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Six Epic College Pranks

College pranks have been part of the college experience since at least the 13^th century, when Oxford students sent a prostitute to the cardinal in residence. The tradition of college pranks came to North America with the Puritans.

In the early 1800s, Harvard students thought it amusing to ring the bell in Memorial Hall during the wee hours of the morning. But at Brown, students preferred to muffle the college bell.

Over the years, college pranks have involved putting farm animals in inappropriate places. Pranksters often victimized prominent statues as well. Dartmouth students painted the statue of Harvard’s John Harvard green, Yale students painted him blue and others put him in women’s underwear.

Here we bring you six historic college pranks performed at New England institutions of higher learning. If you know of any other college pranks, please include them in the comments section.

College Pranks, Animal House Style

The Gardner Dow Field at Connecticut State, where students first paraded the ramnapped Ulysses.

There’s nothing like a sports rivalry to inspire college pranks, and the University of Connecticut and the University of Rhode Island, not 60 miles apart, are no exception.

In 1933, Connecticut State Agricultural College changed its name to Connecticut State College, and renamed its football team the Statesman rather than the Aggies.

It didn’t help the team. In 1934, the Connecticut Statesmen lost six out of their first seven games, while their opponents shut them out five times. Their final home game against the Rhode Island State Rams was likely to end badly for Connecticut.

Then Connecticut students learned that Rhode Island students planned to taunt them by bringing Ulysses, their ram mascot, to the game.

The Connecticut students stole Ulysses. During the 1934 game, Connecticut fans paraded Ulysses on the field accompanied by the marching band. As expected, Connecticut lost 18-0, Rhody fans tore down the goal posts and a fight broke out.

The next month, Connecticut chose as its mascot the Husky, a less kidnappable animal than the ram. For years afterward, Connecticut students ramnapped Ulysses and his successors. And for years afterward, the winner of the UConn-Rhode Island football game took home Ramnapping Trophy. When Rhode Island quit using live rams as mascots in 1974, the trophy was moved to the J. Robert Donnelly Husky Heritage Sports Museum on the UConn campus.

Streaking in Winter

University of Maine at Orono

College pranks took the form of streaking on college campuses starting in the early 1970s. Defined as running naked through a public place, streaking started out with solitary males running across campus or at sporting events. Women soon joined in the fun and streakers began running around en masse.

Some historians peg the beginning of the craze after newspapers began reported streakers at Florida State in January 1974. Despite the New England winter, University of Maine students quickly took up the sport at Orono.

The student government in March called a meeting at Memorial Hall to discuss how to handle the streaking epidemic. One streaker couldn’t resist temptation, and he streaked the meeting.

The state of Maine ended up enacting a law against streaking, but it proved ineffective. On Nov. 2, 2002, a police officer arrested two University of Maine undergraduate women for jogging naked through downtown Orono. A prosecutor charged them with indecent conduct. One of the women asked the police officer if he saw her genitals. He said no. The judge ruled a woman naked in the street is not an indecent act under Maine law because a woman’s genitals are primarily internal.

MIT Masters College Pranks

Smoot mark 364.4 on the Cambridge end of the Harvard Bridge. It says “+ 1 ear”, not “± 1 ear”, as it should.

The geeks at MIT have so perfected college pranks over the centuries that the MIT Museum once featured a Hall of Hacks.

The college pranks at MIT often display technical aptitude, something you’d expect at a university that teaches technology. MIT students once put a campus police car on top of the Great Dome, its lights flashing and its dummy inhabitant enjoying coffee and donuts.

Later, they put a subway car on the Great Dome and got it moving.

In the 1930s, Ken Wadleigh and four other MIT students welded a streetcar to its rails. They distracted the motorman and then set off thermite bombs to weld the wheels. Wadleigh became a dean at MIT.

In 1958, MIT students used undergraduate Oliver R. Smoot to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. They marked the bridge at every Smoot, and measured it as 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear. When the bridge was renovated in 1964, the markings were restored, and they remain today.

Not all pranks involve technology. MIT students dressed the John Harvard statue as the Unabomber after the arrest of that Harvard alumni.

Cow-centric College Pranks

Thompson Hall at UNH

University of New Hampshire students have long taken to heart the admonition, “If at all possible, involve a cow.”

