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Eleanor Roosevelt

In Search of the Roosevelt Outhouse in New England

During the Great Depression, the U.S. government built 2.3 million outhouses in rural America. They earned several nicknames, including the Roosevelt Outhouse, the Roosevelt Room, the White House, the Relief Office or simply the Eleanor. Some people excused themselves by saying they had to visit Miss Perkins, meaning Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of Labor.

The sanitary toilet program aimed to combat hookworm, typhoid fever, diarrhea and dysentery, especially prevalent in the rural South. A survey of 700 counties in 11 southern states found the presence of hookworm in every one of them. Soil pollution was the leading cause of hookworm, and unsanitary outhouses were a leading cause of soil pollution.

Educators and government officials from 1900 on tried to improve farm sanitation by promoting better privies. “Nothing is more important to the farmer than good health. Good health cannot be preserved if the sanitary conditions of the farm are bad,” wrote Agriculture Secretary James Wilson in 1911 in the introduction to the USDA Farmers Bulletin 463 – The Sanitary Privy.

An image that appeared in a number of government publications.

Then in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 1 million sanitary privies built. In the end, the WPA and other agencies more than doubled that number to 2,309,239. Today, people who own a Roosevelt Outhouse proudly describe their iconic outbuilding to local reporters or on real estate listings. But they’re mostly in the South and the Midwest. Which raises the question: Did anyone build a Roosevelt Outhouse in New England?

Yes they did.

Evolution of the Roosevelt Outhouse

In 1909, the Rockefeller Foundation made public health a priority, and undertook a hookworm study from 1909 to 1915. It found that unsanitary privies caused hookworm infections, which led to diarrhea, stomach ache and anemia. The study concluded that outhouse pits had to be at least six feet deep to prevent hookworms from making contact with humans.

The U.S. Public Health Service began to work with state governments to distribute plans for sanitary privies during World War I and the 1920s. Then the country fell into the Great Depression, and few people could afford to build a new outhouse.

The Civil Works Administration formed in 1933 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and began building sanitary outhouses. Property owners supplied the wood and other materials, while the CWA provided the labor. However, the agency discovered wooden floors were hard to clean and rotted quickly.

The Works Progress Administration picked up the privy project with an improved design. It had a concrete vault below ground, which served as the foundation for the structure. The pot had a square hole and a wooden seat with a lid that closed so tight flies couldn’t get in. The concrete vault also had a ventilation shaft with screens to keep out flies.

Families had a choice of a one-holer or a two-holer. The two-holer had a smaller seat for children who might otherwise fall in.

A concrete outhouse base. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

The concrete and lids were mass produced in central locations. WPA employees then went to work building Roosevelt Outhouses for homes, schools, dairies, filling stations and tourist camps.

Sanitary pre-cast concrete bases or the Roosevelt Outhouse after stripping of forms, Image courtesy Library of Congress.

How To Build a Roosevelt Outhouse

It took three-man WPA teams 20 hours, or three days, to build one. The labor was again free, but a family had to pay for the materials if it could afford it. For $17, a farm family could buy the materials for an outhouse.

Loading completed privy houses on truck for delivery to site in 1938. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The sanitary toilet project was one of the few that built a structure on private property. The WPA justified the private improvements as necessary for public health. The Roosevelt Outhouses did reduce the incidence of hookworm.

Where To Find a Roosevelt Outhouse

Roosevelt Outhouses still stand in places throughout the county.

Beckley, W. Va., has an exhibition coal mine that features a Roosevelt Outhouse. The concrete base has “1939” and “WPA” written in the concrete.
The Case-Barlow Farm in Hudson, Ohio, has an outhouse with a concrete base, probably a Roosevelt Outhouse.
In Atchison County, Kans., a couple enjoys owning an Eleanor outhouse, according to Capper’s Farmer.

Fitting vent stack and seat cover to sanitary base of privy. Courtesy Library of Congress.

A real estate listing for a 150-year-old farmhouse in Indianapolis boasts of charm, woodwork, soaring ceilings and “a Roosevelt Outhouse!”

