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Six Places That Raised a Liberty Pole

Beginning in 1766, the liberty pole symbolized dissent from Great Britain, but over the years it took on different meanings for the people who raised them.

The first liberty pole in America was actually a tree. On Aug. 14, 1765, the Sons of Liberty hanged stamp collector Andrew Oliver in effigy from the boughs of a large elm in Boston. Forever after it’s been known as the Liberty Tree.

When someone raised a red flag – a gift of John Hancock — at the top of the tree, it meant the Sons of Liberty should meet. British soldiers later hacked it down when they occupied Boston.

As tall as 170 feet high, the liberty pole sprang up in towns throughout New England as the British Parliament imposed unpopular taxes and restrictions on the American colonies. Sometimes it stood next to a liberty tree. Sometimes it replaced the tree.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, commenting on symbolic reisistance to Great Britain, wrote, “In this department of silent propaganda no single venture paid richer dividends than the Tree of Liberty.”

“Raising the liberty pole,” 1776 / painted by F.A. Chapman ; engraved by John C. McRae, N.Y.

The Liberty Pole

The Romans erected the first liberty pole after assassinating Julius Caesar. The murder plot’s leaders met at the Roman Forum, where someone placed a Phrygian cap from a freed slave on top of a pole to show the Romans won their freedom from Caesar’s tyranny.

In the British North American colonies, the liberty pole began to spring up in response to specific events. Shutesbury, Mass., for example, erected a liberty pole on Sept. 5, 1774, the day the Continental Congress first met.

When the pole (or tree) was capped with a red Phrygian cap or a flag, it meant the townspeople should assemble and vent their anger with the British government.

The liberty pole reappeared even after the Revolution ended. It showed resistance to the Whiskey Tax and support for the French Revolution. When the Sedition Act passed, the liberty pole reappeared — and disappeared. Federalists who supported the Sedition Act cut them down in Wallingford, Vt., and in Vassalboro, Maine.

By the mid-19^th century, people erected liberty poles as focal points for Fourth of July celebrations or as symbols of loyalty to the United States. Sometimes they stood for symbols of dissent and had nothing to do with patriotism.

The Phyrgian cap survives too — on the official seals of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Army and the state flags of West Virginia, New Jersey and New York.

Here, then, are six places where a liberty pole once stood. If you know of any others, please mention them in the comments section.

Newtown, Conn.

On May 19, 1774, 1,000 residents of Farmington, Conn., erected a liberty pole, burned an effigy of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and a copy of the Boston Port Act.

By October 1774, Connecticut newspapers reported, “Liberty-poles from 100 to 170 feet high, are erected and erecting in most of the towns of Connecticut.”

Newtown, Conn., put up a liberty pole to commemorate the nation’s centennial in 1876. It wasn’t the town’s first liberty pole, though; a resident remembered one in his childhood, sometime in the 1830s. The wooden pole fell to the weather and the town replaced it several times. Today, Newtown’s flagpole stands as the town’s most prominent landmark.

Old Town, Maine

A disagreement among two factions of the Penobscot Indian tribe resulted in two liberty poles on their reservation.

Sometime between 1848 and 1859, the Indians on the Penobscot Reservation in Old Town, Maine, split into two groups. It started when the old sachem, Atien Swassin, was accused of drunkenness, adultery and corruption. A public council convicted him and removed him from office, but his followers remained loyal to him. They formed the Old Party and erected a liberty pole and flag.

Those loyal to the new sachem formed the New Party and also erected a liberty pole and flag.

The two groups argued and fought until the Old Party sent a messenger to several Indian tribes in Canada, inviting them to participate in a fight on the reservation, also known as Indian Island. The tribes refused, but held a Great Fire Council to try to reconcile the two parties.

The council sent two envoys to the Penobscot Reservation, and they agreed to abolish the parties, cut down the liberty poles and live in peace. But a wily leader of the Old Party persuaded the New Party to cut down its liberty pole first. After they cut it down, three members of the Old Party hugged their liberty pole so now one could cut it down without cutting their arms.

