Tag:

Fall River Mass.

The Rise and Fall of the Fore River Shipyard

The Fore River Shipyard started out as a farm in East Braintree, Mass., when Thomas Watson bought it.

Watson had loaned money to his boss, Alexander Graham Bell, to help him develop the telephone. He was the same Watson who Bell had summoned through the phone with the words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”

Thomas Watson

Bell repaid his assistant with a 10 percent share in what would become the Bell Telephone Co. Watson sold the shares and bought the farm, where he started work on marine engines. His company, the Fore River Engine Company near the Weymouth Fore River, would give birth to one of the largest shipyards in the country, if not the world.

Fore River Shipyard

Under Watson’s leadership, the company’s reliable, high-quality engine acquired a reputation that spread throughout the Eastern Seaboard.

The depression following the Panic of 1893 turned out to be a godsend for the fledgling yard. The U.S. Navy awarded two contracts to build two destroyers, the USS. Lawrence (DD-8) and the USS Macdonough (DD-9). This boondoggle was augmented with an award to build the U.S. lightship LV-72. These would be the last ships constructed in East Braintree. In 1901, the yard moved to Quincy Point.

USS Rhode Island, ca. 1904

In 1902, the keel was laid for the USS Rhode Island (BB-17). Launched in 1904, the Rhode Island took part in the two- year around-the-world cruise of the Great White Fleet. The USS Vermont (BB-20) was also built there and launched in 1905.

Fore River Submarines

John Philip Holland, an Irish engineer, developed the first submarine officially commissioned by the U.S. Navy. The Navy launched his sub, called the USS Holland, in 1900. However, the boat needed improvement. Its storage batteries gave off toxic fumes that killed the crew.

John Holland in one of his submarines.

Nonetheless, the Imperial Japanese Navy entered into a licensing agreement with Holland and contracted with the shipyard to build five submarines. After completing the subs, the yard then disassembled them to ship to Japan, presumably for use in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).

Submarines for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Fore River Shipyard.

Holland worked on improving his first designs, and came up with the USS Octopus (SS-9), launched in 1906.

The Octopus was the first American submarine built in the yard, but not for John Philip Holland. The Electric Boat Company had purchased the Holland Torpedo Boat Company. However, EB didn’t have a yard of its own, so it subcontracted with Fore River to build what turned out to be 69 American subs up until 1922.

Electric Boat, now a subsidiary of General Dynamics, today has a shipyard in Groton, Conn., a fabrication plant in Quonset, R.I. and a design and engineering facility in New London, Conn.

Pre-World War I

We jump ahead to the pre-WW I years. The thriving Fore River Shipyard built and launched destroyers, submarines, merchant ships and four battleships. Bethlehem Steel, the main supplier for the yard, finally bought it to protect its interests in 1913.

Joseph P. Kennedy ca 1914

The yard then began to ramp up production in anticipation of entering World War I. In 1917, a 28-year-old Irish-American named Joseph Kennedy started working as an assistant general manager at the yard now known as Bethlehem Fore River, later Bethlehem Quincy.

In that job, Kennedy got to know Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant secretary to the Navy. Roosevelt later appointed him ambassador to the United Kingdom.

World War I

In 1918, the Bethlehem Fore River Shipyard built an impressive 18 destroyers, 10 submarines and six merchant ships. Altogether, the yard built 71 destroyers during World War I, more than all the other U.S. shipyards combined.

Bethlehem Fore River even built a destroyer, the USS Reid, in a record-breaking 45.5 days.

The Roar Turns to a Whimper

During the Roaring ‘20’s and then the Depression years, the Quincy yard produced a whole series of naval ships: submarines, destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers, as well as merchant ships. Among them, the “Queen of Flattops,” the USS Lexington (CV-2) in 1927.

“Lady Lex” started out as a battlecruiser, but the Washington Naval treaty of 1922 ended the construction of all new battleships and battlecruisers. So the Navy converted the ship into one of the first aircraft carriers. When a drought in late 1929 caused hydroelectricity shortages in Tacoma, Wash., Lady Lex’s turbo-electric propulsion system supplemented the city’s electricity.

The launch of Lady Lex.

During the Great Depression, the yard built the USS Wasp (CV-7) and a few other ships. But business slowed, and employment dwindled to 812 by 1931.

