Tag:

Eastham

The Wellfleet Oyster: A Brief History of the Precious Mollusk

Diamond Jim Brady once spat out an oyster served him at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant. “That’s not a Wellfleet oyster!” exclaimed the Gilded Age gourmand.

Discriminating diners have long prized the Wellfleet oyster for its merroir—the flavor that comes from the clear air and salty, plankton-rich seawater it ingests. Plump and clean, the Wellfleet oyster has a briny sweetness with an undertone of seaweed.

For centuries, the tasty meat and the hard gray shell of the Wellfleet oyster attracted an indigenous settlement, which gave way to a town. From Wellfleet’s immense oyster beds, fortunes were made, a culture developed and commercial networks spread along the Eastern seaboard. Wellfleet oysters wrapped in copper wire traveled across the Atlantic to royal tables. In tin cans they rumbled overland in covered wagons to the prairies and mountains of the West. They even contributed to the epic U.S. victory in the 1980 Olympics.

But in the centuries since the English, the French, the Africans and the Finns came to Wellfleet, the oyster has gone through dark days. Pre-Revolutionary gluttons doomed the wild Wellfleet oyster to extinction. The beds recovered, but so many oysters slid down so many gullets that they nearly disappeared again.

Wellfleet Oyster

Wellfleet lies just above the elbow of Cape Cod, and wraps like a fishhook around harbor, five miles long, two miles wide and open to the south.

Estuaries, clear and cold, feed into the harbor and the Atlantic. The Herring River, Blackfish Creek and Duck Creek carry diatoms and protozoa from the rich salt meadows along the border. Big, fast moving tidewaters feed the oysters twice a day, and at low tide the oysters are exposed to air, which makes them hardy.

Thousands of years ago, a year-round Native American community lived near the immense Wellfleet shellfish beds. Unlike most coastal New England Indians, the Native people didn’t migrate to the interior during the winter. They called themselves the Pononakanet, a branch of the Nausets, and in 1979 a discovery of 56 Native skeletons in an ossuary dated their bones to the 11^th century.

They piled shells along the forest edge to protect against storms and make it easier to get to the shore. Henry David Thoreau saw Native shell middens in nearby Truro during a visit to Cape Cod. He found oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes, and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds. “I picked up half a dozen arrowheads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them.”

Europeans Arrive

Samuel de Champlain sailed into Wellfleet Harbor in 1606, and the tremendous oyster beds so impressed him he called it Port aux Huistres.

A decade after Champlain’s visit, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast. When the Plymouth colonists arrived they found so many indigenous people had died they couldn’t bury their dead. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor.

The Mayflower had sailed past Wellfleet before anchoring in Plymouth Harbor, but soon enough the colonists discovered the oyster beds. They reminded them of Billingsgate, the London fish market famous for its foul-mouthed fish wives. So “Billingsgate” it was.

Billingsgate fish market in 1736 by Arnold van Haecken .

By 1644, the Plymouth settlers set their sights for another settlement on the Lower Cape from Truro to Chatham, the wrist to the elbow. They called it Eastham.

‘Then I do’

Bradford, the story goes, looked out to Billingsgate Island and asked the Pononakanet sachem, George, “Who owns that?” “No one,” replied George. “Then I do,” Bradford said.

William Bradford

Over time, the Europeans edged out the indigenous people. Some of those who survived the white man’s diseases converted to Christianity and moved to a Praying Indian town.

The last of the tribe, Delilah Sampson Gibbs, a widow, died sometime after 1838.

Billingsgate Bivalves

The European settlers learned how to tong for oysters. They’d lean over the side of a flat-bottomed boat with clumsy, 20-foot poles and grab them with the gripping teeth at the end.

In 1665, a randy Portuguese whaler and oysterman named Jacobus Loper started hauling Billingsgate oysters in his sloop. He had an easy sail from the protected harbor to Boston and Salem, and oysters travel well. Unlike scallops and soft-shelled clams, they can live for long periods in the shell outside of water.

Others quickly caught on to the oystering business. In the decades before the American Revolution, the burgeoning towns along the coast consumed vast quantities of the cheap, nutritious and highly portable Wellfleet oyster.

The town jealously guarded its beds from interlopers. By 1674 Eastham Town Meeting voted to apprehend any out-of-towners taking oysters from Billingsgate Bay.

Wellfleet Oysterman

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing made their famous trek along the Lower Cape and learned about the extinction of the Wellfleet oyster.

They stayed at the home of John Young Newcomb and his family. Thoreau mistook the 87-year-old oysterman for a scarecrow. He immortalized him as the Wellfleet Oysterman in the posthumously published Cape Cod.

John Young Newcomb house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

The merry old man loved to talk. His conversation, coarse and plain, would have suited Rabelais, Thoreau noted. He told story after story, ejecting his tobacco juice right and left. The old man’s shots seasoned breakfast of eels, applesauce and green beans.

Newcomb was born in 1762, when Billingsgate still belonged to Eastham. He remembered hearing the guns at Bunker Hill and seeing George Washington ride down a Boston street, bowing gracefully to the crowd.

When Newcomb was a year old, Billingsgate broke off from Eastham. Billingsgate chose to change its name to “Wellfleet” after the famous “Wellfleet” or “Wallfleet” oysters of England’s Blackwater Bay. The revolution loomed as Newcomb reached his teens, but the town was more concerned about the disappearance of the oyster.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

In 1773, the town voted to regulate the oyster fishery.“ That meant keeping outsiders off the beds.

Some people said the split caused the oysters to go away. Others blamed God’s wrath, ground frost, or pollution from a stranding of pilot whales.

Newcomb said Wellfleet’s quarrel with the neighboring towns about gathering oysters, yellow specks appeared in them. Providence then caused them to vanish. At least that was the most common explanation.

The real reason the oysters went away: probably the harvesters who stripped the beds. They didn’t realize juvenile oysters needed to attach themselves to something hard, like a shell, to survive. Instead, they burned the oyster shells for fertilizer and plaster. They also cut down the forest, which caused blowing sand to smother the young oysters.