New England certainly had its share of outhouses. The 1940 Census showed 29 percent of homes in Vermont and 25 percent in New Hampshire did not have flush toilets.

So where might one find a Roosevelt Outhouse in New England?

Probably in Albany, N.H., at the Blackberry Crossing Campground. According to the Living New Deal website,

Blackberry Crossing is unique in that it was a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) Camp during the 1930’s. There is a self-guided tour of the old camp within the campground. The campground has 26 sites that are available on a first come, first served basis. There are hand pumps for water and vault toilets. A short walk from the campground is the Albany Covered Bridge, The Nanamocomuck Ski Trail, and the Boulder Loop hiking trail.

“Vault toilet” is another name for a Roosevelt Outhouse.

Some Historic Outhouses

In the search for a Roosevelt Outhouse, we came across several other historic privies.

The outhouse behind the Silas Deane house. Photo courtesy the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

Connecticut has several in Wethersfield at The Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, which features a fancy six-holer outhouse where George Washington may have sat.

The 1938 New England Hurricane upended the outhouse at the Israel Putnam farm, and no one seems to have restored it. The National Register of Historic Places nomination form for the farm makes no mention of an outhouse. The Putnam Cottage (or Knapp Tavern) in Greenwich, however, does have a reproduction privy.

Israel Putnam’s privy after the 1938 hurricane

In Boston, archaeologists dug up an outhouse that Paul Revere may have used.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Bob Fogg Brings Aviation and Adventure to New Hampshire

“The Weirs” on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, has been a popular summer resort since shortly after the last Ice Age, when the continental ice sheet melted away. It left the state’s largest lake, known as “The Smile of the Great Spirit,” in its wake. The Weirs attracted Native American fishermen, Civil War veterans and 20^th century tourists looking for fun and adventure. They found both with Bob Fogg.

Fogg carried over 50,000 eager summer tourists over the lakes and mountains in the biplanes that first brought flying to the Granite State. He operated from the seaplane base, a fixture on the lakeside boardwalk from the early 1920s until shortly after World War II.

Airplanes Arrive

Bob Fogg had flying in his blood from the very beginning. He owned an early Bleriot monoplane by 1915, when aviation was just 12 years old and he was just 18. His father, though, took the engine from it before young Bob could get hurt with his new toy.

Bob also worked on cars and had his radio operator’s license, so clearly he had a fascination for the new technology of the new century.

Technology has come at us so fast during the 20^th century that it’s hard for us now to imagine the excitement people felt in the early 20^th century when the “flying machine” first appeared. Human beings had dreamed of flight since the dawn of time, and now, suddenly, anyone with the price of a ticket could do it.

Imagine the thrill if you had never seen an airplane fly, and suddenly one day, one landed in the cow pasture next door!

If you have never seen the surface of the earth from a small plane a few hundred feet above the ground, or maneuvered among the clouds, it’s hard to convey the joy and wonder of it. But once done you can’t forget it. No wonder the early “barnstormers” loved to fly.

Iin-flight view from the Curtiss Canuck flown by Bob Fogg from 1920-23, thought to be in flight over Hampton Beach, NH.

Bob Fogg

Robert Stevens “Bob” Fogg was born in 1897 in Brookline, Mass., just a few years before the Wright brothers first flew in 1903. As a boy he avidly followed the adventures of the early birds of flight. So when the United States entered the Great War in 1917 and the aces of the Western Front began winning fame and glory, Bob was ready to go.

Enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Service, he learned to fly at a Texas Army flying field. But the war ended with an Allied victory before he could get to the fighting himself.

Bob Fogg in his World War I uniform.

When the war to end all wars ended, the United States had hundreds of surplus airplanes, mostly trainers. Anyone with a few hundred dollars could buy one, no training, license, or registration required. Bob Fogg was one of them.

After an adventurous flight from Toronto, using the “I Follow Railroads” method of aerial navigation, he arrived in Concord, N.H., on the Fourth of July, 1920. He then set out to make his fortune hopping passengers.

