also known as the Lake Company.

Lake Company office in Lakeport, key battleground in the Winnipesaukee water war.

The Lake Company had little intention of manufacturing anything in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. But it did intend to seize control of the Merrimack River’s headwaters. Between 1845 and 1856, the Lake Company stealthily took control of 103 square miles of New Hampshire waters, including Winnipesaukee, Squam, Winnisquam and Newfound lakes.

The company fortified dams and deepened channels. By 1859, the mill owners had a system for raising the level of the lakes during the winter and spring. Then during the summer they opened the floodgates to send waterpower to Massachusetts when rivers historically ran low.

Inequality

The citizens of New Hampshire soon figured out what was going on, and they didn’t like it one little bit. Raising the lake levels flooded farmers’ fields. Lowering the lake levels impeded navigation for shippers and ferryboat owners. It also prevented loggers from sending timber downstream. And it deprived local mills of enough waterpower to run their machinery.

Something else fueled the anger of the farmers, millers, loggers and shippers of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. They grew frustrated with the industrialization along the Merrimack and its impact on New Hampshire’s way of life and its businesses. As New Hampshire’s waters drained away to Massachusetts, they carried away the wealth of the farmers and small business owners to the pocketbooks of powerful industrialists.

The big Lakes Region towns – Meredith, Gilford, Laconia – were gradually shifting from agriculture to manufacturing. It was an economic rearrangement that didn’t reward participants equally. Farms were not only declining, but becoming less profitable. Mill workers barely earned enough to survive. And inequality was on the rise.

Weaving room of an Amoskeag mill.

The Winnipesaukee Water War Begins

Into the breach stepped James Worster, a 50-something farmer and former blacksmith. Worster wasn’t the only New Hampshire citizen angered by the Lake Company’s economic wrongdoing. Others had tried to wreck dams. Others had asked the Legislature to intervene. And others had sued the company.

But none was as fanatical as James Worster. A Lake County agent said “he ought to be in jail or in an insane asylum.” A New Hampshire judge described him as “so much a man of one idea, that it is of no use to talk with him.”

For years that one idea was to loosen the Massachusetts mill owners’ iron grip on New Hampshire’s lake waters. Worster would, in the end, pay a steep price for his quixotic quest – and for failing to recognize that times were changing.

Up until the mid-19^th century, New Hampshire law permitted landowners to destroy a dam upstream if it damaged their property. Worster tried to destroy three of the dams owned by Massachusetts men (and came to grief) between 1847 and 1859. His obsession with the Lake Company would land him in jail.

For years he bounced around New Hampshire, from the Seacoast to Concord to the Lakes Region. With each move, he bought or rented farmland downstream from dams owned by out-of-state mill owners. Whether he deliberately obtained property likely to be flooded is an open question.

Lake Village Dam, where the Winnipesaukee water war broke out

James Worster

In 1847, Worster first tried to fight the Great Falls Manufacturing Co., Massachusetts owners of five cotton mills in New Hampshire. Worster leased farmland in Dover, which flooded when a dam held back the Salmon Falls River. He partially destroyed the dam by tearing off an abutment and cutting down its planking. He then threatened to destroy the whole thing. The company went to court and got an injunction against his further damaging the dam.

Salmon Falls River

Two years later, Worster’s daughter Adeline took on the Lake Company. She co-owned land with him in Tuftonboro on the northeast shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. She sued the company, claiming the Lake Company’s dam at Lake Village flooded their property, causing damage. The court dismissed the case in 1852.

While Adeline Worster’s case languished in the courts, her father got hold of more properties. All of them were flooded seasonally by the Lake Company’s machinations – meadowland in Sanbornton, a farm in Gilford along Paugus Bay, and a share of Rattlesnake Island in Lake Winnipesaukee. In 1853, after the court threw out his daughter’s case against the company, Worster threatened to break down the Lake Village dam.

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A Bloodied Nose

By then, the Lake Company’s people in New Hampshire were keeping a close eye on Worster. The company’s agent, James Bell, obtained from the New Hampshire Superior Court an injunction preventing Worster from interfering with Lake Company property. It couldn’t have hurt that his brother, Justice, Samuel Bell, sat on the court.

Worster then moved to Concord and obtained farmland bordering the Merrimack River in Hooksett. The property lay upstream from another dam that powered the giant Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester. Again it was a dam owned by Massachusetts men. And again it flooded.

The Merrimack River in flood, Manchester, N.H.

At 6:30 a.m. on March 7, 1859, Worster and another man showed up on the Amoskeag Company’s dam. A watchman ordered them to leave. They refused. A fight broke out and the watchman knocked down Worster, then in his 50s, three times and bloodied his nose.

That year the Legislature considered a bill to prevent landowners from destroying dams. It moved through committee until Worster and others appeared at the Statehouse and made an enormous fuss. The bill died.

Four months after his attack on the Amoskeag dam, Worster prepared to launch another. The Amoskeag Company’s agent caught wind of his plans and notified the sheriff. In July, Worster showed up with six men, and they started to rip the flashboards off the dam. The sheriff and his deputies then arrived and arrested Worster.

Worster was not only charged with conspiracy, but pressured financially by the Amoskeag Company. An agent bought an unpaid note in Worster’s name and got a lien put on the Hooksett property for nonpayment.

A Losing Battle for the Lake

By the fall of 1859, feelings were running so high against the Lake Village dam that the Lake Company took extra security precautions. The company’s office was practically on top of the dam, and an engineer was told to find “two or three men that would be sure and reliable in case of trouble.”

Lake Winnisquam

In August, Worster complained to the Lake Company that the dam had overflowed his properties along Lakes Winnisquam and Winnipesaukee. At that point he was on trial for trying to destroy the Amoskeag dam, and he was still enjoined from damaging the Lake Company’s dam in Lake Village.

That didn’t stop him.

Dam Trouble

The riot itself was preceded by a skirmish on the morning of Sept. 28, 1859. A few determined men showed up at the Lake Village dam. They intended to remove planking, which would allow the lake water to drain off their properties. They believed they were acting within the law.

When the men showed up, the sheriff arrived and sent them away. Undeterred, they came back in the afternoon and began removing the planking. The Lake Company’s agent, Josiah French, and his assistant tried to stop them. In the course of the struggle, French’s assistant struck one of the men on the hand with an iron bar. Some of them tried to push French off the dam.

The dam attackers left again, only to return around nightfall with a larger crowd. Worster arrived with the 50 men wielding axes and iron bars. They came from as far away as Concord. And they brought with them a law enforcement officer who arrested French and his assistant for assault and battery.

When the officer took the Lake Village agents away, he left the field clear for a serious assault on the dam. Fifty angry men with axes and iron bars bashed away at the hated structure. They did some damage, but may not have realized how hard it would be to destroy a tight, seven-year-old, 250-foot stone dam.

Perhaps they could have demolished the dam, but, according to the Winnipesaukee Gazette, “the big boys” of the village came to rough them up. The big boys were probably reimbursed by the Lake Company for their efforts. “The crowd was summarily dispersed, without much regard to ceremony – some of whom were not handled very lightly,” reported the Gazette.

Prison

A raft of litigation followed the melee. Seven of the rioters were charged with attempting to kill Josiah French by pushing him off the dam. The trial ended in a hung jury.

Squam Lake, another front in the Winnipesaukee water war

French was then sued for assault because he’d clubbed a rioter’s hand with an iron bar. A jury acquitted him.

Worster was charged with contempt for rioting after he’d been enjoined against interfering with the Lake Company’s property. The litigation dragged on for several years, during which Forster lost his temper and attacked the Lake Company’s lawyer.

Finally, he was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison and a $500 fine. Worster then gave the Lake Company no more trouble.

The Lake Company also succeeded in convincing the court to issue an injunction against eight of the rioters similar to the one that landed Worster in jail.

End of the Winnipesaukee Water War

The courtroom victories arising from the Lake Village Riot enabled the Lake Company to consolidate its control over New Hampshire’s water. For the next few decades, the Lake Village monopoly remained intact.

Eventually, the mills replaced hydropower with steam. The Lake Village’s control of the lakes would only be loosened by the decline of New England’s textile industry, which began to move south in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the New Hampshire state government would take control of the Lakes Region water flow.

Today, the state of New Hampshire’s Dam Bureau runs the Lake Village dam. And the dam operator still works out of the Lake Company’s old offices.

We are indebted to Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, by Theodore Steinberg for this story. This post about the Winnipesaukee water war was updated in 2022.

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New England Slavery: Decent Burial for a Slave Named Fortune, 200 Years Late

More than 200 years after his death, a Waterbury, Conn., slave received a proper burial. His name is Fortune, and his journey to this point starkly illustrates the timeline of changes in the way people viewed New England slavery since he died in 1798.

From the Mettatuck Museum’s Fortune’s Story Exhibit. Fortune as he may have looked in life. Painted by William Westwood, a medical illustrator, based on Fortune’s skeleton.

Upon his death, Fortune’s owner Dr. Preserved Porter decided to make use of his remains at his “School for Anatomy.” After Fortune died by the Naugatuck River, Dr. Porter personally carried out the gruesome process of reducing Fortune to a skeleton. The slave’s remains served as a medical teaching tool for decades.

In 1933, the Porter family gave the skeleton to the Mattatuck Museum, which displayed it as a curio from the days of New England slavery until 1970. Then the museum removed it from display, beginning a 40-year period during which no one knew quite what to do with Fortune.

Used for medical research, subjected to vandalism and mockery and finally shoved in a basement for more than 20 years, Fortune’s history is shameful. And his state in 2013 no doubt resulted from unethical behavior.

But since righting the original wrongs done to him is not possible, his fate created a conundrum. His guardians had to try to decide what to do with the remains of someone born into New England slavery around 1740. What would he want to happen to his remains today in their current condition?

No one could determine the answer with any degree of certainty. But on Sept. 12, 2013, Fortune received a proper burial, hopefully the best outcome possible.

New England Slavery

While never as prevalent in New England as it was in the South, New Englanders did indeed practice slavery.

The 1790 census showed the scope of New England slavery.

Colony	Number of slaves
Connecticut	2648	1790 Census
Massachusetts	4500	1754 Census
New Hampshire	157	1790 Census
Rhode Island	958	1790 Census
Vermont	16	1790 Census*

*This figure is subject to dispute.

Outlawed by 1784, New England slavery wasn’t completely extinguished until the mid-1800s. But Fortune was, nevertheless, one of the later slaves in New England.

How did Fortune die? There are theories, legends and precious little known about the answer to that question.

His death is documented. Local lore suggested that he had been trying to escape when he was killed. Other stories say he drowned in the Naugatuck River, by accident. Either way, he wound up a scientific specimen.

Heirloom

Today physicians afford people a great deal of control over what experiments are performed on them and how their remains are disposed. Fortune, however, belonged to the unfortunate class of people for whom there was no say.

There were laws against dissection of human cadavers, and the practice was controversial. Some places outlawed it completely. In Massachusetts, certain executed criminals could be dissected. But for slaves, it was as simple as Dr. Proctor taking Fortune’s body to a remote spot, hacking it up, boiling it down and putting the skeleton in his medical school.

It’s certain that the skeleton was put to good use in educating future doctors, but after Proctor’s death it was apparently relegated to the status of unusual family heirloom.

New England Slavery Remembered

In 1930, the skeleton had been reconstructed, with the bones labelled, and donated to the museum. Along the way, someone scrawled the name “Larry” on Fortune’s skull. In the 1940s, the museum put it on display to highlight Waterbury part in New England slavery as well as the medical school.

For purposes of the exhibit, and commemorative postcards, he became “Larry the Skeleton.”

He remained a fixture in the museum until 1970 when someone tactfully suggested it might not be appropriate to continue displaying his remains. So they were tucked away, secure in the basement. And there they stayed for more than 20 years.