Students at UNH, a land-grant college, have access to farm animals for their college pranks. Over the years, students put pigs and sheep in places where pigs and sheep don’t belong.

In the 1930s, Alpha Gamma Rho brothers managed to haul a cow into the Thompson Hall tower. Somehow they got the cow down as well.

In 1951, students replicated the college prank by stashing a cow in the second floor of Ballard Hall. A poem written by the night watchman, Pop Marshall, recounts the episode:

“Now I’m willing to guard your property / And watch your buildings fine, / But teaching music to a cow / Is a little out of my line.”

Years later, UNH would be victimized by a more serious college prank of sorts when popular physics professor Kevin Yates turned out to be a college dropout named Marvin Hewitt. Read Hewitt’s extraordinary story here.

Messing With Messer

In the annals of Brown University, perhaps no administrator was so victimized by college pranks as Asa Messer. He became president in 1804, just when Nicholas Brown gave $5,000 to the College of Rhode Island and renamed it Brown. Under Messer’s tenure, the student body grew, but Brown’s bequest wasn’t quite enough to run the college to the student’s liking.

Asa Messer

Beloved tutors left Brown for other colleges, but Messer couldn’t afford to hire enough replacements to keep class size down.

Early in his presidency, students played harmless college pranks such as painting Messer’s horse or stabling it in his third-floor office.

Then the students’ pranks turned dangerous. They built a hut of kindling and set it on fire next to University Hall, endangering the building’s roof and Messer’s barn. Students damaged dormitories in University Hall and broke windows and doors of Hope College’s new chapel.

University Hall in 1792

Messer didn’t believe in sparing the rod and spoiling the undergraduate. He punished pranksters by rusticating them – sending them off to work on a farm. They called him a tyrant.

Messer believed the students aimed their vandalism at him personally, and he resigned.

Samuel Gridley Howe had attended Brown during those troubled times, and had once led Dr. Messer’s horse into the belfry. He also put hot ashes in his tutor’s bed.

After he founded the Perkins School for the Blind, Howe went to visit Dr. Messer. He apologized for his wayward youthful behavior. Messer replied, “Howe, I am afraid of you now. I am afraid there will be a torpedo under my chair before I know it.”

Panty Raid To End All Panty Raids

Vermont College of Fine Arts today

On the evening of May 24, 1963, carloads of cadets from Norwich University led a panty raid against the women of Vermont College (now the Vermont College of Fine Arts).

Vermont’s faculty and staff had an inkling something would happen that evening. A local store clerk said he’d sold out of women’s underwear that day. Vermont Dean Pauline Collins told her students she’d received a call from Gen. Ernest Harmon, who headed of Norwich Academy, warning about the panty raid. She told them to cancel their dates, return to the dormitory by 7:00 p.m., turn out the lights when the panty raid began and let no one into the building.

At dusk, cars carrying 300 Norwich cadets began to arrive, followed by the police and fire department. A hose truck stopped in front of the dorm, and the firefighters jumped out to hook up the hoses. A Norwich cadet commandeered the fire truck and drove it into a fountain. Girls shouted from the windows, “Come on Norwich! We want Norwich!” Firefighters then turned their hoses on the students in the windows.

Fighting broke out between police and cadets. Police Chief George Connor said, “We were knocked down, kicked, and trampled upon. It’s a miracle that no one was killed.”

In the end, Vermont’s president issued a denial that his students had participated at all in the hijinks.

Images: Smoot, By Denimadept – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6792703; Streaker, By Alex Kehr – originally posted to Flickr as #367, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3953923Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225. Vermont College By Hannahmorris – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24295961.

This story about college pranks was updated in 2022.

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How the Mark Twain Library Started With Books He Defaced

The Mark Twain Library in Redding, Conn., started with 200 books donated by local resident Mark Twain – books he’d scribbled over with comments, praise, criticism and corrections.

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens

He read widely, which you’d expect from a writer, and his books include novels, biography, poetry, history and adventure.

He donated books he liked, books that didn’t belong to him and books he hated. You might wonder why someone who started a library in his own name would want to fill it with lousy books. But Mark Twain, never short of words, had a reason:

“The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good,” he wrote. “Only the mediocre is unendurable.”

The Mark Twain Library

Mark Twain left his house in Hartford in 1891 when he suffered financial reverses. He and his family traveled in Europe, where he raised money lecturing and lived more cheaply. He didn’t return to the house after his 24-year-old daughter Susy died because he couldn’t bear the reminders of her.

