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Beginner’s Guide to the French and Indian Wars, All Six of Them

Before the American Revolution, which everyone knows about, six – count ‘em, six – French and Indian Wars engulfed the region for over 43 years.

The French, Indians and British basically fought over territory, largely to the north and west of New England. French fur traders, soldiers and Jesuits along with their Indian allies fought off encroachment by land-hungry English settlers. Those Indian allies, the Micmac, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscot people had formed the Wabanaki Confederacy in 1606.

View of the English landing on the island of Cape Breton to attack the fortress of Louisbourg. 1745.

In the end, the French and Indians lost, but they put up a good fight for a long, long time.

The English did have some Indian allies. The Iroquois, for example, enemies of the Wabanaki, allied with the French. But the French generally treated Indians better than the English did. Though the French had far fewer settlers, they made a formidable foe. Even after they surrendered Canada, Maine and all the land east of the Mississippi to the English, they came back to fight the English again in the American Revolution.

Historians sometimes refer to the French and Indian Wars as part of the first world wars, a remote theater of the wars fought by European empires on the continent and at sea.

The Candlemas Massacre took place in the first of the French and Indian wars, King William’s War.

The first five French and Indian Wars involved expeditions of several hundred men into enemy territory combined with murderous raids and massacres. Those included the Candlemas Massacre in King William’s War, the Deerfield Raid in Queen Anne’s War and the Battle of Norridgewock in Dummer’s War.

Finally, in the sixth French and Indian War, both sides got serious and committed significant resources to the war effort.

The Six French and Indian Wars

Each of the French and Indian wars has multiple names, which makes them even more confusing. They are:

King William’s War (1688-97)
Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713)
Dummer’s War (1722-1725)
King George’s War (1744-1748)
Father Le Loutre’s War (1749–1755)
French and Indian War (1754-1763)

King William’s War

King William’s War is also known as Castin’s War, Father Baudoin’s War, the First Intercolonial War or the Second Indian War (the first being King Philip’s War. Perhaps someone forgot the Pequot War.) Europeans knew it as the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), the War of the Grand Alliance and the War of the League of Augsburg.

In short, the Nine Years’ War had to do with Louis XIV’s plans to expand France and the British, Dutch and Austrian Hapsburgs forming an alliance to block his ambitions.

In North America, it started because the French and the English didn’t agree on the boundary between British New England, or what is now Maine, and French Acadia, now Nova Scotia. The British claimed Maine all the way to the Penobscot River, but the French insisted on the Kennebec as the boundary.

New France Gov. Frontenac performing a tribal dance with Indian allies ca. 1690.

In addition, some Indians fled to Maine after King Philip’s War and sought revenge. They allied with the Wabanaki, who got tired of the English cheating them and trying to take their guns away. Tensions rose with English provocations. Three British sailors killed an Indian child, and a colonial administrator named Edmund Andros raided what is now Castine, Maine. He destroyed the home of a powerful French fur trader and soldier, Baron Saint-Castin. The baron had cemented an alliance with the Indians by marrying the with his marriage to the daughter of the great chief Madokawando.

Saint-Castin

Saint-Castin and Madokawando led a series of raids against English settlers in Acadia, as far south as Andover, Mass., and as far west as Schenectady, N.Y. In 1692 they killed 50 settlers during the Candlemas Massacre in what is now York, Maine.

When it all ended, the French and Indians wiped most of the English settlements off the map of Acadia. From 1689 to 1713, there wasn’t a single English home north of Wells.

Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin as imagined by a 19th century artist Will H. Low.

From 1693, historian John Grenier characterized the war as devolving ‘into a string of gruesome murders that terrorized New England.’

Elsewhere in the North America: The English led a couple of failed raids in Canada: Sir William Phips (later governor of Massachusetts) led a raid against Quebec and Fitz-John Winthrop (later governor of Connecticut) led a raid against Montreal. Both failed. French raiders also took over English trading posts run by the Hudson Bay Company in the Hudson Bay region.

Best remembered from King William’s War: Hannah Duston, captured with her infant daughter in a raid, retaliated by killing and scalping 10 of her Indian captives – one man, two women and six children.

Impact: King William’s War removed the English from much of Maine.

Queen Anne’s War

Queen Anne’s War is also known as the Third Indian War and the Second Intercolonial War. Europeans know it as the War of Spanish Succession. Fought in Europe over the heir to the Spanish throne, the French wanted their king’s relative, Philip of Anjou. The English and Dutch did not, fearing French power.

In Maine, the war pretty much extended King William’s War: The English wanted to settle in Maine north of the Kennebec River, and the French didn’t want them there.

The French and Indians launched raids against northern Massachusetts (and Maine), most spectacularly against Deerfield in 1704. French privateers also captured over 100 fishing and merchant vessels from New England. The English sent expeditions into Canada, unsuccessful until they finally captured the Acadian capital of Port Royal in 1710.

1913 reenactment of the capture of Eunice Williams.

The war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht.

Best remembered from Queen Anne’s War: The Raid on Deerfield and the capture of Eunice Williams, daughter of a Puritan minister. Despite her family’s best efforts, she remained with the Indians, converted to Catholicism, married an Indian and never moved back (she did visit her family, though).

Impact: The war still kept the English out of Eastern Maine, but France ceded Nova Scotia (except for Cape Breton Island), Newfoundland and the Hudson Bay region to the British.

Dummer’s War

Father Rale’s War is also a common name for this one, also known as Lovewell’s War, Greylock’s War, the Three Years War, the 4th Anglo-Abenaki War, or the Wabanaki-New England War of 1722–1725. It didn’t have a European counterpart.