Skeletons in the Basement

Quinnipiac faculty, staff, and students use diagnostic imaging techniques to learn more about Fortune and his life in New England slavery.

After a Waterbury black history publication started up that Fortune again came to light. The researchers who had pulled together the story of early African Americans in Waterbury received in the mail one of the old “Larry the Skeleton” postcards, according to the Episcopal News Service. They decided to look further into the matter.

With that, the museum faced the conundrum. People had undoubtedly subjected Fortune to a laundry list of indignities. But what would he want now?

There is, of course, no way Fortune would have ever imagined his fate. With no guidance, the museum began an exhibit and did its best to restore Fortune’s dignity. It shepherded him off to a better fate than the basement.

Using DNA and computer software that can guide facial reconstruction, they tried to bring his story to life. Artists did their best to recreate his likeness. A full symphony and choir performed a cantata based on an elegy written to honor his memory.

Respectful Burial

Diagnostic imaging tools were employed to learn all that could be learned about his life. Scientists discovered that he had injured his neck, which may have caused his death. But nothing indicated that someone had killed him.

And researchers attempted in vain to find his ancestors in the hopes that they could consult them about what to do with his remains. Fortune had a wife and four children, but the researchers discovered no descendants.

In the end, the museum returned to the church that baptized Fortune in the year before his death. They asked the Episcopal priest if she would perform his funeral. The Rev. Amy Welin agreed.

“When I realized he had been baptized at St. John’s, I thought, ‘Oh my heavens, this man is actually my parishioner!’” she told the Episcopal News Service. “We are giving a parishioner the decent and respectful burial that he was denied 215 years ago.”

This story about New England slavery was updated in 2022.

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Witch Trial Records Produced Hysteria of Their Own

Whether you’re a Pawn Stars fan or Antiques Roadshow is more your speed, the story is the same. Money-hungry owner of a rare ‘authentic’ bit of American history has his object appraised and comes face-to-face with the cold hard truth: The colonial desk has drawers made of pressboard, that 1472 on the bottom of the vase is really 1972, the Vermeer handed down through generations is really a paint-by-number made by a kid at summer camp.

Judge William Stoughton signed Bridget Bishop’s death warrant during her witch trial.

And so you sniff with satisfaction and click off the television. ‘Never happen to me,’ you say. But are you so sure?

Suppose you ran into a stranger, a military veteran down on his luck. And he explained he needed money to travel home because his wife just died. He knew that the rare document he possessed was worth more than he was asking, maybe even a lot more. But he was looking for quick cash and was offering you a win-win proposition. Would you help this poor fellow, or turn your back?

Now look at the two photos below. Two death warrants signed for witches from the witch trial records of the Salem witch hysteria – Bridget Bishop and Martha Corey. Look closely at the witch trial death warrant on the right. The paper seems incredibly bright and clean, the wax stamp is bright red. Almost too perfect, isn’t it?

And the witch trial death warrant on the left, tattered and barely readable. The stamp destroyed. You can’t even tell what it says. Who could authenticate such a document? But isn’t that what a missing sheriff’s order from 1692 would most likely look like?

You decide. Because one witch trial death warrant is undoubtedly worthless and one witch trial death warrant is worth, who knows?

Not so simple now, is it? It wasn’t so simple for investigative reporter A.B. Macdonald of Kansas City, either.

Witch Trial Hysteria

In 1692 and 1693, the courts of Massachusetts did indeed order the deaths of 20 people for witchcraft. Two hundred (perhaps a few more) were charged in what historians now believe was a massive case of petty jealousies and score settling. One scientist, though, has posited that it was a case of fungus-induced hysteria.

Killing witches was nothing new, but the the Salem trials stood out for their sheer insanity and corruption. In the aftermath, the court papers were stored away and an 1875 review found the death warrants for the 20 murdered witches were, for the most part, gone from the files.

Bridget Bishop’s death warrant

Pilfered for profit? Removed as souvenirs? Purged because of the shame now associated with the trials? Simply lost? It’s not clear. But only one witch trial death warrant remained with the original records. The others were missing, and a great mystery to the collector community.

$20 Death Warrant

Forged death warrant

This was roughly the state of play in 1932 when “Captain E. Newman Bradley” knocked on the door of A.B. MacDonald, a writer for the Kansas City Star. Though somewhat knowledgeable about historic documents, MacDonald bought Bradley’s story that he needed money to travel because he had been notified his wife was dead.

MacDonald’s main reservation about paying $20 for the witch trial death warrant was that he was taking advantage of Bradley’s misfortune. He would pay more, he offered, if the man could wait until morning for a check. But Bradley was clearly a bird-in-the-hand man, and fled with a wave of his hand.

Of course, researchers now suspect Bradley had more than one death warrant in his collection, and he was probably off to his next mark.

Though the witch trials actually took place in what is now Danvers, Mass., much of the action, including the executions, took place in modern-day Salem. Thus Salem has forever been the hub for the history and hysteria surrounding the witch trials. So it was Salem where MacDonald’s document ultimately wound up for review.

With visions of scoring $10,000 for the document, a Vermont antiques dealer presented it to Howard Corning, secretary of the Essex Institute, now the Peabody Essex Museum. Priceless or worthless?

Corning delivered the bad news. The document was not only a forgery, it was a bad one, Corning said. And he pointed the dealer to the authentic warrant – the bright clean one for Bridgett Bishop – to demonstrate what they should look like.

More Forgeries Surface

But MacDonald was not the only one fooled. A slew of phony death warrants were floating around, bought by eager collectors. As more and more people began plaguing Corning about their ‘authentic’ warrants, he began speaking out about them. Harvard historian Steven Biel produced a terrific article about the forgeries for Common-Place in 2005.

Today the forgeries are lodged in collections and attics around the country, and the ways they are uncovered make for interesting reading. MacDonald wrote of his experience for the Kansas City Star.

In 1939, another death warrant emerged for five of the accused witches. It is in the Boston Public Library collections. Others, however, remain missing. None of this means that the ‘death warrant’ you find mixed in with the family photos in the attic or stashed in a box at the yard sale isn’t real. But you probably want to have it checked out before planning your retirement.

You can view the witch trial records, collected at various libraries and museums, at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Black Kings and Governors of New England

From about 1750 to 1850, New England had at least 31 elected black kings and governors, nearly all of them enslaved.

They were elected on ‘Negroes Hallowday’ or “Negroes Election Day,” the most important day of the year. Black men held it annually on the same day the white men of New England gathered to vote for their leaders.

In the royal colonies where the Crown appointed the governor – New Hampshire and Massachusetts – black men elected black kings.

In the charter colonies where white men elected their own governor – Rhode Island and Connecticut – black men elected black governors. (For a list of known black governors of Connecticut, click here.)

African-Americans elected a king in Portsmouth, N.H. So did the Massachusetts towns of Salem and Lynn. Newport and Narragansett in Rhode Island elected black governors, as did a handful of towns in Connecticut.

For New England’s African slaves, Election Day meant a rare break from toil and a chance to poke fun at their white masters. They could express pride in their African heritage. And they could elect black kings and governors to maintain discipline among the slaves. Better they do it than their white masters, went the rationale.

Rum, Gingerbread and Election Cake

E.R. Potter, his family and a slave. Newport Historical Society

E.R. Potter, his family and a slave, perhaps Black Governor John. Newport R.I. Historical Society

Election Day began with the Puritans as a jolly secular holiday. The colonists traveled to town in spring or early summer to elect their local leaders. Some had to travel quite far, and might stay overnight.

Important families, or maybe the local government, hosted election-day celebrations. They served rum and gingerbread and thick, fruit-studded election cakes.

The masters let the slaves take Election Day off or brought them into town. According to Salem minister William Bentley, African bondsmen and servants “were too restless at home to be of any use till (the election holidays) were over.”

And so the Africans started organizing their own elections and their own celebrations. They did it first in Newport and Hartford and then throughout New England.

In Connecticut, an enslaved African named London served as the first black governor known to history. London, who belonged to Capt. Thomas Seymour, won election as Connecticut governor in Hartford in 1755.

As Connecticut Colony’s population grew, black residents began to elect leaders who lived nearby. Historians know of black governors in Derby, Durham, Farmington, New Haven, New London, Norwich and Seymour.

A Real Black King

One of New England’s black kings, Nero Brewster, had been born of royal lineage in Africa early in the 18^th century. As a child, slavers captured him, took him to the American colonies and sold him to a wealthy tavern owner in Portsmouth, N.H.

For many years, Nero won the annual Negro Election and presided over an informal black government that mirrored the white polity.

Other black kings had royal African blood. Even before the Negro Election began in Lynn, Mass., African immigrants honored a prince of Africa named Pompey. Slavers had captured and sold him, but his master freed him when he grew too old to work.

Pompey then moved to a little glade near the Saugus River Every year he hosted a holiday for the African bondsmen from nearby towns. Women picked flowers to crown old King Pompey, and the men sat and talked about happier times on the Gambia River in West Africa.

Monarchs Held in Esteem

Some black kings and governors won election because of their achievements, their strength or their abilities. Their rank could also reflect their masters’ stature. Nero Brewster’s master, Col. William Brewster, owned the Bell Tavern in Portsmouth, a well-known gathering place for patriots during the Revolutionary War.

Advertisement for the Bell Tavern

Hartford’s Black Governor Peleg Nott, described as “a first rate feller,” had traveled far. He drove a provision cart during the American Revolution. Black Governor Tobiah of Derby, Conn., was “a man of tact, courage and unusual intelligence.”

Black Governor Guy Watson of South Kingston fought in the 1^st Rhode Island Regiment at the battles of Red Bank and Ticonderoga.

And black Governor Quosh Freeman of Derby, Conn., was a “man of herculean strength, a giant six-footer.”

The Parade

Portsmouth’s Negro Election Day was probably typical of what happened throughout New England.

Black King Nero dressed in his finest clothes to lead a procession of slaves and freedmen from Portsmouth and neighboring towns. His honor guard, perhaps decked out in feathers, flowers and ribbons, accompanied him.

The parade started with the crack of a gunshot. Marchers made a happy racket with many African languages, gunshots, tambourines, banjos, fiddles and drums. All the slaves wore their best clothes, often hand-me-downs from their masters, altered with an African flair. They borrowed swords, guns and even horses from their masters.

What did their costumes look like? According to a description of one fugitive from slavery, he wore a Saxon blue jacket with bright green baize lining, slash sleeves and small metal buttons, a brown sleeveless jacket and scarlet breeches.

In Portsmouth and elsewhere, bondsmen deliberately played the fool in their gaudy Election Day costumes. White people looked on with enjoyment, belittling the slaves’ deportment and clothing as “fantastic.”

Today, historians note the white onlookers didn’t understand that the black celebrants were making fun of their stiffness and pretensions. Some historians view their antics as a form of self-preservation. They didn’t want white people intimidated by their claim to participate in government.

Haranguing and Socializing

A black king's election was an occasion for dancing. Creative Commons

Election of a black king, an occasions for dancing. Creative Commons

When the Portsmouth marchers reached an open space, Nero and his opponent harangued each other as the crowd socialized and celebrated. Women, who couldn’t vote, lobbied for their favorite candidates. The revelers reunited with friends and family who lived far away, and exchanged news and opinion about the white people they served.

More than a hundred probably took part, for in 1767 Portsmouth alone had 124 male and 63 female slaves, according to Brewster’s Rambles. (The total population of Portsmouth, one of the biggest cities in the colonies, reached 4,466 that year.)

After about three hours of electioneering and merriment, men voted and then declared Nero the black king. He subsequently announced his court: Viceroy Willie Clarkson, Sheriff Jock Odiorne and Deputy Sheriff Pharoah Shores. All came from Africa.

