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Danbury Conn.

The 1790 Census: New England by the Numbers

Just after the American Revolution, Gilmanton, N.H., ranked as the 30^th biggest municipality in the United States. The Lakes Region town was bigger than Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh, Trenton, Louisville, Cincinnati and Savannah, according to the 1790 census.

New Hampshire, in fact, had four towns among the 30 largest in the country, including Londonderry, Portsmouth and Rochester. Only four New England states belonged to the union then, but they were home to 19 of the 30 biggest cities and towns in the country. Back then, one in four U.S. citizens lived in New England.

The region’s power and influence in the early Republic can be inferred from the 1790 census, the first taken in the United States. It didn’t last long. The westward migration had already begun in 1787, from a minister’s house in Ipswich, Mass. As people migrated west for land and opportunity, new cities and towns began to eclipse those of New England.

Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn served as U.S. Marshal for Maine during the 1790 census. Painting by Gilbert Stuart.

The 1790 Census

In 1790, there were 93,000 people living in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including the District of Maine. A year after the federal government took the 1790 census, 86,000 Vermonters officially joined New England.

Massachusetts alone held nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population, and Boston ranked as the third biggest municipality. Only New York and Philadelphia had more people. Census takers counted Boston’s population at 18,320 — about the size of contemporary Hopkinton, Mass.

Jonathan Jackson served as U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts during the 1790 census.

Today, only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population lives in Massachusetts, and Boston has slipped to the 24th biggest city.

Census taking in 1790 was an inexact science. Congress ordered U.S. marshals to take it. Each state had only one marshal, so the marshal appointed assistants to count people. The 650 enumerators had nine months to collect the data and post the results in two public places. Then they stored the results in the federal courthouse.

The U.S. marshals in New England included Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn for Maine, Jonathan Jackson for Massachusetts, John Parker for New Hampshire, William Peck for Rhode Island and Philip Bradley for Connecticut.

Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both questioned whether the census could count everyone. During a time of difficult travel and communication, the enumerators probably missed some people. And they deliberately missed all Indians not taxed, for example.

In the end, the census takers managed to count just under 4 million people.

A pitcher commemorating the 1790 census

Urban vs. Rural

The vast majority of Americans lived in the country in 1790. New Hampshire was one of the more urban states, with more towns in the Top 30 rankings than Connecticut, which only had New Haven and Hartford. New Hampshire, in fact, had more municipalities in the Top 30 than Pennsylvania, which had almost three times the population.

Today, New Hampshire’s biggest city – Manchester – ranks 259^th, the only New Hampshire municipality among the top 300 U.S. cities.

Massachusetts was similarly urban, though some towns had not yet started to grow into cities – Worcester, Springfield and Fall River, for example, were all smaller than Gilmanton, N.H. Lowell didn’t even exist.

But the towns in Massachusetts that ranked in the top 30 might surprise you. In ascending order, they were Plymouth, Beverly, New Bedford, Taunton, Middleborough, Sherburne, Newburyport, Gloucester, Marblehead and Salem. Salem was bigger than Richmond, Va., and Albany, N.Y. Middleborough, Mass., was also bigger than Albany.

New England, in fact, had five of the 10 largest urban places in the United States: Boston, Salem, Mass.; Newport, R.I.; Providence, R.I., and Marblehead, Mass.

Connecticut had a significantly more rural character then than it does now. New Hampshire’s population was denser, especially along the southern border. The Connecticut towns of Stamford, Waterbury and Danbury had fewer people than Gilmanton. Bridgeport, now Connecticut’s biggest city, wouldn’t incorporate for another 30 years.

Westward Ho!

The center of the U.S. population has steadily moved west and slightly south, as people migrated and new states joined the union. New England’s presence steadily declined.

Ten years after the 1790 census, only 15 New England cities ranked in the top 30, despite having added Vermont. And in 1820, New England had just 13 of the biggest cities and towns.

