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Five Heroic Moms in New England History

With Mother’s Day soon upon us, it’s a good time for a reminder about heroic moms.

For much of New England history, moms were supposed to be quiet, submissive, stay-at-homes providing a moral influence for the family. Reality often intruded, however. Mothers had to meet challenges without the advantages their male counterparts enjoyed.

Heroic Moms

Contrary to popular belief during most of New England history, moms were capable of military feats that took great courage. Prudence Cumming Wright, for example, captured two British spies while armed with little more than a pitchfork.

Time and time again, women have stepped in when their husbands died or disappeared. During the 18th and 19th and well into the 20th centuries, heroic moms raised children and ran businesses with few legal protections or even the right to vote.

Mothers of accomplishment until recent decades have largely escaped the historian’s notice. And so to rectify those oversights we bring you five heroic moms in New England history.

Ann Smith Franklin

Benjamin Franklin wasn’t the only member of his family to leave Boston for another city so he could start his own newspaper. Ann Smith Franklin, his sister-in-law, did it as well.

Born in 1696, Ann married Ben’s brother James, the one Ben didn’t get along with. James landed in jail in Boston for printing ‘scandalous libel’ — in other words, criticisms of the Puritans. So he and Ann took his printing press and moved to Newport, R.I. There they started printing the Rhode Island Almanack.

James died, leaving Ann with five children and a business to run. She couldn’t make enough money to support her family, so she asked the General Assembly for a contract to print the colony’s laws.

Ann Smith Franklin got the job. She also raised three children to adulthood, started The Newport Mercury with her son James and then continued to run it after he died in 1762.

She died in 1763. Her obituary described her as a woman of ‘economy and industry … [who] supported herself and her family, and brought up her children in a genteel manner.’

Prudence Cummings Wright

At 35, Prudence Cummings Wright had five children and a husband who marched off to the Siege of Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

That same fate befell most of the other ladies in her hometown of Pepperell, Mass. When Prudence learned British spies were passing information from Canada to Boston through Pepperell, she decided to do something about it.

One of many heroic moms

Prudence Wright organized a militia from the women of the town. They dressed in their husband’s clothes and, since their husbands took all the muskets, probably grabbed farm implements. Then the ladies’ militia patrolled the town.

One night they stationed themselves at Jewett’s Bridge and waited silently for the spies they expected. When two horsemen approached from the north, Prudence burst upon them with a lantern demanding to know their identities and their business. One of the men — Prudence’s Loyalist brother — tried to flee.

The women dragged both men off their horses and searched them. They found dispatches intended for the enemy, so they took the men to the local tavern. The men were released after they agreed to leave the colony for good.

At Town Meeting on March 19, 1777, Pepperell voted to pay Prudence Cummings Wright and her ladies’ guard for their service.

Mary Patten

Mary Patten wasn’t a mom yet when she faced down a mutinous crew and took command of a clipper ship. At 19, she was pregnant with her only son, Joshua.

She came from a well-to-do East Boston family and knew navigation and sailing. Her husband, a sea captain also named Joshua, took her along on a voyage from New York to San Francisco in 1856. As the ship approached the southern tip of South America, Joshua fell ill with fever. Mary set the course, navigated the vessel and nursed her husband.

Mary Patten

Then the first mate tried to incite the crew to mutiny, but Mary persuaded them to obey her. Joshua recovered briefly, but then again fell ill. For 50 days Mary wore the same clothes at the ship’s helm, ultimately reaching San Francisco with the cargo intact. Newspapers found out and made her an instant celebrity.

The Pattens returned to Boston overland. Joshua lived only a few more months. He never knew Mary gave birth to a son, and she only lived to the age of 24.

Toy Len Goon

Toy Len Goon was born in 1891 in a mud brick hut to peasant farmers in Guangdong Province. As a child she did backbreaking farm chores until the family’s land could no longer support all six children. At 10, Toy Len began to work for a wealthy merchant family as a servant and babysitter.

She married Dogon Goon when he returned to China from Portland, Maine, where he worked in a laundry. In 1917 he was arrested as an illegal resident, To avoid deportation he had to serve in the armed forces during World War I, where he was wounded and lost a limb.

When Toy Len arrived in Portland, she spoke no English. She worked in the laundry with Dogon. Over the next 13 years, they had eight children.

She managed to save $500 for a down payment on a three-story building in which they lived and started their own laundry. Dogon died of gangrene in 1952, leaving Toy Len with eight children ages three to 16. She kept the laundry going and made sure all her children got educations, refusing offers to put them in foster care. All did well academically.

In 1957, a local newspaper reported her son Carroll was a physician, Richard a businessman, Edward a research chemist, Albert a lawyer, Josephine a mother, Arthur, a Navy veteran, studying electrical engineering. Doris was a court reporter and Janet a college student.

Toy Len Goon receiving the Maine Mother of the Year Award.

Toy Len Goon was named Maine Mother of the Year in 1952 by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation.

Shortly after receiving the award, she moved to Lynn, Mass., to be closer to her children. She died at the age of 101 in 1993.