Who ran against Black King Nero? One wonders if it was ever Prince Whipple, the literate servant of William Whipple, who lived in the Moffatt-Ladd House.

Prince Whipple, born a prince of Africa, served as General Whipple’s bodyguard during the Revolutionary War. He also stood with the general at the Battle of Saratoga and at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

According to legend, Prince Whipple accompanied George Washington during his famous crossing of the Delaware.

In the 1851 painting by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, some identify the black oarsman as Prince Whipple.

Victory Party

Regardless of whom he defeated at the polls, Black King Nero led the raucous procession back to his master’s house for a victory party. As at the other Negroes Hallowdays, Nero’s master paid for the meal, though the black slaves and freedmen prepared it.

Nero and his so-called Negro Court were toasted indoors, while games were played and athletic competitions held outside. At the end of the day the celebrants moved to the slave quarters, where they danced energetically to fiddle tunes of West African origin or influence.

The black elections could get expensive for the masters. In Narragansett, R.I., E.R. Potter’s slave John was elected governor. Potter, a state and federal legislator, told John that one of them would have to give up politics or the expenses would ruin them both. John stepped down.

Black Kings and Their Courts

Throughout the next year, Black King Nero meted out judgments and punishments to slaves accused of petty crimes.

In 1859, Portsmouth columnist C.W. Brewster described one trial in a typically condescending (for whites) account. A slave named Prince Jackson reportedly stole an ax. The black sheriff, Jock Odiorne, seized him and summoned the court.

Black King Nero sat for the examination in which evidence was submitted. He found Prince guilty and condemned him to 20 lashes on the bare back at the town pump.

The slaves gathered at the pump. Then, wrote Brewster,

…the Sheriff, after taking off his coat and tying up the convict to the pump, hands the whip to his deputy, Pharaoh Shores, addressing the company, “Gemmen, this way we s’port our government” – turning to his deputy – “Now, Pharaoh, pay on !” After the whipping was over, the sheriff dismissed the prisoner, telling him that the next time he is found this side Christian Shore, unless sent by his master, he will receive twenty lashes more.

Prince did not reform. Shortly afterward he was found guilty of larger thefts and taken to the white people’s court.

“Here, we feel a just equality”

During the Revolutionary War, Black King Nero led at least one meeting of 20 black slaves to discuss their freedom. He may well have held more.

Inspired by revolutionary ideals and hatred of their servitude, they drew up a petition demanding their freedom. They may have borrowed some of the language from the patriots who talked of revolution at the Bell Tavern. They certainly took some language from the Declaration of Independence.

The petition ensured that history remembered Black King Nero better than his master.

The painting Washington Crosses the Delaware depicts a black oarsman reputed to be Prince Whipple.

As in the Declaration, the signers list their grievances and denounce their enemies:

…thro’ ignorance & brutish violence of their native countrymen and by similar designs of others, (who ought to have taught them better) & by the avarice of both, they, while but children, and incapable of self defense, whose infancy might have prompted protection, were seized, imprisoned, and transported from their native country, where (tho’ ignorance and inchristianity prevailed) they were born free to a country, where (tho’ knowledge, christianity and freedom, are their boast) they are compelled, and their unhappy posterity, to drag on their lives in miserable servitude. . . .

The Dignity of Human Nature

The bondsmen emphatically rejected any idea that they are inferior to white people. “[H]ere, we feel the passions and desires of men, tho’ check’d by the rod of slavery! here, we feel a just equality!” they wrote.

And they ended with a prayer, “that the name of SLAVE may no more be heard in a land gloriously contending for the sweets of freedom.”

They submitted the handwritten petition for freedom to the General Assembly in Exeter on Nov. 12, 1779. According to Black Portsmouth, the original manuscript disappeared. No one knows whether the men signed their own names or used a mark.

It was read in the House of Representatives on April 25, 1780, and ordered published in the New Hampshire Gazette. The newspaper printed it that summer, with a disclaimer that it was intended “for the amusement “ of its readers.

The House then took up the petition on June 9, 1780, but decided to table it until “a more convenient opportunity.” No other legislative action would be taken on it for 234 years.

Finally, Freedom

Prince Whipple’s grave in Portsmouth, N.H.

Six of the signers of the New Hampshire petition, including Prince Whipple, gained their freedom after the Revolution. Black King Nero died a slave, and possibly as the last black king of Portsmouth. Historians haven’t unearthed any evidence that any other black kings were elected after he died.

Nero’s obituary described him as, “A Monarch, who, while living, was held in reverential esteem by his subjects consequently, his death is greatly lamented.”

In 2013, state Sen. Martha Fuller Clark of Portsmouth declared Nero Brewster and the other 19 captive Africans deserved some closure. She filed a bill before the Legislature to posthumously free the remaining 15 slaves. The bill then passed, and Gov. Maggie Hassan signed it into law. King Nero Brewster won his freedom, on Friday, June 7, 2013.

What’s more:

Our story owes thanks to two books about black kings and governors: Black Portsmouth and Black Yankees.

Prince Whipple died in 1796 at age 46 and now lies buried in Portsmouth’s North Cemetery. In 1908, local military veterans placed a stone on his grave.

In October 2003, road contractors rediscovered the Negro Burying Ground under Portsmouth’s Chestnut Street.

This story about black kings and governors was updated in 2022.

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The Greatest Submarine Rescue Ever: Saving the Squalus

On the morning of May 23, 1939, the submarine USS Squalus slipped beneath the storm-tossed surface of the Atlantic on a sea trial. Minutes into the maneuver, she began flooding uncontrollably. The Squalus sank to the ocean floor nine miles off the New Hampshire coast, trapping 59 men on board.

The salvage tug Falcon on the way to rescue the crew of the Squalus. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

For some of the Squalus crew, May 23, 1939 would be carved on their headstones. For others, it would mark a 39-hour ordeal they would live with for the rest of their lives. And for a hastily assembled Navy rescue team rushed to New Hampshire, it would be forever remembered as the date they launched an unprecedented rescue mission that stretched their abilities to new extremes.

Tears and Honors

No submarine rescue had ever succeeded beyond 20 feet of water. The Squalus was down 240 feet. The Navy team had to use new methods that had existed only in theory before that day. They encountered problems that forced them to make decisions on the fly—each with life-or-death consequences. And they did it all with the world watching intently, captivated by the fate of the trapped men whose plight had been broadcast around the world at telegraph speed.

Whether the men could be rescued before their oxygen ran out depended on an unproved diving bell, the seamanship of the crews, courageous divers, a quick-thinking admiral, a visionary submarine commander and the vagaries of New England weather.

In the end, the officers and men of the Squalus’ rescue and salvage team would receive four Medals of Honor, 46 Navy Crosses and one Distinguished Service Medal. There would be countless tears of mourning in the homes of those who did not survive the accident. And there would be a glorious new chapter written in the history of underwater rescue.

Newest Sub in the Fleet

The USS Squalus being fitted out at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

Harold Preble left his rented cottage on Great Bay in Greenland, N.H., on the morning of May 23 and gave young Dorothy Emery a ride to school. She was his landlord’s teen-aged daughter, and she agreed to keep an eye on his sailboat for a few days. Preble would be joining the crew of the Squalus for routine sea trials.

Tall, spare and outdoorsy, he was the senior naval architect at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard a few miles away. He had ridden every new sub that left the yard for 22 years. Preble thought o the $5 million Squalus, the newest submarine in the fleet, as the best yet.

Named after a small shark with a big bite, Squalus launched before a cheering crowd at the shipyard in September 1937. Since then, she had performed successfully in 18 test dives, and no one expected trouble on the 19th. The sub was watertight, her systems worked.

The Squalus Commander

Her commander that morning was Lt. Oliver Naquin, a 35-year-old Louisiana native, once the hottest trumpet player at Annapolis. Now married with two children, he had charge of four officers, 51 enlisted men and three civilians – Preble and two electricians, one from the shipyard and the other from General Motors.

The Squalus got underway at 7:30 a.m. in choppy seas and a stiff wind. She then headed down the Piscataqua River and out to a point four miles past the barren Isles of Shoals. Naquin ordered the crew to rig the submarine for a dive and all hands assumed their posts.

At 8:40 a.m., Naquin gave the order to dive. The klaxon sounded, the hatch closed, vents opened and the Squalus went into a steep dive. Everything worked perfectly.

Preble turned to Naquin. “This is going to be a beauty,” he said.

‘Take her up! Take her up’

At 60 feet something went horribly wrong. The Squalus began to level off, and the crew in the forward compartments of the submarine felt a slight flutter. Suddenly Yeoman Charles Kuney heard over the battle phone frantic voices from the engine room. Someone screamed desperately, “Take her up! Take her up!”

The main air induction valve had opened, or failed to close, for reasons never discovered. Tons of seawater gushed into the engine room aft of the vessel.

The stunned crew paused for a moment, then frantically tried to raise the Squalus. They closed the flooded aft compartments and vainly tried to shut the induction valve. Preble and Machinist Mate Nate Pierce slammed levers to force compressed air into the ballast tanks to lift the stricken vessel. The Squalus stabilized and seemed to nose upward. Then, as the men tried to close leaks in the ventilation lines, pressure suddenly increased terrifically. Torrents of ocean water surged into the forward compartments, knocking down Preble.

The weight of the water in the aft compartments was too much. The Squalus began to sink to the ocean floor.

Squalus Blackout

Chief Electrician’s Mate Lawrence Gainor realized seawater was flowing into the aft battery room. Steam poured off the six-foot-high batteries and boiling acid rattled their caps. Gainor saw that the batteries were shorting out and would soon either ignite or explode.

Lloyd Maness

He crawled through a narrow opening to the switches and turned the first battery off, setting off a miniature lightning storm. Half blinded and sure he’d be electrocuted, he shut the other switch off just in time. The entire sub immediately blacked out.

Lt. Naquin, clinging to a periscope, ordered Electrician’s Mate Lloyd Maness to close the watertight steel door between the operating compartment and the aft battery room. The North Carolinian held the door open shouting, “Hurry up.” His shipmates shouted back, “Keep it open! We’re coming!” They swam and clawed their way through the torrents of seawater to the safety of the operating compartment. Eight men made it through the door.

Maness then struggled to close it, his muscles quivering with the effort to hold back the floodwaters with a 300-pound steel door.

Sherman Shirley

Finally the door shut with a click. Maness realized his friend, Torpedoman Sherman Shirley, was on the other side of the door. Shirley was to be married the following Sunday, and he had asked Maness to be his best man.

Maybe Shirley and some of the other men had barricaded themselves safely in the aft torpedo room, Maness thought. Maybe.

What Had They Done?

Later that morning at Portsmouth High School, the principal came into one of the history classes walking fast and looking tense. “We all glanced up from the maps we were drawing,” recalled Dorothy Emery. The principal called two students outside. The rest of the students wondered what these two had done wrong.

During the next period the principal grimly rushed into class again. He summoned three students from the classroom. “We couldn’t imagine what was going on,” wrote Emery in her book, Salt Water Farm: Memoir of a Place on Great Bay.

At recess, Dorothy found out from the children of Navy men and fishermen that the Squalus had gone down. The children called out of class all had fathers trapped at the bottom of the ocean. Classes were called off for the rest of the day.

The ‘Dreaded Hour’ Arrives

Lt. Cdr. Charles “Swede” Momsen was eating a ham sandwich for lunch at the Washington Navy Yard when the phone rang. He was a submarine rescue expert and head of the Experimental Diving Unit, and one of his divers was just emerging from a pressure tank. It was the final test of a 10-year-series of tests using a mixture of helium and oxygen to avoid decompression sickness, or the bends.

Commander Lockwood in Operations of the Navy Department was on the line. “Squalus is down off Isles of Shoals, depth between 200 and 400 feet,” he said. “Have your divers and equipment ready to leave immediately.”