Eventually the three Old Party members repented and apologized, and the two parties managed to get along after that, according to Sprague’s Journal of Maine History in 1917.

Bedford, Mass. (Still Raising a Liberty Pole)

The liberty pole appeared in many Massachusetts towns, including Taunton, Concord, Middleborough, Barnstable, Granville and Vineyard Haven. But as far as we know, only Bedford still commemorates the raising of the liberty pole two Saturdays before Patriots Day.

The tradition began in 1965, a year after the Bedford Minuteman Company of reenactors formed. Now, minutemen reenactors from all over New England gather on the Town Common and march with fife and drum to Wilson Park. There they watch a minuteman shinny up a 25-foot pole and place a red cap on it. Then a British soldier disrupts the celebration.

The Bedford Liberty Pole Capping Parade and Ceremony is one of the opening event for all of the minuteman companies of the region;

Portsmouth, N.H.

A tall flagpole with an eagle, a shield and a carved Phrygian cap marks the spot of Portsmouth’s first liberty pole. It lies between what is now Prescott Park and Strawbery Banke.

During the run-up to the American Revolution, a tidal inlet separated the two places, and a swing bridge connected them.

On Jan 9, 1766, New Hampshire’s Sons of Liberty erected a liberty pole by the bridge to show their opposition to the Stamp Act. They hoisted a banner that read, ‘Liberty, Property and No Stamp.’ They also forced the stamp tax collector, George Meserve, to resign.

From then on, Portsmouth called the bridge Liberty Bridge.

Portsmouth put up a flagpole to honor the original liberty pole on the Fourth of July in 1824, and then replaced it with another in 1899.

At that point, Portsmouth also filled in the inlet, dismantled the Liberty Bridge, tore down dilapidated old buildings and created Prescott Park and the Strawbery Banke house museum.

The flagpole, though, still stands in the original spot.

Newport, R.I.

Newport’s patriots assembled under the liberty tree on a triangular piece of land at the corner of Thames and Farewell streets. William Read had donated the land to William Ellery and other Sons of Liberty shortly after the repeal of the Stamp Act. There, the patriots held mock funerals for liberty and hanged unpopular Loyalists in effigy. They also put up a liberty pole at a distance from the tree and put their colors on both whenever appropriate.

When the British occupied Newport, they cut down the liberty tree. Newport patriots planted an oak tree in its place to commemorate their victory in the American Revolution. It lasted until the Civil War, and another oak was planted in 1876. That one lasted only 21 years. The fourth liberty tree, a leaf beech tree, was planted in 1897 and still stands. In 1919, Henrietta C. Ellery deeded the property and the tree to the city. It is now William Ellery Park, a small pocket park.

Waterford, Vt.

Capt. John Wyman was a belligerent Revolutionary War veteran extremely proud that he had fought at Bunker Hill. After the war he moved to Dummerston, Vt., and said he wanted to be buried on a hill on his farm. He got his wish, at least until the town moved his body to a cemetery. While he rested on his farm, however, townspeople erected a liberty pole next to his grave.

However, we couldn’t figure out where the old revolutionary had been buried, and Dummerston bears no sign of a liberty pole. Nor could we find evidence of liberty poles in Bennington or Wallingford, where Vermonters had erected them. We hit pay dirt, though, in the Lower Waterford section of St. Johnsbury.

The Caledonian Record reported on May 17, 1861, “People of all parties assembled at Lower Waterford to participate in the ceremony of giving to the breeze the American flag … and to declare their devotion to the constitution and the Union.” They formed into a hollow square around the liberty pole, and ‘the flag was brought forth and flung to the breeze…’

Howard Coffin, in his book, Something Abides: Discovering the Civil War in Today’s Vermont, refers to a photo that shows the flagpole in front of the Congregational Church across from the old hotel. Both still stand.

This story last updated in 2022.

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John and Abigail Adams Give Hamilton a Review – No Stars

There was no love lost between Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Hamilton famously castigated Adams in a pamphlet published in 1800 entitled, Letter … Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams.

