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A Brief, Mostly Nonmusical History of Baked Beans

Do not mess with a New Englander over the proper way to cook baked beans. You soak them, you parboil them, you add a few things from the pantry and then you bake them for a very, very long time.

But within those limits you can find many variations, depending on where you live or where your family comes from. A church lady in Brewer, Maine, will use a different kind of bean than a fisherman Downeast. A Franco-American in Vermont won’t use the same sweetener as a Boston Irishman.

Massachusetts Baked Beans

How you cook your baked beans also varies with your latitude. The Penobscot people in Maine will probably tell you to cook your beans in a bean hole. But in Connecticut, Jacques Pepin prefers his oven.

History of Baked Beans

Food historians liked to quibble over the origin of baked beans. The traditional story has indigenous people teaching the Puritan settlers how to bake beans in an earthenware pot.

Then the Puritans, who wouldn’t work on the Sabbath, baked beans for Saturday night supper, along with brown bread. On Sunday morning the beans came out of the still-warm oven for a breakfast without toil.

Antique beanpots

Some food historians say they can find no direct evidence that indigenous people baked beans in earthenware pots. Kenneth Roberts, a Maine novelist with strong opinions about ketchup, argued against the legend of the baked bean. Instead, he said, baked beans had been a traditional Sabbath dish among North African and Spanish Jews.

Whatevs. Today the baked bean is unquestionably linked to Boston and the rest of New England, especially Maine. There they bake beans in a hole in the ground.

The baked bean tradition probably has to do with New England’s long winters back in the day. Game was scarce and fresh produce long gone. Dried beans helped keep people alive.

Three Sisters

The baked bean belongs to the Three Sisters of the indigenous tribes of the Northeast: corn, beans and squash. Together they provide unequaled nutrition and soil enrichment.

Three Sisters

Along with corn and squash, baked beans contain all nine amino acids, complex carbohydrates, fatty acids, protein and Vitamin A.

Today, baked beans have a side benefit, especially when oil prices rise. They keep drafty New England kitchens warm on a winter day.

Beantown

Baked beans are the reason Boston is called Beantown. They’re the reason four college hockey teams compete in an annual tournament called the Beanpot. And they’re why a tourist slogan from the 1920s claimed, “You don’t know beans until you’ve bean to Boston.”

An old bit of doggerel goes:

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

The Boston version of the baked bean uses molasses, as the city was the epicenter of molasses (and rum) production in the United States. Bostonians bake their beans in a beanpot, once sold as souvenirs. They prefer the Navy bean to the yellow eye or the kidney. On June 23, 1993, the Massachusetts General Court determined the Navy bean had been the original bean in the venerable Boston Baked Bean recipe. Thus the baked Navy bean became the official Massachusetts State Bean.

Wayne Turner holds the Beanpot, 1980

See below for a recipe from Boston’s venerable, but now defunct, Durgin Park restaurant.

Baked Beans with Syrup

The farther north from Boston you go, the more likely you are to find your baked beans sweetened with maple syrup. In Hopkinton, N.H., you can actually get baked beans at Breakwind Farm. Breakwind makes traditional beans with molasses, maple syrup, onions and garlic. It also makes a version with Kombu (edible kelp), but takes it out after boiling to reduce the gas. Those beans come with a catchy slogan: “No more need to avoid beans before weddings and long flights!”

Vermonters have their own version of the baked bean. It uses bacon instead of salt pork and maple syrup instead of molasses.

Maine Baked Beans

Tread carefully when discussing baked beans with an old-school Mainer. Do not even suggest baking beans with other than State of Maine beans, made by the Kennebec Bean Company in North Vassalboro.

Mainers prefer the bean-hole bean, cooked over hot coals in a hole in the ground (seriously). That’s the way the Penobscot people did it back in the day. Adding bear fat and maple syrup used to make for a sublime winter dish.

Today churches hold bean-hole dinners as fund raisers and the Common Ground Fair has one going in August.

Beans were ideal sources of protein for hungry lumberjacks, and every Maine lumber camp featured a bean hole.

Breakfast at a Maine lumber camp in 1943, They also get pancakes, syrup, scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, biscuits, molasses cookies, gingerbread, pie, coffee, bread and butter.

According to the Maine Folklife Center,

In the logging camps, beans were served at every meal. The bean hole is a stone-lined pit in which a fire is built until a good bed of coals forms. A cast iron bean pot (holds about eleven pounds of dried beans) is lowered into the pit, covered over with dirt and allowed to cook, usually overnight. Several bean pits could keep beans cooking at all times.

Regional Preferences

But which beans? Depends on where you live. According to the Folklife Center, Yellow-Eye beans, with a clean, mild flavor, rank No. 1 in Maine. But certain places have certain preferences. In Lewiston they prefer the white Navy bean, but the Jacob’s Cattle bean is the one for people just west of Fryeburg and North Conway.

You’ll find the old Marafax bean – dense, chewy and flavorful — Downeast in Jonesport and Addison. St. Joseph Church in Brewer prefers the Pea bean, though Brewer itself is Sulphur, or China, bean territory.

Opinions are strongly divided, however, on the addition of baking soda to cut down on the musicality of the fruit. Some say it ruins the taste; others say it doesn’t, and it’s definitely worth it.

