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Charlestown Mass.

Samuel Morse Paints 38 Masterpieces (And Then Invents the Telegraph)

Samuel Morse as a young man wanted nothing more than to be an artist, an aspiration upon which his Puritan parents frowned. But they saw how much he wanted it, and so they finally acquiesced.

He traveled to Europe to study painting. In the early 19th century, the United States had no museums to speak of. Young artists went to Europe to learn how to paint and sculpt.

The Gallery of the Louvre by Samuel Morse

Morse improved tremendously while studying in London. He then established himself as a portrait painter in the United States, but he wanted to do more. So he returned to Europe and threw himself into studying Renaissance art. In Paris, Morse decided to create a giant painting that featured European masterpieces. He wanted to give art students in America a chance to study the Old Masters without having to travel to Europe.

The painting, called The Gallery of the Louvre, flopped. Critics liked it, but the public didn’t.

Fortunately for Samuel Morse, he had a side hustle.

Samuel Morse

He was born April 27, 1891, to Jedediah Morse and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese Morse in Charlestown, Mass. His father, a stern Calvinist minister, had, like his son, another interest. Jedediah Morse was an avid geographer.

Known as Finley, Morse attended Phillips Academy in Andover and then, at 14, Yale College. At Yale, he studied religious philosophy, mathematics and the science of horses (really). He also studied electricity under Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day. He made enough money painting to support himself during college.

Samuel Morse self-portrait, 1812

After college, his father apprenticed him to a bookstore owner, but he insisted he wanted to be an artist. Finally, his parents acquiesced. In 1811, they sent him to London to study painting with a noted American painter, Washington Allston.

Young Americans went to Europe in those days because they wanted to excel in their work. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied medicine at the Ecole de Medecine. Charles Sumner became an abolitionist after attending lectures with black students at the Sorbonne. James Fenimore Cooper, already a successful author, wrote several books in Paris and started writing about politics for newspapers.

“In this country, young in the arts, there are few means of improvement,” wrote Samuel Morse’s father in a letter of introduction for his son.

A Painter’s Life

In London, Morse improved rapidly under Allston’s tutelage. Upon his return to the United States he began to win portrait commissions. He painted John Adams, James Monroe, Eli Whitney and Noah Webster.

In 1818 he married Lucretia Pickering Walker in Concord, N.H. They moved to New Haven, but Morse led the itinerant life of a painter, chasing commissions in Washington, D.C., New York and Charleston, S.C. He eventually opened a studio in New York City.

In 1825 he was working in Washington, D.C., on a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, then visiting the United States. Lucretia gave birth to their third child, and then died of a heart attack in New Haven. Morse’s father sent him the news in a letter, but Lucretia had been buried for several days by the time he got the letter and returned to New Haven.

Soon thereafter, his father and mother both died. Grief-stricken, he left his children in the care of relatives and moved to Europe.

By 1831 he was living in Paris, where he buried himself in the Louvre.

Marquis de Lafayette by Samuel Morse

Samuel Morse at the Louvre

The young Americans in Paris in the 1830s found the Louvre amazing. On Sundays, people from all walks of life crowded into the galleries.

Morse thought he’d do his countrymen a favor and introduce them to the masterpieces of European painting. He decided to paint the greatest works exhibited in the Louvre — all in one giant painting, six feet high by nine feet long.

Just selecting several dozen of the greatest paintings from the 1,250 hung on the museum’s walls was a task in itself. Morse chose four by Titian, three by Murillo and Van Dyke and two by Veronese, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Guido Reni and Rubens. Leonardo da Vinci only got one — the Mona Lisa.

For months, Morse spent every day in the Louvre from 9 am to closing time at 4 pm. Most days people could find him on a scaffold in front of a masterpiece, sometimes 12 feet above the floor. Or they’d find him moving the scaffold around to another masterpiece. Eventually, the American painter became as much of an attraction as the paintings themselves.

His close friend and fellow expatriate, James Fenimore Cooper, came to the Louvre every day to visit him. At the time, Cooper reigned as the most popular American author due to his Leatherstocking tales.

Morse returned home in the fall of 1832.

He finished The Gallery of the Louvre in the United States, and then put it on exhibit in New York for an admission price of 25 cents.

Box Office Poison

The crowds didn’t exactly flock to see it.