Since 1921, 825 men had died in submarine accidents. No rescue attempt had ever succeeded. In 1925, Momsen commanded a submarine that made a futile attempt to rescue a sister sub rammed by a passenger ship. The officers aboard the doomed submarine were his friends.

Momsen had vowed to find a way to rescue trapped submarine crews. He invented an underwater breathing device, called the Momsen lung. And he conceived of the diving bell that he would use, for the first time, to try to rescue the Squalus crew.

Within two hours, Momsen boarded a seaplane at the Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington. “The dreaded hour was here!“ he thought. “Would the dreams of the experimenter come true or would some quirk of fate cross up the plans and thus destroy all of this work?”

Terrors

Momsen’s plane landed in the teeth of a storm on the Piscataqua River that evening.

Fog forced another plane carrying a team of divers to land in Newport, R.I., 125 miles to the south. The divers jammed into three cars that screamed up the coast as state and local police blocked intersections. They drove so fast they lost the police escort in Boston. When they finally arrived at 4:15 a.m., one diver said, “After that trip, the terrors of deep-sea diving are nothing.”

Cmdr. Charles “Swede” Momsen

Around midnight, Momsen reported to Rear Admiral Cyrus Cole, the shipyard commander.

Good Instincts

Cole’s instinct that the Squalus was in trouble, and his quick response, proved crucial to the rescue of the men.

He grew concerned when the submarine didn’t report surfacing on schedule at 9:40 a.m. He called the White Island lighthouse keeper, who couldn’t see a trace of the submarine.

At 11 a.m., Cole rushed to the dock where the Squalus’ sister sub, the Sculpin, prepared to depart for the Panama Canal a half hour later. Cole told the sub’s captain to pass through the vicinity of the Squalus and to try to make contact.

Cole called Washington to ask for the Navy’s best divers. Then he summoned the USS Falcon, a 187-foot minesweeper stationed in New London, Conn., 200 miles away. She would carry Momsen’s diving bell.

Squalus Sunk Here

Meanwhile, 240 feet beneath the surface of the ocean, ice formed on the bulkheads in the Squalus’ forward torpedo room. There, some of the survivors lay quietly under blankets in the dark. Others were in the control room, moving as little as possible. Most of them were wet, and all were cold. The toxic air caused some of them to vomit.

It was essential they preserve their strength. Lt. Naquin had figured they could last 48 hours if they didn’t use too much air. So he ordered the men to stay calm, to lie down, to try to nap, not to talk. They were to use buckets to relieve themselves rather than go to the head. Each man was given a Momsen lung and reminded how to use it.Men spread soda lime powder on the Squalus decks to absorb carbon dioxide.

Naquin stayed cheerful, smiling and asking after each of the men. He ordered them not to talk about the men trapped in the flooded engine rooms. Despite the frigid temperature, no one complained or expressed fear.

The survivors sent up signals for help. Naquin also ordered Lt. (jg) John Nichols to release a marker buoy from the deck of the boat. The three-foot yellow buoy was attached to a long cable and had a telephone in it. Big letters on the buoy spelled out, “Submarine sunk here. Telephone inside.”

As the buoy shot to the surface, a valve broke in the torpedo room and seawater gushed through, knocking down the cook. The crew hastily plugged the leak.

The Squalus crew sent up smoke rockets regularly, and blew slugs of oil out of the toilet bowl to supplement the smoke bombs.

Not one detail was overlooked, recalled one survivor. There was absolutely no excitement.

Two Options for Squalus Rescue

The rescue chamber aboard the Falcon. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection.

That first night, the vessels anchored on the search perimeter created a spooky tableau. Searchlights played along the inky surface of the ocean, illuminating the mist and the rain. Men looked for signs of the Squalus from the Sculpin and from the Coast Guard tugs Wandank and Chandler. Two Coast Guard patrol boats cruised outside the perimeter. As the fog rolled in, they wondered when the Falcon would arrive.

Aboard the Sculpin, Momsen considered the situation carefully. He knew he had to work fast. The ocean waters could breach the wreck and drown the men, or chlorine gas could poison them. And they were running out of air.

Momsen had rejected a proposal to raise the Squalus because it was too difficult and too risky. That left two options: The trapped men could don Momsen lungs and slowly ascend to the surface, or the rescuers could use the diving bell from above. If they went with the first option, the men would have to escape quickly through the hatch. They’d be weak and susceptible to the cold and pressure of the ocean waters. Some wouldn’t make it.

“On the other hand,” recalled Momsen, “rescue by the rescue chamber is safer, and there is less chance of losing men.”

That meant they’d have to wait on the slow-moving Falcon – and hope for better weather.

‘What’s your trouble?’

It was only by luck that the rescuers knew where the Squalus went down.

Somehow, the exact coordinates of the dive had been garbled in transmission to the shipyard. So Sculpin went in the wrong direction to search for signs of Squalus.

One lookout, Lt. (jg) Ned Denby, happened to glance in the opposite direction and thought he saw a smudge of red smoke. He whipped out his binoculars and confirmed it was a distress signal just as the smoke disappeared. The Sculpin changed course and raced toward the spot.

At 12:55 p.m., Sculpin recovered the yellow telephone buoy and then dropped anchor. The trapped submariners’ spirits rose because they knew the propellers they heard came from their sister ship.

Sculpin’s commander, Lt. Warren Wilkin, got on the phone. “Hello, Squalus. This is Sculpin. What’s your trouble?”

Nichols, the lieutenant (jg.) who had sent up the marker buoy, responded: “High induction open, crew’s compartment, forward and after engine rooms flooded. Not sure about after torpedo room, but could not establish communication with that compartment. Hold the phone and I will put the captain on.”

Thirty seconds later, Naquin got on the line. “Hello, Wilkin,” said Naquin. Then the cable snapped.

To continue reading, click on the link The Greatest Submarine Rescue Ever: Saving the Squalus (Part 2).

This story was updated in 2022.

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Austin Corbin, The ‘Part-Hog, Part-Shark’ Robber Baron of New Hampshire

In the history of New Hampshire, Austin Corbin stands out as probably the most loathsome blight the state ever produced.

So perhaps it’s fitting that his Newport mansion sold in 2019 for a fraction of the asking price. Corbin built the estate around his childhood home, which he razed except for his old bedroom. The house measures 7,500 square feet with four bedrooms and six bathrooms, and the owners asked $3.75 million for it. In September 2019 it sold for $612,733.

Born on July 11, 1827, Austin Corbin made his mark on the world as a railroad man, plantation owner, resort operator and banker. His success came mostly in places outside New England, such as Arkansas, Iowa and New York. And he carefully cultivated the image of a prosperous businessman who summered at his New Hampshire mansion.

Aerial view, Austin Corbin’s Newport estates. Image courtesy Google Maps.

A Monument to Greed

The mansion was his birthplace, but he gradually tore it down over the years. In its place he erected a monument to his greed, complete with a private rail siding for his personal rail cars. You can see it here as it was when the Wall Street Journal featured it as the House of the Day in 2012.

Austin Corbin continued visiting New Hampshire his whole life, and died on his estate in 1896. He was much lamented by the press of the day, which regurgitated the pleasant fiction of the self-made business success.

Scratch the surface of Corbin, however, and you unearth a long and sordid history of corruption, swindling, bribery, thuggery and anti-Semitism. It’s hard to imagine that one man could possess all these traits and in such full measure — but he did.

Austin Corbin

Austin Corbin is largely forgotten in New Hampshire now, but one odd memorial to him remains: Corbin’s Park. You’d need to look a little bit to find it. Even if you did you couldn’t get in (because it’s fenced off and private). But it still exists, taking up 20,000-plus acres – roughly half the size of Lake Winnipesaukee. You’ll find it in Sullivan County near Claremont on the borders of Grantham, Croydon, Cornish and Plainfield.

The park was odd even when it was conceived in 1888, and it’s odder still today. Once upon a time it was open to public visitors; it now remains silent for most of the year. It serves only as a local curiosity and private animal preserve for canned hunts. It’s made the news in the last 20 years only once — when a hunter mistook one of his companions for one of the park’s boars, shot at him (twice) and killed him.

Still, Austin Corbin and his park remain a subject of interest. Brian Meyette, a neighbor of the park, has created an authoritative and informative history of the park at his website. He writes on the site, and rarely does a day go by, even now, when someone doesn’t land on the site looking for information.

Widely Despised

And if you read about the robber barons who did so much to crash financial markets and corrupt governments in the 1800s, you’ll find Austin Corbin generally makes an appearance. In the photo below from the satirical magazine Puck from September 1882, Austin Corbin is depicted in a Louis XV-style party cavorting with other unscrupulous businessmen of his ilk, such as Jay Gould and Russell Sage. A host of senators, including Massachusetts’ George Hoar, are dressed as their courtesans. Corbin stands to the rear of the group with his back to us and a bag of money slung over his shoulder.

Though not as prominent as some of the wealthier robber barons, Austin Corbin was well-known and widely despised in his day. And the story of that black hole of forest in the middle of New Hampshire and the man who created it provides some stunning parallels to the corruption we are surrounded by Austin today.

Friends in High Places

Austin Corbin’s business success is indisputable. He made a long career out of marrying his political connections with his business interests to his benefit and the to benefit of his investors. After learning law at Harvard Law School, he went to work with Ralph Metcalf, Newport’s politically connected lawyer and former New Hampshire secretary of state. Metcalf would later go on to serve two terms as New Hampshire governor.

In 1851, Austin Corbin struck out for the western frontier, which at the time was Iowa. He was armed with his and Metcalf’s connections and investor cash. Metcalf alone had loaned him $1,200. Arriving in Davenport, Iowa, he began working as a lawyer. However, he quickly jumped into the more lucrative real estate and banking trades. Here he got his first experience in the profitable business of selling mortgages to the flood of people relocating to the Midwest.

Banking in mid-1800s was a state-by-state business, with banks each issuing their own currencies supported by their gold reserves and their own credit from lenders. The system was unstable, open to a host of threats such as banks overextending themselves and counterfeiting. The result was a system where anyone accepting currency had to question first if it was real and, if so, was it actually worth anything?

Banking on Success

Austin Corbin succeeded in this rough-and-tumble business. He ran one of the few banking concerns in Davenport that did not have to shut its doors during the 1857 financial panic. However, he was also intimately familiar with the weaknesses of state-by-state banking. At one point, he and his banking partner caused a minor panic in Davenport when they began refusing Illinois currency because of their suspicions about its soundness.

Such decisions were difficult. Accept a weak currency and a bank could be out a lot of money. Refuse it and its customers would revolt. When the Congress passed the National Banking and Currency Act of 1863, Austin Corbin and a group of associates received the first charter for the First National Bank of Davenport. It was the first national bank anywhere under the new rules, according to the bank’s published history.

The national bank system and uniform currency were highly unpopular with established banks. They were accustomed to making money off their own currencies. But the politicians of the day desperately needed to stabilize the financial markets and gain a new source of revenue for the fast-accumulating Civil War debt. The national banks, operated by the Republican-friendly businessmen who won their charters, would provide a much-needed supply of customers for that debt.

Austin Corbin, always politically plugged in, saw the opportunity. He and his colleagues in the First National Bank of Davenport wasted no time in sending off their application to Washington, D.C., seeking the charter. In addition to his political insights, Corbin also had another asset that may have helped clear the way for his banking venture. President Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase.

Another Friend

Chase, who wrote the National Banking and Currency Act and issued the charters, was also a fellow son of New Hampshire. Originally from Cornish, Chase had moved to Cincinnatti, Ohio, in the 1830s. The he won election as both senator and governor before Lincoln chose him as his treasury secretary. He was also Austin Corbin’s cousin.

