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The Ipswich Fright: Terror Strikes a Town Even When the British Aren’t Coming

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In the days after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, a general panic seized the population around Boston. Would the British regulars march to other towns, murdering their inhabitants and burning their homes? Nowhere was the fear greater than on the North Shore, where a fast-spreading rumor caused the Ipswich Fright.

Hundreds of frightened Ipswich citizens fled their homes, filling the roads with carts carrying what household goods they could grab. Their panic spread to the nearby towns of Newbury, Newburyport, Beverly, Salisbury and even Haverhill, Mass., 20 miles to the west.

John Greenleaf Whittier

The rather ignominious show of fear might have been forgotten, save for John Greenleaf Whittier. He immortalized the Ipswich Fright in 1866 with a story about it in his Prose Miscellanies.

Whittier described the Great Ipswich Fright as “the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.”

The Ipswich Fright

Ipswich, in the days of revolution, was a steady, conservative town solidly behind the patriot cause, wrote Whittier. Midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport,

…the traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off to the seaside, forms a green background.

The John Whipple House in Ipswich

On April 22, the able-bodied men and boys of Ipswich had marched off to Cambridge after the Battles of Lexington and Concord three days earlier.

Rumors flew that the soldiers would come out again, and they would burn, kill and destroy everything that came in their way. Coastal towns had special concern that the British would attack from the sea.

So on that morning, old men, women and children rushed to the village green to hear the news.

“A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed on the coast and were marching upon the town,” wrote Whittier. “A scene of indescribable terror and confusion followed.”

Carrying Off Goods

Thomas Franklin Waters reported that someone had seen two small vessels standing in the Ipswich River. “We may be sure there was fright with good reasons at the farms on Castle Hill and Castle Neck,” wrote Waters in Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1917.

View from Castle Hill

People hid their valuables, piled their household goods into ox carts and headed north to New Hampshire.

Diarist John Tudor described the scene that followed. “[M]en and horses driving past, up and down the roads…People were in great perplexity; women in distress for their husbands and friends who had marched. …All confusion, numbers of carts, etc., carrying off goods, etc.

Contagion

The rumor quickly spread to Beverly that the enemy had massacred every man, woman and child in Ipswich. The scene repeated itself.

At mid-afternoon in Newburyport, the town had assembled to hear the details of the Battles of Lexington and Concord., according to a later account in the Newburyport Herald. Parson Carey was opening the meeting with a prayer when a rider named Ebenezer Todd rushed up.  “Turn out, turn out, for God’s sake,” he cried, “or you will be all killed! The regulars are marching on us; they are at Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!”

The people of Newbury ran to Salisbury, while the people of Rowley ran to Newbury. The people of Haverhill fled in boats across the Merrimack River to Bradford.

Many spent the night in empty houses in Salisbury. The houses were empty because their inhabitants had fled farther north into New Hampshire.

Woof of Comedy

During the Ipswich Panic, one woman threw her silver down her well. A man hid his private documents under a stone and stood guard in his home with a musket.

Another man put his family into a boat to find safety on Ram Island. Through the evening dusk he imagined the enemy pursued him. An infant started crying in the stern of the boat.

“Do throw that squalling brat overboard,” he said to his wife. “Or we shall all be discovered and killed.”

A woman ran four or five miles up the river. She stopped to take a breath and nurse her child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought the cat instead of the baby.

The Newburyport Herald also reported,

In another instance, a Mr. J. L. seeing Mr. C. H., a very corpulent man, standing at his door with his musket loaded, inquired of him if he was not going. “Going! No.” said he, “I am going to stop and shoot the devils.”

Not until the next morning did most of the refugees learn the truth. Some, however, found out earlier. According to Whittier, a young man from Exeter, N.H., happened to be staying in Ipswich.

[H]e mounted his horse and followed after the retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at night he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the welcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning home ward, their satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant conscious ness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.


Images: Whipple house By Elizabeth B. Thomsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28573446. View from Castle Hill By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11189622. This story updated in 2022. 

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The Portsmouth Fires That Turned the City to Brick

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Three Portsmouth fires, all at Christmas, destroyed 500 buildings within a decade in the early 19th century. Miraculously, no one died in the blazes.

Portsmouth, N.H., was then a gracious seacoast town, home to wealthy merchants and the first federal shipyard. It had served as the colony’s seat of government before the Revolution, and remained so until 1808.