Making a Living

New Hampshire as yet had no airports, so he flew from the National Guard training field in Concord, on Hampton Beach (at low tide), and various fields and fairgrounds around the state. Like many another wartime aviator, he wanted to use his new skills to keep on flying and also to make a living, if possible.

As the military downsized and no airlines existed, selling thrill rides to a population that had never flown before was the only way to go.

Barnstorming did not turn out to be a get rich quick scheme, but it was the most exciting career choice a young man could make in 1920. Like other early aviators, Bob Fogg said the greatest danger a pilot faced was starvation. Unless, of course, he sold enough rides to put gas in the tank for one more day.

How quickly things once new and exciting become merely ordinary. Bob had the first privately owned airplane in the state in 1920. But by 1922, as he later wrote, ‘crowds no longer flocked three miles to some hayfield to pay five dollars for a ride in my Hisso Standard.’

“I then decided that if the people would not come to my plane, the next step would be to take a plane to the people.”

The Weirs

The Weirs, the main tourist stop on Lake Winnipesaukee, fit the bill. Surplus aircraft were still cheap and available, and for $750 Bob purchased a Curtiss Model MF flying boat, known as the Seagull. Brand new, right from the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, the Seagull came all in pieces on a freight car with some assembly required.

Despite New Hampshire’s lack of airports, its many lakes and ponds made ideal runways. And many had existing summer resorts where Bob could sell airplane rides.

Assembling the Seagull on an old barge near the Weirs Channel, Bob and mechanic Caleb Marston converted the two-seat trainer to a four-place passenger plane, and made their first flight on Aug. 14, 1923. Two men, names lost to history, who had been watching the proceedings, asked for a ride, and for $5.00 each they became the first to “Fly With Fogg.”

Getting used to the feel of the new airplane, Bob Fogg ‘yoyoed up the bay like an airborne porpoise.’ He then arrived safely at the Weirs with the compliments of the two passengers.

On August 15, Bob and Caleb started their first business day on the boardwalk alongside the Weirs Café and the Mount Washington dock. They then flew for over 12 hours, taking up 73 passengers for total receipts of $315.

Andy Cannon, Bob Fogg, and Floyd Miller, pilots at the Weirs seaplane base

Thrill Rides

Today small private aircraft are a fairly common sight, but in the 1920s and ‘30’s, seeing an airplane fly over was a highlight. Taking a flight was the experience of a lifetime. Bob continued to fly the Seagull at the Weirs through the summer of 1927, on one occasion even charging $50 to a passenger who wanted to fly one mile high. It was a slow process at a rate of climb of approximately 250 feet per minute.

In 1925 he operated the first aeromarine mail service in America. He picked up mail from the Weirs train station and delivered it to ten locations around the lake, all before 8:00 a.m. He dropped off most of the airmail at boy’s summer camps, where plenty of willing volunteers waded out and swapped mail bags. They also helped turned the plane back toward open water for the next takeoff.

Regulation

In 1927 the government finally decided to regulate airplanes and pilots. And so the official inspector came to give Bob Fogg and the Seagull a check ride.

The wind blew offshore from the Weirs, so Bob and Inspector W.A. Brooks had to taxi a long way out in order to take off into the wind and clear Brickyard Mountain. After making a successful takeoff, with the engine roaring at full power to clear the pine trees atop the mountain, a startling bang came from the engine, and it quit cold.

Bob calmly guided the craft to a safe landing in Paugus Bay. Then he turned to the inspector and remarked, “Well! She never did that before!”

The inspector agreed that Bob had demonstrated excellent piloting skills, quickly licensed both plane and pilo, and left town on the next train.

Later, as technology advanced in during the 1920s and ’30s, Bob Fogg replaced the faithful Seagull with larger and more powerful Waco biplanes, a Travel Air 6000 cabin monoplane featuring cabin-enclosed comfort for six passengers. Later he bought a speedy Staggerwing Beechcraft capable of 200 mph, and a 10-passenger Sikorsky amphibian that could land on water or land. Quite an upgrade from the slow and steady old Seagull in just a few short years.