The French, English and Wabanaki Confederacy fought Dummer’s War along the frontier of Massachusetts, which at the time included Maine and Vermont.

The Massacre at Norridgewock and Father Rale’s death.

Queen Anne’s War had ended with a peace treaty that set the boundary of Massachusetts (now Maine) at the Kennebec River. But English colonists ignored the treaty and began settling east of the Kennebec. New Englanders also fished in Nova Scotian waters.

The English and the French and Indians began building dueling settlements. In Maine, the French built churches in the Indian villages of Norridgewock, where Father Sebastien Rale lived, and at Penobscot. The English built forts in Arrowsic, Brunswick, Thomaston and Richmond. In 1722, Massachusetts Gov. Samuel Shute sent an expedition to capture Father Rale, who escaped. But the Massachusetts men found his strongbox, which contained papers that showed he worked for the government of New France. He had promised enough ammunition to the Indians to drive out the English settlers.

The Wabanaki retaliated for the raid on Norridgewock by burning Brunswick, so Shute declared war on the Wabanakis in 1722. When he left for England, acting Gov. William Dummer took charge of the war in Maine.

Wabanaki Raids

The Wabanaki attacked Arrowsic, then the English attacked Penobscot. The Wabanaki over the next two years raided the Maine settlements. They also captured nearly two dozen fishing vessels in canoes.

The war was known as Greylock’s war in western Massachusetts and Vermont, where Chief Grey Lock raided Northfield and Rutland. In response, Dummer ordered Fort Dummer built in Brattleboro, Vt., where soldiers ventured out to punish the Abenaki. Greylock retaliated in Hatfield, Deerfield, Northfield, and Westfield.

The war reached New Hampshire when militia captain John Lovewell led three expeditions of militia companies to the Lake Winnipesaukee region. In the third, he built a fort in Ossipee and killed Pequawket Chief Paugus in Fryeburg, Maine.

The death of Chief Paugus

In late 1725, Dummer and tribal chiefs signed a peace treaty

Best remembered from Dummer’s war was the Massacre at Norridgewock on Aug. 23, 1724. Two hundred colonial troops led a second raid on the Abenaki village of Norridgewock, Maine, and killed some 80 civilians, including Father Rale.

Impact: The Native and Indigenous population declined in Maine west of the Penobscot River and the French lost their foothold. Lovell, Maine, was named after John Lovewell, and Chief Paugus had a mountain and a bay named after him. Grey Lock also had a mountain named after him.

King George’s War

King George’s War (1744-1748), also known as the War of Austrian Succession or the Third Intercolonial War. Fought primarily along the frontier of northern New England, it didn’t settle much in the end.

Again, the belligerents fought over who got to settle Acadia and upstate New York, and who got to fish off Acadia’s Grand Banks. Europeans fought over the Habsburg queen Marie-Therese, who tried to prevent France and Prussia from seizing her territory in Austria.

In Nova Scotia in 1744, a French fleet burned down a small British fort near Canso, a fishing port used by New England fisherman. The English retaliated the next year by capturing the Fortress at Louisbourg, a stronghold in the Acadian territory still held by the French. The English paid a heavy price for the victory, though, losing as many as 1,000 men, mostly to exposure.

The capture of Louisbourg, the most celebrated English victory in all the French and Indian wars.

The Wabanaki then responded by attacking 11 English settlements along the Maine coast over the summer of 1745. Over the next two summers, they continued the attacks, capturing a few people, killing a few people, burning buildings and slaughtering livestock.

The French and Indians also attacked the western frontier of Massachusetts. In late November 1745 they raided and burned Saratoga. They also raided the lightly defended Fort Massachusetts near North Adams, taking the English fighters prisoner. The prisoners were later exchanged, and Fort Massachusetts is now a parking lot of the former Price Chopper supermarket between Williamstown and North Adams.

Greatest Victory of the French and Indian Wars

Best remembered from King George’s War: The capture of the Fortress at Louisbourg, New England’s greatest military victory until the American Revolution.

When King George’s War broke out, Massachusetts Gov. William Shirley along with New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth organized an expedition to capture the fort. The two governors got 500 troops from Connecticut, a ship from Rhode Island and guns and money from a few other colonies. William Pepperrell of Kittery, Maine, commanded the combined forces.

After a 47-day siege, the Fortress at Louisbourg surrendered, and the 13 colonies and Great Britain joyously celebrated.

William Pepperrell

It made heroes of Vice-Admiral Peter Warren (with a town in Rhode Island and one in New Hampshire named after him), and William Pepperrell, who had a Massachusetts town named after him, though it dropped an ‘r’ from ‘Pepperrell.’

But then the French and British signed a peace treaty in 1748, and the British returned the fortress to the French. That did not go over well in New England.

Impact: Killed a lot of people in Massachusetts, didn’t settle much. In fact, the fighting didn’t even end in Maine and Nova Scotia. It simply morphed into Father Le Loutre’s War.

Father Le Loutre’s War

Also known as the Indian War, the Micmac War and the Anglo-Micmac War, it didn’t really have a European counterpart.

Bookended by King George’s War and the French and Indian War, it was a war of resistance by the Acadians and the Micmac, led by the Jesuit priest Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre and Acadian Joseph Broussard (an ancestor of pop star Beyonce).

Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre

Some Acadians in British-held Acadia had remained neutral, and some waged guerilla war with their allies the Micmacs, also Catholic. There wasn’t much the British could do with the recalcitrant Acadians because the French Acadians outnumbered them. Many absolutely refused to take loyalty oaths to the King of England or to the Protestant church.