Margaret Rudkin

She was a society housewife who lived in a Tudor mansion with her husband and three sons in tony Fairfield, Conn. Life was good until the stock market crashed in 1929 and her husband suffered a polo accident.

Margaret Rudkin sold the horses, fired the servants and tried to make ends meet selling apples and turkeys.

According to one account, she began baking stone-ground whole wheat bread because her son Mark had severe food allergies. According to her own account, she started baking because of her ‘interest in proper food for children.‘

In August 1937 she sold her first batch of Pepperidge Farm bread to her grocer in Fairfield, Mercurio’s Market.

Eventually she moved her bakery from the kitchen into the garage and began making white bread with unbleached flour. A specialty food store in New York, Charles & Co., ordered 24 loaves a day. Then the orders poured in after Reader’s Digest ran a story about her deluxe bread. Margaret Rudkin borrowed $15,000, and in 1940 moved her bakery to Norwalk, Conn.

Eventually she added premium cookies and small fish-shaped crackers. She and her husband sold the company to Campbell Soup, where she became the first female director. Margaret Rudkin died of breast cancer in 1967.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Buzzards Bay Leper Colony: Tragic Exile

Around the turn of the 20^th century, a terrifying new kind of immigrant arrived in Massachusetts: the sufferer of Hansen’s disease. A person who had it was stigmatized as a leper and cast out of society.

Doctors knew little about the disease. Obviously it caused ugly sores and scales, disfigured the face and sometimes led to blindness and deafness. But many doctors thought, incorrectly, that leprosy resulted from living in filth or in sin or in both. They also thought, incorrectly, that it was extremely contagious and invariably fatal.

Under Biblical law, priests declared people with leprous sores ‘unclean,’ and exiled them. In the Middle Ages, they had to wear a bell and a clapper to keep others away. In 20^th century Massachusetts, they were forced to live out the rest of their lives on a remote island in Buzzard’s Bay, denied almost all that life held dear.

“The strength of this stigma is almost unique in the history of Western medicine,” wrote Ron Amundsen, who equated the word ‘leper’ with racial epithets.

In 20^th century Massachusetts, no one wanted to care for the outcasts. Except for a successful and socially prominent Malden couple, Dr. Frank and Marian Parker.

The Disease

Leprosy, a bacterial infection, attacks the skin and the nerves in the victim’s hands, feet, nose and eyes. According to the Boston Public Health Commission, about 95 percent of all adults have an immunity to it. It doesn’t spread easily, either. It requires prolonged contact with bodily fluids, usually through coughing or sneezing.

Another kind of leper

People can, in rare cases, get leprosy from armadillos, the only other animal known to be susceptible to the disease.

Leprosy develops slowly and takes two to ten years to manifest itself. It can cause nerve damage that leads to injuries the sufferer doesn’t notice. And, until the development of antibiotics in the 1950s, it eventually killed the sufferer.

Father Damien

Leprosy didn’t exist in Massachusetts until the late 19^th century, when it began to arrive on a wave of immigration and military conquest. People knew the disease from the Bible and from the contemporary controversy over Father Damien.

Damien, a Roman Catholic priest, ministered to sufferers of Hansen’s disease on Molokai, Hawaii, until he died of it himself in the spring of 1889. However, he had his critics who condemned him as coarse and ignorant. (The Roman Catholic Church has since sainted him.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, visiting Hawaii later in 1889, ferociously attacked one of Father Damien’s critics in a letter.

“You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father,” Stevenson wrote. “But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture?”

Stevenson paid to publish and distribute the letter, which added to Father Damien’s fame – and to the awareness of leprosy.

In 1895, Boston health officials diagnosed an East Boston sailor with Hansen’s disease. For many years the sailor had sailed on a ship that “carried lepers from various islands of the Hawaiian group to Molokai.” They quarantined him on Gallop’s Island in Boston Harbor, where he died two years later.

Father Damien shortly before he died

The Price of Conquest

The United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 after setting out on a course of military expansion throughout the globe. The only people in Massachusetts who contracted Hansen’s disease were immigrants and people who had traveled in places – like Hawaii, China and the Caribbean — where the disease had spread.

Over the next six years, Massachusetts doctors diagnosed a half dozen or so cases of Hansen’s disease. A gardener in Salem who’d spent time in Hawaii ended up dying in the poor house. A Swedish woman discovered on entry into the port of Boston was sent back home. A British West Indian was confine to Gallop’s Island – and escaped.

Then in April 1904, Dr. Louis Edmonds reported another case of Hansen’s disease in the town of Harwich.

Sympathy for the Leper

Edmonds diagnosed a 38-year-old stevedore named Frank Pina who had lived in New Bedford’s Cape Verdean community. He had an advanced case of the disease. Pina lived apart from his wife and eight children, and Harwich officials asked the state Board of Charity to do something with him. Dr. Edmonds quarantined him in Harwich as officials wrangled over his fate. The neighbors threatened to drive Pina from town.

