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Beverly Mass.

6 Places That Became a Summer White House

The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.

Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.

Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.

The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.

A Thimble island

According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.

The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.

Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.

Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.

The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.

Bar Harbor, Maine

President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.

President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.

Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.

Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.

Hancock House

A Summer White House in Maine

Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.

He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.

“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”

However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.

Taft at his summer White House

And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.

Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.

Hyannis Port, Mass.

The Kennedy Big House

The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.

The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.

In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.

John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.

To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.

Cornish, N.H.

Harlakenden House

Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.

Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.

The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.

Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Newport, R.I.

Eisenhower House

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.

He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Plymouth Notch

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Brigadoon as a Summer White House

The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”

Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916

Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.^”

Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.

This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2023.

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The Cold Friday of 1810

The legendary Cold Friday of 1810 brought such terrible winds and frigid temperature that people talked and wrote about it for generations.

Tales of the killer weather event made their way into town histories, journals and court records long after it happened on January 19. They told of the many people who froze to death while traveling along the highways. The wind blew down houses, barns and vast numbers of timber trees. Ships wrecked, cattle froze in their barns and old people died of hypothermia inside their homes. It was so cold pens wouldn’t write though they were right next to the fireplace.

Winter in the country: a cold morning. by Currier and Ives, courtesy Library of Congress.

What made the Cold Friday so lethal was the sudden, steep drop in temperature that caught people unaware.

Sudden Plunge

Several jourrnals claimed the mercury dropped 100 degrees in Boston in less than 24 hours, from 67 to 33 below zero, Michael R. Doyle reported in 2005. Though the ice in the harbor did freeze to Spectacle Island, that may have been an exaggeration.

The more scientific minds at the American Register reported the mercury dropped from 48 degrees on Thursday to nine below zero on the cold Friday. In Portsmouth, N.H., it went from 54 on Thursday to minus 12 on Friday — and minus 13 on Saturday.

Joseph Dow, in his History of Hampton, N.H., described how the plunge in temperature surprised some local farmers:

“…[I]n Hampton, the morning was so mild, several farmers set out for Newburyport, with ox-loads of potatoes, beguiling with neighborly chat the tedium of the slow progress.

“On the return, the cold became so intense and the wind so violent, all suffered extremely, and one man who had rashly left his overcoat at home was only saved from perishing, by wrapping himself in the blankets that had covered the potatoes.”

Cold Friday Redux

So memorable was the Cold Friday that a mention of it 20 years later meant the listener understood it to mean January 19. Asked to recount a date in a New Hampshire court case, the witness simply said it happened on the “Cold Friday, 1810.”

Henry David Thoreau, one o the two loves of Louisa May Alcott

Henry David Thoreau thought of the Cold Friday during the winter of 1857, the coldest ever in New England. On Jan. 11, 1857, he wrote in his journal:

“Mother remembers the Cold Friday–very well–She lived in the house where I was born–The people in the kitchen Jack Garrison–Ester–& a Hardy girl drew up close to the fire–but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.”

Few people ventured outside. The New England Farmer reported, “very little going from place to place. Farmers piled on the wood and attended to their cattle, and that was about all for the day.” Anyone who had to go outside for an errand that could not be deferred, ‘sped over the ground like squirrels and were fortunate if they returned with no flesh from the intensity of the frost.’

One intrepid little girl named Rebecca Ramsdell braved the cold to walk a mile to school in Henniker, N.H. Her teacher, who awarded medals to his most punctual students, gave her the prize. She kept it during the term. In fact, she kept it her whole life. The Henniker Historical Society has a picture of her at age 100 with the medal. (See it here.)

Casualties

In Woburn, Mass., Joseph Brooks, a 50-year-old Revolutionary War veteran, and his cousin Benjamin, 45, had no such luck. They went into the forest to cut wood during the mild afternoon of January 18. They were found frozen to death on January 20.

The Rev. William Bentley

People even died without going outside. Salem diarist William Bentley reported in his diary.