No strong record details the relationship between Corbin and Chase, who sought the presidency three times and failed at each attempt. On at least one occasion, however, Corbin repaid the kindness of his cousin. Chase’s daughter had married the governor of Rhode Island and the two had a turbulent and scandalous marriage with infidelity on both sides. On one well-documented occasion, Chase’s daughter was driven from their Rhode Island mansion. Corbin gave her shelter and, more importantly, stepped forward to defend her in the press.

For two years Corbin acted as the Iowa bank’s president, and when he resigned in 1865 the bank’s assets had grown from $100,000 to more than $500,000. The national charter had been a goldmine for those banks that seized the opportunity. With their single, uniform currency they were wildly popular with the stability-seeking public. Local currencies, soon subject to discounts by anyone accepting them, gradually left circulation.

The future for the national banks looked bright, but Austin Corbin decided his interests would be better served in New York. And so he took his now-considerable fortune to Manhattan where he could profit by connecting eastern capital with western farmers.

Friend to the Farmer

Corbin’s devious brain saw an opportunity in the rewritten banking act. Congress had restricted commercial banks from holding mortgages. While this protected the currency from being tied to institutions conducting profligate lending, it also created a business opportunity for Corbin. He worked with mortgage companies and a network of brokers to sell mortgages to farmers in the frontier states. The mortgages would be profitable enough, paying 7 to 10 percent. Austin Corbin,though, found a way to improve on that.

His mortgage brokers also kept a portion of the loan as a fee. For instance, someone borrowing $1000 would pay the regular payments with 10 percent interest to Corbin’s mortgage company until the $1000 was repaid. In addition, the borrower would pay a fee to the broker of perhaps $200 from the loan itself.

Austin Corbin of Newport, New Hampshire

Corbin’s practices were illegal. He was sued and convicted of usury for the scam, but he succeeded in hoodwinking the farmers more often than he got caught. He became a millionaire in the process and earned his investors far more of a return.

Still, to any ambitious, flimflam man of the era, mortgage scams amounted to small potatoes. The mortgage processing machinery that Wall Street used to destroy the economy in 2008 hadn’t been invented yet. In Corbin’s day, the real action was in railroads, and that’s where he focused his energy.

Railroads

Railroads in the late 1800s were booming. There was no quicker, nor more corrupt, way to make big money fast. States, counties and municipal governments would grant millions of acres to the roads to lure them in. Financing was readily available for the sexiest venture of the age. And the western frontiers had a tremendous appetite for moving freight and goods.

In addition, the constant mergers and the possibilities for fraud and speculation were tailor made for the Wall Street hustlers. Some of America’s biggest fortunes were made, at least in part, off the railroads. Vanderbilt, Gould, Corning, Harriman and Fisk all profited mightily off the boom, and Austin Corbin intended to join the party.

He is described as a reluctant participant in his first venture — bringing the Indiana, Bloomington, and Western Railroad out of receivership as its president. Corbin quickly saw how the industry worked. The I.B.&W was born out of the financial mismanagement and corruption of the smaller lines brought together to form it. It connected Indianapolis with points in Illinois.

After Austin Corbin shepherded the railroad from receivership in 1870, it racked up a remarkable $13 million in new debt. Then it collapsed into default again in July of 1874. Furious bondholders were left picking through the ashes of the company that now consisted of an inventory of decrepit equipment and little cash. The books were a tangle of self-dealing, and there was little to recover. It gave Austin Corbin a taste for what railroading could be, though, and he went on to own or control numerous railroads in his lifetime.

Philadelphia and Reading

Compared to Frank Gowen, Austin Corbin was a saint. But that’s not saying much. Gowen assumed the presidency of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in 1870, at the age of 33. The Reading had a profitable business in transporting anthracite coal from the Schuylkill County region of Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. There it could be loaded out to other destinations.

Cowen believed that Reading could enhance its profit if it could also own the coal mine and the ships that carried it. The Reading’s charter, however, prevented it from engaging in mining. So one of Gowen’s first acts as president was to convince the Pennsylvania Legislature to create a special entity that would be formed to develop coal in the Schuylkill region. Its stock would be available for purchase.

No sooner did the law pass than the Reading Railroad began buying the stock and pouring its money into the region’s mines. Eventually, the Reading would be the major coal operation in Schuylkill, operating as the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company.

The coal miners’ lives were a bitter struggle. The pay was low and the work extremely dangerous. A quarter of the workers were children between 7 and 16. The Irish immigrant miners had formed the Molly Maguires, who used guerilla tactics against the mine owners.

Molly Maguires

When Gowen took control of the Reading in 1870, it was at the heart of the Molly Maguires disputes that had rocked the region since 1833. Gowen decided to escalate. He reduced wages for his workers, guaranteeing a high level of violence in the region. He hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the group. The Pinkertons passed along information to vigilantes who murdered the Maguires and their families if the state couldn’t execute them legally.

Throughout the period, the railroads and mines persistently sought to lower wages. All the while the railroad executives traveled the rails in luxurious private rail cars and vacationed abroad. The excess and inequality frequently caused strikes. No sooner would one strike end then the companies would cut wages and prompt another strike. One particularly long strike in 1877 included a massacre of railroad men in Reading.

Throughout the chaos, the Reading held a virtual monopoly on anthracite coal. During this period it used dubious means to make money: It fixed prices with other mines, delayed and limited shipments from competitors that would not cooperate, and manipulated its stock both up and down. One of the company’s clever tricks was to charge exorbitant shipping fees to the mining company that it owned to carry its coal. The mining company would borrow the millions to pay the fees, and then the railroad would record the loan proceeds as revenue even though it would need to repay the loans.

Gowen took the company into bankruptcy twice, and after 10 years he began losing his grasp on it. J.P. Morgan finally ousted him. In 1887, with the railroad in receivership, Morgan created a trust to run it with Austin Corbin as president. Corbin reorganized the line to much fanfare, but his tenure would not last long.

Hiring Scabs

Virtually his first act as president was to reignite old fights with the miners, and he managed to extend the fight to the more reserved railroad engineers. From December 1887 to April, 1888, the Reading was beset with strikes. Corbin managed to bring in strikebreakers.

Congress hauled him to Washington to face charges that he provoked a strike by lying that he would raise wages. That let him push coal prices higher and hire scabs at lower wages. Congress exposed the Reading’s fiddling of its books and rigging of coal prices. The company subsequently took a beating in the press.

Austin Corbin also infuriated the congressional committee members by offering to take them to Reading in a posh, private rail car. In that era, people viewed such blatant efforts at bribery as at least somewhat shameful.

People who worked for a living viewed Austin Corbin with derision. The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, for example, published an article about the strike. In it, Austin Corbin was described as belonging to ‘that tribe of human monsters who prey upon poor men, who combine the natures of hog and shark, who, being influenced by greed, make war upon the weak, regardless of right.’

For Austin Corbin, however, criticism from his own kind caused greater problems. While Morgan had cleared out the competition for the Reading once, the remnants of the old management weren’t entirely silenced. The trust had control, but the stockholders were still eager to play games with the company.

Critics

Corbin’s critics constantly needled him. They accused him, for instance, of filling coal cars and putting them on sidings. That way he drove up coal prices by preventing competitors from using them to ship coal. And his critics damaged him seriously when they uncovered another example of his self-dealing.

As the Reading struggled, it could not maintain lease payments to a New Jersey railroad over which it shipped coal. That resulted in a loss to the Reading and a gain to the New Jersey line. Using this information, Corbin heavily invested in the New Jersey rail line.

This kind of manipulation was commonplace among railroad barons, but it resonated with investors who perceived management was more interested in personal profit than the operations of the company.

Austin Corbin beat back his critics, and shareholders selected him to continue on as president. But in 1890 he did an about-face and resigned. It’s unclear why. Did he face new allegations? Had Morgan lost faith in him? Or had he simply realized the company was headed for disaster once again? Because in 1893 the Reading again defaulted.

This time, it signaled the start of the nationwide depression of 1893, which brought years of hardship for the country.

It would be impossible to catalog or reconstruct all of Corbin’s railroading schemes. However, in part two of this article we look at some of his other ventures.

To continue to part two of this article, click here. This story about Austin Corbin was updated in 2022.

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Classic Movies Shot in New England, 13 Award-Winners

Hundreds of filmmakers have come to New England since the turn of the last century and some have shot classic movies here.

It isn’t just because autumn leaves and church steeples make the perfect backdrop for classic movies. New England’s history and literary tradition provide rich material for stories and characters set against quaint fishing villages, gritty mill cities, Gilded Age resorts and Ivy League campuses.

New England’s Classic Movies

Familiar New England themes appear again and again in film. The theme of the salty sea captain fighting a sea monster inspired classic movies from Moby Dick through Jaws to The Perfect Storm. Family secrets inspired Eugene O’Neill’s fictional Ah Wilderness in 1906 as well as the true story of a suspected murder in Reversal of Fortune in 1990. And haunted New England was a favorite theme long before Stephen King arrived on the scene.

New England characters populate many classic movies shot in the region. They include the Boston Brahmin, the rustic Yankee, the stalwart fisherman, the town gossip and the outsider struggling to assimilate.

Characters from New England literature also populate many classic movies. Filmmakers first shot Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in New England in 1909 and remade it four times as a feature film, three as a television production. But because it’s literary doesn’t make it good; Demi Moore starred as Hester Prynne in the 1995 remake of Scarlet Letter. It bombed at the box office and earned seven Golden Raspberries including “Worst Remake or Sequel.”

Here is a baker’s dozen of classic movies shot on location in all six states.

Boomerang

When a murderer takes the life of a kindly priest on a street corner, a prosecutor fights to prove the accused man innocent. The true story of Boomerang actually took place in Bridgeport, Conn., but the filmmakers couldn’t get permission to film there.

Elia Kazan, who directed many classic movies, shot the 1947 film in Stamford, Conn., instead.

He directed an all-star cast including Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt and Karl Malden. Playwright Arthur Miller appeared uncredited as a suspect in the police lineup.

Boomerang received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Kazan also won Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

Homer Cummings, the real-life prosecutor who inspired the film, served as U.S. attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt.

Boomerang, filmed in Connecticut, Maine and New Hampshire.

The Boston Strangler

This true-crime film about the serial killer who terrorized the Boston area from 1962-64 starred Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. As shooting was set to begin in 1968, the man believed to be the Strangler — Albert DeSalvo –escaped from the mental institution where he was held. DeSalvo was captured 33 hours later. Ed Brooke was elected U.S. senator after coordinating the hunt for the killer. “The Boston Strangler” was filmed in Boston, Cambridge and Malden. It received Eddie, Edgar and Oscar nominations. DeSalvo died in prison (where he made choker necklaces for sale) in 1973. His family is still trying to exonerate him.

The Boston Strangler was mostly shot in Boston.

The Trouble With Harry

Just about all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films are classic movies, and The Trouble With Harry is no exception. The trouble with Harry in the film is that he was dead. Hitchcock’s 1955 dark comedy starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine was filmed in Morrisville, Barre and Craftsbury Commons. The crew arrived in Craftsbury on September 27, 1954 to film outdoor shots of fall foliage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any, so they glued leaves on trees. It was nominated for three awards, including BAFTA, Directors’ Guild and Satellite for “Outstanding Classic DVD” in 2005.

Jerry Mathers in The Trouble With Harry, filmed in Craftsbury, Vermont.

The Stepford Wives

A 1975 take on the theme of haunted New England, the film takes place in the fictional Connecticut town of Stepford. Johanna Eberhart moves there with her family and soon discovers a sinister truth behind the perfect behavior of the town’s housewives — they’re robots.

