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Five Heroic Moms in New England History

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With Mother’s Day soon upon us, it’s a good time for a reminder about heroic moms.

For much of New England history, moms were supposed to be quiet, submissive, stay-at-homes providing a moral influence for the family. Reality often intruded, however. Mothers had to meet challenges without the advantages their male counterparts enjoyed.

Heroic Moms

Contrary to popular belief during most of New England history, moms were capable of military feats that took great courage. Prudence Cumming Wright, for example, captured two British spies while armed with little more than a pitchfork.

Time and time again, women have stepped in when their husbands died or disappeared. During the 18th and 19th and well into the 20th centuries, heroic moms raised children and ran businesses with few legal protections or even the right to vote.

Mothers of accomplishment until recent decades have largely escaped the historian’s notice. And so to rectify those oversights we bring you five heroic moms in New England history.

Ann Smith Franklin

Benjamin Franklin wasn’t the only member of his family to leave Boston for another city so he could start his own newspaper. Ann Smith Franklin, his sister-in-law, did it as well.

Born in 1696, Ann married Ben’s brother James, the one Ben didn’t get along with. James landed in jail in Boston for printing ‘scandalous libel’ — in other words, criticisms of the Puritans. So he and Ann took his printing press and moved to Newport, R.I. There they started printing the Rhode Island Almanack.

James died, leaving Ann with five children and a business to run. She couldn’t make enough money to support her family, so she asked the General Assembly for a contract to print the colony’s laws.

Ann Smith Franklin got the job. She also raised three children to adulthood, started The Newport Mercury with her son James and then continued to run it after he died in 1762.

She died in 1763. Her obituary described her as a woman of ‘economy and industry … [who] supported herself and her family, and brought up her children in a genteel manner.’

Prudence Cummings Wright

At 35, Prudence Cummings Wright had five children and a husband who marched off to the Siege of Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

That same fate befell most of the other ladies in her hometown of Pepperell, Mass. When Prudence learned British spies were passing information from Canada to Boston through Pepperell, she decided to do something about it.

One of many heroic moms

Prudence Wright organized a militia from the women of the town. They dressed in their husband’s clothes and, since their husbands took all the muskets, probably grabbed farm implements. Then the ladies’ militia patrolled the town.

One night they stationed themselves at Jewett’s Bridge and waited silently for the spies they expected. When two horsemen approached from the north, Prudence burst upon them with a lantern demanding to know their identities and their business. One of the men — Prudence’s Loyalist brother — tried to flee.

The women dragged both men off their horses and searched them. They found dispatches intended for the enemy, so they took the men to the local tavern. The men were released after they agreed to leave the colony for good.

At Town Meeting on March 19, 1777, Pepperell voted to pay Prudence Cummings Wright and her ladies’ guard for their service.

Mary Patten

Mary Patten wasn’t a mom yet when she faced down a mutinous crew and took command of a clipper ship. At 19, she was pregnant with her only son, Joshua.

She came from a well-to-do East Boston family and knew navigation and sailing.  Her husband, a sea captain also named Joshua, took her along on a voyage from New York to San Francisco in 1856. As the ship approached the southern tip of South America, Joshua fell ill with fever. Mary set the course, navigated the vessel and nursed her husband.

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Mary Patten

Then the first mate tried to incite the crew to mutiny, but Mary persuaded them to obey her. Joshua recovered briefly, but then again fell ill. For 50 days Mary wore the same clothes at the ship’s helm, ultimately reaching San Francisco with the cargo intact. Newspapers found out and made her an instant celebrity.

The Pattens returned to Boston overland. Joshua lived only a few more months. He never knew Mary gave birth to a son, and she only lived to the age of 24.

Toy Len Goon

Toy Len Goon was born in 1891 in a mud brick hut to peasant farmers in Guangdong Province. As a child she did backbreaking farm chores until the family’s land could no longer support all six children. At 10, Toy Len began to work for a wealthy merchant family as a servant and babysitter.

She married Dogon Goon when he returned to China from Portland, Maine, where he worked in a laundry. In 1917 he was arrested as an illegal resident, To avoid deportation he had to serve in the armed forces during World War I, where he was wounded and lost a limb.

When Toy Len arrived in Portland, she spoke no English. She worked in the laundry with Dogon. Over the next 13 years, they had eight children.

She managed to save $500 for a down payment on a three-story building in which they lived and started their own laundry. Dogon died of gangrene in 1952, leaving Toy Len with eight children ages three to 16. She kept the laundry going and made sure all her children got educations, refusing offers to put them in foster care. All did well academically.

In 1957, a local newspaper reported her son Carroll was a physician, Richard a businessman, Edward a research chemist, Albert a lawyer, Josephine a mother, Arthur, a Navy veteran, studying electrical engineering. Doris was a court reporter and Janet a college student.

heroic-moms-toy-len-goon

Toy Len Goon receiving the Maine Mother of the Year Award.

Toy Len Goon was named Maine Mother of the Year in 1952 by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation.

