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The Endicott Pear Tree, Still Alive in Massachusetts After Nearly 400 Years

Sometime around 1630, John Endecott planted a pear tree with the hope it would live for generations. He got his wish with the Endicott Pear Tree, believed the oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America.

The tree survived harsh winters, hurricanes, earthquakes, grazing by cows, suburban sprawl and vandals. It was declared a national landmark in 2011. Clones from the Endicott Pear Tree have been planted in at least 17 states.

The Endicott Pear Tree was featured in a 1919 biography of trees called The Historic Trees of Massachusetts. Author James Raymond Simmons called it ‘one of the most quaint and strangely impressive of all the historic trees.’

John Endecott

John Endecott

Endecott (the name was changed later) scouted the New World with about 70 others who sailed aboard the Abigail in 1628, during the Great Migration of Puritans. He established a small settlement and called it ‘Salem,’ the Hebrew word for peace.

On July 3, 1632, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted Endecott 300 acres of land on “a necke of land lying about three miles from Salem” now known as Danversport, a section of Danvers.

The tree was planted sometime between 1630 and 1649. Endecott may have planted it first on his farm in Salem and then moved it to Danvers. He began cultivating a farm, with a cow barn, house and outbuildings. Endecott also owned the first sundial in America and introduced the ox-eye daisy to the colonies.

He also served as the first governor of Massachusetts until his death in 1665. A descendant, Endicott ‘Chub” Peabody, also served as governor of Massachusetts in 1963. People sometimes called the tree The Governor’s Tree.

The Endicott Pear Tree

William Endicott with the Endicott Pear Tree, 1925

John Endecott planted the tree in the presence of his children and workers and said, “I hope the tree will love the soil of the old world and no doubt when we have gone the tree will still be alive,” according to Danvers historian Harriet Tapley.

In 1809, Salem diarist William Bentley sent pears from the Endicott Pear Tree to former President John Adams. Adams planted the seeds and wrote, “I have several young Endicotts … in my garden. They are very flourishing and if I can guard them from accident I hope they will be an ornament to this farm and a comfort to some good citizens 200 years hence.”

In 1904, the Boston Globe reported the tree bore fruit during the last season, although the pears were had ‘not of too pleasant flavor.’

A Worthy Shoot

Lucy Larcom wrote a poem to commemorate the Endicott Pear Tree for Arbor Day in 1890:

Who would not be proud to say
Of the deed he does to-day,
If it be a worthy shoot
From an honorable root,
That, when centuries had passed,
Bloom an fruitage still would last,–
Still a growing, breathing thing–
Autumn, with the heart of spring.

In 1964, vandals ripped off the limbs and jumped up and down on them, leaving two trunks five to six feet high. Several weeks later, shoots appeared and the tree grew again. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was erected to protect the tree. Later, a more attractive fence was built.

The Endicott Pear Tree, 1920

The farm passed down through generations of Endicotts. William Endicott posed in the 1925 photo above with the tree. Ultimately Osram Sylvania bought the farm, and today the land belongs to Massachusetts General Hospital/North Shore Center for Outpatient Care.

To learn about acquiring an Endicott Pear Tree, click here. This story was updated in 2023.

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Boston’s J. Wright Boott – A Tale of Orchids and Insanity

In March of 1845, J. Wright Boott wrote a letter to his old friend and business partner, John Amory Lowell; with it he enclosed his will and wrote that he planned to kill himself. ‘Please don’t think any less of me,’ he added.

For J. Wright Boott, life had become unbearable. But exactly why it happened spilled out into a debate that ran for years between prominent Boston families. One camp held that he had been harassed to the point of despair by two of his siblings. The other said his end resulted from insanity – that his mental condition had gradually deteriorated from mildly peculiar to outright madness.

National Park Service artwork, Kathleen Konicek-Moran

J. Wright Boott

The story starts in 1817 when Boott was 31. Boston businessman Kirk Boott died, leaving an estate worth $280,000 (more than $4 million today). For Boott’s son and business partner, J. Wright Boott, the receipt of such a fortune might seem like a great gift. But the burden of managing the estate and looking after his siblings proved too much to handle.

