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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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The Oldest Lighthouse in Each New England State

The oldest lighthouse in the country would have been in New England had the British not blown it up during the American Revolution. Today, Boston Light is the second oldest lighthouse in the country — and the oldest in Massachusetts.

Lighthouses and history go together like — well, ‘New’ and ‘England.’ Many of the coastal beacons predated the United States itself, but, like Boston Light, were replaced with newer, better versions.

Each New England state has multiple lighthouses. Maine, with its long coastline, has 57, while New Hampshire has only two along its 18 mile coast. Vermont actually has six.

But which are the oldest? Here, then, is a list of the oldest lighthouse in each New England state.

New London Harbor Light

Built in 1801, the New London Harbor Light is not only Connecticut’s oldest lighthouse, it is the tallest.

New London Harbor Light

The colonial Connecticut legislature in 1760 decided to build the first lighthouse at New London, then one of the busiest whaling ports in the colonies. The government sold lottery tickets to raise 500 pounds to pay for building it. In 1781, Benedict Arnold led a British raid on New London and burned the town, but the stone lighthouse and keeper’s cottage survived the attack.

Connecticut ceded New London Harbor Light to the United States in 1789, and 11 years later Congress voted money to rebuild it.

Abisha Woodward, a New Londoner, built the 80-foot-tall octagonal stone tower.

Lighthouse keepers were political appointees, and Martin van Buren appointed John Munn at New London Harbor Light. Munn lost his job in 1841 after van Buren lost reelection, and before he left he blackened the reflector and trashed the lamps. His successor, a popular fisherman named John Mason, took weeks to repair Munn’s vandalism. But after Mason served only four months as keeper, Munn wrangled his job back, outraging the locals. The controversy died down when Munn passed away and Mason took his place.

The Bureau of Lighthouses automated the New London Harbor Light in 1912, and auctioned the property. Today the lighthouse remains in private hands, but New London has others. Today, you can see five lighthouses from Pequot Avenue — and learn more about lighthouses at the Coast Guard Museum.

U.S. Coast Guard Museum, 15 Mohegan Ave., New London, Conn.

Portland Head Light

You may know the Portland Head Light as the Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse. The General Court of Massachusetts appropriated $750 to build it on the shores of Cape Elizabeth in 1787. Three years later, the U.S. government took responsibility for lighthouses and provided $1,500 to finish the job. President George Washington reminded the contractors the government didn’t have much money, so they should take building materials from the fields and shores.

Portland Head Light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine

Sixteen whale oil lamps first lit Portland Head Light on Jan 10, 1791.

One of the strangest shipwrecks in history took place at Portland Head Light on Christmas Eve, 1886. The three-masted bark Annie C. Maguire rammed right into the ledge by the lighthouse, though the crew plainly saw the light before the disaster. The keeper, Joshua Strout, along with his family and volunteers used a ladder as a gangplank to rescue all 14 aboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard decommissioned Maine’s oldest lighthouse in 1989. Today Portland Head Light, which sits next to 90-acre Fort Williams Park, has a museum within the former keeper’s quarters and a seasonal gift shop.

1000 Shore Rd., Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Boston Light

One would almost think Boston Light was cursed, given the trouble that befell the people who associated with it and the number of attacks it sustained from fire, lightning and warring armies.

Boston Light

There had been beacons on Brewster Island before to signal the approach of enemies and ships. The Boston merchant who petitioned the General Court to build Boston Light died before construction began. The first lighthouse keeper drowned. So did the second. The third lighthouse keeper had to clear his name after he was unfairly blamed for a fire in the light.

Fire broke out again and lightning struck the lighthouse several times. During the American Revolution, the Americans burned the wooden parts after the British captured it. When the British evacuated Boston, they left a time charge in Boston Light and blew it up.

A second Boston Light was built in 1783, and it is now the second oldest lighthouse in the United States. (The oldest is in Sandy Hook, N.J.)

Massachusetts gave Boston light to the federal government in 1790. In 1813, lighthouse keeper Jonathan Bruce and his wife watched the battle between the USS Chesapeake and the HMS Shannon. Just before dying, the wounded Chesapeake captain told his men, “Don’t give up the ship.” The crew gave up the ship anyway nine minutes later.

