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The Dutch in New England: More Than Sinterklaas and Koekjes

Today the remnants of the colonial Dutch in New England are pretty much limited to the region’s outer rim: At Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown, R.I., in Vermont’s oldest house in Pownal, on Leyden Street in Plymouth, Mass. and on a historic sign in Castine, Maine.

But the Dutch had more of a presence in early New England than along the perimeter, and far more than commonly acknowledged. The Dutch claimed much of Connecticut, for example, before English settlers crowded them out. The early Plymouth and Massachusetts colonists might not have survived had the Dutch not brought trade goods like tools and cheese, cannon and livestock. Rhode Islanders had an especially cozy relationship with Dutch traders, and the Dutch claimed part of Downeast Maine.

Don’t forget King William III was also a Dutch staedtholder.

When thinking about the history of British North America It’s easy to forget that William of Orange seized the English throne in 1688 with the help of Dutch troops. King Williams was not only a French prince but also a staedtholder – a Dutch earl or a duke — of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic.

Decades later, the English Parliament decided to tax tea to discourage the Dutch from smuggling the stuff into the colonies – hence the Boston Tea Party. The Dutch were also the first to salute the American flag and, therefore, the first to acknowledge the independence of the United States on November 16, 1776.

The Dutch in New England

In early 17^th century New England, colonists depended on Dutch traders because they had to. England was still recovering from Henry VIII’s shenanigans and had some catching up to do. Amsterdam, not London, had grown into the European capital of shipping, banking and finance.

“The British government and the British commercial world had not yet got their colonial act together,” wrote Charlotte Wilcoxen. The country ‘was still inexperienced at coordinating the production and distribution of goods,’ she wrote. “Her American colonies, victims of this ineptitude, were forced to look to the Dutch for supplies.”

A Dutch trading vessel, known as a fluyt.

In the 16^th and first half of the 17^th centuries, the Dutch were leading traders in the world, with outposts in Thailand, Brazil, Africa, Indonesia and the Caribbean.

Dutch merchants may have traded on the coast of New England as early as 1598. And they didn’t differ from the other European powers in wanting to expand in North America. One big reason: soft gold, otherwise known as beaver.

Beavers

From about 1550, all the best people in Europe had to have a beaver hat. They were soft, attractive, durable and expensive. The beaver hat craze nearly drove the Eurasian beaver to extinction, and sent trappers and traders to North America from Europe.

Nice hat. The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals.

Dutch traders set up trading posts along the coast from Maryland to Maine, and up the Hudson, Connecticut and Delaware rivers. They bought beaver furs from Indians in exchange for trade goods. They learned from the Pequot how to use wampum, or zewant, and then taught the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony how to do it.

In 1621, the Dutch government chartered the West India Company to, among other things, exploit the beaver trade and colonize North America. Three years later the Netherlands sent colonists to try to settle a wide swath Northeast territory.

In addition to New Amsterdam (New York) and Fort Nassau (Albany) the Dutch in New England eventually had a fort in Hartford, called Fort Hope. They also built a fort called Roduins, or Red Dunes, at the mouth of the Housatonic River. They had a trading post on Quetenis, what is now Dutch Island in Jamestown, R.I., and briefly set up a fort and a warehouse in Old Saybrook, Conn. The Dutch may also have settled along the coast of Maine.

Traces of the Dutch presence in the eastern part of upper New York State can be found in the Mooar-Wright House. Built around 1762, it has a Dutch frame around a typically English layout.

Mooar-Wright House

Bye-Bye Beaver

If beaver mortality is any indication, New England and Europe kept up a brisk trade during the first half of the 17^th century.

Europe’s insatiable appetite for beaver fur kept New England’s Indians busy trapping the creatures. The Dutch in New England tried to keep up with their demand for knives, axes, glassware and wool. From 1626 to 1632, the Dutch sent 52,584 beaver pelts back to the Netherlands.

It only got worse for the beaver. By 1650, trappers and traders were sending 80,000 beaver pelts a year to England and the Netherlands. Fifty years later, the once-plentiful beaver had disappeared completely from Massachusetts, and soon after vanished from Vermont and Connecticut.

Massachusetts

In 1635, a Dutch vessel stopped in Marblehead with 140 tons of salt and 10,000 pounds of tobacco. They probably sold salt to Marblehead’s cod fishermen before sailing back to Europe to unload their tobacco.

Dutch merchants also bought tobacco from Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims, after all, had lived for about a dozen years in Leiden, about 30 miles southwest of Amsterdam, and undoubtedly spoke at least some Dutch. When they arrived in Plymouth they built houses on Leyden Street in 1620. It’s still there.

Leyden Street in the 1800s

Plymouth Gov. William Bradford reported ‘profitable commerce’ with the New Amsterdam Dutch for ‘diverse years.’ Plymouth colonist Isaac Allerton brokered the sale of a Dutch ship from two Dutchmen in New Amsterdam.

Next door in Massachusetts, Gov. John Winthrop noted in his journal that the two colonies often traded with the ‘Dutch at Hudson’s River’ for sheep, beaver, cannon, sugar, wine and linen. Massachusetts, in fact, did so much trade with the Dutch that the colony used Dutch currency and passed a law in 1643 regulating its use.

One reason Massachusetts had to use Dutch currency was that the English Civil War, which started in 1642, pretty much ended trade between England and the colonies for a while. Colonists who needed supplies had to go Dutch — or perhaps Venetian or Spanish.

Today The Dutch House in Brookline, Mass., serves as a memorial of sorts to the Dutch in New England. Built as a pavilion in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Brookline resident Charles Brooks Appleton saw it, bought it and had it moved to his hometown.

Rhode Island, aka Roode Eylandt

On the shore of Mill Cove off Narragansett Bay stands a large, plain, wooden house in a clearing. A Rhode Island merchant named Richard Smith, Jr., built it in 1678, after Narragansett Indians burned down the previous house during King Philip’s War. Smith fortified the big old colonial with two small cannons, thus earning the name “Smith’s Castle.” Today it’s a house museum, which in 2019 scheduled a holiday event, Christmas at the Castle, celebrating ‘Dutch influence on colonial life.’