Morse had high hopes for the sale of the painting, thinking he could get $2,500 for it. Cooper had hinted he’d buy it. Morse also thought the painting would help him clinch the commission to paint a mural in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

Cooper didn’t buy the painting, and John Trumbull got the commission for the Capitol Rotunda. Morse sold The Gallery of the Louvre for a disappointing $1,300 to a man named George Hyde Clarke, a neighbor of Cooper’s in Cooperstown, N.Y.

By 1837, perhaps burned out by his Louvre experience, Morse abandoned his art career. “Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me,” he wrote to Cooper. “I have no wish to be remembered as a painter.”

Something Else

Morse, in Paris, had found something else to interest him: the French telegraph outside of Paris.

In 1792, a French inventor named Claude Chappe invented a semaphore system to relay messages faster than post riders could. It included a tower within sight of another tower on top of a telegraph hill. On top of the tower were movable shutters – also called blades or paddles. An operator could move them into different positions to represent different letters of the alphabet.

Samuel Morse in 1840

When an operator in the tower saw the semaphore move on the neighboring hill, he would pick up the message and then send it to the next relay tower. The French used the system along the coast to warn of the approach of British warships. (Massachusetts also used that system for a while.)

Morse talked about the system to his friends in Paris, complaining about its slowness. He often mentioned his idea of communicating messages through an electric wire. Cooper later admitted he thought the idea “chimerical.”

Then on his voyage home aboard the Sully, Morse met Bostonian Charles T. Jackson. Jackson told him about European experiments in electromagnetism. That gave Morse the idea for an electromagnetic telegraph using a system of dots and dashes.

But that is another story. (Read it here.)

In 1982, the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago bought the painting for $1.325 million, the highest price paid for an American painting up to that time.

With thanks to David McCulloch, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.

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A Fake Priest Gets a New England Mob Boss Out of Prison

Ray Patriarca ruled as the New England mob boss for 25 years from his Coin-O-Matic “vending business” on Atwell’s Avenue in Providence. He was a friendly guy but fatal, known for his ruthlessness and his political clout.

He rose to the top of organized crime in New England in the 1950s with the help of Dan Coakley, a Boston politician on the take. Coakley freed Patriarca from prison by inventing an Irish priest who pleaded to let the nice young man go home and take care of his mother.

The New England mob boss on his way up

It’s a classic tale featuring vivid characters: a New England mob boss called El Padrone, a Boston Irish pol named Dapper Dan, a governor nicknamed Chowderhead and a fictional Father Fagin, as in the Dickens character who led children into crime.

The pardon that Dapper Dan Coakley got for Ray Patriarca turned out to be a turning point for both men. It ruined Coakley, and it helped Patriarca’s rise in the mob.

Ray Patriarca, New England Mob Boss

He was born Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca on St. Patrick’s Day, 1908, in Worcester, Mass. His father, Eleuterio, had immigrated from southern Italy; his mother, Mary Jane DeNubile, had Italian ancestry.

Five years later the family moved to Providence, where his father ran a liquor store. Raymond left school at age eight to help support the family, shining shoes and working as a bellhop. Then Eleuterio died when Ray was 17, setting him adrift. He discovered that Prohibition offered upward mobility for a young man on the make—through smuggling, hijacking and armed robbery.

He had a pleasant manner, but he could order a hit on a wayward underling with an abrupt, “Do it.” Stealing, however, was his first love. “The happiest days of my life were when I was on the street clipping,” he once said.

In 1929 the Mafia (called “The Office” by Rhode Island mobsters) inducted him into its ranks. From Rhode Island, he forged ties with the New York Profaci and Genovese families, who began to view him as their “can-do” guy in New England.

Vito Genovese

Caught

As he approached 30 he had a reputation and a rap sheet as a .gunman, gambler, pimp, thief, extortionist, bootlegger, hijacker and murder suspect.

On Feb. 12, 1938, Patriarca and his accomplices held up the Wallbank Jewelry Company in Brookline, stealing $12,000 worth of gold and gems along with an employee’s car. Five nights later, they pulled off another heist at the United Optical Plant in Webster. A barking dog alerted police, who found Patriarca hiding under a bench. They arrested him.

In August he pleaded guilty to the Brookline robbery and, in a separate trial, a jury found him guilty of the United Optical break-in. A judge sentenced him to three to five years in Charlestown State Prison.

Dapper Dan

Dapper Dan Coakley preferred a more genteel form of crime–the graft, blackmail and bribery kind.

