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Susannah Johnson, Indian Captive, Gives Birth in the Wild and Commemorates the Spot 45 Years Later

In August 1754, Susannah Johnson gave birth to a daughter in the Vermont wilderness during a forced march by her Indian captors.

The French and Indian War had started, and childbirth in the woods was only the beginning of her ordeal. Hunger, fatigue, fear and pain accompanied her on her march to an Indian village. The Indians sold her into slavery to the French, who eventually put her and her family into a Montreal prison. To return to her home in Charlestown, N.H., Susannah Johnson had to sail to England first.

Forty-five years later, Susannah Johnson hired a stonecutter to create two stone markers. She had them placed on the exact spot where she bore her daughter Captive and where they spent the night.

The markers still stand, though only near their original location. People know them as the Vermont Indian stones.

Susannah Johnson

Susannah Johnson was born Feb. 20, 1729 or 1730, in Lunenberg, Mass., one of 12 children to Moses and Susanna Hastings Willard. She was descended from Maj. Simon Willard, who founded Concord, Mass., and Thomas Hastings, who immigrated to America in the Puritan Great Migration.

Old Fort No. 4

At the age of 14 she moved to Charlestown with her family. The New Hampshire settlement amounted to little more than a fort, a saw mill and a cluster of huts for about 10 families.

Susannah Johnson’s step-uncles settled Charlestown, but Indians killed one of them during King George’s War, the third of the four French and Indian Wars.

When still in her teens, she married James Johnson in Lunenberg, Mass.

James Johnson

Her new husband had already spent much of his life in captivity – but to the British. As a 10-year-old boy he went to sea with his uncle, a ship captain. His uncle died on the voyage, and the crew sold him to a ship taking Irish slaves to America.

When the ship landed in Boston, the boys were allowed to play on the wharf. Susannah Johnson’s great-uncle happened to walk by them, and he noticed young James Johnson, the only boy who spoke English. The great-uncle bought his indenture.

At the age of 20, James Johnson bought his freedom and obtained a lieutenant’s commission. He married Susannah Willard, and they moved to the northernmost British settlement on the Connecticut River. Known then as Fort at Number 4, it is now called Charlestown, N.H.

Charlestown

During the peaceful years between the third and fourth French and Indian wars, Charlestown doubled in size. James Johnson did some farming and traded with the Indians.

An Abenaki couple

By May of 1754, James and Susannah Johnson had three children. That spring, he decided to go to Connecticut on a trading trip. In Connecticut he learned about an imminent war with the French and Indians, but he didn’t think Charlestown was in any immediate danger.

When James Johnson returned home in late August, neighbors came over to celebrate his return. They ate watermelons, drank flip, made merry and stayed in the Johnsons’ log house until midnight. When the neighbors left, the Johnsons went to bed and slept soundly.

Susannah was in the last days of pregnancy, happy her husband had returned.

The Indian Attack

Just before sunrise on Aug. 30, 1754, the Johnsons’ neighbor Peter Labarree knocked at the door. James Johnson got out of bed and put on his clothes to let him in.

Susannah Johnson heard him open the door and then shout “Indians! Indians!” He went to grab his gun, but a crowd of Indians burst in. Some hauled her 14-year-old sister out of bed, another grabbed Susannah and four Indians tied up her husband.

The Indians led her to the door, fainting and trembling, then brought her three naked children to her. She realized she herself had no clothes on. An Indian gave her a gown. She asked for a petticoat, but he refused.

The Indians took some plunder, bundled it up quickly then ordered them to march. Two Indians grabbed her arms and hurried her through thorny thickets. She lost a shoe.

They walked for a little while until they heard alarm guns from the fort. That hurried the Indians. After walking a mile and a half, Susannah Johnson grew faint and sat down. An Indian drew his knife; she thought he meant to kill her, but he just loosened her dress.

Baby Captive

Image of Susannah Johnson giving birth

The marching party included 11 Abenaki Indians, who understood little English. Also included: James and Susannah Johnson, their son Sylvanus, 6, daughters Susanna, 4, and Polly 2, Susannah’s sister Miriam, 14, neighbor Peter Labbaree and Ebenezer Farnsworth, a hired hand.

Hours after they set out, Indians noticed the blood covering Susannah’s legs and feet, cut badly because she had lost her shoe. They gave her moccasins. Then they caught a stray horse, threw bags and blankets on top of him and put her on top.

They walked another eight miles or so before sleeping on the ground. On the next day’s march, Susannah Johnson sat on the horse, her husband walking next to her holding her on.