Rhode Islanders like Smith got rich trading with the Dutch in New England. Dutch explorer Adriaen Block had explored Rhode Island and the interior of Connecticut in 1614, naming Block Island after himself and probably naming Rhode Island “Roode Eylandt.” The Dutch even tried to claim Rhode Island as a colony.

Smith Castle

Trading With the Dutch in New England

Nevertheless, Rhode Island probably had the most sustained and cordial trade relations with the Dutch in New England, according to Charlotte Wilcoxen. Rhode Islanders who did business with the Dutch included William Coddington, William Brenton, John Underhill, John Throgmorton and the father and son pair of Richard Smith.

Richard Smith, Sr., had set up a trading post in a place they called Cocumscussoc, now North Kingstown, with his business partner, Roger Williams. In 1651, he built a house there, 20 miles from the nearest settlement. Smith also had trading posts in Taunton, Mass., and in New Amsterdam, where he lived part time. He sent fish, beaver and salt to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods. Slaves and sugar came from the Dutch in the West Indies.

After Richard Smith died in 1666, his son Richard took over the business. Today the Smith Castle docents will tell you his family incorporated Dutch holiday traditions – such as Sinterklaas and koekjes — into their daily life.

Anglo-Dutch Wars

In the mid-17^th century the English began to block Dutch shipping in the English Channel and along other trade routes. That caused three Anglo-Dutch Wars, fought primarily at sea. The first broke out in 1652 and ended in 1654. The second lasted from 1664-67, and the third from 1672-74.

The New England colonies kept up commerce and correspondence with the Dutch during the wars. Rhode Islanders especially honored bans on Dutch trade more in the breach than in the observance.

Huys de Hoop, Connecticut

Connecticut probably had the testiest relations with the Dutch in New England, perhaps because familiarity bred contempt. Connecticut, after all, was cheek-by-jowl with New Amsterdam, and the Dutch early on claimed both the Connecticut and New Haven colonies.

Dutch settlements

The Dutch called the Connecticut River the Versche, or Fresh, River, and the Dutch made good use of it in the early 17^th century. They traded beaver for trade goods with the Indians. In 1633, they built a fort called Huys de Hoop, or House of Hope, on a tributary of the Versche in what is now Hartford. Today Huyshope Avenue connects the Connecticut Probation Department at one end with Aetna Ambulance Services at the other.

The Dutch intended the House of Hope to serve as the capital of Dutch Connecticut, which had amounted to a few tiny, scattered settlements – in Branford, Old Saybrook and New Haven. But they couldn’t keep up with the influx of English immigrants fleeing the Puritans in Massachusetts.

Groenwits

One exception was Greenwich, in the far southwestern corner of Connecticut. Today it’s called the Entryway to New England. In 1640, the Dutch considered it the westernmost settlement of New Amsterdam.

That year, two Massachusetts families, the Feakes and the Patricks, bought land from the Indians and called it Elizabeth’s Neck. Massachusetts had banished them for their support of the heretical Anne Hutchinson. The Feakes later built a house, the Feake-Ferris House, in what is now Old Greenwich.

Three months after their arrival, armed Dutch soldiers from New Amsterdam showed up in Elizabeth’s Neck. They gave the Feakes and the Patricks a choice: submit to Dutch rule or leave. They submitted. The Dutch then changed the settlement’s name to Groenwits and held it for the next 16 years.

Coincidentally, Greenwich was one of the first Connecticut towns to suffer Dutch Elm Disease in 1934.

Squabbling

The Dutch and the ever-increasing English squabbled constantly over their borders in Connecticut. It didn’t take long for English settlers from Massachusetts to surround the House of Hope in Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford. Finally in 1650 the English and Dutch settled their boundary 50 miles west of the Connecticut River. Greenwich stayed with the Dutch.

The Dutch relinquished those claims at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667. In exchange, they got concessions on the Indonesian spice trade including, ironically, nutmeg.

The Dutch eventually realized they couldn’t compete with the exploding English population in Connecticut. So they decided to consolidate their North American colony at the tip of Manhattan in New Amsterdam.

New Amsterdam

But even the retreat to New Amsterdam was fraught. The leadership in England, kings and Cromwell alike, dearly wanted to oust the Dutch from the North American colonies.

During the first Anglo-Dutch War, Oliver Cromwell outfitted an invasion force under Robert Sedgwick to take over New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam stayed in Dutch hands only because the two nations declared peace. Sedgwick turned north and captured Acadia instead.

Then after Charles II got his throne back he decided he wanted New Amsterdam for his brother, the Duke of York. On Aug. 27, 1664, four English frigates under the command of Richard Nicholl sailed into the harbor. The Dutch, with few supplies, quickly surrendered.

New Amsterdam in 1884

As a Dutch minister, Samuel Drisius, wrote, “No relief or assistance could be expected while daily great numbers of Englishmen arrived from New England both on foot and on horseback hotly bent upon plundering this place.”

The city, now New York, stayed in English hands until July 1673, when it reverted to the Dutch. The Dutch held it until the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, when they gave it up in exchange for Surinam.

The Dutch influence in the region can still be seen in the region, from architecture to place names to New York Mets uniforms. The blue, white and orange colors go back to the 17^th-century Prinsenvlag, or Prince’s Flag, the naval flag of the States-General of the Dutch Republic.

Maine

In 1857, a military historian named Maj. Gen. J. Watts De Peyster read a paper before the New York Historical Society about Dutch settlement and exploration 250 years earlier.

“There never was a good piece of land that the Devil did not open his bag and shake out some Dutchman upon it,” he said. That land included ‘the rich lumber districts of Maine.’ The Dutch, he said, made several attempts to settle Maine to ‘share the prolific fisheries; the unsurpassed masting and lumbering facilities; and, at that time, the rich fur trade.’

Though Maine was, in the early 17^th century, the Province of Acadie, the Dutch planted the flag at least on the shores of Muscongus Bay at what is now Bremen. De Peyster said the Dutch language was perpetrated in the town by a steady stream of Germans who followed in the footsteps of those early settlers.