Shortly after receiving the award, she moved to Lynn, Mass., to be closer to her children. She died at the age of 101 in 1993.

Margaret Rudkin

She was a society housewife who lived in a Tudor mansion with her husband and three sons in tony Fairfield, Conn. Life was good until the stock market crashed in 1929 and her husband suffered a polo accident.

Margaret Rudkin sold the horses, fired the servants and tried to make ends meet selling apples and turkeys.

According to one account, she began baking stone-ground whole wheat bread because her son Mark had severe food allergies. According to her own account, she started baking because of her ‘interest in proper food for children.‘

In August 1937 she sold her first batch of Pepperidge Farm bread to her grocer in Fairfield, Mercurio’s Market.

Eventually she moved her bakery from the kitchen into the garage and began making white bread with unbleached flour. A specialty food store in New York, Charles & Co., ordered 24 loaves a day. Then the orders poured in after Reader’s Digest ran a story about her deluxe bread. Margaret Rudkin borrowed $15,000, and in 1940 moved her bakery to Norwalk, Conn.

Eventually she added premium cookies and small fish-shaped crackers. She and her husband sold the company to Campbell Soup, where she became the first female director. Margaret Rudkin died of breast cancer in 1967.

This story was updated in 2022.

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7 Fun Facts About the Boston Irish

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George Washington famously acknowledged the Boston Irish on March 17, 1776, when he ordered new code words to pass through Continental Army lines. The password, “Boston,” was to be answered with “St. Patrick.” Then, of course, the army trained cannons from Dorchester Heights onto the occupying British, and they left in a hurry.

Boston has had an Irish population since the first four shiploads from Ulster arrived in 1718. But not until the potato crop began to fail in 1845 did the huge influx of Irish immigrants sail into Boston Harbor.

The potato famine wasn’t the only thing that brought the Irish to Massachusetts rather than, say, Virginia or Maine. Hunger and poverty pushed the Irish out of Ireland, but the promise of work pulled them to Boston.

The world’s largest Irish flag at Rowe’s Wharf in Boston.

In the Atlas of Boston History, Robert J. Allison explains that Irish immigrants came for jobs. Jobs in the Merrimack River Valley, the most industrial region in the Western Hemisphere. Jobs in Lowell, the biggest industrial city in the United States. And jobs in Boston, a manufacturing powerhouse that led the nation in distilling and refining.

The Atlas of Boston History isn’t just about the Boston Irish. Edited by historian Nancy Seasholes, it traces the history of Boston from the Ice Age to the present. It includes 57 full-color maps, along with illustrations, graph and text.

Here are seven more facts about the Boston Irish borrowed liberally from the Atlas of Boston History.

1. Coming from County Cork

Some Irish immigrants walked a hundred miles to reach Queenstown (now Cobh), their port of departure. Most came from the southwestern counties of Galway, Kerry, Clare and especially Cork. Many arrived so sick and destitute that people said they came in famine ships.

Where they came from. Courtesy The Atlas of Boston History.

2. Hives of human beings

In 1849, a ship from overseas brought cholera to Boston. Crowded, unsanitary housing caused an epidemic of the disease, from which the Irish suffered the most. Of the 611 people who died of cholera, 500 came from Ireland.

The city physician investigated the living conditions, and included his findings in the Report of the Committee of Internal Health on the Asiatic Cholera. He was especially horrified by the Fort Hill neighborhood (now the Financial District), which had the densest Irish population. He called it a “perfect hive of human beings, without comforts and mostly without common necessaries; In many cases, huddled together like brutes… sometimes wife and husband, brothers and sisters, in the same bed.”

Some dwellings had 100 people living in them with one sink and one toilet. Half Moon Place was the worst, walled in by tall buildings, Fort Hill and 14 overflowing privies. Boston had 586 cellars used as dwellings; they had neither light nor ventilation and as many as 15 people living in them. The average age of Irish life in Boston didn’t exceed 14 years, he wrote.

Neighborhoods to avoid. Courtesy The Atlas of Boston History.

3. Filling in nicely

Back Bay and the South End owe their existence to the Irish, for more than one reason. So many Irish flooded into the city that Boston’s political leaders grew concerned that their taxpaying Yankee political supporters would move to the suburbs. So they built two attractive residential neighborhoods to keep Yankees in the city: Back Bay and the South End.

Irish laborers filled in the mud flats in Back Bay so Yankee homes could be built. Irishmen also filled in South Cove (now Chinatown) and expanded the shoreline and docks in Charlestown and East Boston. They also built a new warehouse and docks along Fort Point Channel.

Back Bay

4. A way to find missing friends

Friends and relatives of Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston placed thousands of “Missing Friends” advertisements in the Boston Pilot, a national Catholic newspaper.

Newcomers to Boston did it to find family who had come over earlier. Sometimes relatives and friends in Ireland placed ads to find immigrants in America they’d lost touch with. Or sometimes they advertised to find another immigrant who moved elsewhere to find work.

The map of Ireland that showed which counties Irish immigrants came from is based on that information.