After about an hour, she went into labor. The Indians indicated they must go to a brook.

She later wrote of her distress. She was

…fifteen or twenty miles from the abode of any civilized being, in the open wilderness, rendered cold by a rainy day–in one of the most perilous hours, and unsupplied with the least necessary, that could yield convenience in the hazardous moment. My children were crying at a distance, where they were held by their masters, and only my husband and sister to attend me.

Though the Indians remained aloof during her delivery, ‘they shewed some humanity,”

They built a small hut to shelter her, and at 10 am, she gave birth to a daughter, named Captive. The Indians expressed pleasure that they had another prisoner to sell.

More Misery

Captivity narrative by Susannah Johnson

The Indians let her rest during the day and made her a hut to sleep in at night. For two more days they marched on in glum silence and unvarying fatigue. On Day 5 they reached the banks of Lake Champlain, where they shot the horse she rode and ate it.

She couldn’t walk. Her husband had to carry her, which nearly killed them both.

“Inevitable death, in the midst of woods, one hundred miles wide, appeared my only portion,” she wrote.

They marched for four more days. At every meal, the Indians shared with them equally, and more than once they gave her a blanket, to shelter her from a thunderstorm.

On day 9 they reached East Bay in Lake Champlain. There, two Indians met them in four canoes, and they paddled all night to reach the western shore. The Indians built a fire and made the prisoners dance.

Again they embarked in canoes, and arrived at the French fort Crown Point at noon. The Indians took the prisoners to the French commander’s home. He gave them brandy, a good dinner, a change of linen and he put them up for four days. Susannah Johnson had a nurse, who dressed her infant in a French outfit she described as fantastical. Captive kept the outfit her whole life.

The Rest of the Story

They traveled north by water from French garrison to French garrison. Finally they arrived in St. Francis near Montreal, a village of about 30 wigwams and a Catholic church where a French friar said daily Mass.

Sylvanus went hunting with the Indians. Susannah Johnson wouldn’t see him again for years. The Indians put her in a large wigwam with three Indian men and three women. They took James Johnson to Montreal to sell him. Her daughters, her sister Miriam and Peter Labarree soon followed. In November, so did she.

After 11 days of travel she found her husband, children and friends in Montreal. Respectable people had bought them all and treated them well, except for the mayor, who treated her small daughter Polly badly.

James Johnson got two months’ parole to go to New England to raise cash to redeem his family. Massachusetts gave him 10 pounds and New Hampshire 150, but then the Massachusetts governor told him he had to stay.

When he didn’t return after two months, Susannah’s masters started to treat her badly. Finally James Johnson did return, only to be incarcerated with his family in a criminal jail. They were prisoners of war.

Susannah Johnson described conditions in the jail as shocking. The family all got smallpox, but survived.

Freedom

The Indian Stones, near the spot where Susannah Johnson gave birth

After six months the Johnsons persuaded the French authorities to transfer them to a civil jail. There they had decent beds, candles, food and fuel.

In the spring of 1757 they petitioned for their freedom, and got it. She found passage to England and from there she hoped to return home. Her husband had to stay behind. She, her two little daughters and her sister sailed for Plymouth, then went to Portsmouth. They then sailed to Cork. Then to New York, three years, three months and 11 days after her capture.

On Jan. 1, 1758 she embraced James Johnson, her ‘dearest friend’ in Charlestown. Charlestown had suffered from the war, so the family went to Lancaster. Her husband won a captain’s commission.

Captivity, slavery and imprisonment hadn’t killed James Johnson. But shortly after he won his freedom, he died fighting the French and Indians at Ticonderoga.

In October 1758, Susannah Johnson tracked down her son, now 11, who didn’t know her and spoke only broken English. He knew perfect Abenaki, however, after living with the Indians for three years.

Susannah Johnson eventually remarried and had more children. She published a book about her captivity in 1796, when captivity narratives had become a popular literary genre. Hers was no exception.

Indian Stones

In 1799, Susannah Johnson hired a stonecutter to engrave two slate slabs. One said,

On the 31 st of August 1754, Capt James Johnson had / a Daughter born on this Spot of Ground, being / Captivated with his whole Family by the Indians.

The other said,

This is near the Spot that the Indians Encamp/ the Night after they took Mr Johnson’s Family, / Mr Labarree & Farnsworth, August 30th 1754, and / Mrs Johnson was Delivered of her Child Half a mile up this Brook; // When troubles near the Lord is- kind, / He hears the Captives crys. / He can subdue the Savage mind, / And learn it sympathy.