The state Board of Charity argued the patients should go to the state infirmary in Tewksbury. At least there the nearness to friends and relatives would soften the rigors of their disease.

The infirmary trustees said no — adamantly.

Then the commonwealth decided to build a leprosy hospital. Massachusetts bought a farm for it in the Cape Cod town of Brewster. So many panicked Cape Codders flocked to the Statehouse to object that the railroad had to add a special train.

“I am full of sympathy for them [the lepers],” a Rhode Island judge told lawmakers. “My heart is warm for them, but I, for one, do not want to see them on Cape Cod.”

Finally, Massachusetts settled the matter by buying Penikese Island, 74 acres of rock and grass 12 miles off Cape Cod. Harvard University had used the island as a natural history summer camp. Adding some cottages made it a leprosy hospital — only the second leprosy hospital, after Louisiana, in the country.

The treatment resembled that for tuberculosis in the age before antibiotics would cure both diseases. Penikese’s doctors believed in bathing, light clothing, ointments and tonics, fresh air and a nourishing diet.

Newspaper story about New England’s Leper Island

Penikese Island Leper Hospital

Dr.Edmonds supervised the first five patients, including his own, Frank Pina. Of the rest, two were Cape Verdians — Jose Rogeriquez and Isabella Barros — and two Chinese – Yee Toy and Goon S. Dub. Later exiles to the island came from Italy, Portugal, China, Japan, Greece, Russia, Latvia and Barbados. Few spoke much English.

Isabella Barros was a pregnant 26-year-old Cape Verdean woman taken from her husband and three children in Wareham. She had dark olive skin, and “her eyes are large and darkly eloquent and her teeth beautifully even and white,” reported the San Francisco Call in a story headlined “New England’s Leper Island.” Recent pictures “show her with a melancholy, despondent expression,” the newspaper reported.

Isabella Barros gave birth to a healthy baby on Penikese Island. Twenty days later, officials sent the infant to the Boston Poor Department, along with her other children.

That sent her husband, Napoleon Barros, to an insane asylum. After his release, he no longer had any interest in her or their family.

In 1906, a rumor spread that Isabella Barros had been cured. Suddenly people feared the hospital would send her back to what was left of her home. But the disease had only gone into remission, and she died after 10 years of exile on the island.

Frank and Marian Parker

After two years, Dr. Louis Edmonds left the island, unable to stand the isolation. Dr. Frank Parker took his place, and his wife Marian came along and helped with the patients. He abandoned a lucrative 22-year practice, and she left her prominent social circle.

Both Parkers tended to the patients. The hospital averaged 14 patients over the years. Parker earned $2,000 a year, organized a farm and did carpentry and electrical work. The Parkers paid for food and medical supplies with their own money. In the 13 years they lived on the island, they only took three weeks’ vacation.

Penikese Island in 2005, sit of the Penikese Island Leper Hospital.

Staff turned over frequently. As Parker explained, “The task for those who must bathe the patients, bind up their wounds and care for their quarters is sufficiently distasteful to explain their reluctance to remain long.”

Plus, he said, the isolation got on the nerves of even healthy people. But for his patients, “some insight is readily gained into the broodings of the leper, ill as he is, racked often with rheumatic pain and burning with leprous fever, — a person without hope, committed against his will to this no-man’s land.”

Nighttime Funeral

The island had few visitors, but a Catholic priest came to say Mass once a month. In 1914, Dr. Parker pleaded with a group of Protestant ministers in New Bedford, asking them to lead services on the island. He told them:

Last summer, a West Indian leper died at Penikese. He was a Catholic and we were unable to get Father Bernard until night…Picture then this burial by lantern in the dead of night. We went to the western end of the island, where the burials are made. There are no gravestones there, because the lepers do not like to see these reminders of what they are coming to. It was the month of August, when flowers were many, and each one had his little bunch of flowers. You have never seen a more striking scene.

Ornery

Solitude and injustice made the patients ornery, Parker reported to the Board of Charity in 1915. “Weak though he be he will wage such war as he may,” Parker wrote.

The patients threw away food or they opened a faucet and let water run all night, knowing of its scarcity. Since the Parkers would fulfill any reasonable request, the patients asked them to furnish all sorts of delicacies they discarded, pets they neglected and gardens they forgot.

Louisiana Leper Hospital

The Carville, La., Leprosarium. Courtesy Public Health Image Library.

Meanwhile, the federal government made plans to build a leprosy hospital in Carville, La. World War I delayed those plans, but by 1921 the government was building the Louisiana facility.

Massachusetts Gov. Channing Cox then decided to close the Penikese Island Leper Hospital. He wanted to send the 13 patients to the unfinished facility in Louisiana, far from their friends and families. Parker publicly criticized him for closing the island.

On Thursday afternoon on March 10, 1921, a harbor tugboat arrived at a New Bedford coal wharf. The patients disembarked as a crowd of gawkers and newspaper reporters looked on. Then they boarded the hospital train.