The Tragedy of B & M Beans

Portland’s B & M Baked Beans for a century slow-cooked baked beans in brick ovens, the way they’re supposed to cook. Tragically, the parent company sold the factory in 2021 and moved production to the Midwest. A nonprofit planned to turn the iconic factory into a digital life sciences center. B & M Baked Beans’ 86 employees had to find new jobs. The plant manager in August 2021 said he thought manufacturing in Maine would be excited to have employees of that caliber. (If they can find manufacturing in Maine or anywhere else in the U.S. for that matter.)

What To Eat With Them

In Boston, baked beans go with brown bread, made from rye or whole wheat, corn meal, molasses and raisins. It’s ok to steam it in a can, but it is not ok to steam beans in a can the way a certain company whose name rhymes with mines does.

Rhode Islanders eat baked beans with johnnycake – fried pancakes made from ground corn. You can still buy stone-ground corn meal in Usquepaug , R.I., from the Kenyon Corn Meal Co. They grind it in a mill that dates to the early 1700s.

If in doubt, there’s always the frankfurter.

Traditional Boston Baked Beans

Here’s the Durgin Park recipe for Boston Baked Beans.

Durgin Park 2009

1 lb dried Navy beans
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
½ lb salt pork
1⁄2 medium onion (peeled and uncut)
4 tablespoons sugar
1⁄3 cup molasses
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon salt

Soak beans overnight.

Preheat oven to 325°. Place the baking soda in a Dutch oven and fill halfway with water.

Bring to a boil, add the beans and boil for 10 minutes.

Drain beans in a colander and run cold water through them. Set aside.

Dice the salt pork.

Put half of the salt pork on the bottom of the bean pot, along with the onion.

Put the beans in the pot.

Then put the remaining salt pork on top of the beans.

Mix the sugar, molasses, mustard, salt and pepper with 3 cups of hot water and pour over the beans.

Cover pot with lid and place the pot into the preheated oven.

Bake for six hours.

Check pot periodically to make sure the amount of liquid is okay.

Add water to the beans slowly as needed to keep them moist; DO NOT FLOOD THEM.

Remove the pot from the oven and serve.

Images: Baked beans By Victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23943506. 1980 Beanpot By Nusportsinfo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5677874. Beanpot: By FiveRings at en.wikipedia – self-made, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16968646. Lumberjacks: Collier, J., photographer. (1943) United States Maine, 1943. May. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017855691/. Three Sisters By Garlan Miles – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97241939. Durgin Park By Pmcyclist – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6655738.

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The Other Side of the Boston Tea Party

Every story has two sides, and the other side of the Boston Tea Party is rarely told. But the merchants responsible for the tea viewed the beverage protest as misguided and, ultimately, a triumph of mob rule.

Parliament actually thought the colonists would favor the Act that inspired the Tea Party. After all, it lowered the duties on tea—well, some tea, the tea sold by the East India Company.

The Boston Tea Party

The company was then a foundering monopoly. It faced bankruptcy, and it had a huge surplus of tea.

So Parliament exempted the company from duties on tea to England, where it was shipped before export to the colonies. England still collected a tax on that tea when imported to the colonies. However, the East India’s tea would still cost less than it had, making it more competitive with tea smuggled into the colonies.

The Other Side of the Boston Tea Party

The merchants who agreed to sell the tea in the colonies viewed the arrangement as eminently reasonable. The Sons of Liberty and their ilk did not. Bostonians just trying to make a living were caught in the middle of the controversies over Parliament’s trade regulations.

John Singleton Copley, the preeminent American artist of the 18^th century, could see the other side of the Boston Tea Party controversy—until a couple of pre-Tea Party riots terrorized his family.

John Singleton Copley could sort of see the other side of the Boston Tea Party debate.

Copley had married the daughter of Richard Clarke, a wealthy merchant who agreed to sell the East India Company tea. When Benjamin Edes and John Gill began agitating against the tea tax in their Boston Gazette, Clarke penned a response.

“Have not large quantities of tea for some years past been continually imported into this Province from England … all of which have paid the American Duty?” he wrote. “What consistency is there in making a Clamor about this small Branch of the Revenue, whilst we silently pass over the articles of Sugar, Molasses and Wine, from which more than three-quarter parts of the American Revenue has and always will arise.”

The Merchants’ Quandary

Richard Clarke

Clarke’s ability to get credit depended on his reputation for integrity and reliability. So he couldn’t afford to go back on his word that he’d accept the tea from the East India Company.

He and the other consignees faced a series of provocations from a group they viewed as the rabble. Their haughty demeanor in facing the mob didn’t help them.

Riot No. 1

On Nov. 17, 1773, Richard Clarke entertained his extended family in his Boston mansion. John Singleton Copley no doubt attended the gathering to welcome home is brother-in-law from England.

A letter to the editor of the Boston Post-Boy (probably written by Clarke) described what happened next. Suddenly they heard “a violent Knocking at the Door, and at the same Instant a tremendous Sound of Horns, Whistles and other Noises of a Multitude.” The noise caused distress among the “tender Sex,” which included Copley’s wife, Sukey.

Hundreds of drunken, brick-wielding men surrounded the house, throwing the women into a violent panic, according to the letter.

The women ran upstairs while the men barred the doors and closed the shutters. But the crowd surged into the house and began breaking up the furniture. For two hours they argued and fought with the men of the Clarke family, slightly injuring one or two. One of the Clarkes shot a gun from a second-floor window. Finally the mob quieted and suggested a meeting between the tea consignees and the tea opponents the next day. The Clarkes refused.

The Boston Gazette put a different spin on the affair. A “small number of invincible heroes had spread terror among a mere host of poltroons,” reported the Gazette. The Clarkes had “treated the people with an air of contempt,” provoking them with threats and guns. The crowd had acted peacably, demonstrating its “uneasiness” with a few “Huzzahs.”

