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The Gundalow: The Workhorse Barge of the Piscataqua River

The gundalow (from “gondola”) was a flat-bottomed sailing barge, akin to a scow, that first appeared in the Piscataqua River Region in the 17th century. It continued to assist in the economic development of the region until the early 20th century.

The gundalow Piscataqua, The Portsmouth-based Gundalow Company offers scenic river cruises on the gundalow.

Small gundalows, less than 30 feet long, without a sail, propelled by poles and long oars (“sweeps”), appeared in the mid to late 17th century in northeastern Essex County in Massachusetts. They transported two types of grass (either “marsh hay” for livestock or “thatch” for roofs and gardens) from tidal creeks to a place for distribution. Larger gundalows also began to appear in Massachusetts along the Merrimack River and the Ipswich marshes. They could be up to 50 feet long.

The Gundalow on the Piscataqua

The Piscataqua River Region in the southern part of New Hampshire and Maine generally embraces the 12-mile Piscataqua River and its tributaries (including Great Bay and Little Bay). It is a tidal estuary that flows into Portsmouth Harbor before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean.

Piscataqua River watershed. Map courtesy Google Maps.

As in Massachusetts, 17th-century settlers in the Piscataqua River Region came from England. The abundance of natural resources (e.g., fish, timber and wild game) that they enjoyed encouraged further migration. As trade grew between island settlements and Portsmouth, a need arose for a practical and efficient mode of water transport that could handle the fast-moving current of the tidal estuary twice a day.

Thus, the gundalow had appeared by mid-17th century as a 20-30 feet long flat-bottomed boat with a wide beam. It initially did not have a sail, but was propelled by a crew using poles. They had no decks or raised platforms to aid direction but could travel in shallow water as low as four feet deep. Given that wharves were scarce, the boats rested on mudflats when they reached their destination. Over time riverboat storehouses would appear on the banks to facilitate the loading and unloading of the vessels.

View of Portsmouth, New Hampshire from across the Piscataqua River, 1780

Freight Carriers

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the gundalows primarily carried “salt hay” for animals, various kinds of fish, lumber (i.e., oak and pine), furs and farm goods for export to Portsmouth and other domestic and foreign ports. On the return trip, they brought back manufactured goods (e.g., furniture, linens and hardware) that had arrived from England. After the American Revolution, trade resumed with the West Indies and the region again received sugar and rum.

The tidal currents on the Piscataqua River are very fast. They allowed the gundalow operators to move swiftly both upriver as the tide comes in and downriver with the outgoing tide. The owner-operators of the gundalow did not always stay on the water. Many of them pursued farming, crafts and other activities.

The Gundalow Evolves

After 1800 the design of the gundalows totally changed. The stern acquired a rounded form, allowing for a fixed rudder and tiller for better steering. Raised platforms gave the crew a better view of potential hazards. The first sails on gundalows were square-shaped and mounted on a mast and further enhanced the speed of the vessels. Although unclear when it first appeared, the lateen sail had a triangular shape and was mounted on a mast located at the bow. It could be lowered to allow the gundalow to safely pass under low bridges. Over time the size of the gundalows increased. It could become more than 65 feet long and 20 feet wide. Cabins for the captain and crew also began to appear.

Besides the aforementioned goods, the gundalows of the 19th century began exporting bricks and cotton cloth. Brickmaking rested on using the marine clay of the estuaries, with the finished product transported to schooners for delivery to Boston and other coastal locations. When cotton mills appeared in the early 1800s in the region, the gundalows brought coal, raw cotton and machinery to the mills. They also took the cloth produced to Portsmouth for transfer to other ships. Although Portsmouth was the main port for the gundalows, other New Hampshire ports included Dover, Exeter and Newmarket, along with Berwick, Maine.

Piscataqua River from Portsmouth at sunset. Today, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, is the largest enterprise on the Piscataqua.

The Ultimate Demise

When the Boston and Maine Railroad received its charter to operate in New Hampshire in 1835, it foreshadowed the demise of the gundalow. Compared to the gundalow, it could operate all year. It could also travel faster and provide access to more inland settlements. By the end of the 19th century, more railroads and steam-powered tugs had all but replaced the need for the gundalow.

In 1896 Capt. Edward H. Adams launched the last commercial gundalow, the Fannie M., in Durham, N. H. It operated in the region until 1925.

(Click here to see a short video of a gundalow in action. )

***

Now available in paperback and as an ebook from the New England Historical Society! A collection of stories about the French people who came to America. Click here to order your copy today!