By the time he left the seaplane base in 1938, Bob had safely carried over 50,000 passengers, quite a feat considering that his airplanes only carried between two and eight passengers at a time.

Other Adventures

Bob had other high-flying adventures, including one with the Charles Lindbergh. He hosted the world-famous aviator in Concord during his tour of the country in The Spirit of St. Louis, which followed his historic transatlantic flight.

Charles Lindbergh and Bob Fogg (in uniform).

After the disastrous Vermont flood in 1927, Bob Fogg flew the mail from Concord to the stricken state during November and December in his open-cockpit Waco. Then in the early spring of 1928, he flew to remote Greenly Island in northern Canada. He made the flight to bring back the first newsreel footage of the first plane to fly nonstop east-to-west from Europe to America. The Bremen had landed in Newfoundland.

Bob Fogg in the furs he wore to Northern Canada.

Flying High With Eleanor

Bob went to work for the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington, D.C., in 1939, building 300 seaplane bases around the country for national defense. On several occasions he flew with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to dedicate them.

The story goes that he let the First Lady take the controls once airborne, and that she did a pretty good job. Imagine the First Lady trying that nowadays! Bob Fogg, Jr., related that the First Lady could not drink alcoholic beverages in public because of concerns over its propriety. But after they finished their official duties for the day, Mrs. Roosevelt would call Bob’s hotel room and invite him down for a Manhattan.

Following service in World War I, Bob served his country again in the Army Air Corps reserves from 1923 until World War II. Then he flew on active duty through 1945.

He hung up his flying goggles in 1951, having seen aviation progress from wooden biplanes with linen-covered wings to jets breaking the sound barrier.

Bob Fogg passed away in 1976 after a long and adventurous life.

Jane Rice, who wrote this story, is the author of Bob Fogg and New Hampshire’s Golden Age of Aviation, available online or from the author at [email protected].

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L.L. Bean, Merchant of the Maine Woods

L. L. Bean liked to hunt and fish more than he liked to work, and his first attempt at running a clothing store failed miserably.

He was pushing 40 when he had the idea that would make him a household name. He came off a hunting trip in the Maine woods that failed because his boots got wet, leaving his feet cold and sore. A local cobbler helped him graft leather uppers to a pair of rubber work boot bottoms. He then got hold of a list of non-resident holders of Maine hunting licenses and produced a three-page flyer with a proclamation.

You cannot expect success hunting deer or moose if your feet are not properly dressed. The Maine Hunting Shoe is designed by a hunter who has tramped the Maine woods for the last 18 years. We guarantee them to give perfect satisfaction in every way.

That failed too.

Ninety of the first 100 pairs were returned because the leather separated from the rubber.

Bean made good, though, on his ‘100 percent money back guarantee,’ and perfected the boot.

L.L. Bean Himself

L.L. Bean

Leon Leonwood Bean was born Oct. 13, 1872, in tiny Greenwood, Maine, the son of Benjamin Warren Bean, a farmer and horse trader, and Sarah Swett Bean. His parents died within four days of each other when he was 12. He and his five siblings went to live with relatives in South Paris, Maine.

After his locally made boots failed, L.L. Bean borrowed $400 in 1911 and went to Boston to persuade the United States Rubber Company to improve the quality of the shoe. The company agreed and, in another stroke of luck, the United States Post Office introduced parcel post service.

Maine Hunting Shoes were so popular that L.L. Bean opened a store to sell them on Freeport’s main street in 1917. The shoe, according to Bean, saved an outdoorsman from lifting 2,310 pounds in the average seven miles he took a day.

When his brother was named postmaster in Freeport, Maine, L.L. Bean opened a factory on the floor above the post office.

He continued to come up with new outdoor products, such as the Maine Auto Sweater, designed for duck hunting and automobile riding. He created the Deer Toter to transport a dead deer more easily; the Bean Sandwich Spreader; the Bean chamois shirt; and the down vest. In 1944 L.L. Bean introduced its iconic tote, the ‘Ice Carrier’ made of heavy canvas designed to carry ice. It’s now called the Boat and Tote.