5. Third Place

Irish immigrants made Boston the third-biggest city in the country in 1850, behind New York and Baltimore. The city had slipped to fifth place in 1840, but the Irish helped it climb into third.

Boston went from having a minority of foreign born residents to having a majority between 1845 and 1855. By then, 42.5 percent of the population of Boston was Irish.

map-boston-irish

Courtesy The Atlas of Boston History

6. Bring on the brawn

Boston Irish offered a vast pool of cheap labor to Yankee businessmen, and they fueled a manufacturing boom. Irish workers churned out steam engines, industrial furnaces, pianos, organs, refined sugar, candy, iron rails and ale and spirits.

Boston Irish laborers

Ready-made clothing makers, centered in and near the heavily Irish North End, challenged New York City, the top garment producer in the United States. And Boston shipyards made the clipper ships and steamers that carried to market New England’s products—especially textiles and shoes. Irish dockworkers and teamsters hauled the fruits of Irish labor into warehouses and onto ships that the Irish helped build.

7. McGinniskin was the first

In 1851, Boston hired the first Irish cop in U.S. history, a quiet and respectable 42-year-old laborer named Barney McGinniskin. Boston’s Yankees objected strenuously, and held meetings (including at Faneuil Hall) to protest his appointment. One alderman complained Boston set a dangerous precedent because the ‘Irish commit most of the crime.’

McGinniskin served for three years until the political winds changed. The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothings elected a Boston mayor and McGinniskin got fired from his job in 1854.


Images: Largest Irish flags By John Hoey from Framingham, MA, United States – World’s Largest Irish Flag (1), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47411665 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47411658; all maps from The Atlas of Boston History by Nancy Seasholes. Back Bay by By Rick Berk – https://www.flickr.com/photos/rickberk/2848634125/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10986897. This story was updated in 2022.

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Samuel Maverick Writes A Guide to the Wonders of New England – in 1660

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Samuel Maverick, as his name suggests, didn’t like to go along with the crowd. The Puritan crowd, that is.

He came to Boston sometime in the 1620s, before the Puritans arrived, and lived on Noddles Island in Boston Harbor. Noddles Island is now East Boston, which has a Maverick Square and a Maverick T stop.

Samuel Maverick, a firm Anglican and staunch royalist, saw amazing changes in New England during the first 30-some years of his residence. When he arrived, several hundred Europeans were scattered over 150 square miles of wilderness. By 1660, Maverick saw 86 towns that fielded militia, vast herds of livestock, an abundance of English fruit, and harbors bustling with many dozens of ships, some as large as 300 tons.

Other changes he didn’t like so much. He chafed under the Puritans’ rigid laws and suffered from their religious intolerance. Another Samuel Maverick – who may have been a descendant – shared his independent spirit in 19th century Texas. The Maverick name would brand movies and cars and sports teams into the 21st century.

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East Boston, 1841. The large building in the center is the Maverick Hotel.

Samuel Maverick

He was born in England around 1602, the son of the Rev. John Maverick, who later followed him to the New World.

Samuel arrived in Massachusetts when in his twenties. With another colonist named David Thompson he built a house on Noddles Island and fortified it with guns. Thompson died, and Maverick married Thompson’s widow, Amias. They had three children in addition to her son by David Thompson.

When Maverick started out in Massachusetts, fewer than 300 Europeans lived within a radius of 150 miles.  Then in 1630, John Winthrop and his band of Puritans arrived and started running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Things would change dramatically in a few decades.

Maverick Guide to New England

In 1660, Samuel Maverick returned to England with a guide he wrote about New England. He intended to present it to King Charles II, along with his complaints about how the Puritans treated him.

He called the guide A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof. In it, he described 86 towns from Damariscotta, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn. Maverick described how New England had once had only a sparse population of scattered colonists. By 1660, however, almost all of those towns could field a militia (“a full Company of Foote and some Horse”).

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Changes in the Boston shoreline from 1630-1675

When he first arrived in New England, he wrote, he found nothing but shacks save for three or four decent houses in Plymouth. Boston, which wasn’t even Boston then, was “a swamp and pound.” It grew into a “great Towne” with “two churches, a Gallant Statehouse & more to make it compleate, then can be expected in a place so late a wilderness.”

“Now to behold the handsome Houses & Churches in so many Townes as I have named is a wonder,” wrote Maverick.

Wonders

Farming and husbandry had flourished in every town he mentioned.

In 1626 New England had not a single head of cattle, nor horse, nor sheep, and very few goats or hogs. But less than 40 years later, New Englanders exported livestock to the Caribbean, consumed much of it themselves and provisioned the ships that called at New England ports.

Along with the livestock, “the great abundance of English Fruite, as Apples, Pears, Apricots, Plumbs, Cherries Musk-Mellons, Water-Mellons &c. is not to be beleeved but by those that have seene it,” wrote Maverick.

Massachusetts also had harbors filled with “great Shipps of Burthen” and “many Vessels…of all sorts and seizes,” he wrote. “And I am confident there hath not in any place out of so small a number of People been raised so many able Seamen and Commanders as there hath been.”