Stormfield, Twain’s house in Redding

Two years before he died in 1910, Mark Twain moved to a villa he built in Redding, Conn. He called it Stormfield because his book, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, paid for it.

Five months after he moved in, he and his neighbors formed the Mark Twain Library Association. He raised money for it by charging his houseguests to retrieve their luggage. He also prevailed upon them to donate books as well. His daughter Clara, an opera singer, held a benefit concert for the library.

The Mark Twain Library

In classic fashion, Twain announced that a local farmer, Theodore Adams, would donate the land for the Mark Twain Library. Theodore Adams hadn’t actually agreed to donate the land yet, but he did anyway.

Twain’s youngest daughter Jean lived with him in a farmhouse on the Stormfield property. When she died tragically – most likely of an epileptic seizure – Twain sold the land and gave the $6,000 proceeds to build the Jean L. Clemens Memorial Building.

His daughter Clara donated several thousand more books from the family library after Mark Twain died in 1910.

Marginalia

Mark Twain couldn’t keep his opinions to himself, and recorded them in the margins of his books. He disagreed with President William McKinley’s imperialism in a book called The Philippine Problem. The author wrote McKinley became convinced that ‘it was the will of the people’ that the United States “should acquire the Philippines.’ Twain would have none of it. He scribbled, “If McK had opposed it, these empty heads would have applauded that. He put imperialism into them, and they responded.”

Twain mocked a book called Saratoga 1901 by Melville Landon. Calling it ‘The Droolings of an Idiot,’ he noted the stolen jokes throughout and on page 104 wrote, “Hear this humbug, this sham, deliver himself.”

Twain carried on a running debate with a woman named Mary Somerville throughout her memoits. On page 125, the author described how she smuggled some antiquities out of Pompeii. Twain wrote, “Evidently Mrs. S. thinks there are kinds of immorality which are not immoral.”

Grammar

Mark Twain was a stickler for good grammar, and even rectified his friend Rudyard Kipling’s grammatical errors in his books. Robert Louis Stevenson stood corrected by Twain, as well.

He criticizes an author for writing, “A long procession of angelic beings move in procession” by noting sarcastically, “of course a procession moves in procession.”

Lew Wallace, an Autobiography, by the Civil War general who wrote Ben Hur, did not impress Twain. In the inscription, he wrote, “The English of this book is incorrect & slovenly & its diction, as a rule, barren of distinction. I wonder what “Ben Hur” is like.”

What Did He Like?

Not every book donated to the Mark Twain Library contained the author’s acerbic comments. He admired the poet Robert Browning, for example, and he marked up the poems with cues to help him read them for the most dramatic effect.

Twain also liked The Arctic Traveller by Hans Hendrik, an adventure story. “A very valuable book – and unique,” he wrote.

Books that belonged to his daughters had loving inscriptions in them. His daughter Jean loved animals, and his library includes her books about wildlife. Birds of Eastern North America, is inscribed, “To Jean Clemens with her Father’s love.”

The books are still at the Mark Twain Library, but you can see some of his comments here.

The Mark Twain Library can be found at 439 Redding Road, Redding, Conn.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image: Mark Twain Library By Aab254 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71297666.

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Johnny Appleseed, The Real Reason He Wandered

Johnny Appleseed wasn’t quite a New England version of St. Francis, wandering the countryside in rags, scattering apple seeds and befriending woodland creatures.

Oh he did wear rags, he did love animals and he did bring apples to thousands of people. And he certainly roamed the newly settled frontier.

But he did it to make money selling apples for hard cider.

And Johnny Appleseed died a wealthy man.

John Chapman birthplace in Leominster, Mass.

Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Leominster, Mass., on Sept. 26, 1774. You can hardly miss him if you visit the city. His birthplace has a granite marker and a billboard, streets and schools bear his name and a wooden statue of him stands in City Hall.

He only lived in Leominster a few years, though. His mother died when he was very young, and his father moved to Longmeadow, Mass., and remarried. Along came 10 half-siblings, and Johnny and a half-brother left the crowded house around 1796.

At that time, New England farmers began to head west in great number, looking for better soil and bigger farms. Life on the frontier wasn’t easy, and often farmers only had hard cider to quench their thirst for an alcoholic beverage.

