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U-boat Victims of World War II: New England’s Secret Rescues

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Late in the afternoon of June 5, 1942, a Coast Guard lookout spotted a wooden motorboat puttering up Nauset Inlet with 20 windburned, exhausted men aboard. He’d expected them — U-boat victims. They had radioed for help to navigate to Cape Cod from the spot where their freighter sank 200 miles off Nantucket.

The lookout notified the Nauset Coast Guard Station, which sent three trucks carrying blankets, medical supplies and a surfboat to the survivors. By dinnertime they reached the station, where they had hot coffee and sandwiches. Four local doctors examined them. One survivor suffered from exposure after three days in an open boat and one had a broken eardrum, hit by a boom in the torpedo explosion. The other U-boat victims were fine. They took showers and slept, unbothered by curious civilians or prying reporters. The Coast Guard posted guards around the station, and the Red Cross volunteers kept their mouths shut.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

The 20 men belonged to the hundreds of traumatized U-boat victims rescued along the New England coast during World War II. The U.S. government did its best to keep their existence secret.  It had to because it didn’t want the public to know about the Battle of the Atlantic off the U.S. East Coast.  Over and over, the government and the military lied about the casualties inflicted by German U-boats sometimes just a few miles offshore.

U-boat Victims

Eight days earlier in New York City, the men in the lifeboat had boarded the Mattawin, a British freighter carrying 8.6 tons of military trucks, airplanes, guns and ammunition. The vessel had instructions to deliver the materiel to Alexandria, Egypt, for the Allied invasion of Africa.

Delayed a day by engine trouble, the Mattawin left Long Island Sound on May 31 with 71 souls aboard. Twelve passengers belonged to the American Field Service, a volunteer ambulance corps. Three gunners from the British military guarded the freighter with machine guns and a four-inch anti-aircraft gun.

At night the Mattawin  passengers and crew slept in their clothes because of the German U-boats prowling the Atlantic. In the first five months of 1942, U-boats sank nearly 500 ships, three a day.  They had left the sea littered with lifeboats, debris, loose cargo and oil slicks.

Attack

The Mattawin passed Nantucket Shoal Lightship at 6 a.m. on June 1, then headed  east-southeast toward Capetown. When night fell, eight men aboard the ship stood watch, the three gunners at the ready, according to Capt. Charles Sweeny.  They couldn’t see much, though, because clouds obscured the full moon.

U-505 captured off the coast of West Africa in 1944.

AFS volunteer Nicholas Madeira stood watch in the gun turret. “I’m pretty sure I saw the wake of the torpedo just before it hit,” he later wrote, according to historian Eric Wiberg in his book, U-boats in New England.

At 1:19 a.m., a torpedo exploded in the Mattawin’s hull, sending up a huge column of water from one of the hatches, Sweeny recalled.

Sweeny realized the Mattawin would sink fast. He ordered an SOS signal sent, the engines shut off and the lifeboats launched. The radioman then threw secret codes overboard. AFS volunteer Harry Blackwell pointed out a submarine 200 yards off the starboard side of the ship. “No time to look at the sub much,”  wrote another volunteer, Marshall Phelps.

Phelps, Blackwell, the other AFS volunteers and most of the crew quickly filed into four lifeboats without confusion. Three lifeboats pushed off. Minutes later, another torpedo struck. Captain Sweeny, still on board the sinking vessel, yelled to the others, “Every man for himself.” The last lifeboat remained in the davits, and Sweeny and four others hopped in. The Mattewin sank almost immediately, a mere 11 minutes after the first torpedo struck. Everyone had gotten off safely.

U-boats

Typically, the U-boat, U-553, waited for the crew and passengers to get into the lifeboats before firing the second torpedo. The Germans wanted to sink ships, not kill civilians. It wasn’t unusual for a U-boat to surface next to survivors in a lifeboat just after it had torpedoed their ship. The Germans would ask for the ship’s name, tonnage and destination. They’d then offer their victims water, cigarettes, bread and directions to the nearest land.

To win the war, Germany knew it had to delay the buildup of America’s war machine and interrupt supply lines to the Allies in Europe and Africa.  Germany sent its fleet of U-boats — 159 at peak strength — to sink merchants ships and oil tankers. The goal was to starve the Allies of industrial as well as military supplies.

