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Six Historic Fourth of July Celebrations

The Fourth of July has been celebrated with feasting, fireworks and festivity since Boston shot off cannons on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The document wasn’t actually signed on the Fourth of July, as some of the signers weren’t even in Philadelphia that day. And John Adams thought the Second of July would be the day to remember, as that was when the Continental Congress voted for independence. The Fourth of July was the day the Congress adopted the document.

No matter. The first Fourth of July turned out to be cause for celebration year after year. Here are six of the oldest – and most historic – Fourth of July celebrations. If you know of another worth mentioning, please include it in the comments section below.

New Haven, Conn.

Yale College (left) and the State House.

In 1788, New Haven held a large and lavish Fourth of July celebration featuring a parade of working men grouped by their occupation. Cordwainers in a wagon made shoes as the parade wended its way from the long wharf to the Brick Meeting House. Blacksmiths made a hoe during the parade with anvil, hammer and bellows, while goldsmiths displayed a silver urn with 10 stars – one for each state that had adopted the Constitution.

According to a contemporary account, there were also sowers, reapers with sickles, thrashers with flails, butchers, barbers, distillers, bakers, tanners, curriers, leather dressers, stonecutters with chisels, cabinet makers, coppersmiths and braziers, watch and clock makers, coopers, painters, hatters with bows, weavers, tailors, boat builders, rope-makers wearing hempen girdles, shipwrights, a whaleboat with her crew, papermakers, printers, merchants, schoolmasters followed by their scholars, physicians, Yale College tutors, clergy, sheriffs, the common council, mayor, alderman, recorder, orator and high sheriff.

Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration of Independence, attended the festivities. He heard Josiah Meigs, publisher of New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine, read the Declaration of Independence and listened to a performance of a hymn composed by Barna Bidwell, a tutor at Yale College.

A feast was held at the Statehouse with at least one toast – to a model of the frigate USS Constitution. Patriotic toasts were probably drunk for George Washington and the veterans of the Revolution as well. After dinner came a ball. Outside, no doubt, there was plenty of noise. As a Yale student named Thomas Robbins wrote in his diary on July 4, 1796:

The students fired guns, etc., then came here and were very noisy, drinking toasts, etc.

New Haven over the years became the best place in the region to see fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Thomaston, Maine

Montpelier (Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, New York Public Library).

Revolutionary War General Henry Knox led a Fourth of July celebration in 1795 that wasn’t the first in Maine, but it was certainly the grandest.

After the American Revolution, Knox relocated to Thomaston, Maine (then Massachusetts) where he built an estate and mansion, Montpelier.

Knox owned the better part of four counties in Maine, which he came by via his wife’s family. In 1795, with Montpelier finished, Knox came to Thomaston from Philadelphia. His mission was to develop the state. By 1795 he was busily building sawmills, kilns, quarries and brickyards to attract employees and tenants for his properties.

To promote the Maine endeavor, Knox opened Montpelier to any and all guests on the Fourth of July in 1795. The feast was legendary for its sheer size. Chicken, geese and an entire ox fed the crowds. More than 100 beds were made up for overnight guests. A delegation of Penobscot Indians, with whom Knox wanted peaceful relations, came and stayed more than a week. They finally left at Knox ‘s urging. He was annoyed by the length of their visit.

Knox would live barely 10 years after the celebration, and his plans for Maine met with limited success. Montpelier was torn down to make way for a railroad when the house fell into disrepair and no buyers could be found for it. Today no one will produce a feast for you, but you can visit a 1929 replica of Montpelier in Thomaston that operates as a museum.

Boston

The Old State House in Boston. The Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony.

Boston celebrated the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with joyful delirium.

The festivities began at dawn with a grand salute fired from cannon at Fort Independence and ships in the harbor. Gov. John Hancock proposed 13 toasts from the balcony of the Old State House, while cannons fired and Boston’s militia companies paraded, drilled and fired off their guns.

That day Boston established the tradition of Fourth of July oratory. It stemmed from the Boston Massacre speech delivered annually for 13 years commemorating that sad event. Rev. Dr. William Gordon of Roxbury preached a patriotic sermon to the General Court.

At night, a Col. Crafts illuminated the Boston Common. He ‘threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.’

