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The Trumbull Store, George Washington’s Favorite Shop in Connecticut

When Gen. George Washington needed men, food, cannon or gunpowder for his army, he could usually get it at the Trumbull store in Lebanon, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Jonathan Trumbull ran the tiny, two-room store as a war office during the American Revolution. He weighed, measured and packed up barrels and boxes of his own merchandise for the cause. Then he sent off teams of oxen and carts to the Continental Army and dealt powder and musket balls to the militiamen.

The Trumbull store, aka the War Office

Throughout the American Revolution, Connecticut’s Council of Safety met in the Trumbull store next to his house on Lebanon Green. Visitors included George Washington, Henry Knox, Israel Putnam, Marquis de Lafayette and Count Rochambeau. Both the house and the War Office still sit on the mile-long green.

Jonathan Trumbull did so much for the Revolution that Washington called him’the first of the patriots.’ And the Trumbull store earned Connecticut the nickname, ‘The Provision State.’

Jonathan Trumbull

Trumbull was the only colonial governor who sided with the rebels during the Revolutionary War. He was also one of the few Americans governors of both a colony and a state.

Jonathan Trumbull

Before the war, he accumulated great wealth as one of the most prominent shipping merchants in the colonies.

Born Oct. 12, 1710, he had graduated from Harvard and studied for the ministry. He had a license to preach at Colchester, Conn. Instead, he joined the family business after his brother disappeared at sea and his father got too old to work.

His sloops, schooners, brigantines and snows came into New London and Norwich carrying goods from a wide commercial network. They came from the east coast of North America, the West Indies and Europe.

His ships carried Connecticut products: salt fish, oil, flax-seed, produce, wool, livestock and pine and spruce for the king’s masts.

In the Trumbull store he sold imported dry goods: cloaks, caps, waistcoats, greatcoats, cloth, scythes, nails, firearms, crockery, cutlery and pewter.

War

Trumbull was worth 18,000 pounds at the end of 1765. He held various judgeships and government jobs until 1769 to 1784, including governor of the colony, then the state.

Lebanon, by the way, produced five governors, including Trumbull’s son and grandson. The people of Lebanon liked to boast, “We supply Norwich with butter and cheese, and the State with Governors, especially when they want good ones.”

As a merchant and a politician, Jonathan Trumbull objected to Britain’s Intolerable Acts. He was especially offended when Parliament authorzed home invasions to search and seize goods.

When he got word of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, he went to the Trumbull store and collected supplies for the men marching off from Lebanon.

Gen. Thomas Gage

Then the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage, asked Trumbull for help. Trumbull refused. He told Gage his troops would ‘disgrace even barbarians.’ He also accused Gage of ‘a most unprovoked attack upon the lives and the property of his Majesty’s subjects.’

Inside the Trumbull store, he discussed ways to supply the armies as messengers came and went on horseback. He sent off wagon trains and herds of cattle. When men marched off to fight, they gathered around the store nicknamed the ‘War Office.’

From his War Office, Trumbull directed supplies to feed the Continental Army, French troops and — just as important — the workmen of a forge in New Jersey. When Nantucket had no bread one winter, he let them barter oil, salt and rum with Connecticut merchants. When Congress asked him for 539 head of cattle immediately, he sent them. And when the starving troops in Newport came close to mutiny, he sent them 300 barrels of Indian corn.

Trumbull Store Delivers

During the winter of 1779-80, Washington and his ragged, hungry troops quartered in Morristown, N.Y. George Washington Parke Custis later related how his adopted father despaired of getting any supplies from any of the states.

George Washington Parke Custis

Washington sent a letter by special messenger to Trumbull, Custis said. Trumbull met the messenger in the War Office and told him to rest for the night. The messenger galloped back the next day with a sealed letter. Washington read the letter in the presence of Custis. It said at a certain hour on a certain day, a wagon train from Hartford would arrive with 200 barrels of flour, 100 barrels of beef and 100 barrels of pork.

On the day Trumbull said the provisions would arrive, hungry American soldiers stood on the camp’s highest hills looking for the wagon. Custis described how, “Within half an hour of the time assigned by Governor Trumbull for the arrival of the stores, the expectant eyes almost filled with tears of joy at discovering through the mists of the valley the teamsters cheering along their jaded horses.”

Restoration of the Trumbull Store

The Trumbull store passed into other hands after the war, and for many years functioned as a country store. Then the owner used it as a dwelling. Finally, the Trumbull store was abandoned.