The fires would spare the wooden mansions of the wealthy, separated by wide lawns. But the poor and middle class who lived in crowded quarters would find themselves out on the street, again and again.

1st Portsmouth Fire

The first of the Portsmouth fires started early in the morning of Dec. 26, 1802. It began in an old wooden building downtown, swept through the city and destroyed 100 homes.

Firefighting then amounted to ‘engines’ – water pumps on wheels – which fed the bucket brigades. Homeowners hung leather fire buckets (now highly collectible) near their doors for use in the bucket brigades. ‘Rescue’ involved fire societies, who salvaged items from burning homes. Members carried bags to rescue household valuables and bed keys to quickly dismantle beds and remove them.

Women and men fought the fire in bucket brigades until they dropped, relieved by volunteers from neighboring towns. When it was all over, only the North Church and the Old State House still stood. “The whole beauty of the town is gone! is gone!!!” wailed The New Hampshire Gazette.

statehouse

Artists’ conception of the old New Hampshire Statehouse in Portsmouth (after the fire of 1813).

Most of the building owners had no insurance, and they had to rely on private charity to recover. Donations came in from near and far, amounting to f $45,410.43.

Congress stepped in – for the first disaster relief ever. In January 1803, Congress passed a law to temporarily suspend “the collection of bonds due by merchants of Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, who have suffered by the late conflagration of that town.”

Historic North Church in downtown Portsmouth.

New Hampshire businessmen also responded by incorporating the N.H. Fire and Marine Insurance Co.

2nd of the Portsmouth Fires

Four years later, the second of the Portsmouth fires broke out on Bow Street, raced up Market Street and gobbled up a row of wooden commercial buildings along the Piscataqua River.

The blaze wiped out Market Square, which had barely recovered from the previous fire, as well as St. John’s Episcopal Church, built in 1732. The damage was estimated at $130,000, about $2.7 million in today’s dollars.

portsmouth

Portsmouth’s Market Square in 1853.

The disastrous fire preceded two more blows to the city: the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812. Both events sent Portsmouth, heavily dependent on shipping and trade, on a long downward slide. The industrial revolution bypassed Portsmouth, spurring growth in nearby mill towns like Dover and Rochester.

john-langdon-house

Gov. John Langdon’s house in Portsmouth, N.H., spared by the fires.

Last of the Portsmouth Fires

Then almost exactly seven years after the second fire, on Dec. 22, 1813, the worst of the Portsmouth fires caused more devastation.  The blaze started in Mrs. Woodward’s barn at the corner of Court and Church streets, allegedly set on purpose by an angry servant.

The fire then marched down to the river, burning everything in its path.  The conflagration wiped out 300 buildings, reducing 15 acres to smoking rubble and, as one resident put it, ‘a forest of naked chimneys.’

The huge fire could be seen as far away as Salem, Mass. Volunteers from that town traveled 48 miles in six hours to help put out the blaze. Help also came from Newburyport, Mass., and the New Hampshire towns of Dover, Exeter and Durham.

Market Square, well after the Portsmouth fires

The fire sent the N.H. Fire and Marine Insurance Co. into bankruptcy. It destroyed many businesses that had relocated after the first fire of 1802.

After the Fires

Portsmouth had been growing at a good clip before the fires. Its population increased 13.1 percent from 1790 to 1800, and then at a spectacular 29.9 percent from 1800 to 1810. After the fire of 1813, the city’s growth slowed to only 5.7 percent from 1810-1820. to 7,327. Some people, including a young lawyer named Daniel Webster, packed up and left.

In 1814, the New Hampshire General Court passed the Brick Act, requiring every building over 12 feet high to be built of brick with a slate roof. Portsmouth rebuilt its downtown in brick, and tried to enjoy the holidays.

Jefferson Street in Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke Museum.

You can still get a feel for what Portsmouth was like before it went brick at the Strawbery Banke collection of house museums, right in the middle of the city.


With thanks to Dennis Robinson, The Three Fires of Christmas, SeacoastNH.com, 2005. Images: North Church By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34161214. Gov. John Langdon House By Daderot – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5643711. Jefferson Street By Ken Gallager (Ken Gallager from en.wikipedia) – Author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15734947. This story about the Portsmouth Fires was updated in 2023.

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John Trumbull Gets a Few Things Wrong in His Famous Declaration of Independence Painting

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Ten years after the American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull traveled the country in a carriage seeking out all the men who signed the document. He wanted to paint their likenesses in a monumental work depicting the nation’s founding moment.