American Revolution

After the Wellfleet oyster disappeared, the town’s population fell to 1,113 in 1790, down from 1,235 when the American Revolution broke out.

But Wellfleet’s oyster industry gradually recovered with the help of oysters from away. Aquaculture had gone on since the Romans did it in the first century, and Wellfleetians found they could do it too.

Oystermen began bringing oysters from Buzzard’s Bay and Narragansett Bay, fattening them up in Wellfleet’s estuaries and giving them time to acquire that special Wellfleet relish. Then they started bringing oysters in coastal schooners from the Chesapeake Bay.

jonathan carnes corners the pepper market

Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market.

In 1802, 40-year-old John Young Newcomb bought a share in the schooner Lydia, and then opened an oyster shop in Salem.

By the time Thoreau came to visit in 1849, Wellfleet natives supplied and kept nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts. Newcomb told him the business was still good and improving.

Wellfleetians positioned themselves throughout the oyster industry even beyond Massachusetts. There were Atwoods, Dyers, Holbrooks and Freemans working in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Providence, Dover, N.H., Lewiston and Saco, Newburyport and Lynn.

The Golden Age of the Wellfleet Oyster

“In the palmy days of the Wellfleet oyster business, forty or fifty sail of vessels were engaged each winter in transferring the product to the Boston market,” wrote historian Simeon L. Deyo.

From 1830-1870, Wellfleet monopolized the oyster business in New England. And what a business it was, thanks to the tin can and a widespread frenzy for oysters.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French invented canning so they could feed their armies on the march. Canning then found its way to Boston by the 1840s. There, the William Underwood Company canned large volumes of Wellfleet oysters. Union Army soldiers during the Civil War developed a taste for them; so did the pioneers migrating west.

Mawhinney Oyster Saloon in Philadelphia

By then, oystermania had taken hold of America. Starting around 1820, oyster cellars, oyster bars, oyster lunchrooms and oyster parlors sprang up all over the Eastern seaboard. Many were just plain eating dens with big heavy tables and floors covered with sawdust. They served booze and cheap oysters, raw or roasted on the half shell, oyster stew, maybe some clams, some toast or some pie.

Oyster cellars, a few steps down from street level, meant adult fun– beer, nightlife, the demimonde, the sporting life, prostitution. Charles Dickens relished his visit in 1842 to an oyster cellar in New York’s seedy Five Points neighborhood.

Ever-ready Resource

In 1848, Boston had 69 oyster houses and oyster peddlers went door to door. According to Rambles in Old Boston,

Oystermen usually appeared in the evening, carrying their heavy burden, in the shell, on their shoulders in a kind of saddle-bag, crying, “Oys! Finey Oys! Buy any Oys?” They opened the bivalves at the purchaser’s door, throwing the shells into another part of the bag.

In 1857, an Englishman named Charles MacKay visited the United States and commented on the only class difference in America: Some people washed down their oysters with champagne, some with beer.

Elegant restaurants served oysters, but so did housewives of modest means. They were cheap and nutritious. Homemakers viewed them as “the ever-ready resource” because of their “suitableness for all occasions.”

Fresh oysters were shipped west, first in wagons full of ice and then in train cars. In Illinois, a congressman named Abraham Lincoln used to hold oyster orgies in which huge quantities of the bivalve were consumed.

Big Business

In 1826, Hawes Atwood opened Atwood’s Oyster House on Union Street – still in business as the Union Oyster House. Daniel Webster often ate there, downing six dozen Wellfleet oysters at a sitting. Atwood built an imposing house in Everett, a town he helped found.

Union Oyster House

In New York City, Wellfleet’s Libby family established the famous Libby’s Oyster House on Fulton Street in 1839. It lasted more than a century. Unpretentious, Libby’s had chefs and waiters described as “despotic and opinionated but highly skilled.” It served Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, served New England clam chowder every day and had a hard-and-fast rule: No Manhattan Clam Chowder served in here.

Isaac Rich, born poor in South Wellfleet in 1801, built a fortune on oysters. He started off with an oyster stall on Boston’s City Wharf, then moved into warehousing, shipping and banking. In 1869, Rich cofounded Boston University.

The oyster also gave Brigham and Women’s Hospital its start. Peter Brigham, a Vermonter, began selling oysters and fish in Boston while still in his teens. Eventually he amassed enough money to leave $1.3 million for a new hospital after his death.

Oyster Wealth

The Wellfleet oyster made Wellfleet a real town. Local businessmen built Commercial, Enterprise, Mercantile wharves to service the vessels along the busy waterfront.

First Congregational Church

The Duck Creek Shipyard produced schooners, The white clapboard Congregational Church went up in 1850 with a town clock that still chimes ships’ time. Houses floated over to Commercial Street from Chequasset Neck, Griffin Island and Bound Brook. Tradesmen built shops along the long main street. Timothy Daniels ran a store across from Uncle Tim’s Bridge – a favorite motif of plein air painters – connecting Hamblen Island to the village.

There were still oil works for rendering oil from the pilot whales that washed ashore, saltworks to make salt for cod, chandleries to supply the ships.

Aquaculture

Then in 1870, the Old Colony Railroad opened to Wellfleet. The town gathered, celebrated, listened to speeches and poems. One speaker said the railroad would do for the Cape’s fisheries what it had done in Chicago for midwestern grain.

It didn’t. The railroad instead carried Wellfleetians to the mainland — to stay. The population declined along with the oyster beds.

That year, Wellfleet selectmen took notice. They began requiring permits to work the beds. Then in 1876, they adopted the grant system, leasing sections of flats to people who then cultivated and bedded oysters.

It got harder to bed oysters from the south, as northern oyster dealers had caught on to the idea. They found it cheaper for them to bed their own oysters nearby than to pay for freight from Wellfleet.

Wellfleetians then tried to plant oysters – that is, deposit seed, or spat, onto a bed of cultch. E.P. Cook got the first grant. He scattered shells along the sandy bottom, then caught and planted spat. He moved the young oysters around to different water depths to enhance their growth.