The John Singleton Copley family

Another Side

However, the peacable crowd had destroyed Richard Clarke’s house. His family had to move from the now-uninhabitable dwelling. Clarke went to his sister’s house in Salem, and his sons and their families moved to Castle William, the fort on Boston Harbor.

John Singleton Copley and his wife Sukey went back to their home on Beacon Hill, next to John Hancock’s mansion. They called their 20-acre estate Mount Pleasant. It had several houses on it, gardens and a piazza.

During the tea controversy, Copley had acted as a go-between for the two sides. He had failed to reconcile them, and the tea went into Boston Harbor.

His sympathy for the other side of the Boston Tea Party battle ended in April 1774.

He and Sukey, asleep in bed around midnight, awoke to a loud knocking on the door.

Copley went to the window and saw “a number of persons below.”

They said they were looking for George Watson, married to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s daughter. Copley undoubtedly remembered a mob had destroyed Hutchinson’s house nine years earlier.

Copley said Watson had visited them, but he’d gone home. Asked how he could entertain such a rogue and a villain, Copley said Watson had visited John Hancock and stopped by his house afterward. The name Hancock assuaged the crowd and it left.

The Hancock House from across Boston Common

The Mob Returns

But then the mob turned around and came back, shouting the Indian yell. Copley opened the window again and said Watson wasn’t in the house. They refused to take his word for it. They said they didn’t believe him. His blood would be on his head if he lied to them, they said.

Finally, they went home.

The late-night visit unnerved Copley, a stammerer and a cautious man. Had Watson stayed over, he said afterward, he would have had his house pulled down. And “perhaps my family murdered” if he didn’t give up his friend.

Flight to England

Soon after Copley faced down the mob, he fled to England.

He’d never been to England, despite the fame and fortune he believed awaited him there. England’s leading American painter, Benjamin West, had invited him to join him. Copley had meant to take up the offer, but hadn’t. America, after all, was the provinces; for someone as ambitious as Copley, England was the place to be.

His wife and children eventually joined him, and so did his father-in-law. He didn’t forget his native land, but he tried to forget the controversies that had started a war.

“When I reflect what a happy people the Americans have been & how unhappy they are at this time I am much greaved,” he wrote.

“[B]ut I have dwell’d longer on this subject than I intended so shall leave it for this time, for I will avoid engaging in politicks as I would wish to preserve an undisturbed mind and tranquility that is inconsistent with political disputes.”

***

The semiquincentennial of the American Revolution is just around the corner. Find out how to be a part of New England’s Revolution 250 celebration in “Revolutionary War Sites in New England.” Click here to order your copy today!

With thanks to A Revolution in Color, The World of John Singleton Copley by Jane Kamensky.

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Stephen Higginson Tells Fish Stories To Parliament In 1771 and Gets Arrested For It

In 1771, the British government desperately needed to know how American colonists felt about fishing policies. Stephen Higginson filled them in, and almost got jailed as a traitor because of it.

Stephen Higginson served in many capacities during the American Revolution and the formative years of the country – military leader, representative to Congress and political intriguer.

Higginson was born in Salem, Mass., in 1743 into a family of politicians and clergymen. Well-connected, his single act of rebellion against his place in society seems to be his decision to marry Susannah Cleveland, his second cousin from Connecticut. As their families opposed the marriage (probably because of their youth), the couple ran away to New Hampshire to marry in 1764.

After returning to Salem, Higginson took up his position as a merchant trader, same as his father. He set up a home near East India Square in Salem across from the Lafayette Coffee House. Armed with introductions from his well-connected father, he sailed to England in 1771.

Stephen Higginson in London

Stephen Higginson

In England, Higginson had his first critical brush with politics. Higginson, on his travels in England to introduce himself to his trading partners, found himself summoned before Parliament to answer to an investigation about New England’s fisheries.

Higginson’s testimony gave a picture of how large and vital cod fishing was to the New England economy.

Seven hundred fishing vessels, most between 40 and 70 tons, worked the waters off New England fishing for cod. It took more than 4,000 people to man those vessels, Higginson estimated. Another 2,000 worked on shore, curing and preparing the catch for sale. And another 350 vessels, employing another 3,000 people, transported the fish to market.

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all New England exports by value. But the interests of the English and their American colonies often diverged when it came to codfish.

Fishing schooners

American fish fed slaves in the West Indies and Catholics in Europe. This resulted in New England fishermen trading with the French, importing French sugar, rum and molasses, as well as trading directly with the French in Newfoundland. Britain implemented a series of tariffs to limit New England fishermen’s ability to trade with the French, preferring to keep such trade for Englishmen.

By 1771, the arguing over the New England fishery had gone on for 40 years, and Britain’s Navy actively seized American fishing vessels caught trading with the French. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament who sympathized with the colonists and their position, summoned Higginson to testify.

Stephen Higginson Testifies

The British, as usual, were concerned that New England was trading too much with Spain and France, rather than England.

Higginson explained that Britain remained New England’s primary trading partner. He suggested that restricting New England trade would result in the region being unable to pay its debts to English companies.

In particular, the Parliament questioned what New England fishermen would do if the government closed the fishery entirely.

A partial transcript of his testimony:

Under Questioning

Q. What would these people do if the Fishery was stopped?

A. I can’t readily resolve that question. I suppose they would remain where they are as long as they could subsist in hopes of being engaged in their old employment.