“Several Old Persons perished within doors…Susanna Beadle, aet. 82, attempting to arise from bed was so chilled as to expire immediately.” Bentley wrote. “A woman, also a Widow, chilled, fell into the fire, on the western part of the Town, & escaped with life enough to put out the fire in her clothes but did not call assistance & perished with the cold & found dead in the morning.

“The young man from the Ship going to Beverly Shore not half a mile could not be recovered. A Soldier coming from Salem Fort only to the Farm houses on the Neck, not half a mile, was much frozen……the use of the pen was impracticable unless near to the fire, & even before the fire the water froze on the tables.”

The fierce winds blew ashore several other vessels in the harbor. Capt. James Sears and the crew of the sloop Margaret, carrying a load of plaster from Thomaston, lost their lives at sea.

In Antrim, N.H., the wind blew the roof off the home of Samuel Marshall and his family, and in Farmington, Maine, the home of James Johnson burned.

Saddest Story

The saddest tale of suffering was repeated many times. It happened in Sanbornton, N.H. According to the New Hampshire Historical Society, the wind blew down part of the home of Jeremiah Ellsworth, jeopardizing the lives of his wife and three children.

Mrs. Ellsworth dressed the youngest child and went into the cellar, leaving the other two in bed. Jeremiah Ellsworth went to the home of David Brown, a quarter mile away, seeking help. His feet had frozen, though, and the two men agreed he shouldn’t risk the danger of going back home.

Brown hitched his horse to a sleigh to rescue Mrs. Ellsworth and the children. He found her and the baby in the cellar, the other two naked in bed as the wind blew their clothes off. He covered them with a blanket and put them in the sleigh, but the wind turned the sleigh over and scattered everything.

Mrs. Ellsworth decided to walk to Brown’s house but sank into the snow, benumbed by cold. She crawled to Brown’s house, where she had changed so much her husband didn’t recognize her.

Brown put the children back in the sleigh but the wind blew it over again and tore it to pieces. He could only carry two of the children, so he left the baby, who was dressed, behind on the road. When he reached his home the children were still alive, but died a few minutes later. Brown was too exhausted and frostbitten to find the baby, but later that day a search party found him dead by the side of the road.

The parents lived, but had no more children after that Cold Friday.

This story was updated in 2023.

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We Wuz Robbed, or How Jack Sharkey Boxed His Way to a Catchphrase

Jack Sharkey not only won the world heavyweight championship but was responsible for the classic sports expression: We wuz robbed.

Sharkey, nicknamed The Boston Gob, was the only man to fight Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. After he retired, he became an outstanding fly fisherman who teamed up with Ted Williams to promote the sport.

Along the way, it was a a controversial fight that inspired the phrase, We wuz robbed.

Becoming Jack Sharkey

He was born Joseph Paul Zukauskas on Oct. 26, 1902, in Binghamton, N.Y., the son of Lithuanian immigrants. As a young boy his family moved to Boston.

He ran away from home as a teenager. In his own words,

I slept in YMCAs, worked the bars and shoveled coal, worked for the Diamond Match Company, and I come back to New York, scared to go home, and the money ran out and I had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and I joined the navy, five cents in my pocket.

He took up boxing in the navy, where he won 38 fights. His ship’s home port was Boston, and he fought for pay on liberty in the city. He was told he couldn’t fight under the name Joseph Zukauskas, so he chose the names of his boxing idols: Jack Dempsey and Tom Sharkey.

By the time Sharkey was honorably discharged, he was earning write-ups in the Boston newspapers and earning good money for boxing.

Sharkey was a powerful boxer who could take punishment, but didn’t always focus and fought erratically. “I was a hothead,” he later said. “You could never tell what I would do.”

In 1927 he faced Jack Dempsey in a fight to determine who would take on heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. Sharkey turned his head to complain to the referee that Dempsey hit him with a low blow and Dempsey knocked him out.

Original caption: Jack Sharkey examines his mitts after he used them to defeat Jack Stribbling in their 10-round bout in Miami. March 3, 1929. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie jones Collection.

Two years later he won the heavyweight championship of the world, and he bought a $100,000 house in Chestnut Hill.

We Wuz Robbed

In 1930 he lost a fight for the vacant heavyweight championship to Max Schmeling on a foul. The referee ruled he hit Schmeling below the belt.