Bryan Forbes shot the film in Connecticut, including Redding, Fairfield, Westport, Weston, Darien (at the Goodwives Shopping Center) and Norwalk at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion.) Katharine Ross, who stars as Johanna, won the 1976 Golden Scroll Best Actress award.

Stepford Wives enjoyed moderate success at first, but evolved into a cult classic over time.

The Stepford Wives, filmed at the Goodwives Shopping Center in Darien, Conn.

Lost Boundaries

This 1949 drama fictionalized the true story of Albert Johnson, a light-skinned African-American doctor. Johnson passes for white in a small northern New Hampshire town.

Starring Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson, director Alfred Werker shot Lost Boundaries in Kennebunkport, Me. (church scene), York (Nubble Light) and Portsmouth, N.H.

In one scene, the doctor takes a Coast Guard boat from Portsmouth to the Isles of Shoals, six nautical miles away. He lands in York, however, quite farther away.

The film won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949.

Lost Boundaries, fimed in Portsouth, New Hampshire.

Jaws

Jaws was the first of the summer classic movies released in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily. The 1975 blockbuster featured a simple premise — the hunt for a man-eating shark that terrorized beachgoers.

The most successful film in box office history at the time, it set a precedent. Director Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws mostly in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard.

It won many awards, including three Academy Awards for Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound. In 2001, Congress voted to include it in the National Film Archive as “culturally significant.”

The author, Peter Benchley, later felt guilty about unfairly maligning the Great White Shark, a creature generally uninterested in eating human beings.

Jaws, filmed in Menemsha, belongs to the pantheon of classic movies shot in New England.

The Great Gatsby

This 1974 film starring Robert Redford as self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby featured the Newport, R.I., mansion Rosecliff as his home. Another mansion, the Vanderbilt’s Marble House, provided interior scenes.

The original Long Island mansion that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write the novel fell to the wrecking ball in 2011. Stanford White designed Rosecliff in 1902 for Nevada silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs.

The Great Gatsby also featured Hammsersmith Farm, another famous Newport property where Sen. John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier.

The Great Gatsby, which also starred Mia Farrow, received two Academy Awards for Best Costume Design and Best Music.

Robert Redford in the Great Gatsby, filmed in Newport, Rhode Island.

Peyton Place

New Hampshire writer Grace Metalious’ best selling book Peyton Place inspired the 1957 movie of the same name. It starred Lana Turner and Hope Lange.

Director Mark Robson shot the film mostly in Camden, Maine, with some exteriors filmed in the Maine towns of Belfast and Rockland, Gilmanton, N.H., and Lake Placid, N.Y.

Peyton Place employed as many as 500 local residents as extras. Most of them donated their earnings — $10 or so — for a new hospital.

The film premiered in Camden two days before everyone else saw it. Peyton Place didn’t do well at the box office for the first four months. Then, Lana Turner’s daughter killed her mother’s mobster lover, Johnny Stompanato. It then became the second-highest grossing film of 1958.

Peyton Place received nine Oscar nominations, including four for supporting performances.

A scene from Peyton Place shot in Camden, Maine.

Love Story

Love Story, the highest grossing film of 1970, was a romantic tragedy based on the wildly popular novel of the same name. It starred Ryan O’Neal as the preppy Harvard student Oliver Barrett IV. Ali MacGraw played the working-class Italian “Cliffie” doomed to an early death.

The American Film Institute placed Love Story in its pantheon of classic movies, calling it one of the most romantic films of all time. Production at Harvard caused such damage to the campus that the university denied future requests to film there.

The movie was also shot in Massachusetts at the frame house at 119 Oxford St. in Cambridge. There, MacGraw’s character utters the famous line, “Love means never having to say your sorry.” Love Story received nominations for seven Academy Awards, winning one for Best Music, Original Score.

Our Town

A 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder‘s play Our Town about family conflict in a small town, this classic movie was shot in Peterborough, N.H. It starred William Holden and Martha Scott.

The town served as the real model for the play, written by Wilder while in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough. Wilder probably named the fictional town of Grovers Corners for Peterborough’s Grove Street. The film received six Academy Award nominations. See the full film here.

Captains Courageous

Spencer Tracy — in curls — played a Portuguese fisherman who rescues Harvey Cheyne, played by Freddie Bartholomew. Captains Courageous begins when Cheyne, a railroad magnate’s spoiled son, gets thrown overboard from an ocean liner.

The 1937 film adapted a book written by Rudyard Kipling in 1897 when he lived in Brattleboro, Vt.

Director Victor Fleming shot scenes in Gloucester, Mass., as well as in California with fish flown in from Alaska and Boston. Gloucester has also provided settings for quite a few classic movies, including Mutiny on the Bounty and The Perfect Storm.

The film received four Oscar nominations. Spencer Tracy won the first of two consecutive Best Actor awards for Captains Courageous; he won for Boys Town in 1938.

Spencer Tracy starred in many classic movies; Captains Courageous, with Freddy Bartholomew, was one of them.

The Thomas Crown Affair

Thomas Crown, a debonair bank executive, thinks he pulled off the perfect bank robbery in this 1968 crime drama.

Steve McQueen starred as Crown, while Faye Dunaway played the insurance investigator who will do anything to get her man.

Director Norman Jewison filmed The Thomas Crown Affair in a number of well-known (and still recognizable) Boston-area locations, including Beacon Hill, the North End, Cambridge Cemetery, the Tobin Bridge, the Allston-Brighton toll booth, Crane Beach in Ipswich and Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant.

The second Harrison Gray Otis house, designed by Charles Bulfinch for a congressman, appeared as Crown’s house. The Thomas Crown Affair won an Oscar for Best Song, Windmills of Your Mind.

Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway on Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass.

High Society

This 1956 musical remake of The Philadelphia Story starred Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. Kelly, who starred in many classic movies, retired after making High Society to marry Prince Albert of Monaco.

Cole Porter wrote the score and Louis Armstrong appeared as himself. Sinatra and Kelly appear driving together in a scene along Ocean Boulevard in Newport, R.I.

Director Charles Walters filmed interiors at a Newport mansion later purchased by Sunny von Bulow. Prosecutors later accused her husband Claus von Bulow of murdering her in the mansion. That story then inspired another film in 1990, Reversal of Fortune.

High Society received nominations for two Oscars, Best Musical, Original Song, and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra on the set of High Society.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about historic New England movie sets and six places New England films were shot.

Images: Menemsha by User:Elkman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Menemsha.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350749. Boston Strangler By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26732719. Our Town By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7159045. Love Story https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6778617.

This story about classic movies shot in New England was updated in 2022.

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Prohibition in Rhode Island: A Three-Time Failure

Prohibition in Rhode Island, always New England’s naughtiest state, failed not once, not twice, but three times. Each time booze was banned, Rhode Islanders made it clear they couldn’t abide Prohibition.

Rhode Island temperance advocates pushed through Prohibition twice before the Eighteenth Amendment forced the entire country to go dry in 1920. During the first two tries, two ardent teetotalers’ lives were threatened. One was murdered.

The third attempt at Prohibition in Rhode Island went even more spectacularly wrong. The Coast Guard started gun battles in Narragansett Bay, ordinary Joes turned into criminals and criminals got organized — and rich. Ray Patriarca, who would ruthlessly control the New England mob from Providence, got his start as a bootlegger.

Even Al Capone was said to have had an illegal drink in Rhode Island.

Prohibition in Rhode Island

The urge to ban booze began inside Protestant churches. Temperance advocates saw alcohol as the cause of urban crime, poverty and violence. They also thought it unhealthy and expensive. They believed prohibition would lower society’s costs for poorhouses and jails, and it would improve everyone’s health and welfare. Immigrants, many of them Catholic, saw temperance as an attack on them. They weren’t wrong.

Maine in 1851 first tried Prohibition in the United States. Other states followed, but people called alcohol bans elsewhere the “Maine Law.” Catholic immigrants in Maine thought it was aimed at them. They rioted in Portland against the city’s teetotaling mayor, Neal Dow. Maine then repealed the Maine Law after five years.

Rhode Island first tried it in 1852. The experiment lasted 11 years.

Political cartoon depicting the Woman’s Holy War against booze

That first attempt at Prohibition in Rhode Island had many detractors – including whoever murdered Burrill Arnold on May 27, 1859, in West Warwick. His friends thought his temperance activities led to his assassination, the local newspaper reported.

Nor did returning Civil War soldiers have any use for Rhode Island’s dry regime, Russell DeSimone speculated in Small State, Big History. Rhode Island repealed Prohibition in 1863, and DeSimone suggested battle-hardened veterans forced the issue.

Second Time Around

Rhode Island did it again in 1886 with a constitutional amendment. The Providence Journal predicted failure. The newspaper was correct.

The General Assembly left enforcement up to the cities and towns, and most cities and towns did little to discourage drinking. East Greenwich, however, waged a determined battle against the rum traffic. That led to the East Greenwich Outrage – attempts on the lives of two ardent prohibitionists. One found arsenic his well on the same day a small explosion went off in the house of the other.

Rhode Island Gov. John Davis missed that licensing revenue

Gov. John Davis opposed Prohibition in Rhode Island as well. The state lost $100,000 in licensing revenue and ran a deficit of $114,000, he said. “This is not a cheerful showing from a financial point of view,” he said, according to the local newspaper.

Three years after Rhode islanders approved Prohibition, they repealed it. On June 20, 1889, 75 percent of voters (all adult males) voted against the law.

Third Time No Charm

Rhode Island learned its lesson. When it came time for the states to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, Rhode Island refused to go along. Thirty-six other states did, however, and Prohibition took effect for a third time on Jan. 17, 1920.

No town in Rhode Island could claim it didn’t have illicit liquor-related activities. In Providence, bootleggers moved into the Biltmore Hotel, newly built with multiple bars. They set up headquarters, and hotel staff made a little extra cash by filling guests’ flasks with illegal booze from a speakeasy nearby.

A few blocks away, the folks at Camille’s Roman Garden made hooch in the basement and served it upstairs in coffee cups to patrons seated in curtained alcoves.

General Stanton House, once a speakeasy

Illegal hooch flowed freely in Kent County: in West Warwick, Old Warwick, Warwick Neck, Arctic, Apponaug and East Greenwich.

In Charlestown, the General Stanton Inn had to add a room to handle to overflow of bootleggers and rum runners. Guests included Al Capone and Tallulah Bankhead.

The Bootlegging Life

During the Depression, Prohibition offered people a way to make a living. A former bootlegger who called himself “Ron Deaver” described how it happened in an interview with Old Rhode Island magazine in 1991 when he was 97 years old. Small State Big History picked it up.

Hell, we didn’t have any choice. There weren’t no jobs, and if you did find a place that was hiring, there would be 500 people lined up in front of you . . . all wanting the same job. It was the time of the Depression. I lived with my sister and her husband for a while and I was waiting tables in a restaurant. I made $9.36 the first week. This was during Prohibition, and it didn’t take me long to figure that people were more interested in drinking than eating. I made a connection with old man Giles, and he would let me have five or six half pints on credit. I would then go to work, put one of the bottles in my pocket, and as I waited tables, I would drop a hint that I could get them some liquor if they wanted. I made 35 cents on every half pint at first, but it wasn’t long before I got the price up.

Nearly everybody broke the law. Deaver said he delivered three or four cases of scotch to a congressman when he visited his home in Newport. The politician had voted for Prohibition.

Ships of the Line

At first, said Deaver, most of the liquor came in by speedboat from New York or Canada, but after a while it came in by the shipload.

The ships would anchor right outside the seven mile limit, and smaller boats would go out and take on loads. Sometimes, if you couldn’t find the brand you needed, you would go shopping out there. You would pull up next to one of the ships, ask them what brands they had and how much it was. Some of the ships would actually fly a pennant showing what they had on board. Everyone’s favorite was the “Johnny” ship. It had a large pennant, must have been 20 or 25 feet long flying from the bridge, with the words “Johnny Walker…Imported” on it.