But then Britain began to colonize aggressively, establishing the city of Halifax in Nova Scotia, and in Maine, Fort Halifax, now Winslow; Fort Shirley, now Dresden; and Fort Western, now Augusta.

Settling Halifax, though violated the treaty with the Micmac and touched off Father Le Loutre’s War.

The Acadians and Micmacs waged relentless guerilla warfare against the British, keeping them holed up in their new forts.

Expulsion of the Acadians

But by June 1755, three English regiments and New England Ranger units had arrived to back up British demands. With those reinforcements, acting Gov. Charles Lawrence ordered the Acadians to take the loyalty oath.

Departation of the Acadians

They refused. Fed up, Lawrence ordered the forcible removal of the entire Acadian population from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and parts of what is now Maine. Estimates vary, but as many as 10,000 Acadians out of a population of 12,000 were rounded up, boarded onto ships and sent to the 13 British colonies in North America and to France. Several thousand died of disease, starvation and drowning.

Best remembered from Father Le Loutre’s War: Expulsion of the Acadians.

Impact: Expulsion of the Acadians.

Last of the French and Indian Wars

Also known as the Seven Years’ War, its counterpart had only one name in North America: the French and Indian War.

The sixth time was finally the charm that ended the French and Indian wars, though arguably they continued through the American Revolution with French, Indians and English all in the fight again.

In Europe, Britain allied with Frederick the Great of Prussia to contain the French, while Austria switched sides and allied with the French. The enemies fought at sea, with the British harassing French vessels, blockading shipping lanes and bombarding enemy ports.

Young George Washington

With Nova Scotia and Maine now firmly in English hands, the fight moved west to the Ohio River Valley. Virginia planters had received a patent for the Ohio lands west of the Alleghenies, and had a keen interest in keeping them. But the French had built forts along the Allegheny River to defend their fur trapping and trading with the Indians.

A 22-year-old George Washington, commanding a small militia company, went to occupy a fort called Necessity in what is now Confluence, Pa. Washington and his company encountered a French scouting party, killed the commander and eight men and took 20 prisoners. That pretty much started the French and Indian War.

The first four years of the war didn’t go well for the English because the French sent more land forces to North America. In one of the most notable defeats, Fort William Henry on Lake George surrendered.

William Pitt Runs the French and Indian War

But then William Pitt the Elder rose to power in England and he decided to seize as much of the French empire as he could. That included North America. So he poured men and materiel to enforce England’s claim to the territory, including Canada and the Mississippi River Basin. Robert Rogers alone commanded a unit of 600 guerilla fighters called Rogers Rangers.

British forces began to win major victories, in places like Pittsburgh, Youngstown, N.Y., and Crown Point on Lake Champlain. The final victory came in the fall of 1758, when the British defeated the French in the Battle of Quebec.

The Death of General Wolfe, by Benjamin West

Best remembered from the French and Indian War: The Battle of Quebec, in which both commanders, James Wolfe and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, died on the Plains of Abraham. The French, badly outnumbered, had to surrender Montreal and all of Canada.

In the end, the British victory gave the English control of Canada and the land east of the Mississippi.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Charles Shay, An Indian War Hero on Omaha Beach

Charles Shay, a 19-year-old Penobscot, landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Under heavy German fire, he bandaged the wounded and pulled drowning men from the blood-red tide.

The way Charles Shay looked at it, liberating Normandy continued a traditional alliance between the Penobscot Indians and the French people. His ancestor, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin, served as a French military officer in Acadia, now Maine, during the late 17^th century. The town of Castine, Maine, is named after him. Castine married the daughter of another of Charles Shay’s ancestors, the chief Madockawando, and he fought with the Penobscot against the Dutch and the English.

There is now a plaque commemorating Indian soldiers in a little park on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. On June 5, 2015, the park got a new name: The Charles Shay Indian Memorial.

Charles Shay shakes hands with fellow D-Day veteran George Kline at the dedication ceremony for the Charles Shay Memorial in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France, June 5, 2017

Charles Shay

When the U.S. Army drafted Charles Shay, history repeated itself. His ancestor, Joseph Orono, helped the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Shay was trained as a medic and shipped out with the 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Big Red One. The Big Red One spearheaded the assault on Normandy, and suffered about 2,000 casualties on D-Day, mostly in the first hour.

Shay landed under heavy fire, carrying two satchels of medical supplies. He saw wounded men drowning in the sea, and he pulled them onto the sand. He bandaged the wounded and administered morphine, cradling the dying in his arms.

Assault troops on Utah Beach

Seven medics were killed and 24 wounded. Charles Shay escaped unhurt.

He then tended to wounded soldiers at the Battle of Aachen, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Germans captured him after he crossed the Rhine on the bridge at Remagen. A month later, American troops liberated the POW camp.

Austria

Shay went home briefly, but couldn’t find work. He re-enlisted and returned to Europe as a medic for a military police battalion in Vienna. He met and married an Austrian woman, Lilli Bollarth.

Then the Korean War broke out, and Charles Shay went into battle once again as a combat medic. When the war ended, he returned to Vienna and worked for the United Nation’s Atomic Energy Commission. He and Lilli returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine during the summers. While in Maine, he’d visit the University of Maine at Orono to talk German with the German language students.

His aunt, Lucy Nicolar, and her husband Bruce Poolaw had built a two-story wooden teepee from which they sold Indian novelties and Lucy’s baskets. When she died, Charles Shay inherited the teepee, so he remade it as a small family museum.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

His grandfather, Joseph Nicolar, had written a book called, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, in 1893. Shay had it republished, and he wrote his own autobiography. But he also worked on winning recognition for Indian warriors, persuading the state of Maine to recognize June 21 as Native American Veterans Day.