In southern New England, he wrote, “it is incredible what hath been done.”

The Puritan by August Saint-Gaudens. Samuel Maverick chafed under their intolerance

Majority Rule

As colonists carved towns out of the wilderness, the Puritans gained power at the expense of the minority Anglicans. They took over Maine, then largely Anglican, and they persecuted Thomas Morton, a free-thinking Anglican in Braintree. They cast out nonconformists, who often ended up in free-thinking Rhode Island.

The Puritans also created and enforced a set of laws that reserved privileges for members of the Puritan church, or freemen. Samuel Maverick was not one of them. As such, he couldn’t hold government office, but he had to pay taxes. He also couldn’t take communion and he couldn’t have his children baptized.

Nevertheless, Samuel Maverick prospered and contributed to the community’s defense. Contemporaries described him as a  “whole-souled, generous, hospitable man, of warm impulses and courteous behavior.” He was “a royalist and Episcopalian, living in a strongly fortified residence on Noddle’s Island,” according to A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of Its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix, by William Hylsop Sumner.

puritan ban

Intolerance

Ironically, Maverick owned three slaves. His treatment of them is another story. Suffice it to say he felt he was the one denied civil and religious liberties.

By 1647, Maverick and others began to resent the colony’s rigid laws. He joined several others in a petition to end taxation without representation and to gain basic civil and religious rights.

They complained the colony did not base its laws on the fundamental laws of England. The government also denied them the same civic and religious privileges as the church members, or freemen. They protested they were entitled to those privileges as “freeborn Englishmen of sober lives and conversation.”

Maverick and the other petitioners threatened to take their complaints to England if the Puritans didn’t cave in to their demands.

And so the Puritans sent him to jail for conspiracy and perjury and slapped him with a steep fine. After 12 days he paid the fine and went free.

Successful Complaint, Failed Commission

Maverick wasn’t going to get any satisfaction in England while the English Civil War raged. Nor would he while Oliver Cromwell ruled the country. But when Charles II restored the Crown in 1660, Samuel Maverick headed straight for England to air his complaints about the Puritans to the King.

He brought with him the little book he’d written, outlining the lay of the land. A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof received the King’s attention. For centuries it rested in private hands, its existence unknown to but a few. Then in 1875 its owner put the book up for auction and the British Museum bought it.

charles ii

King Charles II

His little book convinced the king he needed to rein in his independent colonies. Maverick returned to New England in a position of authority as one of four commissioners. The King charged the commissioners with enforcing liberty of conscience and oaths of allegiance as well as forcing local militias to follow the King’s orders.

The commissioners couldn’t exercise their power, though, and Samuel Maverick moved to New York. He is believed to have died sometime around 1670.

Maverick’s Brief Description

Here are excerpts from his descriptions of 20 towns from Maine to Connecticut. (To see all 86, click here.)

Note his disapproval with how the Massachusetts Puritans took over Maine towns, originally settled by Anglicans like himself.  And he makes clear his disdain for the poor, weak and Dutch-friendly Plymouth Colony.

Map of New England, 1677

Maine

  • Pem˜a—Westward from Penobscott (which is the Southermost Fort in Nova Scotia) … is Pem˜aquid…many Families are now settled there… by vertue of [a patent granted by King James I] they hold the Islands of Monahegan and Damerells Coue, and other small ones adjacent Commodious for fishing.
  • Casco Bay.— In this Casco Bay are many scattering Families settled…[Col.] Alexander Rigby…[held the patent] and under this Goverment the People lived some yeares, till of late the Government of the Massachusits hath made bold to stretch its Jurisdiction to the midle of this Bay, and as lyeing in their way have taken in a dozen of Goverments more.

New Hampshire

  • Strawberry Bank. The Great House & Isle of Shooles.—Within 2 Myles of the Mouth is Strawberry Banke where are many Families, and a Minister & a Meeting House …This Strawberry Banke is part of 6000 acres granted by Patent about yeyeare 1620 or 1621, to Mr David Thompson, who with… assistance … went over with a Considerable Company of Servants and built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarly with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians, who at that time were insulting over the poor weake and unfurnished Planters of Plymouth… all is at this day in the power and at the disposall of the Massachusitts. Two Leagues of lyes the Isle of Shooles one of the best places for ffishing in the land, they have built a Church here and maintaine a Minister.