Sharkey described Schmeling as ‘a methodical, cruel, terrific puncher.’ Two years later, they faced each other again, and Sharkey was declared the winner though Schmeling seemed to have outboxed him.

After the match, Schmeling’s manager, Joe Jacobs, uttered those classic words, “We wuz robbed.”

Sharkey later said the fight was fixed.

Jack Sharkey, wife and son at home, Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

If Jack Sharkey inspired “We wuz robbed,’ while working, he came up with a second oft-quoted comment in retirement.

He finished his career in 1936 after Joe Louis knocked him out in Yankee Stadium. Sharkey’s career record was 38-14-3, with 13 knockouts.

He saved his money and opened a saloon named Jack Sharkey’s in Boston, but closed it in 1943. (There was another Sharkey’s in New York City, a private boxing club famously painted by George Bellows.)

He earned a living as a boxing and wrestling referee. He and his family moved to Epping, N.H., in 1954, where he pursued his love of fly fishing.

Jack Sharkey with Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

He and Ted Williams teamed up to promote the sport at sporting shows. He was asked at one show whether he preferred fishing to boxing.

“It doesn’t pay as much,” he replied, “but then the fish don’t hit back.”

Jack Sharkey died on Aug. 17, 1994, at the age of 91 in Beverly, Mass.

To see a video of Jack Sharkey fighting Jack Dempsey, click here.

This story about the phrase, We wuz robbed, was updated in 2022.

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The Stolen Books That Launched America’s 1st Math Genius, Nathaniel Bowditch

In 1791, two Salem ministers let an 18-year-old apprentice named Nathaniel Bowditch use their private library. Maritime navigation would never be the same.

Nathaniel Bowditch, by Gilbert Stuart

It just happened to be one of the best scientific libraries in America, and Bowditch happened to have one of the best mathematical minds in the world.

The library had been captured during the American Revolution by a privateer from Beverly, Mass., right next to Salem. The ship’s owners agreed to sell the books to a group of prominent men on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

The serendipitous linking of Nathaniel Bowditch with the Salem Philosophical Society’s library proved fortunate for American science and for sailors around the world. Had it not been for that library, Bowditch might never have founded modern marine navigation, trained a generation of American astronomers, become the first insurance actuary in America or directed investment into New England’s nascent manufacturing industries.

Nathaniel Bowditch

Nathaniel Bowditch was born March 26, 1773, the fourth of seven children in a family that had lived in Salem since 1639. His father, Habakkuk, a fourth-generation shipmaster, had also learned the cooper trade. He suffered business reversals at the beginning of the Revolution and, despondent, went back to making barrels. He had so little money he received $15 or $20 a year in charity from the Salem Marine Society.

The Rev. William Bentley

Nathaniel showed an early interest in mathematics, once solving a problem so quickly that his teacher accused him of cheating. At the age of 10, his mother Mary Ingersoll died. That ended his formal schooling, and he went to work in his father’s cooper shop to help support the family.

At 12 he was apprenticed to the ship chandlery of Ropes and Hodges as a clerk. In 1790 they retired, and Bowditch went to work for Samuel Curwen Ward, another ship chandler, until he went to sea in 1795.

Salem Philosophical Society

But during all those years, Nathaniel Bowditch spent his leisure reading whatever books he could get his hands on. He especially liked mathematics.

In 1787 his brother William, also good in math, told him about a new way of figuring out problems using letters instead of numbers called algebra. Nathaniel was intrigued. He managed to borrow a book about algebra, which so excited him he couldn’t sleep that night.

Bowditch’s family belonged to the Rev. William Bentley’s East Church of Salem. Bentley and his friend the Rev. Joseph Prince, both scholars, often stopped by Bowditch’s shop to chat with the young bookworm. The two ministers belonged to the Salem Philosophical Society, which had bought a library from a privateer.

The Library

On Sept. 5, 1780, the American privateer Pilgrim seized a British frigate on a voyage from Galway to London. The ship carried the library of Richard Kirwan, a prominent Irish chemist.

Revolutionary-era privateer.

