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Six Historic Love Nests

In honor of Valentines Day, the New England Historical Society chose to highlight six love nests.

Love nests can be lavish mansions built for mistresses or summer homes where movie stars can canoodle. Or they can be places where long and happy marriages take place.

We even included a house that was a love nest only in an author’s imagination.

Here, then, are six historic love nests, one for each New England state. If you know of another historic love nest, please share it in the comments section.

Hepburn House

Katharine Hepburn’s house in Fenwick, probably Connecticut’s most famous love nests.

Katharine Hepburn loved her summer home in Fenwick, and she loved her married co-star Spencer Tracy.

And, lucky for her, she could enjoy both of them together.

She had been going to the summer beach colony in Old Saybrook, Conn., since she was five years old. Born in Hartford in 1907, she swam, sailed and golfed at the wealthy enclave. After she met Spencer Tracy on the set of Woman of the Year, she could have called it her love nest.

At that first meeting, Katharine famously said, “I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy.” Film director George Stevens retorted, “Don’t worry, he’ll soon cut you down to size.”

Instead, they fell in love with each other. They starred in nine movies together, but lived apart and kept their affair private. Tracy was estranged from his wife, but neither sought a divorce.

Tracy and Hepburn stayed together at Hepburn’s Fenwick home. Her caddy remembers them having breakfast together.

The house, at 10 Mohegan Ave., is privately owned, but you can visit the Katharine Hepburn Museum in Old Saybrook. It’s at 300 Main St. Click here for more information.

Aaron Dunning House

As love nests go, this one was imaginary. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Visitors to Brunswick, Maine can take a stroll past 76 Federal Street, also known as the Aaron Dunning House at the corner of Cleaveland Street. This was where Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bowdoin Class of 1825) spent most of his school days.

Across the street was the home of Professor Parker Cleaveland, a mineralogist who taught Hawthorne. More importantly to the future author, Cleaveland’s very attractive servant also lived there. Whenever someone arrived at Cleaveland’s door, Hawthorne would come to his window to catch a view of the young woman.

Some writers suggest this young woman was the model for a character in his first novel, Fanshawe, set at the fictional Harley College. The college bears a striking resemblance to Bowdoin.

In real life, 76 Federal Street served Hawthorne’s love nest only in his imagination. Some say Professor Cleaveland thwarted Hawthorne’s desire by shooing him away from the young lady. If so, that would explain his portrayal of an academic in his short story, The Great Carbuncle. An extremely eccentric fictional Doctor Cacophodel bore a striking resemblance to Professor Cleaveland.

The Aaron Dunning House is private, but you can see it at 76 Federal St., Brunswick, Maine

Emily Dickinson Museum

As love nests go, this one may have been the oddest.

Emily Dickinson’s married brother Austin carried on an illicit love affair for 13 years with Mabel Loomis Todd, also married.

The whole town of Amherst, Mass., including Todd’s husband, knew about the affair. He thought it was okay. Austin’s wife did not.

Austin used to take Mabel next door, where his mother and reclusive sisters Emily and Lavinia lived. They’d then have sex on Emily Dickinson’s dining room sofa.

We know because Austin recorded everything in his diary. For example, on January 3, 1886, he wrote, “at the other house 3 to 5 and +=====XXX.” Mabel, who also kept a diary, wrote on the same day. “A most exquisitely happy and satisfactory two hours.”

Emily Dickinson, who surely knew what went on in the dining room, died in 1886. Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to publish her poems. They did, and Mabel embarked on a lecture tour that made famous the reclusive Emily.

Mabel’s affair with Austin ended with his death in 1895.

The Emily Dickinson Museum includes both Emily’s and Austin’s house. It is at 280 Main St. in Amherst, Mass. Click here for more information.

Wentworth Coolidge House

One of New Hampshire’s colonial love nests.

When the cream of Portsmouth, N.H., society assembled at Gov. Benning Wentworth’s house in March of 1760, they had no idea they’d entered his love nest.

Wentworth had a surprise in store for his guests.

His maid entered the room, not to serve the meal but to get married – to the governor.

Wentworth, at 64, had been widowed and his two sons had died. He hoped to produce an heir.

Martha Hilton, 23, decided to marry the crotchety, portly, gouty Wentworth. The two tied the knot right there in the midst of colonial New Hampshire’s high society. They remained married, living in what is now the Wentworth-Coolidge House for a decade. The marriage ended with Wentworth’s death.

Wentworth-Coolidge House, 375 Little Harbor Road, Portsmouth, N.H. Open to visitors in spring, summer and fall.