The pamphlet, a 40-plus page attack against Adams’ presidency and his fitness to serve, probably contributed to Adams losing his election to a second term in office in the election of 1800.

hamilton

At the same time, historians have suggested that Hamilton handled it clumsily. Hamilton probably wanted the pamphlet circulated in small numbers to discreetly urge support for Charles Cotesworth Pinkney over Adams. But because the pamphlet was published prematurely and given wide national circulation, it backfired badly on Hamilton.

Hamilton and Adams belonged to the same political party, and the pamphlet exposed Hamilton as an unscrupulous political manipulator,

As for Adams, he publicly held his tongue about Hamilton’s pamphlet for many years. But his private opinions were anything but kind.

Hamilton’s Grudge

In his autobiography, Adams said he believed Hamilton’s attack on him was motivated not by any concerns over public policy, but simply the result of a long-held personal grudge. During the American Revolution generals Philip Schuyler and Horatio Gates had a long-running rivalry. Gates prevailed and Adams had supported him. Schuyler, however, was Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law.

Adams wrote in his autobiography:

…whatever Hamilton may have pretended, I am persuaded that the decided part I had acted and the free Speeches I had made in Congress against Schuyler and in favour of Gates, had been rankling in Hamilton’s heart from 1776 till he wrote his Libel against me in 1799. Gates’s Resentment against Jay, Schuyler and Hamilton made him turn in 1799 against me, who had been the best Friend and the most efficacious Supporter he ever had in America.

I had never in my Life any personal Prejudice or dislike against General Schuyler: on the contrary I knew him to be industrious, studious and intelligent: But the New England Officers, Soldiers and Inhabitants, knew Gates in the Camp at Cambridge. Schuyler was not known to many and the few who had heard of him were prejudiced against him from the former French War. The New England Soldiers would not enlist to serve under him and the Militia would not turn out. I was therefore under a Necessity of supporting Gates. Mr. Duane, Mr. Jay, Colonel Harrison &c. supported Schuyler. There is no difficulty therefore in Accounting for Hamilton’s ancient [grudge] any more than his modern Malice against me.

Hamilton as Debauched as Franklin

In his exchange of letters with his wife Abigail, Adams was even more blunt, though he may have underestimated Hamilton’s ability to inflict political harm on him. In January of 1797, just weeks after his election to the presidency, John wrote to Abigail:

Hamilton I know to be a proud Spirited, conceited, aspiring Mortal always pretending to Morality, with as debauched Morals as old Franklin who is more his Model than any one I know. As great an Hypocrite as any in the U.S.

His Intrigues in the Election I despise. That he has Talents I admit but I dread none of them. I shall take no notice of his Puppy head but retain the same Opinion of him I always had and maintain the same Conduct towards him I always did, that is keep him at a distance.

The private criticisms of Hamilton’s lack of morality foreshadowed the sex scandal that enveloped Hamilton later in 1797. It was revealed that Hamilton had had an affair with a much younger woman six years earlier.

Abigail Joins In

In a letter in 1799, with Hamilton perhaps already pondering the attack pamphlet he would write, Abigail wrote to John about Hamilton:

I have not any Confidence in the honour, integrity or patriotism of any Man, who does not believe that. Thou shalt not commit Adultery is a positive prohibition of God. Thou shalt not covet thy Neighbours wife is another, and yet I have been credibly informed that the Audacious publication of that Man has only rendered him more bold, and hardened in iniquity. It only requires a temptation sufficiently powerful to Ambition to lead from the path of political Rectitude; it is a strange way of Reasoning. I would not upon any consideration do a public wrong or injury, but I can be guilty of breaking the most solemn private engagement and that to one whom I am bound by affection, and by Honor to protect, to Love and Respect. I can disgrace and stigmatize my Lawful offspring, and feel neither Shame or compunction, but I would not betray a public trust. I cannot see that I commit any breach of Charity in this comment . . . I hope I am not too censorious, yet upon looking over my Letter, I begin to suspect that I have given myself a pretty free latitude. I believe I had better close before I attack any other, assuring you that I am in full Charity with all Good Men, and that I am your truly affectionate

Abigail Adams

Renders him more bold, indeed.