The military extinguished the light during World War II as a security precaution, and relit it on July 2, 1945. The Coast Guard decommissioned Boston Light in 1998, but it remains staffed by a keeper who acts mostly as a tour guide.

The National Park Service conducts tours of Boston Light twice daily on summer weekends.

Little Brewster Island, Boston, Mass.

White Island Light

The oldest of New Hampshire’s two lighthouses: White Island Light.

White Island Light, also known as Isles of Shoals Light, was built in 1859, though the New Hampshire light station had been around since 1821.

Thomas Laighton famously took the job as lighthouse keeper after losing the election for New Hampshire governor in 1839. He sold his business in Portsmouth, moved his family to the small archipelago known as the Isles of Shoals and vowed he’d never set foot on the mainland again.

Laighton bought four of the nine islands and wrangled the federal appointment as lighthouse keeper. His daughter Celia wrote a poem about the island’s sandpipers, which the Atlantic magazine published. Laighton later built a summer resort on another island in the Isles of Shoals, and Celia Laighton Thaxter became one of America’s most popular writers. She maintained a salon on the Isles, hosting such luminaries as Childe Hassam, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

New Hampshire’s oldest lighthouse was built of brick with a cast iron lantern.

The island is closed to the public, but you can get close to White Island Light in an excursion boat.

White Island, Rye, N.H.

Poplar Point Light

Built in 1831 in North Kingstown, R.I., Poplar Point Light is not only Rhode Island oldest lighthouse, it’s the oldest with a wooden tower in the United States.

Wickford, R.I.’s, protected harbor off Narragansett Bay allowed the village to develop as a shipping point for trade between local plantation and international ports.

Poplar Point Lighthouse

Congress agreed to spend $3,000 for a light at the entrance to Wickford Harbor, and local contractors finished it by the end of 1831. The Poplar Point Light guided sloops and schooners in and out of the harbor’s wharves.

By 1838, a Coast Guard survey concluded the light wasn’t needed, but Poplar Point Light stayed lit. By 1870, the government decided to build a new lighthouse at Old Gay Rock to guide the burgeoning ferryboat traffic. Albert Sherman bought Poplar Point Lighthouse at auction for $3,944.67. By 1932, Edith Grant owned the lighthouse and built a large house around it. The Shippee family bought the building in 1962, and has lived there since.

Poplar Point Light is not open to the public, but Rhode Island Bay Cruises and Save the Bay offer lighthouse cruises that may go near. They usually run between May and October.

Juniper Island Light

The oldest lighthouse in Vermont: Juniper Island Light in Lake Champlain.

Juniper Island Light is not only the oldest lighthouse in Vermont, it’s the oldest cast iron lighthouse left in the United States. Originally a lantern on a post on Juniper Island marked the entrance to Burlington Harbor until a 30-foot-tall brick tower, the first on Lake Champlain, replaced it. That fell to a tower of cast iron in 1846. The lighthouse guided thousands of ships into Burlington Harbor, for many years the second busiest lumber port in the United States.

After 108 years of service, an automatic light on a tower replaced the Juniper Island Light. A state senator named Fred Fayette bought the island and the lighthouse in 1956. Careless campers started a fire that destroyed the lighthouse keeper’s house in 1962. Fayette’s 11 children inherited the island after his death and in 2001 began to reconstruct the keeper’s house with reclaimed bricks. They later restored and painted the tower.

Juniper Island, Burlington, Vt.

Images: Portland Head Light, By Rapidfire – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7161757; Boston Light By Dpbsmith at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1663166. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Canals That Built New England

In 1803, one of the first New England canals made Boston the undisputed commercial center of New England.

Called ‘the Incredible Ditch,’ the Middlesex Canal allowed a barge to haul 30 tons of goods back and forth between Chelmsford (now Lowell) and Charlestown (now Boston). A horse and wagon could haul perhaps three tons over the rough roads of the era.

Canal fever broke out in New England during the early 19^th century with the opening of the Erie Canal, finished in 1825. The Erie Canal gave New York City an unbeatable advantage over other port cities, and a frenzy of canal-building broke out throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic States.

New England states built dozens of canals, first to transport goods to seaports and then to power mills and factories. By 1840, there were 3,300 miles of canals in the United States.

Today the canals are mostly gone, filled in, paved over or maybe declared a Superfund site. Some still function as recreational trails, waterways for pleasure boats or even sources of hydroelectric power.

