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Bostonians Practice Their Tea Party on Andrew Belcher in 1710

Sixty-three years before the Boston Tea Party, outraged men launched a nighttime attack on a ship belonging to Andrew Belcher in Boston Harbor. And in a preview of upcoming events, they intended to remove the ship’s cargo.

But it was bread, not tea that enraged the attackers.

Belcher had singlehandedly caused a bread shortage in 1710, and Bostonians decided to take justice into their own hands.

Boston Harbor around 1720

Andrew Belcher

Less than a century after the Puritans landed in a howling wilderness, Boston merchants engaged in international trade – with the West Indies, Newfoundland, Portugal, Spain, England and Ireland. Entrepreneurs sold whatever they could on the international market at the best prices they could, regardless of the welfare of their community.

Andrew Belcher, one such entrepreneur, was born in 1646 in Cambridge, Mass. He married the daughter of a rich Connecticut merchant and established his own successful trading business.

He lived in a mansion, rode around Boston in an elegant carriage and owned many slaves and ships. His son, Jonathan Belcher, would serve as royal governor.

Gov. Jonathan Belcher

In 1703, Massachusetts officials made Andrew Belcher commissary general, though his critics charged he sometimes sold spoiled food.

The working poor of Boston had no use for him either. He hoarded grain in his warehouses during food shortages and then shipped it off to the West Indies.

The 1710 Food Riot

By 1710. Queen Anne’s War had started. Food grew short and bread grew terribly expensive. Andrew Belcher bought up all the wheat in the countryside surrounding Boston. Then he held it until prices went up, and sold it to himself as commissary general for a very nice profit.

He singlehandedly caused a bread shortage in Boston.

One night one of his ships was about to sail away with 6,000 bushels of grain. Under cover of darkness a group of marauders approached the ship and sawed through the rudder, according to Judge Samuel Sewall’s diary.

Samuel Sewall

The next night 50 Bostonians commandeered the ship and tried to force the captain ashore, intending to loot the grain. Authorities arrested some of the attackers.

But their Grain Party was so popular a grand jury refused to indict them.

The incident revealed the transformation of Boston from a Puritanical city on a hill, with an emphasis on the common good, to an ethic of individualism. The Bostonians were “appalled that a leading townsman would put profits ahead of the welfare of the community,” wrote historian Gary Nash. They demanded food at prices they could afford, despite merchants’ insistence on the laws of supply and demand.

Authorities responded by banning the sale of grain abroad during times of shortages, regulating bread prices and establishing a public granary.

The 1713 Food Riot

Three years later, Andrew Belcher tried it again with a similar result. He hoarded grain in his warehouses while prices rose, then tried to sell it in Dutch Curacao in the Caribbean. Two hundred Bostonians attacked his warehouses and emptied them of flour. When the lieutenant governor tried to stop them, they shot him.

Andrew Belcher died Oct. 31, 1717.

If you enjoyed this story about Andrew Belcher, you may also want to read about the female food riots of the American Revolution in Boston here or the 1914 macaroni riots in Providence here.

With thanks to Red White & Black and The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution by Gary Nash.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The New England Summer Theater — Six of the Oldest

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

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

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

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

Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse

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

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

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

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

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

103 Main Street, Ivoryton, Conn.

Lakewood Theatre

Lakewood Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

76 Theater Rd., Madison, Maine

Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Barnstormers

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

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

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

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

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

104 Main Street, Tamworth, N.H.

Weston Playhouse

Lloyd Bridges

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

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

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

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

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

703 Main St., Weston, Vt.

Theatre by the Sea

Theatre By The Sea

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

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

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

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

364 Cards Pond Rd, Wakefield, R.I.

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

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

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Six Colonial Homes by Wallace Nutting

Wallace Nutting was a dyspeptic minister so overwhelmed by urban life and modern values that he led millions of Americans on a nostalgic journey into the colonial age.

As the Martha Stewart of the Colonial Revival, he influenced the décor of countless American homes. He spurred a wave of historic preservation and advanced the study of American decorative arts and architecture.

Wallace Nutting

A nervous breakdown forced Wallace Nutting to retire from the pulpit at 43. He took to selling photographs of rural scenes and colonial homes to earn a living. Before Martha Stewart ever brandished her glue gun, Wallace Nutting created an empire of hand-tinted photographs, books, reproduction furniture and experiences, all evoking a better, happier time. By 1915, he earned $1,000 a day.