Edward T. Howe, Ph.D. is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Siena College near Albany, N.Y.

Images: View of Portsmouth, Des Barres, Joseph F. W. , Engraver. View of Portsmouth, New Hampshire from across the Piscataqua River. [London: J.F.W. Des Barres] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2004671484/. Map of Piscataqua River by Google Maps.

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A Brief History of Handwriting

The long and storied art of handwriting began in the Papal treasury, migrated through Europe to the American colonies, flourished in New England penmanship schools and then died in the internet age.

Handwriting once meant something. For one thing, it meant you could read and write. Back in the day, not everyone who could read knew how to write.

Your style of handwriting also showed who you were. Businesspeople used one style of handwriting, a simple, legible hand. Leisured gentlemen used another with lots of flourishes. Ladies had their own delicate alphabet.

Handwriting, though, didn’t just evolve as a generally accepted thing. Over the centuries, a handful of individuals, fanatic about penmanship, set handwriting standards for most of the rest of us. They decided what a capital X should look like, at what degree letters should be angled, the loopiness of lower-case letters.

Then, of course, the keyboard and the screen made handwriting disappear. But devotees of pen and ink should take heart. Handwriting may be coming back.

An essential skill

For centuries, legible handwriting was an essential skill for businesspeople and government officials. Laws, deeds, proclamations, contracts and military orders all had to be recorded somehow. But without a standard, different penmanship styles were like different languages.

Writing masters in the papal treasurer’s office first developed an italic cursive script that morphed into the handwriting taught to American schoolchildren in the 20^th century. After the sack of Rome in 1527, the pope’s writing masters moved to Southern France. But without the Roman Catholic Church enforcing handwriting discipline, they began to come up with new styles of writing alphabets.

The Italic cursive evolved into italic circumflessa, which further evolved into a French style called rhonde.

French government officials complained they couldn’t read documents because they were written in different hands. The Controller-General of Finances then decided all legal documents had to be written in one of three handwriting styles: the coulee, the rhonde and the speed hand.

The French rhonde migrated to England, where it developed into the English round hand.

A Handwriting Giant

George Bickham, a giant in the pantheon of penmen, was a key figure in the development of handwriting. A calligrapher and an engraver, in 1733 he collected samples of penmanship from 24 writing teachers in London. He engraved them and published them in a book, The Universal Penman.

The book had 19 complete alphabets, such as Gothic, which was falling out of fashion except for legal documents. Bickham’s book – still available, on Amazon — popularized the new English round hand. It looks like a typeface known as Copperplate.

Bickham had an alphabet for everyone, or at least anyone who needed to write. There were alphabets for English gentlemen, alphabets for merchants, alphabets for women and girls.

Handwriting Schools

Like many other things, the English round hand crossed the Atlantic to the colonies. Writing masters taught the English round in writing schools, or they traveled the countryside like peddlers looking for pupils.

Boston had three writing schools by the time of the American Revolution. They taught more boys than the better-known Latin School. The curriculum was narrow: boys were taught math and penmanship so they could produce dignified-and readable documents. If you wanted to be a merchant, bookkeeper, legal clerk or engrosser, you needed to have decent handwriting.

It wasn’t easy. You had to know how to make a quill from a goose feather, mix ink, rule lines on paper or parchment and write without spotting or smudging the writing surface. You had to know how to sit or stand, what angle to position the paper and how to hold the pen.

John Tileston taught at Boston’s public writing school in the North End for 65 years. He had an injured hand and probably inspired the fictional character Johnny Tremain. Tileston was also a good friend of John Adams, who needed legible handwriting for legal complaints, letters to Abigail and founding documents of the United States of America.

Declaration of Independence

It was Adams’ friend Thomas Jefferson, of course, who drafted the Declaration. He had a neat round plain hand, but he didn’t actually write the document. A Pennsylvania brewer, Timothy Matlack, known for his excellent handwriting, was tasked with the project.

Timothy Matlack

Matlack didn’t sign the Declaration, even though he wrote it. He wasn’t a delegate. But he did fight in the American Revolution, leading Pennsylvania’s 5^th Rifle Battalion across the Delaware with George Washington.

Spencerian Handwriting

Handwriting changed along with writing instruments and the reason for writing. English round hand, for example, came about partly because people started using more flexible nibs. The Spencerian script spread as people began using steel pens. Telegraph operators adopted the Spencerian script because they needed a faster, simpler handwriting than the English round hand in order to transcribe Morse code.