The Wadsworth Stable

In 1891, the owner gave the building to the Sons of the American Revolution. The Sons restored it and now run it as a museum, open in the summer. It sits on Lebanon Green, quite close to the Lebanon Historical Society’s campus, which includes a museum and six other structures — among them, a historic outhouse and the Wadsworth Stable. The Lebanon Towne Militia held an encampment on the Green after the Memorial Day parade in pre-pandemic times.

Image: Wadsworth Stable By JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26594416.

This story about the Trumbull store was updated in 2021.

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How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10^th and 11^th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors. Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20^th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres. The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H. Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

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How New England Towns Got Their Place Names

Sometimes when you hear a place name, you’re pretty sure it’s somewhere in New England. The region’s distinct history left it with some pretty distinct naming patterns.

Many of the earliest towns settled by English Puritans take their names from their homes England, especially East Anglia. Since the French tried to claim New England, too, especially near the Canadian border, they managed to give some settlements French names — along with a state and an enormous lake. The Scots-Irish who settled New England’s frontiers also named their new towns after their homes in Ireland.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall.

Indigenous people, of course, had plenty of names for New England places before it became New England. So if a town doesn’t sound English, French or Irish, it’s a good bet it’s Native American.

Unless it’s Warren. New England has six towns called Warren, one in each state, but the reason for those place names is more complicated than you might think.

English Place Names

Massachusetts has at least 104 English names for cities, towns and counties, starting with Amesbury and ending with Yarmouth. (Click here for a complete list of U.S. places named after places in England.)

Rhode Island has the fewest — 15 of them, from Bradford to Wickford. Maine has 32, Vermont 36. Connecticut 31, including Hartford, an archaic spelling of Hertford (the birthplace of one of Thomas Hooker’s assistants, the Rev. Samuel Stone).

New Hampshire was named after Hampshire, England, by John Mason, the colony’s first proprietor (though he never set foot in New England). New Hampshire has 47 cities, towns and counties named after English places.

Puritan Place Names

Many Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts Bay during the Great Migration of 1620 to 1640 left from East Anglia, a wealthy center of cloth manufacturing. It had thriving ports named Boston, Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Colchester and Harwich.

Norwich in East Anglia

Other Puritans came from Norfolk, the county of the North Folk, or the Northern Angles, while others came from Suffolk of the South Folk. Essex, between Suffolk and London, was the home of the East Saxons; Middlesex of the Middle Saxons.

The Puritans even named groups of towns in New England after groups of towns in England: Boston and Lynn, for example, were next to each other in East Anglia as they were in Massachusetts. So were Worcester and Leominster, and Amesbury, Salisbury, Newbury and Andover.

In Rhode Island, the geography of England was mimicked in Warwick and Coventry and in Bristol and Newport. In New Hampshire, Sandown and South Hampton are next to each other as they were in England. And, as in England, there was once a Gosport on the Isles of Shoals next to Portsmouth in New Hampshire.

Scots-Irish Place Names

Some place names reflect the Scots-Irish origins of their first settlers. Derry, N.H., counts as the first.

The First Parish Church in East Derry.

The Massachusetts Puritans, led by Cotton Mather, encouraged the Scots-Irish to settle in places where they would serve as buffers against the Indians. Those frontier settlements to the west, north and east became Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. And so New Hampshire has a Derry, a Londonderry and a Derryfield. It also has an Antrim, Colebrook, Dublin, Hillsborough, Kilkenny and Stewartstown.

Vermont has a Londonderry, named after Londonderry, N.H.

In Maine you’ll find a Belfast, Bangor, Limerick and Newry.

French Place Names

Northern New England — not Louisiana — has the highest percentage of people who claim French ancestry. And New France, or Acadia, once stretched into Maine. That explains at least some of New England’s French place names.

Castine, Maine, which dates to 1613, takes its name from the French Baron de Saint-Castin. A military officer, he established a fort and trading post there in the late 17th century. Other French place names in Maine include Tremont, Presque Isle, Montville, Minot, Lamoine, Lagrange, Isle au Haut and Frenchboro.

Castine, from Fort George, by Fitz Henry Lane

Vermont also has several towns with French names: Vermont, a corruption of the French for “Green Mountain,” has a Belmont, an Orleans and a Vergennes.