Kirk Boott came late to the scene of Boston Brahmins. He arrived in Boston from England in 1783 and set up business as a wholesaler. His connections in England and the unquenchable appetite for European fine goods in New England combined to quickly make him a wealthy man.

Boott built for himself a mansion in Boston’s Bowdoin Square (at roughly the corner of Bowdoin and Cambridge Streets). He brought his two oldest sons, J. Wright and and James, into his business and renamed it Kirk Boott & Sons.

In 1817, as Kirk died, the fortunes of the Boott company took a turn for the worse. Boott had profited throughout the War of 1812. But after the war, America dropped tariffs against English goods. The Boott company found that its inventory on-hand could now be imported at lower cost.

The merchants that it sold to struggled to pay for their goods, and many failed. Back in England, an uncle of the Bootts’ declared bankruptcy, owing the firm £10,000. All of this drained the value of Boott’s inheritance, and for the next 20 years he struggled to manage the expenses of his younger siblings. He launched them into business and marriage.

Time To Retire

By 1830, Wright Boott prepared to retire from active business. He had backed his two brothers-in-law in a foundry that nearly bankrupted him, and he had worked with his partner, James A. Lowell, in a short-lived wholesaling partnership.

In 1822, he had personally invested in the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. His younger brother Kirk moved north to help establish the City of Lowell. Backed by Boston’s wealthy families, enormous fortunes grew from the Lowell mills.

Kirk Boott

The younger Kirk Boott encouraged his brother to take a more active role in operating the mills, but Wright declined. He had only one true passion left: his plants. Boott, who had collected and grown plants for many years, embraced the orchid craze sweeping the country. When relatives would travel to England they would send special plants back for Boott. He even discovered a plant in New Hampshire’s White Mountains named for him: Rattlesnake or Boott’s Root (Prenanthes boottii).

Boott’s collection was a large and acclaimed one among Boston’s horticulturalists. In her book So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens, Alan Emmett notes that his flowers were included in the Massachusetts’ Horticultural Society’s first exhibit in 1834 at Faneuil Hall. Though he became less active in the society, his plants were so well known they were still being featured in the society’s publications.

Family Feud

In his 50s Boott began withdrawing from society. His mother moved to England. Boott, living alone in the mansion at Bowdoin Square, grew increasingly irascible.

Then the family finally imploded. Boott’s younger sister Elizabeth had married Edward Brooks – an heir to an enormous fortune of his father, Peter. The Brookses were well-connected among Boston elites.

Brooks did not get along with J. Wright Boott. One day in 1844 Elizabeth visited Wright at the family mansion and took offense at two of her nephews, also visiting. At noon she encountered the boys still lounging over breakfast, reading newspapers and smoking cigars. They rudely ignored her.

Elizabeth wrote to her mother complaining of the situation. That infuriated Boott, who believed Elizabeth was needlessly agitating the family. When he ignored both her and her husband at a family gathering, Edward Brooks took offense.

Finally, Brooks said, he would no longer tolerate Wright Boott’s rudeness. He wrote to Wright’s siblings and told them he and Elizabeth would no longer associate with them if they remained on friendly terms with Wright. They declined, preferring to remain neutral.

His only ally in the fight was Wright’s youngest brother, William, who had quarreled with Wright.

William and Wright Boott

William and Wright had been fast friends, though William had a reckless streak. He had a history of ingratiating himself with Wright when he needed money, but criticizing him behind his back for his temper. Much of his inheritance had been spent on travels in Europe. In 1834 he had been arrested for participating in a duel, and Wright stood by him.

Finally, though, the two brothers fought and William moved out of the family mansion. The house was now occupied by Boott and his widowed sister. They barely spoke, if at all. Boott was convinced she had allied herself with the Brooks’ against him, and forbade them from visiting.

John Amory Lowell

The mansion was part of the Kirk Boott estate, and it had been left for his widow’s use for as long as she lived. However, having moved to England with another of her sons, Boott’s mother consented to have the house and its contents sold, the proceeds to be distributed in line with the terms of his father’s will.

At the sale, Boott learned that he needed his brothers and sisters to sign off on the deed. They refused, until Boott provided an accounting for how he had handled their father’s estate. The estate had long been settled. In 1833 all parties had agreed that Boott had settled affairs and they had no claims against him. Now, however, egged on by Brooks, the family wanted more proof.