Photograph of John Chapman in the 1840s.

Johnny Appleseed saw his opportunity. He had a knack for predicting where the next wave of settlement would go, and he began to plant apple trees in anticipation of the next settlers.

He didn’t scatter seeds for orchards, but planted nurseries — in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Johnny Appleseed eventually traveled as far as Ontario, Illinois and West Virginia.

Once he planted his nurseries, he built fences around them. Then he hired someone to take care of them and returned every year or two to check on his trees. The caretaker sold seeds and saplings.

He wandered because he had to to buy up inexpensive land before the next group of customers settled the frontier.

Apples

The apple industry created the myth that Johnny Appleseed brought a healthful, delicious fruit to pioneer farmers.

Johnny Appleseed

In truth, his apples had one purpose, and it wasn’t to make pies and crumbles. Farmers could only make hard cider from them.

Johnny Appleseed’s apples didn’t come from grafted trees, but from seedlings. Henry David Thoreau once wrote that apples from seeds were “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.”

Eight years before he died, the financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his wealth. Nevertheless, Johnny Appleseed died a rich man, owning more than 1,200 acres of prime real estate.

Bit of a Loon

Parts of the Johnny Appleseed myth do have elements of truth to them, though. He did dress in rags, sometimes even in old coffee sacks with holes cut in them for his head and arms.

Stamp.

He did it because he followed the Swedenborgian religion, and believed that the more he suffered in this world the more happiness he would experience in the hereafter. According to his obituary, he ‘submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter.’

Johnny Appleseed often stopped in frontier cabins to spread ‘some fresh news from Heaven.’

According to Harper’s magazine, he once lingered to hear a longwinded preacher speak to a crowd of people from a stump he used as a lectern.

The preacher urged his listeners to give up extravagance.

“Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher asked

Exasperated, Johnny Appleseed put his bare foot on the stump and said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!”

Folk Hero

Johnny Appleseed shared his trees with Native Americans during his travels, and converted some of them to his religion. They in turn taught him how to heal with herbs and plants, and even hostile tribes left him alone.

He had some other eccentric beliefs, which at least one biographer attributes to a kick on the head from a horse. For example, he thought it cruel to ride a horse or chop down a tree.

Gravesite of John Chapman.

He also liked to give ribbons to small girls and entertain small boys by walking on hot coals.

Eventually his travels brought him a reputation as a healer and a folk saint.

Johnny Appleseed died around 1845, though the exact date of his death is disputed. He left his valuable nurseries to his sister.

Today, an annual Johnny Appleseed Festival draws an average of 10,000 people – held in the fall, of course, around the time of the apple harvest.

Read more surprising apple history along with historic apple recipes in the New England Historical Society’s 29 Historic New England Apple Recipes. Available now in paperback.

With thanks to MassMoments. Image of Johnny Appleseed gravesite, By Rochelle Karp – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21439692; Apples by By Leslie Seaton from Seattle, WA, USA – Newtown pippins, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33880381. This story was updated in 2023.

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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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How the Real Miss Rumphius Decorated Maine With Lupines

There was a real Miss Rumphius who lived in Christmas Cove and secretly planted lupine seeds to adorn Maine’s roadsides and meadows.

The fake Miss Rumphius was the subject of a 1982 children’s book written by Barbara Cooney.

The real Miss Rumphius is at least partly responsible for the gorgeous show of lupines throughout Maine’s countryside in early summer. The wildflowers thrive in Maine, but they aren’t native to the state. How they got there and spread in such profusion is a mystery explained only by – well, an old lady who was the real Miss Rumphius.

Lupines in Maine

The Real Miss Rumphius

Hilda Edwards arrived in South Bristol, Maine, from Bristol, England, in 1904, at the age of 15.

There were no roads to Christmas Cove. Hilda Edwards had to take a train to Newcastle and then a mail launch down the Damariscotta River.

Her uncle, Smith College professor Harry Norman Gardiner, had invited her to stay in his remote cottage on Jupiter Knoll at Christmas Cove. Explorer John Smith had named the inlet after discovering it on Christmas Day.

Christmas Cove in 1906

Hilda Edwards graduated from Smith in 1912 and in 1915 married Talbot Faulkner Hamlin. He was a professor and librarian at Columbia University and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

Like Miss Rumphius, Hilda Hamlin traveled widely, though with her husband and three sons.