He carried a small painting, protected by a special case, to which he added each portrait as he found each member of the revolutionary Congress.

Trumbull traveled to Boston, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Virginia to find the Founding Fathers. He went to Paris and London to consult with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And he went to Philadelphia to capture the room where the Continental Congress met.

The small painting, 21” by 31”, became the model for the giant 12’ by 18’ painting that hangs in the Capitol Rotunda.

Since then, John Trumbull’s image of the nation’s founding moment has been reproduced millions of times. It is etched indelibly in the American consciousness.

It’s amazing he got it done — but he did get a few things wrong.

John Trumbull

John Trumbull believed he was uniquely suited to paint the history of the American Revolution. His father, Connecticut Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, thought he’d be better off as a lawyer or minister.

John Trumbull

John Trumbull

He was born in Lebanon, Conn., in 1756, the youngest of Jonathan and Faith Trumbull’s six children. As a child he lost an eye when he fell down a flight of stairs.

He attended Harvard, but studied art on the side over his father’s objections. After graduation he joined the First Regiment of Connecticut, rising to the rank of colonel and serving as an aide to George Washington. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill, which he later painted.

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull.

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull.

In 1780, John Trumbull went to London, where his mentor, Benjamin West, advised him to paint scenes of the Revolution. When Maj. John Andre was hanged as a spy, British outrage led to Trumbull’s arrest. He spent seven months in prison until his friends got him released.

Support From Jefferson

Trumbull had told Thomas Jefferson he intended to paint a series of historical paintings. Jefferson liked the idea so much he asked Trumbull to stay with him in Paris, where he served as minister to France. He urged Trumbull to paint the presentation of the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson gave Trumbull a sketch he’d drawn of the room in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Continental Congress met. Trumbull later visited the room and found it modernized. Jefferson’s sketch, though, allowed him to  recreate the look. He made up the flag and drum on the wall and put the delegates in fancier chairs than they’d actually used.

john-trumbull-declaration-large

The Small Painting

In 1786, John Trumbull returned to the United States and began a small painting on which he based the larger work. It took him 33 years to complete.

The painting showed the moment on June 28, 1776, when the five-man committee that wrote the document — Jefferson, Roger Sherman, John Adams, Robert Livingston and Benjamin Franklin — presented it to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress. The painting didn’t show the signing, which took place a month later.

No written record existed of who was there and who wasn’t. Trumbull consulted Jefferson and Adams. Should he include everyone who might have been in the room that day? Should he include the men who opposed the Declaration? What if the member had died, and he couldn’t find an image of him?

42 + 5 – 14

Jefferson and Adams agreed Trumbull should include the Declaration’s signers, along with those who opposed it. In the end, Trumbull painted 47 men, five of whom did not sign the Declaration of Independence. Fourteen signers did not appear in the painting because Trumbull had no image of them.

Trumbull painted Franklin and John Adams in London, Jefferson in Paris and John Hancock and Sam Adams in Boston. He painted Edward Rutledge in Charleston, S.C., George Wythe in Williamsburg, Va., and Josiah Bartlett in Exeter, N.H.

He took nine portraits from images painted by others. Trumbull painted Gen. William Whipple of New Hampshire from memory. He had no image of Benjamin Harrison, but based his portrait on Harrison’s son, who resembled his father.

Guide to the portraits in 'The Declaration of Independence' by John Trumbull.

Guide to the portraits in ‘The Declaration of Independence’ by John Trumbull.

The Capitol

The Capitol wasn’t even rebuilt from damage caused in the War of 1812 when John Trumbull got the commission to paint four monumental paintings to hang in the rotunda. He received $8,000 per painting, a sum that would have cheered his father.

But he was 62 years old and had only one good eye. Critics saw he’d started to lose his touch with his portraits of Thomas Lynch, Samuel Chase, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. Some thought his large painting wasn’t as good as the smaller, original version.

John Randolph of Virginia didn’t like the painting at all.  He said it should be called ‘Shin-piece,’ for ‘surely never was there before such a collection of legs submitted to the eyes of man.’

Some say it looks as if Jefferson stands on John Adams’ foot, representing their troubled relationship. The Architect of the Capitol says no. The painting had suffered from humidity, smoke and dirt. So restorers overpainted the feet to repair damage, which created the impression.

Fame, No Fortune

Despite its critics, the Declaration of Independence painting quickly became one of the most famous in American history.