Dan Coakley

He was born to Irish immigrant parents in Charlestown, Mass., in 1865. He won acceptance to the bar after studying law at his brother’s law firm. In 1910 he defended Big Bill Kelliher, who’d robbed the National City Bank of Cambridge. Kelliher got 18 years in jail, and from prison he claimed he’d given Coakley $23,000 to bribe the U.S. attorney and the jury.

Coakley’s later attempts to bribe district attorneys succeeded. He became the fixer for anyone who wanted an unpleasant charge of larceny, theft, prostitution or fraud to go away.

Coakley wasn’t above committing the odd crime himself. He once got hold of railroad magnate H.H. Hunnewell’s love letters to his mistress, and charged him $150,000 to get them back.

Fatty Arbuckle

In 1917, the film star Fatty Arbuckle came to Boston for a Copley Plaza dinner held by a group of movie producers. Afterward, they decanted to the Mishawum Manor, a house of ill repute run by one Brownie Kennedy. Brownie’s ladies accommodated the men in what the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court called an orgy of drink and lust… a debauch in a bawdy house … a stench in the nostrils of common decency. A photographer happened to be there, and a few days later Dan Coakley’s then-ally Mayor James Michael Curley called them to say they faced morals charges. It cost them $100,000 to make law enforcement forget the party.

Pardon Me

Coakley’s antics eventually got him disbarred. But in 1936 he won election to the Executive Council, which soon began recommending pardons to juvenile delinquents and notorious criminals. Gov. Charles “Chowderhead” Hurley signed them.

Gov. Charles Hurley

As historian Francis Russell put it, “the quality of Massachusetts mercy grew so strained that more convicts seemed to be leaving prison than entering.”

Most of the pardon petitions came from the hand of Councilor Dapper Dan Coakley.

The Fix Is In

Coakley filled his pardon petition for Ray Patriarca with lies. For starters, he called the future New England mob boss “a virtuous young man eager to be released from prison so that he might go home to his mother.”

A “Father Garneri” of Quincy signed a statement that he was anxious to express his opinion to the governor. Patriarca’s Providence pastor, “Father Fagen,” did the same. So did the Rev. Sixtus Brambilla of East Boston.

The Executive council granted the pardon and Patriarca was out the next day after serving 84 days of a three-to-five year sentence. Though he served for three different crimes, the pardon petition mentioned only one.

Leverett Saltonstall

On Election Day 1938, Massachusetts voters, tired of Chowderhead Hurley’s shenanigans, voted to replace him with a straight-arrow Republican, Leverett Saltonstall. Saltonstall appointed a commission to look into the paroles and pardons granted over the last 10 years.

Ironically, Patriarca’s wife Helen’s sister worked for Saltonstall.

Findings

On Dec. 20, 1938, Joseph Patriarca, Ray’s brother, checked into Boston’s Parker House, saying he wanted a room as near as possible to Dan Coakley’s suite, room 978, the commission found. Joe Patriarca got room 944.

A number of meetings followed between Coakley, Joe Patriarca, witnesses and priests. Money exchanged hands.

The Parker House in 1910

The commission found that Father Garneri of Quincy was actually the Rev. Philip Guarino of Waverly. He didn’t know Ray Patriarca, never discussed his pardon and had never authorized his signature. Father Fagen didn’t exist, except in Dan Coakley’s imagination. Coakley said he couldn’t think of the priest’s name but was thinking of Fagin, the character in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Father Sixtus Brambilla said he signed the petition as a favor to a donor, who’d told him Patriarca had just committed minor juvenile delinquencies.

The petition also asked to pardon Patriarca for one crime, though he served time concurrently for three.

Coakley also told Governor Hurley that no one had identified Patriarca in the Brookline jewelry theft. They had, but recanted, like many witnesses to Patriarca’s crimes.

The commission recommended Dapper Dan Coakley’s impeachment.

Fagin. He didn’t exist in real life, either

Mud Bath

Reporters dubbed the Senate trial the “Mud Bath.” It took the entire month of September 1941.

During the Mud Bath it came out that Patriarca didn’t even take care of his mother—his brother Joe did.

The trial also exposed Coakley’s Statehouse trickery. One executive councilor had told Coakley he would not vote for Patriarca’s pardon. But during the meeting to issue pardons he left for 15 minutes to take a phone call. The Patriarca pardon passed, and the councilor read about it in the newspaper the next day.

Patriarca even failed to give the customary thanks to the governor for the pardon.

Massachusetts Statehouse

Coakley offered a spirited defense, but the state Senate voted 33-6 to remove him from office.