Q. But when that hope failed and they could no longer subsist?

A. Then they will probably go elsewhere?

Q. Whether they would settle at Halifax?

A. In general I think not … the Fishermen in Salem and other Towns are a very quiet and steady set of men They esteem the people of Halifax to be dissolute and of a quite contrary turn. I think therefore they would not sit down among a people so different in their manners. Another reason is that they think the Government of Halifax is arbitrary and have a terrible notion of it. Another, those who have been there have disliked the country very much as being inhospitable.

Q. Would they go to Miguelon and St Pierre and fish for France?

A. Don t think they would generally. From Marblehead some perhaps would.

Q. Why would they from thence?

A. Because the people there are of various nations Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, but the others are born in the towns where they live, have tenements and freeholds there and would not leave their place of abode, I conceive.

Return of the Traitor

News of Higginson’s appearance before Parliament spread, and upon his return to Marblehead, the colonial authorities arrested him on suspicion of traitorous conduct. Higginson had walked a fine line in Parliament, both continuing to state the American case for greater freedom in operating the fishery while defending the loyalty of the colonists.

Fortunately for his sake, Higginson had brought a detailed account of his testimony home with him. When he presented what he had said, the colonial authorities reversed themselves and praised him for his poise and presentation.

Into the History Books

During the American Revolution, Higginson ran his ships as privateers, and in 1783 Massachusetts elected him to the Continental Congress. Following the war, he participated in the military force that put down Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 and 1787.

Higginson’s most well-known legacy involves his opposition to John Hancock, during Hancock’s term as governor of Massachusetts. Higginson was a firm Federalist, along with John Adams and many others. The Federalists wanted a strong central government, and they were opposed by the Anti-Federalists who wanted the states to retain more power in the new country that they were forming.

John Hancock, meanwhile, had become something of a political chameleon. He managed to win support from enough Federalists and Anti-Federalists to serve as governor.

Stephen Higginson led probably the harshest attack on Hancock, though there were many. He published the “Laco Papers” in a newspaper, castigating Hancock for a weak military record during the Revolution. He called into question Hancock’s fitness to serve, as well as the alliances he had struck with his opponents, including Samuel Adams. In addition to printing the letters in a newspaper, under the pseudonym Laco, he also had them bound and distributed.

The Laco Papers had a remarkable effect, though not the one Higginson intended. Historians agree that the publication most likely generated sympathy for Hancock and helped extend his political reign.

Thanks to: Life and Times of Stephen Higginson, Member of the Continental Congress (1783)

Images: Stephen Higginson, Delegate to Continental Congress, New York Public Library, Max Rosenthal(Etcher)

Postcard of fishing vessels at the Portland Dock, Maine, c. 1908.

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The Nutshell Studies: Frances Glessner Lee and the Dollhouses of Death

In 1929, a depressed, divorced 51-year-old society matron decided to take up murder as a hobby. Frances Glessner Lee had just closed her New Hampshire antiques business, and she was looking for something to do. Chance and a family friend led her to create 20 crime scenes in dollhouses. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Frances Glessner Lee

Frances Glessner Lee for years featured her macabre dollhouses in weeklong training seminars for homicide detectives at Harvard. They’d spend hours figuring out how her dolls got bitten, stabbed, hanged, beaten and shot. Lee provided them with exquisitely crafted and accurately proportioned clues. A pencil made from a toothpick had real lead in it, while nail polish blood spatters were scientifically accurate.

“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this,” filmmaker John Waters told the New York Times after seeing her work.

Dorothy Dennison, a high school student, was found dead in the Parsonage Parlor after her mother reported her missing. She’d gone to the store to buy hamburg meat. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Godmother

Plump and grandmotherly, Frances Lee had no business dabbling in criminology. She was a woman for one thing, and she had no formal education. But she used her money, her connections and her passion for dollhouses to change the way police investigate murders. Her philanthropy earned her the nickname “godmother of forensic science.”

Her most visible legacy – her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death — survives to this day and is still used to train detectives. Several books have been written about them. In 2017 the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum displayed the restored dollhouses for three months. The exhibit attracted 100,000 visitors, wowed by the extraordinary craftsmanship and attention to detail.

The Creator of the Nutshell Studies

Frances Glessner was born March 25, 1878, in Chicago, an heiress to the International Harvester fortune. She grew up pampered and protected inside a stone fortress, a Prairie Avenue mansion designed by H.H. Richardson.

The Glessner House as it neared completion. Photo courtesy Cornell University Library.

The Glessner house stood out as a monumental architectural masterpiece among the other Gilded Age mansions on Prairie Avenue. Frances’ mother, an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, decorated the house in impeccable Arts and Crafts style.

Frances had one sibling, older brother George, who suffered from hay fever. The family doctor advised the Glessners to take George away from Chicago during hay fever season. So they built a summer home on 1,500 acres in Bethlehem, N.H., called The Rocks. Family friend Frederick Law Olmsted landscaped the estate. Both Frances and George would move there permanently as adults.

Harvard

When George reached college age, he went to Harvard. Frances wanted to join him and study medicine, but her father – her “jailer,” she once called him – wouldn’t let her. Instead, her parents sent her to Europe with an aunt for 14 months and encouraged her to pursue music and the crafts.

At Harvard, her brother formed a close friendship with George Magrath, a brilliant medical student. Magrath would later have a major impact on Frances’ life. Back then, he and her brother liked to jump on their bicycles and race each other to big fires in Cambridge or Boston.