After leaving her husband in Paris in 1926, she audited courses at Smith, but still came to the little cottage on Christmas Cove in summertime. She began planting lupine seeds imported from her native England. Every August she cut bundles of lupine stalks and shook out their seeds over a wider space.

Then she began putting seeds in her pocket when she walked to the post office and strewing them along the roadside. She did it in secret, rarely telling anyone about her lupine obsession. Some friends knew. The real Miss Rumphius didn’t drive, and when friends gave her a ride they’d catch her tossing lupine seeds out the window. They called her ‘Hilda Lupina’ or the ‘Lupine Lady.’

Lupine Lady

More lupines

Lupinus polyphyllus are three to six feet tall and stand erect, with leaves below the flower stalk. Their two-foot-long, spiky flowers are blue, purple, rose and white. Lupines were planted in Europe to stabilize soils and to feed animals, but they’re considered a problem in Lithuania because they crowd out forest herbs. Bears like to eat their roots.

Researchers say they arrived in Maine sometime around 1950 – when the real Miss Rumphius entered her 60s — and spread along the Maine coast.

“Many a motorist with a botanical eye pulls into a gas station for an explanation of the display,” wrote W. Storrs Lee in a 1971 article for Yankee magazine. He had visited Hilda Hamlin for an interview, noting the spectacular display of lupines along Route 129. He also noted a handwritten sign next to a woodpile: “If friends of Hilda Hamlin would tote a few sticks of wood to her cottage, they would be doubly welcome.”

Secret Garden

Hamlin, not yet immortalized as Miss Rumphius, kept her gardening a secret from the world. There’d been one exception, wrote Lee. She was on her way to the post office when a ‘regular old-time school marm’ stopped her Model T and asked her to explain the origin of the lupines.

Hamlin replied,

At the end of the road lives a queer old bird who has so many hundreds of lupines on her land that she has acquired the habit of cultivating the seed when it opens.

The old schoolmarm said she’d like to shake her hand. “Shake,” said Hamlin. “I am Hilda Lupina.”

Yankee , in a subsequent edition, published an editor’s note: “Mrs. Hamlin was overwhelmed with hundreds of letters and almost as many visitors following publication of the original article in the June, 1971, Yankee; most of the correspondents and callers begged for sample seeds. Out of deference for Mrs. Hamlin’s advanced years, the editor feels called upon to remind would-be roadside gardeners that “Hilda Lupina” is not in competition with Burpee and other seed suppliers, and, happy as Hilda is with her fan mail, she is no longer up to distributing souvenir seeds of receiving and entertaining hordes of callers at Jupiter Knoll.”

Barbara Cooney

Barbara Cooney was an award-winning children’s book writer who lived in Damariscotta, Maine, about 20 miles from Christmas Cove. In 1982 she wrote and illustrated the book, Miss Rumphius, about a fictional woman named Alice Rumphius who lived a life of travel and adventure before retiring to her cottage. The story begins,

“Miss Rumphius, The Lupine Lady lives in a small house overlooking the sea. In between the rocks around her house grow blue and purple and rose-colored flowers. The Lupine Lady is little and old. But she has not always been that way.”

Miss Rumphius shared the 1983 National Book Award for Children’s Books. The National Education Association named the book one of its “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children” in 2007. Spellbound Productions made the book into an 18-minute film in 2000, and the Maine Library Association named its Lupine Award after Miss Rumphius.

Part of the book’s appeal lies in one of its last paragraphs, in which Miss Rumphius tells her niece: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”

Images: Miss Rumphius book cover By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2629786; Lupines By Theendofforever at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6755546. This story was updated in 2023.

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Perkins Metallic Tractors – Connecticut’s Cure for Everything That Ails You

A reputable young Connecticut doctor went off the rails shortly after the American Revolution with an invention that supposedly cured everything: the Perkins Metallic Tractors. It didn’t, but it made him rich.

Elisha Perkins

As the war wound down, Connecticut surgeon Elisha Perkins had a bright future. He had taken up medicine under the tutelage of his well-respected physician father. He had provided his services to the soldiers during the war. And he set up his home in Plainfield, Conn., to include a private hospital for the well-to-do.

“The Stage seemed set for a successful career,” as one of his biographers put it, “but it was not to be.”