From the 1860s into the early 1900s, Spencerian handwriting dominated the written word in America. Platt Rogers Spencer invented it in 1840 by simplifying the English round hand. His capital letters didn’t require the pen to be lifted from the paper so much, and lower-case letters were more angular.

He opened a school in Jericho, N.Y., to teach his system of handwriting and record-keeping. His students went on to found the chain of Bryant & Stratton business schools, which spread Spencerian handwriting in factories, mills and warehouses throughout America. He also taught Penmanship at the Enterprise Institute in Hiram, Ohio, under President James A. Garfield, who later became U.S. president. Garfield wrote the introduction to his book, the Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship. He called Spencerian script “the pride of our country and the model of our schools.”

Spencer came up with a ladies’ hand, too.

After the Civil War, it became the American standard writing style for business correspondence and for government clerks. Henry Ford learned the Spencerian style of handwriting; you can see it in the Ford Motor Company logo. Coca Cola’s bookkeeper also used the Spencerian script to design the company’s trademark.

Palmer Method of Handwriting

Good handwriting could get you a good job. G.A. Gaskell taught Spencerian handwriting at a Bryant & Stratton business school in Concord, N.H. He ran a newspaper ad for the school saying hundreds of his students, “who by means of their elegant penmanship secured through his instruction, now occupy important and lucrative positions.”

Austin Palmer worked as a janitor to pay his tuition at Gaskell’s school. Sure enough, he got a job as a bookkeeper and clerk in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Palmer watched his colleagues toil away at their writing all day. Spencerian handwriting had too many curls and flourishes, he thought. It also required too many lifted-arm movements. It was too tiring and too slow, and at the end of the day it gave a clerk a sore arm.

Palmer penmanship

He decided to turn handwriting into “rapid, plain, unshaded, coarse-pen, muscular movement writing,” as he put it.

Muscle Memory

He came up with the idea of muscular movement. Palmer insisted writers use their forearm and hand to move the pen rather than fingers. He believed in muscle memory—if muscles moved in the same pattern over and over, those movements would be imprinted on the brain and become habit.

Palmer quit his job and taught penmanship, while starting the first handwriting magazine, The Western Penman.

He subjected his penmanship students to tedious drills in which they had to quickly repeat the same spiral and wave marks hundreds of times. Palmer also viewed left-handedness as deviant and made all students write with their right hand.

Catholic schools adopted his method first, liking its emphasis on discipline and hard work. Then Palmer demonstrated the Palmer method at the St. Louis Exposition, where it impressed a New York City school superintendent. Soon half the students in New York City were learning the Palmer method. When Palmer died in 1927, 75 percent of the schools in America taught the his method.

After Palmer

Twentieth-century child psychologists figured out that small children, especially boys, did not have the fine motor skills to master cursive writing. By the 1950s, the Palmer method began to fall to the Zaner-Bloser method, which taught children to print their letters before learning cursive.

Then after 1976, schools adopted the D’Nealian method. Educators thought it made it easier for children to transition from print to cursive.

When the internet came along, educators pretty much abandoned teaching penmanship altogether. In 2010, cursive was removed from the federal Common Core Standards for K-12 education. The group that created the standard decided the need to learn to keyboard became more important.

Then parents began noticing their children couldn’t sign their own name when they applied for passports or endorsed checks. The pendulum began to swing back. In 2023, Connecticut changed course and restored the requirement that schools teach cursive writing.

Thanks to Handwriting in America by Donna R. Braden at the Henry Ford blog.

Images: Timothy Matlack by By Charles Willson Peale – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, online database, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4023540.

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Six Historic One-Room Schoolhouses

Thousands of one-room schoolhouses once educated New England children, some well into the 20^th century.

Small, utilitarian buildings, they usually lacked plumbing and electricity. An outhouse stood out back, as did a woodshed for the wood-burning stove that heated the room. In the early days, one-room schoolhouses were usually built on tiny plots of cheap land in the village center. Dim, cold and often crowded, one critic called them ‘juvenile penitentiaries.’

One-Room Schoolhouses

In the 1850s, school sessions ran for eight weeks in summer and eight weeks in winter. They increased to three sessions, then to three longer sessions. But the length of the school sessions affected attendance, because the children had to help with farm chores like haying in the spring and apple picking in the fall.

In the 1850s, school reformers like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard led a wave of change that affected the look of one-room schoolhouses. They believed schools should have good light, better heat, comfortable seats and separate entrances and cloakrooms for boys and girls. In their view, schoolhouses should have ‘civilizing’ architectural style and solid construction to uplift and inspire students.