As an entrepreneur and a businessman, the Wallace Nutting name stood for quality, according to Charles T. Lyle, executive director of the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, and curator of a recent Nutting exhibit.

Wallace Nutting

“Wallace Nutting was a true pioneer in the emerging fields of historic preservation, and in the study and appreciation of American decorative arts and architecture,” Lyle said. “Nutting created an aesthetic that popularized the use of American antiques that people wanted to have in their own homes and could live with comfortably.”

Historic New England has an online collection of Wallace Nutting photographs, called the Wallace Nutting photographic collection, 1910s-1930s. It’s searchable by state. Click here to see it.

Following are photographs of six colonial homes featured by Wallace Nutting. If you have any Wallace Nutting favorites, please share them in the comments section.

Joseph Webb House

In 1914 Wallace Nutting began buying a series of colonial homes that he called “The Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.” They gave him the freedom to create ‘a proper setting for quaint pictures with attractive background and furnishings.’ But he didn’t have to adapt to the schedules and room arrangements of the new house museums.

One of those homes was the Webb House in Wethersfield, Conn. Joseph Webb, a successful merchant with ships that traded in the West Indies, built it in 1752. He died at 34, leaving six children and a widow. Diplomat Silas Deane, executor of the estate, later married Webb’s widow and built a house next door.

Webb’s son Joseph, Jr., inherited the house. In 1774, he hosted Gen. George Washington for five nights while he planned the Siege of Yorktown with the Comte de Rochambeau. It passed through several owners after Webb sold it in 1790. Martin Welles bought it around 1820, and it stayed in his family until 1913. Wallace Nutting bought it in 1916 as a sales office, studio and tourist attraction.

He lovingly photographed the details of the house, including the doors, the fireplaces, the shell dome cupboard and the china inside. For a time the public flocked to Wethersfield to pay 25 cents for admission to the house. World War I and gas rationing interrupted the business.

Nutting sold the house to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in 1919. Today it belongs to the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

211 Main Street, Wethersfield, Conn.

Wadsworth-Longfellow House

Wadsworth House

Since childhood, Wallace Nutting set his heart on becoming a Congregational minister. He grew up in Augusta, Maine, and attended Philips Exeter Academy before entering Harvard. After graduating seminary he took a job as minister at the Fryeburg Congregational Church for a season.

Wallace Nutting was back in Maine in 1914, photographing the Wadsworth House, now the Wadsworth-Longfellow House, in Portland.

Elizabeth and Peleg Wadsworth, a Revolutionary War general, raised 10 children in the house, built in 1785-86. It was the first brick building in Portland and the oldest standing building on the peninsula.

Wadsworth’s grandson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, lived in the house from the time he was 8 months old until he was 35. Henry’s younger sister Anne Longfellow Pierce was the last family member to live in the house. When she died in 1901, she left it to the Maine Historical Society, which has run it as Maine’s first house museum since 1902.

Wallace Nutting was buried in Augusta after he died at home in Framingham, Mass., on July 19, 1941, at age 79.

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House opens to the public from Maine through October; click here for information about hours and directions.

489 Congress Street, Portland, Maine.

Hazen-Spiller House

Wallace Nutting photo of the Hazen-Spiller House, courtesy Historic New England.

Wallace Nutting was born in the village of Gleasondale, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1861. His father died in the Civil War when he was eight months old.

A story about his ancestor resonated with him. The forebear was killed in an Indian raid in Groton, Mass., in 1639, and his head stuck on a pole to warn off new settlers.

Nutting returned to Massachusetts again and again. He bought the Cutler-Bartlett House in Newburyport and the Ironmaster’s House in Saugus.

In 1917 he bought the Hazen-Spiller House in Haverhill, where Indian raiders burned many wood houses. That may have contributed to the decision to have the house made of brick. Many brick makers lived in Haverhill, and the house is notable for both its size and its two fireplaces. Rather than two central fireplaces, the fireplaces in the house stand at either end of the building.

Richard Hazen, member of an early Haverhill family, built the house.

Nutting’s speculated the house was partially a shoe factory and garrison, used by early settlers to escape Indian raids. He dated the house to sometime before 1700. But today historians date it to 1724, after the Indian raids in Haverhill ceased.

Wallace Nutting operated the house as a museum in 1918, though it was not one of his more successful properties. Today the house has private ownership.

The Hazen-Spiller House today

8 Groveland St., Haverhill, Mass.

Wentworth-Gardner House

‘Colonial woman’ descending staircase, Wentworth-Gardner House.