Some towns took French names because of enthusiasm for France after it helped win the Revolutionary War. Thus, Rhode Island has a Lafayette and Maine has a Paris and a Calais. Vermont also named Calais and its capital, Montpelier, in a burst of Francophilia.

Four New England towns took the French name Orange. In 1689, much to the joy and relief of New England’s Puritans, William of Orange deposed the Catholic King James II. Towns in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont named themselves after him.

Vermont

Generally, towns only named themselves for individuals after the American Revolution, New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth proved an exception.

Wentworth, colonial governor from 1741 to 1766, sold 138 tracts of land for town charters and named some of them after people he wanted to flatter. He named Clarendon, for example, for the earl of the same name and Monkton for British Gen. Robert Monckton. Wentworth named tiny Ferdinand after Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick-Luneburg, related to England’s royal family.

Wentworth named Bennington after himself.

Montpelier

Many Vermont towns were settled after the Revolution. Hence, Wolcott named itself after Revolutionary general Oliver Wolcott, who also signed the Declaration of Independence.

Barton, Vt., named itself after Maj. William Barton, who captured British general Richard Prescott in Newport, R.I., during the Revolutionary War. He founded the town and then went to jail for selling the same piece of land to two people. Barton was born in Warren, R.I.

Then There’s Maine

Much of Maine came late to the naming party, mostly because Europeans didn’t settle the interior until the French and Indian Wars ended.

The coastal south, established earlier than central Maine, has the Puritan-sounding towns of York, a Falmouth, a Berwick and a Yarmouth.But When settlers put down roots in Maine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many people in foreign countries fought for independence. And so they named their towns after the freedom fighters they admired.

The residents of a town previously known as Holmanston incorporated in 1818, they chose “Mexico” to honor the Mexicans who won independence in 1815.

In 1821, people in Maine’s western interior decided to name their town Peru after the South American country that had just declared its independence from Spain.

Denmark, incorporated in 1807, was named in solidarity with the people of Copenhagen. The British Royal Navy attacked the Danish city in 1801 and 1807, much as it had attacked Falmouth in 1775. (Read more about Maine names here.)

Indigenous Names

Two New England states, Connecticut and Massachusetts, take their names from Native Americans. The Massachusetts tribe from the Great Blue Hill region near the bay gave the colony, then the state, its name. Other towns and villages named after tribes include Niantic, Conn., Penacook, N.H., Natick, Mass., and Penobscot and Norridgewock, Maine.

Quite a few Maine place names come from Native Americans, including Machias (“bad little falls”) and Ogunquit (“beautiful place by the sea”). Indigenous people also named Caribou, Damariscotta, Kennebunk, Millinocket, Orono, Penobscot, Saco and Skowhegan.

Main Street, Nantucket

Connecticut in particular has an abundance of towns and villages with indigenous names. They start alphabetically with Aspetuck in Fairfield County and end with Yantic in Norwich. They also include Cos Cob, Mianus, Mystic, Niantic, Norwalk, Willimantic and, appropriately, Uncasville, home of the Mohegan Sun casino.

Elsewhere in New England, some of the better-known towns with Native American names include Pawtucket, R.I., where the Red Sox farm team used to play and Nantucket, where whaling families used to live.

The Bush family still has a summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, while the Kennedys have theirs in Hyannis, Mass.

Many geographical features, from Narragansett Bay to Mount Katahdin, also have Native American names, but that story is for another day.

Two Warrens, Six Towns

Each New England state has a town named Warren, though two different heroes of distinctly different eras inspired the place names.

Warren in Rhode Island, with colonial roots back to 1621, and Warren, N.H., which welcomed its first English settlers in 1767, were named for Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Warren. Admiral Warren was an Irish officer in the British Royal Navy. He, along with American troops, captured the French fort at Louisbourg on Nova Scotia’s Cape Bretton Island in 1745.

Warren, R.I.

The action established trading agreements between the New England colonies and Canadians. The victory not only made Warren very wealthy, it made him a celebrated figure throughout New England.

The Warrens in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine trace their name to a more well-known figure in U.S. history: Dr. Joseph Warren. Warren led the American struggle for independence in the run up to the war. A major general in the Continental Army, he died fighting with the militia at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British army knew him well and celebrated his death.

To Americans, however, Joseph Warren died a martyr to the cause of freedom. They have affixed his celebrated name to schools, monuments and towns throughout America since shortly after his death.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fannie_s_Last_Supper/UX-ZAAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=1896+world+food+fair+boston&pg=PT243&printsec=frontcover

This story about New England place names was updated in 2021.