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John Humphrey Noyes Finds Out Sex and Silverware Don’t Mix

John Humphrey Noyes started out in the 19^th century as a conventional Yale-trained minister until he found out he was perfect and without sin.

He attracted hundreds of followers who liked thinking they were perfect, too. They followed John Humphrey Noyes to his utopian communities in Putney, Vt., Wallingford, Conn., and Oneida, N.Y.

There they prospered. But John Humphrey Noyes liked sex as much as he liked being perfect, and he wound up fleeing to Canada.

He left a legacy, though, on millions of dining room tables throughout the world.

John Humphrey Noyes

He was born in Brattleboro, Vt., on Sept. 3, 1811, with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, John Noyes, went to Congress, and his mother, Polly Hayes Noyes had a nephew who became president of the Unite States, Rutherford B. Hayes.

John Humphrey Noyes’ well-to-do family sent him to Dartmouth and then to Yale Theological Seminary.

In his second year in seminary, he decided Christ had already come a second time in 70 A.D. He then had a religious conversion, his second, after which he proclaimed he did not sin. His friends, unsurprisingly, began to think him unbalanced.

He converted a woman named Harriet Holton to his doctrine of Perfectionism, and they married in 1838. During the first six years of marriage she gave birth five times, but only one of their children lived. The couple then began living apart. He said the separation brought them both satisfaction that they had never before experienced.

Utopian Living

John Humphrey Noyes attracted about 40 followers of his Perfectionism, mostly New England farmers. After Yale kicked him out of school, Noyes and his followers moved to Putney, Vt.

In the mid-1840s, the Putney community began to experiment with communal living.

The Oneida community between 1865-75.

They shared some traits with the Shakers. For example, they believed in working for the good of the community, not just for oneself. And the whole community raised their children.

Unlike the Shakers, who didn’t have sex, the Perfectionists believed in having sex with multiple partners.

They didn’t hide their beliefs, which horrified Vermonters. A mob drove them out of Putney even as the state attorney general issued arrest warrants for John Humphrey Noyes on the grounds of adultery.

The Perfectionists moved to Oneida, N.Y., where they took out a mortgage for $2,000 on 40 acres of land, an old house, an abandoned Indian hut and an old Indian saw mill.

Silverware and Hats

They started out poor, sleeping on the floor of the old house. But they worked hard, sawing lumber for neighbors, raising crops and small fruit and making rustic furniture, silk thread, traps and palm frond hats. John Humphrey Noyes took up blacksmithing. Eventually the Oneidans starting making their famous silverware.

The community benefited from its remoteness and its simple living. It was so far from population centers that its young men didn’t have to register for the draft during the Civil War. And they used so few consumer goods they reinvested their profit in their business ventures.

The Perfectionists set up a satellite community in Wallingford, Conn., where they made matchboxes, and in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they made traveling bags. Two other small offshoots started in Newark, N.J., and Cambridge, Vt. After about a decade of hard work, they had accumulated a net worth of $67,000.

By 1875, they were worth $180,580 with about 300 members.

Criticism Prevents Novel Reading

They created a unique form of government called ‘criticism.’ It cured all sorts of faults, including selfishness, idleness, rudeness and a love of novel-reading.

Cartoon of Charles Guiteau

In 1875 a New York journalist named Charles Nordhoff visited the Oneida community and watched a session of criticism. John Humphrey Noyes sat in a large rocking chair as a group of 15 criticized a young man named Charles, who sat in the middle of the room.

Charles, they told him, sometimes used slang, acted supercilious and haughty and sometimes used pet names for people he liked. One critic said Charles had condemned the beefsteak as tough and made other unnecessary remarks about the food on the table.

Charles himself conceded he had started to think religion wasn’t important, but he was correcting that error.

Criticism, apparently, didn’t work too well on one member of the community. Charles Guiteau lived in Oneida for five years before going off to assassinate President James Garfield.

Stirpiculture

But it was John Humphrey Noyes’ views on sex that got him into trouble. He believed in ‘complex marriage,’ or what others call polygamy.