Boston was the first municipality to officially designate the Fourth of July as a holiday, in 1783. And in 1929, Arthur Fiedler first took the podium to conduct the Boston Pops Orchestra’s performance of the 1812 Overture on the Esplanade. To this day, Boston celebrates with cannon, fireworks and church bells in one of the best attended Fourth of July celebrations in the country.

Portsmouth, N.H.

The Continental frigate Bonhomme Richard 9commanded by John Paul Jones) battling the HMS Serapis.

There is a legend about the first Fourth of July celebration in Portsmouth, N.H., that probably isn’t true.

The story has it that five young ladies of Portsmouth — Mary Langdon, Augusta Pierce, Caroline Chandler, Dorothy Hall and Helen Seavey — made an American flag from their best silk gowns, according to specification by John Paul Jones.

Jones supposedly sailed the USS Ranger from Boston to Portsmouth, where the Ranger had been built at what is now the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The ladies presented him the flag. He then hoisted it on the Ranger. The record suggests, however, that John Paul Jones wasn’t in Portsmouth that day.

What did happen was that a Captain Thompson invited people to lunch on board a Continental frigate. Salutes were probably fired, church bells probably rung, and a toast to George Washington was probably drunk. In 1805, for example, Portsmouth gave Washington the following toast to ‘The memory of George Washington, Greater than Caesar–he would wear no crown, but that of the people’s love. ‘

Bristol, R.I.

The Bristol, R.I., parade.

Fourth of July observances have waxed and waned over the centuries, but not in Bristol, R.I. The town proudly claims to be the birthplace of the Fourth of July celebration.

The Bristol Fourth of July Celebration started in 1785 by the Rev. Henry Wight, newly hired by the First Congregational Church.

Wight had served as a soldier in the American Revolution, and he determined that Bristol should observe Patriotic Exercises on the Fourth of July. He led the ceremonies in 1785 with a speech calling for reflection on the veterans who won the war and celebration of the new nation’s freedoms.

For 40 years, Wight would continue leading these ceremonies. The Fourth of July has been celebrated every year in Bristol since.

Sometime in the early 1800s the now-2.5-mile Military, Civic and Firemen’s Parade began. In 1975, Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci started fighting with parade organizers. Under the rules, he wasn’t entitled to walk in the parade, but he did anyway.

Parade organizers sent him a letter in 1979 telling him not to show up in 1980, and the Bristol police chief vowed to arrest anyone who made a disturbance. Cianci showed up in a helicopter. So many parade-goers cheered him the police had to let him march.

In 1984, Cianci pleaded “no contest” to a charge of assault and skipped the parade. A clown dressed in a prison uniform, carrying a ball and chain, marched in his place. In 1989 he marched ahead of the marshal, prompting the parade chairman to say Cianci was rude and shouldn’t be invited back. In 1997 and 1998, he brought along an entourage of law enforcement officers squirting the crowd with water rifles, which got him dis-invited in 1999. He returned in 2009 after serving jail time for racketeering.

Today Bristol’s Fourth of July celebration officially starts on June 14th, Flag Day, and ends with the parade on July 4th. In between are concerts, fireworks, a drum corps show, a firefighters muster and a Fourth of July ball.

Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci marched in the Bristol, R.I., Fourth of July parade in 2009 after his conviction.

Bristol, Vt.

Coincidentally, the parade committee in Bristol, Vt., boasts that the Bristol Vermont Fourth of July parade is the oldest continuous parade in Vermont.

The parade committee is silent on when the parade first started, simply saying it has been going on for ‘decades.’ Bristol did host a parade for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976. Today Bristol’s fireworks are said to rival Burlington’s, and the parade runs for an hour and a half.

In 1980, the Bristol parade featured the first annual Outhouse Race. Contestants participate in teams, with two runners and one rider who sits inside the outhouse frame. The outhouse frame must have a door for privacy. The race runs from St. Ambrose Catholic Church to the finish line at the traffic light, and there are usually three or four outhouses in each of the four heats.

For a youtube video of the outhouse race, click here.

Images: Old State House, Boston, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221678; Bristol, R.I., parade: By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49912345; Buddy Cianci By Notyourbroom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7211464; Bristol, RI, street scene By TwoSheds (talk) (Uploads) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12287639

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The New England Summer Theater — Six of the Oldest

Summer theater has been a feature of New England resort towns since a Maine entrepreneur started staging plays in a former skating rink in 1899.