She had the stone slabs placed on the spot where she gave birth to Captive, and the other near the place where they slept that night. In 1918, the stone markers were mounted on a single slab. You can still visit them.

Susannah Johnson died November 27, 1810.

To read her entire story, click here.

Elizabeth George based her young adult novel Calico Captive on Susannah Johnson’s story. You can find the Indian Stones at a small roadside pullout in southern Reading, Vt., on the east side of Route 106 at its junction with Knapp Brook Road.

Images: Stone marker with steps, By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34713735; small stone Indian stone By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34713733

This story was updated in 2022.

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Neshobe Island, The Algonquin Round Table Summer Home in Vermont

During the 1920s and 1930s, rumors about the crazy doings on Neshobe Island flew through the resort hotels along Vermont’s Lake Bomoseen.

The summer vacationers heard that famous people lived on the dinky island on the large lake in western Vermont.

They were right, but they could not confirm the rumors for themselves. Neshobe Island served as the private club of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table and their even more famous guests.

Neshobe Island

Vivien Leigh visited Neshobe Island after winning an Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht finished their screenplay for Wuthering Heights there. The landscaping was done by Gerald Murphy, the Mark Cross heir who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional character Dick Diver.

And Harpo Marx took off all his clothes and waved an ax at snooping tourists.

“The thing we cherished most about the island, along with its natural beauty, was its isolation,” Marx wrote in his autobiography, Harpo Speaks.

Lake Bomoseen

Old Vitriol and Violets

Lake Bomoseen, just north of Castleton, Vt., is the largest lake within Vermont’s borders. In 1924, drama critic Alexander Woollcott rented seven-acre Neshobe Island just a quarter mile from Lake Bomoseen’s shore. He loved the island so much he bought it and turned it into a private club for his closest friends.

Woollcott was born in Colt’s Neck, N.J., and grew up in his family’s ramshackle 85-room mansion. He had no use for his father, a Cockney ne’er-do-well. When his father came round the breakfast table to kiss his sons goodbye, ‘Aleck would slyly thrust an upright fork above his ear in the fond hope of puncturing the paternal jowl,’ wrote his biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Alexander Woollcott

Woollcott grew up to become a drama critic, radio personality, New Yorker columnist, author and member of the witty group known as the Algonquin Round Table. It was Woollcott who first said, “All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.”

He was bitchy, fastidious, bookish, flamboyant and so pudgy Harpo Marx called him an escapee from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He proposed marriage to five different women, but each laughed him off.

James Thurber called him Old Vitriol and Violets.

Neshobe Island Club

Woollcott socialized with the media celebrities of his day, and he invited some of them to be charter members of the Neshobe Island Club. They included such Algonquinites as writer Alice Duer Miller, playwright Beatrice Kaufman and illustrator Neysa McMein, along with New Yorker co-founder Raoul Fleischmann, songwriter Howard Dietz, actress Ruth Gordon and publisher Harold Guinzberg.

Alice Duer Miller

There were only 10 members at any one time, and memberships could be bought and sold. Each member paid $1,000 to spend the summer on Neshobe Island.

They worked a little in the rustic house, talked a lot and played a lot at sports and games. Not everyone enjoyed it.

Vincent Sheen and Dorothy Parker sat in a corner and drank. “Alec was simply furious,” wrote Sheen. “We were in disgrace. We were anathema. we ween’t paying any attention to his witticisms and his goddamned games.”

Harpo Marx

Harpo Marx, the goofy, silent, harp-playing Marx Brother, received an invitation to Neshobe Island in the summer of 1927 from Alexander Woollcott.

To Harpo, the invitation was more than a feather in his social cap.

“It meant you had been nominated for the Alexander Woollcott Roster of Who’s Who,” he wrote. Then Harpo received an invitation for a second visit, joining the company of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, Ethel Barrymore, Noel Coward and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Finally Woollcott asked him to join as a member.

Years later he waxed nostalgic about, ‘the reading of plays around the fireplace, the wonderful voices of the Lunts, Ethel Barrymore, Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly.’ He remembered,

The sound of music coming across the water on Saturday nights from the open-air dance on the mainland, tinny and gay, like a crazy, woodland honky-tonk (the only times we ever felt tolerant toward the tourists).

On his first visit to Neshobe Island, Woollcott met Marx at the boat landing. Harpo drove up in a dilapidated car.