He also believed people should create children intentionally rather than through haphazard sex. But John Humphrey Noyes believed the Christian view of sex — limited to marriage — had the effect of sexually starving young people from about age 14 until they wed.

He solved the problem by having young men practice having sex with older Perfectionist women who’d gone through menopause. That way, the young men could practice delaying gratification, which was Noyes’ preferred method of birth control. He also believed women had the right to choose whether to have a child.

John Humphrey Noyes reserved most of the community’s young virgins for himself.

Another odd practice: Men asked women to have sex through a third party. At least that cushioned the letdown.

By 1869, John Humphrey Noyes began encouraging the best and brightest young people to have children. He called it ‘stirpiculture’; others called it eugenics. That’s when the community began to have trouble, because parents wanted to raise their own children.

Families also began to raise their children for a competitive, capitalist society rather than for the communal good.

Trouble

Noyes also ran afoul of Anthony Comstock, a young New York reformer who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
In 1879, John Humphrey Noyes heard a rumor that he was to be arrested for breaking the state’s marriage laws, so he fled to Canada. He died there on April 13, 1886.

The Oneida community went on to form a corporation. The business leaders determined the new company’s most profitable products were plated spoons. Eventually, the Oneida company grew into the world’s largest producer of flatware.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Equity, Maine Meets the New England Divorce Reform League

The New England Divorce Reform League sprang up in the late 1800s in response to a divorce crisis in the country. The Civil War was hard on marriage. Men left their families for long periods. Many returned with mental as well as physical injuries (not to mention sexually transmitted diseases, in some cases). Thatsad state of affairs began showing up in divorce records.

In the years after the Civil War, divorce rates began to skyrocket nationwide. From 1850 to 1880, divorce rates in Massachusetts increased from one in 41 marriages to one out of every 21 marriages. The other New England states showed similar increases.

Divorce Reform

The problem touched off debate about when to allow divorce and when not to. It also raised the question of where people could get a divorce.

Puck cartoon from 1900 highlights the national debate over divorce.

What if a couple resided in separate states? When was a spouse (usually the man) guilty of desertion?

Divorce laws varied widely from state to state. Adultery, abandonment, cruelty and simple incompatibility were all reasons for divorce in certain states. Connecticut maintained what it called an omnibus divorce law, which essentially allowed a judge to grant a divorce for whatever reasons he deemed acceptable. And judges were inclined to grant divorces when lawyers asked for them. The only way to stop a divorce was for one party to contest the divorce – a rare occurrence.

Social critics argued that easy divorce led to casual marriages. The president of Yale College tackled the issue head on. Theodore Woolsey was known more for an interest in international law and Greek, but Woolsey dove into the thorny topic of divorce, publishing essays on the topic in 1868 and 1869. The linchpin of Woolsey’s position was that adultery should be the only acceptable reason for divorce.

In the southern states, the removal of governments following the Civil War brought tremendous changes to divorce customs, as well. In most of the South before the war, an act of the legislature was needed to end a marriage, following Church of England customs. That would change after new reconstruction era governments took power.

The West, meanwhile, had a hodge-podge of divorce laws. Couples often entered into common-law marriages, simply by cohabiting and declaring themselves married. Divorces were often also informal, do-it-yourself affairs.

William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells tapped into the national angst over the state of marriage in 1881 with a best-selling, serialized novel — A Modern Instance. It was the first American novel to examine divorce. In the book, Marcia Gaylord, the most desirable young girl in the fictional town of Equity, Maine, falls for Bartley Hubbard, a thoroughly modern man. The couple then run away from Maine to Boston. In doing so they leave behind the guiding forces of family and religion to live a life governed now by greed and charm. The marriage ends with a divorce. The book leaves Bartley dead and Marcia cloistered, sorrowfully, in her childhood home of Equity.

Howells had come to Massachusetts in 1860 and served as editor for the Atlantic Magazine. He summered in Maine and wrote more than 100 books in his lifetime. His great friend Mark Twain claimed that he was himself the model for Bartley Hubbard. That was something of an insult since Hubbard is an immature, frivolous fellow whose good looks are only rivaled by his scoundrel’s streak.