In 1916, the Provincetown Players produced Eugene O’Neill’s plays on a wharf. During the 1920s, summer theaters started up in Peterboro, N.H., Cape Cod and the Berkshires. They featured young talent, usually fresh out of college, and provided good, cheap entertainment for vacationing city dwellers. They were called ‘summer stock’ because they reused costumes and sets, and were performed by a resident company.

The ‘Straw Hat Circuit,’ as it became known, became a proving ground for Broadway plays. Stars like Bette Davis, Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando got their start in summer theater.

Here are six of the oldest summer theaters in New England, one in each state. If you have a favorite old summer theater, please mention it in the comments section.

Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse building started out in 1911 as a recreation hall for the workers of the Comstock-Cheney factory, which made ivory coverings for piano keys. There was another ivory manufacturer in Ivoryton, a village of Essex, Conn. It’s called ‘the town built by elephants.’

The building was vacant when an actor and director named Milton Stiefel came to Essex for a rest after touring nationally. He saw the potential of the unused building as a summer theater. He put his actor friends together in a troupe called The New York Players and staged the Broadway play Broken Dishes on June 30, 1930. By the end of the season the Ivoryton Playhouse was the first self-supporting summer theater in the country.

The theater quickly developed a national reputation and helped launch the careers of Cliff Robertson and Katharine Hepburn. It went dark during World War II due to gas rationing, but resumed afterward. The summer theater attracted such stars as Marlon Brando, Art Carney, Talullah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ezio Pinza, Betty Grable, Groucho Marx and June Lockhart.

Milton Stiefel retired in 1973, but stayed involved in the summer theater until he died in 1983. His successor couldn’t quite make a go of the theater and decided to sell it. Rumors spread that the building would be razed for a discount drugstore, and so supporters formed the non-profit Ivoryton Playhouse Foundation and bought the building. The theater floundered until 1987, when The River Rep company began to stage artistically successful productions.

This summer, the Ivoryton Playhouse will present Million Dollar Quartet, West Side Story, Saturday Night Fever: The Musical, and the world premiere of I Hate Musicals: The Musical.

103 Main Street, Ivoryton, Conn.

Lakewood Theatre

Lakewood Theatre

The Lakewood Theatre started out as a religious sanctuary for spiritualists on the shores of Lake Wesserunsett, six miles north of Skowhegan in Madison, Maine. It became a skating rink and a vaudeville theater.

By 1899, it was part of a swampy amusement park at the end of a trolley line when Herbert Swett began running it as a summer theater. He developed it into a venue for Broadway tryouts, which earned the theater the nickname “Broadway in Maine.”

During its heyday, such stars as Vincent Price, Ethel Barrymore and George M. Cohan played in Lakewood. The summer theater premiered one of the longest running play on Broadway, Life with Father, in 1939.

The theater declined after World War II. The Swett family sold it in 1970 and owners came and went for the next 15 years. Television and pop stars played the summer theater. John Travolta appeared in Bus Stop while taking a break from the Welcome Back, Kotter television series. He scrawled his signature on a backstage wall. So did Myrna Loy and Mama Cass Elliot.

In 1985, the The Cornville Players arrived with an agreement to perform three plays for six weeks. They were successful, and formed the nonprofit CUE (Curtains Up Enterprises). Since then, CUE has renovated the summer theater and stages comedies, dramas, musicals and children’s shows.

This season, the Lakewood Theater presents Arsenic and Old Lace, Some Sweet Day, Shout! The Mod Musical, Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner, Avenue Q, The Savannah Sipping Society, Bullets Over Broadway, Baskerville and A Comedy of Tenors.

76 Theater Rd., Madison, Maine

Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse, like the Lakeville Theater and Barnstormers, claims to be the oldest summer theater in the country.

We won’t debate the merits of their arguments, but we do question the original cover story about the Cape Playhouse, which also has a cinema on its grounds. The theater’s marketing claim was that a visionary ex-botany teacher named Raymond Moore moved an old church to a pasture on Cape Cod and transformed it into a world-famous theater complex. The Playhouse debuted Bette Davis, Henry Fonda and Humphrey Bogart, while the Cinema featured a spectacular ceiling mural by Rockwell Kent.

