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Six Colonial Uprisings Before the Revolution

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The Boston Tea Party was just one of several colonial uprisings before the shot was heard ‘round the world on April 19, 1775. Anger toward the British had been growing throughout New England — and not just about tea.

The Tea Party itself wasn’t a protest against taxes. It was a protest against a corporate tax break – to the East India Company. The giant corporation was near financial collapse, though it had an abundance of unsold tea. Parliament agreed to bail out the company. The Tea Act of May 10, 1773 exempted the East India Company from the tea tax, making it easier to sell in the colonies. The Act also allowed the company to sell directly through agents, bypassing the colonial middlemen.

The East India Company was in effect granted a monopoly that allowed it to sell cheaper tea, threatening independent colonial merchants. The Tea Act also set a precedent of Parliament taxing the colonies without the colonies having a say in the matter.

Not for the last time did a corporate bailout anger Americans. An embargo was declared on tea, and on Dec. 16, 1773, 60 men dressed as Indians dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Thought it was the best known of the colonial uprisings, it wasn’t the only one inspired by British exploitation. Throughout 1774, protests of the Tea Act spread to New York, Annapolis, Charleston, S.C., Greenwich, N.J., and York, Maine.

The British also angered colonists with aggressive enforcement of customs, disputed rulings over land claims and confiscation of pine trees for the Royal Navy. They caused the Pine Tree Riot in New Hampshire, the Gaspee Affair in Rhode Island and the rise of the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont.

Here are six colonial uprisings that occurred in each of six New England states before the Revolution.

Colonial Uprisings in Vermont

The Catamount Tavern in a late 19th-century photograph

The Catamount Tavern in a late 19th-century photograph

Since New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth began selling grants to lands west of the Connecticut River in 1749, Vermont was disputed territory. New Yorkers – called ‘Yorkers’ — claimed the lands were theirs. Settlers holding the New Hampshire grants disagreed. The competing claims landed in court.

In 1764, King George III decreed the land belonged to New York. Settlers on land with overlapping claims had to pay a second time for their grants. The situation deteriorated and surveyors were threatened with violence. In 1770, Ethan Allen formed the Green Mountain Boys during a meeting at the Catamount Tavern in Old Bennington.

The Green Mountain Boys drove off surveyors and New Yorkers, occasionally destroying property and manhandling tenants. New York’s royal governor, Thomas Tryon, cracked down on the Green Mountain Boys with a law that imposed the death penalty for interfering with a magistrate and criminalized meeting of more than three people for unlawful purposes in the New Hampshire Grants.

On March 13, 1775, several men took possession of the courthouse in Westminster to prevent the next day’s session. The court officers attacked, killing two men. Allen and a group of Green Mountain Boys met in Westminster to prepare a petition to the King.

A month later, the American Revolution broke out. Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, along with Benedict Arnold and members of the Connecticut militia, captured Fort Ticonderoga.

Allen planned both the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and the Battle of Bennington at the Catamount Tavern. Today the site of the Catamount Tavern is marked by a granite and copper statue on Monument Avenue.

New Hampshire Pine Tree Riot

A Weare, N.H., sawmill, ca., early 20th century

A Weare, N.H., sawmill, ca., early 20th century

On April 13, 1772, Ebenezer Mudgett was arrested by the sheriff and his deputy for unlawful possession of pine logs reserved for the King’s Royal Navy.

A surveyor had found illicit white pine logs at Mudgett’s sawmill in Weare, N.H. Other loggers and mill owners nearby had been discovered with the King’s trees. They agreed to pay a fine. Mudgett refused. Upon his arrest, though, he agreed to come up with the money on the next day. The sheriff and his deputy let him go and spent the night in Quimby’s Inn.

The next morning, Mudgett and 20 men with soot-blackened faces burst into the sheriff’s room and began beating him to their heart’s content. They removed the floorboards above the deputy’s room and beat him with poles. Then they cropped the ears of the officials’ horses and sheared their manes. The sheriff and his deputy left town to jeers and catcalls.

Eight rioters were identified and charged with rioting and assault. The judge let them off with a light fine.

A millstone marks the site of the Pine Tree Riot where Quimby’s Inn once stood on Rte. 114, South John Stark Byway near the Avon store on Eastman Hill.

Gaspee Affair

The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles deWolf Brownell, c1892

The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles deWolf Brownell, c1892

On June 9, 1772, the British customs schooner HMS Gaspee ran aground in Narragansett Bay while chasing a local vessel, the Hannah. Rhode Islanders had long endured the Gaspee’s harassment of local shipping and its arrogant captain, William Dudingston.

As soon as the Hannah’s captain went ashore, he told the news to John Brown, Rhode Island’s wealthiest merchant. Brown realized the Gaspee would be grounded until midnight. He ordered eight longboats, summoned 100 Sons of Liberty and led a raid on the ship.

Brown’s men shot Dudingston, though not fatally, captured the crew and set the Gaspee on fire.

The British considered the Gaspee attack treason and an act of war. But silence surrounded the perpetrators, and a Royal Commission of Inquiry found it was done by persons unknown.

Rhode Islanders, though, were galvanized by British threats to try and to punish the raiders in England. They began to form committees of correspondence, which acted as shadow governments and catalysts for the American Revolution.

