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Deer Isle

Seven Fun Facts About New England Taxes

There isn’t much that’s fun about taxes, but we thought we’d try to find something. So we found seven fun — well, maybe just fun-ish — fact about taxes.

We do think it’s at least interesting that Rhode Islanders didn’t have to pay taxes for 40 years. And it’s fun to find out what kind of a job Sam Adams did as tax collector, or what Mainers did when the federal government actually returned money to them.

Here, then, are seven fun facts about taxes.

1. When Printing Money Meant No Taxes

Rhode Island enjoyed a 40-year holiday from taxes starting in 1710 when the General Assembly cranked out money on the printing press.

Here’s how it worked: The colony had a number of land banks, which loaned paper money for mortgages on land. The loans generated interest, which the colony’s government used to pay for its operations.

The value of the paper money often declined, which made it easier for landholders to repay their debts. Rhode Island’s supply of paper money also gave the colonists a medium of exchange. The arrangement made practically everyone happy – except for merchants in London, who had to accept the colonists’ depreciated money to pay off their debts.

When the merchants weren’t happy, Parliament wasn’t happy. In 1751, Parliament passed the Currency Act, making it illegal for Rhode Island’s General Assembly to issue any more bills of credit not backed by taxes. By the middle of 1754, Rhode Island neared insolvency, and Rhode Island towns began collecting taxes.

2. Sam Adams, Tax Collector?

Sam Adams had a job as tax collector, and he was lousy at it. Adams had inherited his father’s malt business, but it failed. In 1756 he ran for and won the post of Boston’s tax collector to support his family. But Bostonians didn’t really want to pay their taxes, and Sam Adams didn’t really want to collect them.

Sam Adams

Then a smallpox epidemic broke out in 1764, forcing many people in Boston to close their businesses. Sam Adams was inclined to overlook tax payments from people who suffered financial reverses. His laxity made him popular among Boston’s working class, but caused him trouble. As tax collector, he was liable for uncollected taxes.

By 1765, Sam Adams owed £8,000, and Boston came close to bankruptcy. Adams sued people for nonpayment of taxes, but still came up short. His friends ended up paying most of the deficit, and Boston Town Meeting made up the rest.

3. ‘Less Real and more Ideal’

In order to pay off its Revolutionary War debt, Massachusetts raised taxes to a level four times that before the war. The people of Greenwich, Mass., complained, “Our Grievances Were Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.“

Greenwich, Mass.

Greenwich would actually have more to complain about in 1938, when the commonwealth flooded it for the Quabbin Reservoir.

4. High Hopes for a Tax Refund

In a once exciting but now forgotten episode in U.S. tax history, the federal government ran a surplus of about $30 million in 1836. Revolutionary War debt had been paid off by the sale of public lands in 1836. What to do with the money generated fierce arguments, of course, but in the end Congress decided to give most of the money back to the states. Each state could do with it what it wanted.

As state lawmakers debated about what to do with their share, ‘high hopes were awakened in all children who were out of pocket-money.

Maine, a state for only 17 years, decided to give the money back to the taxpayers. Every resident – including children — received about $2 from the state of Maine. A Deer Isle farmer’s wife named Salome Sellers decided to buy a pair of candlesticks with her money. She lived to be 108 years old, and was the last person born in the 18th century to die in the 19th. Her house is now a museum and displays the candlesticks.

Salome Sellers and one of her candlesticks

5. A Literary Solution to Taxes

New Hampshire in 1821 tried to raise money for a public university by taxing the capital stock of banks. Seven years later the state abandoned the plan as the tax didn’t raise nearly enough money.

Instead, New Hampshire established the Literary Fund, which it divided every year among the towns. The money was to be spent for the
“support and maintenance of common free schools or other purposes of education.” The Town of Peterborough decided to spend it on a municipal library.

Taxes on banks helped pay for Peterborough’s library.

6. Vermont Declares War To Raise Taxes

Vermont declared war on Germany three months before the United States did so it could give its GIs a raise. In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Enlisted men earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s lawmakers voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees and enlisted men.

Montpelier

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters. Vermont’s lawmakers used that as an excuse to declare war on Nazi Germany – and give a bonus to Vermonters in the military.