As the senators filed out of the chamber, Coakley stood in the doorway greeting his supporters and glaring at those who voted against him. “I can say ‘forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’,” he then said in a statement to the press.

New England Mob Boss

Getting out of prison won Ray Patriarca new respect from the mob because it showed he had political clout.

In 1954, New England mob boss Philip Bruccola returned to Sicily, helped along by an IRS investigation into tax evasion. Patriarca stepped into his Italian footwear and ran the mob for the next 25 years.

Ray Patriarca, R.I. police I.D.

From his Coin-O-Matic building in Providence’s Italian section, Patriarca insisted he ran a legitimate vending machine company. Actually, he ran loan-sharking, gambling and pornography operations from Maine to Connecticut as well as real estate interests from Las Vegas to Florida.

Between 1962 and 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had the Coin-O-Matic bugged without a warrant. FBI agents heard talk of bribes to lawmakers, judges and governors’ appointees in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But the FBI couldn’t admit the evidence in court.

Over his lifetime, Ray Patriarca was arrested or indicted 28 times, convicted seven and imprisoned four for 11 years. But he honored the code of silence — omerta –and he never snitched to law enforcement.

He died of a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 76. Dan Coakley died in 1952 at the age of 86. He never finished his autobiography, The Sparkling Past.

Images: Ray Patriarca By Rhode Island State Police – http://www.wrko.com/whitey-watch, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40688140the impeachment]. Massachusetts Statehouse By King of Hearts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94906441.

With thanks to The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill and The Knave of Boston by Francis Russell for American Heritage August 1976. This story last updated in 2022.

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6 Fun Facts About Ezekiel Cheever, Puritan Schoolmaster

Ezekiel Cheever taught Latin, writing and arithmetic to the children of New England’s first Puritans for 70 years. He taught in New Haven, Boston, Charlestown and Ipswich, Mass., earning distinction as the ‘father of New England schoolmasters.’

When he arrived in the New World in 1637, New England was an isolated wilderness separated from the mother country by a vast ocean. For the Saints, or Puritans, to establish “Zion,” pious, educated men were needed, wrote Charles W. Allen. Ezekiel Cheever took his mission to heart, and taught many of the great men of their generation. His pupils included Judge Samuel Sewall, poet Michael Wigglesworth and Gov. Jonathan Belcher.

Cotton Mather

One pupil, Cotton Mather, delivered his funeral sermon, in which he called him “Master Socrates.”

“New England has never known a better,” Mather said.

Ezekiel Cheever

Born Jan. 25, 1614 in London, he came to Massachusetts toward the end of the great Puritan migration.

Soon after he arrived he went to New Haven Colony and taught for 12 years. He then moved to Ipswich, Mass., in 1650, where he taught for 11 years. Then on to Charlestown for nine years. He ended his career as the first master of the Boston Latin School, where he taught for 37 years.

Boston Latin School.

He married twice, first to Mary Culverwell for 11 years and then to Ellen Lathrop for 54. From 1639 to 1664, he had 12 children, but only nine survived to adulthood.

He taught in his home for most of 70 years. In the early years, he had a young and growing family. Historian Charles W. Allen concludes ‘the youngsters must have been confined to a small upper or adjacent chamber and kept entertained for the six to seven hours the house was used as a school.”

He never made much money, and more than once he had to beg local officials for back pay.

Ezekiel Cheever died Aug. 21, 1708 at the age of 93. Here are six fun facts about the old Puritan schoolmaster.

1. His Teaching Style—Not Progressive

He did not spare the rod. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Grandfather’s Chair, wrote,

It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birch rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils.

Ezekiel Cheever’s Latin textbook

He also wrote a textbook, probably the first in America. Called Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, American schools used it for at least a century. Hawthorne commented,

…the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys.”

2. He Hated Periwigs

The controversy over periwigs raged throughout New England during the 17^th century. The periwig was a highly styled wig, a fashion imported from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Samuel Sewall.

The early Puritans hated them, but they eventually won acceptance. Cotton Mather, for example, wore a long brown periwig.

Samuel Sewall, like Cheever, wore a black skullcap. He wrote a eulogy for Ezekiel Cheever that ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

3. He Helped the Puritan Project Succeed

During Cheever’s lifetime, colonial settlements grew into thriving towns along New England’s coast. Cheever gave hundreds of New England boys the tools to build those Puritan cities on hills. His best students entered Harvard and were ordained as ministers.