Rhode Island celebrates Gaspee Days every year with a parade and a symbolic burning of the ship. Gaspee Point, where the ship ran aground in Warwick, R.I., is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There is also a plaque in a parking lot on South Main Street in Providence, marking the tavern where the plot was hatched to attack the Gaspee.

2nd Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party Museum in Fort Point Channel

The Boston Tea Party Museum in Fort Point Channel

 

On March 7, 1774, three months after the Boston Tea Party, 60 men disguised as Indians boarded the Fortune in Boston Harbor. They forced the crew below deck and dumped 30 chests of tea into the water.

Of the 30 100-pound chests of tea destroyed, 16 were from tea merchants Davison Newman & Co. The company, still in business today, was outraged by the loss of their cargo. They petitioned King George III for compensation. In the document, they described how their tea was destroyed ‘by persons, all unknown to the Captain, armed with axes and with force threw the tea in to the Water whereby the same was wholly lost and destroyed.’

Today the Boston Tea Party Museum features two replica ships, reenactments, a documentary and one of two known tea chests from the original event.

York Tea Party

York Harbor, 19th-century painting

York Harbor, 19th-century painting

On September 15, 1774, the sloop Cynthia sailed from Newfoundland into harbor at York, Maine. Her cargo included 150 pounds of tea for its Loyalist owner, local judge Jonathan Sayward. The Sons of Liberty noted the Cynthia’s arrival and called a town meeting on September 23. The meeting voted to seize the tea over the objections of the ship’s captain, James Donnell, who also happened to be Sayward’s nephew. The tea was stored in another merchant’s warehouse.” That night, “a Number of Pickwacket Indians” (so it was said) broke into the storeroom and carried away the tea.

Two days later, the tea mysteriously reappeared in the warehouse. Some speculate the tea was stolen to establish York’s bona fides as patriotic sympathizers. It may have been returned so Judge Sayward could have his tea without paying taxes on it because it was stolen. Maine tea drinkers benefited from the low price of untaxed tea.

Visitors to York (during he summer and fall) will want to include a stop at the Museums of Old York, a collection of notable properties that includes the old jail, that dates to the 1600s, the Perkins House Museum and the site of the patriot John Hancock’s wharf.

New London Cannon Theft

Map of Fort Trumbull, drawn by a British soldier

Map of Fort Trumbull, drawn by a British soldier

Many Connecticut merchants traded regularly through the Port of Boston and sympathized with Massachusetts when the British closed the port. Many Connecticut towns created committees of correspondence and denounced British actions. Mansfield, Conn., passed its own declaration of independence in October 1774. Anti-Loyalist laws were passed, and some Loyalists like the Rev. Samuel Peters were forced to flee to the protection of British troops.

On Dec. 13, 1774 men from New London removed – the British would say ‘stole’ — cannon from the sole fort guarding Connecticut’s coast lest they fall into British hands. The cannon were ‘removed to the country.’

It was nearly a year after the first Boston Tea Party and one day before the New Hampshire militia raided Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth, taking 100 barrels of gunpowder.

The New London fortification from which the guns were taken was Connecticut’s only defense from the Royal Navy. Gov. Jonathan Trumbull described it as ‘a small battery at New London, consisting of nine guns, built and supported at the colony’s expense.” It was also in ruinous condition.

New London, then one of the world’s busiest whaling ports,  was vulnerable to British attack because of its proximity to Long Island Sound and the Thames River.

Trumbull recommended a new fort be built. Fort Trumbull was completed on a rocky point of land jutting into the river; the fort was captured in 1781 by turncoat Benedict Arnold and British forces. Today, Fort Trumbull is open to visitors as party of Fort Trumbull State Park.

Photos: Boston Tea Party Museum, By Tim Pierce – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28919099

 

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New England’s Historic Haunted Houses

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Haunted houses belong to New England lore as much as Revolutionary battles or clipper ship races.

New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape have populated the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. The region’s special brand of horror even has a name: Gothic New England.

Here are stories of six haunted houses, plus some extras suggested by our readers and added in 2017. We use the term ‘houses’ loosely, for they include hospitals, a library, a dormitory, a lighthouse and a fort. But all have drama or sorrow in their past. If you know of other historic haunted houses, please share them in the comments section.

Seaside Sanitarium

Seaside Sanitorium

Seaside Sanitorium

Is it ghosts that haunt the sinister and bizarre Seaside Sanitorium in Waterford, Conn. — or its past?

In 1936, doctors treated children with tuberculosis with rest, sunshine, fresh air and good food. Seaside was built as a ‘heliotropic’ treatment hospital for children. Gothic Revival architect Cass Gilbert, who also planned the U.S. Supreme Court building, designed the sanitarium. The building faces Long Island Sound, with large terraces and porches for sunbathing.

Drugs made heliotropic treatment obsolete, and Seaside then evolved into a geriatric hospital, a medical hospital and a hospital for the mentally disabled. People accused its staff of abusing the patients, and it had an unusually high death rate.

The hospital finally closed in 1996. Now dilapidated, creepy and boarded up, abandoned playground equipment litters its grounds. The ghosts of abused patients are said to haunt the place.