The year before graduation, in 1893, George Magrath joined the Glessner family at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. The next year, Magrath spent three days with the Glessners at The Rocks in New Hampshire. In his thank you letter to Mrs. Glessner, he wrote, “My visit besides being the source of much immediate pleasure has left with me the refreshing picture of a corner of the universe where the beautiful and the ideal are very fully realized and where true happiness exists.”

Lonely and Terrified

Frances found little happiness. She once wrote at 73, “This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life I have lived.”

In 1898, just shy of her 20^th birthday, Frances Glessner married Blewitt Lee, a lawyer 10 years her senior. She barely knew him. Her father built them a house near his own in Chicago, and they had three children. Frances left her husband several times and then finally divorced him in 1914. Her father packed her and the children off to Santa Barbara in disgrace.

When Frances created her Nutshell Studies, most of the victims were women who died violent deaths at home. Perhaps she was commenting on her own marriage. Or was she expressing her feelings about the domestic role foisted on her?

After World War I she moved east, splitting her time between Boston and The Rocks. She and her daughter, Frances, opened an antiques shop in New Hampshire. But that enterprise ended just before she checked into Massachusetts General Hospital in 1929 for surgery.

Coincidentally, her old friend George Magrath was there, too.

Could this be a clue to a murder? In the 1930s, homicide detectives didn’t get any training to to determine whether it was or not. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

George Magrath

Florence Glessner Lee and George Burgess Magrath had such a close friendship that people wonder if they were lovers. Lee’s biographer, Bruce Goldfarb, doesn’t think so. He told an audience at the Kansas City Public Library that Magrath was probably gay.

Magrath was also eccentric. He ate one meal a day, typically at midnight at the St. Botolph’s Club. Big and rugged, he wore his hair long, smoked a calabash pike and always wore a flowing Windsor tie.

He had one weakness, wrote Goldfarb. Alcohol. Magrath maintained a steady state of intoxication. Perhaps he needed to self-medicate during a lifetime in which he investigated 21,000 deaths and testified in 2,000 trials.

In 1929, Magrath needed treatment for a severe bacterial infection of his hands. He had served as the Suffolk County Medical Examiner since 1907, the first medical examiner with training in pathology. (He shared the office with Dr. Timothy Leary, father of the LSD crusader of the same name.)

Turning Point

Recuperating at Mass General with Frances, George Magrath entertained – no, enthralled — her with stories about his work. He had examined corpses in the Boston Molasses Flood, solved the Frederick Small case and proved a gun belonging to Niccolo Sacco had killed a victim in an armed robbery.

He said he refused to rely on hunches during his investigations. And he told her no medical school gave adequate training for medical examiners, while detectives had no training at all. George and Frances talked about the evils of elected coroners, vulnerable to political pressure during murder investigations.

Frances Glessner Lee left the hospital with renewed purpose. She began reading up on criminology and collecting books and papers on the subject. In 1931, she gave Harvard Medical School $250,000 to endow a chair of Legal Medicine for George Magrath, who had taught there for years.

In 1934 she donated 1,000 books to Harvard to start the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. Magrath, she said, had practically invented the field. The library opened in 1938 with training tools such as specimens of insects that infest corpses.

Then George Magrath died on Dec. 11, 1938.

The Nutshell Studies

By then, Frances’ father, mother and brother had died and she could dispose of the family fortune as she liked. So she made dollhouses.

It was a popular hobby among wealthy women of the era. Frances Glessner Lee had a friend in Chicago, Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who created exquisite dioramas documenting European and American rooms over seven centuries.

The gorgeous Thorne miniature rooms now reside at the Museum of Fine Arts. Glessner’s lived-in, sometimes shabby homes belong to Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

She created lower-middle-class shacks, poor tenements and workers’ modest houses. Sex workers, housewives and farmers lived in them. For each dollhouse of death, Frances compiled case notes and witness statements drawn from real murder investigations.

In this “Pink Bathroom” Nutshell Study, Mrs. Rose Fishman, a widow, was found dead on the bathroom floor by the building janitor after people complained of a smell. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

She named her Nutshell Studies after a police saying, “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The Case of Annie Morrison

In one of the nutshell studies, Annie Morrison lies face down on the ground underneath her second-story porch. A wet rag and a clothespin lie next to her. According to the notes Frances wrote, an undertaker discovered a bullet in Annie Morrison’s chest. Her husband owned a revolver with a .22, but he denied murdering his wife. He said he had been sitting in the kitchen when he heard a noise. Out on the porch he found laundry blowing in the wind and a chair resting against the porch railing.

Did the husband do it? The solution to the crime had less importance than the ability to read clues, according to Frances.

Mrs. Agnes Butler, a neighbor, heard the Morrisons quarreling that morning. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Making the Nutshell Studies

Frances began making her nutshell studies in a workshop at The Rocks with carpenter Ralph Mosher and his son Alton.

They made everything to a 1:12 scale, the standard of the day. Frances consulted a forestry professor at Yale to find woods with fine enough grain to look real at that scale. She even knitted tiny clothes using pins and a magnifying glass. The Nutshell Studies had working mousetraps and carpet sweepers, real newspapers reproduced in miniature and murder victims that wore underwear under their bloodied clothing.

Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory, his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda Mae Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor. This is a detail from the crime scene, called Three Room Dwelling. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Once Frances bought a tiny, solid gold electric mixer, made for a charm bracelet, and painted it gray so it could sit on a miniature kitchen counter. After spending thousands of dollars on a miniature cabin, she took a blowtorch to it and half burned it down.