Massachusetts

  • Newbury—… the Houses stand at a good distance each from other a feild and Garden between each house, and so on both sides the street for 4 Miles…
  • Salem—… very commodious for fishing, and many Vessells have been built there and (exceptBoston) it hath as much Trade as any place in New England.
  • Marblehead or Foy.—… the greatest Towne for ffishing in New England.
  • Lynne—… within the bounds of it are the greatest Iron works…
  • Cambridge—[In] Cambridge … is a Colledge a Master and some Number of Students belonging to it…

    boston-statehouse

    The Old State House in Boston

  • Boston—the Metrapolis of New England lying pleasantly on a plaine and the ascending of a High Mount which lyes about the midle of yeplaine, …It hath two handsome Churches in it, a handsome market place, and in the midest of it a Statehouse. In the Towne are fouer full companys of ffoote and a Troope of horse…The Towne is full of good shopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize
  • Braintree—once called Mount Wolaston, … It subsists by raiseing provisions, and furnishing Boston with wood.
  • New Plymouth.—… This place was seated about yeyeare 1620 or 1621 by a company of Brownists, …[They] found this place and there settled liveing extream hardy for some yeares and in great danger of the Indians, and could not Long have subsisted, had not Plymouth Merchants …at Monhegon and Pascattaway … supplyed them…It is a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.
  • Sandwich—a good Towne … which affords good store of Provisions, and some yeares a quantity of Whalebone made of Whales which drive up dead in that Bay.

Rhode Island

  • Rhode Island.— It is full of people haveing been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinions.
  • Warwick Providence.— I think they still keepe a seeming forme of Goverment but to litle purpose, none submitting to Supream Authority but as they please.

Connecticut

  • (Pequot Plantation, now Mystic and Stonington—Haveing gone through New Plymouth Goverment we come next to Connecticot Goverment. The first that was under this Goverment was Pequate
  • Hartford—From Withersfield to Hartford the Metropolis of the Goverment, it is about 3 Miles, it is a gallant Towne, and many rich men in it.
  • Springfield— This is the Massachusetts bounds. And above Springfeild 8 Miles is another Towne at first Intended but for a tradeing house with the Indians, but the gallant Land about it hath invited men to make it a Toune. This Connecticott River is a great River before yeTowne[which] is also in the Massachusetts bounds and under its Goverment although 8 Miles from it.

    new haven colony

    Woodcut of New Haven, 1786

  • Newhaven—This Towne is the Metropolis of that Goverment, and the Goverment tooke its Name from this Towne; … was the first built in those parts, many stately and costly houses were erected the Streete layd out in a Gallant forme, a very stately Church; but yeHarbour proveing not Comodious, the land very barren, the Merchants either dead or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes, The Towne is not so glorious as once it was.
  • Milford—From Newhaven to Milford it is about 10 Miles, This Towne is gotten into some way of Tradeing to Newfoundland, Barbados, Virginia, So also hath some other Townes in this Goverment.
  • Greenwich—From Stamford to Greenwich…these two last Townes are under Newhaven Goverment, and there was another place begun and much done in it, but the Dutch came and tooke it by force, and since the people of this Towne call it New Chester…

The Rest of the Story

New England had no shortage of Mavericks, and it’s hard to tell who was the ancestor of the famous Maverick who moved to Texas as a baby. That Maverick, also Samuel, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as mayor of San Antonio, owned huge tracts of land and practiced law. He also had a few cows. He didn’t brand his cattle, and, according to lore, those who strayed into another rancher’s herd were called mavericks.

His grandson Maury Maverick coined the term ‘gobbledygook.’

This story was updated in 2022. Image of map of New England: By http://maps.bpl.org – A map of New England, being the first that ever was here cut … places, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807459.

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Steamboat City of Rockland – The Cursed Ship of The Tourist Trade

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Construction started on the City of Rockland at East Boston’s McKie Shipbuilding Company in 1900. By 1901 she sailed regular runs up the coast of Maine carrying summer visitors and freight back and forth to Boston.

She stopped in Rockland, Camden, Belfast, Bangor, Northwest Harbor, Southeast Harbor, Seal Harbor and Bar Harbor. The Eastern Steamship Company advertised the vessel as travelling “the picturesque route with connections to all northern Maine sporting resorts.”

City of Rockland Run Aground in 1904

City of Rockland Run Aground in 1904

They might well have added, “provided you ever arrive.”

City of Rockland

The City of Rockland ranked as one of the most troubled steamers ever to carry the summer tourist trade north for a break from the city heat. In those days $5 would get you from Boston to Camden or Rockland and back. For just a little more, $6.50 would take you to Bangor. For the tonier destinations of Northeast and Seal Harbors and Bar Harbor, $7.50 and $8 would take you there.

In July of 1904, the 274-foot side-wheeler struck a ledge in the Muscle Ridge Channel off Thomaston, Maine, in the fog. News accounts of the day cheerily reported the divers’ assessment.

“After an examination lasting an hour they reported that the City of Rockland was resting on a huge boulder forward and an old sunken wreck aft. They could not find that the steamer was badly strained, nor were they able to locate the leak in the bow.

“Newton’s wharf is tonight piled high with freight and baggage from the wrecked steamer. Among the articles rescued today was a trunk containing imported lace valued at $15,000. The lace is ruined.”

City of Rockland sunk at her pier in 1921 (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

City of Rockland sunk at her pier in 1921 (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

“A large wrecking fleet still surrounds the stranded vessel and not the least interesting incidents at the scene today were the numerous fights among fishermen in their endeavor to secure valuable wreckage.”