7. Connecticut’s 42-Day Income Tax

Connecticut had an income tax for 42 days, and then it didn’t. In 1971, the state had accumulated a debt of a quarter of a billion dollars. Lawmakers struggled with how to get back into the black. Since Connecticut had the highest per-capita income in the country, the General Assembly decided on an income tax – in a late-night budget session at the end of June. The income tax was to take effect in October.

Connecticut State Capitol

The public reacted fast and furiously, though. So a special session of the General Assembly repealed the income tax on Aug. 12, 42 days after passing it. Instead, they increased sales taxes and raised tuition at the University of Connecticut.

Twenty years later, the General Assembly approved another income tax, which survives to this day.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of state capitol: By jglazer75 – Connecticut State Capitol, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2574147

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Six Mid-Century Modern Homes

Though people usually think of the quintessential New England house as a white clapboard farmhouse or Cape, we actually have quite a few mid-century modern homes. And we have even more of their successors, the ubiquitous ranch house.

Mid-century modern houses typically have big windows, open floor plans, integration with the outdoors and little ornamentation.

Frank Lloyd Wright, an early practitioner of mid-century modern homes, called it ‘Prairie Style’ or ‘Usonian.’ Refugees from Hitler’s Germany such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought their own modernist philosophy to America. The Germans called it Bauhaus, and they influenced a generation of architects who designed mid-century modern structures from about 1945-75.

Then mid-century modern fell into disfavor. In 1975, critic Tom Wolfe excoriated mid-century modern style as architecture that nobody liked in his book, From Bauhaus to Our House.

Today, however, mid-century modern homes are popular again and command high prices. In New Canaan, Conn., a 1,500-square-foot house designed by Philip Johnson sold for $2.3 million in 2015.

Here, then, are six mid-century modern homes, one (at least) in each New England state. If you know of others, please share them in the comments section.

The Glass House

The famous Glass House was built in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns.

Philip Johnson designed the Glass House in 1949 as a weekend retreat in New Canaan, an upscale suburb of New York. Johnson belonged to a group of modern architects known as the Harvard Five, who lived and worked in the town. They all followed Walter Gropius.

The Glass House is an extreme version of a mid-century modernist home. Johnson designed the kitchen, dining and sleeping areas as one glass room. He enclosed the bathroom in a brick cylinder, the only object to reach floor to ceiling.

Johnson lived in the Glass House – for a while. He could only do it because you can’t see it from the road. The house sits behind a stone wall and overlooks a pond. Johnson viewed the surrounding landscape as his wallpaper, once commenting, “I have very expensive wallpaper.”

Eventually he only used it for entertaining and stayed in another building on the property – a brick guest house.

New Canaan has about 80 other mid-century modern homes built between 1940 and 1960. Not everyone loved them, and tore down about 20. The town now tries to preserve them. You can visit the Glass House in the summer (for information, click here). You can see many of the rest of New Canaan’s mid-century modern homes in the 1997 film The Ice Storm.

Emily Muir Boat House

The Emily Muir Boat House

Deer Isle, a fishing community in Penobscot Bay, has a collection of 48 mid-century modern homes designed by Emily Muir. The Boat House is one of them.

Emily, born in 1904, was an artist who married sculptor William Muir. As a child she summered on Deer Isle and moved there permanently in 1939 with her husband.

She didn’t turn to architecture until she reached her own mid-century. Emily had no training in architecture and designed her first home for her mother. That got her hooked on architecture.
Her homes have exaggerated angles and large windows that let in plenty of light. Many, like the Boat House, are perched on boulders that overlook the water.She tried to use as much local granite and wood as possible.

People who live in them now say they love the views, but Emily didn’t cook and didn’t clean so the kitchens often need renovation and the closet space is limited. She designed the houses to be affordable so fishermen could buy them, but it was summer people who snapped them up.

Emily Muir died in 2003 at the age of 99.

You can rent the Emily Muir Boat House from the Island Agency (click here). Even If you don’t’ love mid-century modern homes, you’ll probably love the views.

Gropius House

The Gropius House stands as a symbol of modern architecture in Lincoln, Mass. But in 1937, Lincoln itself symbolized freedom to Walter Gropius, who settled in the historic town while teaching at Harvard. .

A Lincoln philanthropist, Helen Osborne Storrow, gave Gropius the land on which to build a house.

Gropius built a simple, efficient contemporary home that melded industrial and traditional New England architectural materials. He used a fieldstone foundation, white painted wood, a brick chimney and a screened-in porch. Many of the fixtures were ordered from catalogs. It cost $18,000.