World War II

The specter of World War II brought a surge of construction that started in 1938.

Employment reached 17,000 in 1941. By 1943, the payroll at the Fore River Shipyard reached–in today’s dollars– $1.63 billion.

James J. Kilroy worked as an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard during World War II. He said he used the famous phrase, “Kilroy was here,” to mark rivets he had inspected as ships were built. Later, sailors would find the phrase in places like sealed hull spaces. Kilroy later won election as a Massachusetts state representative, and the phrase was engraved on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Another interesting employee joined the shipyard as a welder in 1942: 20-year-old Florence “Woo Woo” DiTullio. The nickname Woo Woo developed because groups of men would holler out “Woo Woo!” when she walked by. She paved the way for 2,000 women who would work at the yard during the war. She came to be known as Winnie the Welder.

Over the course of the war, some 32,000 people worked at the Fore River Shipyard. They built and launched many destroyer escorts and landing ships from the yard.

They built a second USS Lexington (CV-16) to replace the first, sunk early in World War II.

Fore River Shipyard workers eventually built 71 destroyers during the war, more than any shipyard in the country. To support this output they built a boiler plant at Fields Point in Providence, R.I.

USS Massachusetts in Battleship Cove.

They completed and launched the USS Massachusetts (BB-59) in 1941. Her crew called her “Big Mamie.” She can still be toured today at Battleship Cove, at Fall River, Mass., a testament to the quality of the work at Fore River. One of the welders who worked on the Massachusetts and the aircraft carrier Lexington came from Barrington, R.I.–Leo Caisse, my father, who learned his trade while serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Fore River Postwar Years

The postwar years were not kind to the Fore River Shipyard. The world had too many ships. In 1954, the yard did win orders for five destroyers, five tankers and a fleet oiler.

However, in 1955 the shipyard bid on some of the Forrestal-class aircraft carriers, but lost them to the Newport News and New York naval yards. The navy, however, awarded Fore River contracts for the building of four frigates as a consolation prize.

After the war, shipbuilding continued and included some noteworthy ships, including the USS Bainbridge (DLGN 25) and the USS Long Beach (CGN 9), both nuclear-powered guided missile ships. Fore River also built destroyers, frigates, the liner Independence and the supertanker Manhattan, among the first ships to traverse the Northwest Passage.

A Texas Tower

Interestingly, the Fore River Shipyard built two radar towers in the 1950’s, Texas Tower 2 and Texas Tower 3. These were U.S. Air Force Air Defense Command platforms, similar to oil drilling platforms, placed along the East Coast to detect Soviet bombers. Texas Tower 4, built in Maine, tragically collapsed in a winter storm in 1961, killing all 28 men off the coast of Long Island.

Sister Yard

In 1964, the General Dynamics Corporation purchased the Fore River Shipyard. It became the sibling shipyard to Electric Boat. General Dynamics invested heavily in the yard, including a 1,200 ton crane nicknamed Goliath capable of lifting up to a thousand tons.

During its tenure in Quincy, General Dynamics built all kinds of naval support vessels and civilian merchant ships as well as several nuclear submarines. Then it shifted all that work to Electric Boat. From the 70’s to the 80’s, 10 liquefied natural gas tankers were built in the yard. Many of them are still in service today.

The yard built and delivered five (MPS) Maritime pre-positioning ships to the U.S. Navy between the years 1985-86. From two miles at sea, these vessels could deliver and support, with all their supplies, 4,000 Marines for 30 days.

Return of the Salem

By the 1980s, the U.S. simply had too many shipyards, and Quincy failed to win any contracts. That led to the closure of the Fore River Shipyard that year.

USS Salem

Eventually, General Dynamics sold off the equipment, and none of the efforts to reopen Quincy as a shipyard succeeded. On a brighter note, the USS Salem (CA-139) returned to its birthplace to become the main attraction for the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum at the former Quincy yard in 1994.

With thanks to the Haze Gray and Underway Naval History Information Center, http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College.

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 843 views

The Fall River Skeleton in Armor

The Fall River skeleton discovered in 1832 in a sand bank near a church had an unusual feature: It was clad in armor.

Sketch of the Fall River skeleton in armor.

Not 20 miles north another mysterious discovery had been made: Dighton Rock, a 40-ton boulder with strange writing carved in it.