Here are six canals built in New England before the Civil War. If you know of other interesting canals, please mention them in the comments section below.

Farmington Canal

An old lock along the Farmington Canal.

The Connecticut Legislature granted six canal charters to private companies, but only two – the Enfield and Farmington – were actually built.

Beginning in 1825, Irish immigrants and farmers along the route dug the canal, four feet deep and 20 feet wide using handmade shovels, wheelbarrows and wagons. The private investors got no state help and struggled financially. It took 10 years to dig the canal, which began at New Haven, snaked through Granby and ended at the Connecticut River in Northampton, Mass. The laborers also built 60 stone locks along the 80-mile waterway.

When the New Haven-to-Farmington leg of the canal opened in 1828, four African American boys rode gray horses that pulled a boat carrying 200 dignitaries sipping refreshments. For a while the towns along the canal prospered, as apples, butter, cider, and wood flowed south to New Haven; coffee, flour, hides, molasses, salt, and sugar headed north.

In Plainville, Edna Whiting built a general store with doors opening onto the canal for dropoffs, which included the original Eli Terry clock weights.

But heavy rains damaged the canal, which required repairs, and toll revenue covered only 20 percent of expenses. The Farmington Canal turned a profit in just one of its first 10 years, and canal operations were slowly phased out. Eventually the Farmington Canal owners sold the land to the New Haven and Northampton Company, which built a railroad that became the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.

The railroad was turned into a rail trail in the 1990s, and today the Farmington Canal Trail runs from downtown New Haven to Northampton, Mass.

Cumberland and Oxford Canal

A steamboat like the ones that used the Cumberland and Oxford Canal between Sebago and Long Lakes about 1910.

Unlike Connecticut, Maine lawmakers decided the state should support a new canal from inland lakes to the Portland seaport. A state lottery raised $50,000 and a bank was chartered to provide the funds for the $206,000 project.

The Cumberland and Oxford Canal, opened in 1832, connected the large lakes of southern Maine with Portland along the Presumpscot River. The 38-mile canal required 27 locks to reach Sebago Lake, 267 feet above sea level. Passengers paid a half cent to go through each lock.

Barges carried lumber, firewood, masts, barrel hoops and apples from Maine’s forests and farms to the sea. From Windham, the Oriental Powder Company mills sent down the canal a quarter of the gunpowder used in the Civil War.

When the railroad that became the Maine Central opened a station in Sebago Lake, the canal started its decline. A steamboat company continued to carry tourists between Portland and the Lake Region until the last steamboat Goodrich burned at its dock in 1932. Songo Lock is still in service for pleasure boats.

Tours have been held along the old canal in Portland.

Lowell Power Canals

The Pawtucket Gatehouse, which controls power from the canals.

Lowell, Mass., contains the world’s largest system of canals that generate hydro-electric power, but they began as a modest transportation waterway in 1796.

The Pawtucket Canal was built so New Hampshire logs could be hauled around the Pawtucket Falls in East Chelmsford, Mass., to shipyards in Newburyport, Mass.

By 1806, the Middlesex Canal made the Pawtucket Canal irrelevant.

In the early 1820s, associates of Francis Cabot Lowell (who had just died) gave new life to the Pawtucket Canal: They saw it could power textile mills instead of hauling canal boats. The subsequent canals that fed off he widened and deepened Pawtucket Canal created the City of Lowell.

First the Merrimack Canal powered the Merrimack Manufacturing Co. Then waterpower from the Hamilton Canal was sold to other companies. Then the Northern Canal and the Moody Street Feeder increased the waterpower to the system. The canal owners finally built the Pawtucket Gatehouse to control flow from the Pawtucket Dam into the Northern Canal.

Lowell’s six-mile canals are still there and working. They are part of the Lowell National Historical Park, established in 1978. For a map of walks along Lowell’s canals, click here.

Amoskeag Canals

One of the canals along the Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

Manchester, N.H., was a tiny town called Derryfield when industrialist Samuel Blodget declared, “For as the country increases in population, we must have manufactories, and here at my canal will be a manufacturing town, the Manchester of America!”

It was 1807, and Blodget was as good as his word. He had gotten money from state lotteries in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1798, he broke ground on the canal, which ran parallel to the Merrimack River. Ten years later, the granite-lined canal was ready for business.