Oyster spat

But oyster planting was an inexact science, and often it failed.

In 1878, S.R. Higgins deposited seed from the Taunton River, and it lived and thrived. Oyster planting slowly increased. In 1889, Wellfleet had 30 acres of grants. Twenty years later, it had 2,400.

It wasn’t enough. Simeon Deyo in 1890 wrote, “the oyster and the oysterman are, so far as these shores are concerned, slowly, but surely, passing away.”

The harbor filled in. People moved away, as they had been every decade since 1840. The fish began to disappear.

In 1898, Fred Snow brought the last load of fish aboard the schooner Pleiades into Wellfleet Harbor.

Sealshipt

In 1911, a big, modern oyster company called Sealshipt came to Wellfleet.

Actually, it was a trust, and in 1910 the New York Times reported that the Sealshipt Oyster System was trying to monopolize the Atlantic Coast oyster business.

Sealshipt had developed a sanitary container for shipping oysters and marketed it heavily through its 25,000 retail agents. That was a big deal at the time. Exposes of adulterated and unsanitary food had riled the public, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Sealshipt employed up to 125 people, who worked six days a week from 7 am to 5 pm. Another 600 worked at the Sealshipt office in Boston. They only got Thanksgiving and Christmas off, worked by the light of kerosene lamps and shipped 50 barrels of oysters a day.

Things were looking up for the Wellfleet oyster. In 1909, 22,500 bushels of Wellfleet oysters were harvested from the flats – about a fifth of the haul during the palmy days of the Wellfleet oysters. Still, an improvement.

Sealshipt lasted three years. In 1914, the business was sold at foreclosure.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

Lorenzo Dow Baker, the Banana King, came into this world on Bound Brook Island in 1840. He founded the Boston Fruit Company, which evolved into United Fruit, which evolved into Chiquita Banana.

Baker envisioned a different future for his hometown, one based on tourism and aquaculture.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

In 1886, he built the luxurious 62-room Chequasset Inn on Mercantile Wharf, which had served the now defunct mackerel fleet. Baker brought his Jamaican staff in the summer north from his Titchfield Inn, which he ran in Jamaica in the winter. He billed the Chequasset as a cruise without the seasickness.

Sportsmen and their families came for the duck hunting, fishing, tennis and billiards. Guests could stroll among the fashionable elite along the boardwalk. A full orchestra entertained dinner guests.

Then in 1905, Baker added a funny little shed with a pitched roof to the side of the Chequasset Inn. He let a Dr. David Belding conduct his shellfish research from what was actually the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries Shellfish Laboratory and Quahog Hatchery.

David Belding

Belding, a brilliant shellfish biologist and a medical doctor, laid the foundation for modern aquaculture in that shed. He wrote groundbreaking reports on bay scallops, quahogs, oysters and soft-shell clams that have yet to be surpassed. Belding also served in the Army Medical Corps in World War I, wrote books and worked as Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology at (appropriately) the Boston University School of Medicine

It would be a long time before Belding’s research bore fruit. The Wellfleet oyster continued its slide.

Things got worse. A typhoid epidemic in 1924 was blamed on oysters, while Prohibition closed the oyster cellars and taverns where they were so gleefully consumed. In 1936, David Atwood closed Wellfleet’s last oyster company. The town turned to tourism, improving the roads, creating a dump, bringing in electricity.

The Return of Dr. Belding

Scallops and quahogs overtook oysters as Wellfleet’s main crop during the Depression. Then during World War II, the Army set up a training camp for amphibious landing craft at Wellfleet. The vessels churned up so much silt they smothered the oyster beds.

By 1956, Wellfleet oysters were only planted by individuals doing it as a side hustle on small private beds. The good news was that people started following Dr. Belding’s advice, and it seemed to work. The town bought seed from the state and encouraged fishermen to bring in their shells to one section of the flats so they could collect oyster seed.

In 1966, Dr. Belding, then in his 80s, returned to Wellfleet to join the newly created Shellfish Advisory Board. Wellfleet worked with other Cape towns and the state to revive the Wellfleet oyster. They started a cultching program, planting bushels of scallop shells to catch oyster seed.

Wellfleet Harbor today

Miracle on Ice

In 1980, an artist, entrepreneur and fisherman named Paul Suggs formed the Mud Hake Oyster Company. It signaled a new era and new energy in the Wellfleet oyster industry. Suggs got a grant, and he got good at shucking. Two days a week he’d take his oysters on the road to sell them.

Suggs then decided to sell Wellfleet oysters at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He bought up the local product in the weeks beforehand – 80 bushels of oysters, 25 bushels of mussels and 40 bushels of clams.

In a rented U-Haul, he led friends, wives and children to Lake Placid. They set up a raw bar at the Ancient Mariner Hotel and started selling shellfish as fast as they could shuck them. One day Suggs was walking through the Ancient Mariner restaurant wearing a Wellfleet oyster T-shirt. Someone yelled, “Hey Wellfleet, hey Wellfleet!” The voice belonged to a member of the U.S. hockey team.

Suggs got to talking with the hockey players, who told him how much they wanted to win their game against the Soviet team the next day. The Soviets had dominated Olympic hockey through the 1970s, and their army had just invaded Afghanistan.

Suggs said he held the key to victory. He would give them all the Wellfleet oysters and clams they could eat for free, if they promised not to have sex that night and dissipate all that energy. He guaranteed they’d win if they kept their promise.

Both sides kept their end of the deal, and the next day the U.S. hockey team won in the last 10 seconds of the game – the Miracle on Ice.

End Notes

With thanks to The Famous Beds of Wellfleet, A Shellfishing History, by D.B. Wright. according to History of Barnstable County, Mass., 1620-1637-1686-1890 by

Images: Wellfleet oysters by Paula O via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Map of Wellfleet, Boston Public Library via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Miracle on Ice magazine cover By Copyright by Sports Illustrated/Photographed by Heinz Kluetmeier, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25356046. Union Oyster House by By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434529. Wellfleet’s First Congregational Church By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093285. Oyster spat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35474428. First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. This story updated in 2022.