Actually lumber heiress and Cape summer resident Edna Bradley Tweedy backed Raymond Moore in his summer theater venture. She secretly married him a year before she died in 1953. She was at least 65, he was still in his late 30s. Tweedy had inherited the Bradley lumber fortune and left Moore a generous bequest. That became public when Moore quarreled over the will with her three daughters, the main beneficiaries of the estate.

Whatever. The Cape Playhouse was a smash hit when it opened in 1927. Three years later John Barrymore praised Moore for bringing Broadway to “dirt road and oil-lamp country.” The Cape Playhouse and Cape Cinema, he wrote, are “a dream come true, that has attracted the attention of the theatrical and playgoing world.’

This season, the Cape Playhouse presents Art, The Foreigner, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Red, Gypsy and Murder for Two.

820 Maine St. (6A), Dennis, Mass.

The Barnstormers

The Barnstormers, like the Cape Playhouse, claims to be the oldest ongoing professional summer theater. It was founded in 1931 by Francis Cleveland, the son of President Grover Cleveland. He ran the Tamworth, N.H., theater until he died in 1995.

Francis, his wife Alice and their friend Ed Goodnow founded the summer theater company in 1931. Their company of resident actors – mostly recent college graduates — performed different plays each night in Maine and New Hampshire. Sometimes they arrived at a barn in the afternoon, set up scenery and lights and performed in the evening — hence the name ‘Barnstormers.’

They finished each week with a Saturday evening performance in Tamworth at a former boxing venue where former First Lady Frances Cleveland, dressed in an evening gown, often greeted the audience.

In 1935, the Barnstormers bought Kimball’s Store on Maine Street in Tamworth and turned it into a summer theater. Since then the acting company rehearses one play by day and performs one by night. Barnstormers is one of three Equity theaters in New Hampshire.

This season, Barnstormers presents Spamalot, The Ghost Train, My Three Angels, Toward Zero and Driving Miss Daisy.

104 Main Street, Tamworth, N.H.

Weston Playhouse

Lloyd Bridges

Beginning in summer of 1937, a drama teacher at the Boston Conservatory of Music traveled to Weston, Vt., to produce 10 plays. For the next 34 summers, Harlan Grant produced ambitious summer theater programs. From that day to this, the Weston Playhouse never missed a summer theater season.

Among the actors launching the first professional season was none other than Lloyd Bridges.

Over the years the theater, housed in a remodeled church, encountered some difficulties. On a summer night in 1962 fire gutted the theater. But in the spirit of ‘the show must go on,’ the company performed the next night in a tent on a makeshift stage in front of an audience seated in folding chairs. An enthusiastic crowd assembled that night for the performance of Write Me a Murder.

The 300-seat theater was rebuilt for the following season. Floods damaged the rebuilt theater twice in the 1970s, but the Weston Playhouse has never ceased to thrive. It opens its season in 2017 on June 22 with the theater’s Young Company performing the musical Really Rosie. Also showing this summer are Once, Lost in Yonkers, The Music Man, Long Days Journey Into Night, Tenderly and Buyer & Cellar.

The Weston Playhouse is poised to launch a new arts center for the development of a new generation of playwrights, actors and directors.

703 Main St., Weston, Vt.

Theatre by the Sea

Theatre By The Sea

In 1933, Alice Jaynes Tyler brought “Broadway in a Barn” to the Rhode Island village of Wakefield in South Kingstown. It was on the grounds of a summer camp that had been crippled by the Great Depression.

For the next 35 years the Theatre by the Sea thrived as visitors spent days on the nearby beaches and nights seeking entertainment. Along the way, the Hurricane of 1938 put a dent in the theater’s façade. During World War II it did its part for the war effort by serving as a target for training pilots to dive at.

In 1963 it faced its closest brush with death when it nearly was demolished. But for a few seasons when it went dark, however, the summer theater never wavered.

Stars such as Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Judy Holiday, Shelley Winters and more entertained the summer crowds night after night. In 2017, the summer theater opens again with Beehive, The Music Man, Beauty and the Beast and The Producers.

364 Cards Pond Rd, Wakefield, R.I.

If you don’t recognize the stars at the top of the page, they are Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis and Lloyd Bridges.