In 1790, Massachusetts had 9.7 percent of the U.S. population. Twenty years later it had only 6.5 percent, as four states had joined the union. And in 229 years, the Bay State has slipped from fourth to 15^th place.

Gilmanton has grown a little from its base of 2,613 in 1790, when it had an ironworks and a half-dozen villages and parishes. In 2017, 3,734 lived in the town. But Gilmanton never again appeared on the list of the top 30 cities and towns in the United States.

For a list of the Top 30 cities, click here.

This story was updated in 2021.

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Women’s History Quiz

It’s women’s history month, time to find out how well you know your women’s history. You’ll probably do well if you’re a faithful reader of the New England Historical Society.

Here’s the quiz:

[mlw_quizmaster quiz=4]

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The Mad Hatters of Danbury, Conn.

The 19^th-century hat factories of Danbury, Conn., made physical wrecks of thousands of workers. They turned them into mad hatters with symptoms known as the Danbury shakes.

A Danbury hatter binding a hat.

Hat makers used mercuric nitrate to make hats. Many developed mercury poisoning, manifested as drooling, pathological shyness, irritability and tremor. Mercury poisoning looked a lot like drunkenness, a handy misconception for employers to exploit.

Hat History

Danbury’s hat-making history goes back to the late 18^th century. According to local legend, a man named Zadoc Benedict plugged a hole in his shoe with fur. He found sweat and friction turned it into felt.

Benedict began making felted fur hats on his bedpost and eventually opened a hat shop on Main Street. Others followed, setting up small hat shops in Danbury. By 1800, Danbury made more hats than any other U.S. city.

By the 1880s, industrialization and consumer demand fueled the growth of Danbury’s hat factories, which produced 5 million hats a year. People called Danbury ‘Hat City’ and formed baseball teams called the Danbury Hatters. A lighted sign proclaimed ‘Danbury Crowns Them All,’ and the city put a derby hat on its seal.

Danbury Mad Hatters

Working in the factories was awful. By the outbreak of the Civil War, doctors knew the symptoms of mercury poisoning. But no one did anything about it for almost a century.

To make hats, workers matted together rabbit or beaver skins and smoothed them with an orange solution containing mercuric nitrate. Hatters then shaped the resulting felt into large cones, shrank them in boiling water and then dried them.

mad hatters city seal

In 1851, the workers formed the hatter’s union. That year they reported on working conditions in an effort to improve them. One worker said:

So much steam, you didn’t only want to wear a rubber apron in front of you, but also over your head; there wasn’t any ceiling; the steam rising to the rafters, condensed and came down like rain.

According to the report, “Unknown to the workers it was a rain of death from the fumes of nitrate of mercury.”

Another worker said hatters hid the Danbury shakes:

I suspect I had it too, but I wouldn’t go to the doctor. If a worker claimed compensation, he got on the blacklist of the manufacturers — he couldn’t get another job unless he’d sign a waiver against future claims.

Danbury hatters sizing a hat

Diagnosis

The first clinical description of the problem was published in 1860. However, the U.S. Public Health Service didn’t study it until 1937 after prodding by the hatters’ union.

A British Journal of Industrial Medicine article described the mad hatters’ symptoms in 1946:

The man affected is easily upset and embarrassed, loses all joy in life and lives in constant fear of being dismissed from his job. He has a sense of timidity and may lose self control before visitors. Thus, if one stops to watch such a man in a factory, he will sometimes throw down his tools and turn in anger on the intruder, saying he cannot work if watched. Occasionally a man is obliged to give up work because he can no longer take orders without losing his temper or, if he is a foreman, because he has no patience with men under him. Drowsiness, depression, loss of memory and insomnia may occur, but hallucinations, delusions and mania are rare.

The most characteristic symptom, though it is seldom the first to appear, is mercurial tremor…It may be interrupted every few minutes by coarse jerky movements. It usually begins in the fingers, but the eyelids, lips and tongue are affected early. As it progresses it passes to the arms and legs, so that it becomes very difficult for a man to walk about the workshop, and he may have to be guided to his bench.