Awards

Charles Shay received the Bronze Star and the Silver Star from the United States, but the French awarded him an honor that perhaps surpassed those. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic, inducted him into the Legion of Honour as a Chevalier.

Charles Shay on Omaha Beach in 2018.

In 2015, Charles Shay presided at a ceremony on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. Dignitaries unveiled a granite statue of a turtle and a plaque dedicating the park to the 175 Indians who landed on the beach that day. The park got a new name that day: the Charles Shay Indian Memorial.

“There is now a plaque commemorating Indian soldiers who left Turtle Island to help liberate our ancient French allies,” he said. “We will not forget their sacrifices.”

Charles Shay Indian Memorial on Omaha Beach

Shay, 98 in 2022, has a website. You can visit it here. His book, Project Omaha Beach: The Life and Military Service of a Penobscot Indian Elder, is available from Bookshop.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Shay in 2018 By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721834. Image of Charles Shay Indian Memorial By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721835.

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The Civilian Conservation Corps, a Young Man’s Adventure

During the depths of the Great Depression, a 17-year-old boy from Warren, R.I., enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

He did it to help support his family, but his time in the Civilian Conservation Corps turned into the adventure of a lifetime.

The CCC started when President Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Emergency Conservation Act on March 31, 1933. His goal: to generate jobs for young men suffering from an almost 25 percent unemployment rate.

The Warren boy at first was too young to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. You had to be 18 to enlist. But in October 1935, the government lowered the age requirement to 17, and he signed up. The teenager met all the other requirements. He was unemployed, unmarried, physically fit and his family was on relief — like tens of millions of other American families.

He earned $30 per month {about $570 today), but he had to send $25 home. That beat the $21 per month that regular U. S. Army soldiers made at the time. The money the CCC boys sent home supported an estimated 12 to 15 million family members.

The Civilian Conservation Corps 141st Company. Leo Caisse is in the middle row, second from right.

Go West, Young Men

The Warren boy was sent to Fort Adams in Newport for physical conditioning and evaluation, just as all other enrollees in the nation did at their local Army depot. At the end of their two weeks of training and evaluation, he received his final physical and inoculations. For some of the boys it was the first time they saw a doctor.

The Civilian Conservation Corps assigned the Warren boy to the 141^st company posted at Burlingame in Charlestown, R.I. He was issued a blue denim work suit and a renovated Army olive drab uniform with CCC patches. (Roosevelt thought the uniforms looked shoddy and in 1938 ordered the Navy to design a spruce-green uniform.)Then he took the CCC oath.

civilian-conservation-corps-burlingame-beach-house

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this beach pavilion at Burlingame State Park.

His company, like several others, was transferred out West, which had more forest work and fewer unemployed young men than in the East. He had to get his parents’ permission because of his age.

He took a train cross country from Fort Adams to a campsite at Triangle Lake near the Town of Junction City, Ore. There they became the 2108 Company of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In Oregon, the teenager and his company built fire guard service stations, fire lookout towers, trails and shelters. They fought forest fires when needed, a hallmark of the CCC wherever they were.

Cowboys and Mountain Lions

The young man earned a truck driving license issued by the Department of the Interior. He learned to operate a bulldozer, tractor and a jackhammer. He also learned welding, a skill he would later use in helping to build the USS Massachusetts at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass.

In Oregon, he served a maximum of four six-month enlistments, all that the CCC allowed and was honorably discharged on June 23, 1936.

Leo Caisse

He returned to Warren, but after a little more than a year he re-enlisted in 1937. This time was assigned to the 2130^th company in Casper, Wyo.

In Wyoming, his Civilian Conservation Corps company built bridges, roads and a dike, according to National Archives records. He fought fires, of course, and some members of his company fought coal fires. While in Wyoming, he also learned another skill: how to evade a mountain lion in the wild.

Later in the 1950s he told stories to his son about how he knew real cowboys and Indians out West. That was really intriguing because it was the heyday of cowboy shows on TV and Cowboy Town in Plainville, Mass. His name was Leo Caisse. He was my father and he passed away when I was very young.

It has been a revelation researching his adventures and it has given me a sense of pride that he and so many others benefitted from this program, which began the green movement.

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Roosevelt’s Tree Army developed many public parks that still stand today as a living legacy to their work.

Less obvious today was the improved health and well-being of the boys who joined.

Enlistees were so undernourished due to the Depression that they gained an average of 12 pounds each. When issued their uniforms, it was the first time most of them got new shoes.

Many camps had two movies a week with state-of-the-art equipment, chaplain services, lending libraries, organized sports and vocational education. President Roosevelt mandated that all enrollees learn to read and write in the service if they hadn’t achieved literacy yet.

The Civilian Conservation Corps offered 603 different courses nationwide. They often had camp newspapers, wrote poetry, composed songs and put on plays, as well as engaged in organized sports with other camps and local teams.

A Civilian Conservation Corps pillow

The men celebrated holidays in camp, including Mother’s Day. In one instance, they invited their mothers to camp for a dinner and the boys put on a skit for them. In another, the commanding officer collected 25 cents from each man to send home a special pillow to their mothers.

The Army ran the CCC, but the state or national park service would select the projects. Since fascism was on the rise overseas, the Army was careful not to drill the Tree Army. Nor did it allow saluting or weapons training.