Wallace Nutting eventually took his art of hand-colored photography to a new level. He began to stage scenes of domestic life with people dressed in colonial garb inside of colonial houses, such as the woman descending the staircase, above.

He bought the Wentworth-Gardner House in 1915 and restored it as one of his ‘Chain of Colonial Picture Homes.’ It’s a Georgian-style waterfront mansion in Portsmouth, N.H., built in 1760 by Mark Hunking Wentworth. Mark Wentworth was a wealthy member of the prominent Wentworth family. His brother was colonial Gov. Benning Wentworth. He built the house as a wedding gift for his son Thomas and his daughter-in-law Anne Tasker.

The house itself very nearly wound up in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it with the intention of dismantling it and moving it. But the museum changed its mind and left it in place. The house is notable for the skill of the local craftsmen who carved its intricate details to mimic the tastes of the English aristocracy.

Wentworth-Gardner House

Nutting removed later additions to the building and returned it to its 18th Century appearance. Today it is open to visitors, along with the adjacent Tobias Lear House, as a museum.

140 Mechanic St., Portsmouth, N.H.

Eleazer Arnold House

Nutting had his final pulpit at the Union Congregational Church in Providence. He hated the city, but he found a way to soothe his jangled nerves in the countryside. “I took long bicycle rides on Monday,” he wrote.

On those bicycle trips, he began to take photographs of landscapes. He then made a deal with a local printer to print platinotypes of birches and blossoms of photos he’d taken in Northern New England. Nutting had so much success he opened a studio in New York City, but soon moved to Southbury, Conn.

He photographed the Eleazer Arnold House in Lincoln, R.I. Wheeler, a tavern owner, built the house in 1693. It’s a rare example of a 17^th century ‘stone-ender,’ a house with fieldstone side walls and chimney and wooden end walls. The building type came from western England, mostly to northern Rhode Island.

Nutting’s photograph shows the side stone façade.

The Eleazer Arnold House was donated to Historic New England (then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) in 1919, when Wallace Nutting took the photograph. The public can visit on weekends year-round from 11 am-4 pm.

487 Great Road, Lincoln, R.I.

Gen. David Robinson House

David Robinson House

Wallace Nutting collected furniture as props for his photographs, then opened a factory and sold high-quality reproductions. But he lost $100,000 in the venture, he wrote.

His furniture was so authentic unscrupulous dealers bought pieces, aged them artificially and sold them for a hundred times what they paid. Wallace Nutting also published The Furniture Treasury in 1928, which collectors then used as a standard guide for many years.

In the 1920s, Wallace Nutting began publishing his States Beautiful series of travel books. Read his book, Vermont Beautiful, online by clicking here.

David Robinson House

One example of Nutting’s colonial vignettes is this oddly hand-colored photograph of a man and a woman in period dress standing at the gate of the Gen. David Robinson House in Bennington, Vt. The man wears a coat tinted bright red but the woman is in black and white.

General David Robinson, a Revolutionary War general, built his house in 1796. Handed down through the family, in 1912 it contained an invaluable collection of Revolutionary relics. Those included the sword and hat worn by Robinson during the Battle of Bennington.

Monument Avenue, opposite the Robinson marker, Bennington, Vt.

Images: Wallace Nutting images courtesy Historic New England; Wentworth-Gardner House By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28778716; Hazen-Spiller House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9715789. This story was updated i 2022.

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The Tungsten Light Bulb Scandal of 1908

John Allen Heany managed to fool some of the people with his tungsten light bulb, but he couldn’t fool General Electric.

In 1905, the electric industry was improving by leaps and bounds. Heany wanted to push it further forward.

Thomas Edison had created light bulbs with carbon filaments in 1879, but they were problematic. They tended to cloud the inside of the glass as they burned. A light bulb with a filament made of tungsten, with its incredibly high melting point, was the Holy Grail for manufacturers.

Yet the manufacturing technique to make a tungsten light bulb had yet to be perfected.

The Tungsten Light Bulb

John Allen Heany, owner of the Heany Lamp Company of New Haven, was hot on the trail of the tungsten light bulb.

General Electric was the 800-pound gorilla of the electricity world. The company conducted its own research, but also funded other inventors, usually buying out their companies if they were successful.

GE funded Heany’s promising research, but in December of 1904 the company’s faith in Heany flamed out. At the time, Heany lived in Pennsylvania where he had taught college-level science courses before venturing out as an entrepreneur.