And some 30 miles south in Newport, R.I., stood a stone tower that some – including a famous poet — thought the Vikings had built.

The discovery of the Fall River skeleton so near those other artifacts inspired theories that an ancient people had colonized America well before Columbus. Maybe they’d written their epitaphs on the rock found in Dighton.

If the skeleton survived, modern scientists might have solved the mystery. But the skeleton and its armor remained intact for only 11 years after their discovery.

Fall River Skeleton in Armor

Laborers uncovered a skull as they dug down a sand bank in the town of Fall River. They dug further and found a body in a sitting posture, enveloped in a covering of coarse dark bark. Copper bangles, brass arrowheads and triangular copper armor surrounded the Fall River skeleton. It had a belt made up of 41 small brass tubes.

Most people at the time thought the skeleton belonged to a Native American chief. Given Fall River’s location, he could have belonged to the Narragansett or Wampanoag tribe.

Some thought the Fall River skeleton belonged to a Phoenician, Carthaginian or Egyptian mariner who discovered North America.

Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

The skeleton took up residence in the Fall River Athenaeum, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow went to see it.

He liked what he saw.

“The skeleton in armor really exists. It was dug up near Fall River, where I saw it two years ago,” he wrote. “I suppose it was one of the old northern sea rovers who came to this country in the 10th century.”

Longfellow wrote a poem, The Skeleton in Armor. “I was a Viking old,” the narrator declares.

The Newport Tower

He included the Newport Tower in the poem. The Viking brought to the new land a wife, “a blue-eyed maid,” he wrote. She died, and “Under that tower she lies.”

Fall River Fire

The fire of 1843 destroyed both the athenaeum and the skeleton inside it. It happened when two boys playing with a small cannon set 20 acres of Fall River on fire, burning the post office, custom house, shops, banks, churches and the homes of 200 families.

The fire made it impossible to date the remains of the Fall River skeleton in armor. But it couldn’t have lasted more than a few centuries because it was buried in moist soil. That rules out the ancient mariner theory.

In 1881, Henry E. Chase of Brookline, Mass., debunked the theories about a pre-Columbian colony in an essay, Notes on the Wampanoag Indians.

Chase pointed out the Indians had a custom of stringing tubes of copper or brass in wide belts, and they buried their dead in a sitting position.

“We may regard him as a very ordinary and vain Indian, buried in his finery,” he wrote. “[O]r we may think of him as a successful warrior safely returned from a secret participation in King Philip’s war, and afterwards buried in the spoils which he had stripped from a fallen foe.

Several decades later, archaeologists discovered the brass arrowheads to be the same as those the Iroquois used.

Archaeologists eventually determined the Newport Tower was actually the remains of a 17th-century windmill.

But they never solved the mystery of the Fall River Skeleton in Armor.

Click here to read Longfellow’s poem, The Skeleton in Armor.

This story about the Fall River skeleton in armor was updated in 2022.

Images: Newport Tower By ajay_suresh – Newport Tower – Newport, RI, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110188720.

2 comments 696 views

6 Places That Used To Be Part of a Different State

For centuries, New England’s borders were anything but stable, and New Englanders didn’t agree on what they were. Maine was once part of Massachusetts, New Haven and Plymouth were separate colonies and Vermont belonged to New Hampshire – or was it New York? At least six places – cities, towns and parts of towns – used to belong to a different state until a border dispute was settled.

Of course all of Maine once belonged to Massachusetts, but that’s a separate story.

Here then, are six places that used to be part of a different state. Or so it was claimed.

Enfield and Suffield, Ct.

The Southwick Jog

Enfield and Suffield — two towns in Connecticut — began their American history as part of Massachusetts.

The two towns’ transition from Massachusetts to Connecticut took 162 years to fully accomplish.

The confusion about which state owned the towns dates back to 1642. With Connecticut seeking a charter from the King of England, Massachusetts officials decided it would be wise to survey the southern border of their territory.

To carry out the assignment, Massachusetts hired two English surveyors — Solomon Saffery and Nathaniel Woodward.

The two men had determined the border’s location by using the most southerly point of the Charles River for reference. From there, they established a point from which they could draw a line directly westward. But when they drew the line, the two surveyors actually placed one end of the line at the wrong location. The result was a diagonal line that extended some seven miles below where Massachusetts’ border was supposed to end.