Sorry, Very Much

Dr. Parker wept as he said goodbye to his patients on the wharf, and they, too, had tears in their eyes. The doctor shared a letter from a patient with a newspaper reporter.

“My dear Mr. Parker,

I am here now 15 months with you, and now I go away from her I am sorry, very much, because I can’t repay that help you did for me. I thank you very much for your benefit you do to me and my sister. We never forget your noble feeling for us unhappy people.

I wish the God to help you and all your people as you desire, and I wish to meet you again outside some day. I say again I thank you very much. Excuse me because I can’t write very well to write you a few line words pleasant to you.

Farewell, Dr. Parker. Good-bye.

Gratefully yours,
John Marketakis”

Without a Rudder or a Job

Nurses Hall

Frank Parker said he felt like a ship without a rudder now that the patients left the island. He turned down a job with the Louisiana hospital, not wanting to move south or work in a large institution. But he couldn’t restart his practice because people feared he’d contracted Hansen’s disease after 14 years on the island. Hospitals wouldn’t employ him for the same reason.

Governor Cox stripped him of his pension in retaliation for his criticism. So Frank and Marian Parker moved to Montana to live with their son. Frank Parker died five years later, a victim of another, more contagious disease: whooping cough.

The state couldn’t find a buyer for the island, so it burned and then dynamited the hospital.

Today, a combination of antibiotics will cure Hansen’s disease. Patients can go to outpatient clinics for treatment.

In 1996, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts honored Frank and Marian Parker with a plaque in Nurses Hall at the Massachusetts Statehouse.

Images: Nurses Hall By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1410477; Armadillo By http://www.birdphotos.com – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4325104.

With thanks to Ron Amundsen, A Wholesome Horror: The Stigmas of Leprosy in 19th Century Hawaii, in Disability Studies Quarterly, and to Paul Cyr, author of The Exiles of Pekinese Island for the New Bedford Historical Society. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six (And More) Mothers Who Left a Mark on History

Mothers have always had to balance competing demands, and some of those who did it best made history.

Mindful that Mother’s Day is around the corner, we bring you more than six New England mothers who left a mark on the region.

They include an African-American inventor from Connecticut, a Chinese-American laundress from Maine, a magazine editor from New Hampshire, a midwife from Vermont and a character from a widely-read book who was quite different from her popular image.

Mothers of Invention

Sarah Boone

On May 15, 1809, Mary Dixon Kies of Killingly, Conn., won a patent for her technique of weaving silk thread into straw to make straw hats — becoming the first woman in the United States to receive a patent. President James Madison signed Kies’ patent, and First Lady Dolley Madison wrote to congratulate her.

The people of Connecticut have been unusually inventive ever since David Bushnell invented a submarine for George Washington called The Turtle. Connecticut women – 44 of them – were among the 5,578 Connecticut inventors who obtained U.S. patents in the century after the U.S. Patent Law was passed in 1790.

From 1876 through 1890, the U.S. Patent Office ranked Connecticut first in inventions per capita every year but three, when Connecticut came in second.

At the 1876 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, the Connecticut Women’s Building featured 69 inventions by women, including Catherine Griswold’s skirt-supporting corset, Mary Ann Boughton’s cooking stove, Ann Harrison’s sleigh bells and Ellie Sperry’s check punch for banks.

Connecticut-born Eliza Murfey, a physician, took out at least 23 patents between 1870 and 1875 for railroad packings, used to lubricate rail-car axles to prevent derailments.

Sarah Boone, an African-American woman, received a U.S. government patent for an ironing board in 1892. She was born in Mississippi sometime around the end of the Civil War and moved to New Haven.

People had ironed on boards placed between two supports. Boone designed a hinged board with curved ends, making it possible to iron sleeves and dresses. She died in 1900, eight years after she obtained her patent.

Connecticut was still a leader in inventiveness in 2015, when it ranked eighth in the United States for total patents awarded.

Today you can see straw hats made by Mary Kies at the Bugbee Memorial Library in Killingly, Conn., as well as at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.

Mother of the Year

Toy Len Goon receiving the Maine Mother of the Year Award.

Toy Len Goon was born Sept. 21, 1891 in a mud brick hut to peasant farmers in Guangdong Province. It was a far cry from the White House, where she would meet First Lady Bess Truman.

As a child she did backbreaking farm chores until the family’s land could no longer support all six children. At 10, Toy Len was given to a wealthy merchant family, where she worked as a servant and babysitter. They treated her kindly. At 12 she went to a girls’ school to learn to be a good Chinese wife.

She married Dogon Goon, who had been working in a laundry in Portland, Maine. In 1917 he was arrested as an illegal resident. He had to pay $1,500 in bail and to serve in the armed forces during World War I to avoid deportation. He was wounded and returned an amputee.

He went back to China to marry Toy Len. When his new bride arrived in Portland, she spoke no English. She worked in the laundry with Dogon. Over the next 13 years, they had eight children.

She managed to save $500 for a down payment on a three-story building in which they lived and started their own laundry.