It was immediately reproduced as an engraving, one of which Lafayette framed and hung on his bedroom wall.  Currier and Ives printed and sold thousands of copies. It appeared on the two-dollar bill and as a postage stamp. A reproduction hangs in the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.

john-trumbull-two-dollar-bill

In 1830, John Trumbull was living in a New York City apartment filled with his paintings. He was short of money. He and Yale professor Benjamin Silliman agreed he would donate his paintings to Yale for a lifetime annuity of $1,000. Yale had to house them in a fireproof building that Trumbull designed.

And so the Yale University Art Gallery – the first college art museum — began in 1832 to house Trumbull’s paintings.

John Trumbull died in 1843. He and his wife Sarah were buried beneath the Yale University Art Gallery.

This story about John Trumbull was updated in 2022. 

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Six Brutalist Buildings In New England

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Two of the most famous Brutalist buildings in America are still provoking strong emotions in New England decades after they first reared their heavy concrete heads.

The massive buildings – Boston City Hall and Rudolph Hall — are appropriately in Boston and New Haven. Both places are key to the development of modern architecture.

For example, the influential modernist Walter Gropius found a home in Boston after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. He joined the faculty at Harvard, where he brought modern ideas about architecture to the United States.

And in New Haven, Yale President Whitney Griswold’s building campaign from 1950-1963 had an outsize influence on modern architecture. Glass-and-steel International Style office buildings are called Yale Boxes.

Brutalist Roots

Like much New England architecture, Brutalism came from Britain. The British didn’t love it much. Prince Charles called a Brutalist shopping center in Portsmouth, England, a ‘mildewed lump of elephant droppings.’

Many Brutalist buildings were part of urban renewal programs and, like urban renewal, were born of idealism and quickly viewed as a big mistake.

Brutalist buildings got shabby fast as concrete aged faster than the architects predicted. They turned out to be unfriendly to pedestrians and difficult to subdivide.

When Michael J. Lewis entered architecture school in 1980, Brutalism was ‘unlovely, irrelevant, a universally acknowledged historical blunder.’

And now it’s coming back.

Nikil Saval, in the New York Times, wrote in October 2016, that enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings is taking hold.

“Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness,” he wrote.

Brutalist buildings can be found throughout New England. Here are examples of six for you to love or hate.

Rudolph Hall, Yale University

brutalist rudolph hall

The Yale Art and Architecture Building was the crown jewel of Yale President Whitney Griswold’s modern building program after World War II. Under Griswold, nearly a dozen new buildings were designed by such leading modernist architects as Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft and Philip Johnson.

Paul Rudolph, who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard in 1963 designed the Brutalist Art and Architecture Building.

Critics called it ‘the most provocative American building of the decade.’

Rudolph, then chair of Yale’s architecture department, created a heavy concrete structure with 36 (or 37, depending on who’s counting) levels within seven stories.

The building had problems from the start. First, art students threatened to picket the dedication ceremony. Then during the ceremony itself, 2,000 people heard architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemn the building as oppressively monumental.

And yet it appeared on the cover of every major architectural magazine, and New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it.

Inside, the building had bright orange carpets, incandescent lighting and plaster casts of Classical artworks.

Sculpture students had to work in small, dark studios in the sub-basement. The rope curtains didn’t keep out sunlight.

“It ignored about two-thirds of its users,” said Mark Simon, an architect who had to use it. Richard Benson, who taught in the building for 18 years, called it ‘awful.’

A spectacular fire raced through the building not five years after its dedication. It was widely believed (though never proven) the fire had been set by student architects forced to use it. Yale remodeled the building, cutting up the interior space into a ‘depressing rabbit warren of white-walled rooms.’

Yale then spent $126 million to restore and expand the Brutalist building, renaming it Rudolph Hall. The New York Times called it, ‘a masterpiece of late Modernism.’

Hillside, Colby College

brutalist colby

The problem with Brutalist architecture, wrote critic Michael Lewis, was that people ‘could not be made to see that the problem with modern architecture was that it was insufficiently surly.’

Corporate and commercial clients wouldn’t buy Brutalist architecture. Only administrators of academic institutions, government and the occasional church seemed to like it.

In Waterville, Maine, Colby College administrators belonged to that select group. The college hired Boston architect Ben Thompson, a partner of Walter Gropius, to design dormitories. He came up with a network of five interconnected dorms called Hillside.