The Pilgrim returned to Beverly in 1781. The ship’s owners, John and Andrew Cabot, agreed to sell the library’s 116 scientific books at a reasonable rate. To buy them, Harvard President Joseph Willard, of Beverly, raised $435.35 from prominent local men such as Edward Augustus Holyoke and Manassah Cutler. They donated the books to the newly formed Salem Philosophical Society. The library was kept at the home of the Rev. Joseph Prince. It was considered the second-best library in America, next to the one in Philadelphia. Among its treasurers were the Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

Nathaniel Bowditch copied by hand all the papers on mathematics.

Learning French

Years later, the Salem Philosophical Society offered to give back the books to Kirwan. He refused, saying he was satisfied they had found so useful a destination.

Nathaniel Bowditch learned French from a foreigner living in Salem in exchange for English lessons. That enabled him to become the first American to learn about European breakthroughs in astronomy. He translated and updated four volumes of a treatise by the French scientist Pierre LaPlace.

In Mecanique Celeste, LaPlace summarized his predecessors’ work in mathematics, statistics, physics and astronomy. It wasn’t until 1829 that Bowditch published his translation at his own expense, the astronomical sum of $20,000. It was used as a textbook for the next generation of celestial mathematicians.

Bowditch began to teach himself Latin in 1790 so he could read Newton’s Principia. Bentley, who had tutored at Harvard, had given one of his students a copy of the Principia. The student, Benjamin Pickman, returned it to Bentley so he could give it to Bowditch. Pickman later became a congressman and developer of Derby Square in Salem.

8000 Errors

1st edition of ‘Bowditch’

By the time he was 21, Nathaniel Bowditch was probably the best mathematician in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1795, he went on the first of five voyages first as a clerk, last as a shipmaster and part owner. He found an error in a commonly used navigation manual by John Hamilton Moore, and a publisher asked him to see if he could find others. While Bowditch was at sea he pored over the book and corrected more than 8,000 errors, finally deciding to publish his own. During that voyage he taught the entire crew of 12, including the cook, to calculate lunar positions and position the ship.

‘Bowditch’

In 1802, he published The New American Practical Navigator. It is still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel and has never been out of print. It’s called, simply, ‘Bowditch.’ According to tradition, no sailor leaves port without a Bible, a chest of clothes, a mother’s blessing and his copy of Bowditch.

After Bowditch published the Practical Navigator, he settled back in Salem, married twice and had eight children. He also amassed a valuable library of his own. During his career he played a critical role in the advancement of American astronomy.

Thomas Jefferson had sought him out to teach at the University of Virginia, and West Point wanted him too. He declined, preferring business. Bowditch went to work as the country’s first insurance actuary as president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company. He also helped found the East India Marine Society, now the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem.

Later in life he moved to Boston and managed money for people who had made their fortunes at sea and redirected it to manufacturing.

The day after Nathaniel Bowditch died in Boston on March 16, 1838, his children decided to make his library a public institution. Eventually his descendants donated it to the Boston Public Library.

Nathaniel Bowditch House

The Salem Philosophical Society merged with the Social Library and formed the Salem Athenaeum. The National Register of Historic Places also lists the restored Nathaniel Bowditch House in Salem.

With thanks to Memoir of Nathaniel Bowditch, by Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch. Photo of Nathaniel Bowditch House by Daderot at en.wikipedia. Own work. Transferred from en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. This story about Nathaniel Bowditch was updated in 2023.

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Samuel McIntire, Ingenious Man of Salem

Samuel McIntire, who was born and died in poverty, created fine Federal style buildings in Salem, Mass., for wealthy patrons. Today, an entire historic district is named after him.

Samuel McIntire’s Peirce Nichols House today.

Samuel McIntire

He was born Jan. 16, 1757, to housewright Joseph McIntire and Sarah Ruck, people of modest means. He took up woodcarving as a trade, and showed so much skill his friend the Rev. William Bentley persuaded him to take up sculpture. He carved a bust of John Winthrop for Bentley, now in possession of the American Antiquarian Society.