This mistake set off the 162 years of fighting. Rightly or wrongly, people have pilloried Saffery and Woodward over the years. Some historians had said the pair were drunks, and that explained the mistake. Others have said they were unqualified — that they were sailors, not surveyors (though Woodward, at least, had a track record as a surveyor).

More charitable historians have suggested the instruments available to surveyors at the time were not the most reliable. Further, they note, Saffery and Woodward took a shortcut to their surveying — extrapolating from mathematical calculations rather than walking the land. They had to, in part, because they worked on land the Indians considered to be theirs.

Back and Forth to a Different State

Regardless, at first Massachusetts had the upper hand in the debate (Connecticut didn’t even have a charter). However, Massachusetts had one difficulty in maintaining its claim: it was clearly wrong. Every time surveyors from both Massachusetts and Connecticut investigated, they concurred Saffery and Woodward got it wrong in 1642.

In 1713, the two colonies got together and reached an agreement. Though the 1642 line was wrong, they both agreed to accept it with regard to the towns of Suffield, Enfield and the newer town of Woodstock. The towns would stay in Massachusetts. In return Connecticut would receive unsettled land in Massachusetts as payment.

A stake marks the southernmost point in the “Southwick jog” of the Massachusetts-Connecticut boundary. Seen from East Street in Granby, Conn.

The 1713 compromise satisfied everyone but the people who lived in the disputed towns. They still wanted to be part of Connecticut — probably because Connecticut had lower taxes and a more progressive government. In 1749, the disputed towns declared themselves part of Connecticut. This later prompted residents of Southwick, now bounded on three sides by Connecticut, to petition to join Connecticut, too.

This eroding away of Massachusetts was too much for its officials to accept. But negotiations had to be put on hold while the American Revolution was decided. Finally, in 1804 representatives from the two states got together and agreed that Southwick would stay in Massachusetts. The others would stay in Connecticut. The result was a small, square cutout in the border known to this day as the Southwick Jog. In Southwick today you can stand at the corner of Two States Road and Two States Avenue.

Seavey’s Island, Maine

Seavey’s Island

When Maine became a state in 1820, her 95,640 people lived in 232 cities and towns that had already been incorporated by Massachusetts.

Maine’s border disputes with Canada erupted in 1838 with the bloodless and often comical Aroostook War. The boundaries were famously settled by Daniel Webster.

But it was New Hampshire that caused the most recent border dispute.

The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, created in 1800, lies in the middle of the Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery, Maine. It was cobbled together over the years from five islands, now called Seavey’s Island.

The federal government owns the island, and for decades the U.S. Navy viewed it as part of New Hampshire – hence the name, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

Different State

Shipyard workers come from New Hampshire, which doesn’t have an income tax, and from Maine, which does. New Hampshire shipyard workers had to pay Maine income tax because Maine claimed Seavey’s Island.

In 2001, New Hampshire went to the U.S. Supreme Court and tried to get Seavey’s Island back.

New Hampshire claimed it owned the Piscataqua River to the Maine shoreline. Maine claimed the boundary between the two states ran down the middle of the river.

Unfortunately for New Hampshire, it had agreed in a 1977 lawsuit over fishing rights that the border ran between the middle of the river.

Maine got Seavey’s Island.

Fall River, Mass.

Fall River. The pink section at the bottom was once Tiverton.

Fall River started out as a rural outpost of the Plymouth Colony. In 1694, its southern neighbor Tiverton was incorporated as part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which by then had merged with Plymouth. In 1746, Tiverton was annexed to Rhode Island colony by Royal Decree. (So were Little Compton, Barrington, Bristol and Cumberland.)

In 1856, Tiverton decided to spin off its northern industrial section. It was called Fall River – Rhode Island. Five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court moved the state boundary to create one Massachusetts city of Fall River.

Bellows Falls, N.H.

The International Paper Co. in Bellows Falls, Vt., starred in the final chapter of the border wars between New Hampshire and Vermont in 1934. These disputes had gone on for hundreds of years, predating Vermont’s creation as a state.