They suggested the two entrances as a way to prevent ‘much confusion and rudeness’ and to promote ‘orderly habits.’

New England’s one-room schoolhouses began to reflect those physical changes. But they were slower to change something else: the district school.

Typically, towns divided themselves into school districts and made each district responsible for educating its students. Reformers attacked the district schools because they didn’t give all children an equal education. Some of the one-room schoolhouses had untrained teachers and none had a standard curriculum. Religious dogma often filled the children’s textbooks.

Ultimately, most one-room schoolhouses disappeared. They were moved, dismantled for reuse in other buildings or converted to a new use with additions and alterations. Some survived, however, and some serve as museums today reminding schoolchildren to be grateful for central heat, electricity, and a ban on corporal punishment.

Here, then, are six one-room-schoolhouses, one in each New England state. If you know of other one-room schoolhouses, please let us know in the comments section.

Wylie School

The Wylie School in Voluntown, Conn.

The Wylie School in Voluntown, Conn., is typical of the hundreds of ungraded one-room schoolhouses that predominated in rural Connecticut as late as the 1930s. It’s atypical, though, because it survived until today in relatively good condition.

In 1850, the town built the Wylie School and later named it after Horace Wylie, who donated the land. Unlike New England towns outside of Connecticut, It had financial help from the state. Connecticut set up a School Fund from the sale of the state’s land in the Western Reserve in Ohio, which includes Cleveland.

The Wylie school had two entrances to separate the 15 to 20 boys and girls who attended. It also had a three-hole privy that still survives.

One teacher, Miss Margaret Tanner, taught in Voluntown from 1909 to 1947. For many of those years she taught at the Wylie School, which didn’t close until 1939. The town never upgraded the school’s heating and sanitation beyond the wood stove and the outhouse.

Today the Voluntown Historical Society uses the Wylie School for meetings and events.

Jct. of Ekonk Hill and Wylie School Rds., Voluntown, Conn.

York Corner Schoolhouse

The York Corner Schoolhouse and Jefferds Tavern.

Maine, a largely rural state, had 4,000 one-room schoolhouses by 1900. That number fell to 226 in 1960 and today only a handful remain.

York has one that survived, the York Corner Schoolhouse. It’s one of the earliest existing 18^th-century one-room schoolhouses in the country. The town started building it in 1746, then paid two pounds 13 shillings to finish it nine years later. The windows had no glass, just oiled brown paper, and the school had no stove, just an open fireplace.

After the schoolhouse closed, a farmer converted it to a chicken coop. Local preservationists saved the building and converted it to a museum. Today it belongs to the Old York Historical Society’s nine historic buildings. In season, visitors can tour the Old Schoolhouse and Tavern.

Maine, by the way, still has six island one-room schoolhouses.

3 Lindsay Rd., York, Maine

West School

Old West in Dennis

The West School in the Cape Cod town of Dennis is the only remaining one-room schoolhouse of the twelve that once educated local schoolchildren. Built aroud 1770, it’s also the oldest in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Younger children attended school in the spring and summer, while the older ones went to school in winter when they had fewer farm chores.

The wooden building used to stand at the intersection of Old King’s Highway and New Boston Road. It operated as a schoolhouse until 1865, and then moved to 61 Whig Street in 1973. Today it’s part of the Josiah Dennis House property, which the Dennis Historical Society runs as a museum.

61 Whig St., Dennis, Mass.

Indian Stream Schoolhouse

A piece of North Country history: The Indian Stream Schoolhouse in Pittsburg, N.H.

The Indian Stream School, one of nine one-room schoolhouses in Pittsburg, N.H., was built and furnished in 1897 for a few hundred dollars. It educated students through the eighth grade, with the older students tutoring the younger.

The town closed the Indian Stream Schoolhouse in 1939, and it stood vacant for years. Then the son of one of its students, Roy Amey, came into possession of the school. The roof leaked, the floor sagged and the chimney had fallen in. Amey wanted to save it as a piece of North Country history, so he and others formed a nonprofit to restore the school.

In 2014, New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed Amey and Bernice Fish, a former student. Amey described how his father had attended the school in 1907.

My father talked about it as very strict, you were very respectful to the teachers, and you came here to learn. Very small classes, very cold in the winter. You’d come here in the morning and there would be snow on the floor, you’d track it in and it didn’t melt because there was no heat. You’d stand around the stove and shiver and wait for it to get going.