Got to where there was so many ships out there it looked like we were being invaded.

Prohibition agents examining barrels of liquor seized from a rumrunner. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Prohibition also made mob kingpins rich. Carl Rettich ran a bootlegging operation out of his crime castle in Warwick. Police believed he killed his rival, Danny Walsh, who also got rich off bootlegging. Walsh’s girlfriend talked too freely, and police believed Rettich disposed of her, too. She may have been the first person to wear cement overshoes.

Raids and Gun Battles

The feds tried to stem the flow of hooch. They raided Twin Oaks in 1933, five years into Bill and Eva DeAngelus’ operation as a speakeasy in their modest Cranston farmhouse. He had been making moonshine in the basement, while she made meatball sandwiches upstairs.

Federal agents destroying barrels of booze

They also raided Rettich’s crime castle. They didn’t find the bodies they sought, but they eventually accumulated evidence implicating Rettich in the disappearance of Danny Walsh, a dozen Massachusetts bank robberies and four murders. Rettich went to prison, and the 11 local police officers he bribed to look the other way left the force.

Carl Rettich’s house, where Danny Walsh may have been killed. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Coast Guard battled rumrunners in Narragansett Bay with machine guns and cannon, sometimes within sight of spectators on shore.

An incident in Narragansett Bay on Dec. 29, 1929, helped put an end to Prohibition. Just after 2:00 a.m., a zealous Coast Guard rum chaser, CG-290, went after the Black Duck, a speedboat carrying illegal liquor. Boatswain Alexander Cornell opened fire on the Black Duck, killing three men on board and wounding the fourth.

Many people sided with the Black Duck. The trigger-happy boatswain received a letter addressed to “Mr. Cornell, the Hun.” It warned him not to come ashore because, “Death is waiting for you and your crew.” A few days after the shootings, protesters held a meeting in Boston. The meeting chairman claimed 1,100 people had perished in the so-called “Rum War.”

On December 5, 1933, Prohibition ended with the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Rhode Island would never try that again.

Images: General Stanton Inn By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49470434

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Northern New England Has Gores – Who Knew?

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 18^th and 19^th 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.

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How Clam Chowder Came to New England

If it weren’t for religious persecution, clam chowder might never have happened.

In the 16^th century, Catholic France began persecuting Huguenots. Some of them migrated to Northern Ireland, dominated by another Protestant group — Presbyterians. The Presbyterians welcomed the Huguenots as fellow Protestants and skilled artisans.

But then in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, Anglican England began persecuting anyone who wasn’t Anglican. The Irish Parliament passed a series of laws, called the Penal Laws, to wipe out Catholicism. Then in 1704, it passed the Test Act, which punished anyone who didn’t worship the Anglican way. People had to prove they had taken communion in the Irish branch of the Anglican Church, the Church of Ireland, if they wanted to serve in the army or in the government. They also had to pay tithes to the Church of Ireland. Under the Test Act, the government no longer recognized non-Anglican clergy, and it didn’t recognize non-Anglican marriages.

The Clam Years

The Penal Laws drove Irish Catholics and Presbyterians to North America, where they settled the frontier and planted the potato. Between 1717 and 1775, 250,000 Irish came to America, 200,000 of them Ulster Presbyterians, most of the rest Catholic.

Huguenot cross

They first came to Boston, where the Puritans didn’t especially welcome them. But Gov. Samuel Shute saw how he could use the Ulster Irish. Maine, which then belonged to Massachusetts, was then a battleground. Settlers and natives had been fighting for decades, and natives raided Massachusetts towns like Billerica, only 25 miles from Boston. Shute thought Scots-Irish settlements would make a convenient barrier along the frontier. So in 1718 he agreed to give them land. Some of them came to Maine and settled Bangor, Belfast, Newry and Limerick. (Some stayed in Boston. Peter Faneuil and Paul Revere were Huguenots.)

Maine is about the size of Ireland. Like Ireland, it has a long coastline, mountains and rivers filled with spawning salmon. And, starting in 1718, Maine, like Ireland, had poor hungry Irish people.

The Clam Chowder Story

The Scots-Irish had brought with them Huguenots, who had once lived along the coast of France from Bordeaux to Brittany. That’s where the word chowder came from – the French word chaudière.

M.M. Drymon, in her Scotch-Irish Foodways in America: Recipes from History, points out that the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “chowder” to the heartland of the Huguenots.

Huguenot settlers

During the difficult early years, the starving settlers on the Maine coast lived on clams and potatoes. They called those dire times “the clam years.” And thus clam chowder as we know it came to New England.

A nice big bowl of clam chowder

Fish soup, of course, isn’t unknown throughout the rest of the world. But the Irish and Huguenots who settled Maine brought something special to the table: clam chowder with potatoes.

Potatoes originated in the Americas, but Europeans didn’t actually eat them. Not until Spanish ships brought them back to Europe. The Irish were the first Europeans to cultivate the potato in order to eat it. Scots-Irish who settled Londonderry, N.H., are credited with planting the first potato in the American colonies.

Today, any pub in Ireland that serves traditional Irish food likely sells Irish fish chowder — in Dublin, especially. And most New England pubs that serve food offer clam or fish chowder. There’s one big difference between the two kinds of seafood chowders, though: the Irish usually include smoked fish. New Englanders just include clams. And potatoes.

Huguenot cross by By Syryatsu – Own work (création personnelle) modified from File:Blason_ville_fr_Lacoste_(Vaucluse).svg by User:Spedona, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5143336.

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The Easter Rising Jolts the New England Irish

Just after noon on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, seven men stood on the steps of Dublin’s General Post Office and touched off the Easter Rising, Éirí Amach na Cásca in Gaelic.

One of the men, Patrick Pearse, read, “The Proclamation of a Free Irish Republic.” “In this supreme hour the Irish nation must . . . prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called,” he said.

The fighting then began.

About 1,200 armed members of Irish paramilitary groups, including the women’s Cumann na mBan, seized City Hall, the General Post Office, a telegraph office, the workhouse, the courts and a railway station. They barricaded the streets and proclaimed the Irish Republic.

A Dublin street barricaded during the Easter Rising.

The British responded with thousands of soldiers, artillery and a gunboat. After six days of street fighting, the rebels surrendered unconditionally. British forces rounded up 3,500 prisoners, sending 1,800 to internment camps. They quickly executed nearly all of the instigators, sparing one of them, Eamon de Valera, because he’d been born in the United States.

It was the latest in a long series of failed Irish rebellions against English Rule. There’d been 1641, 1798, 1803, 1879-1881, as well as guerilla skirmishes and Home Rule campaigns. Like the others, the Easter Rising would fail, at least in the short term. But unlike the others, the Irish would continue to fight and ultimately prevail. The Irish in America who supported the war effort made the difference. The British couldn’t get at them.

From Irish communities throughout the Northeast came lawyers, guns and money for the cause of Irish freedom. And after a bloody war for independence, the Irish Free State came into existence in 1921.

Easter Rising

The British had plenty of warning that Irish America would significantly aid the cause of Irish freedom. From New York, Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World newspaper, warned the British, “You are now, unlike the past dealing with two Irelands. The Greater Ireland is on this side of the Atlantic. This is the base of operations. We in America furnish the sinews of war. We in America render moral aid.”

In Britain, Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt observed the Irish were in Ireland during former rebellions. “We could reach their forces, cut off their reserves in men and money and then to subjugate was comparatively easy,” he wrote. “Now there is an Irish nation in the United States, equally hostile, with plenty of money, absolutely beyond our reach and yet within ten days sail of our shores.”

Not all the Irish in America supported the Easter Rising, not at first. But many did. They hadn’t forgotten centuries of persecution nor the horrors of the Great Hunger. Still fresh were the memories of the famine ships, grinding poverty in American slums and bigotry embodied in the warning, “No Irish need apply.”

The shell of the General Post Office in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.

In some cases, an even more intimate connection existed between Irish New England and Ireland. James Connolly, one of the seven leaders of the Easter Rising, had lived and worked in Roxbury, Mass., for a time. Hartford police Det. Sgt. Daniel McAuliffe had had a childhood friendship with another Irish leader, Michael Collins.

One old New Bedford sailor, Henry C. Hathaway, had years earlier aided the cause of Irish independence. In 1869, as fourth officer of a whaling bark, Hathaway rescued the Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly from an Australian penal colony. O’Reilly had been recruiting men to a regiment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood when the British arrested him. After his rescue, he moved to Boston and advocated for the Irish community as editor of The Pilot.

John Boyle O’Reilly. Editor of the Boston Pilot, he died before the Easter Rising.

A Mass Movement for Irish Independence

Before the Easter Rising, the Irish in America didn’t all support a violent uprising against British rule. Two Irish American groups in Boston made the difference clear. The United Irish League of America, founded by the professional and business class, raised money to support a peaceful transfer of power under Home Rule. But Ireland would still belong to the United Kingdom. The Clan na Gael (Fenian Brotherhood), founded in 1867 by Irish working-class immigrants, supported violent rebellion to win Irish independence.

In the wake of the Easter Rising, American newspapers reported how Britain put Ireland under martial law and ruthlessly quashed any dissent. That solidified support in Irish America for an independent republic, turning it into a mass movement.

The execution of James Connolly, one of the seven leaders, proved especially provocative. Severely wounded in the street battles, he had but a day to live when British executioners tied him to a chair — he couldn’t stand up — and shot him to death. Connolly’s daughter Nora came to New England to speak about her father and raise money for the cause. She did an interview with the Boston Globe and met with Mayor James Michael Curley, who gave her a purse full of money.

The American Irish Rise Up

The Easter Rising sparked mass rallies throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut. In Massachusetts they rallied in Lawrence and Lowell, Fall River, North Attleboro, Brockton, Worcester, Chicopee, Springfield, Holyoke and Pittsfield.

Hartford held mass rallies and sent aid to the Republicans. So did New Britain, which sent rifles to Ireland.

A New Haven lawyer, John M. Sullivan, suffered in Kilmainham Jail after his arrest on the streets of Dublin. When Daniel McAuliffe returned from Ireland, the Hartford Police Department put him back on the force.

Branches of Friends of Irish Freedom formed throughout New England and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed a free concert for Clan na Gael to raise money for widows and orphans. The concert opened with Beethoven’s march, “Dead Heroes.”

De Valera Comes to America

Eamon de Valera

In 1918, a majority of newly-elected Ministers of Parliament from Ireland refused to take their seats in London. Instead, they convened at Dublin’s Mansion House, declared Irish independence and elected de Valera president of the new Irish Republic.

The Irish war for independence would continue for another four years. In the meantime, de Valera spent a year and a half in the United States. He spoke to large crowds, seeking financial support and international recognition for an independent Ireland.

He spoke to crowds in Connecticut and Rhode Island, then to 50,000 at Fenway Park. The Massachusetts General Assembly received him warmly, and New Hampshire Gov. John Bartlett invited him to Manchester. He gave a speech at the Lexington Opera House in Kentucky and spoke to a crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York. For 18 months he received warm greetings by crowds, official welcomes, the freedom of cities and two honorary degrees.

The British couldn’t get to him.

On Dec. 6, 1921, the Irish Free State came into existence. More years of struggle followed, but Ireland was well on its way to becoming a republic — with the continued help of Irish America.

Historian Catherine B. Shannon described the Irish-American aid as essential. “Support from Irish America, unified by the brutal British suppression of the Easter Rising, ultimately proved crucial in the subsequent War of Independence from 1919-1921 that secured freedom for the twenty-six counties that now constitute the Republic of Ireland,” she wrote.