Nutshell Studies Get Studied

In 1943, the New Hampshire State Police named Frances as their educational director and commissioned her as a captain. From then on she liked people to call her Captain Lee.

In 1945, Captain Lee brought her Nutshell Studies to Harvard’s Medical Law department for the first of the twice-yearly Frances Glessner Lee Seminars on Legal Medicine. She brought in speakers from around the world and invited 25 to 30 police officers.

For a week, trainees spent the morning listening to lectures, then after lunch they examined the Nutshell Studies in a dark room. They got a flashlight, case notes, witness statements and 90 minutes to analyze the crime scene. Frances didn’t make them all murder scenes. Some depicted accidents and suicides that just looked like murder.

The week ended with an elegant banquet at the Ritz-Carlton, planned to the last detail by Frances Glessner Lee. She bought a set of gilt-edged china for $8,000 to be used only for her seminars.

Rave Reviews

With her seminar and her Nutshell Studies, Frances Glessner Lee had a huge hit on her hands. In 1948, Erle Stanley Gardner attended to find plots for his Perry Mason novels. He wrote that police sought invitations to the seminars the way girls who aspire to be actresses sought bids from Hollywood. William P. Hancock, chief of the Maine State Police, raved about it, calling it the best of all the training sessions he attended. [botz]

Lee branched out, developing training courses for police officers in other states. Her granddaughter said she loved to be surrounded by young men in uniform. They called her “Mother.”

Marie Jones, a prostitute, was discovered dead by her landlady, Mrs. Shirley Flanagan. Her boyfriend claimed she’d committed suicide. Photo by Laurie Shaull.

Aftermath

Frances Glessner Lee died in New Hampshire on Jan. 2, 1962. Her friend Erle Stanley Gardner wrote her obituary in the Boston Globe. “I collect characters as other people collect postage stamps, and Capt. Lee was one of the rarer items in my book.” He dedicated his story, The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom, to her.

Harvard disbanded the Department of Legal Medicine in 1967, and loaned the Nutshell Studies to an alumnus appointed as Maryland’s chief medical examiner. Since then they have resided at Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, still used as a training tool.

Corinne May Botz in 2004 published a book of essays and photographs about the Nutshell Studies. Susan Marks released a film, “Of Dolls and Murder, in 2012.” Then in 2017, the Renwick Gallery restored them and put them on exhibit.

Now the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests uses The Rocks as the North Country Conservation & Education Center.

Though many of the old Prairie Avenue mansions are gone, the Glessner House remains as a museum.

This story last updated in 2025.

With thanks to The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz and 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics by Bruce Goldfarb and Judy Melinek.
Images: Frances Glessner Lee by By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61712759. Nutshell Studies all by Lorie Shaull – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Ketchup Made With Sugar? An Offense Against God For Some Mainers

The old saying “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” may have applied to politics, but never to ketchup. The historic novelist Kenneth Roberts abominated ketchup made with sugar, and he claimed his fellow Mainers shared his contempt. At least those who appreciated good Maine cooking did.

Roberts inherited his love of unsweetened ketchup from seafaring ancestors who learned about the condiment in its proper form during their travels to the West Indies.

Kenneth Roberts. No ketchup made with sugar for him.

Ketchup evolved into the sweet, tomato-y condiment we know today after the tomato itself gained popularity in the United States. But in rural, isolated parts of Maine, old-fashioned cooks stuck to their guns and made their own ketchup the way Roberts’ grandmother made it.

Roberts, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his historical fiction, begged his grandmother for her ketchup recipe. Eventually, he and his niece wrote a cookbook, Good Maine Food, in which a recipe for unsweetened ketchup appears.

Early American Ketchup

Ketchup actually wasn’t always made with tomatoes, nor was it invented by Americans. The Food History Timeline claims that it originated in Southeast Asia. Then colonists and traders brought ketchup back to Europe, and British cooks adapted their own recipes. They used mushrooms, walnuts, anchovies and oysters to make ketchup for use as a sauce on meat and fish or as an ingredient in gravies.

But all that happened before the tomato won wide acceptance in Europe and North America.

Tomatoes took a circuitous route from their native soil in South America to Europe and then to New England. The species originated in western South America and Central America. By the time the Spanish conquered Mexico, the Aztecs were using tomatoes in their cooking.

In the 1520s, the Spanish took tomatoes from Mexico to Europe, where they grew in popularity. Eventually they spread to Southeast Asia as Europeans began to establish colonies there.

Tomato seeds may have come to Europe in one of these.

Tomatoes caught on later in British North America, but how, exactly, is a mystery. The first known cultivation of tomatoes in the colonies happened in the Carolinas in the mid-18^th century. Perhaps French Huguenots or British colonists brought tomato seeds with them from Europe. Merchant traders may have brought them from the West Indies. Or perhaps the Spanish started growing them in their colonies in Florida and Georgia, and the practice spread north.

Tomatoes, however, didn’t gain wide acceptance until after the Civil War. Before then, many people thought of tomatoes as poisonous, disgusting or unpleasant.

No recipes that use tomatoes appear in Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, the first U.S. cookbook, published in Hartford in 1796. Tomato recipes started popping up in cookbooks around 1820, but then only sporadically.

The First Tomato Ketchups

A Philadelphia scientist named James Mease gets credit for inventing the first ketchup made with tomatoes in 1812. The recipe included pulp tomatoes, brandy and spices.