L.L. Bean appealed to frugal Yankee customers by advising them to return their Maine Hunting shoes for reworking.

During World War II, Bean designed military wear, and in 1973 the Israeli military rush-ordered boots and heavy shirts direct from the company for duty on the Golan Heights.

Shake His Hand, Get a Catalog

His company continued to grow along with the number of pages in his promotional flyer.

L.L. Bean fixated on building his mailing list. So much so that Maine writer John Gould said, “If you drop in just to shake his hand, you get home to find his catalog in your mailbox.”

Most of L.L. Bean’s sales came through the catalog. The store in Freeport, however, had a bell by the door that sportsmen could ring to summon a watchman or, sometimes, L.L. Bean himself. They rang at all hours of the day and night to buy last-minute hunting or fishing gear. The company hit $1 million in sales in 1937.

In 1951, L.L. Bean opened the store round the clock 365 days a year. “We have thrown away the keys to the place,” he said. Today the Freeport store has no locks. Families stranded in blizzards over the years have camped in the camping section — with permission.

Famous customers included Ethel Kennedy, John Wayne, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Cronkite, Jack Dempsey and Gregory Peck.

Merchant of the Maine Woods

Time magazine hailed him as the ‘Merchant of the Maine Woods.’ In 1967, the magazine called the company ‘an efficiency expert’s nightmare’:

It stashes incoming mail in shirt boxes. Once it lost $125,000 in business when a list of 40,000 would-be customers was mistakenly destroyed. Under a garish, multicolored letterhead, its owner once answered a formal appointment request by advising “I am personally away more or less.”

In January 1967, 94-year-old L.L. Bean checked the galleys of the now-100-page catalog. He died a week later, on Feb. 5, 1967. The company received 50,000 cards and letters of condolence.

With thanks to Maine Icons: 50 Classic Symbols of the Pine Tree State by Matthew P. Mayo and Jennifer Smith-Mayo and The Grand Emporiums by Robert Hendrickson. This story was updated in 2023.

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How To Make a Maine May Basket

An old New England tradition that perhaps deserves reviving is the giving of a May basket on May Day. It was popular among children, especially in northern New England, during the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century.

First Lady Grace Coolidge gets a May basket. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Children made small homemade baskets or used available ones. They filled them with treats: candy, cookies, flowers. Then they’d hang them on the doorknob or leave them on the doorstep of a friend, a sweetheart or a favorite relative. The custom was to knock, yell “May Basket” and then run. If the recipient caught the giver, he or she was entitled to a kiss.

Louisa May Alcott wrote about May baskets in her 1880 children’s book, Jack and Jill. “Such a twanging of bells and rapping of knockers; such a scampering of feet in the dark,” she wrote. She described ‘droll collisions as boys came racing round corners, or girls ran into one another’s arms as they crept up and down steps on the sly.

“Such laughing, whistling, flying about of flowers and friendly feeling—it was almost a pity that May-day did not come oftener,” wrote Alcott.

In 1889, a young man in Taunton, Mass., got up very early and walked a mile and a half to hang a basket on his sweetheart’s door. When he got there he found another basket from another young man already hanging there.

The kissing game proved too much for the parents of Caroline Creevey, who in the 19th century made May baskets of willow twigs and trailing arbutus. She recounted in her book, A Daughter of Puritans, how her father gave her a May Day party to take her mind off osculating boys.

May Basket Misadventure

Renee DesRoberts, writing for the Maine Memory Network, told the story of another May basket adventure that went awry at the Biddeford Pool in 1917.

A Mrs. T. K. Niedringhaus, wife of a St. Louis railroad financier, was spending the night at the Main Street home of Mrs. Fanny C. Foster, another summer resident.

The women heard a knock on the door and,

…”fearing burglars, the house dog was loosed and he chased whoever the party was across the golf links and far away.”