Still, many Civilian Conservation Corpsmen who joined the Army were automatically inducted as corporals or sergeants, depending on their leadership experience in the Corps.

Following are summaries of the Civilian Conservation Corps in each New England state.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island had eight camps, but they did not all operate continuously or simultaneously. Fort Adams served as their state headquarters.

In the very beginning at least two Rhode Island companies were sent to other states: one to Rangeley, Maine and another company (about 200 men) to Vermont. Later they went to Oregon and Wyoming.

Rhode Island eventually enrolled 15,900 men out of 2.5 million men who served nationally.

civilian-conservation corps-goddard-state park

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this structure and many fireplaces at Goddard State Park in Rhode Island.

Massachusetts

Over 100,000 men served in the Massachusetts Civilian Conservation Corps, which brought together two wasted resources: young men and the land.

When the CCC began, Massachusetts had accumulated 100,000 acres, mostly inaccessible to the public. When the Emergency Conservation Act passed, Chief Forester Harold Cook immediately prepared applications for seven camps. He would eventually have 31 camps.

The first enrollees arrived at Fort Devens for medical exams and some basic training and testing to acclimate them to a military routine.

They built roads and trails, overlooks, picnic shelters and log cabins. And they engaged in timber improvement, pest control and forest fire fighting. In the end they planted 12 million trees and improved 170,000 acres of state land. The Massachusetts enrollees collectively sent an estimated $20 million home to their families.

Friends of the Upton State Forest are restoring a former CCC administration building and cottage. At least one former member – and probably many others — was so desperate for work he forged his birth certificate and joined at age 15. He learned construction skills that served him the rest of his working life.

They built the access road to the top of Mount Greylock as well as the Thunderbolt Trail. The CCC created the Savoy State Park, too, and the Elliot Tower in Milton’s Blue Hills Reservation. It still stands today and offers a panoramic view from Boston Harbor to Mount Wachusett. The Blue Hills reception center has a small CCC exhibit that includes memorabilia.

New Hampshire

Bear Brook State Park is one of the few surviving CCC camps that now serve as museums.

Over 37,000 young men served in the CCC in New Hampshire. They built state parks such as Moore Brook and Bear Brook, and ski facilities such as Waterville Valley, Cannon Mountain and the Wildcat Trail at Pinkham Notch. They also fought forest fires, planted trees and built dams, bridges, roads, camp grounds and hiking and bridle trails.

At the Bear Brook exhibit stands a statue of a shirtless Corpsman with an ax. Identical statues stand at the Freetown State Forest, a former camp, and at the Maine State Library in Augusta.

civilian-conservation-corps-acadia-shelter

The Civilian Conservation Corps built many park shelters, like this one at Arcadia State Park in Rhode Island.

Connecticut

Connecticut had a total of 17 camps, and over 30,000 men served in the CCC. Some hadn’t enlisted, but were LEMs – locally enlisted men, such as carpenters and stone masons. Along with their traditional work, the CCC also built nine lookout towers, constructed 123 bridges and developed over 1000 acres of public camping and picnic grounds.

As in all other camps, the Connecticut CCC couldn’t build roads. They did, however, build many truck roads for fighting forest fires.

When a dam broke above Hartford in 1936, it devastated the area. The CCC lent a hand by clearing out 2,950 buildings and 800 other structures.

A CCC Museum in Stafford Springs, Conn., once the administration building for Camp Conner, contains photos, displays, information and artifacts.

Maine

CCC statue in Augusta

Fort Williams in Portland Harbor administered and trained Civilian Conservation Corpsmen for both Maine and New Hampshire. At its height, Maine had 16,686 men, 1,612 supervisors and 1,136 out-of-state enrollees in 19 camps. Additionally, Rhode Island sent 144 to the Rangeley area. The camps closed by 1942, but in their heyday the CCC’s emphasis evolved from emergency relief to job training. The Maine and New Hampshire Tree Army sent home an estimated $4 million.

Their assigned work came from the Maine Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and the National Park Service. It included, much like all the other CCC work roads, trails, recreation areas, erecting buildings, and pest control.

George Dorr, superintendent of Acadia National Park, saw his chance to improve the park in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He asked Roosevelt for a camp at Acadia. Eventually some 3,000 poor boys, mostly from Maine, came to three CCC camps in Acadia. They opened new trails and improved old ones, planted thousands of trees, made fire roads, fought fires, built footbridges and constructed two campgrounds, Blackwoods and Seawall. They built Ocean Drive, which loops around the park with stunning views of the coast and opened hiking trails to Echo Lake, Long Pond and Beech Cliff.

There is a memorial dedicated to the CCC and their work in Maine in Augusta.

Vermont

Vermont was originally allocated four camps but got 30, more than any other state of its size. The reason? The highly motivated State Forester Perry Merrill, a man with great foresight who saw the potential for CCC work.

Some 40,000 men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Vermont. However, only about 11,000 came from Vermont. The other companies transferred from other states such as Rhode Island because Merrill found so much work for them to do.

A massive flood in 1927 had devastated much of the state, and the Vermont CCC boys gained recognition for their flood control activities and dam building. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the 2,000-foot Waterbury Dam along with the Wrightsville and East Barre dams.

They also built many ski slopes, including the Stowe Ski Resort and the Mount Mansfield State Park. They also built 105 miles of truck roads for forest fire fighting and 10 lookout towers.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He has also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College. Leo passed away in 2020, and we miss him very much. This story updated in 2022.

Photos, except for the Civilian Conservation Corps pillow and statue, courtesy Leo Caisse. CCC statue by By DrStew82 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59856211. This story was updated in 2021.