“What do you call that?” Woollcott said.

“My town car,” Marx replied.

“What was the town?” said Woollcott. “Pompei?”

Neshobe Island Rules

Woollcott ruled the island like a benevolent despot, setting down rules and directing activities: cribbage, poker, or party games like anagrams and Murder.

Harpo Marx

Breakfast was at 7 a.m. Cocktails ended the day, but intoxication was forbidden. When they played the Murder game, Woollcott wouldn’t allow dinner to be served until the murderer was discovered.

Under the rules, the secretly chosen murderer was to catch a ‘victim’ alone and say, ‘You’re dead.’ The person chosen as the district attorney had to identify the murderer.

Harpo Marx was once the murderer. He knew the women guests sometimes used a bathroom at the back of the house, so he sneaked back and wrote the death message in lipstick on the toilet paper. Under the rules, the victim had to stay where he or she was. For the next five hours the islanders looked for the murder victim. They were all hungry, but Woollcott refused to serve dinner. Finally at 11 p.m. Alice Duer Miller was discovered in the john.

Woollcott, who played the district attorney, immediately fingered the lightly educated Marx because he had written “YOU ARE DED.” Then he stormed off to bed.

Tourists

Everyone had to take a morning dip no matter how cold the lake. Woollcott, with his protective layers of fat, seemed impervious to the cold water, and read books propped on his belly while floating on his back.

Marx once caught tourists on shore looking through binoculars at Woollcott swimming. To Marx’s delight, they mistook Woollcott for Marie Dressler, a homely, heavyweight comedienne.

The Neshobe Islanders fought for and protected their privacy. Though the Vermonters didn’t bother them, the tourists did.

Once Alice Miller took a walk and rushed back to report tourists picnicking on the beach. Marx tore off his clothes, put on a red wig, smeared himself with mud and war-danced down to the shore, brandishing an ax. No more snoopers appeared that summer.

Dorothy Parker also wore nothing but a hat for three days, which Woollcott tolerated, except she also got drunk on those days. He then asked her to leave.

5 members of the Algonquin Round Table: (standing l to r) Art Samuels, Harpo Marx (sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.

Croquet Obsession

The Algonquin Round Table is credited with popularizing croquet in the United States, and Woollcott is enshrined in the Croquet Hall of Fame.

When Woollcott wanted to play croquet on Neshobe Island, everyone had to play. He got Harpo Marx hooked on the game. He also got Harpo into the Croquet Hall of Fame.

They competed ferociously for some very high stakes. Marx lost $900 to Woollcott in his first week of playing on Neshobe Island.

Once, when Woollcott drove Marx’s ball into the woods for the third time, Bea Kaufman found him sobbing his heart out against a tree, wrote Margaret Case Harriman in The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table.

Nothing – absolutely nothing – made Woollcott as happy as a good croquet shot.

“When Aleck sent an opponent’s ball crashing down through the maples of Neshobe Island, he would swing his mallet around his head like David’s slingshot and whoop, “Buckety, buckety! Buckety, buckety! Buck-ket-ty-buck-ket-ty-in-to-the-lake!,” wrote Marx.

Or, wrote Marx, “He would dance around the court on his toes, kicking his heels together (unaware that his shorts were falling down), and singing in the exuberant soprano of a cherub in a Sunday-school play:

I’m des a ‘itto wabbit in de sunshine!
I’m des a ‘itto bunny in de wain!”

End of the Club

The Neshobe Island Club ended abruptly on Jan. 23, 1943.

Woollcott was broadcasting his Town Crier radio show from New York when he got agitated defending Franklin Roosevelt’s war policy. He stopped in midsentence, wrote “I AM SICK” on a sheet of paper and collapsed of a heart attack. He died a few hours later.

Images: Lake Bomoseen, By Jc3s5h – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44282020.

With thanks to Harpo Speaks, by Harpo Marx. This story about Neshobe Island was updated in 2023.

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When the Pickwick Club Collapse Killed 44 in Boston, the Charleston Took the Blame

At 3 a.m. on July 4, 1925, 50 couples crowded onto the dance floor of the Pickwick Club in Boston’s Chinatown, kicking their heels while dancing the Charleston. They were tripping the light fantastic ‘like folks gone mad,” a club singer later said.

Moments later the Pickwick Club came crashing down, killing 44 and injuring scores more. It was the worst disaster to strike Boston until then.

Though fire, rain and an excavation next door weakened the Pickwick Club, many believed the Charleston caused the building’s collapse.