Lately, there’s been talk of rehabilitating the old building. The State of Connecticut may redevelop it into a lodge.

35 Shore Rd.,  Waterford, Conn.

Other Connecticut Haunted Houses

Two other former insane asylums in Connecticut have reputations as hospitals of horror: Norwich State Hospital in Preston and Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. Tales of cruelty and abuse in the creepy old buildings fostered rumors of hauntings.

haunted-houses-norwich

Norwich State Hospital

An early lighthouse keeper named Ernie supposedly haunts the New London Ledge Lighthouse in the mouth of the Thames River. On the night before the lighthouse was automated, a Coast Guard officer wrote in the log: “Rock of slow torture. Ernie’s domain. Hell on earth—may New London Ledge’s light shine on forever because I’m through. I will watch it from afar while drinking a brew.”

Fort Knox

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Fort Knox, Maine’s version of the Great Pyramid, was built in the mid-19th century to prevent the British from invading the region. They’d already done it during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

The State of Maine bought the hulking granite fortress on the Penobscot River from the U.S. government in 1923. Back then it cost $2,100.

The fort provides ideal conditions for haunting: it stands next to swirling waters, it’s made of vast quantities of granite and it’s in a cold climate. It also has lots of dark tunnels.

People say they hear footsteps or laughter inside the fort, or they feel someone’s touch. Ghost hunters heard soldiers talking about the Civil War. A retired state trooper saw a white object with no head, arms or legs that moved, then vanished.

The ghost in the duster coat who wanders the fort’s dark, wet tunnels is Leopold Hegyi, the caretaker at the fort from 1887 to 1900. Of Hungarian ancestry, he served as a cavalryman who helped train George Custer’s army before moving to Maine. He then patrolled the fort for 13 years by himself, except when a few soldiers arrived during the Spanish-American War.

The fort hosts an annual paranormal/psychic fair. “Fright at the Fort,” a haunted house fundraiser that helps fund the preservation of the historic site.

Click here for a ghost tracker documentary of Fort Knox.

740 Fort Knox Rd., Prospect, Maine

Other Maine Haunted Houses

A woman in a nightgown climbs the spiral staircase of the Captain Lord Mansion, a Kennebunkport bed and breakfast. Some say she was the wife of Captain Lord, who built the house in 1812, but died before living in it.

Indian chief Taukolexis died by hanging from a tree, and he supposedly haunts the nearby fort, William Henry, now a museum near New Harbor.

The ghost of 19th-century poet Sylvester Beckett rips the bed sheets off guests at Beckett’s Castle, his former summer home on Cape Elizabeth.

Boston Athenaeum

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The Boston Athenaeum today

As an aspiring writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne frequented the Boston Athenaeum, a private library across from the Statehouse. In April 1842 he visited the Reading Room and encountered Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, Harvard’s librarian. Harris sat in his usual chair, reading a newspaper. Hawthorne didn’t think anything about it until later that evening, when a friend told him Harris had died. Hawthorne said that was impossible, as he had just seen him in the Athenaeum.

Then the next day, Hawthorne returned to the Athenaeum only to see Harris in the same chair. The writer speculated he was reading his own obituary. Of the encounter he wrote,

I remember—once at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last, appealing look.

The minister’s ghost isn’t the only creepy thing about the Boston Athenaeum. The library holds a copy of a criminal’s memoirs bound in his own skin.

James Allen robbed and shot a man on the Salem Turnpike. In 1835, Allen received the death sentence for attempted murder and was held in Charlestown State Prison.

Allen then told his life story to the prison warden. Before his execution, he asked that his skin be used to bind two copies of his memoirs. One copy ended up at the Athenaeum after Allen’s family passed it down. It had been used to spank children who misbehaved.

10½ Beacon St., Boston, Mass.

Other Massachusetts Haunted Houses

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The Lizzie Borden House

The ghosts of the Borden family roam the halls at the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, now a bed and breakfast. Lizzie Borden famously …’took an axe/And gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done,She gave her father forty-one.”

Jerusha Howe, an early innkeeper at the Wayside Inn before it was the Wayside Inn, rejected many suitors attracted by her beauty. She couldn’t resist an English gentleman who promised to return for her. He never came back, and Jerusha’s ghost waits for her lover in her bedroom, Room 9.

Novelist Edith Wharton built an estate called the Mount in Lenox around the turn of the century. She avidly collected ghost stories, and now visitors say they see ghosts in period dress — even Wharton herself reading — wandering what is now a house museum.

Ipswich has quite a few haunted houses, including the Treadwell-Hale house in North Main Street. It had a ghost that whispered from the top of the stairs to the rear bedroom.

Huntress Hall, Keene State College

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Huntress Hall at Keene State College was named after Harriet Huntress, a New Hampshire Department of Education administrator. Her abandoned wheelchair is still stored in the attic of the building, built in 1926. The creaking chair can be heard wheeling around the attic at night, according to students who live there.

Huntress does not like to be mocked and wreaks revenge on anyone who dresses up like her at Halloween. Students who have done so – usually with a gray wig and a wheelchair — failed tests, broke their legs or been involved in bad car accidents.