A confidential student guide to Colby describes them as ‘ugly.’ “But they have their charm, including spacious common rooms, that cozy small-dorm feeling, and their own parking lot…  Plus, “I live in Hillside” can be another point of bonding– bonding through adversity, hah.”

Boston City Hall

brutalist Boston_city_hall

Boston City Hall arose from the urban renewal program that demolished the immigrant West End neighborhood in the 1950s. From the rubble rose the State Health, Education and Welfare Service Center, designed by none other than Paul Rudolph.

Mayor John F. Collins then continued urban renewal with the New Boston program. It leveled the bawdy Scollay Square neighborhood, to the regret of countless sailors.

Collins wasn’t careful enough for what he wished. When presented with the blueprints of City Hall, he is said to have gasped. Someone in the room then said, “What the hell is that?”

The architectural firms of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty designed the Brutalist behemoth and completed it in 1968.

It is easily the most hated building in the city. Boston’s late mayor Tom Menino wanted to tear it down. So did the next mayor, Marty Walsh. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow agreed with them. “Its great crime isn’t being ugly; it’s being anti-urban,” he wrote.

“The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm’s length,” he wrote. “It disperses crowds, instead of gathering them together. It creates an island of inactivity, several blocks long and wide, in the middle of what is otherwise a bustling commercial district.”

Some, though, view it as a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. An American Institute of Architects poll listed it as one of the 10 proudest achievements of American architecture in 200 years.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

brutalist phillips exeter

The writer Tom Wolfe had little use for Louis Kahn, the architect who designed the Brutalist Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H.

Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, described Kahn as a ‘shambles,’ who had deep within a ‘molten core of confidence.’ “Kahn would walk into a classroom, stare blearily at the students, open his mouth… and from the depths would come a remarkable voice: “Every building must have … its own soul.”

Kahn was hired in 1965 to design a home for the Phillips Exeter’s 60,000 volumes. The collection has grown to 160,000 since the library opened in 1971. Today it’s the largest secondary school library in the world.

Kahn designed the library in three concentric squares. The brick outer ring includes the outer walls and the library carrel space, the concrete middle ring holds the stacks and the inner ring is an atrium with circular cutouts that reveal the stacks.

In 1997, the American Institute of Architects 1997 gave the library the Twenty-five Year Award, which recognizes architecture of enduring significance and given to one building per year.

On the Brutalism website, someone commented,

This is exactly how I imagine the library from A Clockwork Orange (book).

Knight Campus, CCRI

brutalist knight campus

In 2017, admirers of the Brutalist style held a funeral for the John E. Fogarty Building, torn down in 2017.  (Watch the video here.)

It’s the third Brutalist building torn down in Providence. Also gone are The Outlet parking garage on Friendship Street and the circular Gulf gas station off Broadway.

But in Warwick, R.I., the Knight Campus of the Community College of Rhode Island still stands.

The Brutalist architectural firm The Robinson Green Beretta Corporation,  viewed the building as an educational megastructure. They rejected the traditional sprawling college campus with buildings separated by disciplines. Instead they tried to promote diversity and interaction among students in a single, gigantic structure.

It was built on the former Knight Estate, a gentleman’s farm owned by the founders of the Fruit of the Loom brand.

When the building opened in 1972, people already considered it outdated.

Cathedral Church of St. Paul

brutalist st. pauls

In 1971, a fire destroyed the Gothic Revival building where years to Episcopalians in Burlington, Vt., had worshiped. The city had undertaken a massive urban renewal project at the time. It therefore offered to swap the old St. Paul’s land for a large tract overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. Though controversial, St. Paul’s took the deal.

The cathedral’s leaders wanted to make a new architectural statement. They thought it shouldn’t function as a museum, but home to the arts, lectures and discussion. So an international competition was held, and the winner was a local firm  Truex, Cullins & Partners. The Brutalist building was consecrated in 1973.

Images: Rudolph Building, Yale By Photographer: interrupt; – edit of flickr image, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11872101; Hillside (Sturtevant dormitory), By Colby Mariam – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49324860; Boston City Hall, By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12229690 Phllips Exeter Academy Library, By Gunnar Klack – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57029474; St. Paul’s Cathedral, By Beyond My Ken – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29111530. This story about Brutalist buildings was updated in 2023. 

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The First Town Meeting Still Going in Six States

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Town Meeting dates to the European settlement of New England, and it persists today in town halls, schools and auditoriums.

Not to be confused with Town Hall meetings, it’s a form of direct democracy in which a community gathers and votes on budgets and policies.