Heany applied for a patent for his tungsten light bulb, and then brought samples to the GE offices. All failed miserably. Heany left, discouraged. After the visit, he sent a letter asking GE to return the bulbs. GE kept one.

John Allen Heany's light bulb (courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution)

John Allen Heany’s tungsten light bulb (courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution)

As the race intensified to see who would develop the tungsten filament, Heany emerged in 1908 with a winning light bulb. He claimed he based it on his 1904 patent, but GE – which backed other entries in the race to perfect the tungsten filament – had suspicions. If Heany’s bulb based on the 1904 design was working fine, why had it failed so miserably when he showed it to them?

As all this was going on, Heany tried to sell the patent to GE for $500,000.

3rd Time the Charm

The GE patent staff went to work. Three times they visited the patent office to review Heany’s various applications, and on the third time they found a flaw.

The patent office had accepted a submission from Heany on one of his applications dated and stamped January of 1905. The paper had a watermark, however, that didn’t come into use until later in 1906.

Clearly, the patent application for the tungsten light bulb had been updated, but made to look like the original submission.

With the warning flags raised, it didn’t take long for the patent office to zero in on the problem. The office had fraud in its midst. The patent office uncovered collusion between a patent examiner, Ned Barton, and Heany’s lawyer – Henry Everding.

The patent office fired Barton. Not surprisingly, Heany hired him and Barton went front and center to defend his new boss.

“I would be a fool to mix up in any matter such as this,” Barton said. But he soon caved. He pleaded guilty to fraud. Everding and Heany stood trial.

Eventually, Everding admitted his part in altering the patent douments. A jury convicted him.

Both Everding and Barton refused to implicate Heany. Others had no qualms.

No Bullet, No Patent

Witnesses from his own company testified that Heany had crowed about his infiltration of the patent office. A glassblower showed how bulbs supposedly patented in 1905 hadn’t been designed until years later. Nevertheless, Heany dodged the bullet and won an acquittal.

Following the trial the patent office took up the question of whether to invalidate Heany’s patents – now worth millions. Heany put up a fight, but refused to answer questions about his involvement in the patent rigging. In 1911 all the patents were invalidated.

Heany would go on to have a successful career as an inventor and business man. He won dozens of patents both in the U.S. and in foreign countries. During World War I he turned his skills toward developing gas mask technology.

He died at age 69 in 1946 in Hamden, Conn. — his home for 25 years – the fraud scandal of his youth well behind him.

This story was updated in 2022.

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P.T. Barnum’s Grandson, Herbert Barnum Seeley, Throws the Greatest Bachelor Party on Earth

Herbert Barnum Seeley inherited a large portion of his grandfather P.T. Barnum’s estate, but none of his common sense.

In December of 1896, Clinton Barnum Seeley was getting married. His brother, Herbert Barnum Seeley, decided to send him off with a bachelor party worthy of the grandson of Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Barnum. Grandpa Barnum, circus entrepreneur, had of course created the Greatest Show on Earth.

The party would feature a 17-course dinner, music and drinking. Scantily clad dancing girls would hand out gifts for each of the guests. Herbert Barnum Seeley drew up the guest list from the who’s who of young society – the dissipated offspring of the robber barons and impresarios of the Gilded Age.

Little Egypt

Little Egypt cost Herbert Barnum Seeley his wife

The capstone of the evening was to be a belly dance by a French-speaking dancer of Lebanese descent. Using the stage name “Little Egypt,” Ashea Wabe wowed audiences with her “hoochie coochie” dance.

She had unveiled the dance at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.

Little Egypt was to do one better for the Barnum grandsons. She would dance and then perform a pose, as in a nude pose the way a model would for a painter. Or, as Little Egypt would later put it, “a little Egyptian pose on a little pedestal in ‘zee altogether’.”

Then Teddy Roosevelt’s cleanup-minded New York Police Department got wind of the party. And at 1:30 in the morning, the cops shut down the big bash at Sherry’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue.

Sherry’s Restaurant in 1899

Herbert Barnum Seeley was charged with indecency. Just how lewd the party grew was never fully exposed, however. Then as now, charges against the wealthy could be silently squelched. And these were.

Instead, the police commission held an inquiry into the evening’s proceedings, airing some details of the debauchery, but protecting the identities of many in attendance.