The genesis of the Huntress haunting is said to be World War II. Keene State was then a teaching school and Huntress Hall was an all-female dormitory. During the war, the U.S. Navy began training pilots at Keene and housed the trainees in Huntress Hall. Huntress was said to hate men and promiscuous women, and it was then that she began to haunt the hall. Some say she is most active when students are having sex inside its walls.

Appian Way, Keene, N.H.

Other New Hampshire Haunted Houses

In the late 19th century, orphans lived in The Chase House on Middle Road in Portsmouth. According to legend, a young girl hanged herself in her room and now haunts the hallway.

Ocean Born Mary, as her name suggests, was born at sea.  Pirates boarded the vessel that sailed from Ulster to New England, and the pirate captain heard the cries of a newborn baby — Ocean Born Mary Wallace, of course. He gave her mother a bolt of light green silk, which was later made into Mary’s wedding dress. Mary’s husband died and she moved to Henniker, where her ghost supposedly protects her house from harm.

Belcourt Castle

Belcourt Castle

Belcourt Castle

The Newport mansion Belcourt Castle features a screaming suit of armor, a haunted gold coronation carriage, chairs that toss people off their seats and apparitions dancing in the ballroom.

Belcourt Castle was built by Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the wastrel son of financier August Belmont and grandson of Commodore Matthew Perry. (His brother August financed the Cape Cod Canal.)  Richard Morris Hunt designed the mansion according to Perry’s wish to devote the first floor to carriages and stables for his beloved horses. He modeled the 60-room house on Louis XIII’s hunting lodge at Versailles.

Belmont married Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of his best friend William K. Vanderbilt, in 1896, and she began redesigning the mansion. After the Belmonts died, Harold and Ruth Tinney bought Belcourt in 1956 and filled it with their own collection of art and antiques. The Tinneys opened the house to the public for ghost tours and as a museum.

When the Tinneys owned Belcourt, suits of armor stood in a row at one end of the ballroom. People say they’ve heard screams from one suit of armor as the owner relives his death. A spear tip pierced his eye through a slit in the helmet.

A carved wooden statue of a monk brings a ghost of a brown-robed monk along with him. The ghost always appeared in the same room as the statue.

In 2012, the Tinneys sold Belcourt. Read more about it here.

657 Belleview Ave., Newport, R.I.

Other Rhode Island Haunted Houses

During the American Revolution, University Hall at Brown was converted into an army hospital where many soldiers died. A contorted soldier’s face appears in a second-floor window.

The body of Providence Mayor Thomas Doyle lay in state at City Hall after his death in 1886. His ghost is now said to haunt the building, smoking a cigar, moving chairs and whispering.

Edward Hamlin Everett Mansion

Hamlin Mansion

Hamlin Mansion

Edward Hamlin Everett got rich as the Glass Bottle King and inventor of the fluted bottle cap. He grew up in Bennington, Vt., and in 1886 married Amy King. Her father owned a Newark glassworks that Hamlin bought before their wedding.

Amy King died suddenly. Some said she committed suicide, others said she was murdered, still others say she drowned while swimming. Her obituary said she died after a severe operation following an unnamed illness.

Everett remarried, but his three grown daughters disapproved of the new wife. When he died, he left most of his wealth to his second wife, leaving only a tenth of it to his daughters. The daughters challenged the will in court, claiming their father wasn’t in his right mind. During the trial, known as The Second Battle of Bennington, the eldest daughter was staying at the house when she said she heard weeping coming from her father’s study.

She went to the room and found her mother lying on the floor, clearly a murder victim. Security guards say doorknobs turn in empty rooms and doors close by themselves. Students say they see a woman in white, roaming the house and grounds. Perhaps it’s the ghost of Amy King Everett.

In 1957, writer Shirley Jackson decided she wanted to write a novel about a haunted house. She began collecting postcards and newspaper clippings of ornate old houses. She likely chose the Edward Hamlin Everett home as the setting for her novel, The Haunting of Hill House. He book, a National Book Award finalist, inspired two feature films and a play.

The court, by the way, sided with the Everett daughters and gave them a third of the estate.

982 Mansion Dr., Bennington, Vt. 

Other Vermont Haunted Houses

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Hartness House Inn.

James Hartness, a factory owner and Vermont governor, built the Shingle-style Hartness House in Springfield in 1904. He built a labyrinth of tunnels under the house that included a library, workshop, study and bathroom. Today the house is run as a small hotel and his ghost is said to be down there still.

Ira Allen, a railroad magnate and relative of Ethan Allen, built the Marble Mansion in 1867 in Fair Haven, Vt. Today it’s an inn, and the ghost of a former owner, dressed in a gray suit, awakens guests by standing over their beds. A young woman supposedly haunts the basement and several ghostly children run around the halls.

End Notes


Photos: Norwich State Hospital, By CLK Hatcher – Norwich Hospital District – Admin BuildingUploaded by LongLiveRock, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15506667; Boston Athenaeum, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802; Belcourt photo by Charles V. Hamm; Hartness House Inn By Tyler Goodrich – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28509336. Seaside Sanitorium by By Victor Solanoy from Silicon Valley, USA – Seaside Sanitorium – Waterford, CTUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29847509.

This story about haunted houses was updated in 2022.