He also claimed a Dutch settlement had existed at one time on the Sheepscot River a mile above Wiscasset, and at Pemaquid.

For a century, de Peysters argument was neither proven nor disproven. But by the end of the 20^th century, archaeologists found extensive Dutch artifacts along the coast from Maine to Maryland.

The Flying Horse

Historians have not disputed the Dutch conquest of Castine. In August of 1674, the Flying Horse, a Dutch frigate, sailed into Penobscot Bay. The fighting force of 110 men easily overtook the 30 French soldiers at the fort of Pentagoet.

Marker showing the Dutch in New England

The Dutch commander, Capt. Jurriaen Aernoutsz, viewed Pentagoet as fair game. The French had allied with the English during the third Anglo-Dutch War. Though the English had settled with the Dutch, the French had not.

Aernoutsz then captured another French fort at Jemseg, and in both places he buried a bottle with a message in it. The message said Acadia belonged to the Dutch and was to be known as ‘New Holland.’ But he sailed away, the Dutch couldn’t hang on to Acadia and soon the French recovered the territory. They gave Pentagoet a new name, Bagaduce, but today it is known as Castine.

Dutch-American Heritage Day

Fast forward a century. On Nov. 16, 1776, an American warship, the Andrew Doria, sailed into the harbor of the Dutch Caribbean island Sint Eustatius. The Dutch governor ordered a friendly cannon salute. That angered the British, and they took control of the island a few years later. The Dutch got it back in 1784. In 1990, that day was proclaimed “Dutch-American Heritage Day.”

The Andrew Doria in Sint Eustatius

With thanks to Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century by Charlotte Wilcoxen and The New Netherlands Institute.

Images: Castine sign By No machine-readable author provided. Masonbarge assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=696875. Smith’s Castle By Mlanni98 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77139260. This story was updated in 2022.

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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

PT Boat 140 off Melville, R.I.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images: PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2022.

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The First, First Sunrise in Each New England State

Trying to calculate the exact moment of sunrise isn’t easy. In fact, the U.S. Naval Observatory says it’s nearly impossible because of the way light bends in the atmosphere.

However, the Naval Observatory does predict the minute at which the sun’s rays will shine on every city and town in the United States. Sadly, the Naval Observatory’s website was down for maintenance in late 2019 and wasn’t scheduled to be up again until mid-2020.

As the easternmost state in the United States, Mainers boast the first sunlight falls on its shores. But it really falls on Nantucket.

Massachusetts’ First Sunrise

First sunrise in the United States: Sankaty Light.

Climb to Nantucket’s 111-foot Sankaty Bluff in Siasconset, and you’ll likely see the first sunrise of 2020 in the United States.

In 1999, astronomers tried to settle a dispute about where the first sunrise would dawn on the new millennium. They argued over whether the sun would rise first over Lubec, Maine, Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park or Siasconset on Nantucket.

Though the National U.S. Naval Observatory claimed the sun would rise first – by two minutes – in Lubec, astronomer Vladimir Strelnitski believed otherwise. According to his calculations, the sun would rise at Sankaty Bluff before it rose either on top of Cadillac Mountain or in Lubec.

Strelnitski, who ran the Maria Mitchell Observatory at the time, arranged a three-way conference call on the morning of Jan. 1, 2000. People gathered at dawn at all three locations.

At 7:04 a.m., the sun’s rays hit Sankaty Bluff. Thirty seconds later, the sun rose on Cadillac Mountain. Thirty-three seconds after that, sunlight hit West Quoddy Head in Lubec.

Maine’s First Sunrise

First sunrise on Cadillac Mountain.

West Quoddy Head Light is as picturesque a place as there is to watch the first – well, the first-ish – sunrise, which happen at 7:06 am in 2020. But Maine’s first sunrise is actually on Cadillac Mountain (see above).

Visitors to Acadia National Park like to hike or drive to the mountaintop to see the first dawn. The U.S. Naval Observatory pegs the New Year’s Day sunrise at 7:08 am on the mountain, but calculates it at sea level. So unless we’re missing something, the sun will rise on Cadillac Mountain half a minute before it rises in Lubec.

However, Cadillac doesn’t always see the first sunrise. From March 25 to Sept. 18, the sun rises first on Mars Hill, 150 miles to the northeast on the Canadian border.

About a minute after the sun comes up on Cadillac Mountain, it rises at the peak of Mount Katahdin. That’s also the moment Miami Beach sees the first sunrise.

Rhode Island’s First Sunrise

Sakonnet Light in Little Compton.

Little Compton will first see the sun come up over Rhode Island at 7:11 am.

You might want to watch the sunrise from Sakonnet Point, the southernmost point in Little Compton. It has beaches, plenty of birds and the Sakonnet Point Lighthouse, built in 1884. Islands lie just off the coast and on one you can see the remains of the West Island Fishing Club. J.P. Morgan and President Glover Cleveland once belonged as members.

If you’re willing to wait another few seconds, the sun rises on Block Island shortly thereafter.

Connecticut’s First Sunrise

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Dodson Boatyard, Stonington, Conn.

There’s little dispute about where the first dawn will break over Connecticut. The state’s southeasternmost town — Stonington — will see the sunrise at 7:13 am, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. The sun’s rays first fall on nearby Groton about 40 seconds later, then on New London a few ticks after that.

Though Connecticut’s first rays appear about eight minutes past the sun’s first appearance in the United States, the southeastern section of the state offers many consolations.

Stonington itself has a historic lighthouse, the Mystic Bridge Historic District, historic house museums and the sets for the films Mystic Pizza and Amistad.

Whaling once bought considerable wealth to nearby New London. The city now has many cultural and historic attractions, including, the Joshua Hempstead House, the landing site of the Amistad at the U.S. Custom House and Ye Antientist Burial Ground, one of the oldest cemeteries in New England.

New Hampshire’s First Sunrise

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Wentworth-By-The-Sea in New Castle.

At 7:14 am, the sun’s first rays will strike the town of New Castle, N.H. A few seconds later, they’ll hit Hampton. Then the sun will rise on Seabrook and Portsmouth.