Herbert Barnum Seeley

The ensuing scandal cost Herbert his wife, who found greener pastures by marrying the son of Boston stockbroker Thomas Lawson. The glare of the coverage also highlighted just how far the apples had fallen from the tree in the famous Barnum family of Bridgeport, Conn.

Herbert Barnum Seeley was no doubt the sillier of the two Barnum namesakes who inherited a large portion of the circus millions. But Clinton was no prizewinner either. Nonetheless, P.T. had shaken the family tree in search of a successor and selected Clinton as the best option.

He took Clinton into the circus business for a very short time – just long enough for the younger Barnum’s laziness and ineffectuality to truly blossom. P.T.’s fellow ringmaster, James Bailey, swore he would break up the company and go forward alone rather than carry the insufferable Clinton with him. The episode, as such things do, ended in lawsuits between Clinton and the circus.

When P.T. Barnum died in 1891, there was then little to urge the clan toward profitable endeavors. Herbert, however, was restrained from his worst instincts by his aunt and brother Clinton who held his inheritance in trust for him. Herbert fought in court for years to remove them from the trust. In 1900, with Herbert approaching 30, the aunt and brother finally stepped aside. They let Herbert get down to the serious business of squandering his funds.

“Now that Herbert Barnum Seeley has come into the possession of a large and scrumptious fortune, he may dine daily, but it is hardly likely that he gives another dinner,” the Boston Home Journal drily reported.

A regular at the summer hot spots of Newport and Narragansett, R.I., Poland Springs, Maine, and Saratoga, N.Y., Herbert Barnum Seeley also traveled regularly to Europe.

Gusto, Then Scandal

Herbert Barnum Seeley embraced his future with gusto. He entered the Army’s military academy at West Point, but dropped out after two years. He went to Mexico to try to find his fortune in mining. When that failed, he took a quick stab at following in his grandfather’s footsteps as a showman. But he lacked an aptitude for that, as well.

Finally, Herbert found his true calling – buying race horses in Europe and America. For a time he prospered, but he eventually got swept up in scandal at New York’s Morris Park and Narragansett. He had to refund bets made on his horses because they weren’t – strictly speaking – trying to win.

Narragansett Park

By 1904, he had been jailed for passing bad checks in Arizona and was selling off bits of P.T. Barnum’s estate left to him. Clinton, who had hung onto more of his money, declined to bail out his brother. Other relatives had to step in.

In July of 1914, his health flagging, Herbert Barnum Seeley checked into a hospital. He died at the age of 43, best known for what the newspapers described as “Seeley Bachelor Party Orgy.”

His obituary noted: “While his passing will bring a thrill to those who knew him in his heyday of prosperity; the services at Mountain Grove cemetery today, where but a few of his kindred were able to gather, owing to their absence in various parts of the world, brings only pangs of sorrow to those closely related.”

This story about Herbert Barnum Seeley was updated in 2022.

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The Texas-Size Story of William Marsh Rice

On September 23, 1900, William Marsh Rice lay down to sleep, and he would never wake up again. He had an upset stomach from medications he’d taken. At 5-foot-4 and 90 pounds, he made an easy target for Charles Jones, his valet and quasi-secretary.

Jones clamped a rag soaked with chloroform over the 84-year-old Rice’s face and killed him. The murder ended a rather remarkable life that began from humble beginnings in Springfield, Mass., wound through Texas and back to Manhattan. There Rice was murdered by Jones and A.T. Patrick, one of his lawyers.

William Marsh Rice

Patrick and Jones had plotted for months, looking for a way to get at Rice’s fortune. When they killed him they thought they had succeeded. In the end, however, police uncovered the plot to murder Rice and steal his estate. Ultimately the money went to establish Houston’s Rice University, named for the Massachusetts entrepreneur. But it didn’t happen without a lot of effort and misery.

William Marsh Rice

William Marsh Rice was born in Springfield on March 14, 1816. His father, David, worked at a forging shop at the Springfield Armory making rifle barrels and bayonets. His mother, Patty, raised their family, which consisted of 10 children (William was second oldest).

David was active in town and church affairs, serving as tax assessor and donating land for the Methodist Church, which he and Patty avidly supported. They named William for a Methodist Minister, William Marsh.

Springfield Armory

As a child, William was not much of a student, and he left school at 15 to clerk in a grocery store run by a retired whaling captain. At the store he began mastering the art of making money. Within three years, he had established his own store. He was so young that his father needed to co-sign for him to start the business, but William soon made it a success, adding $2,000 to his name.