Why a canal? It was nearly impossible to travel up the Merrimack River in New Hampshire. Between Chelmsford, Mass., and Concord, N.H., the river falls 135 feet, including a 54-foot drop at the Amoskeag Falls. The canal bypassed the falls through a series of locks.

In 1810, the first textile mills were built along Blodget’s canal, then renamed the Amoskeag Canal. They used secondhand machinery bought from Samuel Slater, but it didn’t work well. In 1831 the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. bought the land and water rights along the canal and built the enormous brick Millyard, which became a manufacturing powerhouse until the 1920s.

A second canal was built one block east of the Amoskeag Canal along the length of the Millyard and parallel to the river. The two canals powered the mills. By the 1880s the mill owners switched to electricity and steam power (with disastrous results in 1891).

The canals were paved over in the 1970s. One became Commercial Street, the other a railroad track.

Today, the remains of two small canals sit at the top of Manchester’s Millyard near PSNH’s Energy Park.

Blackstone Canal

The Moshashuck River portion of the canal in Providence, ca 1968. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

During the canal mania of the 1820, Providence merchants wanted to profit from trade with the farming communities near Worcester County and the Blackstone Valley. Until then, farmers sent their products by wagon to Boston.

In 1823, shortly before the Erie Canal opened, Massachusetts gave a charter to the Blackstone Canal Co. Rhode Island soon followed. Irish immigrants dug the canal, a ditch next to the Blackstone River. In Providence, the Moshassuck River became the lower part of the canal.

Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer, had supervised work on the Erie Canal and applied lessons learned to the Blackstone Canal.

The 45-mile canal opened on Oct. 7, 1828, when the canal boat Lady Carrington arrived in Worcester. For the next 20 years, the canal brought prosperity to farmers, sparked the construction of textile mills along its banks and sustained the growth of Providence and Worcester.

In 1847, the Providence and Worcester Railroad opened, putting the Blackstone Canal out of business the next year.

Today, long sections of the canal belong to the Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park in Massachusetts and the Blackstone River State Park in Rhode Island.

The WaterFire Festival in Providence.

Every summer in Providence, the Moshassuck and Providence rivers attract tourists to the WaterFire Festival. People light 86 fires in braziers anchored just above the waterline to the sound of world music.

Pine Street Barge Canal

Aerial view of the Pine Street Barge Canal and Lake Champlain.

In the 1860s, Burlington, Vt., ranked one of the busiest lumber ports in the United States, and the Lake Champlain waterfront near Battery Street ran out of room. City planners dreamed up the Pine Street Canal to expand the waterfront and allow the loading and unloading of canal boats. A breakwater was also built near the shore of Lake Champlain.

The plan worked. Commerce flourished and factories sprang up along the Pine Street Barge Canal. Unfortunately, the factories also dumped toxic waste into the water.

The U.S. government has designated the Pine Street canal, now a 38-acre polluted swamp, as a Superfund site – perhaps the only superfund site with four shipwrecks in it. At the canal entrance, surveyors found three construction barges from the mid-20th century and the mid-19th century schooner Excelsior.

The brick factories that grew up around the Pine Street Barge Canal are now restaurants, an antiques mall and yoga studios.

Images of canals: Farmington Canal By Staib (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22646095; Pawtucket Gatehouse By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21042220. This story updated in 2022.

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Six Strange Rocks of New England, From the Eubrontes to the Man-eating Stone of Glastonbery

It should be no surprise that New England’s stony soil should produce a goodly number of strange rocks. They have such nicknames as the Devil’s Footprint, the Narragansett Runestone and the Man-eating Stone of Glastonbery.

Folktales grew up around some of New England’s strange rocks, like the one about the devil’s footprint in Maine. Scientific research explained some of the others, like the dinosaur tracks named the Connecticut State Fossil.

In some cases, like the Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee, there has never been a satisfactory explanation for how they got that way.

Here then are six strange rocks, one in each state, along with the stories that go with them. If you know of any others, please share them in the comments section.

The Connecticut State Fossil

Eubronte, one of Connecticut’s strange rocks

In 1802, a Massachusetts farm boy named Pliny Moody came across dinosaur tracks in Holyoke, Mass. That was the first of many discoveries of dinosaur tracks in the sandstone of the Connecticut River Valley.