Instead, Elisha Perkins would pursue a line of investigation into the origins and cures of pain and disease. It would ultimately render him a pariah and label him a quack. But not before it underwrote a prominent medical institute in London named for him, gave rise to a school of medical thought called Perkinism and made him rich.

Perkins Metallic Tractors

It’s not clear exactly when Perkins evolved from a man of science to a charlatan. In his mind, at least, he may have never made the jump. He began working on the idea of his signature invention – the Perkins Metallic Tractors – when pondering the way human flesh responded to metal. He sensed there was some chemical or physiological response when a scalpel or other metal touched flesh.

When extracting a bad tooth, he noted that patients sometimes experienced a temporary relief of pain when he touched an inflamed gum with a metal instrument. Unfortunately, he put two and two together and got the answer five.

Perkins Metallic Tractors by James Gillray, 1801

Perkins began experimenting with different metals to determine if one worked better than another in relieving pain. Then he finally settled on his design.

Today if you think of a metallic tractor, a farm vehicle comes to mind. But Perkins Metallic Tractors were two small metal rods with a point on one end, one of brass, one of iron. Rubbing these metal utensils over an inflamed or painful area could relieve a patient’s distress.

Even better, for the patient, laymen as well as physicians could use Perkins Metallic Tractors . In 1796, Perkins decided he’d finished his Tractors, and he received a patent on them. Then he began to market them.

Miracle Cure

With Congress meeting in Philadelphia, Perkins decided to take his invention there. Perkins had no doubt his Tractors worked on gout, rheumatism and a variety of painful afflictions. But he also invited other physicians to test the devices for themselves.

They Tractors impressed members of Congress. George Washington bought a set Perkins Metallic Tractors for his personal use. The ministers of the city recommended them, and the hospital welcomed him with open arms. The effect of the Tractors seemed remarkable. Today, scientists would ascribe the Tractors’ impact to the placebo effect – the mind’s ability to trick a person into thinking he’s feeling better.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut endorsed Perkins in a letter to his fellow justice, John Marshall. He encouraged Marshall to seek out men willing to help Perkins with his experiments on the Metallic Tractors.

The success of the Metallic Tractors nearly overwhelmed Perkins as customers from high society and low sought out his cure. Word of the miraculous powers of the Perkins Metallic Tractors soon spread to England and to Denmark, where they caused a mania.

Perkins had no shortage of partners. A man in Virginia gave up his plantation and invested everything in Metallic Tractors. Cases were reported of people selling their horse or carriage to buy a Metallic Tractor. People soon began using the Perkins Metallic Tractors on their animals – with great success, they felt.

An 18th century marketing piece for Perkins Metallic Tractors.

Marketing to the Masses

Perkins began using pamphlets to promote his product, gathering testimonials and publishing, Certificates of the Efficacy of Doctor Perkins’ Patent Metallic Instruments.

Hidden among the testimonials was the occasional sly wink. William Allen, D.D., noted “Having had myself for a great many years a pair of them, if they have ever relieved pain, I have found them also useful in picking walnuts.”

With word of the Tractors spreading to Europe, Perkins’ son Benjamin traveled to England (Perkins would go there himself, too). Here Benjamin published: The Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body in Removing Various Painful Inflammatory Diseases, Such as Rheumatism, Pleurisy, Some Gouty Affections, etc., Lately Discovered by Dr. Perkins of North America and Demonstrated in a Series of Experiments and Observations by Professors Meigs, Woodward, Rogers, etc., by Which the Importance of the Discovery Is Fully Ascertained, and a New Field of Inquiry Opened in the Modern Sciences of Galvanism or Animal Electricity. By Benjamin Douglas Perkins, A .M., Son of the Discoverer.

Benjamin spent his days seeing patients at his home and traveling the city to provide treatment and sell Tractors. He advertised the price at five guineas. Benjamin often updated his pamphlets, adding testimonials from physicians, lords, ladies and other prominent members of society who used and benefited from the Tractors.

Meanwhile, at home in the United States, Elisha Perkins turned his attention to a more serious affliction: yellow fever. The disease was rampant in American cities in 1798 and 1799, and Elisha was convinced better use of antiseptics could stop it. He offered to treat anyone suffering from yellow fever. His patients overwhelmed him and he caught the disease himself. Elisha died in 1799 at age 59, but the mania for his Perkins Metallic Tractors had certainly not died. .