Images: Theatre By the Sea, By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434102

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Johnny Kelley, Beloved Icon of the Boston Marathon

The day after Johnny Kelley won his first Boston Marathon in 1935, he showed up at 7:30 a.m. at his job in an Arlington, Mass., greenhouse.

He was a salt-of-the-earth Irishman from West Medford, Mass. By the time he ran his 61st — and last — race at the age of 84, he was the effervescent heart and soul of the Boston Marathon.

Johnny Kelley crosses the finish line in 1945. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

He inspired the nickname “Heartbreak Hill,” where he went from frontrunner to fifth-place finisher in 1936.

Kelley was 65, with almost 20 more Boston Marathons ahead of him when he said, “For me, the race these days is to try to beat the girls to the finish and to wave to all my old friends along the course.”

When he was 70 he said he was afraid to stop running. “I feel too good,” he said. “I want to stay alive.”

Johnny Kelley, Iron Man

He was born on Sept. 6, 1907, the son of a letter carrier and the oldest of 10 children. His family would form a large cheering section at his races.

He ran track and cross-country at nearby Arlington High School. At 20, he ran his first Boston Marathon, one of 285 male entrants, but he didn’t finish. Like the other runners, he took the trolley or bummed a ride to get to the race. The last time he ran, in 1992, 9,629 men and women ran for $418,000 in prizes, including a Mercedes-Benz for the winner.

Others have won more marathons — Clarence DeMar won seven – but Johnny Kelley holds the record for endurance. He won the Boston Marathon twice, in 1935 and 1945, finished second a record seven times and finished in the top 10 in 19 others.

Johnny Kelley with another runner courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Boston Globe reported his bitterest defeat came in 1936.

Kelley was a little cocky when he came up on a struggling Tarzan Brown, the mercurial Narragansett Indian who also won the Boston Marathon twice:

…as they approached the treacherous stretch of hills in Newton. Kelley gave Brown a tap on the back, which was all the fuel Brown needed to rekindle his fire to win the race. The late Globe sports editor Jerry Nason, who witnessed the incident from the press vehicle, saw it as the turning point of the race and dubbed it “Heartbreak Hill.”

“He named it after me,” Kelley said. “I didn’t mean to be fresh or anything when I tapped Tarzan Brown, and it was just a tap, but Nason said I should have never done that, because it wasn’t right. For 15 years, he kept reminding me about it until I told him, ‘Enough’s enough’.”

Kept Going

Tarzan Brown and Johnny Kelley both went to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Kelley finished 18^th in the marathon. Brown didn’t compete because of a hernia, but got into a fight with Nazi brownshirts in a beer garden. Kelley would run two more Olympic marathons, the last in London at the age of 40.

In 1940, Johnny Kelley had a job as a security guard at a Boston Edison power plant and had just married Mary Knowles, a stenographer he met on the streetcar. Shortly after their second wedding anniversary, Mary collapsed and died three days later of cancer. Running, he said, helped him get through it.

Johnny Kelley got drafted in 1942, married briefly a second time and still ran the Boston Marathon. He went back to work at the power plant in mechanical maintenance.

He won his second Boston Marathon in 1945. In 1946, an undernourished Greek named Stylianos Kyiarides came from behind to beat him. Kelley graciously hugged Kyiarides at the finish.

He took up painting in his 50s, producing about 20 seascapes and landscapes a year and selling most of them. In 1972, he retired from Boston Edison and moved to East Dennis, Mass., with his third wife, Laura Harlow.

In 1991, at the age of 83, he fell into Laura’s arms after finishing the race. The two crashed to the pavement. He still hadn’t had enough. The next year it took him 5 hours and 57 minutes to finish the race, and he decided he needed to get home before dark. For the next two years, he only ran the last seven miles of the Marathon, starting at Heartbreak Hill. Finally, he retired in 1995.

No Money

He had run 112 marathons, winning one refrigerator, 22 diamond rings, 118 watches and no money.

In 1995, the first year of his retirement from running, he rode in a convertible at the head of the race as its grand marshal. Four years later, he was hospitalized with pneumonia and missed the race. He sent a tape to the champions’ breakfast before the race of his singing, Young at Heart.