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When Farmers New Year Began on March 25

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A real old farmer’s almanac would have started on March 25, sometimes called Farmers New Year. It was the day they began their diaries.

Many New England farmers kept to the old practice of starting the new year on March 25. It may have begun in North America with John Winthrop, who wrote in his diary: March 25: The year 1620 beginneth. (He arrived a little later.)

John Winthrop. American Antiquarian Society

So important and ubiquitous was the farmer’s day book that the New England Farmer magazine in 1827 gave advice on how to keep accounts in it.

Some had blank pages inserted between the calendar pages. The owner used the blank pages to record his daily expenses, debts, travel, the weather, crops planted and their outcomes.

Thomas C. Hubka, in Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England, explained why 19th-century farmers especially viewed diaries as important. The 1800s were an era of improvement, he wrote. Diaries “partook of the same sustaining spirit of optimism, perfectibility, and progress. Most important, it was an attitude popularly shared and reinforced by most farmers.”

Day By Day

Much can be learned about 19th-century farm life from the diaries that survive. Hubka based much of his book about New England farm architecture on diaries kept by three generations in Kennebunk, Maine. Tobias Walker began his journal on August 1, 1828, when he was 34. He kept it up for more than 37 years until he died on Oct. 10, 1865. His son Edwin continued it, and then Edwin’s son Daniel took it up. The Walker family recorded every single day for 23,691 days.

Daniel Walker made the final entry on Tuesday, June 27, 1893:

Went to the village with butter. Got 10 bushels of corn of Edm. Warren at 5-8cts/bushel. Got a rake and a scyth and —– for haying.

Why Daniel Walker stopped writing is unclear. Hubka speculates he had lost his optimism about the future of farming – like many farmers of that era.

Noah Blake was born on Farmers New Year in Connecticut in 1790. His parents gave him a diary on his 15th birthday. With a crow quill and butternut ink, he wrote about helping his father build a bridge. He also wrote about the weather, a visit from a neighbor (“we drank mead and mint tea” and, maple sugaring.  An entry on March 27, two days into the New Year, read,

27: Father was wrong about the weather, for it snowd again today. We kept within the house, sharping and making ready tools for the year’s farming.

In the next century, writer and illustrator Eric Sloan discovered Noah’s diary in a library book sale. Sloan then illustrated and published it as Diary of an Early American Boy, and it became one of his best-selling books.

Farmers New Year

Another typical farmer, Benjamin Harwood began his diary in Bennington, Vt., on the same day in 1805 as Noah Blake. Harwood started with a typical farm entry:  “Prun’d my Orchard–” Harwood’s son’s diaries were also published as a book.

Farmers weren’t the only ones who kept diaries in early New England. In A Midwife’s Tale, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes daybooks were also kept by craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains and perhaps a very few housewives. Maine midwife Martha Ballard started one when she was 50 years old. She made 10,000 entries in the diary she kept for 27 years.

An entry in Martha Ballard's day book

An entry in Martha Ballard’s day book

(You can search Marta Ballard’s diary entries here.)

On March 25, 1788, for example, she wrote:

Clear & Cold. mr Woodward & his wife here. They Broke their Sleigh Coming Down the hill. I went to to [sic] mr Williamss to See Patty. Shee has a swelling on her throat.

Diarists

Joshua Hempstead of New London, Conn., was perhaps the granddaddy of New England farm diarists. He began his day book on Sept. 8, 1711, and kept it for 47 years.

Joshua Hempstead’s house

On March 25, 1745, Hempstead stayed home, pruned his orchard and paid down a debt.

Mond 25 fair. I was about home all day. I pruned Some appletrees near ye house [and] I pd Mr Gilberts 8. in pat of ye 25. due more 17.

Samuel Lane of Stratham, N.H., — farmer, tanner, shoemaker — enumerated his blessings in his diary when he was 75. On Nov. 21, 1793, a public day of Thanksgiving, he wrote:

  • The Life & health of myself and family, and also of so many of my Children, grand Children and great grandchildren; also of my other Relations and friends & Neighbors, for Health peace and plenty amongst us.
  • for my Bible and Many other good and Useful Books, Civil & Religious Privileges, for the ordinances of the gospel; and for my Minister.
  • for my Land, House and Barn and other Buildings, & that they are preserv’d from fire & other accidents.
  • for my wearing Clothes to keep me warm, my Bed & Bedding to rest upon.
  • for my Cattle, Sheep & Swine & other Creatures, for my support.
  • for my Corn, Wheat, Rye Grass and Hay; Wool, flax, Cider, apples, Pumpkins, Potatoes, Cabbages, turnips, Carrots, Beets peaches and other fruits.
  • For my Clock and Watch to measure my passing time by Day and by Night,Wood, Water, Butter, Cheese, Milk, Pork, Beef, & fish, &c
  • for Tea, Sugar, Rum, Wine, Gin, Molasses, pepper, Spice & Money for to bye other Necessaries and to pay my Debts & Taxes &c.
  • for my Leather, Lamp oil & Candles, Husbandry Utensils, & other tools of every sort &c &c &c. 

Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me Bless his holy Name.

This story updated in 2023. 

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The New England Roots of the Chinese Revolution

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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.

