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East Windsor Conn.

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

Houghs Neck

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

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

New Hampshire Boat Museum

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

Full Moons

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

The Abbe Museum

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

Barefoot in New Hampshire

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

Americana

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

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

Mark Your Calendar

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

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

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

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Jonathan Edwards Loses His Pulpit Over Bad Books

Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan theologian, helped ignite a religious revival known as the First Great Awakening across the 13 colonies. He converted ‘many hundreds’ to his church – and then he got fired from his job.

Jonathan Edwards

It all started when he tried to discipline some young men in his church. He caught them with bad books that ‘promoted lascivious and obscene Discourse among the young People.’

Those same young men had been among Edwards’ first converts. Apparently they fell back asleep.

The 1st Great Awakening

The First Great Awakening made it exciting to go to church. It drew the colonies together in the first major event they all shared. And it challenged established authority, preaching that God viewed all as equal.

Those two developments get credit for paving the way for the American Revolution.

Benjamin Franklin, commenting on the impact of the First Great Awakening, wrote,

…it seem’d as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street…

Jonathan Edwards helped start it all.

Beginnings

Jonathan Edwards was born Oct. 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Conn., the only son of the 12 children of a minister and a minister’s daughter. He entered Yale at 12 and graduated at 17, then studied theology for two more years.

From his boyhood, he struggled with the Puritan idea that God predestines people for salvation. His own conversion experience solved the problem for him. He described how he experienced a personal, emotional connection to God:

…in my father’s pasture, I looked up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God that I know not how to express it. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything, in the sun, moon, and stars, in the clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers and trees, in the water and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind.

In 1727 he married 17-year-old Sarah Pierpont, who possessed remarkable piety and common sense. Edwards wrote of her,

She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly and seems always to be full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what!?

They then had 11 children.

Northampton

Jonathan Edwards

That same year he became assistant pastor to his grandfather’s church in Northampton, Mass. Two years later his grandfather died and he found himself sole pastor of one of the largest and most influential parishes in New England.

In 1733, his sermons sparked a revival in Northampton that resulted in 300 converts to the church over the next few years. The religious fervor spread up and down the Connecticut River Valley.

The revival took a dark turn in 1735, when the revivals unsettled some New Englanders, but didn’t convert them. They grew despondent over their inevitable damnation, and at least two took their own lives. One suicide was Jonathan Edwards’ own parishioner and uncle, Joseph Hawley. The revival cooled for a while.

In 1740, Edwards helped arrange a visit to America by George Whitefield, the British evangelical minister who spread the First Great Awakening throughout the American colonies.

The First Great Awakening again gathered momentum, and on July 8, 1741 Jonathan Edwards preached one of his greatest sermons, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in Enfield, Conn. Today it is considered a classic of American literature.

“Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering,” he preached. His voice was mild but his message was so powerful his listeners gripped their pews.

Though vast multitudes of God’s enemies lock arms together, they are easily broken in pieces. They are like dandelions blowing in the wind, or a large dry field in the path of a wild brush fire. It is easy for us to step on and squish a worm that we see crawling on the ground, or cut a tiny thread holding something together. It is that easy for God, when He pleases, to cast His enemies down to hell.

‘Didn’t Care a Turd’

In the spring of 1744, Edwards learned about 10 young men who had passed around a midwifery book detailing the anatomy of women. Worse, they made lewd wisecracks about what nasty creatures women were. Edwards brought the matter to the church brethren, who appointed a committee. The committee deliberated while the young men waited in an anteroom. They played leapfrog, climbed a ladder to peek at women waiting upstairs and finally left to drink flip at a tavern. One of the young men said he would not ‘worship a wig,’ that he didn’t ‘care a turd’ for the committee because they were ‘nothing but men, molded up of a little dirt.’

Several of the young men confessed to disrespecting authority, and the matter seemed closed.

But it wasn’t.

The incident showed how Jonathan Edward’s influence was waning, for he had converted the young men in the first years of the Great Awakening. He made matters worse by refusing to continue his grandfather’s practice of allowing communion to anyone who had been baptized. Edwards only served communion to converts. For four years, no one joined his church.