In the 1600s, governors of both New York and New Hampshire were merrily giving away sections of Vermont to their friends. The King of England intervened in 1624. He established the New Hampshire border as the western edge of the Connecticut River. This border was largely accepted, though a group of dissidents in New Hampshire decided to secede in the 1770s. In 1778, the 22 New Hampshire towns from Chester to Haverhill declared themselves part of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vermont (after toying with and rejecting the idea of creating a new state altogether called New Connecticut).

New Hampshire took the news badly. It threatened to withdraw support for the American Revolution and to send 1,000 troops into Vermont to restore its borders. Even George Washington had to get involved in whipping the towns back into line. Under pressure from the Continental Congress, Vermont announced it was rejecting the towns’ bid to secede and returning them to New Hampshire.

Bellows Falls at high flow.

When Vermont was granted admission to the union as a state, one condition was that it renounce all claims to any lands to the east of the western edge of the Connecticut River as measured at low water. That settled the matter for more than 100 years, but the Vermonters would once again challenge New Hampshire.

Power struggle

From 1909 on, New Hampshire towns tried to assess taxes on power plants, canals and the International Paper Company’s mill at Bellows Falls in Vermont. The logic was this: the mill was powered by water in the river and, to get access to that water, it had to extend part of its plant beyond the low-water mark and into the middle of the river. Hence the subject properties were in New Hampshire. Vermont sued. The correct location of the border, it now asserted, was the center of the river.

As the dispute dragged on, some novel solutions were proposed – including diverting the Connecticut River altogether to move the border with it.

But swift and steady are the wheels of justice. Well, steady at least. In 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court finally settled the matter, granting New Hampshire ownership of the entire river to the western low water mark. By that time, International Paper Co. had abandoned its Vermont plant, for unrelated reasons, and the Bellows Falls economy was in a tailspin.

Pawtucket, R.I.

Fall River’s neighbor Pawtucket, R.I., comes from the Algonquin name ‘River Fall.’ And when the U.S. Supreme Court in 1861 gave Fall River, R.I., to Massachusetts, it gave Pawtucket, Mass., to Rhode Island as a consolation prize.

The original Pawtucket actually consisted of several towns. Part of it was known as Rehoboth, east of the Blackstone River. Rehoboth was part of Plymouth Colony. West of the Blackstone River a thriving industrial town (thanks to Sam Slater) was part of North Providence.

In 1828, Massachusetts carved out part of Rehoboth and called it Pawtucket, Mass. Pawtucket, Rhode Islanders were not happy.

After the Supreme Court gave Pawtucket, Mass., to Rhode Island, the North Providence land west of the Blackstone River went to Pawtucket. The two towns – East Pawtucket and West Pawtucket — then incorporated as the city of Pawtucket.

A Different State 4X

Windham County, Vt. Vernon is circled in red.

Vernon, Vt., received a charter as Northfield in 1672 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth, who grabbed much of Vermont for his own state, gave part of Vernon to another town he chartered, Hinsdale.

By 1779, four states claimed Vernon (then Hinsdale) due to bad surveying and squabbling over ownership: New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Vernon has successively had the names Northfield in Hampshire County, Mass.; Hinsdale in Cheshire County, N.H.; Hinsdale in Cumberland County, N.Y.; and Hinsdale in Windham County, Vt.

But the Hinsdale in Windham County, Vt., had a problem On the other side of the Connecticut River sat a Hinsdale, N.H. The Vermonters wanted their own identity and voted in 1802 to change the name to Vernon. They supposedly chose it after President George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon.

This story about places that belonged to a different state was updated in 2022.

Image: Southwick Job By Dynzmoar – This file was derived from: Southwick-stake.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31670390

3 comments 886 views

Carl Rettich, The RI Mobster Who Invented Cement Shoes

When Carl Rettich moved to a seaside mansion on Warwick Neck in Warwick, R.I., people thought he was a genteel lawyer named Charles Ryerson who moved to the neighborhood to take care of his elderly father.

The crime castle of Carl Rettich. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

He actually belonged to the mob and had links to Al Capone.

Carl Rettich

The New Jersey-born Rettich got involved with New York’s criminal underworld at 17. He overheard a plot to kill a wholesale poultry dealer, but kept his lips sealed about the murder. That got him started in the mob-controlled live poultry business. He soon moved on to bootlegging.

Suspected of a 1924 murder in New York, Carl Rettich moved to Rhode Island to run New England’s biggest crime ring during Prohibition.