There are plenty of great spots along New Hampshire’s 18-mile seacoast to watch the sun first rise in 2020: along the boardwalk in Hampton Beach, by the large old homes of Little Boar’s Head, the beaches in Rye or by Wentworth-By-The-Sea in New Castle.

Vermont’s First Sunrise

Road chapel (for a sunrise service?) in Vernon, Vt.

Vernon in the southeast corner of Vermont will see the state’s first sunrise at 7:20 a.m. About half a minute later, Guilford will see it, then Brattleboro will see it. Putney sees the sunrise seconds after Brattleboro.

Steep hills surround the towns, which belong to the Connecticut River Valley in Vermont’s lowest elevation. So you may want to climb Round Mountain or Putney Mountain to shave a few seconds off the sunrise.

Images: Sankaty Light By EWM – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15305621; Cadillac Mountain Sunrise By JetsonJones – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26798494; Plaice Cove By Steve Hedin, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40842204; Vernon, Vt., road chapel, By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49797570; Sakonnet Light By Zhengan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50957093.

This story was updated in 2020.

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Six Stunning Gothic Revival Buildings By Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan didn’t leave much in the way of paper records, but he did change the face of Puritan New England with dozens of striking and much-admired Gothic Revival churches, schools and mansions.

He worked on two of the most important cathedrals in the United States, Washington National and St. John the Divine. His chapels at the Groton and St. Paul’s schools are considered two of the most beautiful Gothic churches in America.

Henry Vaughan around 1907

Henry Vaughan

Born in Cheshire, England, in 1845, he likely trained with British architect George Frederick Bodley, the leading architect working in the Gothic Revival style. Vaughan also worked as Bodley’s head draftsman.

In 1881, 36-year-old Henry Vaughan came to Boston representing Bodley. He would then design the chapel for the Sisters of St. Margaret, associated with the Anglican monastic order, Society of St. John the Evangelist.

Very few Gothic Revival architects had his training and sophistication. Whether he intended to stay in America isn’t clear, but he quickly launched a successful architectural career — though he never sought commissions.

The Episcopal church gave him plenty of work. So did eccentric millionaire Edward Searles.

Henry Vaughan, Throwback

Henry Vaughan’s style of work was as much a throwback as the buildings themselves. When Vaughan was working on the Washington National Cathedral, recalls an employee, everything was done in a very ‘old time way.’ He viewed the telephone as an intrusion, and the head draftsman occasionally typed out a letter with one finger.

Described as shy and withdrawn, Henry Vaughan attended daily Mass. He lived in a boardinghouse on Beacon Hill, had few friends and rarely appeared in public. After dinner, he always returned to the office to feed the mice with leftover rolls. His employees were forbidden from coming in then because they might disturb the creatures.

Though Henry Vaughan’s architectural designs dated to the Middle Ages, they were actually quite new for the region. New England had its roots in Puritanism, but the old hatred of Catholicism and High Anglicanism was fading.

When Henry Vaughan died in 1917, Episcopal Bishop William Lawrence suggested a change had come over the people. “Many of them are turning back to the prayer book, the dignified forms and rich associations of the church of our English ancestors,” he wrote in Vaughan’s obituary.

Here, then, are six Henry Vaughan buildings, one in each state (plus a few bonus mentions). If you know of other Henry Vaughan buildings worth mention, please share them in the comments section.

Christ Church

Christ Church, New Haven

The Gothic Christ Church is a landmark in downtown New Haven. It combines a ‘bells-and-smells’ high Anglo-Catholic tradition with a soup kitchen and a residence for homeless young people.

Henry Vaughan designed Christ Church with a stone tower modeled after Magdalen College in Oxford. He chose the artists to decorate the interior, including Johannes Kirchmayer for the wooden carving and C.E. Kempe to create the stained glass windows. The high altar was inspired by Winchester Cathedral and St. Alban’s in England.

Vaughan’s follower Ralph Adams Cram wrote that Christ Church was ‘worked out on lines that are absolutely right’

“It could not be taken for a country church; yet is pure and scholarly Gothic, both modern in feeling and medieval—the enduring style adapted to new conditions,” wrote Cram.

Christ Church holds Solemn High Mass at 11 a.m. every Sunday. A large crowd comes to Compline, or night prayer, at 9 pm September through May. Christ Church is the headquarters for the North American branch of the Society of Catholic Priests, Episcopal clergy who practice the Anglo-Catholic tradition.

70 Broadway, New Haven, Conn.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

St. Andrew’s Church in Newcastle

Henry Vaughan’s first parish church, St. Andrew’s, is one of at least two notable churches in tiny Newcastle, Maine. The other is New England’s oldest Catholic Church in continuous use, St. Patrick’s, proud owner of a Revere bell.

He sailed to the United States in 1881 on the packet ship American Clipper, owned by Capt. and Mrs. William Glidden of Newcastle. Vaughan probably met them on the voyage.

Glidden and his partner owned clipper ships that sailed between Boston and San Francisco starting in the Gold Rush of 1849. The Gliddens commissioned Vaughan to design St. Andrew’s, and he lived with them while he worked on the church in 1883.

The charming half-timbered stucco church lies on the banks of the Damariscotta River. Its simple exterior is a rare example of rural late English Gothic, the first cottage Gothic Revival church in the United States, according to Vaughan’s biographer William Morgan.

Rich, colored stenciling and carved woodwork decorate the interior. Henry Vaughan had insisted the nave and chancel ceiling be stenciled according to his design. The vestry wouldn’t pay for the work, so Vaughan painted it himself over an entire summer on his back.

In 1908, a fire devastated downtown and the Newcastle National Bank found a temporary home in the St. Andrew’s parish house.

The church has a Henry Vaughan Fund to maintain and preserve the church; you can actually buy a Henry Vaughan gift card.

11 Glidden Street, Newcastle, Maine

Searles High School

Methuen High School, now City Hall

Edward Searles, an interior decorator born in Methuen, Mass., hired Searles for almost as many projects as the Episcopal Church did.