Fish recalled the primitive conditions:

We didn’t have electric lights we didn’t have a flush toilet. We had a pail of water out in the entry there. I think every one of us drank out of the same cup. That’s why we’re tough now! Sometimes the teacher would make us a pot of cocoa in order to give us something hot to drink.

Today it’s a museum open to the public on weekends during the summer and fall. Donations are requested.

10 Amey Dr., Pittsburg, N.H.

Southernmost Schoolhouse

The Southernmost Schoolhouse, one of the oldest one-room schoolhouses in the country.

Portsmouth, the second oldest town in Rhode Island, decided 300 years ago that learning was an ‘excellent ornament to mankind’ and authorized construction of two one-room schoolhouses: the Northernmost and the Southernmost. Built in 1725, the Southernmost still stands, and the Portsmouth Historical Society calls it the oldest schoolhouse in Rhode Island.

The Southernmost had a troubled early history. The first schoolmaster, James Preston, boarded with another family until he fell ill. The town let him and his family live in the basement of the school. After he died, his widow and her family used the school as their home until the town kicked them out in 1746.

The school was donated to the historical society in 1952, and today serves as a museum. Young visitors today are no doubt intrigued by the school’s precise menu for meting out corporal punishment:

Boys and girls playing together – 1 lash
Fighting at school – 5 lashes
Climbing for every foot over 3 feet up a tree – 1 lash
Giving each other ill names – 3 lashes
Wearing long fingernails – 2 lashes
Boys going to the girls’ play place – 3 lashes
Girls going to the boys’ play place – 2 lashes
For not saying yes or no sir or yes or no marm – 2 lashes

The worst infractions? You got seven lashes for lying and eight for telling tales out of school. Misbehaving to girls got you 10 lashes if you were a boy, while swearing at school got both sexes nine lashes.

870 E. Main Rd., Portsmouth, R.I.

Eureka Schoolhouse

The Eureka Schoolhouse, once painted yellow and blue.

The story of the Eureka Schoolhouse in Springfield, Vt., begins with the construction of the Crown Point military route between Fort No. 4 in Charlestown, N.H., with the fort at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. The road wasn’t just for the military; it was intended as a path for westward settlers, and Springfield, was the southern gateway.

Springfield settlers began working on the one-room schoolhouse in 1785, but didn’t finish it until 1790. Today it’s the oldest one-room schoolhouse in Vermont. Though built out of hand-hewn timbers, the settlers tried to give the primitive structure some style. They finished the walls in rough-cut wooden boards scored to resemble cut stone. Originally they painted it yellow with a cobalt blue roof.

The first schoolteacher, David Searle, gave the school its name. After he graduated from Yale he headed north to the Vermont frontier, looking for work. When he reached No. 4, residents told him Springfield wanted to hire a teacher. He followed the Crown Point Military Road, and when he spotted the new school he said, ‘Eureka’ — Greek for ‘I found it.’

Apparently he did his job well. A number of the students went on to attend Dartmouth College.

The town moved the school across the road in 1837. The school population dwindled and the town closed it in 1900. The abandoned building probably would have crumbled into the earth, save for a local preservationist named Anna Hartness Beardsley. She spearheaded the effort to carefully dismantle the structure in 1958, store it and then rebuild it using much of the original material. It reopened in 1968.

Today the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation owns the Eureka Schoolhouse, along with the Baltimore Covered Bridge; the Springfield Chamber of Commerce runs it as the centerpiece of a small historic site.

470 Charlestown Rd, Springfield, Vt.

End Notes

If you enjoyed this story about one-room schoolhouses, you may also want to read about the first public high school in each New England state here.

Images of one-room schoolhouses: Wylie School By Digitalpilgrim – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21161288; Old York School https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/96001495_text; Old West School in West Dennis, By Athanasius28 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27997051; Portsmouth RI Schoolhouse By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20439385; Indian Stream Schoolhouse By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51959410. This story was updated in 2019.

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The Double Life of Railroad King (and Crook) Robert Schuyler

Robert Schuyler was one of the most respected men of his era, the last person likely to pull off one of the greatest swindles in Wall Street history. But in 1853, that’s exactly what Robert Schuyler did.

Robert Schuyler

He came from an illustrious family, grandson of Gen. Philip Schuyler, hero of the Battle of Saratoga, and nephew of Alexander Hamilton. His relatives included the landowning Beekmans and Van Rensselaers, New York nobility.

When the organizers of the new New York & New Haven Railroad went to look for a president, they chose Robert Schuyler because he represented the last word in respectability and financial responsibility.

Years later all hell broke loose when it turned out that he sold thousands of shares of bogus stock, kept three sets of books and stole $137,527.98.