Eubrontes is the name given to the footprint, not the dinosaur. Edward Hitchcock, the president of Amherst College, studied fossils in Holyoke, Mass., and gave them the name. He concluded, wrongly, the tracks were made by large birds.

On Aug. 23, 1966, Edward McCarthy was bulldozing a path for I-91 in Rocky Hill, Conn., when he overturned a block of sandstone imprinted with six three-toed footprints. The land turned out to be a former lakebed riddled with dinosaur tracks, the largest in North America.

Scientists confirmed the importance of the Rocky Hill dinosaur tracks, which are about a foot long. The highway was moved and the lake bed was designated a Connecticut state park. Scientists found about 2,000 of the three-toed tracks, which have been linked to the Jurassis-era Dilophosauris.

The Connecticut Legislature designated the Eubrontes fossil as the official state fossil in 1991. Other state legislatures were doing the same around that time. They did so in Massachusetts (therapod tracks in Granby), Maine (Pertica quadrifaria,a plant, in Baxter State Park) and Vermont (Beluga whale skeleton in Charlotte).

Dinosaur State Park, 400 West St., Rocky Hill

Devil’s Footprint

The devil’s footprint is said to be in the cemetery wall.

Next to the meeting house in North Manchester, Maine, lies a cemetery surrounded by a wall with a strange rock in it. The rock, in the corner of the wall, has three imprints said to be the devil’s footprints. One looks like a cloven hoof, the other two look human. Someone conveniently spray painted them red.

There is a story that goes with the rock, which may or may not be true (probably not). Years ago, a crew of construction workers was clearing a path for Scribner Hill Road when they came upon a boulder that could not be moved. One of the workmen exclaimed he’d sell his soul to the devil to move the rock. The next day, the rock was moved and the construction worker gone. The devil left his footprints on the rock as a reminder of the deal.

The North Manchester Meeting House, built in 1793, is still used as a church.

144 Scribner Hill Rd., North Manchester

Dighton Rock

Of all New England’s strange rocks, Dighton Rock, is the most studied.

Dighton Rock has mystified people since before the colonization of America. The rock is an 11-foot-high boulder covered with ancient petroglyphs of an unknown origin. It once rested on the shore of the Taunton River, but it now has its own museum (operated by appointment only) in Berkley, Mass., once part of Dighton, Mass.

Visitors to the strange rock will be in good company as Cotton Mather, George Washington and dozens of scientists have attempted to decode the meaning behind the writing on it.

Some theories: A message left by Norse explorers, Native American symbols and a message from God. So far no consensus exists as to the rock’s significance, and its meaning remains a mystery.

Dighton Rock State Park, Bayview Ave, Berkley

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

The Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee

Seneca Ladd was many things: Piano maker, carriage maker, mill owner, banker (He was one of the founders of the Meredith Village Savings Bank), amateur meteorologist, and geologist.

New Hampshire’s Lakes Region well remembers his legacy. But his most unusual accomplishment remains a mystery. One day while workmen were digging on his property in Meredith sometime in 1872 or earlier they uncovered an egg-shaped object buried at a depth of two feet and encased in clay.

The object, by far the smallest of our mystery stones, is a carved stone bearing markings that remain unidentified. Ladd himself thought his “egg” was Native American in its origins and he displayed it for the curious for much of his life. The egg still baffles scientists as to what exactly it is. Ladd’s daughter gave the object to the New Hampshire Historical Society in 1927, which then displayed it in its Museum of New Hampshire History in Concord.

New Hampshire Historical Society, 30 Park St., Concord

Quidnessett Rock

Wickford, R.I.

Quidnessett Rock, also known as the Narragansett Runestone, is a strange rock in North Kingstown, R.I., with a somewhat shaky pedigree.

Rhode Island historians first paid attention to the 2.5 ton rock around 1984. The rock bears a series of unusual markings that some claim look like markings made by the religious sect known as the The Knights Templar. This faction claims the stone is a marker, probably documenting a land claim that dates to before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

However, Edward Brown of Providence came forward to clarify that he and his brother made the markings on the rock as young boys in 1964, though not as a hoax. They did it just for fun, he said.