He later said he wanted to take a contemporary approach to traditional New England architecture.

When finished, the Gropius House created a sensation. Composer Igor Stravinsky, lecturing at Harvard, was so anxious to see it that he and his new bride visited it scarcely an hour after their wedding in March 1940. Mrs. Storrow was so pleased with it she allowed other architects to build mid-century modern homes on her land.

For information about visiting the Gropius House, click here.

The Zimmerman House

The Zimmerman House.

Frank Lloyd Wright was designing mid-century modern houses well before mid-century, but he designed the Zimmerman House in Manchester, N.H., smack in the middle of the 20^th. In 1950. Wright didn’t just design the house. He also designed the interiors, the furniture, the gardens and even the mailbox for Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman.

The Zimmerman House is one of the few Prairie Style houses in the Northeast. They are typically small, single-story dwellings without a garage or much storage. The Zimmerman House has a carport – a mid-century modern concept and a word Wright came up with.

Like many Wright houses, the Zimmerman House has an L-shape. It also fits around a natural feature – a large rock near the front door.

The Zimmermans meticulously maintained the house, and bequeathed the property to the Currier Museum of Art in 1988. The National Register of Historic Places added it to its list in 1970 partly because of its craftsmanship and detailing.

For information about tours of the Zimmerman House, click here.

Ira Rakatansky Home

Ira Ratansky designed this mid-century modern structure as a synagogue, now the Rhode Island Hindu Temple. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Ira Rakatansky was Rhode Island’s most renowned modernist architect. The son of Russian immigrants, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1942. He then studied architecture under Walter Gropius at Harvard.

He subsequently set up his architecture practice back home in Providence, where he worked from 1947 to 1992. Rakatansky designed dozens of mid-century modernist homes, temples, offices, bowling alleys and drive-ins, mostly in New England.

A former student wrote a book about Ira Rakatansky. He noted ‘his brand of mid-century modernism blew a fresh breeze through staid colonial New England.’

He designed his own house on Everett Avenue in Providence. It features soaring ceilings, large windows that bring in the outdoors and open interior space.

Rakatansky died in 2014. You can take a youtube tour of Ira Rakatansky houses here. Sadly, we couldn’t find any Ira Rakatansky homes open to the public. But we did find a temple he designed, then known as Beth Am in Warwick, which became Am David.

Norwich, Vt., Mid-Century Modern Historic District

A mid-century modern home in Norwich, Vt.

You may not think of Vermont as a hot spot of mid-century modern homes, but Norwich has an entire collection of them. Located on Hopson, Pine Tree and Spring Pond Roads, the National Register of Historic Places listed the district in 1991.

The town lies across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College, which attracted academics open to mid-century modern design.

Norwich’s role in mid-century modern style may have started when another German architect, Walter Curt Behrendt, escaped Nazi Germany, according to the Valley News. He came to the Upper Valley, and Dartmouth made him artist in residence. He built his own home in Norwich in 1945.

Edgar Hayes Hunter and Margaret King Hunter, students of Gropius, taught at Dartmouth and designed several mid-century modern homes in the area.

And Keith and Edna Warner get credit for starting the mid-century modern trend in 1951. They bought a large piece of land and built a house on it. They then sold off parcels to similarly minded people. Many had their home designed by Charles McKirahan of Fort Lauderdale.

Typically they are generally set back from the roads. They also have a horizontal orientation, flat roofs and large glass windows looking out on the hills.

The Norwich Historical Society has an online exhibit called Mad for Mid-Century Modern. You can see it here.

Images: Glass House By Staib – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7797606; Zimmerman House By Jane023 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21316008; Norwich, Vt. Home By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72230045; Emily Muir Boat House courtesy The Island Agency. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places Where A Gallows Once Stood

So many people died on the gallows in New England that you may well have walked over a spot where someone met his or her maker.

With hanging as the primary form of execution in the United States until the 1890s, more than 400 people in New England have been hanged by the neck until they were dead.

Hangings used to serve as public spectacles back when film and video weren’t around to provide violent entertainment.

The Gallows

Typically, crowds would gather to watch as the prisoner was taken to the gallows, usually in a horse-drawn wagon. The hangman bound the prisoner’s hands and feet, tied a blindfold around the head and placed a noose around the neck. Then a trap door would open, the prisoner would fall through and, theoretically at least, the weight of the prisoner’s body would snap his or her neck.