In 1838, like many young men seeking their fortunes, Rice headed west for Texas. He initially faced some headwinds. First he tried to establish a store, but he lost of shipment of goods to bad weather. Then a speculative bubble caused a recession that dampened the economy. But soon, Marsh prospered. He sold a little bit of everything and had his hand in many businesses. He shipped cotton, started a railroad, loaned money for mortgages, bought and sold land and timber, made bricks, ran a hotel and refined vegetable oil.

Leaving Texas

By 1860, he probably ranked as the second wealthiest man in Texas, with a fortune of $750,000. The Houston-based William M. Rice and Company name was becoming well known. Though he didn’t oppose slavery (he owned several at one point, received as payment for debts), he never owned a plantation. He didn’t like the boom and bust of cotton prices. Rice most likely opposed the Civil War, seeing it as harmful to trade.

Nichols-Rice-Cherry House, where William Marsh Rice lived from 1856 and 1873

Following the war, his railroad and other business interests began expanding rapidly. He also dabbled in selling insurance. But he saw another change sweeping the country. Just as going west had made sense in the 1830s, going north made sense following the war. That’s because northern financiers would have a lot more influence in the South.

In addition, a Yankee in the South was always suspect in the harsh years that followed the Civil War. So Rice removed himself from Texas and moved to New York in 1866.

William Marsh Rice Gets Married

He married his second wife in New York. His first wife Margaret Bremond died in 1863. His second, Elizabeth Brown, died in 1896. Her death ultimately led to his own.

The Rices had no children, and William had planned for years to leave a share of his fortune to an orphanage in his adopted home state of New Jersey. The bulk of it he would leave to establish Rice University.

But in the last year of her life, Elizabeth suffered several strokes. During that time, she met an unscrupulous lawyer and signed a will separate from William’s and unknown to him. The will would have distributed parts of the estate to family, as well as the orphanage. It also provided for 10 percent payment to the lawyer to distribute the funds.

It wasn’t until after she died that William learned of the will. A court battle ensued in Texas to invalidate it on the grounds that Elizabeth was not a resident of Texas, as the will claimed. It’s not clear how much of the will was Elizabeth’s idea and how much was the lawyer’s, but it seems unlikely she would have claimed Texas as her residence.

Rice University administration building in 1913

Schemers

With the lawsuits underway, Rice returned to New York from Texas. But before he left he hired a new valet, Charles Jones. In New York Jones began to scheme to get part of the Rice fortune for himself. A.T. Patrick, a local lawyer, managed to ingratiate himself with Rice, probably with Jones’ assistance. The two began manipulating the old man, all the while slowly poisoning him with mercury.

Then in September of 1900, the two men saw their chance. Patrick had already forged a will that left the Rice estate to himself. But he didn’t know how much Rice actually was worth. That month a hurricane and fire destroyed a vegetable oil plant that Rice owned in Louisiana. Rice decided to use his available cash to rebuild it. He had checks drawn up for $180,000 to pay for reconstruction.

The size of the amount alarmed Jones and Patrick. They managed to get Rice to sign the checks, but made them out to pay the funds to Patrick. Soon after, they murdered Rice.

The scheme began falling apart almost immediately. Among other problems, Jones had misspelled Patrick’s name on one check. When Patrick attempted to cash them, the bank decided to investigate before making payment.

When it came to light that Rice had died, suspicions grew. And then Patrick produced the forged will.

As police began asking more questions, Jones learned about the content of the will – including the fact that he was not named in it, just Patrick. He then began cooperating with prosecutors.

Rice University

Throughout his life, William Marsh Rice sent money and gifts to his Massachusetts family, at one point buying his parents a house. He visited often, but his heart was not in Massachusetts. Nor was it in New York, but in Texas where he had made his fortune.

Rice University Houston Texas

Lawyers for the budding university successfully wrestled his estate from not one but two sets of lawyers who had tried to abscond with it. By the end, more than $1 million was spent on legal fees. But $4.6 million remained to found the university of Rice’s dreams.

As for the men who killed him, Jones was allowed to return to Texas in exchange for his testimony. Years later he would kill himself.

Patrick was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Later his wealthy family managed to win him a pardon. He ended his life practicing law for an oil company.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Nichols-Cherry-Rice House By little black spot on the sun today – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9432797. William Marsh Rice statue By Ed Schipul – https://www.flickr.com/photos/16638697@N00/10213400874, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94640453.

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