0 comment 486 views

When the British Bombarded Falmouth

When the War of 1812 came to Cape Cod, only a few towns such as Falmouth resisted the British. In response, the British bombarded Falmouth. The town still remembers the attack, and evidence of British cannonballs can be seen to this day.

The War of 1812

America entered the War of 1812 after the British began boarding U.S. ships and impressing sailors onto Royal Navy vessels.

Most New Englanders, heavily dependent on maritime trade, didn’t want to go to war. They knew the British could easily blockade the coast and stifle trade — as well as bombard their towns.

When the U.S. entered the war on June 18, 1812, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a resolution calling the declaration “an event awful, unexpected, hostile to your interests, menacing to your liberties, and revolting to your feelings.”

Massachusetts Gov. Caleb Strong refused to commit the state’s militia to the war effort. In response, President James Madison refused to send troops to defend Massachusetts.

By the end of the war, several New England states came close to seceding from the United States.

Naval battle during the War of 1812: The USS Constitution vs. HMS Guerriere.

War Hawks

Westerners and southerners, however, wanted war. They wanted to expand westward into the Northwest Territory, some of which was still under British control.

Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod’s southern shore, strongly supported the war. “Falmouth best upheld the honor of the Cape,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison.

During the War of 1812, Cape Cod bore the brunt of British aggression. The British Navy blockaded all the Cape ports, raided the harbors and seized vessels with abandon. They came ashore to steal crops and livestock.

They extorted money from every Cape Cod town but Barnstable, Falmouth, Sandwich and Orleans. They cut off shipping to Nantucket, and the starving islanders voted neutrality during the war.

But Falmouth stood firm against the British. Not only did Falmouth refuse to bribe the Royal Navy, the Falmouth Artillery Company routinely fired guns at British ships that passed by. That made the town an especially appealing target.

On Jan. 20, 1814, David Nye wrote to Secretary of War John Armstrong about the vulnerability of Falmouth. Since the local government couldn’t help, they turned to the federal government. “We have nothing to expect, should we fall into their hands, but to be treated with all the insolence and barbarity which is so peculiar to the British and their savage allies,” he wrote.

The British Bombarded Falmouth

When the British bombarded Falmouth, illustration.

At about the time of David Nye’s letter, the H.M.S. Nimrod, an 18-gun cruiser that would capture or destroy 50 U.S. vessels during the war, anchored off Naushon Island nearby. The captain, Nathaniel Mitchell, heard about a U.S. sloop that ran aground off Woods Hole in Falmouth. He sent sailors in small boats to attack the vessel.

But the Falmouth Artillery Company got wind of the planned attack and hastened to Woods Hole. They arrived in time and fired on the British, killing one sailor and wounding another.

When he learned of the failed attack, Capt. Mitchell wanted revenge. So he sailed the Nimrod to Falmouth, raised a white flag and sent a boat ashore. When the landing party came onto the wharf, it demanded that Falmouth turn over two cannon and sloop.

The Artillery Company commander, Weston Jenkins, supposedly replied with words that echo today. “If ye want the cannon, come and get them, and we will give ye what’s in them first,” he said.

The British replied that the Nimrod would bomb Falmouth in an hour. Falmouth evacuated the women and children from the town. One woman stayed behind: Weston Jenkins’ wife Elizabeth, who cooked for the 200 men who stayed in town.

Then the cannonballs began to fly. The British bombarded Falmouth all afternoon and into the evening. Though the cannonballs damaged buildings they didn’t kill anyone. One of those buildings, for many years the Nimrod restaurant, has a hole made by a cannonball in its men’s room from the time the British bombarded Falmouth.

Wareham

The Nimrod finally gave up and sailed toward Rhode Island. In June, the Nimrod sailed into Buzzard’s Bay and anchored offshore Wareham, which borders Cape Cod.

Wareham had no use for the War of 1812. So when Capt. Mitchell sent 200 men ashore under a flag of truce, Wareham welcomed them. The British demanded to know which ships belonged to Falmouth. Wareham officials told them. The British then set afire 17 ships, mostly belonging to Falmouth.

The Nimrod then ignominiously ran aground in Buzzard’s Bay. Capt. Mitchell ordered the cannon thrown overboard to lighten its load.

Orleans

Admiral Lord Richard Howe

In the final Cape Cod engagement of the war, Admiral Lord Richard Howe demanded bribes from Brewster and Eastham to protect their saltworks. Orleans, however, refused. Howe ordered an attack on Orleans, but his vessel, the HMS Newcastle, couldn’t navigate the marshy coastal waters. The Newcastle’s cannonballs fell short of the town.

The local militia skirmished with the HMS Newcastle when it tried to land in Rock Harbor.

In 1987, a diving crew recovered five of the Nimrod’s artillery pieces. The Falmouth Historical Society now has one on display.

This story was updated in 2023.

2 comments 525 views

Six French Place Names in Six New England States

French place names reveal much about the history of a city or town. They reflect the great historical events that took place at the time residents settled on a name. They may have named their town when a popular king took the throne, or during the French struggle for liberty, or right after the American Revolution, or during westward expansion.

You’re far more likely to find French place names the closer you get to the border of Canada. Still, the number of French place names in New England doesn’t truly reflect the region’s French heritage.

Vermont, of course, comes from the French for ‘green mountain’ (vert mont), and 23.9 percent of its population claims French ancestry. But only about a dozen of the state’s 255 municipalities have a French place name.

Vermont is only the third most Franco-American state in the Union. New Hampshire comes in second. Maine, with 25 percent of its population claiming French ancestry, ranks No. 1. The state has two dozen towns with French place names, and the state Legislature once claimed (probably wrongly) that ‘Maine’ came from the French province of the same name.

Here, then, are six New England municipalities with French place names, one in each state. If you know of another with a story worth repeating, please share in the comments section.

Orange, Conn.

Orange Congregational Church

Orange, Conn., initially belonged to the Algonquian Indians until 1637, when they sold it to the Rev. Peter Prudden. The price? Some coats and blankets, hatchets and hoes, a kettle, knives and a dozen small mirrors.