Dogon died of gangrene in 1952, and Toy Len was left with eight children ages three to 16. She kept the laundry going and made sure all her children got educations, refusing offers to put them in foster care. All did well academically.

When asked how she did it, Toy Len Goon said, “If there is harmony in the family, there is good in the larder and peace in the country.”

Toy Len Goon was named Maine Mother of the Year in 1952 by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation. Then she won the national competition.

There were political motives for selecting her. At the height of the Cold War, she represented the superiority of democracy over communism as a Chinese immigrant small business owner and mother.

The week she took off to receive her award was her only vacation. She visited the White House where she met First Lady Bess Truman, and she was honored with a parade in New York’s Chinatown.

Shortly after receiving the award, she moved to Lynn, Mass., to be closer to her children. She died at the age of 101 in 1993.

You can see Toy Len Goon’s former laundry at 615 Forest Ave. in Portland and, while you’re at it, take Mom to the Great Lost Bear nearby for dinner.

Mother Goose

Mary Goose tombstone

Mary Goose, buried in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, is often called the Mother Goose whose nursery rhymes have entertained children for centuries.

There’s a little bit of truth to the story – but just a little. The name ‘Mother Goose’ had been around since at least the 17^th and possibly the 10^th century in Europe.

In colonial Massachusetts, Mary Goose, born Mary Balston, married a wealthy landowner named Isaac Goose. They had 10 children. Mary died in 1690, and Isaac then married Elizabeth Foster of Charlestown, and they had six more children. They named one of their daughters ‘Elizabeth.’

In 1715, the younger Elizabeth Goose married a Boston printer named Thomas Fleet – by none other than Cotton Mather.

They had a son, which delighted Fleet’s mother-in-law. “Mother Goose, like all good grandmothers, was in ecstasies at the event; her joy was unbounded; she spent her whole time in the nursery, and in wandering about the house, pouring forth, in not the most melodious strains, the songs and ditties which she had learned in her younger days, greatly to the annoyance of the whole neighborhood–to Fleet in particular, who was a man fond of quiet. “

Fleet tried to quiet his mother-in-law, but failed. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, he decided, and in 1719 he published a book of nursery rhymes called Songs for the Nursery; or, Mother Goose’s Melodies for Children. It was a clever use of his mother-in-law’s name. In 1697, a French writer named Charles Perrault published a book called Contes de ma Mère L’Oye, or Tales of My Mother Goose.

By 1833, a copy of Fleet’s book survived and was republished as The Only True Mother Goose. A century later, Mary Goose was promoted as the real Mother Goose to attract tourists to the Granary Burying Ground — as if the graves of Paul Revere, John Hancock and Sam Adams weren’t enough.

The Granary Burying Ground is at Tremont & Bromfield Streets in Boston.

Mother of Thanksgiving

Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Hale, born Oct. 24, 1788, in Newport, N.H., influenced American fashion and taste as long-time editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the biggest women’s magazine before the Civil War.

She’s been described as a cross between Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey. Sarah Josepha Hale made popular the Christmas tree, the white wedding dress and the Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie.

We might not celebrate Thanksgiving at all were it not for her. Before the Civil War, there were only two national holidays: Washington’s Birthday and Independence Day. Thanksgiving was only celebrated in New England, and each of the six states scheduled its own date to celebrate from October through January. Hale wrote letters to five presidents and editorials in her magazine urging Thanksgiving be celebrated as a national holiday. Finally Abraham Lincoln acquiesced, thinking the holiday would help unify the nation after the Civil War.

Among her many accomplishments are the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb and dozens of books. She helped with the founding of Vassar College, the restoration of Mount Vernon and the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. The Richards Free Library in Newport bestows the annual Sarah Josepha Hale Award on a New England writer. The first honoree was Robert Frost in 1956; poet Sharon Olds won it in 2016.

The Rising Sun Tavern, her father’s establishment and the site of her wedding, is located two houses north of the south Congregational Church in Newport, N.H. The Richards Free Library is at 58 N. Main St. in Newport. The New Hampshire Historical Society sells Sarah Josepha Hale bobblehead dolls online and at its museum store at 30 Park St. in Concord.

Mother of Industrial Psychology

Lillian Gilbreth

Lillian Gilbreth had 12 children, and two of them in 1948 wrote a book about her called Cheaper By the Dozen. The book described how she and her husband, Frank B. Gilbreth, used the time-and-motion principles they taught industrial clients to manage their large household.

She hated the book, which depicted her as a sweet, stay-at-home mom. She was anything but. Lillian Gilbreth was the prototypical working mom, balancing marriage, career and family.

It wasn’t easy to tell where the management company ended and family life began.

They turned their home near Brown University into a laboratory for motion study. The Gilbreths took photos of their children doing dishes to figure out how to do it faster. They spent a vacation on Nantucket finding the best way to pack soap for Lever Brothers.

The children listened to language lessons on the Victrola while taking baths, and learned Morse code after Frank painted the symbols on their walls and ceilings. He left funny messages in code for them to decipher.