Workmen clearing debris from the collapsed Pickwick Club.

City officials, including Mayor James Michael Curley, thought the old five-story building couldn’t withstand the unnatural pounding of the dancers’ feet. Some cities banned the Charleston altogether, going so far as to post signs saying, “This Building Cannot Withstand the Charleston.”

The Charleston got the nickname ‘Dance of Death.’

The Pickwick Club Disaster

The boisterous crowd at the Pickwick Club in Boston’s Combat Zone celebrated the Fourth of July in exuberant Jazz Age style, drinking (illegally–Prohibition was in effect), eating and dancing the Charleston. It was a revolutionary dance, a break from the past because it allowed partners to separate from each other.

The Pickwick Club was located at 6 Beach St. in Boston’s Chinatown. Here’s how it looks today. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

A fight had broken out earlier, and police arrested one of the belligerents. Men lit little firecrackers to make the women jump. Patrolman Benjamin Alexander had gone into the club, looking for a jewel thief. He would not come out alive.

The four-piece orchestra just finished playing The Twelfth St. Rag, when one of the musicians spoke up.

“Aren’t these lights getting dim?” he said. The porter then pointed out sand sifting down from the ceiling.

The lights went dark, what sounded like fireworks crackled, a women cried out and the floor suddenly dropped. There was an awful crash and a huge gap opened in the floor.

“With a roar that was heard for blocks, the second and third floors were carried down into the basement with their cargo of dead and dying,” newspapers reported.

Two patrolmen heard the roar, and looking back saw dust rising from the ruined building. They pulled several people from the building as the walls and staircase still quaked.

The Dead and Dying

Help came immediately. Within 15 minutes flood lights were trained on the wreckage. Police officers and firefighters searched the timbers and flooring amid the wrenching cries of injured people trapped under beams and bricks. A fleet of ambulances raced back and forth, carrying the injured from the ruined building to nearby hospitals.

A Charleston contest in St. Louis, 1925.

Doctors arrived on the scene. Dr. Michael McGarty amputated a man’s finger to free him, but only after lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke into the victim’s mouth. He had begged for a cigarette before the doctor cut off his finger.

Priests came to provide conditional absolution to the dead and dying as firefighters took off their helmets and kneeled. Rescuers found most of the bodies 15 to 20 feet below street level.

Rescuers heard the cries of Edith Jordan, a 28-year-old newlywed from Somerville buried under four feet of brick and plaster. A beam lay across her chest and two dead people on her legs. Hours later, rescue workers managed to dig a tunnel to her and take her out on a stretcher. She died soon after arriving at City Hospital. Her husband also suffered injuries in the collapse, but survived.

Patrolman Alexander and another police officer died in the Pickwick Club disaster. So did several popular boxers and a man indicted for gas bombing the Rhode Island state Senate Chamber the year before. Most of the dead had only reached their 20s or 30s.

Charleston Blamed

At the time, dance halls were linked with Satan. Reformers like the Rev. John Roach Straton argued that dancing led to immorality.

Newspapers reported the PIckwick Club collapsed because ‘the newest crazy dance step causes vibrations which give the stamping heels of an average couple the destructive force of a giant twenty times their weight.’

Boston city officials tried to shut down two other nightclubs where people danced the Charleston.

Local officials then banned the Charleston across the country. In Kansas City, officials pronounced, “The Charleston dance may shake the foundations of public morality all it wants to, but when it weakens the foundations of buildings housing dance floors, it ought to be stopped.”

What Caused the Pickwick Club Collapse

The real cause of the collapse was a dangerously weakened building undermined by excavation for a garage in the next lot.

A fire had broken out in the Pickwick Club building in April, and only a thin board and tar paper comprised the roof. Rainstorms had weakened the often-overcrowded building.

Three days before the building collapse, a rainstorm blew off part of the roof and a hole was chopped in the floor to let water drain into the basement.

The next day, Boston’s building inspector inspected the building and pronounced it safe.

A grand jury charged 10 men with manslaughter, including building contractors, building inspectors and the president of the Pickwick Club.

During the trial, witnesses testified the collapse was caused by a lack of bracing and the pressure of excavated earth against one side of the wall. The engineer who supervised the construction of the Panama Canal testified a collapsed pier was made of the ‘rottenest concrete’ he had ever seen. Another witness said the fire damaged 50 supporting timbers and a side wall

The jury acquitted all 10 accused men.