William Dean Howells

In Howells’ view, the blame for divorce could be placed upon modern capitalism and greed. He also faulted the failure of society to embrace religion and the importance of family and breeding.

Everyone had an opinion on divorce, but divorce rates still escalated. Woolsey, who moved on from Yale, gathered a group of ministers and founded the New England Divorce Reform League.

The goal of the reform league (which later became the National Divorce Reform League) was to establish stricter, standardized laws for divorce across the country. Lobbying in Connecticut had led to the repeal of the omnibus divorce laws, but states elsewhere were still permissive. Indiana, Illinois, South Dakota and Rhode Island had a long history of taking turns becoming divorce mills. They would allowing out-of-staters to come, establish brief residency and win an easy divorce.

Failure

Ultimately, the League failed in its efforts, collapsing in 1908. Historians judge the league and its supporters made a key mistake in tackling the issue. They didn’t recruit feminists to aid their campaign. Women had as big a stake in divorce as men, maybe bigger, but the reform league did not choose to represent women’s interests in their campaigns. The movement came in an era when women were solidifying legal gains that gave married women more rights and greater control over their own property.

Though the league conventions and events were open to women members, it was slow to tackle the divorce laws that favored men in settling financial affairs. Outspoken women activists of the era such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned their criticism on the divorce reform movement, helping quell its momentum. She and others did not believe male reformers would adequately protect women’s interests in child custody and property rights, and so the divorce reform movement landed on the scrap heap of history and the quickie divorce survived.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places New England Films Were Shot

New England films number in the hundreds since the turn of the last century, partly because the region provides such rich material for stories and characters set against quaint fishing villages, Gilded Age resorts and prep school campuses.

Familiar themes appear again and again in those settings. The theme of the salty sea captain fighting a sea monster inspired films from Moby Dick through Jaws. Family secrets inspired Eugene O’Neill’s fictional Ah Wilderness in 1906 as well as Peyton Place.

Local characters populate many New England films: the rustic Yankee in The Trouble With Harry, the stalwart fisherman in Jaws and the outsider struggling to assimilatein A Separate Peace.

Here, then, are six New England films, each shot on location in at least one of the New England States. If you know of other New England films worth mentioning, please share in the comments section.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Paul Zindel about an eccentric, unhappy middle-aged widow, Beatrice Hunsdorfer, and her teen-aged daughters, Ruth, an epileptic doomed to repeat her mother’s mistakes and Matilda, who is quiet, ambitious and intelligent.

Joanne Woodward played the lead, her husband Paul Newman directed and their daughter Nell Potts (who later ran Newman’s Organics) played Matilda. Roberta Wallach, Eli Wallach’s daughter, played Ruth.

Though the story took place on Staten Island, the film was shot in Bridgeport, Conn., because it was only 17 minutes from Paul Newman’s home in Westport, Conn. The set was constructed inside an abandoned Hungarian church, and scenes were shot at Warren Harding High School.

Warren Harding High School

Joanne Woodward immersed herself in the role, and later admitted to taking her angry, humorless persona home with her. One night Paul Newman arrived at a friend’s house carrying his clothes in a shopping bag. “I’d like to occupy your spare room,” he said. “If I spend another night in bed with Beatrice Hunsdorfer, one of us will not be on the set tomorrow.”

Peyton Place

Camden, Maine

Peyton Place was based on New Hampshire writer Grace Metalious’ best selling novel of the same name. It told the story of sordid secrets – adultery, sexual abuse, murder and hypocrisy – hidden behind New England’s closed doors.

Producers looked long and hard for a New England location. Vermont and New Hampshire rejected them because of the racy content. So they turned to the Maine towns of Skowhegan, Waterville and Wiscasset. Ultimately they chose Camden, where the public library wouldn’t put Peyton Place on its shelves.

Scene from Peyton Place

The 1957 film, which starred Lana Turner, was shot mostly in Camden, Maine, with some exteriors filmed in Belfast and Rockland (also Lake Placid, N.Y.). About 500 local people appeared in the film as extras, though some ended up on the cutting room floor.