Town Meeting Misery

A fan of Town Meeting once called them ‘a little primitive nursery of republican truth.‘ Others have called them ‘misery.’

Exeter, N.H., Judge Henry Shute did not enjoy Town Meeting. In 1898, he complained about Town Meeting, writing,

The hall is full of smoke, there are not seats enough, and the people walk restlessly to and fro, talk gossip, laugh and pay but little attention to the speakers, unless the discussion waxes warm, when there is a rush forward, and the speakers are loudly applauded or roundly hooted, as their opinions find favor or otherwise with the audience. Small boys and some not so small chase each other and wrestle, and the occasional attempt of some inebriated gentlemen to harangue the crowd in the back part of the hall meets with great favor.

The New England Historical Society tried to find the oldest continuously run Town Meeting in each state. We searched records to find the oldest town (or city, in the case of Vermont), when it held its first Town Meeting and whether it’s still held.  We did our best. If, however, you know of an older town with a continuous Town Meeting, please include it in the comment section below the story.

Windsor, Conn.

Town Meeting first church Windsor

First Church of Windsor

Puritans settled Windsor, the oldest English town in Connecticut, in 1633.  In the early days, every man deemed a ‘freeman’ had a duty to attend Town Meeting. The town fined men for failing to attend without excuse.

The town convened meetings as often as needed. Sometimes they published orders and laws from the General Court, sometimes after Lecture Day or on Training Day when all the men would attend.

Windsor originally held Town Meeting in a thatched hut surrounded by a stockade. Eventually it moved to the First Church of Windsor

To be an inhabitant, you had to have a good character, a blameless life and honest conversation. Women weren’t allowed to be inhabitants, nor were vicious and abandoned persons, idlers, vagabonds and paupers.

In 1637, Connecticut’s General Court decreed that unmarried young men couldn’t live by themselves or with a family unless the town allowed it. Disobeying the law brought a fine of 20 shillings a week. In Windsor, Town Meeting decided who should stay and who should go.

Berwick, Maine

Berwick Town Hall

Berwick Town Hall

On June 9, 1713, Berwick became Maine’s ninth town. Since Maine’s older towns no longer have town meeting – or, like Castine, didn’t hold Town Meeting until later — we’re going with Berwick as having the oldest Town Meeting in Maine.

Berwick got its start in 1630, the first settlement in Maine to survive. Two others, Saint Croix Island and the Popham Colony didn’t last long. For nearly a century Berwick was a parish of Kittery, considered ‘too poor and low’ to ever form a town. Among its early settlers were indentured royalist soldiers from Scotland. The Roundheads captured them at the Battle of Dunbar during the English Civil War and sold them as slave labor.

Berwick held its first Town Meeting in the meeting house built in 1706.

Today, Berwick offers a handy guide for newcomers to Town Meeting with questions and answers such as, “Won’t I seem like an idiot if I ask questions?”

Plymouth, Mass.

Reconstructed meeting house at Plimoth Plantation

Reconstructed meeting house at Plimoth Plantation

Dorchester, Mass., claims its early selectmen established the New England Town Meeting. On Oct. 8, 1633, Dorchester passed an order establishing that form of town government. Dorchester, however, has since become part of Boston — and the Pilgrims held a town meeting (then called court day) in 1622.  So the distinction of having the first goes to Plymouth, Mass.

Gov. William Bradford ran the first town meeting of Plimoth Plantation in 1622 in order to divide land among the families.

The other fledgling towns followed the Pilgrim example and held annual meetings as well.

In Massachusetts, the General Court in 1635 enacted the New Towne Ordinance. It authorized each town to dispose of common property, order its civil affairs and to choose its ‘own particular officers.’

The meetings tended to get raucous, though, and in 1715 the Massachusetts General Court passed another law requiring Town Meeting to elect a moderator.

The disorderly carriage of some persons in the meetings….the affairs and business thereof is very much retarded and obstructed…at every such meeting a moderator shall be first chosen by a majority of votes, who shall thereby be empowered to manage and regulate the business of that meeting.

Only freemen had the right to vote in colonial government elections. They were shareholders in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and male property owners. But all adult taxpayers could vote in town government.

A special mention goes to Pelham, Mass., which has the oldest town hall in continuous use for town meetings. It was built in 1743.

Exeter, N.H.

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Settlers founded Exeter in 1638, one of the first four townships in New Hampshire. It’s the only one of the four to still hold Town Meeting.