Finally, a candidate came forward to join the church in 1748. Edwards insisted he meet formal tests that he had devised, and the candidate refused. The church backed the candidate, and on June 22, 1750 a vote was taken on whether Jonathan Edwards should continue as pastor. By a vote of 230 to 23, he was fired.

Jonathan Edwards 2.0

After he lost his pulpit in 1750, he was named pastor to the church in Stockbridge, Mass., and missionary to the Housatonic Indians. There he wrote the book The Life of David Brainerd, a missionary who died in his home. The book inspired thousands of missionaries throughout the 19th century.

In 1758, Jonathan Edwards accepted the position of president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) to replace his son-in-law, the Rev. Aaron Burr, who died. He moved to Princeton, N.J., in January 1758. As the town required, he was inoculated against smallpox, but died of the disease March 22, 1758.

His descendants include his grandson, Aaron Burr, Yale College President Timothy Dwight, First Lady Edith Roosevelt, writer O. Henry, Margaret Van Horne Dwight Bell and poet Robert Lowell.

George Whitefield preaching

This story about Jonathan Edwards was updated in 2022.

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1816: The Year Without a Summer

The year 1816 was known as ‘The Year Without a Summer’ in New England because six inches of snow fell in June and every month of the year had a hard frost.

Temperatures dropped to as low as 40 degrees in July and August as far south as Connecticut. People also called it ‘Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death’ and the ‘Poverty Year.’

The Year Without A Summer had a far-reaching impact. Crop failures caused hoarding and big price increases for agricultural commodities. People went hungry. Farmers gave up trying to make a living in New England and started heading west. Politicians who ignored the melancholy plight of their constituents found themselves out of office.

And to this day, scientists don’t agree on what caused the bizarre weather in The Year Without a Summer.

Year Without a Summer

There were warm days in the spring of 1816, but they were followed by cold snaps. In Salem, Mass., for example, it was 74 degrees on April 24. Within 30 hours the temperature dropped to 21 degrees.

Thomas Robbins, the East Windsor, Conn., bibliophile, noticed the late spring. He wrote in his diary, ‘the vegetation does not seem to advance at all.’

On May 12, strong winds and freezing temperatures from Canada killed the buds on fruit trees. Inch-thick ice formed on ponds and streams from Maine to Upstate New York. By the end of May, corn plants froze in central Maine.

Then on June 6, 1816, six inches of snow fell on New England. Clockmaker Chauncey Jerome wrote in his autobiography that he walked to work that day in Plymouth, Conn., wearing heavy woolen clothes, an overcoat and mittens.

Chauncey Jerome wore mittens in June during the Year Without a Summer.

Flurries fell in Boston the next day, the latest ever recorded. The snow was 18 inches deep in Cabot, Vt., on June 8. On June 11, a temperature of 30.5 degrees was recorded in Williamstown, Mass. Frozen birds dropped dead in the fields. Some Vermont farmers who had already shorn their sheep tried to tie their fleeces back on, but many froze to death anyway.

Benjamin Harwood, a Bennington, Vt., farmer, wrote in his diary that it rained all night then began to snow from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The heads of all the mountains on every side were crowned with snow. The most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen.

And then it got warm again.

More Cold

Temperatures seesawed up and down throughout the Year Without a Summer, bringing hope on warm days that the crops could be harvested after all. Then sharp cold spells brought despair.

On June 22, for example, temperatures reached 101 degrees in Salem, Mass. But July 4 was cool. Chauncey Jerome wrote it was hard to feel patriotic while watching men play quoits in overcoats. Then a northwest wind brought a three-day cold spell, with 30-degree temperatures in northern New England, 40 degrees in Hartford and New Haven.

Gov. William Plumer blamed God for the Year Without a Summer.

The frost destroyed the bean crop in Franconia, N.H., and bean, cucumber and squash crops in Kennebunkport, Maine. Young plants grew so slowly they were vulnerable to frost, and farmers harvested so little hay they had to slaughter their livestock or feed them oats and corn.

As depressing as the second severe cold spell was the drought that enveloped most of the United States, including New England. “I never saw our street so dry,” complained a minister in East Windsor, Conn.

Gov. William Jones of Rhode Island issued a proclamation designating a day of public ‘Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving,’ noting the ‘coldness and dryness of the seasons’ and the ‘alarming sickness.’ New Hampshire Gov. William Plumer believed the weather was God’s judgment in the earth and urged people to humble themselves for their transgressions.