Map of New Haven in 1644, when Ezekiel Cheever lived there

Even those who didn’t do so well at Latin contributed to the success of the Puritan project.

Hawthorne described, as only Hawthorne could, what would happen to Ezekiel Cheever’s math students.

These boys are to be the merchants, shopkeepers, and mechanics of a future period. Hitherto they have traded only in marbles and apples. Hereafter some will send vessels to England for broadcloths and all sorts of manufactured wares, and to the West Indies for sugar, and rum, and coffee. Others will stand behind counters, and measure tape, and ribbon, and cambric by the yard. Others will upheave the blacksmith’s hammer, or drive the plane over the carpenter’s bench, or take the lapstone and the awl and learn the trade of shoemaking. Many will follow the sea, and become bold, rough sea-captains.

Sixty years after Ezekiel Cheever set foot in primitive Boston, the town contained 1,000 houses and 7,000 people dedicated to building schools and churches, wrote Henry Crocker in his A History of New England.

Boston Harbor around 1720

Toward the end of his career, Cheever earned 60 pounds a year at the Latin School, a handsome salary (when the town managed to pay it). He taught in a new schoolhouse, rather than his own house, and he even had an assistant – his grandson, Ezekiel Lewes.

4. He Was Extremely Pious

His pupil Cotton Mather described his ‘untiring abjuration of the Devil.’

Ezekiel Cheever believed the Puritans could grow spiritually and achieve perfection on earth in their new home. Mather struggled with that concept. He didn’t understand how saints could live among sinners on earth. When he brought the question to Cheever, the old schoolmaster replied,

What! The Spouse of CHRIST have the Foul Disease! Never tell me That!

5. His Beard Revealed His Mood

No images of Ezekiel Cheever exist, but an acquaintance, Samuel Maxwell, offered a description:

“He wore a long white beard terminating in a point; that when he stroked his beard to the point, it was a sign for the boys to stand clear.”

6. John Cheever Claimed Him as an Ancestor (But He Wasn’t)

The novelist John Cheever boasted of Ezekiel Cheever as his ancestor, but Ezekiel was just a cousin of his ancestor, Daniel Cheever. Nevertheless, John Cheever had a bit of obsession with Ezekiel. He wrote that he had nothing in his veins but ‘the blood of shipmasters and schoolteachers.’

John Cheever

Cheever talked about Ezekiel a lot in interviews, and named two main fictional characters after him: Ezekiel Farragut in Falconer and Ezekiel Cheever in his Wapshot books. He also named his Labrador retriever Ezekiel, and urged his son Ben (unsuccessfully) to give his son the name.

With thanks to Journey of Promise: West From Sempringham by Charles W. Allen.

Images: Boston Latin School plaque by By User:Swampyank / Swampyank at en.wikipedia – User:Swampyank, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17345900.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Brahmin Rough Riders of New England

Some people believe that the Rough Riders were almost all cowboys from out West. After all, it had earned the nickname “The Cowboy Regiment.”

But that wasn’t entirely the case, as you shall see. Brahmins from New England with refined backgrounds also joined the Rough Riders.

Men from every New England state volunteered for Teddy Roosevelt’s U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders. Massachusetts had as many as 25. As a matter of fact, the actual commander of the unit, Leonard Wood, hailed from New Hampshire. Frederic Remington featured Woodbury Kane from Rhode Island in his famous painting of the immortal charge up San Juan Hill.

Col. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders on top of San Juan Hill.

Roosevelt had four recruiting stations out West, in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the Oklahoma/Indian Territories. He had vast experience in the West and knew the cowboys already knew how to ride and shoot. But Roosevelt knew another target-rich area full of ready-for-action men: His wealthy, pedigreed friends throughout New York and New England.

Roosevelt put out the word. They responded in droves from polo clubs, boxing clubs, duck blinds, steeplechase courses, yacht clubs, Ivy League athletic fields and glee clubs. Many had graduated from Harvard.

One Rough Rider, James McClintock, who hailed from California, said they were in it for the adventure.

The Rough Riders are the stuff of legend, having generated a movie, a television show and, of course, a President. They were, however, one of the shortest lived units in American military history. They only existed for four months and 13 days before they disbanded.

Rhode Island Rough Riders

Woodbury Kane, Newport;Joseph S. Stevens, Newport; Norman Maxwell, Newport; Charles Hatch, Newport; Joseph F. Flynn, Cranston.