View of a Danbury hat factory, 1911

Better a Mad Hatter…

Hatters in the 19^th century faced a more lethal health problem than mercury poisoning: tuberculosis, then the leading cause of death in the United States. In the close, steamy hat workrooms, hatters easily caught the disease.

The hatter’s union fought for safer working conditions. Employers dismissed their complaints. They said the mad hatter symptoms — tremors and hallucinations — resulted from drunkenness and tobacco use.

After the turn of the century, court decisions that favored anti-union employers weakened the hatters’ unions.

In 1901 the United Hatters of North America went on strike against the Danbury hatmaking factory of D.E. Loewe & Co. Dietrich Loewe brought in scabs, and the unions successfully boycotted his hats, damaging him financially. Loewe sued the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the officers of the local hatters’ union and 250 rank-and-file members of the hatters’ union who lived in Danbury and Norwalk.

The case twice went all the way to the Supreme Court, which held the union unlawfully restrained trade. Loewe was awarded about $250,000, and the individual defendants had to pay his judgment. The company attached their paychecks and they faced losing their homes.

The AFL held a Hatter’s Day, in which union members throughout the United States donated an hour’s pay to the hatters. The judgment was paid and the workers kept their houses.

Alice Hamilton

During the 15 years the Danbury Hatters case moved through the courts, a socially prominent doctor who lived in Hadlyme, Conn., took up the cause of workers who got sick on the job.

Alice Hamilton

Alice Hamilton with her sister Edith Hamilton, the classicist, had attended Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., about 50 miles from Danbury. She earned a medical degree and joined Jane Addams’ settlement house, Hull House, in Chicago. Living with poor workers, she got interested in the injuries and illnesses they suffered on the job.

Alice Hamilton pioneered the fields of industrial hygiene and occupational epidemiology. In 1919 Harvard Medical School appointed her an assistant professor in the new Department of Industrial Medicine– its first woman faculty member. Hamilton investigated mercury poisoning and in 1922 produced a report.

Three years later, the Workers’ Health Bureau of America and the United Hatters of America promoted Hamilton’s findings. They reported on the Danbury shakes:

…[of] 100 union hatters of Danbury, Conn., examined by experts, 43 had mercury poisoning… Boys 20 and 21 years old are already so badly poisoned that their hands shake continually, while many of the men who have served longer at the trade cannot even feed themselves.

The report also concluded the symptoms did not result from alcohol and tobacco use, as employers had claimed.

Dec. 1, 1941

Finally, on Dec. 1, 1941, Connecticut banned the use of mercury in hat making. Hat makers instead used hydrochloric acid, a safe alternative. For years thereafter, they celebrated the December 1 anniversary.

But it was almost too late. The hat industry had declined, and by 1923 only six hat factories remained in Danbury. The city’s last hat factory, Stetson, closed its doors in 1965.

Though the hat industry vanished from Danbury, the mercury hasn’t.

The Environmental Protection Agency declared the land on which the hat factories stood a Superfund clean-up site. The sediment of the Still and Housatonic Rivers contains traces of mercury to this day.

In 2003, the state of Connecticut planted on a hat factory site Eastern cottonwood trees genetically engineered to absorb mercury. The trees, however, emit mercury into the air.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Boston Corbett – The Mad Hatter who Killed John Wilkes Booth

Thomas Corbett was born in London in 1832, but he gained his fame as Boston Corbett, the man who killed John Wilkes Booth.

As a young man, Corbett drank heavily. He then moved from New York to Boston and encountered Methodist reformers. They persuaded him to swear off alcohol and join the Methodist Church. He embraced the church as he did everything else in life – with great gusto, changing his name to Boston Corbett and growing his hair long to imitate Christ.

Street Preacher

Corbett became a street preacher, condemning sinners around the city. He would set up an impromptu pulpit on a street corner and offer his sermons to the passing parade. And when criticized or confronted, he put his brawling skills to use and took on all comers.