Grace Vanderbilt

The most lavish of the love nests, it is now the Grace Vanderbilt. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the third son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, built the 33-room Newport mansion in 1909 as a love nest for his mistress, Agnes O’Brien Ruiz.

The affair caused a scandal, as Ruiz was married to the Cuban attache in Washington and Vanderbilt’s wife, the former Elsie French, had moved in with her brother.

The Vanderbilt family told Alfred he could have his money or his mistress, but not both. He chose the money. Ruiz committed suicide.

Vanderbilt remarried and died in the Lusitania sinking. The love nest became a luxury hotel, the Grace Vanderbilt.

You can stay at the Grace Vanderbilt at 41 Mary St., Newport, R.I.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller Farm

The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller mansion is now part of a national park.

When he was 17 years old, Laurance Rockefeller developed his first crush on Mary French. She was the sister of his brother Nelson’s Dartmouth College roommate.

Nothing came of it until several years later, when he attended Harvard Law School and she studied sculpture in Cambridge, Mass. They married in 1934 in Woodstock, Vt., where they held the wedding reception at Mary’s family’s summer home.

They had a close partnership dedicated to philanthropy and conservation. In 1951, at the age of 41, Mary inherited her family’s Woodstock estate, which had originally belonged to environmentalist George Perkins Marsh. Her grandfather, railroad tycoon Frederick Billings, bought it and established a model farm on the property.

Their love nest became the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park when Mary and Laurance gave it to the federal government in 1992.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller Mansion, 54 Elm St., Woodstock, Vt.

* * *

Read more tales of true romance in the New England Historical Society’s collection of historic love stories. Available as an ebook and in paperback. Click here to order your copy today.

This story was updated in 2025.

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12 Fascinating Facts About Independence Day

Independence Day from the get-go has been a rowdy holiday with ringing bells, gunfire, cannon fire, fireworks, feasting, speeches and toasts.

Over the years, people tried to turn it into something else: a platform for temperance speeches, a chance for immigrants to express their ‘American-ness,’ a ‘safe-and-sane’ holiday. But it always seems to revert to a rowdy celebration.

Here then, is a list of 12 fascinating facts about the Independence Day.

1. Adams Messed Up

It didn’t really happen this way. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.

John Adams got the date wrong. In a letter to his wife Abigail from Philadelphia on July 3, 1776, he wrote, “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” You can understand his mistake, since the Continental Congress approved independence on July 2. And all the signers of the Declaration of Independence didn’t exactly gather around the parchment and sign at once. Some had left Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Moreover, the Declaration didn’t get printed with all the names of the signers until January 1777, by Mary Katherine Goddard in Baltimore.

2. A Looong Independence Day Tradition

Boston fireworks, 2011.

Fireworks go all the way back to 1777, when Boston and Philadelphia held the first displays. The Continental Congress authorized the fireworks in Philadelphia. And in Boston, “Col. Crafts illuminated his park on the commons, threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.”

3. Quite a Streak

Charles Francis Adams

The Adams family participated in official Independence Day celebrations for 116 consecutive years. It started from the time John signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and ended in 1892, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., gave a speech at the First Church in Quincy, Mass.

4. Independence Day Toasts

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

During the 19th century, people loved to drink patriotic toasts on the Independence celebrations. Tipplers carefully prepared the toasts and often published them in the local newspaper. They frequently toasted George Washington. For example, a toast from Lexington, Mass., in 1814, went like this: “The memory of Washington. May his name no more be profaned by Hypocrites, as that of Jesus has been by the Jesuits.”

5. Independence Day Time Capsule

Massachusetts State House from the Boston Common

On the Fourth of July in 1795, Paul Revere and Gov. Sam Adams laid the cornerstone for the Massachusetts State House in Boston. They also buried a copper time capsule. It contained a pine tree shilling coin from 1652, a copper medal engraved with an image of George Washington, several newspapers and a silver plate thought to be engraved by Paul Revere. State officials opened the time capsule in 2014.

6. Career Launch

Young Daniel Webster

On the Fourth of July 1800, Daniel Webster launched his political career as an 18-year-old Dartmouth junior. He was chosen to deliver a speech at the college because of his reputation as a speaker and debater. In the speech he praised the veterans of the Revolution, George Washington and the unifying authority of the U.S. Constitution.

7. Coincidence?

Thomas Jefferson

John Adams died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His last words were “Jefferson still survives.” He got it wrong; Jefferson died five hours earlier. Only one signer of the Declaration still lived in 1826: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Md., who died six years later at the age of 95.

8. Playing with Fire

Aftermath of the Great Portland Fire.