In sculpture, wrote Bentley, “he had no rival in New England & I possess some specimens which I should not scruple to compare with any I ever saw.”

McIntire also had musical ability, according to Bentley. “He was among our best Judges & most able performers,” Bentley wrote. “All the Instruments we use he could understand and was the best person to be employed in correcting any defects, or repairing them.”

Samuel McIntire

Land of Promise

Salem held great promise for young men during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Maritime commerce boomed, from privateering during the American Revolution to the China trade afterward. Another protege of Bentley’s, Nathaniel Bowditch, also rose from poor beginnings in Salem to wealth, fame and a place in history.

McIntire, though, stayed on land. He spent what little spare money he had on books about art and architecture, and he studied them assiduously.

Working out of a simple home on Summer Street, he began to design houses. His first major commission was the Peirce Nichols House, now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum. (Sarah Peirce Nichols took the walking cure from this house.)

McIntire then caught the attention of Elias Haskett Derby, at one point the richest man in the United States. Derby commissioned him in 1780 to build a mansion costing $80,000 — an astonishing sum.

Gateposts of the Cook-Oliver House, finished in 1804.

Derby’s mansion cost so much no one could afford to buy it when he died. Before it was torn down, McIntire’s fine woodwork was taken from it and sold.

Recycling

Capt. Samuel Cook later hired McIntire to build a house while he took on a voyage. The trip, though, didn’t succeed and he returned before McIntire had finished the house. He didn’t think he could afford to finish it. McIntire said his men needed work and they could finish it slowly, with Cook paying along the way. He then persuaded Cook to buy some of the Derby woodwork, such as the gateposts in front of the Cook-Oliver House.

Stephen Phillips House, Salem, Mass.

Similarly, four rooms of the Stephen Phillips House were taken from Elias Haskett Derby’s farm in Danvers by his heir, Capt. Nathaniel West. McIntire then designed a new house for West in Salem incorporating those rooms. Then Stephen Phillips bought the house in 1911 and lived there with five generations of family furniture until 1955. Historic New England now owns it.

John Cabot House, completed 1781 in Beverly. Now owned by the Beverly Historical Society and open to the public. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

McIntire established a reputation for building elegant homes. With his two brothers, son and nephew he built many of the 407 houses in Salem that now comprise the McIntire Historical District established in 1981. The district includes the grand old homes that line Chestnut Street — called one of the most beautiful streets in America. It also includes the Federal Street Area Historic District, along with 249 structures nearby. The McIntire District is considered the greatest concentration of 17th and 18th century domestic structures anywhere in America.

Sudden Death

McIntire also built homes in communities nearby, such as the John Cabot House in Beverly, Mass.

Hamilton Hall

McIntire completed Hamilton Hall in 1807, a social gathering place for Salem’s leading Federalist families. Considered one of his finest works, it is still in use today.

By 1811, he had supervised nearly “all the improvements of Salem,” according to Bentley. Those included the courthouse and the North and South meeting houses.

He died suddenly and intestate on Feb. 6, 1811, only 54 years old.

The Rev. William Bentley then wrote of the passing of Samuel McIntire in his diary.

This day Salem was deprived of one of the most ingenious men it had in it. Samuel McIntire, age 54, in Summer street…

He had a fine person, a majestic appearance, calm countenance, great self command & amiable temper. He was welcome but never intruded.

His death, wrote Bentley, left a vacuum. “The late increase of workmen in wood has been from the demand for exportation & this has added nothing to the character and reputation of the workmen so that upon the death of Mr. McIntire no man is left to be consulted upon a new plan of execution beyond his bare practice,” he wrote.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Peirce-Nichols House By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11752606. Hamilton Hall By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9963923. Stephen Phillips House By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9022657.

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Murder in the North Woods: Coos County’s Treacherous David Robbins

David Robbins was nobody’s idea of a good man. But he was a legend of the New Hampshire woods, made infamous by his own black-hearted deeds.

Robbins was a murderer, and 175 years ago he struck fear into the hearts of the people of Northern New Hampshire and Maine – few as they were.