Johnny Kelley in 1996

A 7-foot bronze statue of Johnny Kelley was unveiled in 1993, about a mile from the base of Heartbreak Hill on the Marathon course in Newton, Mass. The statue is actually two likenesses of Kelley: one of him as a 27-year-old winning the Boston Marathon in 1935, the other of him as an 84-year-old finishing his 61^st and last marathon. They hold hands as they break the tape crossing the finish line.

Johnny Kelley died at the age of 97 on Oct. 6, 2004 in a Cape Cod nursing home. He is buried in East Dennis, Mass., and his headstone reads, “Marathon Man.”

This story about Johnny Kelley last updated in 2022.

Image: Johnny Kelley in 1996 By unknown – Original publication: unknownImmediate source: https://archive.boston.com/sports/specials/obituaries/kelley/kelley_pictures?pg=9, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68969198.

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The Deadly October Gale of 1841

So many Cape Cod fishermen perished in the Great October Gale of 1841 that the peninsula’s young women refused to court men who went to sea.

The storm wrecked at least 190 vessels. Sidney Perley, describing the Great October Gale in Historic Storms of New England, wrote,

The ocean roared as though with an unbridled madness, and its waves ran mountain high, throwing their spray far into the sky, and forming a majestic yet fearful sight.

October Gale

The wind kicked up on Saturday, October 2, and by midnight it blew a gale, with rain in Massachusetts and snow in New Hampshire. The sun rose to a clear sky on Sunday morning, but immediately disappeared behind black clouds. The sky took on a wild look. By 11 a.m., heavy seas were throwing vessels onto rocks and beaches.

The gale reached its fiercest at 2 a.m. Monday, October 4, and continued to blow hard until that afternoon.

The Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire were covered with snow the next day. A foot and a half of snow fell in Middletown, Conn. The trees, in full leaf, ‘broke the forest and shade trees in an extraordinary manner.’ The oldest residents of the town couldn’t remember seeing any snow so early and so destructive.

A vessel named Maine broke loose of her moorings in Portsmouth, N.H., and wrecked on Scituate Beach, killing the captain, his daughter, five passengers and one crewman.

On the North Shore of Massachusetts, as many as 40 vessels, mostly fishing schooners, were lost in the October gale. Only two of the 16 fishing vessels in Rockport, Mass., survived the storm. The wreck of the Forest, in which the entire crew perished, left 31 children fatherless in Gloucester, Mass.

Cape Cod

The October gale flooded Nantucket streets, demolished its ropewalks and threw its barns into the sea.

Cape Cod suffered the most. The beach from Chatham to the highlands was strewn with the parts of 50 wrecks. In one day after the October gale, 100 bodies were taken up and buried. The Truro Insurance Company failed for a lack of men to take charge of its vessels.

The Town of Dennis lost 26 men, 18 of which had been schoolmates. Eighteen vessels from West Harwich were destroyed.

Wreck of The Garnet

19th century fishing schooner

On Saturday night, October 2, most of the Truro fishing fleet on the Georges Banks left off fishing and made for home. Only two of the nine ships that set out made it.

Capt. Joshua Knowles in the Garnet and Matthias Rich in Water Witch just barely survived the storm.

Knowles left a detailed record of the perilous voyage. The Garnet sailed out of Provincetown Harbor on October 2 and headed out to Georges Bank under full sail. As the wind grew stronger, Knowles took in sail until morning, when only the foresail was set. The wind blew the foresail to ribbons by nightfall, and Knowles set the mainsail. Soon the wind shredded that too, leaving only the jib.

Titanic waves pushed the vessel toward deadly shoals. Joshua Knowles ordered all crew members below deck except for his brother Zack.

Joshua lashed himself to the helm, and the brother tried to bring the Garnet about. But a huge wave struck the vessel, putting her on her beam ends and washing Zack overboard. He managed to hang on to the mainsheet and survived.

The foremast broke, the mainmast came down. As the storm raged, the brothers chopped furiously at the rigging while the crew moved the ballast to the windward side to right the vessel.

They survived. The storm finally abated, and they jury-rigged a mast. They then found some potatoes floating around, which they cooked for their first meal in two days. At dusk, a Liverpool packet called the Roscius picked them up. The ship captain turned out to be from Truro.

Truro’s Worst Tragedy

First Congregational Parish of Truro

The 57 men and boys in the seven other fishing vessels out of Truro were not so lucky. All died at sea, and only a few of their bodies recovered.