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Six Historic Gardens

Historic gardens have a special appeal to New Englanders if only because of our harsh winters and long dreary springs.

Though they offer the visitor serenity and relaxation, preserving historic gardens usually involves a great deal of hard work and commitment. Stewardship of historic gardens also requires knowledge of horticulture, garden design, landscape design, history and often architecture and architectural history.

Here, then, are six historic gardens, one in each New England state.

Elizabeth Park

The historic gardens at Hartford’s Elizabeth Park

Elizabeth Park in Hartford is the oldest municipal rose garden in the United States with 800 rose varieties.

Charles M. Pond, who financed the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, bequeathed his estate to Hartford — but only if the city named it after his late wife. In 1897, Hartford took possession of the 102-acre site.

Park superintendent Theodore Wirth created the 2.5-acre Rose Garden in 1904. The city decided it couldn’t afford the historic garden in the 1970s, so a group of volunteers rescued it.

Today, the park includes the historic gardens, pathways, century-old Lord and Burnham greenhouses, lawns, tennis courts, bowling greens, a picnic grove and a pond. Ironically, the border between Hartford and West Hartford moved, so Hartford’s largest park now sits mostly in the neighboring town.

1561 Asylum Avenue, West Hartford, Conn.

Asticou Azalea Garden

Asticou Azalea Garden, one of two historic gardens that came from Reef Point

Think of a Japanese stroll garden in coastal Maine and you’ve pretty much imagined the Asticou Azalea Garden. Though it started in 1957, the garden has a much longer history. It began as Reef Point, a Bar Harbor estate owned by Mary Cadwalder Rawle and Frederic Rhinelander Jones, Edith Wharton’s brother. Mr. and Mrs. Jones were also parents of landscape architect Beatrix Farrand.

Farrand inherited the property in 1935, and she and her husband Max decided to turn Reef Point into a horticultural study center. The venture was less successful than the Farrands hoped, and Bar Harbor refused to grant them a tax exemption after the Maine fires of 1947.

Farrand then broke up her gardens, selling many of her plants to Charles Savage. He moved most of them to Thuya Garden, an English flower garden, but he thought the azaleas would do better next to a pond in Northeast Harbor. And so he created the Asticou Azalea Garden, which features cherry trees that bloom in spring, azaleas and rhododendrons in June, Iris in July, water lilies in August and fall colors in September and October.

Savage designed the historic gardens to inspire feelings of serenity, something you’ll need if you visit nearby Acadia National Park in the summer.

3 Sound Drive, Northeast Harbor, Maine

Arnold Arboretum

Arnold Arboretum includes some of the oldest historic gardens

The Arnold Arboretum certainly counts as historic, as it started in 1872 because of a bequest from a whaling captain named James Arnold. But is an arboretum a garden? Well, yes. The Arnold Arboretum includes an herbarium, the wildflower-filled Cosmopolitan Meadow and the Explorers Garden, with plants from the North America-China Plant Exploration Consortium of the early 1900s.

The arboretum began when Arnold bequeathed part of his estate to Harvard, which added it to another country estate given to the college by Benjamin Bussey. In 1872, Harvard named botany professor Charles Sprague Sargent as arboretum director. Sargent worked with Frederick Law Olmsted to design the roads, pathways and gardens.

Harvard gave the Boston the arboretum in 1882, when it joined the city’s Emerald Necklace park system. The college got a 1,000-year lease and the responsibility for running the historic garden, now 281 acres.

The arboretum includes about 15,000 plants, including tiny trees in the Larz Anderson Collection of Japanese Dwarfed Trees, originally imported by Larz Anderson in 1913.

125 Arborway, Boston, Mass.

Prescott Park

Portsmouth’s Prescott Park

Prescott Park provides a waterfront oasis for pedestrians strolling through the historic city of Portsmouth, N.H. Two sisters, Mary and Josie Prescott, inherited a fortune from their brother Charles in 1932. They decided to use the money to replace a seedy, industrial section of town with a public park.

The sisters began to systematically buy up land along the Piscataqua River, deeding the land to Portsmouth in 1940. They also set up a trust to maintain the 10-acre park in 1949.

Today, the University of New Hampshire donates plant material for the park’s flower beds, but the city maintains them. The park, popular among artists and wedding planners, features lawns, gardens, brick walkways, boardwalk piers, public docks, and an island for picknicking. The park stays open year-round, and in summer hosts outdoor Broadway musicals.

1 Water Street, Portsmouth, N.H.

Green Animals

The Green Animals topiary garden in Portsmouth, R.I., dates to 1859, when the Victorian mansion was built on a 7-acre estate overlooking Narragansett Bay.

Thomas E. Brayton, treasurer of the Union Cotton Manufacturing Company in Fall River, Mass., bought the property in 1872. He hired Joseph Carreiro as superintendent of the property in 1905, and Carreiro began to train topiaries. Carreiro also planted and maintained fruit trees, perennial beds, herb and vegetable gardens.

Later joined by his son-in-law, Carreiro created more than 80 topiaries, including a horse and rider, a unicorn, a giraffe, an ostrich, an elephant and two bears.

In the 1940s, the estate hosted a coming-out party for Jacqueline Bouvier and later a reception for First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. In 1972, Brayton’s daughter Alice left the estate to The Preservation Society of Newport County upon her death.

Today, Green Animals is the oldest and most northern topiary garden in the United States. It opens seasonally and includes formal flowerbeds, geometric pathways, rose and grape arbors and fruit trees in addition to the topiaries.