A Fourth of July firecracker in 1866 started the Great Portland Fire in Maine. The conflagration, the worst to date in the United States, burned 1800 buildings. It left 10,000 homeless and killed two. Fireworks, though, didn’t cause as many Fourth of July fatalities as toy guns. The toy bullets — blank cartridges, actually — pierced the skin and caused tetanus, the leading cause of Independence Day deaths in the 19th century.

Henry Ward Beecher speaking at Woodstock, Conn, President Grant seated. From a Harper’s Weekly engraving courtesy Library of Congress.

9. Bor-ing

Starting in 1870, Henry C. Bowen, a businessman, hosted the country’s largest Fourth of July party in Woodstock, Conn., at his Roseland Cottage. The event featured many, many, many speeches; so many, that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes tried to get out of going in 1877. Bowen didn’t drink, and President Ulysses S. Grant had to sneak a cocktail on the porch at the first party in 1870.

The Boston Pops plays Stars and Stripes Forever.

10. Independence Day Pops

The Boston Pops Orchestra has played Stars and Stripes Forever at the end of its concerts since 1899, two years after John Philip Sousa composed it. Arthur Fiedler included it in the first Independence Day Pops concert on the Esplanade in 1929. The Pops has played it ever since, the flag always dropping in the final moments of the piece. As many as 500,000 people show up for the concert.

Americanization Day poster

11. Americanization Day

Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis kicked off the first Americanization Day with a Fourth of July speech in 1915 at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Americanization Day, an attempt to crowd out Independence Day, responded to nearly two decades of increasing immigration, a sore spot for many Americans. The Americanization Day movement set about to reshape the day’s image around themes of immigrants embracing American culture. It didn’t last.

12. No White House Celebration

Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

The saddest Independence Day in the White House was probably in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge spent most of the day at the bedside of his 16-year-old son. Calvin Coolidge, Jr., had developed septic poisoning after he played tennis without socks and it caused a blister that got infected. He died on July 7.

With thanks to James R. Heintze’s Fourth of July Celebrations Database. Boston Fireworks image By Pablo Valerio – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15723763. This story was updated in 2023.

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6 Places That Became a Summer White House

The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.

Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.

Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.

The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.

A Thimble island

According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.

The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.

Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.

Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.

The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.

Bar Harbor, Maine

President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.

President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.

Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.

Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.

Hancock House

A Summer White House in Maine

Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.

He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.

“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”

However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.

Taft at his summer White House

And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.

Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.

Hyannis Port, Mass.

The Kennedy Big House

The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.

The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.

In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.

John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.

To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.

Cornish, N.H.

Harlakenden House

Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.

Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.

The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.

Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Newport, R.I.

Eisenhower House

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.

He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Plymouth Notch

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Brigadoon as a Summer White House

The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”

Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916

Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.^”

Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.

This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2023.

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Eat Like A President, Part II

In honor of President’s Day, the New England Historical Society brings you another guide to how to eat like a president.

John F. Kennedy. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

We focus on New England presidents beginning with John Adams and including one or two diversions such as Abraham Lincoln. (Though it’s worth pointing out that Legal Seafood’s clam chowder has been served at every presidential inauguration since Ronald Reagan.)

Eat Like a President

Green Dragon

John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider when he got up in the morning, and when in Boston he stopped off later at the Green Dragon Tavern.

Paul Revere talks in his memoirs about meeting John and the other Sons of Liberty, like Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren, to start a revolution. The tavern isn’t exactly where it was back in the day, but absent the karaoke bar and table tents it’s quite evocative of the Revolutionary era.

When at home, John and Abigail ate typical New England foods such as codfish cakes, New England clam chowder, Johnny cake, apple butter, succotash, Indian pudding and gingerbread.

John Quincy Adams

Their son, John Quincy Adams, was notoriously indifferent to food despite his exposure to many fine international cuisines. He liked fruit, and was known to say, “Five or six small crackers and a glass of water give me a sumptuous dinner.”

Pie at the White House

Franklin Pierce was another president who liked solid, traditional fare. It was a preference he would have picked up at his father’s tavern in Hillsborough, N.H., where a Christmas dinner was once held for Revolutionary War veterans. Pierce and his family were fond of maple syrup and New Hampshire fried pies, made with dried apples.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Abraham Lincoln, though not a New Englander, had relatives in Massachusetts. His distant cousin Levi Lincoln supported his political career. You can visit Sturbridge Village and see his former mansion where Abraham Lincoln dined in September 1848.

Levi Lincoln, former governor and then the mayor of Worcester, held a meal that Cousin Abraham remembered long afterward. Thirteen years later, he told Massachusetts Gov. Henry Gardner:

I had been chosen to Congress then from the wild West, and with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured State in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment.