Often that didn’t happen, and the prisoner died a slow gruesome death. Sometimes the prisoner had strong neck muscles, sometimes the prisoner didn’t weigh enough, sometimes the rope was too short and sometimes the hangman put the noose in the wrong position. In that case, the prisoner would die of slow strangulation, eyes popping, tongue protruding, limbs thrashing violently and bowels loosening.

Massachusetts has hanged 198 people, Maine 21, Connecticut 108, New Hampshire 24, Rhode Island about 50 and Vermont 21.

Here are six places where people were hanged, one in each state. If you know of an interesting place where someone was hanged, please share it in the comments section.

New London, Conn.

A 12-year-old girl was once hanged on the gallows here in New London.

Connecticut authorities hanged Hannah Occuish in New London on Dec. 20, 1786, the last female executed in the state. She was only 12 years old.

Hannah had murdered six-year-old Eunice Bolles after Eunice accused her of stealing strawberries she’d picked in New London. The colonial court didn’t recognize extenuating circumstances. Hannah’s mother was a Pequot Indian, her father African-American. Both parents died, and she may have suffered a mental disability. Shuttled among foster homes as a child, she had been forced to work as an indentured servant by the age of 12.

On July 21, 1786, Eunice was walking to school when Hannah lured her into the woods with the promise of a piece of calico. Hannah then beat and strangled her to death, and tried to cover her body with large stones.

A passerby soon discovered Eunice’s body, and Hannah confessed to the crime. Officials charged her with murder and, after a swift trial, she was convicted and sentenced to hang.

She cried during much of the day of her hanging, which took place on a gallows built behind the old meeting house, near the corner of what is now Granite Street.

The Rev. Henry Channing from Yale College gave a long sermon before the hanging, at Hannah’s request. It was called “God Admonishing His People of Their Duty, As Parents and Masters.”

“She seemed greatly afraid when at the gallows, and said but little to anyone,” according to The Courant on Dec. 25, 1786. “She thanked the Sheriff for his kindness, and launched into the eternal world.”

Fort George, Castine, Maine

Where Ebenezer Ball died on the gallows at f Fort George in Castine, Maine

Maine has executed 21 people by hanging. Hanging, in fact, has been the only way Maine executed anyone.

In the summer of 1811, a Deer Isle counterfeiter named Ebenezer Ball met his maker before a crowd of people in the center of Fort George in Castine, Maine. Ball had shot to death a sheriff’s deputy, John Tileston Downes, who tried to arrest him.

After a jury found Ball guilty, he appealed the case, claiming he didn’t intend to shoot the sheriff’s deputy.

Nonetheless, Ebenezer Ball was executed on Oct. 31, 1811. A local minister, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, wrote two ballads on the hanging.

Officials erected the gallows in the center of Fort George. A large crowd followed the criminal as he was escorted from the jail to the gallows. Parson Fisher sold copies of his ballad to the crowd:

But oh! The sight — the shocking sight
This day our eyes did see,
A sinful and a harden’d wretch–
Launch’d in eternity.

Proctor’s Ledge, Salem, Mass.

Memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials at Proctor’s Ledge, site of the gallows where they were hanged.

You might think the 19 people hanged for witchcraft in the Salem witch hysteria of 1692-3 met their maker on Gallows Hill. But you’d be only partly right. They were hanged on Proctor’s Ledge, a city-owned wooded spot on Gallows Hill.

Sidney Perley identified the spot as the site of the hangings around the turn of the 20^th century. The scholars merely confirmed his research.

In 2016, a group of seven scholars who called themselves the Gallows Hill Project identified Proctor’s Ledge as the site of the hanging after five years of research. They used court records, maps, ground-penetrating radar and aerial photos. The city marked the spot with a memorial.

South Cemetery, Portsmouth, N.H.

Entrance to South Cemetery, where Ruth Blay once died on the gallows.

Ruth Blay died a slow painful death before a thousand spectators in Portsmouth, N.H. On Dec. 30, 1768, a horsecart took her to the highest point on South Street, now South Cemetery, and an executioner placed a noose around her neck.

She stood on the wagon under a newly built gallows, and the horse pulled the cart from under her feet. It probably took her several minutes to die of slow strangulation.