“If Robert Schuyler is capable of such a wrong,” editorialized a newspaper, “then no one is to be trusted.”

But he was capable of such a wrong, one that ranked with the Bernie Madoff scandal.

Robert Schuyler

Robert Schuyler was born on Sept. 16, 1798 in Rhinebeck, N.Y., to an aristocratic family with vast semi-feudal landholdings in the Hudson Valley. A man of culture and refinement, he cofounded New York’s Union Club.

After graduating from Harvard, Robert Schuyler made the successful transition into commerce, starting his career with steamboats. By 1846 he and his brother George formed R. & G. L. Schuyler, an investment firm specializing in railroads.

At one time, Robert Schuyler served as president of five railroads, including the New York & New Haven Railroad, the Harlem, the Illinois Central, the Rensselaer & Saratoga and the Sangamon & Morgan Railroads. People called him the Railroad King.

The directors of the New York & New Haven completely entrusted the railroad’s financial affairs to him as president and sole transfer agent.

Disasters

In May of 1853, the New York & New Haven Railroad train plunged into Norwalk Harbor and killed about 50 people. The dramatic railroad derailment was by far the country’s worst.

Sketch of the Norwalk Railroad accident

President Robert Schuyler took a little bit of the blame for the disaster. The Connecticut Legislature, assuming Schuyler spread himself too thin, passed a law forbidding anyone to hold more than one railroad presidency at a time. He resigned several of his presidencies, putting his brother in charge of one.

Despite the tremendous loss of life, the Norwalk tragedy didn’t cause the railroad undue financial harm.

Then one year later, a second disaster struck the New York & New Haven when the stock prices began to plunge. In less than five weeks it dropped from $93 to $73.5, suggesting some insiders knew about the stock manipulation going on.

The railroad board tried to contact Robert Schuyler, who claimed he had fallen ill with a bad hemorrhage of the lungs. The New York Herald, though, on July 6, 1854 reported, “Mr. Schuyler has not been confined to his house by sickness lately….He has gone to Canada or some other cool place. New York was too hot to hold him.”

Robert Schuyler had, in fact, fled to France.

Swindler

Schuyler’s lawyer had already handed the railroad directors a letter of resignation. “Your attention to the stock ledgers of your Company is essential as you will find there is much that is wrong,” wrote Schuyler.

It turned out that Robert Schuyler, as sole transfer agent, had sold 19,540 shares in unauthorized stock certificates worth about $54 million today.

At first, the board thought Robert Schuyler had started selling bogus stock after the Norwalk accident. But then the directors learned he’d been doing it much earlier.

He had also maintained three sets of books kept by three different clerks, none of whom knew what the others were doing. He paid damage claims from the Norwalk accident by taking money from railroad accounts in cash and giving out notes signed by him as president.

Allston (New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad station)

Confusion reigned upon the discovery of the swindle because it was so hard to tell who held the bogus stock and who held genuine shares.

The first official meeting after the discovery of the fraud lapsed into chaos. Anyone who tried to be heard got shouted down by those demanding how many shares he held and where they came from. The meeting adjourned.

Stockholders did manage to elect a new slate of officers. And after 10 years of litigation, the court finally ruled that the railroad had to cover all losses.

Trouble Signs

How had people missed the signs of Robert Schuyler’s misdeeds? In hindsight, warning signs abounded.

The New York Herald had received an anonymous letter asking it to demand the board investigate Schuyler. But the paper ignored the letter because of its anonymous author.

And then there was Schuyler’s personal life. He had lived as a bachelor, but he had a family of six children by a woman he hadn’t married and who lived in a separate household. Then a minister proposed to his oldest daughter. To his horror, he discovered she was illegitimate. Robert Schuyler acceded to the minister’s demands and married the mother of his children.

Soon after the news broke about Schuyler’s swindle, the American Railroad Journal carried an editorial claiming not to be surprised. “His reputation for possessing business qualities of a high order, the influential circle in which he moved, and the unlimited confidence which he enjoyed, gave him a paramount voice in the management of numerous schemes, wrote the Journal.” But, it continued, ‘a blight always seemed to rest on everything he touched.’

In conclusion, the Journal had advised investors to stay away from railroad schemes in which Schuyler was involved. “…we took it for granted that he would rob any project of which he had control of whatever vitality he possessed.”