Prudden, educated at Cambridge University in England, came to Massachusetts as part of the Great Puritan Migration. He preached in Wethersfield, Conn., for a while. Then he joined a group of New Haven Colony settlers in Milford and was ordained pastor of the church in 1639.

When Prudden died in 1656, his survivors buried him in his garden, which became the Milford town cemetery. His widow, Joanna Boyse Prudden, married the first English mayor of New York City.

William of Orange

Thirty years after Prudden died, the last Roman Catholic king of England, James II, consolidated the New England colonies. He appointed the hated Edmund Andros as governor general of the Dominion of New England. Andros tried to seize Connecticut’s charter, but failed because a militia captain hid it in a large white oak tree, known forever after as the Charter Oak.

In 1689, much to the joy and relief of New England’s Puritans, William of Orange deposed James II. The staunchly Protestant William, who had inherited the French principality of Orange from his father, was James’ son-in-law and nephew. The colonists sent Andros back to England.

The popular new king gave the village of Orange its name. It belonged to Milford until 1822, when residents formed the Town of Orange. In 1921, rural Orange separated from urban West Haven.

Orange Center Historic District includes 42 historically significant structures, including the Orange Congregational Church. They form a ‘cohesive village of well-preserved buildings and their surroundings that convey a strong sense of the area’s historic appearance,’ according to the National Register of Historic Places nomination form.

Meetinghouse Lane, Orange Center Road, Schoolhouse Land, Tyler City Road.

Calais, Maine

Acadians first settled the region on both sides of the St. John River, so it’s natural that Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, should have a close friendship. Calais has three international crossings over the St. Croix River to St. Stephen.

Calais from St. Stephen

So friendly were the two towns that the British military gave St. Stephen gunpowder to defend itself against Americans during the War of 1812. St. Stephen instead gave the gunpowder to Calais for its July 4^th celebration.

The townspeople named Calais for the French city in 1809 to honor France’s help to the American colonies during the Revolutionary War.

Calais Avenue about 1905

Calais didn’t really get going as a town until the 1820s, when shipbuilding and lumber brought growth and prosperity. Between 1810 and 1850, the town’s population grew tenfold, to 4,749. By 1840, Calais was the second busiest port in Maine next to Bangor. Many successful Calais businesspeople built fine homes in the city during its heyday.

The Calais Residential Historic District comprises 15 acres of handsome 19^th century homes in a variety of architectural styles.

Calais Residential Historic District: Calais Avenue and Main Street From Calais Avenue To Swan Street

Orleans, Mass.

the Duke of Orleans

Orleans, on Cape Cod’s elbow, has had its share of military assaults. The British captured the town twice during the American Revolution, and the Orleans militia skirmished with a British warship trying to dock at Rock Harbor during the War of 1812. And German U-boats shelled Orleans during World War I.

The town split off from Eastham in 1797, when memories of the British occupation still stung.

Isaac Snow, a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrim Stephen Hopkins, supposedly suggested the French place name for the new town. The British had captured Snow during the American Revolution and confined him aboard a prison ship in England. Snow then escaped to France, where he more than likely learned about the popular Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of Orleans. The duke, though one of the richest men in France, supported the French revolutionary cause.

CG 36500

Isaac Snow’s family opened its first store in Orleans in 1887. The Snow family still runs Snow’s, where you can probably find whatever you need.

The town also harbors a motorboat listed on the National Register of Historic Places, CG36500, used in the courageous rescue of 31 Pendleton crewmembers in 1952.

CG 36500 is berthed at Rock Harbor n Rock Harbor Rd., Orleans, Mass.; Snow’s, 22 Main St., Orleans, Mass.

Fremont, N.H.

Fremont, N.H., took its French place name from the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher. John C. Fremont also happened to be a military hero and the Republican Party’s first candidate for president of the United States.

Fremont, N.H., meeting house

Fremont’s mother was the daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter. At 17 she married a well-to-do army major in his 60s. The major hired a Canadian immigrant, Charles Fremon, to tutor his young wife. They fell in love and ran away to Savannah, Ga., where John Fremon was born out of wedlock. The major refused to divorce John’s mother, so she could not marry his father.

When Charles Fremon died, John Fremont and his mother lived in poverty and disgrace. He compensated with pride and ambition.

During his lifetime he fought in the Mexican War, rose to the rank of major general, explored the West, gained and lost a fortune, served in the U.S. Senate from California and ran for president in 1856. He also met and married Jessie Benton, daughter of the powerful U.S. senator from Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton.

John Fremont

Benton earned immense popularity for his support of western expansion. In 1840, the town of Coventry, N.H., decided to change its name to Benton in honor of the senator. Fourteen years later, a town called Poplin, N.H., decided to change its name to Fremont after the future presidential candidate and senator’s son-in-law

Today the town takes justifiable pride in its 1800 Meetinghouse – and for being home to the stunningly awful all-girl group, The Shaggs.

Fremont Meeting House 464 Main Street , Fremont, N.H.

Lafayette Village, R.I.

When the Marquis de Lafayette made his triumphal tour of the United States in 1824, enthusiastic Rhode Islanders renamed a village in North Kingstown after him. Previously, people had given it a less glamorous name: the North Kingstown Cotton Factory.

Lafayette in 1825

Lafayette, though, remained little more than a French place name for a cotton mill, a smattering of houses and an unusually wide road. The road had been ordered by the Rhode Island colony in 1703 so farmers could bring their goods to the port of Wickford. The road had to be as straight as possible and 160 feet wide to allow grazing for livestock.

Today, the National Register of Historic Places lists Lafayette Village as a monument to Robert Rodman, a paternalistic textile manufacturer in the tradition of southern Rhode Island.

Rodman, a relative of the Hazard manufacturing family in nearby Peace Dale, began making wool textiles in Lafayette in the 1840s. He incorporated as the Rodman Manufacturing Co. in 1883 and employed 500 workers by 1900. The Rodman family still owned the company into the late 1940s, when it ceased operation.