Recipes for homemade ketchup made without sugar began to proliferate. In The Virginia Housewife, published in 1824, author Mary Randolph (Thomas Jefferson’s cousin) advised putting a peck of tomatoes in the fire without water and boiling them for an hour. Then, she wrote, strain them twice and cook the liquid with onions, mace, salt and pepper. Boil it until it fills two bottles. “Make it in August,” she wrote.

Mary Randolph

Other ketchup recipes involved a similar level of drudgery. When commercial bottled ketchup appeared around 1830, home cooks gladly bought it. Ketchup, after all, was a sauce they didn’t have to make every time they cooked something.

The factories that churned out canned and bottled food for Union soldiers churned out ketchup after the Civil War, They promoted it as a sauce that stayed fresh for any length of time. In 1876, F & J Heinz introduced tomato ketchup and advertised its convenience. “Blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household” went the ad.

ketchup-ad

Sugar began to creep into the bottled ketchup to counter the acidity of tomatoes. But sugar promoted fermentation and spoilage, so food companies began to add even more. Then they added vinegar to mask the cloying sweetness of ketchup made with sugar.

Benzoate

Food processors began using sodium benzoate to extend the shelf life of ketchup. A controversy then erupted over its safety as a food preservative, and benzoate lost. In 1906, the Pure Food Law banned the use of sodium benzoate in food.

But a husband-and-wife couple who worked for the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry started looking for ways to make ketchup with a long shelf life but without preservatives. Karen and Avril Bitting tried hundreds of recipes, and concluded that sugar and vinegar prevent spoiling. They even wrote a pamphlet in 1909 about it, Experiments on the Spoilage of Tomato Ketchup.

Katharine Bitting

Thus the Bittings sealed the fate of modern, commercial ketchup.

Kenneth Roberts Attacks Ketchup Made With Sugar

Kenneth Roberts, born in 1885 in Kennebunk, Maine, developed an addiction for his grandmother’s ketchup. “I became almost a ketchup drunkard; for when I couldn’t get it, I yearned for it,” he wrote in 1944.

…we could never get enough of it. We were allowed to have it on beans, fish cakes, and hash, since those dishes were acknowledged to be incomplete without them; but when we went so far as to demand it on bread, as we often did, we were peremptorily refused and had to go down in the cellar and steal it – which we also often did.

She made a savory ketchup without sugar, as did many Maine home cooks, wrote Roberts. And he railed against ketchup made with sugar.

Ketchup is an important adjunct to many Maine dishes, particularly in families whose manner of cooking comes down to them from seafaring ancestors. So far as I know, a sweetened ketchup in those families is regarded as an offense against God, and man, against nature and good taste. This antagonism to sweetened ketchup is traceable to the days when dozens of Maine sea captains from every Maine town were constantly sailing to Cuba and the West Indies for cargoes of molasses and rum, and to Spain for salt.

A jar of homemade ketchup.

Recipe: Ketchup Made Without Sugar

Roberts begged his grandmother for the recipe, and in 1944 he included it in the cookbook he wrote with his niece. Here it is:

About one peck (2.3 gallons) of ripe tomatoes, cooked and strained. Use a large spoon to rub the cooked tomatoes through a sieve into a kettle to remove the seeds and heavy pulp. That should produce one gallon of liquid

One dozen cans of concentrated tomato juice.

Put the juice in a kettle on the stove. Bring almost to a boil.

Meanwhile dissolve the following in one pint of sharp vinegar:

6 tablespoons salt
4 tablespoons allspice
2 tablespoons mustard
1 tablespoon powdered cloves
1 teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon red pepper.

Stir the vinegar mix into the hot tomato juice.

Then set the kettle over a slow fire and let it simmer until it thickens, constantly stirring to prevent the spices from settling on the bottom and burning.

How Long To Simmer

If made from concentrated tomato juice, an hour and a half.

If made from canned tomatoes, three or four hours.

When the kettle is removed from the fire, let the mixture stand until cold. Then stir and pour into small-necked bottles.

If a half inch of olive oil is poured into each bottle, and the bottle then corked, the ketchup will keep indefinitely in a cool place. It’s better if chilled before serving.

With thanks to: Epic Tomatoes by Craig LeHoullier, Carolyn’s Compositions, Love-Apples, Tomato Blight & a Maine Ketchup Recipe by Carolyn C. Holland, and Pure Ketchup: A History of America’s National Condiment, with Recipes By Andrew F. Smith.

Homemade ketchup By Rachel Tayse – homemade ketchup cannedUploaded by Mindmatrix, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26446114. This story was updated in 2022.

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The New London Race Riots of 1919 Follow a Pandemic

The New London race riots broke out in 1919, a season of violence throughout the United States known as the Red Summer. White mobs killed somewhere between 180 and 300 black people during riots in just three places: Elaine, Ark., Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Elsewhere during the Red Summer, whites killed blacks by stoning, hanging and burning them alive.

Reasons given for the outbreak of violence vary. Historian Jan Voogd argues for two. One, the Great Northern Migration of poor black people to better-paying jobs in the defense industry. Northerners got competition from black workers and Southerners lost cheap labor on their plantations.

Two, World War I. Black soldiers and sailors not only had weapons, but they received better treatment in France than they did in the United States. They came home emboldened, and they fought back against their white persecutors. President Woodrow Wilson expressed his concern that black veterans would demand equal rights when he said “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.”

A Pandemic and Anarchy

Somehow, summer race riots and pandemics seem to go together. In 1919, the flu pandemic wound down, after wiping out as much as 20 percent of the young adult population.