Death in Paris

Robert Schuyler supposedly died in France on Nov. 15, 1855, a little more than a year after the revelations about his mammoth swindle. But mystery surrounded his death as well. A classmate in 1857 wrote to the Harvard Librarian doubting that he had died. A coffin had arrived from France, and a funeral took place in New York, “but I could not find that anybody saw the body or identified it. It may have been a sham.”

With thanks to The Great Schuyler Stock Fraud by Robert B. Shaw and The Strange Case of Robert Schuyler by Sidney Withington.

Images: Allston station by Adam Moss via Flickr, CC By-SA 2.0.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Famous Artists Houses (Where You Can Stay, Too)

Artists gravitate toward places that inspire them creatively, so you can often find artists houses among splendid scenery or in rural isolation.

Famous artists could often afford large houses, and some have since been transformed into inns and bed and breakfasts.

Artists Houses As Inns

Now every New England state has a house that an artist once lived in, but functions as an inn or an artists retreat.

At two of the artists houses described below you can actually practice your art in the same places Fairfield and Eliot Porter and Norman Rockwell found their inspiration.

So here we bring you six artists houses, one in each state (admittedly, we include an engraver and an architect as artists – but we think they’d agree). If you know of any artists houses where people can stay, please include them in the comments section.

Abel Buell Home

The Abel Buell Home

Abel Buell, apprenticed to a silversmith as a boy, learned his craft perhaps too well.

As a young man, he used his skill at engraving to alter the plates for five-pound notes to plates for larger denominations. Then he printed them. He got caught, and authorities cut off the tip of his ear as punishment.

An uncommonly ingenious mapmaker, he designed the first map of the United States in 1784 and colored it by hand. The map involves enough artistry that we’re putting his house on our list of artists homes.

The first map, by Abel Buell.

He was born in 1742 in Clinton, Conn., when it was called Killingworth. Today his home is a bed and breakfast called the Abel Buell House By The Shore. You can stay in one of two rooms, one with a queen-size bed, one with a twin.

33 Commerce St., Clinton, Conn.

Great Spruce Head Island

Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay (thanks, Google Maps!)

Fairfield Porter, born in 1907 in Winnetka, Ill., bucked the Abstract Expressionist trend during the middle of the 20^th century. He stuck to a representational style despite criticism from other artists. In his paintings, he made ordinary landscapes and interiors seem extraordinary.

Under the Elms by Fairfield Porter

His brother Eliot was a biochemical researcher at Harvard who took up photography as a hobby. Fairfield introduced Eliot to Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged him to work harder. Eliot began to exhibit in Stieglitz’s gallery, and eventually he quit his job and pursued photography full time. The Sierra Club published a book of his photographs with quotations from Henry David Thoreau, and it did quite well. Eliot Porter published more books, and is considered the pioneer of the coffee-table book of nature photography.

When the boys were young, their father bought Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay and built a 12-bedroom summer cottage. The brothers and their three siblings spent summers on the island. Today, the Porters’ niece, Anina Porter Fuller, invites a dozen artists to spend a week on the island working independently in late June or early July. (Here’s her painting of the house.)

Great Spruce Head Island, Deer Isle, Maine

Fidelia Bridges Guest House

The Fidelia Bridges Guest House (thanks again, Google Maps)

Fidelia Bridges created exquisite images of nature in the 19^th century, though people have largely forgotten her. Except, at least, for those who stay at one of the most interesting artists houses, the Fidelia Bridges Guest House.

May, by Fidelia Bridges

She was born in 1834 in Salem, Mass., to Eliza Chadwick Bridges and Henry Gardiner Bridges. Her father died in China when Fidelia was 15, and her mother died three hours before the news of her husband’s death reached Salem. Fidelia’s sister auctioned off the family furniture and sold the house.

Eventually Fidelia got a job as a mother’s helper in New York, where she would later run a school and her own studio. She also worked as a governess to Mark Twain’s three children.

All the while she drew and painted, limiting her subjects to birds and plants.

She moved to Canaan, Conn., and lived quietly, drawing and painting for the rest of her days.

The Fidelia Bridges Guest House belongs to the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Mass.

18 Washington Square West, Salem, Mass.

Inn at Whitefield

Interior at the Mountains, by Emil Otto Grundmann

Emil Otto Grundmann was a German art professor and artist who came to the United States. He got a job as director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he founded the Boston School of art. He taught such artists as Frank Weston Benton, Charles Henry Turner and Edmund C. Tarbell.

Grundmann visited a friend in Whitefield, N.H., in 1879 to paint the White Mountains. He painted the lovely Interior at the Mountains, a view of the silhouette of the Franconia range through the window of his friend’s bay window. The interior includes ‘accessories of genteel tourism,’ according to Robert L. McGrath: a map of Europe, sculptures, prints of Roman monuments and wicker furniture.