Others view the rock as a nuisance. A resident of Pojac Point in North Kingstown caused a kerfuffle when he lifted the rock and dropped it farther out to sea to slow the onslaught of visitors to the stone. After someone caught him he retrieved the stone, now on permanent display in Updike Park in the Village of Wickford. It makes as good an excuse as any for a trip to the charming village.

Updike Park, 89 Brown St., Wickford

Man-Eating Stone of Glastonbery

The Green Mountains

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared on Glastonbery Mountain, four without a trace: Middie Rivers (1945); Paula Jean Welden (1946); James Tedford (1949); Paul Jephson (1950); and Frieda Langer (1950).

Rivers, an experienced hunter, knew the area. Welden, a Bennington College sophomore, disappeared while hiking the Long Trail. James Tedord, a veteran, vanished on a bus exactly three years after Paula Welden disappeared. Jephson, an eight-year-old boy, went missing from the family truck while his mother fed some pigs. And Langer disappeared on a hike near the Somerset Reservoir. Her body was then found seven months later in an area that had been carefully searched.

In 2009, a writer named Joseph Citro suggested an explanation in his book, The Vermont Monster Guide: The man-eating stone of Glastonbery Mountain. In it, he wrote,

“No one alive has seen this dangerous anomaly on Glastonbury Mountain. Native Americans knew of it, and warned people away. We can only imagine it as a sizable rock, large enough to stand on. But when someone stands upon it, the rock becomes less solid, and, like a living thing, swallows the unfortunate trespasser. A number of disappearances have been reported on Glastonbury Mountain. Could all these vanished folks have stepped inadvertently on this hungry stone?”

Citro dubbed the area, part of the Green Mountains, the Bennington Triangle.

Glastonbery Mountain, Glastonbery

To read about the strange rocks that form mysterious stone structures of New England, click here.

Images: Wickford, R.I., By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20433895; Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18574963; Green Mountains From the nek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22873955. This story about strange rocks was updated in 2022.

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The Gravesites of Six Revolutionary Heroines

The gravesites of such revolutionary heroes as Paul Revere and John Adams are well known and well marked, but where are the revolutionary heroines buried? The New England Historical Society searched for the stories of courageous women willing to sacrifice for the patriot cause, and then for the their graves.

In each state, we found at least one (and often more) heroine and her resting place. Each found a way to support the American Revolution, whether by spying, nursing, publishing and even fighting.

Here, then, are six revolutionary heroines and their gravesites. If you know of another, please include it in the comments section at the end of this story.

Hannah Bunce Watson

Hannah Bunce Watson stepped in to run the pro-patriot Courant newspaper when her husband died suddenly of smallpox.

The Courant was crucial to maintaining popular support in New England for the American Revolution, as the British had shut down all the newspapers in Boston. Plus, New York’s Loyalist newspapers printed nothing but pro-British news. Only the Courant could provide reliable news to patriots in the Northeast.

Hannah already had plenty to do, with five small fatherless children. She knew little about printing but kept the presses running, even after Loyalists burned down the mill that supplied her paper. The British wouldn’t export paper to the colonies so Hannah persuaded the Connecticut Legislature to lend her money to rebuild the mill.

For two years Hannah steered the Courant, publishing stories about battles, local news, analyses of colonial politics and criticisms of the British Parliament.

Hannah Bunce Watson died in 1807 and is buried next to her third husband, Barzillai Hudson in the Old South Burying Ground in Hartford. The name on her gravestone is Hannah Hudson.

Lucy Knox

Of all the revolutionary heroines, Lucy Knox sacrificed the most for her husband. She defied her rich Loyalist parents in 1774 to marry Henry Knox, a mere bookseller. After the Battles of Concord and Lexington, she never saw or heard from her family again.

Henry taught himself about war from his books. He famously brought artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston and forced the British to evacuate. He served as the second commander of the Continental Army, first secretary of War and founder of West Point.

When Henry left for war, Lucy Knox begged to let her join him. He finally relented, and she stayed with him until he retired in 1794.

Lucy was often pregnant, and only three of her 13 children survived to adulthood. She stayed with Henry during the brutal winter at Valley Forge. She cheered the cold and hungry officers with food, wine and sometimes dancing. Lucy and Martha Washington sewed socks and clothing for the soldiers. The two revolutionary heroines also tended to them when they took sick.

Lucy and Henry Knox lived in borrowed or rented homes for the first 20 years of their marriage, finally settling in their own house, Montpelier, in Thomaston, Maine.