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

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

Back then Camden was mostly a working-class town that attracted some well-to-do tourists. Today it’s a wealthy tourist town, though it still looks much the way it did when the film was shot.

Jaws

Menemsha

The 1975 horror film, Jaws was a classic summer blockbuster and a watershed in the American movie industry. It featured a simple premise — the hunt for a man-eating shark that terrorized beachgoers.

The most successful of New England films – and in box office history at the time — it set a precedent as an action and adventure films released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily.

Jaws was filmed in Massachusetts, mostly in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, as well as in Falmouth. The film features the American Legion Memorial Bridge between Oak Bluffs and Edgartown. Now it’s referred to as the “Jaws bridge.” (Click here for a map of the Martha’s Vineyard filming locations.)

Jaws won many awards, including three Academy Awards, despite an inauspicious start. “”We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark,” said Richard Dreyfuss, one of the film’s stars.

In 2001, Congress voted to include Jaws in the National Film Archive as “culturally significant.” The author, Peter Benchley, later felt guilty about unfairly maligning the Great White Shark, a creature generally uninterested in eating human beings.

A Separate Peace

Phillps Exeter

Producers didn’t have to look too hard to find a setting for the movie A Separate Peace, based on the novel by the same name written by John Knowles. Knowles based his bittersweet coming-of-age story on his time at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. So in 1972 when the filmmakers were adapting the story to the screen and needed a locale for “Devon Academy,” they brought the story back to Exeter.

Sharp-eyed viewers will also notice Newfields, N.H., and Salisbury Beach, Mass. in some of the backgrounds.

The film, about the rivalry between two school chums during the World War II era, received mixed reviews. But fans in New England enjoyed seeing the familiar locations highlighted. Phillips Exeter still maintains a photo essay that shows where scenes from the film were shot.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day

Anita O’Day at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958

One of the great concert documentaries, Jazz on a Summer’s Day captures many of America’s greatest jazz musicians performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. Filmed in Freebody Park, where the festival took place, it includes shots of the audience, the city and the America’s Cup race, then in progress.

The film was shot by fashion photographer Bert Stern and won praise for its lush, color-drenched luminosity and breezy feel. Headliner Louis Armstrong sings Rocking Chair with Jack Teagarden, Dinah Washington swings to All of Me, Ray Charles belts out I Got A Woman and Chuck Berry does the duck walk to Sweet Little Sixteen.

The star of the film, though, is Anita O’Day, who sings Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two in white gloves and enormous feathered hat. (Watch her here.)

Trouble With Harry

Craftsbury Common

Just about all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films are classics, and The Trouble With Harry is no exception.

The trouble with Harry in the film is that he was dead. Hitchcock’ filmed his 1955 dark comedy starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine filmed in the Vermont towns of Morrisville, Barre and Craftsbury Commons.

The crew arrived in Craftsbury on September 27, 1954 to film outdoor shots of fall foliage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any, so they glued leaves on trees.

The Trouble With Harry was nominated for three awards, including BAFTA, Directors’ Guild and Satellite for “Outstanding Classic DVD” in 2005.

Images: Camden, Maine, made by Robert Swanson. Original uploader was Ryssby at en.wikipedia – Transfered from en.wikipedia Transfer was stated to be made by User:Blast., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3185574. Menemsha By User:Elkman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Menemsha.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350749. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Puritan Divorce Allows Escape From the Chain of Matrimony

When Elizabeth Luxford found out her husband James already had a wife, she went straight to the Court of Assistants in Massachusetts Bay Colony. She then got the first-ever Puritan divorce in December 1639.

A Puritan economic unit

Only the very privileged could obtain a divorce back in England because the Anglican church viewed marriage as indissoluble. Henry VIII was the rare person who could get four marriages dissolved. In England, the only way out of a troubled marriage was a ‘bed-and-board’ separation.

Not the Puritans. They rejected the Anglican and Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament, thinking it a ‘popish invention, with no basis in the Gospels.’ They redefined marriage as a civil matter only. If a marriage partner violated the marriage agreement, the injured party could escape the chains of matrimony with a Puritan divorce.