Today you can be your own genteel tourist at the house, now the Inn at Whitefield.

381 Lancaster Rd., Whitefield, N.H.

Architect’s Inn Guesthouse

The Archietect’s Inn

George Champlin Mason designed a number of palatial homes in Newport, R.I., including one for himself.

Mason spent his early career trying to make a living as a landscape painter. He published a collection of engravings of Newport landscapes that promoted the city to tourists and vacationers.

Mason switched careers several times, first as a newspaper editor and finally as an architect. He began designing houses in 1858, eventually designing many of the summer mansions in Newport. He also helped found the Newport Historical Society.

After his death in 1894, Belmonts and Vanderbilts lived in his house. Today it’s an inn, known as the Architect’s Inn Guesthouse, decorated with period furnishings and offering fully interactive Murder Mystery weekends.

2 Sunnyside Pl #1, Newport, R.I.

Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

The Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

Before Norman Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Mass., he lived in Arlington, Vt. There he adopted the themes of Americana that have endeared him to millions of his fans.

Rockwell was 49 when he bought a farmhouse in Arlington, Vt., in the fall of 1943. The move to the house, built in 1792, gave him a much-needed restart for his art.

He was more interested in diners, doctors’ offices and schoolhouses than in the landscape.

Today you can enjoy the Green Mountain scenery or the diners and schoolhouses at the Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio. You can even stay in his studio – or his barn. The inn also offers Rockwell Seminars during which acclaimed painters and illustrators give one-on-one instruction in Rockwell’s actual studio.

3587 River Road Arlington, Vt.

Images of artists houses: Emil Grundmann, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Otto_Grundmann#/media/File:Emil_Otto_Grundmann00.jpg; Under the Elms, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10887039

This story about artists houses was updated in 2019.

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When Calling Someone a New Englander Was an Insult

In November 1852, newspapers in Pennsylvania gave over 650 words to assailing the flaws of the New Englander. In a wide-ranging screed they attacked the region as full of dis-unionists, atheists and abolitionists.

New England, they wrote, “Began its career by burning and hanging Baptists and Quakers, anyone who differed from its Puritanical notions of Religion.”

1860 political cartoon deriding the New Englander, Dividing the National Map (From the Library of Congress).

And it goes downhill from there. The tirade then recounted Massachusetts’ expulsion of Roger Williams and John Adams’ Alien and Sedition acts. It also attacked the region’s opposition to westward expansion and to the War of 1812.

Latest Outrage

In 1852, the region foisted its latest outrage on the new territory of Kansas. New England abolitionists began settling there to create an anti-slavery voting bloc.

Across the country, the expression “New Englandism” gained popularity. Supporters used the term to describe New England’s can-do attitude, its bustling economy and strict religious beliefs. But detractors used it far more often. They said New Englandism meant the anti-slavery sentiments taking root in the Republican Party.

The New Englander, said critics, sought to deprive the nation of slavery. But New England states had, in fact,”‘grown rich by importing slaves from Africa.” Further, they said, the region lives “now in luxury upon the blood and bones of the human beings it thus trafficked in.”

In July of 1858, the Cincinnati Enquirer supported President James Buchanan. The newspaper attacked New England congressmen and senators for voting against Buchanan. This, the newspaper suggested, represented the latest in a long string of New England bad judgment calls.

The region’s flaws included its failure to give even a single electoral vote to Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson when they first ran for president.

In 1859 abolitionist John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry. Newspapers then denounced New England for providing funds for his attack. One southern newspaper noted: “. . . he went back to New England, traveling through its several villages, and collecting money, which was freely contributed.”

By 1863, newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana lashed out full strength against New England. Through the West and Midwest, newspapers reported, the feeling against New Englandism, “is every day growing more bitter.”

The Entitled New Englander

An Illinois newspaper noted the New Englander from the beginning demanded tribute from the rest of the country. They made others pay homage, “first by commerce, then by protective tariffs, and now, in the abolition of slavery.”

The newspaper then warned New Englanders will try to impose their ‘Unitarianism, Congregationalism, or Independentism,’ as the national religion.

And a newspaper in Indiana applauded the other states considering breaking away from New England. The editors also predicted New England would be left out in the col’ to survive on her “bleak and barren hills.” The region, they said, would be “cast off from the protection and commercial advantages” that it enjoyed from the other U.S. states.

This story about calling someone a New Englander was updated in 2023.

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