When the truth about ‘Charles Ryerson’ emerged, so many people flocked to ogle his crime castle that an ice cream vendor showed up to sell his wares.

Prohibition

When Prohibition took effect, speakeasies sprang up all over Rhode Island (and elsewhere). Illegal hooch flowed freely in Kent County: in West Warwick, Old Warwick, Warwick Neck, Arctic, Apponaug and East Greenwich.

Smugglers operated with impunity along Rhode Island’s rugged shoreline, where quiet inlets and coves disguised their activities.

Danny Walsh, a prominent Rhode Island horse breeder, controlled the liquor smuggled into Rhode Island. Carl Rettich joined Walsh and began expanding operations. He bought the 20-room mansion overlooking a cove. The press later nicknamed it the ‘crime castle’ and ‘murder mansion.’

He lived large on Warwick Point. People said Rettich threw parties for politicians and ‘high-hat’ friends, during which he showed off his machine gun by firing it on the front lawn. The estate was so isolated the neighbors didn’t complain.

Carl Rettich also had a fleet of speedboats tricked out for smugglers’ every need. They each had three Liberty airplane engines and were plated with armor and layers of New York telephone directories. They would speed out to the 12-mile limit, where they unloaded bootleg liquor from seagoing vessels. Then the rumrunners brought their contraband to a stone dock leading to Rettich’s crime castle. They stored the booze in a secret underground vault before distributing it.

Then Danny Walsh and Carl Rettich had a falling out. Walsh disappeared in February 1933 a day after they argued in public. Rettich was suspected of accepting a ransom of $40,000 for Walsh and then doublecrossing Walsh’s family.

Grisly Tale

The Associated Press ran a story on June 3, 1935, speculating that Walsh ‘was stood in a tub of cement until it hardened about his feet, and then thrown alive into the sea.’ The AP reported it was just a ‘grisly underworld tale,’ and no witnesses had been found.

Police kept looking. An informant tipped them off to Rettich’s criminal activities. He told them Rettich’s crime castle contained a secret vault and an underground tunnel.

In April 1935, police acted on a tip. On the banks of Lake Pearl in Wrentham, Mass., they found the body of Andino Merola slumped over a Chevrolet with a .38 bullet in his head. Merola was a small-time associate of Carl Rettich, and police believed he was involved in the murder.

In July, police got a warrant to search the crime castle. They combed the property, but found no tunnel, no vault. The basement was spotless, with four whitewashed brick posts.

A Few Beer Cans

One detective thought the basement looked too clean. He looked carefully and found a large screw in one of the posts. When he turned it, the cement floor rose slowly to the ceiling, revealing steps that led to a concrete room. But they only found a few beer cans in the room.

Police discover the secret vault. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

On the rest of the property, though, police found an arsenal of weapons, a car with bullet holes in it and stolen money.

Police eventually accumulated evidence implicating Rettich in the disappearance of Danny Walsh, a dozen Massachusetts bank robberies and four murders.

As details about the real Carl Rettich emerged, his crime castle took center stage. On May 5, 1935, a crowd of 15,000 people came to rubberneck the 20-room mansion.

Cement Shoes

Informants told police that Rettich’s gang took Walsh to a dungeon and clubbed him on the head. They put his body in a barrel filled with concrete and dumped it into the ocean.

His girlfriend talked too freely about what happened to Walsh, they said. Rettich’s men took her to the underground vault, killed her and put her feet in a tub of wet cement. Then they dumped her into the ocean. Putting a whole body in wet cement was just too heavy.

No one ever found their bodies. But Carl Rettich spent the rest of his life in prison anyway, convicted on multiple charges for a Fall River mail heist that netted $129,000.

Carl Rettich built his crime empire with help from corrupt public officials. Prosecutors later discovered that Rettich and his gang had paid off Warwick police for three years. An investigation uncovered the bribes, and 11 police officers left the force.

This story was updated in 2022.

5 comments 675 views

How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10^th and 11^th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors. Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20^th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres. The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H. Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

13 comments 1.1k views

Pass the Tourtiere, C’est Le Reveillon!

For many, many years, le reveillon was the way Franco-Americans ushered in New Year’s Day in New England’s Little Canadas.