The accounts were presented and, it turned out, they showed Boott had given his brothers and sisters more than they were actually entitled to. Brooks was not satisfied the accounts were correct, but he got no chance to challenge them before Boott killed himself.

Dueling Pamphlets

Before he died, Boott rewrote his will. He left the major portion of his fortune to his sister Anne, with whom he had never quarreled. Brooks, William Boott and his sister Mary challenged the will, but they soon dropped the case. Word had spread that Boott had been hounded to suicide by his hostile siblings, and Brooks suspected Lowell, Boott’s executor, was behind the stories and decided to make his case public.

In 1847 he published a 250-page, wide-ranging attack on Lowell and Boott: A correspondence between Edward Brooks and John A. Lowell. It laid out his position that Boott had mismanaged his father’s estate and invested it for his own purposes. He bluntly stated that Boott was insane, and generally aired out the family linen.

Lowell, however, was not one to shy away from a fight. To defend the honor of his friend and business partner, in 1848 he published Reply to a pamphlet recently circulated by Mr. Edward Brooks, which came in at 224 pages. It was a well-argued and thorough rebuttal that tended to clear his name and Boott’s name, and establish that Boott, while difficult, was probably sane. He pointed out that he had offered to have an open trial on either the issues of Bootts’ use of the funds or his insanity, but the family declined to proceed.

Now looking either foolish, dishonest or both, Brooks dredged the whole story up again with a rambling 836-page rebuttal, An Answer to the Pamphlet of Mr. John A. Lowell. Published in 1851, a full six years after Boott’s suicide, it did little to clarify matters.

Legacies

The one thing John Lowell did get out of the whole affair was Boott’s collection of orchids and other plants, which he left to him. Lowell displayed and eventually passed them on to other collectors. The Boott mansion, meanwhile, was demolished to make way for the Revere House Hotel. That, in turn, burned down in 1912.

Kirk Boott’s greatest legacy, apart from orchids, was his son Kirk’s participation in the founding of Lowell, where the Boott Mills still exist today.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Justin Winsor, the Genealogy Nut Who Founded the Library Profession

Libraries might be very different places today were it not for Justin Winsor, who became the head librarian at the Boston Public Library through a twist of fate in 1868.

Reading Room of the Boston Public Liblrary, 1871.

Reading Room of the Boston Public Library, 1871.

He was 34 years old and had never had a real job. For many years he lived at his parents’ home with his wife, doing a lot of reading and writing. As a member of Boston’s Brahmin class, he was named in 1867 to the Boston Public Library board of trustees. After the death of one superintendent and the serious illness of a second, the trustees of the fledgling institution asked Justin Winsor to fill in temporarily. He stayed for nine years.

Justin Winsor

Libraries until then were repositories of books for the elite. Justin Winsor fought to open the Boston Public Library to everyone. He worked to establish branch libraries, extend hours and relax restrictions on borrowing books. He is credited with founding the librarian profession along with the American Library Association, but he was also a historian, genealogist and cartographer.

Justin Winsor

He was born on Jan. 2, 1831, in Boston, just after his parents moved from Duxbury.

His father, Nathaniel Winsor, was a wealthy shipping merchant who controlled a shipping line to New Orleans and established a regular shipping line between the Atlantic Coast and San Francisco. Nathaniel Winsor also had the exclusive right to charter vessels and transport troops from Boston for the Mexican War.

Justin Winsor was a Mayflower descendant on both sides of his family, and used to say of his daughter Constance, “that no one living had more Pilgrim blood than she.” (His biographer, Horace Elisha Scudder noted, “If anyone could have disputed this statement a little later, it would have been his granddaughter, Penelope Barker Noyes.”)

He was an avid reader who hated going to church because it took away from his reading. “I don’t believe, if it were not for my mother, I should ever go to church, for I am always uneasy there,” he wrote. “I don’t hear one sermon in ten that will pay me sufficiently for the loss I sustain.”

A good book induced thinking, he believed, but a sermon gave him nothing new to think about because the substance never varied.

Harvard

When still a schoolboy he had attended meetings of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

As a young man, Justin Winsor aspired to literary fame and managed to meet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on the pretense he was doing genealogical research.