The company sent its officers to search the surf for lost bags and belongings, including a grand piano. Passengers threatened to sue to invalidate the language on their tickets. It declared the shipping line only had liability for lost luggage up to $100.

Refloated

On August 1, with a gale bearing down on the Northeast, the City of Rockland floated again. Onlookers gave her a standing ovation. Then a towboat took her to back to land, precariously. There she was beached for patching and transport back to McKie for a full repair.

A new fog bell was erected on Otter Island. Channel markers, pulled from their proper location by winter ice, went back to their rightful locations.

City of Rockland after collision with the H.P. Havens (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

City of Rockland after collision with the H.P. Havens (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

Again

In June of 1906, the City of Rockland again came to grief. With only the whole ocean to navigate in, the City of Rockland managed to collide with her sister ship, the City of Bangor, 20 miles off Portland. The City of Bangor suffered only minor damage. The City of Rockland, meanwhile, had railings torn from her three decks and five staterooms on her main deck smashed in.

In July of 1912, the City of Rockland managed to collide with a coal ship near Boone Island, 20 miles from York, Maine. The coal ship suffered no damage, naturally, while the Rockland partially sank. Two hundred summer tourists returning to Boston had to transfer to the coal ship, Chisolm, to finish their journey. The City of Rockland once more took a tow to shore and made ready for repairs.

In 1913, towboats once again brought the City of Rockland into Boston, this time with a gaping hole in her bow inflicted by a crash with the schooner H.P. Havens.

1921 found the City of Rockland again sunk – this time while still tied to her pier in East Boston.

The Final Curtain

The final bow for the City of Rockland came September 2, 1923. The ship this time headed from Bath, Maine, toward Bangor when the ship ran up on a reef near Popham Beach. Repeated blasts from the horn drew rescuers. Passengers leapt from the lower deck,  caught by Coast Guardsmen and deposited on the beach. There they gathered around a huge bonfire and ate food brought from the ship.

In his book Storms and Shipwrecks of New England, Edward Snow described the good-natured castaways. “[They] made the best of it. The children, while sliding down the sloping sides of the steamer into the boats, enlivened the proceedings by their songs.” They sang at the top of their voices the era’s favorite songs, ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas Today,’ or ‘Barney Google.’

In October the ship was scuttled at an aptly named location – Misery Island in Salem, Mass. There she was burned for her fittings. For a century her ribs would appear on the beach at low tide.

But for all her misfortune, no one ever died in any of the accidents, and very few suffered injuries.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The L Street Brownies New Year’s Plunge Starts With Washing the Unwashed

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The L Street Brownies annual New Year’s Day plunge had its beginnings with pious reformers who wanted to wash the unwashed — immigrants, that is. Poor Europeans and Middle Easterners began pouring into Boston’s old tenement districts just after the Civil War. Those tenements lacked indoor plumbing, and the city had no place for a cheap bath.

Cleanliness, thought Boston’s high-minded reformers, would bring the poor closer to godliness. All they needed was a bathhouse.

And so bathhouses built after the Civil War had changing rooms for swimming, tub baths, showers, and, eventually pools and gymnasiums. They were wildly popular among the poor, less for hygiene than for entertainment.

The L Street Brownies, 1930s

The L Street Brownies, 1930s

Bathhouses

In 1860, Boston’s board of aldermen and common council appointed a committee to find out if they could provide facilities for cheap bathing.  Few people then — even the well-off — had indoor plumbing. The city had private enclosed bath facilities, but the hygienically challenged poor couldn’t afford them.

A floating bathhouse

The committee recommended trying “cheap plunge baths for poor men and boys.” The Civil War intervened, but in 1866 the city spent $10,000 for saltwater bathing in East and South Boston. Five floating bathhouses were built. They were wooden dock-like buildings that floated on water during warm-weather months.

One natural beach bathhouse, the L Street Bathhouse, was built in South Boston, an Irish immigrant neighborhood. Today’s L Street Brownies change into their bathing trunks in a bathhouse on that same site.

Above the entrance to the old L Street Bathhouse was inscribed the motto, “Cleanliness of Body Is Next to Godliness.”

In the first month, 100,000 people came to the bathhouses. By 1867, the city built seven more.

Josiah Quincy

In 1896, Mayor Josiah Quincy took the bathhouse ball and ran with it. A reformer, his father  Mayor Josiah Quincy had brought a public water supply to Boston. The younger Quincy believed ‘when physical dirt has been banished, a long step has been taken in the elimination of moral dirt.’

He formed a Department of Baths, which in 1898 built the first year-round bathhouse on Dover Street in the South End, then a poor neighborhood of Jews, Italians and Armenians.

Children wait for the opening of the Dover Street Bathhouse, 1899.

Children wait for the opening of the Dover Street Bathhouse, 1899.