During the earliest days, the men of Exeter came to the town center and voted on how to divide up land. Then they had refreshments, perhaps an Election Cake, rum or hard cider. They brought their African-American servants or slaves. The black servants elected their own shadow government, called the ‘Negro Court,’ as they did throughout New England.

In addition to dividing land, electing officers and setting budgets, Exeter Town Meeting resolved controversies. According to the Exeter Historical Society, in 1641 a goodman with an illegible name let his pig run wild through the fields. The pig spoiled some corn planted by the Squamscott Indians. The town had guaranteed them the right to plant and harvest their own crops. Exeter Town Meeting consequently voted the goodman had to give the Indians a bushel of corn.

Exeter usually held its meeting in March. Starting in 1855, the town held it at the Exeter Town Hall. Sawdust was spread on the floor to sop up the mud on meeting-goers’ feet.

New Hampshire allowed towns to adopt a ballot vote in 1996, and two years later Exeter did just that.

In 2019, Exeter already held its first Town Meeting, called a Deliberative Session, in February, but it scheduled an election for March 12 at the Talbot Gym.

New Shoreham, R.I.

Block Island from the ferry

Block Island from the ferry

Town Meeting has disappeared from nearly half of Rhode Island’s towns. Since Rhode Island adopted the Home Rule Amendment to its Constitution in 1951, 15 of the state’s 31 towns abandoned the Financial Town Meeting as the final step in adopting a budget.

New Shoreham — Block Island – is one of the 16 towns that still hold Financial Town Meeting.  It’s also one of the oldest towns in Rhode Island. And according to our research, its Town Meeting is the earliest recorded in Rhode Island, dating to 1672.

New Shoreham’s annual Financial Town Meeting is held at the Block Island School on the first Monday in May. The town has held the longest Town Meeting in recent memory: 4-1/2 days in 1991. It also holds the distinction of being the smallest town in the smallest state in the country.

Vergennes, Vt.

Vergennes Opera House and Town Hall

Vergennes Opera House and Town Hall

Most towns are bigger than Vergennes, Vt., which incorporated as a city in 1788 without first incorporating as a town or a village. Though its annual meeting is called a City Meeting, we’ll grant it the honor of ‘oldest town meeting.’

Vergennes was settled in 1766 along the Otter Creek Falls. The settlement had big ambitions to develop as an industrial center.

For a while it succeeded. The Monkton Ironworks Co. became the biggest iron foundry in the United States by the War of 1812, when it made the fittings for the fleet that defeated the British on Lake Champlain. Commerce boomed until the latter half of the 19th century, when the railroads made Vergennes’ location on waterways irrelevant. Today it’s the smallest of Vermont’s nine cities, with a population of 2,588 in 2010.

Vergennes still has an annual meeting, called a City Meeting, that dates to 1789, the year after it incorporated.

The annual City Meeting is held at the Vergennes Opera House, a restored 1897 building that houses City Hall on the first floor.

Photos: Plimoth Plantation Meetinghouse By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002716; Block Island By Billy Hathorn at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17667939. This story was updated in 2021. 

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Wentworth Cheswell, the Black Man Who Rode With Revere

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In the middle of December 1774, messengers on horseback carried news to the people of New Hampshire’s seacoast. Two British warships were headed to New Castle to reinforce Fort William and Mary. The messengers, or dispatch riders, helped organize the resistance. One messenger was Paul Revere. And one was Wentworth Cheswell.

Revere made quite a few rides before war broke out, and so did dozens of dispatch riders before and during the American Revolution. As part of the secret patriot network, the riders shared intelligence about the enemy and communications between the colonial provisional governments.

Wentworth Cheswell took a number of rides like Revere. He volunteered to serve in the military and fought at Saratoga.  He is also considered New Hampshire’s first archaeologist — and the first African-American elected to public office in the United States.

Wentworth Cheswell

He was born on April 11, 1746, to a biracial father, Hopestill Cheswell (sometimes spelled Cheswill), and Katherine Keniston,  who was white. Hopestill was the son of a white woman and an enslaved black man, Richard Cheswell. Under the laws of the day, Hopestill’s status followed his mother, making him free.

Eventually Hopestill’s father bought his freedom. and in 1717 purchased 20 acres of land in Newmarket, N.H. Richard’s land purchase is considered the first by an African-American in New Hampshire.