During his freshman year at Harvard he published a history of the Town of Duxbury, with genealogical tables. The Harvard librarian, John Langdon Sibley, ‘must have looked with mingled respect and concern’ at him,’ according to Scudder.

While at Harvard he spent more money on books than on his horse, his tuition and his living expenses.

But Justin Winsor hated college, probably because it interfered with his reading, so he dropped out. He went to Europe after his junior year and learned to speak Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian — all fluently.

He returned to Harvard, however. After nine years at the Boston Public Library, he had a tiff with an alderman, so he left to work as Harvard’s librarian.

Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, 1871. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, 1858-95. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Work and Play

He loved the theater and wanted to be a playwright before joining the library. One day he sat down after breakfast to write a farce and finished it by dinner. Two days later he wrote another one. He tried to interest Boston theatrical producers in his plays, but failed.

Known for his prodigious capacity for work, Justin Winsor edited some of the most important historical publications of the 19th century. They include the Reader’s Handbook of American History in 1879, four volumes of The Memorial History of Boston in 1880–1881 and eight volumes of the Narrative and Critical History of America from 1884–1889.

Boston Public Library, McKim Building

He knew more about American maps than anyone. He opened the new field of American historical cartography, which applies information from maps to answer historical questions.

Though he was exceptionally busy and productive, he was also very sociable. His friend and biographer Edward Channing wrote that he used a time-management technique to balance work and sociability.

“While at the Boston Public Library he trained himself to interruption, stopping his pen in the middle of a sentence instead of at the end,” wrote Channing. “In this way he was able to take up the unfinished thought at once upon the departure of his visitor.”

Justin Winsor died Oct. 27, 1897.

Photos: “Reading Room of the Boston Public Library” by J. J. Harley – Scan of 1871 newspaper. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. Boston Public Library McKim building By Fcb981 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2836520.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Eleonora Sears, Brahmin Bad Girl on the Tennis Courts (and Polo Field and Squash Court…)

Eleonora Sears pioneered women’s sports in the way only a Boston blueblood could. When she took up long-distance walking from Boston to Newport, R.I., her chauffeur followed at a discreet distance with a thermos and sandwiches.

Eleonora Sears on the tennis court.

Eleonora Sears was a model of social decorum in the mansions of the rich. On the athletic field, however, she shattered the rules during the first half of the 20^th century. She rode horses in pants, crashed men-only squash courts and shocked tennis spectators by playing in rolled-up sleeves. During her lifetime, she accumulated 240 trophies.

She succeeded in sports when it wasn’t thought important for women to succeed. “Sports were never seen as a proving ground for women, but Eleo made it a proving ground,” said her biographer, Peggy Miller Franck.

Multi-Champion

When Eleonora Sears died in 1968 at the age of 86, Boston Globe sportswriter Victor Jones wrote, she ‘was probably the most versatile performer that sports has ever produced — not just the most versatile female performer, but the most versatile, period.’

She was a four-time national tennis champion, the first women’s squash champion and an accomplished horsewoman who in 1909 became the first woman to ride a horse in a major polo match.

She played 19 sports, including tennis, ice skating, horseback riding, yacht racing, rifle shooting, boxing and football.

Off the field she walked, often commuting the 20 miles from her Beacon Hill home to her summer home in Prides Crossing, Mass. In her 50s walked the 42 miles from Fontainebleu to the Ritz Bar in Paris.

She also was one of the first women to race a car, to fight a speeding ticket and to fly an airplane.

Eleonora Sears, Brahmin

Eleonora Sears was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, born on Sept. 28, 1881, the second child and only daughter of Boston real estate and shipping tycoon Frederick Richard Sears and Eleonora Randolph Coolidge Sears. Her ancestors included Thomas Jefferson (her great-great-grandfather), John Winthrop and Massachusetts Gov. James Sullivan. She was Henry Cabot Lodge’s cousin.

“I began exercising the first time I fell out of my crib,” she said, according to her obituary in the New York Times.

She divided her time between tony Pride’s Crossing in Beverly, Mass., and Palm Beach. Along the way, she used her wealth and social standing to break down barriers for women who lacked that silver spoon at birth.