Rough Rider Woodbury Kane

Woodbury Kane, a classmate of Teddy Roosevelt’s at Harvard, was born in Newport, a cousin of John Jacob Astor IV. A noted yachtsman, he belonged to the New York Yacht Club and served on the crew of the Columbia in the 1899 America’s Cup Race. He was also a noted big game hunter.

After graduation, he lived the life of a bon vivant in Newport and New York. In April 1898 he and other East Coast friends joined the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry.

After enlistment, he, William Tiffany and other East Coast friends donated two $7,500 Colt machine guns to the unit. When the unit expanded to a thousand men he received a lieutenant’s commission.

While serving in the Rough Riders he was always noted for being dressed to a T, no matter the conditions. While leading K Troop in the charge on San Juan Hill, he was wounded in the forearm. Kane was awarded a citation for gallantry and promoted to captain.

He spent the rest of his life living the life of a dandy until a heart attack cut him down at the age of 46. His obituary noted he left no children, but he did leave his beloved polo pony.

Vermont

Ira A. Hill, Grand Isle; Wallace Batchelder, Chester.

Wallace Batchelder graduated from Chester Academy in Chester, Vt., before enlisting in the Rough Riders. He later fought in the Philippines under General Wood. After his service he returned to Vermont, where he became a lawyer and chaired the state’s committee to elect Roosevelt President of the United States in 1904. He later broke with Roosevelt, who in 1912 sent him a telegram telling him not to support any candidate who didn’t support Roosevelt. Batchelder replied he wouldn’t support Roosevelt.

New Hampshire Rough Riders

Dudley S. Dean, Laconia; Walter F. Hickey, Nashua; Leonard Wood, Winchester.

Leonard Wood was the actual commander of the Rough Riders; Teddy Roosevelt was his second in command.

A descendant of four Mayflower passengers, he trained as a physician at Harvard Medical School. He served as a major general in the Army. When he came to command the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry in Cuba, he was a seasoned Indian fighter in the West and had already been awarded the Medal of Honor. After the Spanish-American War, he served as Governor-General of the Philippines and contended for the Republican nomination for President in 1920.

Dean was an All American football quarterback for Harvard from 1888 to 1890. He participated in the charge on San Juan Hill. That was not to be his last military adventure. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant colonel In the U.S. Army Air Force. He was the executive producer of the play Winged Victory, which ran from November 1943 to May 1944. He lived until the age of 79, passing away in 1950.

Dudley Dean, football star

Dudley’s son John H. Dean played football for Harvard too. At Harvard, he befriended Joseph P. Kennedy and they spent summers together at Cohassett, Mass.

Maine

Guy Muncie, Calais; Harrison J. Holt, Portland; Frederick C. Wesley, Bangor.

Harrison Holt graduated from Phillips Andover and Harvard. Upon his Harvard graduation in 1898 he enlisted with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. After the war and some business ventures in Mexico he joined the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser as a reporter. Later in life he wrote novels and detective stories, including The Calendared Isles, a Romance of Casco Bay (read it here) and Midnight at Mears House.

Connecticut

Edward C. Hall, Wallingford.

Unlike most of the Ivy League Rough Riders, Edward Hall graduated from Yale, not Harvard. Upon graduation in 1894, he went to work for Westinghouse and did a brief stint at a North Dakota ranch before enlisting with the Rough Riders. After the war he joined General Electric in Lynn, Mass., then transferred to the Schenectady office, where he died in 1912.

Massachusetts

Harry A. Curtis, Boston; Prescott H. Belknap, Brookline; John D. Hubbell, Boston; Rufus K. Thomas, Boston; Wellman H. Saunders, Salem; John P. Gardner, Boston; Guy H. Scull, Boston; Harry A. Davis, Boston; Francis B. Crowninshield, Marblehead; William H. Mitchell, Salem; Winslow Clark, Milton; Edward F. Donnelly, Boston; Michael F. Hogan; William T. James, Fitchburg; Arthur M. Leroy, Boston; Raymond Morse, Springfield; Edward A. O’Brien, Charlestown; William J. Tudor, Boston; Harry C. White, Somerville.

Francis Boardman Crowninshield, another Harvard graduate, went on to become a noted international yachtsman. He fought with Troop K of the Rough Riders and took part in the charge up San Juan Hill. In 1900, he married Louise DuPont from the famous chemical family. In 1911, he won the King of Spain’s Cup in Spain, now among his many trophies at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Mass.