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

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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Eat Like a President – The Founding Fathers’ Guide to New England Taverns

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The first five U.S. presidents, the founding fathers, were all veteran travelers in New England. And in their travels, they left behind tracks of where they stayed that tourists still follow today if they want to eat like a president.

eat like a president

Green Dragon Tavern, Courtesy of the Boston Public LIbrary

Many of the public houses these men stopped at have been obliterated by time. Many more were converted into private houses. But some gems remain where you can still sit down to dinner and eat like a president.

One of them, the Green Dragon in Boston’s North End, claims to be the headquarters of the American Revolution. But it has only an uncertain connection to the original Green Dragon, watering hole of Paul Revere and John Hancock. John Adams liked to stop at the original Green Dragon for a tankard or two.

Washington Ate Here

George Washington left tracks all across New England. First coming to the region in 1756 to visit Governor Shirley of Massachusetts, he made his next trip to assume command of the Continental Army.

His later trips, as president, were political. He needed to thank the wealthy patrons and soldiers who supported the American Revolution. Washington also wanted to get a sense for the mood of the country. For this northern tour, he decided not to stay in the homes of private citizens. Choosing one invitation over another would surely lead to hurt feelings.

Instead, he stayed at public accommodations, following his usual pattern of rising early and starting his travels. Then he’d stop for breakfast and travel to a town where he would receive a hero’s welcome. As a result, he often dined with the public.

In Fairfield, Conn., in October 1789, George Washington stayed at the Sun Tavern. Though you can’t eat like a president there. But you can visit as it’s now part of the Fairfield Museum and History Center.

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You used to be able to eat like a president at the Old Sun tavern.

Eat Like a President in New Haven

In New Haven, the Union League was built in 1860 on the site of the home of Roger Sherman, a member of the Continental Congress. The club provided a base of support for Abraham Lincoln. Now a restaurant, the Union League Café, the owners noted that Washington visited Roger Sherman in his home there. So while Washington didn’t exactly eat there, he sort of ate there.

Beer’s Tavern in New Haven played host to Washington in June of 1775 when he traveled north to take command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Mass. John Adams also reported staying there while travelling to the first Continental Congress in 1774. Adams returned again and again on his trips back and forth to Philadelphia. Over the years, Beer’s went through many iterations, but you can still eat like a president there today. The restaurant now operates under the name ‘Ordinary’. It has a wonderful description of its history here.

On his way north to Cambridge, Washington also stopped at the Silas Deane house in Wethersfield, now part of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum. He later returned to the nearby Joseph Webb House, also part of the museum, in May of 1781. The house then served as his headquarters. It was here he met with French commander the Comte de Rochambeau, who traveled from Newport, R.I., to discuss plans for the siege of Yorktown.

Then on his never-ending quest for supplies for his army, Washington also visited Thomas Leffingwell at the Leffingwell Inn in Norwich, Conn. The inn is open as a museum today.

Presidential Spirit?

In Middletown, Conn., Bigelow’s Tavern was the popular place to dine. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison stayed there on their return trip from Vermont in 1791, and John Adams stayed in 1774 when passing through Connecticut.

Started by Timothy Bigelow, his widow operated the tavern after his death in 1776. She managed it successfully for decades, despite being accused of sympathizing with the Tories during the American Revolution. Unfortunately, it is long since gone, but the building in its place, which also houses the Middletown Police Department, is home to the First & Last Tavern. Perhaps  the presidential spirit remains there.

In Greenwich, Conn., Knapp’s Tavern is also known as Putnam Cottage, after its famous guest, Gen. Israel Putnam. But as Knapp’s, innkeeper Isaac Knapp kept it as a tavern and hosted both George Washington and John Adams. No longer a tavern, the building can be visited, however, as it is now a museum.

In Guilford, Conn., Thomas Jefferson and James Madison stayed at the Stone Tavern, with Jefferson rating it above average. That tavern isn’t around anymore, but there is a well-known Medad Stone Tavern in Guilford. Unfortunately, it never opened for business.

Mr. Stone, anticipating a change in the route of the Post Road in 1802, built a new tavern along what he thought was the new route. The road, however, went elsewhere leaving him with a tavern with no customers. Today it’s a museum.

The White Horse?

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White Horse Tavern. Eat like a president there, perhaps?

Madison and Jefferson also liked to stay at Bull’s Tavern in Hartford. John Adams visited this tavern, too, and enjoyed his stays. Frederick Bull ran the tavern, now gone, but his brother, Captain William Bull, ran a tavern in Litchfield. The Captain William Bull Tavern moved from its original site and incorporated into the Tollgate Hill Inn and Restaurant.

During George Washington’s celebratory trip to New England in 1789, he left Rhode Island off the itinerary because the state hadn’t taken any action to ratify the U.S. Constitution. When Rhode Island did ratify, Washington made things right in 1790 and traveled to the state for celebrations in Newport and Providence.

In Providence he stayed at the Abner Daggett’s Golden Ball Inn, since demolished. In Newport the only tavern in business today where he might have visited is the White Horse Tavern. French commander Rochambeau frequently patronized the establishment. Though there is no record of it, Rochambeau might have dined with Washington there when Washington came to spend a week in Newport in 1781.