Her father introduced her to tennis. He was one of the first to play the game in America, with Dr. James Dwight in Nahant, Mass., in 1874. Her uncle Richard Sears was the first U.S. national tennis champion, winning seven straight championships from 1881 to 1887.

Eleonora Sears by John Singer Sargent.

Eleonora played tennis with the Astors and befriended the Roosevelts. She sat for a sketch by John Singer Sargent, at his request. “She looked fine in evening clothes, and didn’t look out of place behind a silver tea service,” wrote Jones.

Known as Eleo, she made the best-dressed women’s lists during the early 20th century. “It isn’t my ambition to be the best dressed women in Boston,” she said. “I think that interest in clothes should be perfectly casual.”

Pants and Cigarettes

She attended society balls, weddings and debuts, but she occasionally broke the rules of her social class even off the field. In 1910, she smoked in the lobby of Boston’s Copley Square Hotel because men were allowed to and women weren’t. Police arrested her.

Eleo Sears at a society wedding on Long Island in 1915.

In 1911, newspapers reported her engagement to Harold S. Vanderbilt, and in 1924 she made news by dancing with the Prince of Wales. But she never married and her contemporaries assumed she was gay.

“Her sexual orientation certainly formed her character, and gave her the drive,” Franck told the Windy City Times. “She was tremendously courageous in the way that she was willing to challenge, in a very public way, the very narrow role that woman had.

Her aggressive style of play made her a fan favorite on the tennis courts. She won the U.S. national doubles title four times between 1911 and 1917, and the national mixed doubles championship in 1916.

In 1909, Eleonora shocked people by riding onto the Burlingame Country Club’s polo field wearing pants. Ministers delivered sermons against her wardrobe choice. The California Mother’s Club condemned her as immodest and unbecoming. “Such unconventional trousers and clothes of the masculine sex are contrary to the hard and fast customs of our ancestors,“ the club said in a statement.

Mother of Squash

Eleonora Sears broke through the Harvard Club’s ban on women, and by 1918 she was playing men on its squash courts. She excelled at the game and brought many women into it as president of the U.S. Women’s Squash Racquets Association. She was known as the ‘Mother of Squash.’

Eleonora Sears astride her polo pony. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

As a girl she loved horses, and she bred and rode them until she died. She displayed saddle horses, rode in jumping events, drove harness horses, rode to hounds — and even helped pay for the Boston Police Department’s mounted police unit.

She rode in steeplechases and once, on a bet in 1912, drove a carriage pulled by four horses down Fifth Avenue in New York. That same year she won a quarter horse race in San Diego.

Land and Sea

She also raced yachts and speedboats, and swam the 4-1/2 miles from Bailey’s Beach to First Beach in Newport, R.I. — the first to do so.

Her habit of long-distance walking came from her father. In 1925, she walked the 47 miles from Boston to Providence in 9 hours and 53 minutes. At the age of 46, she competed against Olympic marathoner Bill Agee in a walk from Laurel, Md., to Baltimore. She also once walked the 73 miles from Newport to Boston in 17 hours.

Eleonora Sears died on March 16, 1968 at age 86, four years before the enactment of Title IX, which prohibited discrimination against women in school sports. She was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, the Show Jumping Hall of Fame, the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame and the United States Squash Hall of Fame.

This story about Eleonora Sears was updated in 2022.

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What They Say in New England About Local Characters and Customs

[jpshare]Henry Wheeler Shaw, the 19^th-century humorist known as Josh Billings, said genuine proverbs are like good cambric needles: short, sharp and shiny. In New England, there are plenty of them, about the weather, about holidays and about each other.

In Bath, N.H., someone who makes a strong but odd statement was said to be ‘equal to Priest Sutherland,’ a minister in the town for 50 years who made strong but odd statements.

Also in New Hampshire, ‘leaning toward Sawyers’ was an expression used when someone left the house surreptitiously for a drink. The Sawyer family kept a store where drinks could be purchased in Sugar Hill.

Maine loggers blamed annoyances and misfortune on the mythical character Sock Saunders. If a logger slipped on a log but caught himself in time, he said, “Foxed you that time, Sock Saunders.” If he cut himself, he said, “Got me that time, Sock Saunders.’