Mathew Brady portrait of Boston Corbett

Historians suspect Boston Corbett had mental problems to begin with, but they were probably exacerbated by his exposure to mercury while pursuing his trade as a hatter. In one of the odder incidents in his life, two prostitutes propositioned Corbett. He condemned them and continued home, but the temptation he felt troubled him.

Seeking answers in the Bible, he turned to the Book of Matthew, which instructs: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee….and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Corbett chose a literal interpretation of the book and castrated himself.

Civil War

In 1861, Corbett needed to decide his fate. Would he become a pacifist or a soldier? After prayerful consideration, he chose soldier and enlisted in a regiment from New York to join the Union Army in the Civil War. Before firing a shot he would utter the phrase, “May God have mercy on your souls.”

Corbett was not an ideal soldier. He carried his Bible with him and never missed an opportunity to scold his fellow soldiers – including superiors – for profanity or other sinful behaviors. He was court martialed for his conduct and expelled from military service, but rejoined in 1863.

Andersonville Prison

Corbett would serve time in the Andersonville Prison in Georgia – the Confederate-run prisoner of war camp. Nearly one-third of the 45,000 Union soldiers sent to Andersonville died there. Corbett was fortunate. He survived.

Assassination

After John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln on April 15, 1865, he fled to the Town of Port Royal in the northern end of Virginia’s Tidewater Region.

Currier and Ives print o the Lincoln assassination

Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sent 26 Union soldiers from the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment in pursuit. Boston Corbett was in the regiment, which had orders to bring Booth and his accomplices back to Washington – preferably alive.

When the Union soldiers found Booth holed up in a barn, they flushed him out by setting it on fire. Boston Corbett shot the fleeing Booth in the neck. The shot paralyzed Booth, and he died within two hours.

As Corbett explained it: “I aimed at his body. I did not want to kill him….I think he stooped to pick up something just as I fired. That may probably account for his receiving the ball in the head. When the assassin lay at my feet, a wounded man, and I saw the bullet had taken effect about an inch back of the ear, and I remembered that Mr. Lincoln was wounded about the same part of the head, I said: “What a God we have…God avenged Abraham Lincoln.”

Discharge the Patriot

Corbett became widely known as “Lincoln’s Avenger.” Stanton questioned him about the shooting, but concluded Corbett acted reasonably.

John Wilkes Booth

“The rebel is dead. The patriot lives . . . he has spared the country expense, continued excitement and trouble. Discharge the patriot,” Stanton reportedly said.

Boston Corbett did not live happily ever after. Following the war he returned to Boston, and to hat making. He became even more erratic, launching into prayer and waving his pistol when agitated. He took to giving speeches about killing Booth, but his increasing incoherence prevented him from furthering that career.

Chased out of job after job, he went from Boston to Danbury, Conn., to New Jersey and finally to Kansas as a homesteader. Moved by his role in killing Booth, the Kansas Legislature appointed him assistant doorkeeper in 1887.

By then, however, delusions and paranoia dogged Boston Corbett. He feared irate former Confederates would assassinate him. At one point, convinced his fellow court officers conspired against him, Corbett brandished his pistol and cleared them from the Statehouse. For that, he was sent to an insane asylum in Topeka. He then escaped and with the aid of a friend slipped away.

Kansas Statehouse

Today, no one knows what happened to him. He said he planned to go to Mexico. Some theorize he perished in the Great Hinckley Fire in Minnesota in 1894.

The search for his final history is clouded, however, because many imposters claimed to be “Lincoln’s Avenger” after Boston Corbett disappeared.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about John Wilkes Booth’s New Hampshire fiance here. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Prohibition Speakeasies You Can Still Visit

When the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution took effect on January 17, 1920, New England’s taverns suddenly became speakeasies.