In the fall of 1826, David Robbins, Abner Hinds of Milan and Hezekiah Cloutman ventured down along the Androscoggin River, which winds through Northern New Hampshire and Maine. They were trapping sable.

These were relatively early days for settlement in Coos County, N.H. Hinds was described as one of the wealthiest settlers in the area, well-liked and successful. Cloutman hailed from Rochester, N.H. He lived on his own in the North Country because his wife declined to join him. She preferred the comforts of civilization.

David Robbins

David Robbins, on the other hand, came from an established, if somewhat frightening, family. Originally from Beverly, Mass., one member of the family was long considered insane, and his neighbors up north would sometimes have to stay up nights watching for him out of fear that he would light fire to their property.

Robbins was a skilled hunter and trapper, but also the subject of unsavory rumors. One story holds that he had killed a child and used him as bait.

The three men proceeded along the Androscoggin River, deep into the north woods. There they laid out a line of traps 20 miles long and proceeded to have a successful summer.

As the first snow flew, Hezekiah Cloutman and Abner Hinds made one last trip to check their traps, leaving Robbins behind at their base camp to guard over the furs. When they returned, they would all proceed 60 miles back to civilization in Lancaster, N.H. But things didn’t go according to plan.

Dark Plans

When Cloutman and Hinds returned to the camp, they found it completely burned. Robbins had loaded up the furs and left them with no supplies in the freezing late autumn. Cloutman and Hinds, however, were tough characters in their own right and they didn’t perish in the woods. When they got back down to Lancaster, they sued Robbins and prevailed. Some accounts say Robbins owed them as much as $350 for what he had done.

In 1828, Robbins made a proposition. He would go trapping and hunting again with the men and use the proceeds of the trip to pay his debts. Abner Hinds took him up on the offer, and this time the two men headed into the woods accompanied by Hinds’ 15-year-old son. Hezekiah Cloutman did not join them. The journey met with early success. However, Robbins had darker plans this time.

The men had traveled roughly 50 miles up to Little Kennebago Lake in Maine when Robbins turned on Hinds and shot him. He then killed the boy with a hatchet. When the two bodies were found, it didn’t take long to put two and two together, and the local officials raised a party to go find Robbins, which wouldn’t be easy as he knew the woods well.

Arrest

But Sheriff Lewis Loomis was the man for the job. Described as strongly built and muscular, he had a reputation as a strongman. He would wrestle all comers at annual musters and fairs, and was undefeated. He recruited two men, Hezekiah Parsons, Jr., and Daniel G. Ellingwood to join him. (The town paid $15 for the work.)

They turned to Hezekiah Cloutman, who knew Robbins’ habits from their past trips, to assist as a guide. The men went in to the woods and for the next 30 days searched for Robbins. As autumn approached, they heard word that Robbins had surfaced at his home, but by the time they got there he had left. Then they heard he was travelling up the Magalloway River. They went after him, and the men found his belongings. They managed to get between Robbins and his rifle. Loomis jumped on Robbins’ back and the men tied up the prisoner.

Robbins fought furiously, and the men had to tie him in the floor of their boat as they returned via the river out of fear that he would try to tip the craft over and drown them all.

The arrest was celebrated and Robbins was locked in the jail in Lancaster to await trial. Robbins had friends and family that stood by him, however. They managed to slip him some tools, and he steadily picked away at the bars in his cell. As the day of his trial neared, one morning the jailer found the cell empty. Robbins had broken the bars out of his window and escaped.

Out of Jail

The jailer explained that Robbins had successfully hidden his work by hanging a blanket over the window, complaining of cold drafts. Few people believed the jailer wasn’t in on the escape.

No one else in the area ever saw David Robbins again, other than perhaps his confederates. People lived in fear of his returning for years. Some stories circulated that he had murdered someone in Canada and hanged there, but no official record turned up to support it.

His story was a popular tale for the newspapers of the era. It even appeared in fictionalized form in 1857’s Gaut Gurley: Or, The Trappers of Umbagog. A Tale of Border Life by David Thompson.

Tip of the hat for details of Robbins life goes to History of Coos County, New Hampshire. W. A. Fergusson & Co. This story was updated in 2021.

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