One of the Rodman mansions in Lafayette. Google maps photo.

The company sold St. Nicolas Doeskin to growing markets in the south and west. In 1876, “one supposes a celebratory mood as Rodman packed his entire family, children and grandchildren off to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where the doeskin, a luxury fabric with nap, won a medal,” according to Lafayette Village’s nomination for the National Register of Historic Places.

Shortly after the Centennial, Rodman bought the engineering marvel of the day, a Corliss steam engine, to power his textile machinery. In 1877 he built the vast brick mill that still stands.

Rodman also built a mansion for himself (now a patio furniture store) and three more for his children, a church, boarding houses and workers cottages.

The paternalistic Rodmans stayed within the community, made up of local Yankees who in the 1970s remembered it as ‘one big family’ and ‘all English.’ The Rodmans sponsored the Lafayette Cornet Band, magic shows, games and pottery classes to entertain the mill workers – and, no doubt, to distract them from any union organizers who might be prowling around.

For more photos of Lafayette in the 1970s, click here.

Lafayette Historic District, Properties bordering Ten Rod Road from Wickford Junction to the culvert east of 935 Ten Rod Road and side streets, North Kingstown, R.I.

Barre, Vt.

Barre, Vt., took its name from an Irishman of French Huguenot ancestry who gave the Sons of Liberty their name.

Isaac Barre

Isaac Barre, the son of Dublin’s high sheriff, served the British Army with distinction before representing Chipping Wycombe in Parliament. He had a long, colorful parliamentary career, during which he vigorously opposed the taxation of the American colonies. While addressing Parliament, he coined the phrase ‘Sons of Liberty.’

During his military career, Barre fought at the Battle of Quebec and gathered around the dying general James Wolfe. John Gouldsbury, the earliest settler of Barre, also fought at the Battle of Quebec under Wolfe.

Until 1788, roving bands of Indians were the only inhabitants of the area described as ‘primeval forests, granite hills and green valleys.’ The first settlers named it Wildersborough, but the residents didn’t like it and the name didn’t stick.

According to one story, the settlement’s selectmen decided the person who contributed the most to a meeting house could rename the town. For 64 pounds, Ezekiel Wheeler got to name the town Barre.

Socialist Labor Hall

According to another story, two men from Massachusetts put forward their preferred names at a Town Meeting. Both Captain Joseph Thompson of Holden and Jonathon Sherman of Barre wanted to name it after their former towns. They decided to fight it out in a barn, and Sherman won.

Barre grew into a center of granite cutting shortly after the War of 1812. The work attracted a diverse group of European immigrants, including Italian anarchists and members of the International Workers of the World. In 1916 and in 1929 Barre residents elected a Socialist Party candidate as mayor.

The old Socialist Labor Party Hall still stands, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

Socialist Labor Party Hall, 46 Granite St., Barre City, Vt.

Images for French place names: Fremont Meeting House, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24513389; Socialist Labor Hall By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35779862; Calais By P199 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18061218; Orange church By The original uploader was Staib at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34580770

3 comments 518 views

Tiny Militia Captures Crew of Huge British Warship HMS Somerset

In one of the most remarkable engagements of the American Revolution, the tiny militia of Truro captured more than 400 sailors and marines from the massive British warship HMS Somerset.

It was probably the smallest military unit to take one of the biggest prizes of the war.

The militiamen had some help from Mother Nature. A fierce nor’easter that killed several dozen Cape Codders also hurled the Somerset onto the dreaded shoals near what is now Highland Light.

HMS Agamemnon, similar to the HMS Somerset

HMS Somerset

The Somerset had a long and storied history in North America before crashing on shore outside of Provincetown on Nov. 2, 1778.

Launched in 1748, she was one of the British Navy’s ships of the line. She had 64 cannons and her crew of about 480 included Royal Marines.

Somerset saw action in the French and Indian War at the capture of the Fortress at Louisbourg and Quebec City.

During the American Revolution, the HMS Somerset played a role documented in part by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Then he said ‘Good-night!’ and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Somerset rescued British troops from the American militias.

She was the flagship of the British fleet at the Battle of Bunker Hill, though the broadsides she fired at patriot forces didn’t do much harm.

Somerset bombarding Bunker Hill

In 1777, Somerset took part in the Siege of Fort Mifflin, in which British ships captured forts along the Delaware River in order to provision the British forces holding Philadelphia.

The Wreck

By the autumn of 1778, Cape Codders had suffered at the hands of the British fleet. Fishing and whaling vessels stayed in harbor rather than risk capture by the British and having their crews pressed into service by the navy. The British also blockaded the import of staple goods like cloth, flour and sugar. Most able-bodied men were fighting the war or serving on privateers.

Somerset, under the command of Capt. George Ourry, was sailing from New York to confront the French fleet in Boston Harbor.

Highland Light, near the site of the Somerset wreck. By Edward Hopper, courtesy Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund.

Then, on Monday, Nov. 2, 1778, Somerset got caught up in a deadly nor’easter. Waves crashed over her decks and her sails ripped to shreds. The ship ran aground on Peaked Hill Bars. Then she lost her rudder and broke open at the stern.

Somerset sat 600 feet from the beach as huge waves crashed over her decks. The crew cut away the masts and threw cannons overboard, hoping to lighten the ship enough so it would float off the sandbar and closer to shore.

By Tuesday morning, everyone in town knew about the wreck, but the surf was so high, no one could board it. By afternoon, three boats came from Somerset, but one sank, drowning 21 men. Capt. Ourry, in the second boat, asked for the principal man. When told it was Isaiah Atkins, a selectman, Ourry handed him his sword and said, “Save the men and the ship will be yours.”

Plunder

By Wednesday the storm subsided enough that the Somerset crew could come ashore safely. Several hundred men and women of Truro, eager to plunder the wreck, met them on shore. Schoolteacher John Greenough described the scene:

Almost all the inhabitants of Truro came down to the wreck, they say as militia, although I could never learn that they were in any military arrangement nor under any command, order or discipline…Others were trading with the seamen for clothing, etc., brought from the ship; and a great number cutting up and carrying off sails, rigging, etc.