The tragedy inspired a ballad, The Pickwick Club Tragedy, much asthe Wilton Meetinghouse Collapse inspired a ballad 150 years earlier. (You can listen to it here),

The collapse is credited with inspiring two H.P. Lovecraft short stories, The Horror at Red Hook and He, written within three months of the Pickwick Club Tragedy.

Images: Chinatown Today By Ingfbruno – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27497701. Charleston contest courtesy Missouri Historical Society Photographs and Prints Collection via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

This story was updated in 2022.

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P.T. Barnum’s Grandson, Herbert Barnum Seeley, Throws the Greatest Bachelor Party on Earth

Herbert Barnum Seeley inherited a large portion of his grandfather P.T. Barnum’s estate, but none of his common sense.

In December of 1896, Clinton Barnum Seeley was getting married. His brother, Herbert Barnum Seeley, decided to send him off with a bachelor party worthy of the grandson of Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Barnum. Grandpa Barnum, circus entrepreneur, had of course created the Greatest Show on Earth.

The party would feature a 17-course dinner, music and drinking. Scantily clad dancing girls would hand out gifts for each of the guests. Herbert Barnum Seeley drew up the guest list from the who’s who of young society – the dissipated offspring of the robber barons and impresarios of the Gilded Age.

Little Egypt

Little Egypt cost Herbert Barnum Seeley his wife

The capstone of the evening was to be a belly dance by a French-speaking dancer of Lebanese descent. Using the stage name “Little Egypt,” Ashea Wabe wowed audiences with her “hoochie coochie” dance.

She had unveiled the dance at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.

Little Egypt was to do one better for the Barnum grandsons. She would dance and then perform a pose, as in a nude pose the way a model would for a painter. Or, as Little Egypt would later put it, “a little Egyptian pose on a little pedestal in ‘zee altogether’.”

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s cleanup-minded New York Police Department got wind of the party. And at 1:30 in the morning, the cops shut down the big bash at Sherry’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue.

Sherry’s Restaurant in 1899

Herbert Barnum Seeley was charged with indecency. Just how lewd the party grew was never fully exposed, however. Then as now, charges against the wealthy could be silently squelched. And these were.

Instead, the police commission held an inquiry into the evening’s proceedings, airing some details of the debauchery, but protecting the identities of many in attendance.

Herbert Barnum Seeley

The ensuing scandal cost Herbert his wife, who found greener pastures by marrying the son of Boston stockbroker Thomas Lawson. The glare of the coverage also highlighted just how far the apples had fallen from the tree in the famous Barnum family of Bridgeport, Conn.

Herbert Barnum Seeley was no doubt the sillier of the two Barnum namesakes who inherited a large portion of the circus millions. But Clinton was no prizewinner either. Nonetheless, P.T. had shaken the family tree in search of a successor and selected Clinton as the best option.

He took Clinton into the circus business for a very short time – just long enough for the younger Barnum’s laziness and ineffectuality to truly blossom. P.T.’s fellow ringmaster, James Bailey, swore he would break up the company and go forward alone rather than carry the insufferable Clinton with him. The episode, as such things do, ended in lawsuits between Clinton and the circus.

When P.T. Barnum died in 1891, there was then little to urge the clan toward profitable endeavors. Herbert, however, was restrained from his worst instincts by his aunt and brother Clinton who held his inheritance in trust for him. Herbert fought in court for years to remove them from the trust. In 1900, with Herbert approaching 30, the aunt and brother finally stepped aside. They let Herbert get down to the serious business of squandering his funds.

“Now that Herbert Barnum Seeley has come into the possession of a large and scrumptious fortune, he may dine daily, but it is hardly likely that he gives another dinner,” the Boston Home Journal drily reported.

A regular at the summer hot spots of Newport and Narragansett, R.I., Poland Springs, Maine, and Saratoga, N.Y., Herbert Barnum Seeley also traveled regularly to Europe.

Gusto, Then Scandal

Herbert Barnum Seeley embraced his future with gusto. He entered the Army’s military academy at West Point, but dropped out after two years. He went to Mexico to try to find his fortune in mining. When that failed, he took a quick stab at following in his grandfather’s footsteps as a showman. But he lacked an aptitude for that, as well.

Finally, Herbert found his true calling – buying race horses in Europe and America. For a time he prospered, but he eventually got swept up in scandal at New York’s Morris Park and Narragansett. He had to refund bets made on his horses because they weren’t – strictly speaking – trying to win.