The next day, the women discovered two May Baskets hung on the door by children. As an apology for the chase, each woman held a party for the children.

An item in a Biddeford newspaper concluded, “There are those among the children who aver that they would gladly be chased across the golf links again for another such good time.”

Grace and Edna

Edna St. Vincent Millay

In 1918, a friend of Maine poet Edna St. Vincent Millay sent her a May basket. Millay, then a rebellious Vassar student, sent a thank you note to the friend, Corinne Sawyer of Camden:

Dear old chum –
Bless your heart! You
don’t forget me, do you? A May Basket! Why
it made me a little girl again.
It got here in wonderfully good condition
nothing smashed – nothing spilled. And its
perfectfully dear so sweet outside as in –

Children in other parts of the country hung May baskets as well. In 1927, Washington, D.C., schoolchildren hung a May basket on the White House door for First Lady Grace Coolidge.

Hallmark Gets Into the Act

Hallmark tried to bring back the tradition — in fact, it’s still trying. In 1954, the company advertised ‘May Day Baskets’ that come in ’15 colorful designs — five different designs in each package — and can be assembled easily without scissors or glue.’ You could find them in ‘the fine stores where Hallmark cards are sold, and the price was just 50 cents.’

1954 Hallmark advertisement

In Roots and Branches: Or growing up in Maine, Jane Rozelle recalled making May baskets:

…one of the “funest” things of spring to do, May Basket time! May 1st all the kids in the neighborhood would be figuring how to make a pretty May basket. It usually started with crepe paper, scissors, maybe a little box, glue and many other ideas.

To just use crepe paper, use two pieces approximately a foot square, or a size that you like, fold it so there was a middle point, keep folding it to make a pointed v. Then cut little v’s out of the side and when you open it up you’ll have a sort of lacy bag with the top sort of a handle. If you had a little box then you could paste different pieces around the side and braid some paper to make a handle.

Clotheslined

“May was meant for May baskets, and we hung them all month long in a sweaty helter-skelter of running and hiding,” wrote John Gould in his book, And One to Grow On: Reflections of a Maine Boyhood.

He hung his first May basket on the door of one of his true loves, Grace. Her father answered the door. “Life brings many pleasures, but life has nothing to offer like the shriek of a youthful blonde who has received her first May basket,” he wrote.

Sure enough, Grace chased him, but he met the fate of so many Maine children who go May-basketing. He got clotheslined.

“The first great discovery that came to me, as I sped around the house, was the location of the clothesline. I found it when it sang under my chin,” he wrote. But the evening ended happily, with raspberry shrub and lemon cookies in the kitchen until it was time to go home.

When June came around, Gould and his friends joked about June baskets. They’d fill them with stable manure and leave them on the doorstep of someone they didn’t like. But no one ever hung one. They just joked about it.

This story about the May basket last updated in 2023.

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Marian Anderson Sings at the Lincoln Memorial

It was one of the most extraordinary concerts in history. Marian Anderson sang before 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. She did it because the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let her sing before an integrated audience at their Constitution Hall.

Marian Anderson’s rich contralto voice, said conductor Arturo Toscanini, was heard “once in a hundred years.” Her dignified stage manner “melted the hearts of music lovers around the world,” wrote the New York Times. “Her determination helped shatter racial barriers in the arts.”

The Lincoln Memorial concert became a touchstone for the civil rights movement, a poignant symbol of African Americans’ struggle for equality.

Marian Anderson

Born Feb. 27, 1897, she rose from a poor childhood in South Philadelphia to acquire international fame and the warmth of a community in Danbury, Conn.

Until the mid 1930s, she performed mostly in Europe. There, she encountered less racial prejudice than in the United States. She sang everything from classical music to traditional American songs and spirituals.

In the late 1930s, Marian Anderson began to tour the United States, giving about 70 recitals a year. Despite her growing celebrity, she was denied admission to some hotels and restaurants. Albert Einstein helped her out. She first stayed at his house in 1937 when denied a hotel room before she performed at Princeton University.