Paul Revere

The warship, one of the two biggest British ships destroyed in the American Revolution, made quite a prize. Massachusetts authorities stepped in before the Cape Codders could pick the wreck clean. Two schooners and four sloops sailed to Cape Cod to salvage what they could for the war effort. Sixteen cannons were entrusted to Lt. Col. Paul Revere for fortification at Castle Island in Boston.

Today, houses built with timbers from the ship that once bombarded Bunker Hill still stand on Cape Cod.

The Long March

On Wednesday night, three or four unarmed militia men under the command of Capt. Enoch Hallett escorted the 400-odd sailors and marines off the beach. They went to the homes of Truro’s 250 families for shelter during the night.

Massachusetts gave the Somerset officers the courtesy of taking them to Boston by ship. However the men – many bleeding and hurt – had to march 120 miles from the tip of Cape Cod to Boston in the winter cold. They had little food, and the storm had soaked the Somerset’s provisions. When asked how to feed them, the Governor’s Council responded,

If you have not bread for the prisoners
let them live without as many better
men have done before them.

Local militias escorted the prisoners off the Cape, and the towns bore the cost of feeding them. The ragged horde passed through Eastham, Harwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich. Once they left Sandwich, the Cape militiamen decided their part of the journey had ended. Plymouth raised a company of 28 men to guard the prisoners, but some managed to wander off to freedom.

Sheriffs were dispatched to round up the missing sailors and marines. Traffic sentinels stood guard from the outskirts of Plymouth to Boston.

Fate of the Somerset Crew

When they arrived in Boston, a special guard set up at Boston Neck took them to their new home: a decrepit old French hulk called the Penet.

1886 photo of the wreck of the Somerset

The Somerset’s purser, Edward Cyron, was an old man injured in the wreck. He collapsed during the march and disappeared for several days. On December 5 he petitioned for his release, which was granted. Many of the British sailors and marines were exchanged for American prisoners. Fourteen volunteered to join the American forces and were accepted.

The wreck was buried in the sands, its skeleton exposed by storms and erosion only three times: in 1886, 1973 and 2010. The last time it happened, the National Park Service assumed the timbers would slip beneath the sands again. It recorded an image of the remains using three-dimensional imaging technology.

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 492 views

The Astonishing Voyage of the Northern Light

One spring night in 1853, Capt. Freeman Hatch sailed the Northern Light into Boston Harbor, having accomplished an astonishing feat of seamanship.

Northern Light

He had set a record for sailing between San Francisco and Boston, a record that still hasn’t been broken by a single-hull vessel. And he did it without a hand raised against a member of his crew — unusual at the time for Yankee captains, who meted out discipline with heavy hands.

Northern Light was a clipper ship, of course.

She was designed by Samuel Hartt Pook, New England’s first independent naval architect. He was known for building speedy ships. The Briggs Brothers built her in their South Boston shipyard and launched her on Sept. 25, 1851. She had an angel dressed in white and holding a flaming torch as her figurehead.

National Sport

By then, racing around Cape Horn had become the national maritime sport. Sportsmen placed bets on which ship would make the fastest run between San Francisco and the East Coast, and nearly all the clipper captains raced against another ship.

In 1852, Hatch set sail from Boston in the Northern Light. He had bad luck and took 118 days — a respectable time — to reach San Francisco. He was angry, though, at being beaten by two New York clipper ships, the Trade Wind and the Contest.

A Boston merchant offered Hatch a new suit of clothes if he beat the Trade Wind on the return voyage. He didn’t think the Contest was beatable.

Northern Light

The Trade Wind left on March 10, the Contest two days later, and Northern Light the following day. Early in the race, Hatch easily passed the Trade Wind, earning his suit of clothes, and took off after the Contest.

Cape Horn

He caught up with his rival at Cape Horn, dangerous because of its high winds, strong currents, tall waves and icebergs. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that only the most experienced seamen could “be trusted to drive these saucy, wild clippers against Cape Horn howlers.”

Northern Light and Contest sailed in company for a day or two. The Contest then sailed ahead, but Hatch drove the Northern Light until he was 40 miles ahead at the equator. Hatch, a thorough clipper ship captain, wrote one maritime historian, ‘never allowed his ship to suffer for want of canvas.’ On the clipper ship’s fastest day she sailed 354 miles.

When Northern Light sailed into Boston, Contest was picking up her pilot off the New Jersey Highlands. Morrison, described her entrance into Boston Harbor:

…with skysails, ringtail and studdingsails set on both sides, alow and aloft, she slipped into the Narrows of Boston Harbor on the evening of May 27, 1853, just seventy-six days, five hours, from San Francisco.

Early the next day, Hatch went ashore, hired a hack and drove to the home of Northern Light’s owner, James Huckins. He woke Huckins from a sound sleep and said, “Here I am with the Northern Light, but I’ve strained her dreadfully getting here!”

All Huckins cared about was that he’d beaten the Contest. “I don’t care a damn how much you’ve strained her,” he said.

Aftermath

In the early 1860s, Freeman Hatch retired from the sea. He moved to Needham, Mass., with his wife, Lydia, and took up the practice of alternative medicine.

Northern Light met her end on Jan. 2, 1862, when she sailed out of Havre and collided with the French brig Nouveau St. Jacques. The French vessel sank, and Northern Light sustained so much damager her crew soon abandoned her. Two vessels picked up the captains and crews and took them to the British ports of Falmouth and Cowes.

Hatch died in 1889 and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in his hometown of Eastham, Mass. His gravestone reads:

Freeman Hatch, 1820-1889

He became famous making the astonishing passage in the clipper ship Northern Light from San Francisco in 76 days 6 hours — an achievement won by no mortal before or since.

With thanks to Shipmasters of Cape Cod by Henry Kittredge. This story was updated in 2021. Image: Cape Horn CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57801..

5 comments 222 views

The Worst Tornado in New England History Strikes Worcester, Mass.