Lucy Knox died in 1824 and is buried along with her husband in Elm Grove Cemetery in Thomaston.

Deborah Sampson

At five-foot-seven, Deborah Sampson was tall enough to pass as a boy in 1782. That was an advantage for a girl like Deborah who wanted to join the Continental Army and fight in the war for independence.

Sampson’s father abandoned her after her birth in Plympton, Mass., in 1760. She grew up in indentured servitude. As a young woman, she taught school in Middleborough, Mass.

Her first attempt at enlisting ended as a joke. She disguised herself, joined up and then apparently thought better of it after spending some of her enlistment pay on a drunken bender.

In 1782 she tried again. Again disguised, she signed up for service in Uxbridge in the Massachusetts 4^th Regiment as Robert Shurtlieff Sampson, her dead brother’s name.

Sampson’s undercover act held, for the most part, throughout her 17-month service. She had a close call during a skirmish in Tarrytown, N.Y., when musket fire struck her head and legs. Fellow soldiers brought her to the hospital. Though she let a hospital doctor dress her head wound, she left the hospital before he treated her leg was treated. Fearing discovery, she removed one piece of shrapnel, but she couldn’t retrieve a second. It stayed with her for life.

After a cold winter in which she suffered frostbite, Sampson received a promotion to serve as a waiter to General John Paterson in April of 1783. When she came down with a fever that summer, her doctor discovered her secret. But he kept it. His wife and daughters nursed Sampson back to health.

With the war ended, Gen. Henry Knox honorably discharged her at West Point in October 1783.

Upon returning to Massachusetts, she married Benjamin Gannett of Stoughton and raised four children.

Sampson lectured about her adventures and sold a book about her experiences. But she did struggle financially, and didn’t get her military pension until 1816. After that, she lived comfortably until her death in 1827.

Deborah Sampson Gannett is buried in Rock Ridge Cemetery in Sharon, Mass.

Molly Stark

Molly Stark is the best known of the revolutionary heroines because of the war cry uttered by her husband, Gen. John Stark. During the Battle of Bennington, Stark told his men:

There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!

But Molly Stark made her own contribution to the revolutionary cause. Born Elizabeth Page on Feb. 16, 1737, she had been married for 17 years to Stark when the American Revolution broke out. They had 11 children.

When her husband was camped near Fort Ticonderoga, smallpox broke out among his men. They were cold, hungry and disheartened. Molly Start sent a message to bring the sick home to her. She cared for some 20 patients, including her own children. She saved every patient, but she came down with the disease, which disfigured her for life.

Elizabeth (Molly) Stark is buried in Stark Cemetery in Manchester, N.H. A brass cannon captured at the Battle of Bennington – called ‘Old Molly’ – is fired every year in New Boston, N.H. in her honor.

Lucretia Allen

Lucretia Allen, born in 1770, was easily the youngest of the revolutionary heroines. The oldest child of Judge John and Mary Allen, she lived in North Kingstown, R.I.

Judge Allen staunchly supported the revolution and refused to help the British when they occupied Newport in 1776. He gave the patriots livestock and provisions, and wouldn’t let a Loyalist neighbor use his skiff to bring supplies to the British fleet.

One cold morning in May 1779, the British came ashore to take care of Judge Allen. They drove off his livestock and marched him at the point of a bayonet to their vessels. Then they set his house on fire.

Eight-year-old Lucretia, her mother and siblings fled in their nightclothes to a neighbor’s house. The children were shivering, so Lucretia ran back to her house as the British ransacked it. She faced them and asked for a blanket. A soldier tossed her a quilt.

The British released Judge Allen, and he rebuilt his home.

Lucretia Allen married Silas Allen and had three children. She died in 1810 and is buried in the Deacon George Allen Lot in North Kingstown (also known as Rhode Island Historic Cemetery North Kingstown #81). The cemetery is off Fletcher Road, deep in the woods behind the old Allen homestead at 415 Fletcher Road.

Ann Story

Ann Story’s heroics during the Revolutionary War earned her the sobriquet ‘Mother of the Green Mountain Boys.’

Newly widowed, Ann Story moved to West Salisbury, Vt., in 1775 with her five children. Tall and strong, she could handle an ax as well as a musket.