Marian Anderson, 1940, by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The DAR’s refusal to let her perform thrust her into the international spotlight as a champion of racial equality. It sparked a furor in Washington, D.C., and a mass protest was planned. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR. She wrote about it in her weekly column. “They have taken an action which has been widely criticized in the press,” she wrote. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”

Then Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange the Lincoln Memorial concert.

The Concert

Anderson later admitted the prospect of that concert terrified her. But, she later wrote,” I could not run away from this situation. If I had anything to offer, I would have to do so now.”

Marian Anderson performed on Easter Sunday, not just to the 75,000 people standing before her, but to millions listening on the radio. Six microphones carried her voice for blocks.

Marian Anderson in front of the Lincoln Memorial..

The concert began at dusk. Ickes accompanied her to the stage under the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

“In this great auditorium under the sky all of us are free,” he said. “When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, He made no distinction of race or creed or color.”

She began with an emotional rendition of My Country ‘Tis of Thee. Then she sang she sang an aria from La favorite by Gaetano Donizetti. She followed that with Ave Maria by Franz Schubert and ended with the spirituals, Gospel Train, Trampin’ and My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord. At the end, the enthusiastic crowd insisted on an encore. She sang, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

Mitchell Jameson mural, “An Incident in Contemporary American Life,” 1943, inside the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Reaction

The concert lasted only a half hour, but it created a sensation. (Watch newsreel footage of it here.) The crowd rushed the stage, and police had to hold it back.

“I am so overwhelmed, I just can’t talk,” said Anderson when it was over. Then she thanked the crowd “from the bottom of my heart.”

Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, had joined Marian Anderson on stage. As the crowd surged forward, a single figure caught his eye.

It was a slender black girl dressed in somewhat too garishly hued Easter finery. Hers was not the face of one who had been the beneficiary of much education or opportunity. Her hands were particularly noticeable as she thrust them forward and upward, trying desperately, though she was some distance away from Miss Anderson, to touch the singer. They were hands that despite their youth had known only the dreary work of manual labor. Tears streamed down the girl’s dark face. Her hat was askew, but in her eyes flamed hope bordering on ecstasy. Life which had been none too easy for her held out greater hope because one who was also colored and who, like herself, had known poverty, privation, and prejudice, had, by her genius, gone a long way toward conquering bigotry. If Marian Anderson could do it, the girl’s eyes seemed to say, then I can, too.

Danbury

The year after the historic concert, Marian Anderson and her husband, architect Orpheus Fisher, bought a 100-acre farm on Joe’s Hill Road in Danbury. She lived there for 50 years.

The couple built a music studio on the property, now preserved and open to the public in downtown Danbury. They involved themselves in Danbury’s civic life. She joined the Danbury Music Centre board of directors. She also supported the Charles Ives Center for the Arts and the Danbury Chapter of the NAACP. He designed Danbury’s New Hope Baptist Church.

Marian Anderson insisted on being treated like an ordinary person. She would wait in line like everyone else at shops and restaurants. She visited the Danbury State Fair, gave a concert at Danbury High School, and at Christmas she sang at Danbury City Hall for the lighting of the Christmas tree.

Anderson died on April 8, 1993, one day shy of the 54th anniversary of her historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial.

The DAR

The Daughters of the American Revolution have since come full circle. Four years after refusing to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, they invited her to perform at a benefit for the American Red Cross. She said she felt no sense of triumph.

When I finally walked onto the stage of Constitution Hall, I felt no different than I had in other halls… I felt that it was a beautiful concert hall and I was very happy to sing there.

The DAR’s Constitution Hall.

Seventy-five years after Marian Anderson’s historic performance, the DAR scheduled a concert to honor her. Then in 2014, the DAR issued a press release.

The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is truly honored to celebrate the life, the talent and the legacy of world-renowned opera singer Marian Anderson on the upcoming 75th anniversary of her historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

With thanks to Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey by Alan Keiler. This story has been updated in 2022. Image: Constitution Hall By AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17979389.

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