With thanks to: The Easter Rising: CT Ties to Bloody Irish Revolt of 1916, April 24, 2016, at 11:35 a.m. | UPDATED: December 12, 2018 at 4:47 p.m. Hartford Courant. Also to De Valera in the United States, 1919 by James P. Walsh, Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. 73, No. 3/4 (September, December, 1962), pp. 92-107 (16 pages).

Images: Irish Republican Brotherhood flag By Fred the Oyster – https://flagspot.net/images/i/ie_1798.gif, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35369203

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The Five Satins Start the New Haven Doo-Wop Craze

On a Sunday afternoon in February 1956, four guys got together in a New Haven church basement and recorded a song their leader wrote, “In the Still of the Nite.” They called themselves the Five Satins, though only four of them sang on the record. And they decided to misspell “night” so as not to confuse it with Cole Porter’s song of the same name.

The song would outlive all of them. Rolling Stone ranked it 90 on its list of “the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” It has appeared in major films, at Disneyland, in video games, on cover versions, on a television series. And it is credited with starting the “Doo-Wop” sound — along with the Turbans’ “When You Dance.”

The song “can still raise chills however you happen to hear it,” wrote Christopher Arnott in The Daily Nutmeg.

The Five Satins

Five Satins

The Five Satins’ doo-wop sound didn’t come out of nowhere. According to Arnott,

The Five Satins were far from the only doo-wop group in New Haven. (Many of the New Haven doo-woppers were high school students who practiced in school hallways or near the basketball courts, enthralled by the sound and success of the Satins.)

Doo-wop started out primarily as an African-American sound, popular among urban teenagers on the East Coast, Detroit and Chicago. In The Complete Book of Doo-Wop, authors Dr. Anthony Gribin and Dr. Matthew M. Schiff argue it had five parts: (1) vocal music made by groups with (2) a wide range of vocal parts mostly from bass to falsetto; (3) it includes nonsense syllables and (4) a simple beat and few instrumentals, as well as (5) simple words and music. One reason for the lack of instrumentation: the kids couldn’t afford instruments.

New Haven doo-wop groups included The Scarlets, The Nutmegs, The Chestnuts, The Premieres, Four Haven Knights, Roger & The Travelers, The Academics, the Barries and Nicky & The Nobles.

The doo-wop scene persisted in New Haven into the 1960s and beyond. Punk rockers revived it in the 1970s.

Story of the Five Satins

The group formed in 1954 with six original members led by Fred Parris. The other five were Lewis Peeples, Stanley Dontche, Ed Martin, Jim Freeman and Nat Mosley. Dortche and Peeples left — too soon. Al Denby joined them and soon after recorded “In the Still of the Nite.”

The members of the group came and went. some joining the military. Parris actually wrote “In the Still of the Nite” as an Army recruit traveling by train from Philadelphia to New Haven. He wrote it about a former girlfriend he hoped would come back to him. She didn’t, he shipped off to Japan shortly after recording the song, and when he returned he discovered someone else leading his group. He went to court and they reached a settlement. Various iterations of the group performed until the 1990s.

You can only hear four voices on “In the Still of the Nite,” but they called themselves the Five Satins because of the trend. Groups of four like the Four Lads and the Four Coins fell behind groups of five like the Five Crowns and the Five Royals.

In the Still of the Nite

They recorded it in the basement of St. Bernadette Church in the East Shore neighborhood of New Haven. Their manager, Marty Kugell, owned a small label called “Standord.” Kugell put “In the Still of the Nite” on the B-side of a single, “The Jones Girl.” His friend Vinny Mazzetta served as an altar boy at the church and played the saxophone. Mazzetta convinced the pastor to let the group record the song. Mazzetta played the saxophone on the record, and they used the church piano, drums, a guitar and a cello. But because the group lacked a full backup band, Parris convinced them to fill in with “shoo-doop-shoo-be-doop.”

Fred Parris in 2007

The song got some play in Connecticut, then it was released on a bigger, New York label. It hit No. 3 on the Billboard R&B chart. But it had legs, and stayed on the charts for years.

It also hung around New Haven.

“When the rock-nostalgia club Boppers ruled the downtown College Street dance club scene back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the closing-time anthem every night was The Five Satins’ ‘In the Still of the Night’,” reported Arnott.

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Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Lawyer, Poet and a Black Man’s Drinking Buddy

When Nancy Hammond bought a house on Gates Street in Portsmouth, N.H., she had no idea it would inspire her to trace the life story of a good and interesting man. Tradition had it that Jonathan Mitchel Sewall had lived in the house during the time of George Washington. Washington, in fact, may have walked right past it on his visit to Portsmouth in 1789.

Hammond wanted to find out more.

Sewall’s house on Gates Street

She learned that Sewall recorded his observations about much of the world around him, from Salem to Spain, from slave to Superior Court chief justice. He felt things deeply, and, often depressed, he wrote popular poems about the world he knew. Hammond’s curiosity about him led her to dig up those old poems as well as fragments of his life.

Then, during the COVID pandemic, she wove them together into The Life and Times of Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, 1748-1808.

“Now I am cherishing him and hoping to make him better-known as best I can,” she wrote in her introduction.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Sewall’s life was his friendship with Primus Fowle, an enslaved printer with whom he probably shared “many a cheerful dram.”

Jonathan Sewall

Sewall was the great-nephew of Judge Samuel Sewall, a Puritan leader, Salem witch trial judge and opponent of slavery.

Samuel Sewall

Born in Salem, Mass., Jonathan was educated at Boston Public Latin School while living with his uncle Stephen Sewall, chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature. He then studied law with his cousin Jonathan Sewall, Massachusetts attorney general, before he moved to Portsmouth, N.H There he became a well-known and well-loved local character who wrote poetry and the New Hampshire Bill of Rights. He spoke at every local celebration during the rest of his life, and most likely helped the enslaved people of Portsmouth with their Black Petition of 1779.

Self Medication

Sewall came from a mercantile family, and he was apprenticed in the merchant business in Salem. Some time before his apprenticeship ended, he came down with a fever. It brought him so low that he decided to take a voyage to a milder climate for his health.

And so he sailed for Spain, probably Bilbao. New Hampshire historian Albert T. Batchellor wrote that the warm climate helped him. “[Y]et the violence of his fever and the strong medicines which the physicians administered to him when sick, afterwards subjected him to exquisite nervous affections and the keenest mental suffering approaching delirium,” Batchellor wrote.

Jonathan’s brother-in-law, William Pynchon, described in his diary on December 21, 1785, his visit to his house in Salem: “Bro. Mitchell comes in Portsmouth stage; a dark cloud over his visage, his eyes wild.“

Jonathan grew prone to hypochondria and nervous problems, which he medicated with “stimulating beverages.”

“But his friends loved him none the less and appear never to have lost respect for him,” wrote historian Charles Bell. “The lady who became his second wife, when remonstrated with on her engagement to a man of his habits, replied, ‘I would rather marry Mr. Sewall drunk than any other man sober’.”

Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Lawyer

His mercantile career over, Jonathan Mitchel Sewall turned to the law. He studied — and probably lived with — Judge John Pickering. His later work as a Portsmouth lawyer brought him into contact with people in trouble. He often helped them out without charging them.

According to an obituary Hammond found, “The widow, the fatherless, and the stranger, also found in his talents a never-failing resources, for without even the hope of reward, he devoted his great abilities to their service.”

Though no portraits of him exist, a contemporary noticed his striking resemblance to the British statesman, Edmund Burke.

Edmund Burke, from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, (1767-1769)

Hammond notes Sewall may also have helped draw up an eloquent petition demanding freedom for Portsmouth’s enslaved servants in 1780. The document, known as “the petition of Nero Brewster and others,” failed then to free them. In 2013, New Hampshire’s General Court posthumously granted them their freedom.

Nero Brewster worked for William Brewster, who ran a tavern on Pleasant and Court streets. Sewall may well have medicated himself with stimulating beverages at Brewster’s Tavern .

This map shows the proximity of Judge John Pickering’s house to Fowle’s printing shop.

“With Jonathan’s own propensity for drink, he must have shared quite a few “cheerful” drams with Primus,” wrote Hammond. “Primus may well have been the first enslaved person that Jonathan met in Portsmouth as they probably lived across the street from each other.”

Primus would have printed Jonathan’s poetry. He had come to New Hampshire with his owner, the printer Daniel Fowle. Fowle sometimes printed Jonathan’s public poetry in his weekly newspaper, The New Hampshire Gazette.

Primus

“It has been said that Primus could not read,” wrote Hammond. “If he were the only person working with Fowle it seems unlikely that he would be unable to help with the typesetting.”

His main task, she wrote, “would have been setting the cases of print on to the press, setting the paper, and then inking the letters before the case went into the press. Then the lever was turned to pull the paper and the case of type into it and to press it down to make the print. When this was done, the lever was pulled back to take the case out and then, because the ink was oil based, the printed sheets had to be hung up to dry overnight. The type needed to be cleaned and returned to the letter cases.”

Hammond offers the kind of insight Jonathan Mitchel Sewall revealed in his poetry. She wondered,

“What must it have been like for Primus to print ads for the sale of “Indian, Negro, or Mulatto” people as slaves and information about returning escapees to their enslavers every week?” she wondered. Hammond includes examples, such as “A very likely NEGRO BOY, about 14 years of age, to be Sold, Enquire of the Printer.”

Primus died in 1791, and Jonathan wrote his obituary, which appeared in the newspaper.

Epitaph on the Death of Primus

Under these clods, old Primus lies

At rest and free from noise,

No longer seen by mortal eyes j

Or grieved by roguish boys;

The cheerful dram he lov’d ‘tis true

Which hastened on his end.

But some in paved-street well knew

He was a hearty friend,

And did possess a grateful mind

Though oft borne down with pain,

Yet where he found a neighbour kind

He surely went again;

Too often did the mirth of some

His innocence betray,

By giving larger draughts of rum

Than he could swill away,

But now he’s dead, we sure may say

Of him, as of all men,

That while in silent graves they lay

They’ll not be plagu’d again.

Not Fair

Writes Hammond, “The epitaph reads as though it was given at the graveside as it begins ‘Under these clods.’ It surely gives the impression that Jonathan knew Primus well even to the painfulness of his aging shoulders and knees.”

If Jonathan Mitchel Sewall was sensitive enough to understand that Primus suffered physical pain as well as humiliation, he may also have grasped the unfairness of his enslavement. Hammond noted that Sewall’s son Stephen, probably around 14, apprenticed to a printer, then an elite trade.

“The printing trade was a very good one to be in and a young boy could progress from his seven-year apprenticeship to become a journeyman and then a master printer himself,” Hammond wrote. “As a journeyman he would be able to get a job in almost any city. But at that time these steps would only be possible for a young white boy. Primus’ “apprenticeship” lasted for all of his long life. A printer would not only print the newspaper, but broadsides, pamphlets, books, and many types of forms especially for the state.”

In Silent Graves

Primus Fowle was buried in Portsmouth’s Negro Burying Ground, a segregated cemetery on the outskirts of the town. People eventually forgot about it until 2003, when a road crew unearthed coffins and skeletal remains. Today, a memorial park on the site memorializes those buried there.

Portsmouth African Burial Ground Memorial

Seventeen years later, Jonathan Mitchel Sewall went to his final resting place in Portsmouth’s North Cemetery. His gravestone reads,

Sacred to the Memory of Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Esq.

Counsellor at Law who died March 29, 1808 Age 60

In vain shall worth or wisdom save

The dying victim from the destin’d grave,

Nor Charity, our helpless nature’s pride,

The friend to him who knows no friend beside,

Nor genius, science, eloquence have pow’r,

One moment to protract the appointed hour.

Could these united have his life repriev’d,

We should not weep for Sewall still had lived.

Portsmouth African Burying Ground Memorial Park By LibSEEE – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91322234.

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