Law enforcement couldn’t keep up with the new law, honored more in the breach than the observance. Many old New England homes, drugstores, restaurants and shops turned into speakeasies. They made it easy to find beer and liquor.

You could get alcohol on the sly in hotel basements, in curtained restaurant nooks, in bars that straddled the Canadian border and in commercial buildings turned speakeasies.

Here are six former speakeasies in New England you can now visit – and in five of them, you can order a cocktail. Legally.

If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

TK’s American Café, Danbury, Conn.

One of Connecticut’s many speakeasies.

Connecticut did not ratify the 18th Amendment, and it didn’t take long to realize how many people flouted it. People could easily get booze from rumrunners or stills within the state. By October 1921, the state Prohibition director estimated Connecticut had 1,500 speakeasies, with 400 in New Haven alone.

Speakeasies flourished in Danbury as well. TK’s American Cafe, which started as a car dealership in 1928, became a speakeasy. With the repeal of the Volstead Act, it became the Hat City’s first legitimate bar. Called Bennie Pane’s Stone Bar, it morphed into Pane’s Restaurant in 1937 and served the first pizza in Connecticut. In 1948 it changed hands, and would change hands again and again.

Tom Kennedy opened the old speakeasy as a sports bar in 1990, and struggled to keep it afloat until he offered 10-cent wings on Tuesday nights. Patrons say it hasn’t changed much – except for the televisions – since Bennie Pane owned it.

T.K.’s American Cafe, 255 White St., Danbury.

Bramhall, Portland

Bramhall, then a speakeasy, now a tavern.

Since Maine was the first state to outlaw alcohol, Mainers were the first to flout the ban. The rest of the country didn’t learn from Maine that banning booze drove drinking underground and promoted crime.

Taverns turned into speakeasies, bootleggers smuggled spirits over the Canadian border and rum runners brought them in by sea. Immigrants made and sold alcohol from their kitchens, and farmers made it from secret stills.

The Old Port District, then as now, was a haven for the thirsty public. The Congress Street bar now known as Bramhall was a Portland sanctuary favored by scofflaws during the wild days of Prohibition.

A dim, brick-lined stone vault with little natural light, Bramhall bills itself as a modern speakeasy. For years it was a basement pub under The Roma Café, now defunct. Bramhall has been refurbished and reopened with a reasonably priced menu.

Bramhall, 769 Congress St., Portland

Hotel Vernon, Worcester, Mass.

Worcester had plenty of speakeasies like the Hotel Vernon.

On the eve of Prohibition, Jan. 15, 1920, Worcester celebrated the death of John Barleycorn with raucous partying. Celebrants jammed saloons and hosted parties in hundreds of homes. Most establishments stopped serving liquor at midnight if they hadn’t run out already.

But the party kept going surreptitiously throughout the city, including and especially at the Hotel Vernon on Kelley Square. Two brothers owned it, Frank “Bossy” McGady, a state trooper, and Beaven McGady.

Down a long wooden staircase the hotel served liquor at its hideaway speakeasy, where no one ever got caught. It had a secret entrance and a password, “Madame Rhubarb,” to get through it. Babe Ruth often stopped in for a drink or four.

Just after the end of Prohibition, an artist painted around the hotel bar a mural based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” A backroom was added, decorated like a schooner galley and named “The Kelley Square Yacht Club.” Henry Mancini and Burl Ives visited during the ‘40s and ‘50s, and reservations were sometimes needed two weeks in advance. (A tour of the Hotel Vernon was taped in 2010; watch it here.)

The construction of I-290 transformed the neighborhood, not for the better. The Hotel Vernon became a residential hotel and dive bar. Today you can get $1 drafts, free peanuts and a tour of the speakeasy in the basement if the bartender isn’t too busy.

Hotel Vernon, 1 Millbury St., Worcester.

The Cave, Bretton Woods, N.H.

A Cave in the mountains of New Hampshire.