Ruth Blay was hanged because she concealed her illegitimate child. A 31-year-old schoolteacher, she ultimately admitted to wrapping her stillborn baby in a quilt and hiding it under the floorboards of a barn in South Hampton, N.H. Children playing in the barn discovered the baby’s body three days later.

Ruth received three reprieves before she finally lost her life on the gallows. She was the last of three New Hampshire women hanged for concealment. After the American Revolution, New Hampshire abolished the death penalty for concealment.

Gravelly Point, Newport, R.I.

26 pirates where once hanged on 26 gallows here.

Gravelly Point in Newport, R.I. is the place where Rhode Island hanged 26 pirates in a violent spectacle on July 19, 1723.

A British warship had captured 35 pirates under the command of the notoriously cruel Edward Low. The British took most of them to Newport, R.I., where 26 of them were sentenced to death by hanging.

Rhode Island authorities attached their captured pirate flag onto the gallows at Gravelly Point. A large crowd watched – and celebrated.

“Never was there a more doleful sight in all this land than while they were standing on the stage, waiting for the stopping of their breath and the flying of their souls into the eternal world,” wrote one witness. “And oh! How awful the noise of their dying moans!”

Catamount Tavern, Old Bennington, Vt.

Monument on the site of the Catamount Tavern.

On June 11, 1778, the Republic of Vermont hanged David Redding, but didn’t bury his bones properly for another 198 years.

During the American Revolution, David Redding made the mistake of choosing the Loyalist side. He joined the Queens Loyal Rangers, and while out of uniform tried to steal muskets stored in a barn. Locals caught him and put him in a temporary cell in the Catamount Tavern barn. Redding escaped, but got caught in Hoosick Falls, N.Y.

A jury found him guilty of treason.

He almost died on a temporary gallows in front of the Catamount Tavern, but won a week-long reprieve. Only six jurors had heard his case; under English law, there should have been 12.

The crowd gathered around the gallows was disappointed by Redding’s reprieve. A clamor arose and the crowd threatened violence.

But then Ethan Allen arrived, mounted a stump and spoke. “You shall see somebody hung at all events, for if Redding is not then hung, I will be hung myself.” The crowd, satisfied with Allen’s words if not his grammar, then dispersed.

A jury of 12 quickly re-convicted Redding, and he was hanged on June 11, 1778. A local doctor took possession of his body, which ended up as a teaching tool until the doctor died. The bones passed to his son, who stored them in his attic. Then the Vermont Historical Society got wind of the bones in the attic and took them, only to put them in a drawer. Finally in 1976, the people of Vermont gave David Redding a proper burial in the cemetery of Bennington’s Old First Church.

A statue of a catamount marks the site of the Catamount Tavern, which burned in 1871.

End Notes

Images: Fort George By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34096704; Gravelly Point, By The original uploader was Swampyank at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Kurpfalzbilder.de using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5872173; Catamount Tavern Monument by Doug Kerr via flickr. This story was updated in 2021.

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

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

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

Artists Houses As Inns

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

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

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

Abel Buell Home

The Abel Buell Home

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

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

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

The first map, by Abel Buell.

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

33 Commerce St., Clinton, Conn.

Great Spruce Head Island

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

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

Under the Elms by Fairfield Porter

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

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

Great Spruce Head Island, Deer Isle, Maine

Fidelia Bridges Guest House

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

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

May, by Fidelia Bridges

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

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

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

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

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

18 Washington Square West, Salem, Mass.

Inn at Whitefield

Interior at the Mountains, by Emil Otto Grundmann

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

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

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

381 Lancaster Rd., Whitefield, N.H.

Architect’s Inn Guesthouse

The Archietect’s Inn

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

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

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

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

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

Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

The Norman Rockwell Inn & Studio

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

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

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

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

3587 River Road Arlington, Vt.

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

This story about artists houses was updated in 2019.

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Joseph Orono, The Blue Eyed Indian Who Helped the Revolutionary Cause

The Penobscot sachem Joseph Orono died in 1801, too early to know about his consolation prize for losing his people’s land to white settlers.

He lived plenty long, though. He was said to have been born in 1688, which made him 113 when he died in 1801. If that’s true, Joseph Orono lived through every one of the French and Indian Wars as well as the American Revolution, in which he participated

A Penobscot chief

Five years after his death, Orono, Maine named itself after him. He probably would have preferred the land along the Penobscot River promised him, and then taken.