380 Cory’s Lane, Portsmouth, R.I.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller

The formal Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller Garden

The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park was the boyhood home of George Perkins Marsh, a founder of both the environmental movement and the Smithsonian Institute. Frederick Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, bought the property. He managed it according to the principles of land conservation put forth by George Perkins Marsh.

Mary and Laurance Rockefeller later bought the property in 1954. A series of prominent landscape architects, including Ellen Shipman and Robert Morris Copeland, created and altered the extensive gardens. Today they include an azalea and rhododendron garden, rock garden, cutting garden, a hemlock hedgerow and a stand of Norway spruce,

The property became a national historic park in 1992, its purpose to interpret the history and evolution of conservation stewardship in America. It is open from Memorial Day through October.

54 Elm St, Woodstock, Vt.

Images: Arnold Arboretum By Daderot at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18516058; Asticou Azalea Gardens By Dudesleeper – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17126170; Prescott Park By Bostonian13 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27655804; Green Animals By Brian Feathers, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58062721. This story was updated in 2023.

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New England’s Six Oldest Golf Clubs

In 1728, Royal Governor William Dummer arrived in Massachusetts with nine ‘goffe clubs,’ but it would be another 150 years before golf clubs formed in New England.

But to name the oldest golf clubs in New England is to invite controversy. Can a golf club claim to be the oldest if it started out as a boat or a tennis club and later added a golf course?

William Dummer

We relied on the U.S. Golf Association’s list of the oldest golf clubs in America. However, we chose the oldest golf clubs in each state according to the year the golf course was built.

Oldest Golf Clubs

Julius Caesar played a version of golf, but the sport took hold in Scotland in the 15^th century. A craze for all things Scottish began after Queen Victoria built Balmoral Castle in 1856. The enthusiasm for golf spread to the rest of the British Isles, and then to the United States.

By 1900, the U.S. had more golf clubs than the U.K.

Two of New England’s oldest golf clubs, the Newport Golf Club and The Country Club, met with three other new golf clubs in 1894 to form the U.S. Golf Association.

Here we bring you the six oldest golf club in each New England state. If you know of older clubs, please share them in the comments section.

Two Connecticut Contenders

Greenwich Country Club clubhouse. Image courtesy Google Maps.

It should surprise no one that Connecticut has not one but two of the oldest golf clubs in the country: The Country Club of Farmington and The Greenwich Country Club, which started in 1892.

Thirty-two members formed The Greenwich Country Club in the wealthy, patrician town of Greenwich. The golf course started out with five rough holes, but grew to 165 well-manicured acres. George H.W. Bush met Barbara Pierce at a Greenwich Country Club Christmas dance, and his father and brother both served as presidents. A 1992 magazine article stirred controversy by exposing the club’s whites-only policy.

The Country Club in Farmington, home of the exclusive Miss Porter’s School, also began in 1892. In the 1890s, the club laid out a rough course that only had its greens mowed. A nine-hole course was laid out around 1895. Members expanded a 1767 farmhouse into a stately mansion to use as a clubhouse, but it burned down in 1901. The club rebuilt it, and today boasts that its splendid clubhouse ‘results from unending efforts reaching back more than a century.’

Kebo Valley Golf Club

The Kebo Golf Club, courtesy Google Maps

Bar Harbor, Maine, once attracted Gilded Age socialites who found Newport, R.I., a little too stuffy. They formed the Kebo Valley Golf Club in 1888 in between Cadillac and Dorr mountains. Now the 6,131-acre course shares a border with Acadia National Park.

The club has attracted many famous business and government leaders, including President William Taft. In 1911, he famously shot a 27 on what is now the17th hole, also known as the ‘Taft’ hole.

The Country Club

The Country Club in 1913

America’s first country club is aptly named The Country Club. The exclusive Brookline, Mass., club helped found the United States Golf Association and has hosted 16 USGA tournaments.

The original club focused on horseback-riding and tennis. Then three club members laid out the first six holes in March 1893 and expanded to nine the next year. The primitive course overlapped with a race track.

Today The Country Club has 1,300 members (including Tom Brady) and 27 golf holes. The original 18 holes make up the Main Course, used for the 1913 U.S. Open. In that contest, an unknown caddy who grew up across the street from the club defeated two British Open champions. Heavy press coverage of 20-year-old Francis Ouimet caught the public’s fancy. Golf subsequently spread to the middle class, and the number of golfers tripled over the next decade. .

Exeter Country Club

The Exeter Country Club. Courtesy Google Maps.

The Exeter Gun Club was playing golf at its current location in New Hampshire at least as early as 1889, when it was called Eddy’s Links. But not until 1895 did the Exeter Golf Course form. Five years later it renamed itself the Exeter Country Club.

The club got new members from nearby Philips Exeter Academy, which had a five-hold course nearby. The golf course closed and its golfers went to the country club.

The original clubhouse, built in 1900, fell to a tornado in 1953. Manny Francis, who developed ‘Vesper Velvet’ putting surfaces, redesigned the course in the 1950s. Today, the club boasts of its ‘big course playability’ without the crowds, pretense or cost.

Newport Country Club

The Newport Country Club

Golf came to Rhode Island after Theodore Havemeyer, an heir to the American Sugar Co. fortune, played a round in 1889 the south of France. He returned to Newport and in 1890 convinced several of his rich friends to play the game on rented farmland in 1890.

Three years later, Havemeyer talked John Jacob Astor IV, Perry Belmont and Cornelius Vanderbilt II into buying a 140-acre farm for $80,000. They built a nine-hole golf course and an elaborate Beaux Arts clubhouse, then formed the U.S. Golf Association.