Rough Riders. Image courtesy New York Public Library.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

This story updated in 2022.

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Boston Holds a Water Celebration in 1848

On Oct. 25, 1848, a stream of water gushed from a fountain before 100,000 people assembled on Boston Common for the city’s great water celebration. Bells rang, rockets soared and people cheered, laughed, sang and even cried. A great civic undertaking had been completed.

The Water Celebration

The Cambridge Chronicle, reporting on the celebration, noted that the citizens of Boston had been annoyed for 30 years by the want of pure water. It had taken that long to solve the problem. Most of the delay was due to political controversy. It took only two years to build the aqueduct, dams, pipelines and gatehouses from Lake Cochituate in Natick.

And when the work was completed, Boston threw a water celebration of historic proportions.

Water, Water, Anywhere?

For years the people of Boston relied on cisterns, wells and a spring on Boston Common. As the town grew, private suppliers in 1796 introduced an alternative and began delivering water from Jamaica Pond through a system of hollow pine logs.

It worked until 1825, when Boston’s population more than doubled to about 43,000. Wells became brackish or went dry and the water table fell. A builder named George Cram testified that the city’s need for a public water supply was dire; in one case, 43 families were using a single well.

Mayor Josiah Quincy proposed a public water supply for the growing city (the population would grow to 127,000 by 1848). After a fire in April 1825 destroyed several dozen buildings in Boston, a committee was appointed to look into building a water works.

Quincy’s idea was opposed by private companies that wanted to supply the rapidly growing city and voters who feared a tax increase. ‘Steady and strenuous’ efforts were made for a public water supply, according to the King’s Dictionary of Boston.

After 23 years of controversy, work began under the supervision of three water commissioners – including Nathan Hale, nephew of the Revolutionary War spy and a journalist whose newspaper supported the diversion of water from Long Pond in Natick.

1852 map of the Cochituate Aqueduct

On Aug. 26, 1846, a small groundbreaking ceremony was held at Long Pond in Framingham. A polished steel blade with a rosewood handle and a plate with an appropriate inscription was used. Mayor Josiah Quincy, Jr., lifted the first shovelful of dirt into a wheelbarrow at that first water celebration. His cousin, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams, lifted the second, and Josiah Quincy, Sr., the third.

After the ceremony, the younger Quincy said the name Long Pond wasn’t memorable, and suggested an Indian name: Cochituate, which means ‘torrent’ or ‘place of rushing water.’ It was immediately adopted.

It took two years to build the waterworks, which included wooden dams, an aqueduct, granite gatehouses and pipelines to the Brookline Reservoir and smaller feeder reservoirs. The system was laid out by Ellis S. Chesbrough, who would later reverse the Chicago River, supervised the engineering. John B. Jervis, who designed the American steam locomotive and the Croton Aqueduct in New York, laid out the plans.

The Water Celebration

Principal Gatehouse in Brookline. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The great day began with a 100-gun salute and an immense parade through the city. Mayor Quincy gave a speech, at the end of which he asked if the people of Boston were ready for Cochituate water. The crowd roared, the gates opened and a stream of water 80 feet high burst from the Frog Pond Fountain.

Schoolchildren sang an ode written by poet James Russell Lowell for the occasion, which begins,

My name is water: I have sped
through strange, dark ways untried before
by pure desire of friendship led
Cochituate’s ambassador…

Mark Anthony DeWofe Howe, in his book Boston Common, described the scene:

When the water was turned on, and the fountain leaped high into the air, the school-children, assembled with every other element of the population, sang a song written by poet James Russell Lowell for the occasion…the bells rang, cannon were fired, rockets soared aloft; cheering, laughter and even tears paid their spontaneous tribute to the completion of a great undertaking.

A month later, Charlestown’s mayor toasted the father-and-son mayors. Noting that Josiah Quincy Sr., was responsible for building Quincy Market, the mayor called them ‘a very useful family for Boston — the father gave her a market — the son pure water, the one meat–the other drink.’

Lake Cochituate and the Brookline Reservoir are now parks listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as is the Principal Gatehouse. This story was updated in 2017.

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The British Plot to Poison Boston in 1776

In the days leading up to March 17, 1776, Massachusetts was on edge. British troops, under siege for nearly a year, prepared to leave Boston. The people had many worries. Would the British commander, Gen. William Howe burn the city? Would he plunder it? Or would he change his mind and stay? But few if any suspected a British plot to poison Boston.