Joseph Orono

Historical accounts agree that Joseph Orono had reddish hair, blue eyes and a pale complexion. He spoke fluent French, English and Penobscot.

Accounts disagree about his lineage. Some say he had some relation to Baron de Castine, a French nobleman who married an Indian. (Castine also had a town named after him in Maine.) Perhaps Orono was Castine’s son-in-law, or grandson.

Joseph Orono himself said his father was French, and his mother half French, half Indian. A devout Catholic, he believed the Indians had suffered from war, and advocated peace. White people viewed him favorably, and described him as able, friendly and sagacious.

Revolution

In 1775, Joseph Orono and three other Penobscot chiefs went to air their grievances to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, as Maine then belonged to that colony. The Indian delegation stopped in Falmouth, now Portland, where the people gave them money, horses and a carriage to help them on their journey.

Two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they arrived in Watertown, Mass., where the Provincial Congress then met. It included Sam Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren.

On June 21, 1775, Joseph Orono addressed the Provincial Congress on behalf of the whole Penobscot tribe. As he spoke, the men inside could hear the groans of the soldiers dying of their battle wounds.

Orono said that if the Congress took care of his people’s grievances, the Penobscots would aid the rebels with their whole force. Those grievances consisted chiefly of trespasses by the whites upon their timber lands and cheating them in trade.

The committee responded warmly, and said the Indians’ complaints would receive their attention as soon as they could take a breath from the Revolution. Eventually, Massachusetts signed a treaty giving six miles of land on each side of the Penobscot river to the Indians.

Frigates

In 1779, the British built a fort in what is now Castine. Joseph Orono communicated intelligence about their activities to the patriots. Massachusetts then sent the Penobscot Expedition to Castine, and the Penobscot Indians fought with them. Whether Joseph Orono actually fought is unclear; he would have been 91.

The British routed the Americans in the worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. But Joseph Orono continued to help the cause, communicating intelligence to patriots in Machias and Halifax.

In 1780, Joseph Orono earned his Indian nickname, K’tolaqu. It means ‘frigate.’

Orono went to Newport, R.I., where French forces had landed before marching to Yorktown. His mission: to request a Catholic priest from the French consul. But he was so amazed by the French frigates in the harbor that he couldn’t stop talking about them afterword.

Island Life

Joseph Orono had often stayed and hunted with a friend on Deer Isle, a white settler named Seth Webb. After he broke with other Penobscots in 1783, he moved a small group of his people to White Island, off Deer Isle.

Penobscot wigwams

They established a little village with a Franciscan missionary, a Catholic chapel and wigwams. But they couldn’t live in peace there, either. In 1786, Joseph Orono complained to Massachusetts Commissioner Benjamin Lincoln, once a member of the Provincial Congress. People were chopping down his trees and burning the wigwams, he said.

A decade later, Massachusetts reneged on its deal to deed the land along the Penobscot River to Orono’s people. All they had left was the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

Five years after Joseph Orono died, white settlers near the Indian reservation incorporated, naming the town Orono. Today, the University of Maine has its main campus there. An island in Penobscot Bay also bears his name.

In May 2018, the University of Maine and the Penobscot Nation were scheduled to signed an agreement ‘formalizing their collaborations in the past decade to help manage the tribe’s cultural heritage.’

With thanks to Canoe Indians of Down East Maine, by Bill Haviland. This story about the Penobscot chief Joseph Orono was updated in 2022.

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Seven of the Best New England Hoaxes

The worst thing about the many hoaxes played upon New Englanders throughout history? How many people fell for them.

Though many hoaxes worked because of their victims’ greed, some were so preposterous it’s hard to understand how anyone could fall for them. One hoax in 1673 was aimed at inflaming religious disputes. Other hoaxes didn’t start off as hoaxes at all.

Here, then, are seven hoaxes that caused plenty of red faces throughout New England history.

The 1773 Old Librarians’ Almanac Hoax

Old Librarians Almanac, one of New England’s bookish hoaxes

The 1773 Old Librarians Almanack included Enoch Sneed’s recipe for cockroach poison and warnings against letting women near the books. It had a preposterous cure for rattlesnake bites and advocated the gallows for book thieves.

Librarian Jared Bean supposedly published the book in New Haven, Conn., following the traditional format of Poor Richard’s almanac. But rather than advice for farmers, Bean’s almanac contained advice for librarians about burning books, protecting books and setting rules for who should be allowed to take out books.