A Connecticut toast goes, “Here’s to the Nutmeg State—who has a grater?”

In Massachusetts, they say a rib was taken off Billerica to make Bedford. And for someone who finally realizes something obvious, they say, ‘Dawn breaks over Marblehead.’ When Marbleheaders ran into each other they’d say, “Down bucket,” or “To hell I pitch it.” No one seems to know why.

Travelers used to say that Cape Codders called a house a house, but a house with a shed was a village. (That no longer applies.) Cape Codders were called ‘Chowderheads’ and ‘Mooncussers.’ Cape Codders called people who lived off the Cape ‘Off-Capers.’

Nantucketers called Martha’s Vineyard residents ‘Old Town Turkeys,’ while a Nantucketer was a ‘Scrap Islander’ to a denizen of Martha’s Vineyard. Nantucketers liked to say something was ‘as handy as Caleb’s cheese,’ referring to Caleb Macy, who liked cheese so much he kept one hanging from a string in his sitting room.

Northampton, Mass., was called ‘Pudding Town’ and its people ‘Puddingers,’ after the residents’ custom of eating hasty pudding and milk for Saturday evening supper.

All Boston residents were ‘beaneaters,’ and Boston folk were ‘full of notions.’ ‘Brahmins’ were the clannish, aloof, old New England families. Of them it was said,

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.

‘Cold roast Boston’ referred to Brahmins because they ate roast beef on Sunday and cold leftovers on Monday. The Codfish Aristocracy was a class of nouveau riche who had acquired wealth from the codfishing industry.

Poor Irish were ‘shanty Irish,’ while shanty Irish with notions of respectability were ‘lace-curtain Irish.’ Above the ‘lace-curtain Irish’ were the ‘two-bathroom Irish,’ then the ‘wall-to-wall Irish,’ then at the pinnacle of Irish society were ‘Irish who had fruit in the house when no one was sick.’

‘Black Irish’ were Irish people with dark hair and eyes, said to be descendants of shipwrecked sailors of the Spanish Armada.

Harvard’s battle cry of ‘Oh, Rinehart,’ started on June 11, 1900, when an undergraduate called up to the dormitory window for John Bryce Gordon Rinehart (Class of 1900). His cry was picked up across the Yard by hundreds of students, and was repeated during any campus ruckus.

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Derby, Vt., Harbors a Wealthy Kidnapper and Her Son, Allen Thorndike Rice

In 1860, wealthy kidnapper Elizabeth Thorndike Rice hid in Derby, Vt., with her son as her abusive ex-husband tried to find them. Henry Rice was hell-bent on recapturing their only child, 8-year-old Allen Thorndike Rice, and he was unlikely to share custody of him. After he reneged on their agreement to let Allen visit them alternately on school vacations, Elizabeth Rice hired several men to abduct him from his school in Nahant, Mass.

Allen Rice in costume for a party, much later in life.

Allen Thorndike Rice in costume for a party, much later in life.

She enlisted the help of a family friend and a chivalrous stranger in Derby, Vt., to escape from her husband and his small army of detectives.

Henry Rice was a wealthy Baltimore businessman and a gambler. He had begun to abuse his wife shortly after their marriage. Her health had failed and she refused to sign a will drawn up by him – a will that left all her money to him and his heirs.

For weeks, she and Allen hid out in the woods and in strangers’ homes, always ready to move on at a moment’s notice and several times coming close to discovery. Newspapers eagerly covered the celebrated custody case, with sightings of Allen and his wealthy kidnapper mother reported throughout New England.

Allen Thorndike Rice Kidnapped

Allen Thorndike Rice was kidnapped by several men who drove up to his school, carried him out and threw him into a carriage.

Future U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, 10, witnessed the abduction and later testified against one of the kidnappers.

Elizabeth Rice had paid the men to abduct Allen and bring him to her in Boston, where she disguised him as a girl. They quickly set out for a hotel in Stanstead, Quebec, with two other women.

The carriage driver returned to Boston and, under the influence of alcohol, gabbed about his journey.

Henry Rice’s detectives heard about it and headed for Stanstead, where they posed as salesmen, drovers and summer visitors. Sheriffs, constables and police throughout New England and New York were notified to be on the lookout for them.