All 57 lived within two miles of each other. They were related to nearly everyone in town. Eight were Snows and eight were Paines. And three were boys not yet 13 years old.

During one of his trips to Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau recalled asking a man in Truro, “Who lives in that house?” The man then replied: “Three widows.”

The town, with a population around 2,000, had 105 widows. Young women became reluctant to marry fishermen.

An obelisk in the Congregational Church yard commemorates the 57 October gale victims:

Then shall the dust return to the
earth as it was and the spirit shall
return unto God who gave it.

Man goeth to his long home and the
mourners go about the street.

Image: First Congregational Parish of Truro By Judy Moehle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518277.

This story about the Great October Gale was updated in 2022.

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The Glory Days of the Berlin Turnpike

In the early 1950s, the king of Connecticut’s roads was the Berlin Turnpike, lined with colorful kitschy roadside architecture. It was the main route from Hartford toward New Haven between 1942 and 1965.

The Berlin Turnpike also ranked as one of the great neon strips of the Northeast, featuring 20 traffic signals and at least 200 businesses. It had diners, dairy bars, hot dog stands, motels, drinking places, bowling alleys, dance halls, petting zoos and 32 gas stations.

People called it ‘Gasoline Alley.’

A typical Berlin Turnpike motel. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

The road began as a turnpike in October 1798, when the Hartford and New Haven Turnpike Company formed. Then opened the next year, it was one of the first turnpikes to be built on as straight a line as feasible instead of on roads that already existed.

The state paved the turnpike in 1909 after bicyclists and automobile enthusiasts lobbied for better roads. In 1920 it was then upgraded as part of a continuous paved road between the borders of New York and Massachusetts. The Hartford Courant emphasized the benefit to fans of Harvard-Yale football: “Berlin Turnpike Officially Open, Splendid Stretch of Concrete Ready for Football Crowd,” read the headline. In 1942, the state added two lanes to the turnpike.

Makris Diner. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

The Berlin Turnpike, A Model Road

During the 1950s, 40,000 people a day traveled between Hartford and Meriden.

”When it was going full blast, it was a model of what was happening on highways everywhere in the country,” George (Larry) Larned, a State Transporation Department historian, told the New York Times in 1987. ”It was bumper to bumper.”

Freda Farms dairy bar. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

On Oct. 27, 1965, Interstate 91 opened a few miles to the east. Traffic on the Berlin Turnpike dropped 75 percent.

The Wonder Bar. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library poscard collection.

The Wonder Bar. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

Business dried up. Motels that once catered to middle-class tourists became hot-sheet shops. The Wonder Bar mysteriously burned down.

Olympia Diner postcard

By the 1970s, Gasoline Alley had turned into Death Valley or Torch Alley.

The turnpike since bounced back, now featuring big box stores amid the relics of its past glories like the Olympia Diner.

Hartford Courant writer Dennis Barone argued the Berlin Turnpike deserves designation as an official scenic road.

The Berlin Turnpike (1942) is our Via Sacra, and the Olympia Diner (1952) is our Triumphal Arch. Whereas covered bridges evoke the horrors of so many headless horsemen, eyes light up with fond memory or present-day joy at so much as a mention of the Pike.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Hurricane Carol, So Deadly Her Name Was Retired

Hurricane Carol, one of the worst to hit New England, was so ferocious the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration retired the name for a decade after it struck in 1954.

The Edgewood Yacht Club survived the storm surge

Strong, sustained winds swept through Rhode Island and the eastern parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut, killing dozens and destroying buildings, automobiles, boats and crops. The storm took out power for days, Gov. Dennis Roberts declared martial law in Rhode Island and called up the National Guard.

Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine suffered as well, though to a lesser extent.

On tiny Onset Island, the storm trapped more than a dozen families who had no warning of the approaching storm. Fifty people crowded into a two-story cottage, and their sheer weight held the house on its foundation. Women and children went upstairs, and the men downstairs took the windows out of their frames to let the waist-high water surge through the house.

“We could see and hear the funnel go right up Buzzards Bay,” remembered a cottager, 10 at the time. “After the water went down the men went out to try to find the baby that the mother lost hold of. The baby was found days later floating dead.”

In New England, Hurricane Carol killed 65 people and injured a thousand.