Berlin, N.H., millworkers’ homes. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The reveillon is a long, late dinner preceding a holiday. Tourtiere is central to the meal. The celebrated meat pie, cooked and eaten during the shortest days of winter, often accompanies traditional Franco-American foods such as peas or pea soup, head cheese, croquignoles and ragout.

During the first half of the 19^th century, when the first wave of immigrants arrived, New Year’s Day exceeded Christmas in importance. On January 1, Franco-Americans exchanged small gifts, and children found presents under the tree or near the manger in the parlor. Sometimes their parents told them the presents came from le Pere Noel (a skinny version of Santa Claus) or l’Enfant Jesus.

Family and friends visited each other over the holidays, which stretched from Christmas Eve to January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany or la Fete des Rois. Franco-Americans would go to house parties in their neighborhoods in Nashua, Berlin and on the west side of Manchester, N.H. Other cities with vibrant Franco-American neighborhoods included Lewiston and Biddeford, Maine; Warwick and Woonsocket, R.I.; Fall River and Lowell, Mass.; St. Albans and Burlington, Vt.; and Bristol and Waterbury, Conn.

Historian Yves Roby noted that New Year’s was often a sad day for the Quebecois newcomers who worked in the mills. Because it wasn’t a federal holiday, the reveillon was replaced by a regular work day. Sometime before World War II, a Franco-American millworker complained,

Next Monday (January 1st), while our brothers and other relatives in Canada are celebrating New Year’s Day, we shall be going about our daily occupations.

Holy Day of Obligation

The Roman Catholic parish was central to life in New England’s Little Canadas, and New Year’s Mass was central to the holiday.

On the last Sunday of the year, the local church auctioned off unrented pews and parishioners elected new churchwardens, known as marguilliers.

St. Ann’s Church in Woonsocket, R.I.

Catholics celebrate the ‘Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God’ as a Holy Day of Obligation on New Year’s Day. At the end of the New Year’s Mass, the outgoing officer, along with an altar boy or the sexton holding a lighted candle, led his successor to the marguilliers’ pew.

Sometimes parishioners made a special door-to-door collection for the poor on New Year’s Day.

Many Franco-American families gathered before the reveillon for a solemn and emotional moment. They came to the home of the grandparents or parents, and the oldest son asked for the blessing. In The French-Canadian Heritage in New England, Gerard Breault wrote in 1986,

Everyone knelt before the grandfather who gave a benediction similar to that of the priest at the end of mass. As he made the sign of the cross over everyone, or each individual, he said: “Que Dieu vous benisse au nom du Pere et du Fils et du Saint Esprit. Amen.”

Always the tourtiere.

Then, wrote Breault, the blessing was followed by the classic Franco-American New Year’s wish: Je vous souhaite une bonne et heureuse annee, une bonne sante, et le paradis a la fin de vos jours! , or

I wish you a prosperous and happy New Year, good health, and eternal bliss when you pass on.

After the blessing, everyone stood up, kissed or shook hands and wished each other good fortune.

The Reveillon

Not quite a reveillon: Franco-American potato farmer and his family eat dinner in Wallagrass, Maine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Le reveillon, translated, means ‘the awakening.’ For some, that signifies a religious awakening. For others it means staying up all night for neighborhood house parties during the holiday season.

In the early 20^th century, Franco-American families in Winooski, Vt.., celebrated New Year’s with le reveillon. They ate tourtiere, head cheese, pea soup, pickled beets, roast beef and dumplings boiled in maple syrup. For dessert, they had pies and fudge. But always the tourtiere.

“Reveillon had to have tourtiere. That was a must,” Claire Chase, 91, told the Burlington Free Press in 2011.

Then came the late-night parties, called veillees.

There were sets carres – traditional dances — often accompanied by a fiddler, an accordionist, or maybe a piano, a mandolin, or a mouth organ. Family and friends would sing traditional songs like Minuit Chretien and Alouette. Maybe they’d have a glass of dandelion wine.

The traditional reveillon began to vanish after World War II. Today, even the last vestiges are disappearing.

With thanks to The French-Canadian Heritage in New England by Gerard J. Brault and Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities by Yves Roby. Tourtiere by Mack Male. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Franco-American flag By Robert Couturier (image JPG), Ec.Domnowall (modifications & vectorisation SVG) – francoamericanarchives.org, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15705488. St. Ann’s By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18819427

12 comments 908 views

Newer Posts

Older Posts