Searles married the fabulously wealthy widow (and much older) Mrs. Mark Hopkins one year before she died. She left him a quarter of the Southern Pacific Railroad and $21 million in property. Searles then indulged his whim for building on a grand, even excessive scale, almost always with the help of Henry Vaughan.

Searles sponsored dozens of projects—schools, churches, castles, organ cases, tombs and remodeling.

Pine Lodge in Methuen

Henry Vaughan expanded Searles’ home in Methuen into a huge estate, including a 74-room house and chapel surrounded by castle walls. Today the estate, Pine Lodge, houses Presentation of Mary Academy, a private Catholic high school.

Though rarely seen in town, and then only in his gold-trimmed Pierce-Arrow, Searles made many gifts to his birthplace. He paid Methuen’s $65,000 debt and gave it thousands of trees, a monumental statue of George Washington, three churches, the railroad station, a battlemented bridge across the Spiket River, the Red Tavern, a boardinghouse called the Hayloft, the John Hancock Masonic Lodge, the Central Grammar School, Searles High School, two family tombs, an organ factory and the Serlo Organ Hall.

Vaughan designed much of it, including the high school. From the outside it looks like a Jacobean prodigy house, a large, showy mansion built by English nobles. It cost $1 million and required imported Italian workmen. It now serves as Methuen Town Hall.

He also built one of his masterpieces in Massachusetts, but not for Edward Searles.

St. John’s Chapel at the Groton School.

Groton School Rector Endicott Peabody wanted a chapel that would be ‘one of the most beautiful ecclesiastical structures in America.’ Vaughan’s biographer William Morgan called St. John’s Chapel, built in 1900, a ‘milestone in Vaughan’s career as well as being one of America’s major neo-Gothic monuments.’

Methuen City Hall, 41 Pleasant St., Methuen, Mass.

Searles Castle

Searles Castle in Windham, N.H.

By 1905, Searles fixated on one final obsession. He wanted a proper castle. Searles then bought 1400 acres of land in Windham, N.H., to put it on.

Searles had discovered family ties to the Harcourts in Oxfordshire, England. They had a 15th-century manor house, Stanton-Harcourt, mostly destroyed. He supposedly sent Vaughan to England to draw plans of the ruined section of the original house. Vaughan then designed Searles Castle in Windham as a one-quarter-size replica of the English castle, complete with battlements and portcullis.

The Tudor Gothic castle was built of granite, fieldstone and dark red sandstone, most of which came from Searles’ quarries in nearby Pelham, N.H. It took nearly a decade to finish the castle and $1.25 million to furnish it. Eight-foot walls protected the castle from intruders.

Despite the castle’s high walls, Searles thought the village school was too close. So he offered to build Windham a new school if the town gave him the old one. The town then agreed, and Henry Vaughan designed ‘the handsomest and finest small school building in the state.’

Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H.

Though Searles Castle is one of the most imposing buildings he designed, the Chapel of St. Peter and Paul at St. Paul’s School is his most important. The chapel influenced a long line of school and college chapels and inspired many young architects.

“Had Vaughan died at, say, age fifty and had not lived to design many of his churches or Washington Cathedral, his place in the Gothic Revival in America would still be secure,” wrote Morgan.

For early photographs of the chapel at St. Paul’s, click here.

Searles Castle, 21 Searles Rd., Windham, N.H.

Mansion House, the Lost Henry Vaughan Residence

White Hall, or Mansion House, on Block Island

Searles commissioned Vaughan to build a dream house on Block Island for him and his new bride. Construction began on White Hall in the summer of 1888 and finished in 1890.

Searles spent over $1 million on the project, or about $24 million today. Vaughan designed the mansion as a ‘twin house,’ with each of the Searles having a separate identical side of the mansion. Rumors flew that the marriage was in trouble.

An octagonal dome topped the mammoth white pine house inspired by early 18^th century Palladian designs. The house, dubbed “Searles’ Folly’ and ‘Mansion House’ by the locals, overlooked a pristine beach. A hurricane blew off the dome during the finished house’s first winter.

Mrs. Searles died in 1891, the year after the mansion was finished. Searles rarely visited White Hall after her death. After he died in 1920, White Hall remained empty. Over the years it changed hands until a fire burned it to the ground in 1963.

Today, Rhode Island can only claim as Vaughan’s work the chancel furniture for St. Stephen’s Church in Providence. It was only Vaughan’s second commission in the United States, and it cost $4,000, as much as the entire St. Andrew’s church in Maine.

White Hall, Mansion Beach, New Shoreham, R.I.

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church

St. Peter’s Episcopal Mission in Lyndonville, Vt.

Henry Vaughan designed another small rural church in the northern Vermont town of Lyndonville, St. Peter’s Episcopal Mission. The cornerstone for the simple neo-Gothic building was laid in 1898 on donated land. Today it stands in the midst of a modest residential neighborhood.

51 Elm St., Lyndonville, Vt.

Images: Christ Church (tower) By Delcio GP Filho from Goiânia, Brasil – The First Christ Church of New HavenUploaded by LongLiveRock, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7247526; Christ Church (full view) By Farragutful – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79676982St. Andrew’s By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35548737; St. Paul’s School By FCHarwood – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47027870; St. John’s Chapel By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17866430; Searles Castle By David Kolifrath – Author, CC BY-SA 3.0, By The original uploader was EraserGirl at English Wikipedia(Original text: EraserGirl (talk)) – Own work (Original text: self-made), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3657734https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13339085; Searles High School (Methuen Town Hall)

With thanks to The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan by William Morgan. This story last updated in 2022.

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Exactly How New England’s Indian Population Was Decimated

Even before European colonists thinned the Indian population in New England, war and disease had already begun their dirty work.

A team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists studied the health of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere over 7,000 years. Native American health had declined even before Columbus came to the New World, they concluded in a book published in August 2017, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere.

The researchers found Indians’ health got worse because they came to depend on corn. They also began to live in denser communities, allowing infectious disease to spread quickly.

Still, the Indian population didn’t begin its demise until the Europeans arrived in the 16^th century.

Indians lament death by disease.