The Establishment Strikes Back

From the start, the Metallic Tractors did not get a warm welcome from all members of the medical establishment. Many physicians concluded that the devices were pure quackery. Plus, the fact that patients could use them to treat themselves, rather than hiring a doctor, put them out of favor with many physicians. In 1797, the Connecticut Medical Society expelled Perkins.

Perkins’ critics argued his theories simply extended the school of animal magnetism, which held that held every animal possessed a life force that could be manipulated to end disease. It was an unproven science.

But while doctors raised eyebrows at Perkins’ devices, they could do nothing to stop the word-of-mouth recommendations that drove sales.

And the marketing of the devices, over time, grew more flamboyant. Perkins began to claim that he had designed an exotic, specialized formula for the metal that made up the devices. He employed new marketing strategies. A minister or doctor might receive a set of Perkins Metallic Tractors unordered by mail. The package included a simple request that if the recipient found them useful, he should make payment.

Benjamin Perkins, now residing in London, recruited some of the leading names of the city. With the help of Benjamin Franklin’s son Richard he founded the Perkinean Institute in 1802. It then grew into one of the best funded health care facilities in London. Claims were made for the device’s efficacy in treating toothache, rheumatism, gout, erysipelas, St. Vitus dance and lockjaw.

As the followers of Perkinism grew in number, so did its critics. English physicians conducted tests on the devices treating some patients with metallic tractors and others with wooden ones. Both worked equally well, especially if the doctor delivered the treatment with some ceremony and flair.

Byronic Ridicule

In 1809, the English poet Lord Byron published a satirical critique of modern society, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he held up the Tractors for ridicule:

Thus saith the Preacher: “Nought beneath the sun
Is new,” yet still from change to change we run.
What varied wonders tempt us as they pass!
The Cow-pox, Tractors, Galvanism, and Gas,
In turns appear, to make the vulgar stare,
Till the swoln bubble bursts—and all is air!

London artist James Gillray, in 1801, made a painting skewering the followers of Perkinism. It shows an old, rotund man undergoing treatment. His illness, the painting suggests, stems from his bad habits set out on the table before him: pipe, alcohol and food. An advertisement he has been reading notes: “Perkinism in all its glory being a certain cure for all disorders: Red noses, curly toes, windy bowels, broken legs, Hump Backs . . .”

Modern facsimile of Perkins metallic tractors

Cartoons mocking the Perkins Metallic Tractors also found popularity in Denmark, where Perkinism had a sizable following. They appeared in print as well as etched on other items, such as snuff boxes.

Defenders of Perkinism were just as outspoken. A group of doctors presented evidence to the he Royal College of Physicians supporting the devices. And Thomas Green Fessenden of Walpole, N.H., a 1796 graduate of Dartmouth College, published a poem in defense of the Tractors.

Eventually, however, the furor over the devices gradually faded, along with their popularity, but not before Benjamin Perkins made for himself a considerable amount of money.

A Question of Motives

Oliver Wendell Holmes in his Medical Essays, 1842-1882, noted that early in his career he occasionally encountered people still using the Tractors. Their use, however, had largely died out.

Holmes analyzed the history of the devices and declared that he could not find proof of whether Elisha Perkins and his son were charlatans or simply misinformed. But he had a strong opinion on the question.

As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Tractors, the facts must be allowed to speak for themselves. But when two little bits of brass and iron are patented, as an invention, as the result of numerous experiments, when people are led, or even allowed, to infer that they are a peculiar compound, when they are artfully associated with a new and brilliant discovery (which then happened to be Galvanism), when they are sold at many hundred times their value, and the seller prints his opinion that a Hospital will suffer inconvenience, “unless it possesses many sets of the Tractors, and these placed in the hands of the patients to practice on each other,” one cannot but suspect that they were contrived in the neighborhood of a wooden nutmeg factory; that legs of ham in that region are not made of the best mahogany; and that such as buy their cucumber seed in that vicinity have to wait for the fruit as long as the Indians for their crop of gunpowder.

Many people have documented the history of Elisha Perkins and his Perkins Metallic Tractors. William Snow Miller wrote one of the best articles on the topic, Elisha Perkins and His Metallic Tractors, published in 1935.

This story about Perkins Metallic Tractors was updated in 2022. Image: modern facsimile By Geni – Photo by user:geni, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15503488.

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