Though Frank hadn’t gone to college, she held a doctorate from Brown. She was a pioneer in incorporating psychology in industrial planning and one of the most influential women in America.

She is credited with developing the modern kitchen, conceiving the ‘work triangle’ and inventing the foot pedal trash can, refrigerator door shelves and wall light switches.

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth ran an industrial psychology consulting firm, headquartered in Providence from 1912-19.

Frank died in 1924, but Lillian continued the company until her retirement in 1968, just before she turned 90.

You can still see the New England Butt Company building at 304 Pearl St., where the Gilbreths pioneered the first process flow charts and micromotion studies, or Brown University, where Lillian obtained her PhD in Applied Management. The family lived a half block from Brown, first at 71, then at 77 Brown Street. The Gilbreths’ Nantucket cottage, which had two buglights on the property, was on the extension of Hulbert Avenue behind the Jetties Beach tennis courts.

Mother Myrick

Taconic Mountains

Mother Myrick is both a 3,290-foot-high mountain and a candy store in Vermont. Not much is known today about the original Mother Myrick, but in the late 18^th century she was well respected by the locals.

Mother Myrick lived in Beartown, a now-abandoned settlement on the mountainside. She was a skilled midwife and healer, much like Maine’s Martha Ballard. She had many patients, according to local lore, which is how the mountain was named after her.

Mother Myrick Mountain, part of the Taconic Range, rises to the west of Manchester, Vt. It is covered with a stand of a rich natural hardwood forest, part of the Equinox Highlands.

Mother Myrick’s Confectionery is located nearby in Manchester Center. It began as a small fudge shop in 1977, selling buttercrunch toffee, caramels and chocolates. Today Mother Myrick’s makes cakes, tarts and breads. They offer free shipping for Mother’s Day on their signature Lemon Lulu Cake and Spring Celebration Bread.

Mother Myrick’s Confectionery is at at 4367 Main Street in Manchester Center, Vt.

Images: Mother Goose gravestone By Swampyank at en.wikipedia – Own workTransferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by User:Mutter Erde using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4904213

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Salem Chop Suey Sandwiches, A Sign of Summer No More

Chop suey sandwiches have marked the beginning of summer for generations of people who grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Vendors once sold the beloved cheap treat throughout New England and as far south as Coney Island in New York.

They’ve been sold at the Salem Willows seaside park since the early 1900s. And now the last restaurant that sells them, Salem Lowe. has closed its doors.

“Salem Lowe, the North Shore Chinese restaurant located in Salem Willows Park, will close its door for good following dinner on August 14, making this summer the popular restaurant’s last,” reported Boston.com on July 15, 2022.

Salem Lowe, courtesy Google maps.

The chop suey sandwich is a cheap and filling concoction of roast pork or chicken, onions, celery and bean sprouts cooked in a thickened soy gravy and served on a hamburger bun. They are not to be confused with the Fall River chow mein sandwich, which lack bean sprouts and, often, meat. Chow mein noodles are an option on the chop suey sandwich, but required on the chow mein sandwich.

The Salem Lowe restaurant served the chop suey sandwich in bread rolled into a cone and wrapped in wax paper. According to the Roadfood blog, you had a choice of your sandwich in a take-out container or in a paper cone. “The cones are designed for eating while strolling, which is what you should do,” reported Roadfood.

“If there were a Nobel Prize for food stuffs, one would surely have been awarded to the culinary genius at Salem Lowe that created the chop suey sandwich,” wrote one reviewer on Yelp. “Forget radiology, penicillin and world peace: this deliciously salty sandwich has done more for humanity than those things combined.”

Chop Suey Sandwiches

Chinese immigrant cooks started restaurants and lunch wagons near mills, schools and amusement parks. They tailored their food to local tastes. Foods like chow mein and chop suey, with soft vegetables in a brown sauce, resembled Yankee cooking. Add bread and you had a cheap and filling Asian fusion food – also known as “cheap Chinese.”

Salem Willows Historic District

Salem Willows was an ideal location for the chop suey sandwich. It was developed around 1875, at the same time the Salem Willows resort community (now a historic district) was built. The park and the cottage district were named for the European white willow trees planted in 1801 along a walkway for smallpox patients at a nearby hospital.

Streetcars brought hordes of day trippers attracted by the beaches, the casino, the pavilion and the carousel. They flocked to Restaurant Row, where celebrated eateries served fresh seafood. One by one the eating places succumbed to fire and changing demographics.

Entrance to Salem Willows, courtesy Google Maps.

The last restaurant on Restaurant Row closed in the 1960s, but Salem Lowe still soldiered on with the chop suey sandwiches. (E.W. Hobbs also serves much- loved popcorn, but that’s a story for another day.) But owner David Yee said it’s time for him to retire.

An online exhibit of Salem food linked to Salem State University dates Salem Lowe from ca. 1912. The reasoning: the menu refers to itself as a ‘bill of fare,’ a term not used after 1914. Salem, notes the author, played an important role in the old China trade, which began in 1783. Yee told Boston.com his father had bought into the business in the 1960s.