About 60,000 Indians lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut at the beginning of the 17^th century, according to Sherburne Cook. Maine had a robust population of Abenaki tribes. According to some estimates, Maine had more than 20,000 Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy Indians.

A century later, New England’s Indian population began to disappear. Some tribes were already extinct.

This is how the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population.

Indian Population Before the Pilgrims

The seeds of the Indians’ destruction were planted more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began even before English and French explorers showed up at the turn of the 16^th century. In 1504, a French vessel was documented fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Portuguese fishermen arrived two years later.

Early map of the Grand Banks.

By 1519, a hundred European ships made round trips to the Grand Banks. The first tourist cruise to North America sailed from London in 1536, but food ran short and many died.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans, were devastated by a typhus epidemic in 1586. Other diseases brought the Passamaquoddy population to 4,000 from 20,000.

The 1616 Plague

In 1616, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast, wreaking the most devastation north of Boston. It’s not clear what it was – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague.

Whatever it was, it was terrifying. So much of the Indian population died there weren’t enough left to bury the dead. English colonist Thomas Morton described the heaps of dead Indians ‘a new found Golgotha.’

As many as 90 percent of the 4,500 Indians of the Massachusetts tribe perished. The disease cleared the Boston Harbor islands of inhabitants.

John Smith

English explorer John Smith had visited New England before the plague in 1614. He returned eight years later, and what he saw shocked him.

“God had laid this country open for us,” he wrote. “Where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found.”

Disease persisted among the Massachusetts from 1620 to 1630. When smallpox struck in 1633, it left only about 750 and obliterated entire villages. The colonists herded the Massachusetts who survived into Christian villages of ‘praying Indians.’

Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote ‘about this time [1631] the Indians began to be quarrelsome touching the Bounds of the Land which they had sold to the English, but God ended the Controversy by sending the Smallpox amongst the Indians of Saugust, who were before that time exceeding numerous.’

Along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, Mohawk raids had already weakened the Pennacook Indians when the 1616 plague arrived. It killed three out of four Pennacooks.

That same plague almost completely obliterated two other Pennacook tribes in Massachusetts, the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem.

Wampanoags

The plague of 1616-1618 cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston, but was far less severe south of Plymouth.

King Philip

A year after the Pilgrims arrived, their Indian visitor Samoset told them, ‘about foure yeares agoe, all the Inhabitants dyed of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor childe remaining, as indeed we haue found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claime unto it.’

“Thousands of them died,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor. “They not being able to bury one another, their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground.”

Enough Wampanoag Indians survived to resist the colonists’ land grab during King Philip’s War in 1675.

But disease persisted among the tribe, weakening it further. By the war’s outbreak, the Wampanoag Indian population fell to 2,500 from as many as 5,500. Those who weren’t killed in the war were sold into slavery, moved to praying towns or migrated west. King Philip’s War virtually obliterated the Wampanoag.

Narragansett

Roger Williams with Narragansett Indians

The Narragansett were the biggest tribe in New England, with 7,800 members including 300 on Block Island. Protected by Narragansett Bay, they didn’t come into contact with the white invaders as early or as frequently as northern tribes. The great plague of 1616 didn’t affect them.

Because the Narragansetts were so much larger, Wampanoag leader Massasoit made peace with the Plymouth colonists to ally them against his Narragansett rivals.

The Narragansetts’ first epidemic was smallpox in 1633, which killed 700 of them. Chronic ailments further reduced their numbers to 5,000 by the outbreak of King Philip’s War. Wrote Roger Williams in 1643,

They commonly abound with children, and increase mightily; except the plague fall amongst them, or other lesser sicknesses, and then having no means of recovery, they perish wonderfully.

Infectious disease terrified the Narragansetts. “I have often seene a poore House left alone in the wild Woods, all being fled, the living not being able to bury the dead, so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but Houses and the whole Towne take flight,” wrote Williams.

The Narragansetts tried to stay out of King Philip’s War, but after English colonists massacred as many as 1,100 of them at the Great Swamp Fight in 1675, they had no choice but to fight. After King Philip’s War fewer than 500 Narragansetts remained. They were allowed to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown, R.I., where they frequently intermarried with African-Americans and Indians from other tribes.

The Nauset

The Nauset, a tribe of about 8,000 on Cape Cod and the islands, were also apparently unaffected by the plague of 1616. But other diseases gradually reduced their numbers. The 2,100 Nausets on Cape Cod were down to 1,250 by 1700, and all had been converted to Christianity. By 1660, they had been driven into the Mashpee Reservation; the population of 2,100 Nausets fell to 1,250 by 1700.

Disease had also reduced the Indian population of 6,000 on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket by more than half, to 2,330.

Connecticut’s Indian Population

Before the English arrived, an Algonkian tribe that became the Pequots moved into Connecticut from the Connecticut River to the Rhode Island border, displacing the people who lived there. There were about 3,000 of them, and the population remained stable with little European contact and in the absence of war and severe epidemic disease.

War devastated the Pequot Indian population.

Then English colonists and Mohegan warriors attacked them in the Pequot War of 1637. Hundreds were killed or captured and hundreds more fled to southwestern Connecticut and Long Island. Only 200 were left by war’s end, and they were absorbed into the Mohegan tribe.

Shortly after the Pequot War in 1643, there were about 2,200 Pequot-Mohegans. Smallpox, flu, diphtheria and measles reduced their numbers to 750 by 1705. By then, the colonists had already herded them into Connecticut reservations at Ledyard and Groton.

One Connecticut tribe tried to protect itself by building a fort. A thousand Mattabesic Indians sealed their fate when they enclosed themselves in a palisade fort in Hartford County. By 1634, smallpox and plague killed all but 50 of them with terrifying swiftness.

Of the 3,000 other Connecticut Indians in the vicinity – Podunk, Mattabesic, Hammonasset and Wongunk – most who survived sold their land and moved away.

Reservations

During the 17^th century, life was short for the English colonists as well as the Indian population. By 1700, life expectancy in New England rose to 45-50 years, 15 years higher than in old England.