Liquor was still legal in Canada and times were hard in Northern New England during Prohibition. People therefore had a strong incentive to smuggle alcohol. Bootleggers brought in illegal booze from Canada along the dark, unguarded wooded roads crossing the border into New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.

Boston’s elite enjoyed surreptitious cocktails in The Cave, a subterranean vault in the cellar of the Mount Washington Hotel, which famously hosted the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Patrons drank booze out of teacups. According to legend, Joseph P. Kennedy sold bootleg liquor to the hotel, now known as the Omni Mount Washington Resort.

The Cave was originally set up as squash courts. During Prohibition, the hotel turned them into a speakeasy with a pull-down false ceiling. In the event of a raid, an alarm sounded, the booze would be stuffed in the ceiling and a game of squash would hurriedly start.

Cave is now open from 9 pm to midnight with a late-night menu, televised sports and occasional entertainment.

Mount Washington Hotel, 310 Mount Washington Rd., Bretton Woods, N.H.

Camille’s Roman Garden, Providence

Rhode Island had plenty of speakeasies, including Camille’s.

Camille’s Roman Garden opened the year before Prohibition as Marconi’s, after the pioneer of long-distance radio transmission. It spent its first five years on Atwells Avenue. Then it moved around the corner to a 19^th century mansion on Bradford Street near the entrance to Federal Hill.

Rhode Island, like Connecticut, didn’t ratify the 18^th Amendment, and, like the rest of New England, it pretty much ignored the ban on spirits. Camille’s put curtains on the private alcoves that ring the dining area. Behind those curtains, patrons drank booze made in the cellar.

Camille’s has the distinction as the oldest continuously operated restaurant in Rhode Island and the second oldest family-owned restaurant in the United States.

Frank Sinatra especially liked Camille’s Italian wedding soup, and once burped on stage in Providence. He then said, “”Excuse me, but I just had the most wonderful food at Camille’s Roman Garden.”

The owner sold Camille’s in 2001, and expected the buyer to demolish it. Instead, the buyer renovated Camille’s and now serves fine Italian food.

Camille’s at 71 Bradford St., Providence, R.I.

Canaan Line House, Canaan, Vt.

Speakeasies were especially easy to find on Vermont’s border.

Vermont never went dry, it went damp. Rumrunners routinely supplied booze from Lake Champlain and from over the Canadian border.

It used to take an hour to get through St. Albans because so many people were drinking in restaurants, which either had booze in the back room or advised patrons where they could get it. Bootleggers and people seeking a good time at the line houses routinely jammed traffic.

Queen Lill’s Bucket of Blood in Richford was just one of the many line houses that dotted the Canadian border. The line houses straddled the border between Vermont and Quebec, often with a front door in Vermont and a bar in Quebec.

One of the most well known was the Canaan Line House, on the border between Canaan and Saint-Herménégilde, Quebec. Today it’s known as the Canaan-Hereford Road Border Crossing. The abandoned remains of the old Canaan Line House sit between the Canadian and U.S. Customs stations.

You may also be interested in this story about Prohibition here. This story about speakeasies was updated in 2021.

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New England Places To Visit Now That It’s Memorial Day

Houghs Neck

What better New England place to spend Memorial Day than the Irish Riviera? Wollastan, Nantasket and Hough’s Neck beaches have been popular vacation spots for Irish immigrants since the 19^th century.

But South Shore beaches weren’t only for swimming. In Scituate, the most Irish town in America, immigrants used to harvest red algae – a practice known as mossing. There is actually a Maritime and Mossing Museum run by the Scituate Historical Society. Open Sunday afternoons, it is set in the 1739 residence of Capt. Benjamin James on the Driftway. Exhibits describe the Portland Gale, Scituate’s many shipwrecks, Thomas W. Lawson’s seven-masted schooner and Irish mossing.

New Hampshire Boat Museum

Memorial Day is also the start of boating season and the opening of the New Hampshire Boat Museum in Wolfeboro near Lake Winnipesaukee. The museum features a glorious new display of vintage boats, art from Motor Boating Magazine covers and an exhibit on locally made McDuff engines. For more information click here.