Lincoln, Gardner said, added

That the dinner at Governor Lincoln’s by reason of its elaborate hospitality and social brilliancy was different in kind from any function he had ever attended before. He remarked upon the beauty of the china, the fineness of the silverware and the richness of all the table appointments, and spoke of the company of distinguished and thoroughly educated whom he met there in the animated, free and intimate conversation inspired by such an accomplished host as Governor Lincoln.

Picky Presidential Eater

Where Calvin Coolidge developed his eating habits

Calvin Coolidge, as a state lawmaker and governor, enjoyed dining at the private Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. He was a fastidious eater who believed chicken should be raised close to where they were eaten and kept chickens at the White House. They had an unusual flavor because the chicken yard was built on top of Theodore Roosevelt’s mint bed.

Coolidge liked roast beef, Vermont pickles and corn muffins. According to the Food Timeline, his fastidiousness created a problem for the White House chef, who couldn’t get the recipe for corn muffins right. First Lady Grace Coolidge finally sent off to a Northampton inn to get the recipe.

Coolidge’s discriminating dining habits are illustrated by several versions of a story told about him while he attended Amherst College. Here’s one version:

Dwight Morrow was a classmate of Coolidge’s at Amherst and the father of Anne Morrow, the wife of Charles A. Lindbergh. (Coolidge later appointed Morrow as Ambassador to Mexico.) Morrow used to like to tell the story of when he and Coolidge went to the same boarding house to take their meals. Hash was served frequently. When it was served, Morrow said Coolidge turned very grave. The landlady had a dog and a cat. As the hash was being served, Coolidge would ask “Where’s the dog?” and the dog would be brought in. Then he’d ask “Where’s the cat?” — and the cat would be called in. Only then would he help himself to the hash.

The Modern Era

George H.W. Bush in his broccoli-eating days.

As a member of Congress, John F. Kennedy stayed at a hotel near the Statehouse in Boston. He notoriously showed up at the nearby 21^st Amendment for a beer he never paid for.

Kennedy also liked to read his Sunday paper at the Union Oyster House, where another presidential wannabe, Daniel Webster, used to consume six plates of oysters and a tumbler of brandy for lunch.

Like Coolidge, Kennedy liked corn muffins. He also dearly loved Boston clam chowder. White House chef Rene Verdon remembered,

He asked me to prepare it for him on many occasions…I did everything I could to satisfy Mr. Kennedy’s New England liking for good fish cookery. Quite naturally, as a Catholic, he had it every Friday.

When vacationing on Cape Cod, the Kennedys liked the homemade ice cream from the Four Seas ice cream parlor in Centerville, near the family compound in Hyannisport. Jackie Kennedy’s favorite flavor: peach.

George H.W. Bush was as fastidious about vegetables as Calvin Coolidge was about everything else. He hated broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbage. Barbara Bush said,

The day he was 60, he said to me: `I am never going to eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower or cabbage again.’ And he hasn’t!

Bush and his family liked lobster and ice cream, though. When vacationing in Kennebunkport, they enjoyed Mabel’s Lobster Claw, a seafood restaurant that’s been serving tourists since the 1950s. The Bushes allegedly liked the peppermint stick ice cream.

And on the walls of Frank Pepe’s Pizza Napoletana in New Haven hangs a framed photo of Bill Clinton. Though now a vegan, he liked a good white clam apizza in his day.

This story about eating like a president was updated in 2022.

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

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

Eleonora Sears on the tennis court.

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

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

Multi-Champion

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

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

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

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

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

Eleonora Sears, Brahmin

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

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

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

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

Eleonora Sears by John Singer Sargent.

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

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

Pants and Cigarettes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mother of Squash

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

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

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

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

Land and Sea

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

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

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

This story about Eleonora Sears was updated in 2022.

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Gentleman Gerald Chapman, Connecticut’s Celebrity Gangster

Gerald Chapman, Prohibition’s celebrated “Gentleman Bandit,” might have escaped the gallows if he hadn’t gone on a crime spree in Connecticut.

Gerald Chapman. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

While in prison, Gerald Chapman found a mentor who taught him that dapper dress and good manners diverted suspicion from criminal activity. Before he pulled off the biggest armed robbery in history, Chapman dressed well, lived in New York’s posh Gramercy Park neighborhood and frequented expensive nightclubs. He even affected a British accent.

Newspapers nicknamed him the “Count of Gramercy Park” and the “Gentleman Bandit.” He was the first celebrity gangster and the first criminal the press dubbed “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Gerald Chapman

Gerald Chapman came into this world as George Chartres in Brooklyn, N.Y. — or maybe it was Manhattan’s Lower East Side – sometime in August 1887. As a youth he drifted into petty crime.