The Europeans had large families, and the colonist population grew 3 percent a year, doubling every 23 years. The land-hungry colonists pushed the remaining Indian population into warfare, and then into reservations and to parts west.

Before the Europeans arrived, about 10,000 Penobscot Indians lived in what is now Maine. The population collapsed from infectious diseases and fighting between the Iroquois over the fur trade. The Penobscot sided with the French during four Anglo-French wars, which the French ultimately lost.

The Indian Population Makes a Comeback

Both the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy ceded their land to Massachusetts (which later became Maine). They had only a reservation on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. By 1800, the Penobscot Indian population fell to 500.

Many Indians converted to Christianity and moved to one of 14 praying towns. Indians moved to reservations in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and Fall River in Massachusetts.

During the 20^th century, New England’s Indian population made a comeback. But that is a story for another day.

With thanks to The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century by S.F. Cook and to The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose. This story about New England’s Indian population was updated in 2022.

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The Many Mansions of Edward Searles

In 1921, coroners had Edward Searles body exhumed months after his death. Their conclusion, after examination, was that he had not been poisoned with arsenic as they had suspected. He died of natural causes. And when they planted him back in his Methuen, Mass., tomb they laid to rest a man who had controlled one of America’s greatest fortunes.

Edward Searles didn’t earn his fortune in the typical sense. He married into it. But in another sense he did earn it, because marrying a wealthy widow was the easy part of getting rich for Edward Searles. Keeping his wealth would prove far more difficult.

Over the years, Edward Searles (known by his middle name Frank) had many occupations. The way they were characterized varied depending on who described him. People who liked him called him interior decorator, architect, financier. His enemies – and he had many – called him a bric-a-brac salesman or a paper-hanger.

Edward Searles

Edward’s first job was as a mill hand in a Methuen cotton mill. Searles’ family had moved to Methuen from Nashua, N.H., so that his father could get a job in the Methuen mill. His father and two of his siblings died when he was just three years old, reducing the family to just Edward, his brother Andy and their mother.

Edward Searles took piano lessons, but received little formal education. At age 12 he began working in the mills. As a young man, he went to Gardner, Maine, and taught music to support the family. When his brother returned from serving in the Civil War and stole Edward’s fiancée, Edward left Methuen for Boston to work for the furniture company Paul & Co.

Furniture

When the furniture company went bust, Edward took his accumulated savings and traveled to Europe to study the palaces. In 1874, at the age of 33, he moved on to New York and went to work at Herter Bros., an upscale interior design firm. Herter Bros. had a reputation as the design firm preferred by the Vanderbilt family.

Edward Searles had an eye for furniture and a polished and pleasant manner that went down well among the company’s wealthy client base. In 1881, at age 40, Searles went to San Francisco. Ill health had weakened him and he needed time away, he would say. Armed with a letter of introduction from Herter Bros., Edward Searles began introducing himself to the California elite.

In April of 1883 he approached the home of Mark Hopkins, a multi-millionaire who had died five years earlier. Searles said he hoped to get a look at Hopkins’ famous castle on Nob Hill. The visit led to a dinner invitation. Soon he was approached by Hopkins’ widow Mary. She asked if he would accompany her on a trip back to Massachusetts. She was travelling east to tend to family affairs in Great Barrington, Mass. Searles agreed to go.

Mansion No. 1

In Great Barrington, he and Mary developed plans to build a mansion. He became her companion for three years, traveling with her to New York, Block Island, Florida and Europe. Their relationship gradually morphed from patron/interior designer to husband/wife in 1887.

Searles Castle Great Barrington

Edward would finish work on Mary’s Great Barrington mansion and build another on Block Island. They had an apartment in New York. All the while, he continued expanding his childhood home in Methuen into an enormous estate, Pine Lodge.

He hired Henry Vaughan, the pre-eminent neo-Gothic architect in the United States, to design Pine Lodge. Vaughan would later design three more Searles’ residences and public buildings he underwrote.

When he needed money, Edward would simply send a request to San Francisco and the funds would be sent.

Pine Lodge

Timothy Hopkins

In San Francisco, Mary’s son Timothy Hopkins managed the Hopkins fortune. Mary and Mark Hopkins never had biological children. But they had taken in Timothy Hopkins (Nolan) when he arrived in California from Maine. Timothy’s father had gone to California to work for Hopkins, and he sent word for his family to come join him. By the time the family arrived, however, Timothy’s father had drowned. So the Hopkins looked after the family. Shortly before he turned 21, Mary had adopted Timothy.

By 1887, Timothy had trained in business and was managing the Hopkins fortune. Timothy did not like Edward, but having the continent between the two men seemed like a big enough buffer. In 1891, however, things changed. That was the year Mary Hopkins died and Timothy learned that his mother had changed her will.

While an earlier will left the Hopkins fortune to both Timothy and Edward, a codicil added to the will declared that Mary purposefully disinherited Timothy, leaving most of her money to Edward. The news that the Hopkins fortune, estimated at $30 million, was heading east rattled California society. And Timothy vowed to overturn the will.

Mark Hopkins and His Millions

The money at issue was earned by Mark Hopkins. Mark Hopkins made millions of dollars from the California Gold Rush. However, he never lifted a pick or shovel to do so. Hopkins went west from New York with the 49ers’ gold craze and sold shovels, picks, clothing and mining equipment to the prospectors eager to get into the hills.

Many thought Hopkins a poor businessman. He offered easy terms for his wares, sometimes taking no money and letting miners work on credit for years. From many of his customers he took payment in the form of shares of their eventual claims, many of which proved valueless.

Mark Hopkins mansion in 1890

While some men searched the California wilderness for gold themselves, Mark Hopkins had a small army of men searching for gold for him. When they struck it rich, he and his New England Mining and Trading Company did too.

Thrifty and level-headed, Hopkins parlayed his gold fortune into a railroad fortune when he joined with three other men – Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Corliss Huntington – in founding the Central Pacific Railroad.

In 1854, Hopkins married Mary Sherwood, his first cousin. She eventually persuaded him to build a lavish mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco and have the interior designed by New York’s Herter Brothers.