Elizabeth Rice began to get nervous. She wrote to a trusted friend in Boston, William Dwight, asking if he knew anyone who could hide her and her son.

Dwight replied she should contact John Kelley, a prosperous merchant and hop dealer in Derby, Vt., just over the border. He also wrote to John Kelley and told him Mrs. Rice was a much persecuted woman. It would be a generous thing to do to, he wrote, to help her keep her child.

John Kelley to the Rescue

Elizabeth Rice found John Kelley in Derby. Kelley sent a team to Stanstead to bring them to Derby Center. All four were brought to his brother Daniel’s house, where they stayed a week.

Meanwhile, Kelley began to suspect strangers in town were Rice’s detectives. Rice had promised a reward of $500 for returning his child, and townspeople were aiding in the search. And then a clerk in his store heard a telegraphed message from one detective to another about clues in the search. They were getting close, and Elizabeth Rice was no longer safe.

John Kelley knew he had to do something, but what?

A village in Derby, Vt., where Allen Thorndike Rice hid out.

At dusk he hitched up his wagon, hid under the seat and had his clerk drive to his brother Daniel’s house. He had brought food and blankets, and took mother and son into the woods with his brother William. They spent 24 hours in the woods under William’s care. The next morning Henry Rice and his detectives came to John Kelley’s door.

That night, Kelley returned to the their hiding place in the woods undetected. He told them they must find a new hiding place with one of the few townspeople they could trust.

Under Cover of Darkness

It was a moonlit night, though clouds occasionally obscured the moon. They traveled stealthily through the woods and arrived at the main road. When the moon hid behind the clouds they dashed across the road. At one point they heard the voices of detectives looking for them.

They arrived at Alvin Robbins’ house and knocked at the door, but it was so late the inhabitants didn’t answer it for quite some time. Finally the door opened and Kelley asked Robbins to take in Elizabeth and Allen Rice. Robbins said he couldn’t because the house was filled with girls who picked his hops. Robbins’ wife, moved by the sight of the bedraggled, tired and wet mother and child, persuaded her husband to take them in.

They stayed for three weeks locked in a room that had a trap door in the floor covered by a rug. When anyone came to the house, they vanished into a hole under the cellar. To throw off suspicions that they were staying in the house, the Robbins had a party for the hop pickers.

Escape

Rice’s detectives hadn’t let up the hunt. They staked out John Kelley’s house to glean a clue about the fugitives’ whereabouts. Elizabeth at all times filled her pockets with cayenne, with which she intended to blind anyone who tried to catch her.

Alvin Robbins sent for Dr. Carpenter on the pretense that someone in the house was sick. Dr. Carpenter took messages back and forth between the Robbins and Kelley houses. In that way they came up with a plan to throw the detectives off their trail.

Kelley’s clerk, dressed as a woman, climbed into Dr. Carpenter’s wagon. Dr. Carpenter drove the wagon out of his barn at full speed and in view of the watchful detectives. The detectives harnessed their horses and followed.

About a mile toward Island Pond, the clerk got out and walked back to town. Dr. Carpenter stayed at a friend’s house that night. The following day he threw buckets of water over his horse to make it look as if it had been driven hard, and rode openly into Derby Center. The detectives assumed he had taken Allen to Island Pond, 20 miles away, and resumed their search there. Frustrated, they gave up and returned to Boston.

Aftermath

William Dwight and John Kelley came up with a plan to spirit Elizabeth and Allen Rice out of the country. Allen hid under the seat of a wagon and was taken to a train, which carried him to Biddeford, Maine. Elizabeth Rice took a separate train and met her son in Biddeford. They boarded a schooner, which intercepted an oceangoing vessel bound for Europe.

Elizabeth and Allen Rice settled in Germany and France. Elizabeth died in 1866 and Allen returned to America, where he lived with his father. Henry Rice died three years later, and Allen matriculated at Oxford. In 1877, he purchased the North American Review and dramatically expanded its circulation. He was named minister to Russia by President Benjamin Harrison, but died unexpectedly in May 1889 before assuming the post.

With thanks to Proceedings of the Orleans County Historical Society, for the Year Ending August 1888. For the story of Henry Cabot Lodge testifying against the kidnapper, click here. This story was updated in 2021.

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