Images: Nantucket By The original uploader was Bobak at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2776843. First Parish Church of East Derry By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24513489; Norwich in East Anglia By Pedro Fernandez Photo from Alicante, Spain – #streetphotography #Norwich #norfolk #visitnorwich #enjoynorwich #walk #places #downtown #HDR, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34614607.

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How the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage Nearly Ruined Thanksgiving

Molasses played such a starring role in the colonial New England Thanksgiving that a shortage of it in 1705 forced Colchester, Conn., to postpone the holiday for a week.

That first Thanksgiving

The weather turned unusually frigid for the Connecticut Valley town that fall. In mid-October a terrible cold snap lasted for three days, followed by mild weather, and then a blast of even colder weather.

The river froze, a frigid wind blew and a storm blanketed Colchester under three feet of snow. Because the river rarely froze so early, the settlers hadn’t laid in winter provisions usually shipped from Norwich and New London.

Colchester then had only a handful of families. Founded in 1698 on land purchased from the Mohegan tribe, it was the northernmost town in the colony of New London. The settlers had only established the parish two years before that cold autumn, and they wouldn’t lay out streets until the next year.

Colchester relied on boats to deliver supplies along a tributary of the Connecticut River, 10 miles away.

Early Thanksgiving

In early New England, the Puritans replaced Roman Catholic feast days like Christmas and Easter with secular holidays like Training Day and Commencement Day. Thanksgiving days and Fast days had a religious purpose: to come together as a community for meditation and communing with God.

New England’s theocratic governments called for public days of fasting or thanksgiving in response to political or natural events. They could happen several times a year. And they were often local affairs.

In 1705, November 4 had been proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving. But as the day approached, Colchester had almost no molasses. Worse, nothing could be delivered on the frozen river to the settlement.

Why Molasses?

New England colonists used molasses imported from the West Indies because it didn’t cost as much as sugar. A byproduct of sugar refining, colonists used it in baked beans, brown bread and pumpkin pie. By 1750, colonists consumed an average of three quarts of molasses a year.

Blackstrap molasses

The English colonists had learned from the Native Americans about the pumpkin, called pompion, and adapted it to their own cuisine.

The pumpkin pie came to symbolize the New World bounty celebrated by Thanksgiving. By the time Colchester discovered its molasses shortage in 1705, pumpkin pie had been a well-established dessert for half a century.

Congregational Church, Colchester, Conn.

Pumpkins played such an important role in any feast that some 17^th-century Puritan ministers denounced them from the pulpit. They preached that Thanksgivings should be renamed ‘St. Pompion’s Day’ because of the gluttony they inspired.

But without molasses, the townsfolk of Colchester couldn’t make pumpkin pie. Nor could they have baked beans, molasses cake or sweetener for rum. The bottom line: No molasses, no Thanksgiving.

A Food Legend

And so Colchester’s town fathers postponed Thanksgiving because they couldn’t hold it “with convenience” on November 4. The Colchester town records describe how they came to solve the problem:

At a legal town-meeting held in Colchester, October 29, 1705, It was voted that WHEREAS there was a Thanksgiving appointed to be held on the first Thursday n November, and our present circumstances being such that it cannot with convenience be attended on that day, it is therefore voted and agreed by the inhabitants as aforesaid (concluding the thing will not be otherwise than well resented) that the second Thursday of November aforesaid shall be set aside for that service.

The tale of the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage became a food legend. Two centuries later, Rose Mills Powers wrote a poem about it for the July 1908 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine:

Colchester housewives are glum and sad—
Colchester housewives who should be glad—
Baking and brewing for Thanksgiving day.
What is the trouble up Colchester way?
Answer the housewives with streaming eyes,
“No molasses for pumpkin pies!”
The sloop that fetches the precious freight,
Thanksgiving molasses, is late, is late,
And how can Colchester celebrate!

Colchester housewives are gay and glad—
Colchester housewives bake like mad.
No feast decreed by the governor, this,
But Colchester colonists shall not miss
Their dinner, though late by a week and a day—
The sloop’s in the harbor—Hurray! Hurray!
Thanksgiving molasses for all the town,
For pies of pumpkin so rich and brown;
Colchester folk at last sit down.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Blackstrap molasses by By Badagnani – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4129522.

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