Eat Like a President in Massachusetts

Two locations where Washington definitely dined are Massachusetts museums now. The first, of course, if the Longfellow House in Cambridge, which is where he spent the most time in Massachusetts while commanding the Continental Army. He also dined at the Munroe Tavern in Lexington, a hot spot for anti-British meetings before the war. Washington visited the tavern on his 1789 celebration tour, and today it’s open as a museum.

Several other stops along Washington’s tour in Massachusetts remain open to the public. Ye Olde Tavern in West Brookfield (which also hosted John Adams in addition to Washington) remains a restaurant today.

Washington dined at Faneuil Hall in Boston, though it’s hard to envision the president sitting down at today’s food court. He went on to visit the Jeremiah Lee Mansion in Marblehead, a museum today. And in Newburyport, Washington stayed at the Tracy Mansion, now the public library.

Washington also dined and danced at the Salem, Mass., Cotting-Smith Assembly House, a Federalist club. It’s now used for functions by the Peabody Essex Museum, where guests can perhaps eat like a president.

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Faneuil Hall.

James Monroe

James Monroe also made a stop in Salem on his 1817 tour of New England. The fifth U.S. president probably traveled more extensively throughout New England than any of the founding fathers apart from John Adams. He had to take a long road show to try and soothe New Englanders’ hostility over the War of 1812.

His trip took him through all the states, including extensive travels in Maine and Vermont. As with the other presidents, most of the places he stopped at (Clapp’s Inn in Walpole, Mass., Wyatt’s Inn in Dover, N.H., Gilman’s Hotel in Newburyport) no longer serve the public. Salem, Mass. hosted a reception for him at the Old Town Hall, new at the time.

Thomas Jefferson

While Monroe made it to Vermont, Thomas Jefferson has the distinction of visiting the northernmost part of the Green Mountain state. He crossed Lake Champlain from New York and landed at Crown Point and Chimney Point, now an historic site owned by the state. On his travels south through Vermont, Jefferson visited Bennington, and he was so intrigued by Vermont’s maple syrup that he sent 20 maple trees to his Monticello home, in hopes that America could free itself from dependence on sugar from the West Indies.

John Adams, meanwhile, did the most travelling around New England. His diaries tell of many taverns where he stopped — mostly, sadly, now gone. He stayed at Newcomb Tavern on a trip to Barnstable on Cape Cod, now a private house. Ironically, Loyalists tended to patronize the Newcomb Tavern in the run up to the American Revolution.

Adams also visited Allen’s in Biddeford and Webb’s in Falmouth (Portland), an inn that doubled as the town jail. He stopped at Tilton’s in Portsmouth, N.H. Washington also made it to Portsmouth in 1789, dining at the Langdon House, now a Historic New England museum. Washington also visited the Pitt Tavern, now part of Stawbery Banke, and made a stop at the Folsom Tavern, now open in Exeter, N.H., as a museum.

This story about how to eat like a president was updated in 2022. If you’d like to find out how to eat like more modern presidents, click here. 

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1816: The Year Without a Summer

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The year 1816 was known as ‘The Year Without a Summer’ in New England because six inches of snow fell in June and every month of the year had a hard frost. the year without a summer

Temperatures dropped to as low as 40 degrees in July and August as far south as Connecticut. People also called it ‘Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death’ and the ‘Poverty Year.’

The Year Without A Summer had a far-reaching impact. Crop failures caused hoarding and big price increases for agricultural commodities. People went hungry. Farmers gave up trying to make a living in New England and started heading west. Politicians who ignored the melancholy plight of their constituents found themselves out of office.

And to this day, scientists don’t agree on what caused the bizarre weather in The Year Without a Summer.

Year Without a Summer

There were warm days in the spring of 1816, but they were followed by cold snaps. In Salem, Mass., for example, it was 74 degrees on April 24. Within 30 hours the temperature dropped to 21 degrees.

Thomas Robbins, the East Windsor, Conn., bibliophile, noticed the late spring. He wrote in his diary, ‘the vegetation does not seem to advance at all.’

On May 12, strong winds and freezing temperatures from Canada killed the buds on fruit trees. Inch-thick ice formed on ponds and streams from Maine to Upstate New York. By the end of May, corn plants froze in central Maine.

Then on June 6, 1816, six inches of snow fell on New England. Clockmaker Chauncey Jerome wrote in his autobiography that he walked to work that day in Plymouth, Conn., wearing heavy woolen clothes, an overcoat and mittens.

Chauncey Jerome

Chauncey Jerome wore mittens in June during the Year Without a Summer.

Flurries fell in Boston the next day, the latest ever recorded. The snow was 18 inches deep in Cabot, Vt., on June 8.  On June 11, a temperature of 30.5 degrees was recorded in Williamstown, Mass. Frozen birds dropped dead in the fields. Some Vermont farmers who had already shorn their sheep tried to tie their fleeces back on, but many froze to death anyway.

Benjamin Harwood, a Bennington, Vt., farmer, wrote in his diary that it rained all night then began to snow from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The heads of all the mountains on every side were crowned with snow. The most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen.

And then it got warm again.

More Cold

Temperatures seesawed up and down throughout the Year Without a Summer, bringing hope on warm days that the crops could be harvested after all. Then sharp cold spells brought despair.