Dover Street Bathhouse

The Department of Baths opened the elaborate Dover Street Bathhouse on Oct. 14, 1898, to much fanfare. Quincy called it ‘the finest and most modern public bathing establishment upon this continent.’ It had three stories with a granite facade, terrazo mosaic floors and marble stairs that led to the baths on the second floor. Showers and tubs accommodated men and women, who used separate entrances. A laundry provided fresh towels.

The Boston Herald reported, “The inauguration of winter bath-houses for the free use of the people is something of a novelty in any city in this country.”

Dover Street Bathhouse

So many people used it the city built eight more bathhouses in the poorer neighborhoods: the North End, Dorchester, Charlestown, East Boston and South Boston. Most had alternating days for men and women, except for Dover. The bath houses provided bathing suits. Towels and soap each cost a penny, and on Saturdays children got towels and soap for free.

Inscribed over the entrances to the bathhouses were uplifting sayings like, “The Health of the People the Beginning of Happiness.”

“Boston calls her free public bathing facilities, ‘Hygienic Righteousness’,” reported Modern Sanitation magazine in May 1908. “To champion physical betterment is to promote the moral status of a municipality.”

They evolved into something beyond bathhouses, though: All had gymnasiums along with the tubs and showers. Over time, the emphasis changed from cleanliness to physical fitness.

L Street Brownies

L Street Brownies more thongs

The L Street Brownies under showers in the original bathhouse

The L Street Brownies’ Civil War-era bathhouse was  rebuilt by rogue mayor James Michael Curley in 1931. The city named it the Curley Community Center.

The practice of cold-water swimming in South Boston is believed to date back as far as 1888 or even 1865. It probably started with European immigrants who thought jumping into cold water and then taking a sauna promoted good health. The L Street Brownies today claim superior immune systems.

The most dedicated L Street Brownies swam every day of the year. Their name comes from the L Street Beach and to the nut brown color of their members’ suntans.  Every New Year’s Day, hundreds of L Street Brownies jump into the cold water for their annual polar plunge. Hundreds more watch and a video crew records the event for the nightly news. (You can watch the 2015 plunge here.)

The L Street Brownies started their South Boston tradition of jumping into Dorchester Bay on New Year’s Day in 1904.

L Street Brownies, 1922 by George Luks

Polar Plunge

The tradition of jumping into frigid water before a camera started on Feb. 25, 1905.

Promoters called the seven-minute film by the Renovare Company ‘an astonishing picture’ in which,

A number of sturdy men in bathing trunks are first shown playing on the ice, some of them having skates attached to their bare feet and others playing hand-ball. After their exercise, they run along the shore, upon which ice hummocks are piled high and plunge from the end of the ice-covered pier into the freezing waters of the bay. During the entire picture, the frosty breath of the men is plainly discernible. The film is of the very best photographic value, and the subject in every way one of the most remarkable we have ever made.

You can watch it here.

This story about the L Street Brownies was updated in 2022.

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Italians in New England Declared Enemy Aliens in WWII

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Angela Puleo was one of thousands of Italian immigrants stigmatized as enemy aliens by the government during World War II .

Two months after Mussolini declared war on the United States, the 51-year-old mother living in Boston’s North End  was questioned, fingerprinted and photographed. Officials took her camera and made her carry a little pink ID booklet at all times.

Angelo Puleo went through all that despite having three sons — Charlie, Tony and Jack — on active duty in the military. Many Italian mothers like Angela pasted blue stars in their windows to show they had two, three or four sons fighting the war.

Charles Ruggiero, clerk in a grocery store in New York's Italian section, wishes the handful of spaghetti he is breaking were Mussolini's neck. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Charles Ruggiero, clerk in a grocery store in New York’s Italian section, wishes the handful of spaghetti he is breaking were Mussolini’s neck. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Enemy Aliens

As many as 500,000 Italian sons of immigrants served in the armed forces during World War II. But 600,000 Italian immigrants had not become U.S. citizens. The U.S. government therefore declared them enemy aliens. About 2,000 Italians were arrested and sent to internment camps in a little-known chapter of the Second World War.

The government treated Italians on the West Coast more harshly than their counterparts in the East. Many had to move inland. East Coast Italians had it a little better because their dense neighborhoods gave them political clout. Italians, after all, helped elect Fiorella LaGuardia mayor of New York City.

But still, Italians throughout the country carried the stigma of their classification as enemy aliens. They lost jobs because of curfews. The government shut down their Italian-language newspapers, and the U.S. Navy requisitioned their fishing yawls. They had to give up cameras and short-wave radios for military reasons.

Opera Singers?

The day after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began to impound the assets, bank accounts and homes of Japanese people on the West Coast.

Four days later, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared war on the United States. LaGuardia warned President Franklin Roosevelt he’d better not try it with Italians, threatening revolution. “You’re not going to do what you did to the Japanese. The Italians of the East Coast will form into a revolutionary army and we will march on Washington,” he said.

Attorney General Francis Biddle, in his book In Brief Authority, described how he told Roosevelt about plans to intern enemy aliens.

“And you’re going to intern all of them?” said the President in a tone that suggested he approved of the idea.

“Well, not quite,” replied Biddle.