“Be suspicious of Women,” the almanac advised. “They are given to the Reading of frivolous Romances, and at all events, their presence in a Library adds little.”

One quick read through the Old Librarians Almanack and you might think: This is too good to be true. And you’d be right. The almanac was a work of satirical fiction written in 1910 by librarian and author Edmund Lester Pearson who was born in Newburyport, Mass., served on the library board of trustees there and later lived in New York.

The Outlook magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and the New York Sun praised the rediscovered gem. The Bulletin of Pharmacy even reprinted the snake bite remedy as historical fact. Pearson and his publisher, John Cotton Dana of Woodstock, Vt., disingenuously insisted they didn’t intend the librarians’ almanac as a hoax. R-i-i-i-ght.

To read more about the Old Librarians Almanack hoax, click here.

New England Gold Hoax of 1898

In December of 1897, the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company announced its plans to the world, along with offices in New York, Boston and London. Newspapers quickly spread the news that the company was accepting investors. Soon, it would harvest tons of gold from the sea.

A disillusioned Baptist minister, Prescott Jernegan relentlessly pursued investors among his former schoolmates and acquaintances. The money poured in, mostly from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. The company set up shop and started operations in Lubec, Maine, mostly because of its remote location. There they leased a grist mill, constructed a series of underwater “accumulators” to harvest the gold and employed more than 100 men.

New England Gold Hoax Illustration, New York Herald

To entice investors, Jernegan would take them to the end of a pier and show them his special zinc-lined bucket. The investors would pour mercury into the bucket, and Jernegan would lower it into the ocean. He would then activate a battery that he said would produce the current to allow the mechanism to extract gold from the ocean water.

In actuality, Jernegan’s childhood friend Charles Fisher, a skilled diver, waited underwater. He would follow a line to the bucket and replace the investors’ mercury with mercury infused with gold.

By summer of 1898, the company had taken in nearly $1 million. Even counting the costs of the operation, Jernegan and Fisher were ahead by several hundred thousand dollars.

But when a co-conspirator ratted out Jernegan and Fisher, the jig was up. Fisher disappeared, but the authorities caught up with Jernegan. A good lawyer kept him out of prison, and he spent the rest of his life teaching school in the American West and in the Philippines.

The Secret of the Astor Fortune

Not all hoaxes start off as hoaxes. In 1892, a Chicago lawyer named Franklin Head published a fanciful story in 1892 about the true origin of John Jacob Astor’s fortune. He did it just for fun.

According to the story, the pirate William Kidd buried treasure on land in Deer Isle, Maine, owned by Frederick Law Olmsted’s ancestors. (The landscape architect actually did own land in Deer Isle, and spent one summer there at the end of his life.)

Some hoaxes aren’t really meant to be hoaxes.

According to the story, a trapper stole the treasure chest and, not knowing its actual value, sold it to Astor. William Kidd’s stolen treasure therefore became the basis for the Astor fortune.

In Head’s account, generations later the Olmsteds discovered the theft and sued Astor for compensation. That included back rent on all the Astor Manhattan real estate, which the family could not have purchased without the stolen treasure.

References to Olmsted ancestors Cotton Mather Olmsted and Oliver Cromwell Olmsted suggested the book was a fraud. Nevertheless, Liberty Magazine published the story as true, and it would be told and reprinted many times over the years.

The story surfaced again in 1926 when a California historian presented it as true, and it made its way into newspapers around the world. Not to be outdone, newspapers in the state of Maine even postulated that the state might entitled to recover the treasure, since it would be illegal to sell stolen goods.

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

Charles Lewis Tiffany (left), victim of one of the 19th century’s biggest hoaxes

Two con men came up with a simple ruse: They acquired some industrial grade diamonds and began showing them around as evidence that they had discovered a major diamond mine. As word spread, investors jumped aboard.

Typical of any Ponzi scheme, they took their first investors’ money, about $20,000 worth, and used it to buy more diamonds – scraps from the diamond cutting rooms of Antwerp.

The investors, eager to know exactly what they had found, sent the diamonds to Charles Lewis Tiffany for appraisal. He valued them at an astounding $150,000.

With this new information, the investors, who now included Tiffany himself, pressured the men to sell their mine. The two crooks went to a remote spot in Colorado and salted the area with more cheap diamonds, and then brought the investors to the spot. The investors watched with delight as they pulled diamond after diamond from the ground.