Nasty Lawsuit

Mary’s death and the terms of her will rocked society from coast to coast. She was one of the wealthiest widows in America and her son Timothy had a lot to lose. The ensuing lawsuit was nasty.

Edward said that Mary had changed the will because she learned that her son Timothy had hired private detectives to investigate Edward’s personal life and follow him around.

Timothy countered that his mother hired the detectives. She had grown suspicious of her husband’s affairs.

In a grueling trial, Timothy’s lawyers painted Edward Searles as a gold digger of a different sort than the men who worked for Mark Hopkins. And Edward admitted on the stand that his marriage to Mary had been prompted by romance, but also her money.

Timothy’s lawyers painted Edward Searles as indulging a dotty older woman to get at her fortune. They noted that he encouraged her spiritualist beliefs and attended several séances that she held in her Nob Hill mansion.

Edward’s lawyers countered that Timothy had received an education, considerable money, a Menlo Park mansion, and a high-level job at the Union Pacific Railroad thanks to his relationship with the Hopkinses. His mother Mary felt he didn’t need any more from her estate.

Timothy Hopkins

Secrets

But both sides seemed to dance around some issues. The judge ruled in favor of Edward Searles, but noted in his ruling that the parties were holding back secrets.

“This decision of mine is not at all on the merits of the case,” he wrote. “Why we have had only about of the third of the evidence put in, and the most important witnesses have not been examined.”

Whatever the detectives had found, Timothy was apparently holding it back to use as a bargaining chip as he appealed the judgment. Within a year the fight was settled.

Timothy received money, stocks and land valued at more than $3.2 million. Edward Searles received a promise that Timothy would no longer challenge the will.

The Nob Hill was mansion was split, in a manner of speaking. Timothy received the contents. The building was donated to an art school.

Edward Searles, Recluse

Following the trial, Edward Searles went on an 18-month traveling binge. In Methuen, he continued buying land around his childhood home, creating a mammoth estate. He furnished it opulently. Searles had his genealogy researched in hopes of finding a connection to British royalty. None was found.

He used his money to persuade the town to let him close streets to expand his property, and he fought the construction of a trolley that he felt was too near his home. The local newspaper dubbed him “Millionaire Searles” in reporting on his activities. But it did not deter him from expanding his estate or buying houses, demolishing them and replacing them with parks.

The Edward Searles estate in Methuen, 1890

Most viewed him as a generous, if eccentric, benefactor. He built the town a high school and a music hall. He bought the town newspaper to counteract his critics and staffed it with a friendly editor. And he financed businesses throughout town.

Methuen Memorial Music Hall, formerly Searles Organ Hall

Searles bought an organ factory and began donating organs to local churches, but under the condition that he be allowed to ornately redecorate the church interiors to keep up his decorating skills. Further, he set about commissioning new church buildings as gifts.

He did not limit himself to churches, either. Searles would travel the countryside in nearby New Hampshire. If a farm or rural setting struck his fancy, he would buy it and alter the scenery to his liking. He came to own hundreds of acres of land in southern New Hampshire this way. He would buy a farm, remodel it to resemble an English country house and then rent it or sell it.

A Proper Castle for Edward Searles

By 1905, Edward Searles fixated on one final obsession. He wanted a proper castle. Searles had purchased 1400 acres of land in Windham, N.H. His plans called for a one-quarter size replica of the Stanton-Harcourt Castle in Oxfordshire, England, complete with battlements. His masterpiece, designed by Henry Vaughan and dubbed Searles Castle, was finished in 1915.

Searles Castle

Five years later, at the age of 79, Edward Searles would die in Methuen at his beloved Pine Lodge mansion. And his death touched off one final scandal. In his will, Edward Searles left $250,000 to his nephew Victor Albert Searles. But the will contained a threat. Should Victor challenge any portion of the will, he would be disinherited.

The bulk of Edward Searles’ fortune – some $35 million – was left to his personal secretary, Arthur Walker. The will was drafted and signed just 14 days before Edward Searles died.

Edward Searles’ Second Trial

Victor Searles determined to challenge his uncle’s will. He announced that his uncle’s behavior was so unusual and unorthodox that he would prove his mind was unsound. Aside from his penchant for buying buildings and moving them willy-nilly, Victor Searles promised to unearth a hidden side of his uncle.

Homosexuality was a crime in 1921 throughout America. It was considered a mental illness, and if Victor Searles created a compelling case that his uncle was a homosexual he could use that to challenge the will.

Mud

Victor’s first court filings hinted at the mud he prepared to sling: “Edward F. Searles at the time the will was being executed was . . . in the charge of three New York nurses, none of whom can now be found. His intimate friends were excluded from the Searles home within two days of the making of this instrument on the grounds that he was too ill to see anybody.

“Mr. Searles was a recluse. He was especially shy with women and was what might be called a woman hater. He spoke disrespectfully of women, not wanting them to be around him at all. “

Walker, they charged, had cooked up the will to steal Searles’ money. Searles’ body was exhumed and tested to determine if Walker had poisoned him. And Victor’s lawyers unearthed Angelo Ellison.

Ellison, a young elevator operator, had accepted Edward Searles’ offer to become his companion. Searles had showered clothes and gifts on Ellison and even tried to influence the military to keep the boy out of World War I. He was hiding in the Catskills when Victor’s lawyers found him, giving ammunition for Victor’s lawsuit.

Walker settled the suit and gave Victor $4.5 million rather than drag the matter through the court. He came out of it a millionaire many times over, though he never altered his modest lifestyle.

What Remains Today

Today, Edward Searles’ creations still stand. His mansion in Methuen now belongs to the Presentation of Mary Academy, and his Windham, N.H., Searles Castle is operating as an events facility. His Great Barrington mansion is a private school. The Searles High School in Methuen now houses municipal offices. And at Bowdoin College, Searles Science Building still serves students today.

Images: Searles Castle By David Kolifrath – Author, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13339085. Searles Castle Great Barrington By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23279874. This story about Edward Searles was updated n 2022. If you enjoyed reading about his mansions, you may also want to read about Henry Vaughan here.

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