The Birth of Hurricane Carol

Hurricane Carol started on Aug. 25, 1954, as a tropical wave near the Bahamas, and strengthened as it moved northwest. On August 27, meteorologists clocked Carol’s winds at 105 mph. The hurricane then moved northeast, flooding the mid-Atlantic coast.

On August 31, Carol sped up and slammed into Old Saybrook, Conn. Rosemary Carpichio, then 10, remembered it well. Her family cottage on Cornfield Point stood only three houses from the beach.

“My father took me out during the eye of the storm when all was quiet and the sun was shining,” she recalled. “All of the roads were washed out and we were completely surrounded by water on the point. It was too late to evacuate.”

The next day, Carol morphed into an extratropical cyclone over northern New England.

Power Lines Sparking

Hurricane Carol crashes into Connecticut. NOAA photo.

At the storm’s height, winds gusted up to 125 mph, blowing roofs off houses in Rhode Island. The hurricane flooded downtown Providence with up to 12 feet of water. Winds on Block Island reached 135 mph, the highest ever recorded there.

The aftermath of Hurricane Carol in Westerly, R.I.

The storm washed away 200 homes in Westerly, R.I. In Newport, R.I., it damaged the Casino.

Ronald Guilmette was living in the Rogers Williams Projects in Providence. He and three friends had climbed a tree to see the storm better. “The tree was blown done and I broke my right arm,” he remembered. “To this day I don’t know how I got to Rhode Island Hospital where they repaired it.”

Narragansett Bay, Buzzards Bay and New Bedford Harbor suffered storm surges of more than 14 feet. Rod Sherman was at a family reunion in Little Compton, R.I. He remembered many trees down and power and phone wires dangling in the wind. He also recalled power lines sparking as they hit the wet ground and leaves stripped from trees.

Old North Church after Hurricane Carol got done with its steeple. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Old North

In Boston, Hurricane Carol tore off the spire of the Old North Church. Donations from children across America rebuilt it the next year.

Digital Equipment Corp. then occupied the Assabet Mills in Maynard, Mass. The company’s employees filled several thousand sandbags to protect the buildings that housed production equipment.

Hurricane Carol destroyed this boat in Marblehead Harbor. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

National Guardsmen flew a planeload of dry ice to Boston for people who lost power and had no refrigeration. Gov. Christian Herter called up guardsmen in six Massachusetts towns to prevent looting. State officials then ordered the evacuation of Cape Cod, and 20,000 people left the peninsula.

Paul Phillips was an infant, staying with his mother and his grandmother in Dennisport at a cottage across the street from the ocean. His mother got him and his grandmother to higher ground and then helped to rescue more people. “A day or two later, there was a photo on the front page of the Cape Cod Times of my mom in the back of the truck, reaching out her hand to help someone get on board,” he remembered.

Damage from Hurricane Carol approximated $642 million, making it the costliest storm up to that point. The hurricane destroyed nearly 40 percent of fruit and vegetable crops — apples, peaches, corn and tomatoes. A third of New Englanders lost power, many for days.

Thousands of automobiles like this one were destroyed by Hurricane Carol. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Hurricane Carol destroyed thousands of automobiles like this one. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Damage

The storm damaged more than 10,000 homes, completely destroying 1,545. Mary Willis Paquette lived with her family in a triple decker in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.

“There were triple deckers facing ours, ” she recalled, “and one of two pine trees fell and sheared off our neighbors’ three back porches. My Dad ran out and yelled, ‘Is everyone OK?’, and thank goodness everyone was fine.” She said she’d always remember the smell of the pines and the fresh smell of the air after the hurricane.

Hurricane Carol wrecked another 3,000 boats and 3,500 automobiles. Carol caused such destruction that the weather service retired her name, the first ever for an Atlantic hurricane. It made a comeback 10 years later, only to be retired again.

Then 12 days later came Hurricane Edna. Edna killed 21 people, caused widespread power outages on Cape Cod, flooded roads and railroads in Main and forced evacuations throughout southern New England.

All in all, the 1954 hurricane season ranked as one of the worst in the 20th century.

***

Read more about Hurricane Carol in “New England Weather.” Just published by the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy today.

This story was updated in 2024. You may also want to read about the Great New England storm of 1938 here.

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