Magistrates often ordered harsh punishments for the guilty party in a divorce, including fines, whipping or time in the stocks. The guilty party could not marry again, though the injured party could.

The Puritan Divorce

In 1620, Plimoth Plantation leaders decided marriage belonged to the courts, not to the church. Therefore, they concluded, the courts could grant a Puritan divorce. As governor, William Bradford said marriage should be ‘performed by the magistrate, as being a civil thing.’

The Massachusetts Bay Puritans gave the governor’s council, known as the Court of Assistants, the power to decide divorce cases.

That’s where Elizabeth Luxford went to ask for the first divorce in Massachusetts Bay, but also in colonial America. She already had a daughter with James Luxford, and she was pregnant with their second child.

A magistrate not only granted the divorce, but seized James Luxford’s property and gave it to Elizabeth. Luxford probably left his first wife in England, which wasn’t all that unusual. The court would not have given his property to Elizabeth if his first wife lived in Massachusetts, because that would reduce the first wife to poverty.

The magistrate gave a harsh sentence to James Luxford for his Puritan divorce.

He could not come within sight of Elizabeth, and he had to sit in the stock for an hour. He also had to pay court fines of 100 pounds. Finally, the court banished him from Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Luxford, who changed her name back to Albone, was well rid of him. He later was later found guilty of ‘forgery, lying, and other foul offences.’ The court sentenced him to a whipping, to have his ears cut off and to be –again — banished. He fled to Plimoth Plantation, where he lived in extreme poverty and distress. She remarried and enjoyed the beneficence of the church in Cambridge.

New England Divorces

The guilty party in a Puritan divorce.

The next Puritan divorce didn’t happen for another five years, when Anne Clarke’s husband deserted her to live with another woman. The grandfather of the great theologian Jonathan Edwards got a divorce.

Massachusetts granted 31 of the 40 petitions for divorce or annulment in the 53 years after 1639, when Elizabeth’s Luxford got divorced.

Most divorces resulted from desertion or infidelity. Lovelessness could not be grounds for divorce. If husband and wife didn’t love each other, Puritans expected them to stick together as an economic unit.

Uncleane Yoake-Fellow

A woman had a harder time than a man to get a Puritan divorce for adultery. In 1655, Joan Halsall got a divorce after she charged her husband George with ‘abusing himself with Hester Lug.’ She also called him ‘an uncleane yoake-fellow.’ Four years later, George Halsell appealed the divorce to the General Court. The General Court sided with George, voiding the divorce and declaring he could ‘have and enjoy’ Joan Halsall again.

Connecticut had the most liberal divorce policy in the British empire. The General Assembly ordered that ‘no bill of divorce shall be granted to any man or woman lawfully marryed but in case of adultery, fraudulent contract, or willfull desertion for three years with totall negelect of duty, or seven years’ providentiall absence being not heard of after due enquiry made and certifyed.’

Rhode Island in 1650 passed a law allowing divorces on the grounds of adultery, and later on the grounds of desertion and impotence. Rhode Island would later emerge as the divorce capital of New England.

In New Haven, the law granted divorce for adultery, desertion or a husband’s failure to perform his ‘conjugall duty’ to his wife.

No Wife-Like Affection

John Vffoote’s wife Hannah Beard divorced him for ‘insufficiency’ (impotence) in 1657. Later he went to court on charges he fornicated with his father’s servant, Martha Netleton. Vffoote defended himself by saying Hannah didn’t act ‘toward him as she ought.’ Martha, on the other hand, restored his faith in himself, he said.

Testimony revealed Hannah thought John a ‘foole’ and felt no ‘wife-like affection for him.’ John and Martha had to pay a fine for fornicating, but they could marry (and then fornicate).

An African-American in Massachusetts could get a Puritan divorce. In 1768, a free African-American woman named Lucy Purnan asked for a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Her husband had kidnapped her by force and sold her as a slave. She got the divorce.

With thanks to Divorce: An American Tradition By Glenda Riley. This story about the Puritan divorce was updated in 2023.

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