Narragansett Park

By 1904, he had been jailed for passing bad checks in Arizona and was selling off bits of P.T. Barnum’s estate left to him. Clinton, who had hung onto more of his money, declined to bail out his brother. Other relatives had to step in.

In July of 1914, his health flagging, Herbert Barnum Seeley checked into a hospital. He died at the age of 43, best known for what the newspapers described as “Seeley Bachelor Party Orgy.”

His obituary noted: “While his passing will bring a thrill to those who knew him in his heyday of prosperity; the services at Mountain Grove cemetery today, where but a few of his kindred were able to gather, owing to their absence in various parts of the world, brings only pangs of sorrow to those closely related.”

This story about Herbert Barnum Seeley was updated in 2022.

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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.

2 comments 8.8K views

6 Historic Stagecoach Stops You Can Visit

The history of New England’s post roads and their stagecoach stops mirror the history of the country. The roads date back to the Pequots who used the trails that grew into the post roads for generations. The same trails carried John Winthrop on his journeys from Boston to Springfield.

Traffic on the roads shrank as King Philip’s War turned them into dangerous gauntlets. They expanded again as the war ended and horses made travel more enticing and the mails more efficient.

The heyday of the stagecoaches in the 1800s really drove a blossoming of the post roads. They grew from the first Upper Post Road into a maze of roads that wound their way into every corner of New England.

These stagecoaches created economic booms wherever they went, bringing commerce as well as jobs. Stagecoach stops, needed every 12 to 20 miles or so, were essential, especially in the early days of the stagecoach era. These inns provided income to their owners, and many others: drivers, ticket agents, coach makers, blacksmiths, stable hands and farmers.

Today, the vestiges of the stagecoach era remain with us. Many of the roads New Englanders travel today were once used by the stagecoaches. And along those roads, some of the old stagecoach stops still serve up food, drink and comfort to the weary traveler.

Here are six still open to the public today, one in each New England state:

Old Riverton Inn

The Old Riverton Inn, one of Connecticut’s many, many stagecoach stops back in the day.

Several years before the American Revolution, stagecoaches and stagecoach stops appeared on the Upper Post Road from New York to Boston, and from Hartford to Norwich and Providence. The war interrupted service, but resumed when it wound down. Stagecoach service expanded quickly on the new turnpike roads and postal routes.

Levi Pease began a stage service between New York and Boston on the Upper Post Road. He got the mail contract for all of New England from the U.S. Congress in 1789. Then he expanded his business into Northern New England and to Albany.

By 1827 Connecticut had 26 stage routes. By then it took only 36 hours to travel between New York and Boston vs. the previous six days. Taverns were generally 12 to 18 miles apart. Drivers announced their arrival at stagecoach stops by blowing on a trumpet.

During the early part of the 19^th century, Connecticut developed the most complex network of toll roads in New England. The state had few centers of wealth like Providence or Boston, and market towns competed fiercely for the trade of the back country. Between 1792 and 1839, 1,600 miles of turnpike road were created in Connecticut. The Talcott Mountain Turnpike was a key part of the route from Hartford to Albany.

Jess Ives opened the Ives Tavern or Ives Hotel in 1796 along the Hartford-to-Albany Route in Riverton, Conn. Today it’s known as the Old Riverton Inn and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It overlooks a wild and scenic section of the Farmington River.

The artist who painted murals on the walls of the Hobby Horse Bar also painted murals for the 1936 New York World’s Fair. The inn features bar stools made of saddles on kegs.

For more information about the Old Riverton Inn, click here.

Coach Stop Inn

The Coach Stop Inn, one of the stagecoach stops along the way from Bar Harbor to Maine’s interior.

Stagecoach lines began regular service between Maine towns after the Revolutionary War. The first stages ran between Portland and Portsmouth, N.H., a journey that took three days in 1787. By 1825, a stage could make the journey between Bangor and Portland in 36 hours.

The Coach Stop Inn in Bar Harbor was built in 1804 for newcomers who came to build homes, farms and ships on Mount Desert Island. Known as the Halfway Tavern, it often hosted sailors in the early days. Patrons would arrive by sea and take a stagecoach from the tavern into Maine’s interior towns.

Wealthy patrons charmed by fresh air, beautiful scenery and hiking trails made Bar Harbor a fashionable summer resort during the Gilded Age. In 1947, a fire that burned much of Maine also destroyed some of Bar Harbor’s hotels and mansions. The oldest hotel to survive the fire is now the Coach Stop Inn, a luxurious bed and breakfast.