Full Moons

Last week the Full Flower Moon appeared. It’s what the Abenaki Indians called the ‘moonesquam nimockkesos’, or ‘when women weed their corn.’ William Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, Mass., recorded the Abenaki names for the full moons in 1645. Pynchon built a warehouse in what was once Springfield, but is present-day East Windsor, Conn. The area is still known as Warehouse Point. There’s a lot of history nearby, including the Connecticut Trolley Museum, open on weekends this time of year. St. John’s Episcopal Church at Warehouse Point is on the National Register of Historic Places. In nearby Scantic is the Scantic Academy, a historic Federal Style school building that serves as a museum and as the headquarters for the East Windsor Historical Society.

The Abbe Museum

You can learn more about the Wabanaki tribes at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. The museum has two locations: one at 26 Mount Desert Street in the center of Bar Harbor, and a second at Sieur de Monts in Acadia National Park. Its full name is the Robert Abbe Museum of Stone Antiquities, which gives you the idea that its collection includes Native American artifacts from prehistoric and historic times. The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, opened May 1 with a new core exhibit, People of the First Light, which introduces the visitor to Wabanaki culture and history. Four Directions of Wabanaki Basketry features a basket from each of the Wabanaki tribal communities. At the just-opened Sieur de Monts branch, an exhibit presents Abenaki perspectives on St Sauveur, the first French Jesuit settlement on Mount Desert Island.

Barefoot in New Hampshire

Capt. Walter Barefoot was a litigious rogue who spent a great deal of time in courthouses from Boston to York, Maine, during the 1660s and 1670s. He actually lived in Dover, N.H., where he owned a saw mill along the Lamprey River. The William Damm Garrison house in Dover would have been standing when Barefoot was in and out of court. It’s part of a history museum called the Woodman Institute, which was founded in 1916 and includes exhibits on local history and natural history. The museum’s campus has three brick houses of Federal style architecture, including the former home of abolitionist Senator John P. Hale. Among its art and antiques are a saddle in which President Abraham Lincoln rode to review troops shortly before his assassination, a set of samurai armor that belonged to a Japanese delegate to the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Conference and examples of textiles made in Dover.

Americana

Rose Wilder Lane, the only daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, kept her contribution to the Little House books secret. There’s little trace of Rose in Danbury, Conn., her home for 25 years. But not far away in Kent you can visit a pioneer cabin, part of the Eric Sloane Museum, which opened May 13. The museum by the artist of the same name is open Friday through Sunday. Sloan’s collection of early American tools is on display, as is his studio and some of his artwork. The museum also includes an heirloom apple orchard and the remains of an iron furnace.

Like Sloan, N.C. Wyeth illustrated books about America’s past. Wyeth’s son Andrew and grandson Jamie also explored early American themes. In Vermont, Shelburne Museum director Thomas Denenberg on Wednesday discusses the Wyeths—N. C. (1882–1945), Andrew (1917–2009), and Jamie (b. 1946)—and offers new perspectives on these three painters who have shaped the way Americans view their world. For more information, click here.

Mark Your Calendar

This year the Providence Preservation Society’s annual Festival of Historic Houses features modern living spaces in the city’s prized historic homes and gardens. The 2016 Festival takes place on June 11 beginning at 10 a.m., on the north end of Benefit Street, known as Providence’s “Mile of History.” The Preservation Society was formed on that mile 60 years ago to save the architecturally significant neighborhood from demolition—a major milestone in our America’s preservation history.

New this year, visitors can go to other neighboring cultural organizations as part of Explore Historic Providence day. They can also celebrate PPS’s 60th Anniversary at Cheers to 60 Years, a free open house from 4-6 p.m. following the Festival. Click here for more information.

Photos: Abbe Museum photo By AbbeMuseum – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia; Houghs Neck By Sswonk – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia.

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