Lord Howe evacuating Boston (March 1776) Engraving by J. Godfrey

The British army, hemmed in by rebel cannons, had decided to yield its position and flee to Halifax. Howe and American general George Washington had reached a tacit agreement. So long as the British could leave unmolested, they would not destroy Boston.

The Plot To Poison Boston

But Howe began losing control of his troops. The general had tried to create an orderly process for seizing citizens’ goods the military could use. The soldiers had to issue receipts and certificates for future payment. However, others saw this as a sign that he condoned looting.

Soldiers began plundering stores and homes for anything of value they could find. Frustrated, Howe issued a proclamation:

“The commander-in-chief finding, notwithstanding former orders that have been given to forbid plundering, houses have been forced open and robbed, he is therefore under a necessity of declaring to the troops that the first soldier who is caught plundering will be hanged on the spot.”

Washington, meanwhile, waited impatiently for the British to depart. Concerned that Howe might be stalling while reinforcements arrived, Washington ordered his troops to continue building fortifications. On March 17, however, the British finally made good on their plans. An armada of ships, loaded with more than 9,000 soldiers and more than 1,000 loyalists, made their way to sea.

Dr. John Warren, whose brother Joseph had perished at Bunker Hill, made an assessment of the town after the British fled.

“The houses I found to be considerably abused inside, where they had been inhabited by the common soldiery, but the external parts of the houses made a tolerable appearance. The streets were clean, and, upon the whole, the town looks much better that I expected. Several hundred houses were pulled down, but these were very old ones.”

The Damage Done

The story in Charlestown, which the British had burned, was different. Almost nothing still stood, Warren reported, save for an occasional wall or chimney.

Other parts of Boston also bore the marks of the British occupation while under siege.

The British had turned the Old South Church into a riding school for officers. They had dragged Deacon Hubbard’s ornate pew outside and converted it to a hog sty. The parsonage was pulled down and burned for fuel, as was the Old North Chapel, dating to 1677, the steeple of the West Church and Boston’s celebrated Liberty Tree.

William Howe

The Common was disfigured and fortified, and Faneuil Hall fitted out as a theater, Warren noted. What cannon the British could not remove with them had been spiked (for the most part) and shells split and shot dumped into the harbor. The Americans would repair and recover much of what had been abandoned.

In total, damage amounted to £323,074. Washington informed John Hancock that the British officers who occupied his opulent home hadn’t harmed it. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, describing their house as “very dirty, but no other damage has been done to it.”

Shocking Discovery

But what Warren and fellow physician Dr. Samuel Scott found in the British medical supplies shocked them the most. In a workhouse used as a hospital, Warren discovered a cache of medicines. They could be highly useful in treating soldiers or citizens. However, Scott found that, upon leaving, the British had mixed arsenic into the medicines. He provided an affidavit to the Legislature.

“I, John Warren, of Cambridge, physician, testify and say, that on or about the twenty-ninth day of March last past, I went into the workhouse of the town of Boston, lately improved as a hospital by the British troops, stationed in said town,” he wrote.

In one room they supposedly used to store medicine, “I found a great variety of medicinal articles lying upon the floor,” he wrote. They’d packaged some and scattered the rest on the floor, he wrote.

Dr. John Warren by Rembrandt Peale, Harvard University Portrait Collection

“Amongst these medicines, I observed small quantities of what, I supposed, was white and yellow arsenic intermixed; and then received information from Dr. Daniel Scott that he had taken up a large quantity of said arsenic from over and amongst the medicine,” wrote Warren. He then described how Scott had collected it chiefly in large lumps and secured it in a vessel.

A Shocker

Warren then asked Scott to let him see the arsenic. He did, and Warren judged the lumps of arsenic to weight 12 to 14 pounds. Surprised, he looked at the medicine carefully. He judged them as popular and useful — without the poison.

“I advised Dr. Scott to let them remain, and by no means meddle with them, as I thought the utmost hazard would attend the using of them,” he wrote. The medicine stayed there.

This shocking news reached Massachusetts via the newspapers, and as the horror of the British plot to poison the returning colonists sank in, so did its significance as a propaganda weapon.

The affidavit was quoted and distributed throughout the colonies. It served as a useful message to reinforce public antipathy toward the British.

Thanks to History of the Siege of Boston by Richard Frothingham and The Siege of Boston by Allen French. This story was updated in 2022.

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