In the end, the investors paid $450,000 for the rights to the mine. By the time a government geologist made a survey and gave them the truth, the con men had long gone.

Though the investors recovered some of their money via the courts, the incident remained an embarrassment for Charles Lewis Tiffany. It was not damaging to his store, however, which remained a symbol of luxury. Read more about Tiffany, a son of Connecticut, here.

The Moon Hoax of 1835

On August 25, 1835, Springfield, Mass., native Benjamin Day began a series of articles in his New York Sun describing life on the moon. Richard Locke, a short, pock-marked editor at the Sun cooked up the idea. To give his stories the whiff of authenticity he claimed they were gleaned from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

Life on the moon, as depicted by the Sun in one of the more preposterous hoaxes ever

In his articles, Locke described the living conditions on the moon as seen through an enormous telescope constructed in South Africa. Sir John Herschel and Dr. Andrew Grant were the scientists who made the observations about life on the moon. Wildlife of all manner populated the moon, which contained lakes and fields. And all of it was overseen by a species of winged man-bat. The scientific inquiry came to an untimely halt when the great telescope the men used caused a fire in their observatory.

The story dragged on for six days, complete with illustrations, and Day’s news hawkers had quite an edge. While competitors were flogging slow news from the dog days of August, the Sun was selling an illustrated look at the moon. Other newspapers began reprinting the story, and it made its way across the country.

Several weeks after publication, the great moon hoax was exposed. But the Sun stuck to its story, never apologizing and never correcting the hoax. The newspaper retained a considerable edge in circulation as its loyal readers returned for more fantastic news. Read more about Benjamin Day and the New York Sun here.

The Roger Williams Portrait Hoax of 1844

In 1844, Daniel Jones published an article about Roger Williams in a Welsh-language journal, and along with it he published a print he said was a likeness of Williams. Thus a legend was born: While in England in 1644 Roger Williams had had a portrait painted of himself. Following the turmoil of the English Revolution, the portrait had made its way to America, along with other belongings of the Duke of York, and been auctioned in New York.

The so-called portrait of Roger Williams

Daniel Jones bought the painting, or so he believed, and offered to give it, along with $500, to any group that would also put up $500 to create a memorial to Roger Williams.

Jones, an enthusiastic admirer of Roger Williams, probably didn’t want to deceive people. Though his claims about the portrait were invariably questioned, it made it into a number of books about Roger Williams.

Rhode Island historian Sidney Rider had his doubts. He undertook an inquiry to examine the facts. Could the portrait be real?

Eventually, Rider and others concluded the painting was a hoax. The portrait undoubtedly celebrated Williams’ life; it showed him seated with the Rhode Island charter and had his books in the background. But a number of problems with the painting – including misspelling in one of the titles of his books – led them to conclude the painting was not authentic.

The painting was perhaps, some conjectured, a poor portrait of Benjamin Franklin that had been augmented with the background designed to make it look like a painting of Roger Williams. To read more, click here.

The Mysterious Death of the Rev. Josiah Baxter

In 1673, disturbing news reached London about the ruthless murder of the Rev. Josiah Baxter in Boston.

Baxter was an Anglican minister who had gotten caught up in a public debate with a group of Baptists over their interpretations of the Bible. Baxter had gotten the better of the argument, but his opponents would not let the dispute end there.

Four men followed Baxter to his home. They tied up his wife and children and tortured Baxter in revenge. They literally stripped the skin from his scalp and body until he died.

Benjamin Baxter was so appalled by the murder that he published a pamphlet about the crime to keep his brother’s memory alive in London and warn about the treacherous nature of Baptists.

Publication of the pamphlet triggered a shock wave in England, which was at the time going through wrenching debates over religious tolerance.

Parliament had stymied proposals to give dissenters greater freedom despite considerable support. The broadside against the Baptists reinforced the notion that these Baptists were a threat to civil society.

Two Bostonians arrived in London then, and told the mayor that not only had the murder not occurred, no one had been murdered in Boston. What’s more, the Rev. Josiah Baxter didn’t exist.

Samuel Parker, bishop of Oxford, admitted he published the pamphlet, but couldn’t produce Benjamin Baxter. He denied he had anything to do with any hoaxes, but only conceded he had accepted the story as true too quickly.

This story last updated in 2023.

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