For more information, click here.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn

The most famous of the stagecoach stops, The Wayside Inn.

The Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., boasts that it’s the oldest operating inn in the United States. It has accommodated travelers along the Boston Post Road since 1716. Just a few miles down the road from historic Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, it began life 300 years ago as Howe’s Tavern. David Howe ran it as an extension of his own home.

David handed the property to his son Ezekial – a soldier in Sudbury’s militia during the American Revolution. The Howe family continued to operate and expand the inn until 1861, serving traffic between Worcester and Boston.

The inn stopped operating as a traditional inn in 1861. The owners converted it into something more like a boarding house and dance hall.

But in 1862, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sealed the inn’s place in history. Longfellow visited the building and published his now-famous Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. From that time on, the inn was the destination of tourists and literary pilgrims who wanted to see first-hand the inspiration for Longfellow’s book.

In 1923, the inn took another important step into immortality when automobile magnate Henry Ford bought the property. Ford then began the restoration and expansion that gave shape to the inn’s current configuration.

For more information, click here.

Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern

The Coach Stop, one of New Hampshire’s many stagecoach stops in the early 19th century.

In 1786 the legislature in New Hampshire expanded the system of post roads to travel to four sections of the state. Though the earlier post roads moved mail and people between Portsmouth and some points west and north, only later did the routes reach deep into the western portion of the state.

One such line ran from Portsmouth across the state’s southern tier over to Amherst and back, creating the need for taverns and inns along the way.

Londonderry’s Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern began life in 1810 as the home of the town’s doctor. Later in the 1800s it was maintained as Plummer’s Tavern, located at the junction of two post roads. One carried coaches east and west to Nashua and the other carried traffic north and south to Manchester and Concord. For a map of all stagecoach lines operating in New Hampshire in 1833, click here.

Today the restaurant and inn maintains much of its historical charm, with signs of the original elements of its days as a coach stop remaining intact.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach House Inn

The Stagecoach House Inn, for many years one of the stagecoach stops along the New London Turnpike.

Settlers first came to Wyoming, a historic village in Richmond, Rhode Island, in 1757. Wyoming grew and prospered when the Brand’s Iron Works was founded across the Wood River in Hopkinton in 1787. Sometime around 1800, an inn was built at a strategic crossroads in Wyoming.

Textile mills sprang up in the area, and in 1815 the New London Turnpike opened right past the inn. The new road brought stagecoach riders between Richmond and New London, Connecticut

By 1835, the New London Turnpike – now Route 3 – connected Providence and New London. It proved to be faster and more direct than the Old Post Road, which followed the coastal route. The village thrived, and for many years an inn once known as Dawley Tavern continued as a stagecoach stop.

By the 20^th century, industry began to founder along the Wood River. That, however, allowed Hopkinton and Wyoming to retain much of their historic 19^th century character. The National Register of Historic Places lists almost a square mile of the two villages as the Wyoming Village Historic District. It includes the old ironworks, Greek Revival, Late Victorian, and Federal architecture in both Wyoming and Hopkinton.

Today the Dawley Tavern is called the Stagecoach House Inn at 1136 Main Street.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach Inn

The Stagecoach Inn, a fitting name for one of Vermont’s old stagecoach stops.

At the start of the 19th century, ancient footpaths connected Burlington and Montpelier in Vermont. In 1805, the 36-mile Winooski Turnpike along the Winooski River was chartered to connect the two major towns.

The old Winooski Turnpike turned into U.S. Route 2, the main highway connecting the White Mountains to the Adirondacks. It cuts through Waterbury, the town where Ben and Jerry’s make their ice cream.

In 1826 either a Mr. Parmalee or a lawyer named Dan Carpenter had a structure built on the corner of the Winooski Turnpike and what is now Route 100. The building served as a tavern and inn for travelers and as a meeting place for locals.

By the mid-1800s, a farming family named the Henrys owned the inn. Their eccentric daughter Nettie married an Ohio rubber baron, Albert Spencer. Nettie smoked cigarettes, chewed tobacco and wore a celluloid eyeshade. She expanded and improved the old family house in Queen Anne Style.

Nettie Spencer died in 1947. The home was later run as a rooming house and fell into disrepair. A young couple from Boston bought the property in 1985 and rebuilt the house. Today it’s the Old Stagecoach Inn, a historic bed-and-breakfast in the center of downtown Waterbury.

For more information about the Stagecoach Inn click here.

This story about New England stagecoach stops was updated in 2021. If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about six Revolutionary taverns here.

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