“I don’t care about the Italians,” continued Roosevelt. “They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different; they may be dangerous.”

Joining Up

Italian-Americans, in fact, were some of the bravest fighters in the war. Thirteen Italian-Americans won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Lt. Col. Henry Mucci of Bridgeport, Conn., won the Distinguished Service Medal for leading the daring rescue of American prisoners who had survived the Bataan Death March.

In Italian neighborhoods, young men rushed from street corners and taverns to enlist. Others got drafted. Italian families displayed satin flags in their windows, with blue stars for each son serving in the U.S. military. They replaced the blue star with a gold one when the son or brother died in the war. Italian mothers, like all American mothers, learned to dread the very sight of a telegram delivery boy.

Popular athletes like Rocky Marciano, Dom DiMaggio and his brother Joe enlisted in the military. The DiMaggios’ parents weren’t U.S. citizens, but the government didn’t intern them as enemy aliens. Doing so would probably have created a public outcry.

In February of 1942, Biddle issued the regulations for enemy aliens. Italians who were not U.S. citizens above the age of 14 had to go to the nearest post office to register.

Me Boom-Boom

Josie Patania, then living in Boston’s North End, remembered how her parents were classified as Italian enemy aliens.

I remember filling up an alien card every year for my mother and father. We were witnesses. Then we made my mother go for citizenship. We taught her how to write her name and to say George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. If she saw Mussolini, we said to shoot him. They actually asked her that question. She said, “Me boom-boom.”

Italian-Americans bent over backwards to prove their loyalty to the United States. In Milford, Mass., the Sons of Italy banned the Italian flag and the Italian language.

Hanoer Street in Boston’s North End.

That didn’t stop the government from deporting or interning certain classes of Italians.  According to some estimates, about 2,000 Italians were interned by the War Relocation Authority; others place the number closer to 10,000. The unlucky enemy aliens included those who ran pro-Fascist Italian-language newspapers, members of the diplomatic corps, businessmen and students from Italy.

Pasquale DeCicco

Pasquale DeCicco, a prominent Italian-American resident of New Haven, had served as acting vice consul of the city’s Italian consulate. In May 1909, six years after his arrival in the United States, he became an American citizen. But during World War I, he enlisted in the Italian Army. The U.S. government held that against him in the Second World War, though Italy sided with America during the First.

Forty-two members of his family who had immigrated to the United States were all American citizens.

On April 24, 1942, the FBI came to the New Haven home where Pasquale DeCicco lived with his wife and daughter and arrested him. He was 63 years old. He sent letter after letter pleading his loyalty to his adopted country. The government confined him as an enemy alien in Hartford, in East Boston and then in Ft. McAlester in Oklahoma, where he lost 32 pounds. Unable to pay his mortgage, he lost his home.

Pasquale DeCicco didn’t go home until Dec. 10, 1943, after Italy surrendered.

The Italian fishing fleet in Boston. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Italian fishing fleet in Boston. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Italian Fishing Fleet

Fisherman in Boston and Gloucester, Mass., bore the brunt of the war as well.

The U.S. government requisitioned fishing yawls from the fishing fleet in those two cities to use as minesweepers and patrol boats. At least 200 fishermen were grounded as enemy aliens during the war. The government either bought the vessels outright or chartered them.

Josie Patania remembered,

During the war, they took my father off the fishing boat. So he went to work in the spinach plant, washing the spinach. My brothers Carmelo, Angelo, and Vincent were all in the service at this time. Carmelo and Vincent weren’t even citizens. They swore them in before they went, Vincent to Normandy and Carmelo to the Philippines.

Some fishermen could keep their boats, but they had to jump through hoops to go fishing. Frank Firicano, a Boston fisherman and secretary of his union, remembered:

They had a sub net in Boston harbor too. Because there’s the Boston Navy Yard, and there were convoys leaving night and day from Boston. Eventually, they let us go fishing. We had to have a password each day, go to the Customs House to get clearance, a pass, and then on the way out, stop at a barge off Deer Island manned by the Coast Guard, and they would check out the boat to see we weren’t taking provisions to the Germans. We were allowed provisions for seven, which was our crew. There was the steel gate–it opened, but no one could get out after 5 pm. We had radio silence too; we had locks on the radios. Only in an emergency could you use it.

Columbus Day

On Columbus Day 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced Italians living as long-term residents in the United States were removed from the list of enemy aliens. He had political reasons to do it. Italian immigrants made up an enormous voting bloc and congressional elections were coming up.

The United States was also about to invade Italy.

So the government lifted many restrictions on Italian enemy aliens. Angela Puleo could travel freely again, own a camera and throw away her little pink booklet.

She was one of the lucky ones. All three of her sons – Jack, Tony and Charlie – came home safely from the war.

This story about Italian enemy aliens was updated in 2023. Hanover Street image by By Bundesarchiv, Bild 137-047635 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5418684. With thanks to The Italian American Experience in New Haven by Anthony V. Riccio and Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II by Lawrence Distasi.

 

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