John Paul Jones House

John Paul Jones House

Hopestill, a housewright and carpenter, built the John Paul Jones House in Portsmouth, N.H., as well as the Samuel Langdon House (now in Sturbridge Village). He also built the Bell Tavern (since burned in the Portsmouth fire of 1867).

Hopestill earned enough money to send Wentworth to Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield, Mass. Wentworth took advantage of his unusual educational privilege and worked as a schoolmaster in Newmarket. By the time he reached 21 he owned more than 30 acres and a pew in the meetinghouse.

At 21 he married 17-year-old Mary Davis of Durham, N.H. They then had 13 children. Their descendants identified as white, and the census listed Cheswell as white. Records of comments by his contemporaries suggest they viewed him as biracial.

Public Office

In 1768, 22-year-old Wentworth Cheswell won election as town constable. George Mason University determined that made him the first African-American elected to public office. Cheswell beat out Vermont’s Alexander Twilight for the honor. For all but one year of his life, Cheswell held public office including town selectman, assessor, scrivener, justice of the peace and auditor.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood

His civic involvement included founding the Newmarket Social Library with several other men and bequeathing his books to it.

He also won election as town messenger for the Committee of Safety, which meant he had to carry news to and from the patriot Committee of Correspondence in Exeter.

Riding With Revere

For several years, New England colonists had risen up in sporadic violence to protest Parliament’s taxation and restrictions. Boston had its Tea Party, Providence its Gaspee Affair and New Hampshire its Pine Tree Riot — to name a few. In the fall of 1774, the British government grew concerned about the rebellion then developing. And so it secretly banned the export of munitions to the American colonies. Redcoats also seized gunpowder in Charlestown, Mass., in September.

Boston’s patriot leadership knew that only a few soldiers guarded Fort William and Mary. They believed British troops and ships would sail to New Hampshire to secure the fort. And they thought the gunpowder and weapons at the fort would serve a more useful purpose in patriot hands.

On Dec. 13, 1774, Paul Revere rode the 66 miles to Portsmouth with a letter from Boston’s Committee of Correspondence to its counterparts in Portsmouth and Exeter. The letter advised them to seize the weapons and gunpowder at the fort before the British warships arrived.

Portsmouth mustered volunteers for an assault the next day on the British soldiers who guarded the fort. The men of Newmarket, a strongly patriotic town, wanted to take part in the attack as well. But where and how?

Wentworth Cheswell then rode to Exeter to find out from the Committee of Correspondence where the Newmarket volunteers should go. The next day, 400 New Hampshire men marched on the fort and forced it to surrender. They took 100 barrels of gunpowder, light cannon and small arms.

The ships never arrived, but the patriots used the gunpowder and weapons in the Siege of Boston.

Wentworth Cheswell, Town Father

Some people claim Cheswell rode north from Boston on April 18, 1775, alerting the countryside to the British attack even as Revere did the same riding west.  Local historian Rich Alperin, however, said there’s no evidence Cheswell ever made that ride.

Cheswell did enlist in Col. John Langdon’s Company of Light Horse Volunteers and fought at the Battle of Saratoga. When he finished his military service he returned to Newmarket, where he ran a store next to his schoolhouse. As a prosperous, well-educated citizen, he continued his leadership of the town.

When he realized that Newmarket’s town records might disappear, he copied them all by hand in a journal. The Newmarket Historical Society now holds them.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds another document written by Cheswell — a letter sent to the Rev.  Jeremy Belknap. The letter contains descriptions of artifacts left by indigenous people that Cheswell recovered around Newmarket. Belknap included the information in his history of New Hampshire, and Cheswell earned the distinction as New Hampshire’s first archaeologist.

Wentworth Cheswell died at age 70 of typhus on March 8, 1817. He and his descendants were buried on his farm.

Missouri Compromise

Three years later, Wentworth Cheswell’s name surfaced on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Sen. David Morril of New Hampshire rose to speak against the Missouri Compromise, which forbade biracial people from obtaining citizenship in Missouri.

“In New Hampshire there was a man by the name of Cheswell, who, with his family, were respectable in point of abilities, property and character,” Morril said. “He held some of the first offices in the town in which he resided, was appointed justice of the peace for the county, and was perfectly competent to perform with ability all the duties of his various offices in the most prompt, accurate and acceptable manner. But this family are forbidden to enter and live in Missouri.”

This story about Wentworth Cheswell was updated in 2022.

Image: Historic marker By Slulek – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68100118. To read more about Paul Revere’s ride to New Hampshire, click here. 

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