Geoff Ward, a professor of African and African American studies at Washington University, explained how a pandemic inspires rioting: “These are moments of extreme precariousness, where people are suddenly uncertain about their fate, economic prospects and the social order,” he said.

White men looking for African Americans during the Chicago race riot of 1919.

Other factors led to the season of violence in New England. Two anarchist bombs went off in Boston on May Day, and in September the Boston Police went on strike. Immigrants from Europe and African Americans took the blame for the labor strikes and anarchist bombings that added to the turmoil.

Not every race riot that erupted in the summer of 1919 appeared in a newspaper. But Voogd believes at least 50 took place. One happened in Maine. The New London race riots numbered at least two.

An Attack in Orono, Maine

The Ku Klux Klan had all but disappeared in Maine in 1919, but within five years it would rise again. An ugly incident during the Red Summer foreshadowed the KKK’s regeneration.

Hamlin Hall

A Continental Press story reported on May 22, 1919, that a hazing party at the University of Maine turned into an angry mob. Roger and Samuel Cortney, the “only students of dark skin” attending the university, fought back against white intimidation.

It started when three freshmen tried to break into their room in Hamlin Hall while a student mob waited outside. The brothers knocked the freshmen unconscious. When the three young men didn’t return, the mob went to the Cortneys’ room, where they found them unconscious. The Cortney brothers had escaped.

The student mob divided into three groups to search for them, according to the paper. Some went off campus in Orono, some went to Oldtown, a Penobscot reservation. They found the Cortney brothers at Oldtown. The white students then brought them back to campus and formed a ring around them. First they made them explain why they attacked the freshmen. Then the mob forced the brothers to pour two jugs of molasses on each other and threw feathers on them, according to the news report. The Cortneys, it said, had been “exceedingly popular” among the students up until then.

Returning Home From War

New London, Conn., has always had a large military presence, and it led to trouble in 1919. Fort Trumbull, which dates to the American Revolution, hosted a Coast Guard installation. The U.S. Navy had a submarine base on the Thames River, with offices and housing in New London. The Groton shipyard lay just across the river and military fortifications dotted Long Island Sound.

African-American soldiers in World War I. Images courtesy Library of Congress.

Black and white sailors, home from World War I, mixed uneasily on the streets of New London. African-American servicemen had experienced a much different treatment in France than they had in the United States. They could move freely throughout French society, wrote Voogd. They could go to any business and associate with anyone they wanted, including white women.

African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that, when the black servicemen returned, the reaction of white people in 1919 was ‘almost unbelievable.’

“During that year 77 Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive…That year there were race riots large and small in 26 American cities.”

Du Bois probably counted only half the number of incidents and missed the New London race riots.

New London Race Riots

According to a local newspaper report, bad blood had existed between black and white seamen for some time. The story, typically, blames the African Americans for the trouble. Ward has argued the news media’s complicity in blaming the victim prolonged the summer of violence.

Fort Trumbull

On May 29, the headline screamed, “Negro Sailors Attack White at New London. Worst Riot in Years–U.S. Marines, with Loaded Rifles, Press Crowd Back.”

“Between 15 and 20 sailors and soldiers connected with the New London naval base were arrested by local police,” the newspaper reported. Police called it the ‘worst riot in years. ‘

“The trouble began when negro sailors went into the Coast Guard Academy and attacked white sailors,” according to the story. Six or seven colored sailors went to the Coast Guard Academy at Fort Trumbull and beat a white sailor, the newspaper reported.

Bank Street today

A number of white sailors pursued them through Bank Street, and they took refuge in the Hotel Bristol. The riot call sounded on the fire department whistle. Five thousand civilians “watched” the melee, and the marines came to quell the riot.

The Hotel Bristol

But other versions of the story found in the Visualizing the Red Summer archive tell a more sordid tale.

Twelve days after the riot, the Associated Negro Press reported black sailors complained white sailors attacked them. The white seamen charged the black sailors lay in wait for them at night when they walked over Long Cove Bridge. Then, police arrested two white sailors for fighting. That arrest inspired their white friends to raid the Hotel Bristol, a popular spot for African-American sailors. The whites grabbed the blacks, threw them into the street and beat them severely.

The U.S. Coast Guard Academy

Sailors on both sides, as many as 5,000, then showed up on Bank Street and fought for several hours. The police and fire departments armed with hoses couldn’t stop the melee, so armed marines rushed to the scene. In the end they arrested 15 people, though the news reports don’t identify them by skin color.

According to another news story, “much property was damaged and dozens of negroes were mobbed and severely beaten.”

And Yet Another

But Voogd said another New London race riot went largely unreported. That suggests even more violence occurred in New London, though the military suppressed the information.

A Navy memo revealed that marine guards from the base answered another riot call on June 29. A truck full of marines sped down Smith Street and hit a fire hydrant. The city billed the Navy for the fire hydrant, and the disagreement over that supplied the only paper trail of the incident.

No Riots Here

Meanwhile in Hartford on August 4, “colored clergy yesterday deplored the race riots in Washington and Chicago,” while Hartford police assured the public “there was no likelihood of a dispute between white and colored residents here.” News of a disturbance in Windsor reached police, who dismissed it as ‘phoney.’

With thanks to Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 by Jan Voogd and Visualizing the Red Summer archive by Karen Sieber.

Images: Hamlin Hall CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898. Fort Trumbull By JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26599988. Bank Street By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34773845. This story was updated in 2023.

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