Police arrested him for the first time at the age of 14, and he spent most of his young adulthood in Sing Sing. He met his mentor, George “Dutch’” Anderson, after his transfer to Auburn Prison.

Anderson’s real name was Ivan Dahl von Teler. Born into a wealthy Danish family, he attended Heidelberg and Uppsala universities. Then he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to take up crime. Anderson saw in the younger Gerald Chapman someone who had enough smarts and daring to commit big-time heists.

Prohibition

Gerald Chapman in his Wethersfield prison cell. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

When the two men were out on parole in 1919 they formed a gang with Charles Loerber, a getaway driver. He posed as their chauffeur while they plotted their crimes. Chapman pretended to be an oil baron, and Anderson his business partner. The gang quickly seized the opportunities presented by Prohibition and began bootlegging in the Midwest. They also arranged confidence scams on the side.

In 1921 they branched out into armed robbery. They plotted the route of a U.S. mail truck that ran regularly along a street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. On Oct. 24, they blocked the mail truck with two cars and assaulted the driver. Chapman and his gang made off with $2.4 million in cash, bonds and jewelry – the biggest heist in U.S. history.

They should have lain low, but instead they committed a string of robberies in upstate New York. But robbing the post office is a federal crime, and federal investigators soon hunted them down.

3rd Time the Charm

An undercover postal inspector nabbed them when he bought stolen Argentine gold notes from Gerald Chapman. He and Anderson were tried and sentenced to 25 years in the Atlanta Federal Prison.

Gerald Chapman then managed to escape after three tries. During his first attempt he tried to outrun a posse of 200 men. They shot him in the arm, kidney, hip and back. Six days later he escaped from Atlanta General Hospital, only to be captured again. After returning to the Atlanta penitentiary, he promptly broke out again and made a clean getaway in March 1923.

The press ate up the story of the Gentleman Bandit. Chapman paved the way for future celebrity gangsters like John Dillinger and Al Capone.

According to True Detective in 1929,

Newspaper feature writers used miles of typewriter ribbon on him, and ended by creating an idealized character which combined the daring of Jesse James, the ruthlessness of the apache, Clair Raoul, the suavity of Doctor Crippen and the ingenuity of the notorious Perugia, who committed the famous theft of the Mona Lisa.

Anderson escaped in December that year.

Death in New Britain

Gerald Chapman with his attorneys. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.sp

In the fall of 1924, Gerald Chapman and another man went on a crime spree in Connecticut. They were spotted trying to rob a New Britain department store, and five police officers rushed to arrest them. In the ensuing shoot out, Chapman killed Officer James Skelly and escaped. The police captured the other armed robber — Walter Shean, the ne’er-do-well son of a wealthy family from Springfield, Mass. Shean ratted out Chapman rather than hang for Skelly’s murder.

Gerald Chapman went into hiding at the farm of Ben Hance in Muncie, Ind. Three months later, Hance did his public duty and tipped off the police to Chapman’s whereabouts. Police arrested Chapman and sent him back to the federal prison in Atlanta.

Though the federal government had jurisdiction, the State of Connecticut wanted to try Chapman for murder. In March 1925 he was extradited to Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield. His trial would turn into a media circus.

Awkward

Dutch Anderson ‘Wanted’ poster.

Ben Hance and Walter Shean testified against Chapman. The prosecution also showed that spent cartridges from Officer Skelly’s body matched Chapman’s gun. Chapman denied he’d ever been in New Britain. He also denied knowing Ben Hance or Walter Shean or that he was even Gerald Chapman.

The jury deliberated for 11 hours and on April 4, 1925 delivered a guilty verdict. He was sentenced to hang by the “upright jerker.”

“Death itself isn’t dreadful, but hanging seems an awkward way of ending the adventure,” Chapman then said to his attorney. The upright jerker, a flawed hanging mechanism, dropped counterweights to pull the victim upward. Theoretically death resulted instantly from a broken neck. But in practice victims sometimes strangled slowly.

Chapman’s lawyers argued the state couldn’t execute him because he had to first serve out his federal sentence. President Calvin Coolidge solved that problem by granting Chapman a pardon. Chapman appealed his sentence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the high court ruled against him.

Chapman was hanged until he was dead shortly after midnight on April 6, 1926.

Eight months later, Ben Hance and his wife were killed in revenge. They fell victim to a roadside ambush on the Anderson-Muncie Highway. Mrs. Hance died instantly. But Ben Hance lived long enough to finger Dutch Anderson and an accomplice. Police later killed Anderson in a shootout.

This story about Gerald Chapman was updated in 2022.

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