Nostalgia

Today, Salem Willows still has the carousel and several arcades, one containing a few rides. Two small beaches are popular for watching July 4^th fireworks from Salem, Beverly and Marblehead.

The North Shore inspires a strong sense of nostalgia among those who grew up there. Some say you can’t call yourself a native if you haven’t had the chop suey sandwich at Salem Willows. Brunonia Barry captured that devotion in her novel the Lace Reader, in which the fictional detective eats chop suey sandwiches at least once a day.

Devotees flocked to Salem Lowe on Aug. 12, 2022, the Friday before its last weekend. The Salem News reported,

The window opened Friday to a line that was already more than 50 people deep. By 11:45 a.m., 60 were lined up. By 12:15 p.m., 82. Soon, the line nearly ran the length of the Willows strip, crossing ice cream windows and arcade entrances along the way.

Woodman’s, famous for its fried clams in nearby Essex, Mass., offers a recipe for making your own chop suey in The Woodmans Restaurant blog.

Photo: Salem Willows Historic District, By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11752323.

This story about chop suey sandwiches was updated in 2022.

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The New England Roots of the Chinese Revolution

In 1910, 43-year-old Sun Yat-sen arrived in Boston and set up a secret society to support the Chinese revolution. He started the Boston branch of the underground Tongmenghui Party with five laundry workers and two restaurant owners.

Boston’s Chinatown in the 1920s. Photo courtesy Chinese Historical Society of New England.

Sun met with them in the basement of the Chinese Freemason’s lodge at 12 Tyler St. in Chinatown. He slept in the basement when he wasn’t raising money and spreading his ideas about revolution, nationalism, democracy and prosperity for the people.

Sun encountered those ideas as a teenager living in Hawaii, where he gained an educated from Christian missionaries from New England. Though he was born in China and died in China, he spent much of his life traveling the world. He had a mission to enlist support in Chinese communities for the overthrow of the corrupt and feudal Qing Dynasty.

1911 Chinese Revolution

Sun inspired the Chinese revolution in 1911 that replaced the Qing monarchy with a republic. He was on his way to New England when he was named provisional president of the new country. He unified a divided nation, and even today Chinas on either side of the Taiwan Strait revere him.

Today an arch guarded by Chinese lions stands over the entrance to Boston’s Chinatown. Inscribed on the arch is a favorite saying of Sun Yat-sen: “All under Heaven is for the good of the people.”

Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen was born Nov. 10, 1866 in a farming village in Guangdong Province near the Portuguese colony of Macao. At 13, Sun attended school in Hawaii while living with his older brother, an entrepreneurial merchant and farmer. He studied at schools founded by Protestant missionaries mostly from New England: Asa Thurston of Fitchburg, Mass., and his wife Lucy Goodale, of Marlborough, Mass., Amos Starr Cook from Danbury, Conn., and Harvey Rexford Hitchcock from Great Barrington, Mass.

According to Sun Yat-sen by Marie-Claire Bergere,

Through more than thirteen years of schooling, starting with his arrival at the Iolani School in 1879, moving on from one establishment to another, from Hawaii to Canton to Hong Kong, Sun was a student, a protege, of the Protestant missionaries.

Sun attended the Punahou School, built on land given to Hawaii’s first Protestant missionary, Hiram Bingham, a native of Bennington, Vt., and great-grandfather of the Connecticut governor. Another founder of Punahou, the Rev. Samuel Damon, of Holden, Mass., had a son, Frank, who also became a missionary in Hawaii and a classmate, friend and supporter of Sun Yat-sen.

Sun Yat-sen

Punahou’s most famous graduate is President Barack Obama. It was there that Sun was exposed to the ideas that inspired the Chinese revolution: democracy, anti-imperialism, religious tolerance and the Christian doctrine of the individual’s ability to change earthly institutions.

Sun converted to Christianity in 1883 and studied medicine at the Guangzhou Boji Hospital under John G. Kerr, a protégé of Peter Parker, a medical missionary to China from Framingham, Mass.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen

In 1892, he earned his license to practice medicine from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. Frustrated by the backward and repressive Qing Dynasty, he started on the course leading to the Chinese revolution of 1911.

He traveled several times to the mainland United States to raise money and enlist support from Chinese communities. Sun first arrived in the United States in 1905, while living in exile. He had already participated in two failed uprisings against the Qing Dynasty.

Then, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 forbade people of Chinese descent to enter the United States. Sun got into the United States by producing a fake birth certificate showing his Hawaiian birth.

Official Boston had no love for the Chinese people then. In 1903, police and immigration officials surrounded Chinatown at dusk. They then raided homes and businesses without warrants. Using a murder as an excuse, they rounded up 234 Chinatown residents who couldn’t produce their papers immediately. They deported 45 of them.

The Chinese Revolution

In 1911, Sun planned to return on a fundraising tour along the northern United States to raise money for the revolution. Starting in Portland, Ore., he planned to cross the country speaking and raising money. He would end his tour in the New England cities of Boston, Springfield, Hartford and Providence.