The Worcester tornado of 1953 struck without warning and cut a swath of destruction, at times a mile wide, through a half-dozen towns. It was the worst tornado in New England history, and one of the 25 worst tornadoes in U.S. history.

The worst tornado in New England history spent 90 minutes on the ground in Massachusetts from Petersham to Framingham.

For 90 minutes it stayed on the ground, traveling 48 miles from Petersham through Worcester to Shrewsbury, Southborough and Westborough. Finally it petered out over Framingham, having gobbled up everything in its way.

New England’s worst tornado blew down houses, threw cars out of parking lots, ripped trees from their roots. It grabbed bodies and entire houses and tossed them into Lake Quinsigamond. It snatched paper in Holden and dropped it in Eastham on Cape Cod. The tornado brought with it hailstones the size of baseballs and rained debris on Boston suburbs.

It officially killed 90 people, unofficially killed 94, injured 1,300 and destroyed 4,000 buildings. More than 10,000 people lost their homes.

In the end, New England’s worst tornado would change the way the National Weather Service ran the Storm Prediction Center to give more timely and accurate warnings of dangerous weather events.

Worst Tornado

The deadly twister belonged to an outbreak of tornadoes over the northern United States for three days, from June 6-9. A high-pressure system collided with a low-pressure mass over Nebraska, which generated tornadoes in Ohio, Michigan and Nebraska.

The Flint-Beecher tornado on June 8 — the worst tornado to strike Michigan — killed 116 people and injured 844. Seven other tornadoes in the Upper Midwest that day killed nine more people and injured 52 more.

New England’s worst tornado struck without warning.

The mass of cold air moved east overnight, dropping temperatures rapidly in New England. The cold front collided with warm air from the South, creating highly unusual conditions for a tornado in the northeastern United States.

National Weather Service forecasters in Boston knew a tornado was likely. But it was the first year the NWS forecast tornadoes, and the forecasters feared telling the public lest they cause panic.

Forecasters issued a severe thunderstorm watch instead. So when at 4:25 p.m. the twister touched down near the Quabbin Reservoir in a Petersham forest, no one was prepared.

Fear at First Sight

Boaters on the Quabbin Reservoir first noticed the boiling clouds in the sky, which formed into three funnels. One dissipated, but twin funnels headed southeast.

At first they terrorized farm country. Near Barre a twister collapsed a two-story farmhouse and threw 18-year-old Barbara Knight and 11-year-old Eddie White hundreds of feet to their deaths. Eddie’s mother suffered a fractured spine. His older sister June survived, having been thrown through the air on a door and fallen back to earth safely.

The worst tornado moved through Rutland, killing two. Then it killed nine more people in Holden, where it wiped out the Brentwood subdivision and all but 12 of the 75 homes in White Oaks. A 12-year-old boy, Larry Faucher, struggled against the wind to bring his bicycle home, but the killer tornado picked him up before he made it and hurled him to his death in a field.

New England’s worst tornado left 10,000 people homeless.

The black storm cloud grew to a mile wide by the time it slammed into Worcester. Mrs. Virginia Harrison was the first of 60 people killed in in the city by the tornado. She was swept away with her stately home, which had just appeared in a Better Homes and Gardens photo.

Random Violence

No social class was spared. People were crushed to death in collapsing triple deckers or lost their homes in the fire afterward. A priest and two nuns were killed at Assumption College (now Quinsigamond Community College).

The Uncatena-Great Brook Valley neighborhoods suffered the worst destruction. Houses simply vanished and entire blocks of homes leveled. The tornado picked up a 12-ton bus and slammed it against the Curtis Apartments, killing two and dropping the buildings’ blueprints in Duxbury, Mass. At the Brookside Home Farm, a dairy, six men were killed and the herd of 80 Holstein cows wiped out.

Winds reached speeds of 335 mph, among the highest ever recorded. The tornado caught up people on the street and hurled them to their deaths. Or it tossed around cars and mangled the people inside. It plucked people out of their shattered homes or impaled them on flying debris.

Someone found a wedding dress in Worcester hanging from a telephone wire in Natick. A chunk of mattress found floating in the Massachusetts Bay, 100 miles away.

Winds as high as 335 mph made the June 9, 1953 twister the worst tornado to strike New England.

Still More

Still that wasn’t the end of it. The worst tornado turned east and barreled through Shrewsbury, killing 12, through Westborough, killing six, and through Soutborough, where it claimed three more victims. It crushed them in the collapse of the Fayville Post Office.

The worst tornado had company in New England that day. A smaller tornado struck Sutton, Northbridge, Mendon, Bellingham, Franklin, Wrentham and Mansfield, injuring 17. A still smaller twister injured several people in Fremont and Exeter in New Hampshire, and others caused minor damage in Colrain, Mass.

New England’s worst tornado destroyed 4,000 buildings.

Quelling Panic

People at first thought the Soviet Union had launched an attack on Massachusetts — or maybe it was a side effect of the nuclear testing in the Southwest.

The National Guard came out to quell panic and to help search for bodies and find the still-living under rubble. Several small children were found under the bodies of dead parents. Husbands and wives were found dead together, locked in a final embrace.

worst-tornado-robert-stoddard-john-kennedy

Worcester industrialist Robert Stoddard and John F. Kennedy before take-off in a helicopter to inspect the damage from New England’s worst tornado.

The tornado damaged the Norton Co., Worcester’s largest employer, shattering every window and tearing off the roof. But the company continued operations, employing 5,700 local people making grinding gears and abrasives.

On June 10, a young U.S. senator named John F. Kennedy came to inspect the damage from the storm.

Eight days after the worst tornado struck New England, the U.S. government reorganized the Storm Prediction Center and implemented a national radar system to spot storms. Until the Joplin, Mo., tornado of 2011, no storm since killed more than 100 people.

Photos of the worst tornado damage courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection, except for the photo of “Robert Stoddard and John Kennedy” by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia. For a slide show of the Worcester tornado, click here. This story was updated in 2022.

10 comments 545 views

Newer Posts

Older Posts