When the Revolution broke out, Vermont got dangerous because Loyalists and their Indian allies harassed the patriots.

Many Vermonters left their farms. Ann Story not only stayed, but offered to spy for the Green Mountain Boys.

In one harrowing incident, Story and her children fled in a canoe while Indians burned their house. To hide from future attacks, the Story family dug a cave in the banks of the Otter Creek.

One day, one of her sons discovered a pregnant woman lost in the woods. Indians had captured the woman, but left her behind when she couldn’t keep up. Ann Story took the woman in. Later, the newborn baby’s crying drew the attention of a Loyalist scout, Ezekiel Jenny. He demanded to know the hiding place of the Green Mountain Boys’ supporters.

Story defied him. “I had no fears of being shot by so consummate a coward as he,” she recalled. Jenny continued on his way, and Story told the patriots the Loyalists were afoot. Local patriots tracked down Jenny and his scouting party, captured them and hauled them to Fort Ticonderoga.

Ann Story later married Capt. Stephen Goodrich. She is buried at the Farmingdale Cemetery in Middlebury. Her headstone bears the name Hannah Goodrich. A second memorial marks her home site on Shard Villa Road, West Salisbury. It’s next to the Shard Villa Nursing Home, once the home of lawyer Columbus Smith.

End Notes on Revolutionary Heroines

Thanks to: History of Salisbury, Vermont by A.H. Copeland. You can read more about Ann Story here.

To find the grave of Lucretia Allen: According to findagrave.com, the easiest access can be made through Chimney Rock Drive, with permission of the owner at 150. A pipe rail and granite post fence enclose the lot.

Images: Stark Cemetery By AlexiusHoratius – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26455478; Lucretia Allen and Ann Story, artists’ conceptions.

This story about the gravesites of revolutionary heroines was updated in 2018.

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Prudence Crandall Runs a Forbidden School for Black Girls

In 1831, Prudence Crandall bought a large empty house in Canterbury, Conn., setting off a national controversy.

She had the effrontery to educate an African-American girl. And then she educated only African-American girls.

Prudence Crandall

Prudence Crandall was a well-educated Quaker, born 28 years earlier on Sept. 3 in Hopkinton, R.I. Her father moved the family to Canterbury when she was 17 and sent her to the Friends’ Boarding School in Providence. She taught at a girls’ school before returning to Canterbury.

Prudence and her sister Almira put $500 down and took out a $1,500 mortgage for the house on the town green.

That fall, they opened the Canterbury Female Boarding School in the home.

Prudence Crandall

Things went smoothly until the next fall. A young woman named Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free African-American farmer nearby, asked to enroll so she could learn to teach other African Americans. Prudence Crandall admitted Sarah Harris.

White parents immediately protested and took their girls out of the school.

Prudence Crandall closed her doors — but then opened them immediately, admitting all African-American girls. She recruited students with an ad in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator on March 2, 1833. She called it ‘Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.’

By April 1, 20 African-American girls from Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Connecticut arrived at the school.

The Black Law

Prudence Crandall was excited by her mission to help young African-American girls, but not for long. Angry townspeople held meetings to figure out how to shut the school down.

On May 24, 1833, the Connecticut Legislature passed the so-called ‘Black Law,’ which banned out-of-state African-Americans from receiving an education unless a town specifically allowed it.

Prudence Crandall ignored the law and kept her school going.

She was arrested and jailed for one night that summer. She fought legal challenges to her school with the help of wealthy abolitionist Arthur Tappan. The controversy became national news.

Townspeople ostracized Prudence Crandall and her students. They closed their shops and meetinghouses to them, and refused transportation and medical treatment. They also poisoned the school’s well with animal feces and tried to prevent her from getting water elsewhere.

On July 22, 1834 she won a court ruling. The townspeople of Canterbury responded by breaking windows. Then on Sept. 9, 1834 a mob attacked the house and tried to burn it down. Crandall closed the school the next day.

Later Life and Legacy

That summer, Prudence Crandall married the Rev. Calvin Phileo. They moved to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Illinois. As a widow she moved to Elk Fall, Kans., where she died on Jan. 28, 1890 at the age of 86.

The Black Law was repealed in 1838. Four years before she died, the Connecticut Legislature at Mark Twain’s urging awarded her a $400 yearly pension.

This story was updated in 2022.

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