On Oct 12, 1911, Sun got the news somewhere in the Rocky Mountains that his followers had overthrown the Qing Dynasty two days earlier. He hurried on to China through Europe where he was inaugurated as the provisional president of the Republic of China. (The fundraising tour, by the way, raised $140,000, which would amount to about $3.5 million today).

Overseas Chinese played such a vital role in overthrowing the imperial Qings that Sun himself recognized them as the ‘Mother of the Revolution.’

Sun died of liver cancer on March 12, 1925 at the age of 58. One month after he died, Boston’s Chinatown held a memorial ceremony for him.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Boston’s paifang gate By Ingfbruno – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27497701.

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Fall River’s Famous Chow Mein Sandwich

When 17-year-old Barbara Wong arrived in Fall River, Mass., after World War II, she could hardly have known she would become the pillar of the city’s most treasured culinary tradition: the chow mein sandwich.

If you’re not from southeastern Massachusetts or Rhode Island, you probably never heard of the chow mein sandwich. It’s served on a hamburger bun with chow mein noodles and a brown gravy made with onions, celery and bean sprouts, maybe with shrimp or beef or pork. You can order it strained – without meat or vegetables – or unstrained.

During the ‘30s, the chow mein sandwich was a feature of American Chinese food. The sandwich was sold along the East Coast as far south as Brooklyn, N.Y., where you could buy it at Nathan’s Famous at Coney Island. They were a favorite of students and textile mill workers, who could sit down at a Chinese restaurant or an American lunch counter and get a cheap and filling sandwich for a nickel. A meatless version would be sold for Catholics on Fridays.

They were especially popular in Fall River, where one large Chinese restaurant sold close to two million of them during its 40 years in business, according to Imogene Lim, a food researcher at Malaspina University College.

The Chow Mein Sandwich

You can’t have a Fall River chow mein sandwich without this.

Barbara Wong came to Fall River to reunite with her father, who she only knew through letters. Five years after her arrival, Barbara met Albert Wong, the son of the owner of the Oriental Chow Mein Company. He brought her to the brick factory on Eighth Street in Fall River.

Albert’s father Frederick Wong had left Canton, China, in 1926 to study at Salem State University. He stopped in Fall River to visit an uncle who owned the Hong Kong Restaurant. Frederick decided he’d rather go into the restaurant business. He spent the next 10 years frying noodles in the back of the restaurant, saving to start his own business.

The Fall River textile mills employed a large immigrant population, mostly from Quebec, Ireland and England. Like most Chinese immigrant cooks, Frederick Wong tailored his food to the taste of the area’s population. After 10 years in the restaurant business, he knew what appealed to local tastes: chow mein, with its soft vegetables in a brown sauce that resembled Yankee cooking.

Oriental Chow Mein Co.

He opened the the Oriental Chow Mein Company in the brick building on Eighth Street in 1938. From there he made chow mein mix, crispy noodles and bean sprouts. At first he sold only to local restaurants. But just before World War II, he started to package the crunchy chow mein noodles and a packet of gravy in bright yellow boxes under the Hoo-Mee brand name. The timing was perfect: In 1942 chow mein was added to the U.S. Army cookbook.

The distinctive crunch and flavor of the Hoo-Mee chow mein noodles ensured the chow mein sandwich would remain a favorite in the Fall River area long after it faded elsewhere. So did the need for cheap and filling food in a city that never recovered from the Great Depression.

Fall River native Elise Johnson remembers the staple meal: chow mein sandwich, French fries and an orange soda. Popular chef Emeril Lagasse, who also grew up in Fall River, has expressed his love for the chow mein sandwich. They were a part of the Fall River school lunch menu well into the 1990s.

‘I thought it was great’

It was the early 1950s when Albert brought Barbara to see the family business. “I thought it was great,” she said.

Barbara married Albert in 1953. She also married into the family business. Albert took over from his father, churning out Hoo-Mee chow mein noodles until his death in the 1990s. Then Barbara joined the business with her brothers-in-law and became the gregarious, well-loved face of the Oriental Chow Mein Company, greeting customers with hugs.

It is the only company that makes chow mein noodles in the region. When a fire in 2009 destroyed the factory on Eighth Street, Barbara Wong was besieged by customers wanting to know if she would rebuild. She got so many calls she disconnected her business phone. The calls came to her house. People stopped her on the street wanting to know when the noodles would be back. Restaurants reported they were losing business because they had to buy their chow mein noodles from Boston and New York.

Six months later, the Oriental Chow Mein Company was back in business. The Fall River chow mein sandwich was restored to its former glory.

Further Information

You can order Hoo-Mee Chow Mein noodles directly from the company at Oriental Chow Mein Company, 42 Eighth Street, Fall River MA 02720. Or click here. Follow them on Facebook here.

If you enjoyed this story, you may want to read about another New England culinary favorite: the chop suey sandwich of Salem, Mass. Click here for the article.

This story was updated in 2022.

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