The Newport Country Club held the first U.S. Open in 1895, awarding the winner the Havemeyer Trophy. On its centennial anniversary, Tiger Woods won the U.S. Amateur Championship.

Dorset Field Club

The Dorset Field Club, courtesy Google Maps.

Dorset, Vt., has several claims to fame. Cephas Kent’s Inn is where the Dorset Accords were signed, leading to the Vermont Republic. It’s the birthplace of Bill W., who founded Alcholics Anonymous, and home to the oldest marble quarry in the U.S. and the oldest golf club in Vermont.

The Dorset Field Club sits in the valley of the Green Mountains, and claims to be the oldest continuously operating golf course in America since its establishment in 1886. The club, situated on 155 acres, has 460 seasonal and year-round members. Its fifth hole, called the Dell, was based on an iconic hole in Ireland at the Lahinch Golf Club in Ireland.

Google images of the oldest golf clubs courtesy Google Maps. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Wreck of the Circus Ship, Royal Tar

In 1836, when the steamship Royal Tar launched the first regular service between St. John, New Brunswick, and Portland, Maine, her owners claimed her the safest ship on the sea.

She was 164 feet long, with a wooden side wheel and elegant passengers’ quarters that rivaled the finest hotels.

The Royal Tar, named after King William IV, created a sensation in St. John when she made her maiden voyage around the harbor. To mark the occasion, her owners served a hot lunch to hundreds of onlookers, and they drank ‘rivers of sherry and oceans of champagne.’

On June 5, 1836, the steamer broke a speed record by sailing between Eastport, Maine, and St. John in less than five hours.

In October that year, a circus called Burgess and Dexter’s Zoological Institute chartered the Royal Tar.

The circus included an elephant, a tiger, two camels, exotic snakes, birds, a waxworks exhibit, gaudy show wagons and horses to pull them.

Wreck of the Royal Tar

On Oct. 21, 1836, the Royal Tar left Peter’s Wharf in Eastport, heavily overloaded with a crew of 21, 70 passengers, a brass band and the Fuller menagerie. The crew removed two lifeboats to make room for the animal cages, leaving only two others. The cages made it difficult to move on deck, and the passengers pretty much stayed in their quarters.

As was the custom, passengers put their valuables – gold and silver coins and expensive jewelry — into the ship’s safe.

The steamship ran into heavy weather and put into a safe harbor. After three days, the Royal Tar tried to make headway. Facing heavy seas and a west wind, the steamer put into Machias Bay and dropped anchor.

At midnight the wind shifted and Capt. Thomas Reed decided to continue the voyage.

Steamers were an unusual sight along coastal Maine. An eyewitness remembers her father putting her, her brother and her sister into a small boat to wave at the Royal Tar as it passed through the Deer Isle Thoroughfare. They called out to the passengers on the steamer, and the passengers called back. None apparently knew about the smoldering fire below.

Fire!

Just east of the Fox Islands in Penobscot Bay, Capt. Reed ordered the engines stopped and the anchor dropped. The ship’s engineer had told him the water level in the boiler had fallen to a dangerously low level.

The crew extinguished the fire in the furnace, but about a half hour later they discovered the steamer had caught fire under the middle of the deck.

High winds fanned the flames and consumed the firefighting equipment.

Sixteen able-bodied men decided to save themselves and abandon the others. They lowered the larger lifeboat and rowed toward Isle Au Haut, now part of Acadia National Park.

Isle au Haut today

The terrified passengers began to jump overboard amid the screams of caged animals. Several people clung to a makeshift wooden raft in the water. According to lore, the panicked elephant jumped overboard onto the raft, killing the people who clung to it.

Another legend has it that a man filled his pockets with gold from his luggage, jumped overboard and drowned, dragged underwater by the weight of the metal.

The U.S. revenue cutter Veto came on the scene about a half hour after the fire started. The Veto’s commander refused to go too near the burning Royal Tar, as the cutter carried a quantity of gunpowder.

Survivors

Captain Reed managed to ferry 40 passengers in the remaining lifeboat to safety aboard the Veto.

A fisherman named William Barter of Isle au Haut also picked up some survivors. He took them home, where his wife fed them hasty pudding and put some of them into feather beds. Others slept on the floor. That night, the Barters killed a lamb, cooked beans and baked bread to feed the hungry survivors. A vessel then took them to Thomaston the next day.

In the end, however 32 human lives were lost, including four men, nine women and 10 children. All the animals perished except for two horses.

Four hours after catching fire, the Royal Tar sank beneath the waves.

Penobscot Bay

Aftermath

Captain Reed returned to St. John only to discover his son had died on the same day the Royal Tar sank.

Stories vary about the fate of the animals. According to some, they all perished under the waves. According to others, the larger animals, including the tiger, made it to shore, only to be killed by farmers. Local legend has it that Crotch Island, just south of Deer Isle, harbored a population of exotic snakes for years afterward.

On Nov. 12, 1836, a schooner arrived in Portland and reported passing a burned steamer. It picked up a traveler’s trunk with $90 in it – the only thing recovered from the wreck.

In the panic that followed the outbreak of fire, the ship’s safe had been left behind.

Several months later, a salvage ship tried to recover the safe. It was the first of many such attempts.

Today, the gold, silver and jewelry would be worth $1 million.

This story about the Royal Tar was updated in 2022. Image of Penobscot Bay By Centpacrr at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38015693. Isle au Haut By Flickr user nschouterden – https://www.flickr.com/photos/24429031@N06/10767344353/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47767004.

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