Fear of famine began to grow during the Year Without a Summer.

Hard Frost in August

Early August was sunny and warm. Farmers planted new crops hoping the growing season might last beyond the first frost in October. On Aug. 13th and 14^th, a cold spell froze the corn crop north of Concord, N.H.

On Aug. 20, a short, violent storm struck Amherst, N.H., signaling a steep drop in temperature: 30 degrees within a few hours. It snowed in Vermont. In Maine, farmers wrapped rags around their plants to protect them.

At least the wheat, rye and potatoes were holding up, staving off famine. In Ashland, N.H., Reuben Whitten was able to grow wheat on his south-facing farm. He shared it with his neighbors. After he died in 1847, his neighbors paid for his gravestone and later erected a monument that read:

A pioneer of this town. Cold season of 1816 raised 40 bushils of wheat on this land whitch kept his family and neighbours from starveation.

Hopes of salvaging what remained of the corn crop were dashed by a severe frost on Aug. 28. Maine and New Hampshire farmers cut up whole fields of corn for fodder.

Rev. William Fogg of Kittery, Maine, summed up the Year Without a Summer: ‘Crops cut short and a heavy load of taxes.’

There were reports of people eating raccoons, mackerel and pigeons.

It warmed up again in September, as usual, but then at sunrise on Sept. 26 in Hanover, N.H., it was 26 degrees. Snow fell throughout the region, and a killing frost froze crops in the field and apples on the branch.

Nettles and Hedgehogs

The drought caused wildfires to break out in the woods throughout New England. Fires in western New York produced so much smoke that sailors were blinded on Lake Champlain.

The Year Without a Summer was especially hard on the poor. The New Hampshire Patriot reported on Oct. 22, 1816, that ‘Indian corn, on which a large proportion of the poor depend is cut off. ‘ Vermont farmers lost much of their livestock, and Vermonters foraged for food such as nettles, wild turnips and hedgehogs.

Daniel Webster lost his bid for reelection during the Year Without a Summer.

Three-quarters of the corn crop was lost during the Year Without a Summer. Prices soared for wheat, grains, meat, vegetables, butter, milk and flour. In Maine, the price of oats tripled and potatoes doubled. Hay was 180 a ton in parts of New Hampshire, six times its usual cost.

The Year Without a Summer brought widespread famines in Europe as well. The bad weather forced a group of poets to remain in their rooms in Switzerland. To avoid boredom and entertain the group, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Making maple syrup

At least the Year Without a Summer had been good for producing maple syrup. Vermonters traded syrup for fish, which is why they called 1816 the Mackerel Year.

Members of Congress seemed insensitive to the suffering of the people and voted to double their own salary. It didn’t go over well. Nearly 70 percent of incumbent U.S. representatives were voted out of office – including Daniel Webster.

After the Year Without a Summer, Josiah Meigs, commissioner general of the Land Offices, in 1817 began a more systematic approach to observing weather phenomenon. He ordered the 20 Land Offices to take thrice-daily recordings of the temperature, winds and precipitation.

The Frigid Zone

Author Samuel Goodrich visited New Hampshire, observing:

At last a kind of despair seized upon the people. In the pressure of adversity, many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become part of the frigid zone.

Samuel Goodrich

The next year started out cold as well, convincing Northeast farmers to migrate to the Midwest.

Rev. Samuel Robbins in East Windsor, Conn., wrote, ‘We have had a great deal of moving this spring. Our number rather diminished.’

At the time, many reasons were given for the weird phenomena: sunspots, deforestation, great fields of ice floating in the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod experiments and, of course, the wrath of God.

Many people believe the Year Without a Summer was caused by a massive volcanic explosion on Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, killing 15,000 instantly. Soon after, another 65,000 perished of disease and starvation. The volcanic ash and debris thrown up into the stratosphere is thought to have blocked the sun and caused a gradual lowering of temperatures.

Lee Foster, NOAA meteorologist, notes that climate data shows 1816 was part of a mini ice age lasting from 1400 to around 1860. The era had unusually harsh winters, short growing seasons and dry weather.

With thanks to The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. This story was updated in 2023.

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