On June 22, for example, temperatures reached 101 degrees in Salem, Mass. But July 4 was cool. Chauncey Jerome wrote it was hard to feel patriotic while watching men play quoits in overcoats.  Then a northwest wind brought a three-day cold spell, with 30-degree temperatures in northern New England, 40 degrees in Hartford and New Haven.

Gov. William Plumer

Gov. William Plumer blamed God for the Year Without a Summer.

The frost destroyed the bean crop in Franconia, N.H., and bean, cucumber and squash crops in Kennebunkport, Maine.  Young plants grew so slowly they were vulnerable to frost, and farmers harvested so little hay they had to slaughter their livestock or feed them oats and corn.

As depressing as the second severe cold spell was the drought that enveloped most of the United States, including New England. “I never saw our street so dry,” complained a minister in East Windsor, Conn.

Gov. William Jones of Rhode Island issued a proclamation designating a day of public ‘Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving,’ noting the ‘coldness and dryness of the seasons’ and the ‘alarming sickness.’ New Hampshire Gov. William Plumer believed the weather was God’s judgment in the earth and urged people to humble themselves for their transgressions.

Fear of famine began to grow during the Year Without a Summer.

Hard Frost in August

Early August was sunny and warm. Farmers planted new crops hoping the growing season might last beyond the first frost in October. On Aug. 13th and 14th, a cold spell froze the corn crop north of Concord, N.H.

On Aug. 20, a short, violent storm struck Amherst, N.H., signaling a steep drop in temperature: 30 degrees within a few hours. It snowed in Vermont. In Maine, farmers wrapped rags around their plants to protect them.

At least the wheat, rye and potatoes were holding up, staving off famine. In Ashland, N.H., Reuben Whitten was able to grow wheat on his south-facing farm. He shared it with his neighbors. After he died in 1847, his neighbors paid for his gravestone and later erected a monument that read:

A pioneer of this town. Cold season of 1816 raised 40 bushils of wheat on this land whitch kept his family and neighbours from starveation.

Hopes of salvaging what remained of the corn crop were dashed by a severe frost on Aug. 28.  Maine and New Hampshire farmers cut up whole fields of corn for fodder.

Rev. William Fogg of Kittery, Maine, summed up the Year Without a Summer: ‘Crops cut short and a heavy load of taxes.’

There were reports of people eating raccoons, mackerel and pigeons.

It warmed up again in September, as usual, but then at sunrise on Sept. 26 in Hanover, N.H., it was 26 degrees. Snow fell throughout the region, and a killing frost froze crops in the field and apples on the branch.

Nettles and Hedgehogs

The drought caused wildfires to break out in the woods throughout New England. Fires in western New York produced so much smoke that sailors were blinded on Lake Champlain.

The Year Without a Summer was especially hard on the poor. The New Hampshire Patriot reported on Oct. 22, 1816, that ‘Indian corn, on which a large proportion of the poor depend is cut off. ‘ Vermont farmers lost much of their livestock, and Vermonters foraged for food such as nettles, wild turnips and hedgehogs.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster lost his bid for reelection during the Year Without a Summer.

Three-quarters of the corn crop was lost during the Year Without a Summer. Prices soared for wheat, grains, meat, vegetables, butter, milk and flour. In Maine, the price of oats tripled and potatoes doubled. Hay was 180 a ton in parts of New Hampshire, six times its usual cost.

The Year Without a Summer brought widespread famines in Europe as well. The bad weather forced a group of poets to remain in their rooms in Switzerland. To avoid boredom and entertain the group, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Making maple syrup

At least the Year Without a Summer had been good for producing maple syrup. Vermonters traded syrup for fish, which is why they called 1816 the Mackerel Year.

Members of Congress seemed insensitive to the suffering of the people and voted to double their own salary. It didn’t go over well. Nearly 70 percent of incumbent U.S. representatives were voted out of office – including Daniel Webster.

After the Year Without a Summer,  Josiah Meigs, commissioner general of the Land Offices, in 1817 began a more systematic approach to observing weather phenomenon. He ordered the 20 Land Offices to take thrice-daily recordings of the temperature, winds and precipitation.

The Frigid Zone

Author Samuel Goodrich visited New Hampshire, observing:

At last a kind of despair seized upon the people. In the pressure of adversity, many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become part of the frigid zone.

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Samuel Goodrich

The next year started out cold as well, convincing Northeast farmers to migrate to the Midwest.

Rev. Samuel Robbins in East Windsor, Conn., wrote, ‘We have had a great deal of moving this spring. Our number rather diminished.’

At the time, many reasons were given for the weird phenomena: sunspots, deforestation, great fields of ice floating in the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod experiments and, of course, the wrath of God.

Many people believe the Year Without a Summer was caused by a massive volcanic explosion on Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, killing 15,000 instantly. Soon after, another 65,000 perished of disease and starvation. The volcanic ash and debris thrown up into the stratosphere is thought to have blocked the sun and caused a gradual lowering of temperatures.

Lee Foster, NOAA meteorologist, notes that climate data shows 1816 was part of a mini ice age lasting from 1400 to around 1860. The era had unusually harsh winters, short growing seasons and dry weather.


With thanks to The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. This story was updated in 2022.

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