U-Boat Victims on Lifeboats

The four Mattawin lifeboats had pemmican, cigarettes, chocolate, salted peanuts, 36 gallons of water and red sails. In the first boat, Sweeny had a sextant and chronometer. The fourth had a motor and a radio. For four hours they stuck together, rowing toward Cape Cod in the dark.  Sweeny figured they’d reach Cape Cod in seven days.

A crowded World War II-era lifeboat

At dawn they raised their sails. AFS volunteer Edward Fenton, Amherst Class of ’37,  wrote he’d never forget how beautiful it was — “the great red sail unfurling, and the sun upon it, and the men in their yellow suits against it. We sailed on all day, the other three boats following. We had an extremely good time in our boat, laughing, telling jokes; and the British engineers taught us a number of songs to which we have words.” Fenton would survive the war and write children’s books.

The four boats kept together until 2 p.m., when the third boat disappeared from sight. Sweeny told the motor launch to go ahead and find a rescue ship.

That night it rained,  making for uncomfortable slumber. As June 3 dawned, the third lifeboat remained out of sight.

Early that morning the launch spotted a Norwegian freighter, the Torvanger, which paused to let it come aside.  Capt. Leif Danielsen offered to take them aboard. When the men learned she was bound for Capetown, they said they’d prefer to try for Cape Cod.  Danielsen gave them some fuel. He then looked for the other lifeboats and steered toward them. They both declined to come aboard and continued sailing.

A motorized World War II-era lifeboat

Fenton, in the second lifeboat, recalled they had gone half an hour when they noticed the Torvanger was steaming toward them.

The Torvanger Turns Back

What happened aboard the Torvanger was this:

Rescues at sea, which sometimes took a long time, exposed the rescuer to U-boat attacks.  The Torvanger had risked U-boat attacks at least seven times in the past 48 hours. When she stopped for the Mattawin victims, she had already rescued two sets of U-boat victims. Some of them had been torpedoed on two consecutive vessels in the space of a week.

After she left the last Mattawin lifeboat, the Torvanger’s crew confronted Captain Danielsen. They were fed up risking torpedo strikes. After all,  three lifeboats full of shipwreck survivors told them they’d rather spend a week eating salted peanuts in an open boat than board a 7,000-ton freighter sailing unescorted across the Atlantic.

They demanded an armed escort before heading to Africa.

The Torvanger turned around and found two of the Mattawin lifeboats again. Captain Danielsen told the survivors  he’d decided to head back, and they agreed to come on board . But fog had drifted in and they couldn’t spot the other two Mattawin boats.

Survivors brought aboard a cutter

On board the Torvanger, Fenton recalled coffee and cheese in the salon, and a general reunion. “For the first time since the torpedoing, I found myself trembling,” he wrote. “The coffee slopped all over from my shaking hand.” That night Fenton bunked with the crew, along with another AFS volunteer, Richard Edwards,  nephew of future U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

The next day, June 4, the Torvanger encountered a convoy bound for Halifax, which welcomed the vessel to join them. By that evening they landed in Canada.

Halifax

Just as the U.S. Coast Guard did on Cape Cod, the Canadians kept the U-boat survivors under wraps.  After they landed in Halifax, Fenton wrote, “We were rushed in a bus to the Allied Seaman’s Institute, where tables had been roped off, with signs on them that read “Reserved – For Survivors Only.”

When the Mattawin’s launch landed in Eastham, the Coast Guard refused access to curious civilians, friends and newspaper reporters. The U-boat victims were whisked to an undisclosed location and interviewed by the U.S. Navy.

USCGC General Greene

On June 8, the third lifeboat was picked up by the Coast Guard cutter General Greene and taken to Nantucket. The island that month had taken in nearly 100  U-boat victims from four separate sinkings. Again, the Red Cross and the Coast Guard kept them sequestered. The survivors were taken to the Bennett Theater, where they slept on cots. Townspeople who brought clothes and bedding couldn’t get past the door. The General Greene then took the survivors to Newport for questioning by the Navy.

Throughout New England, 649 survivors of Uboats landed in a dozen ports, according to Wiberg. Some got counted twice, like the Mattawin survivors who landed at Nantucket and then Newport.

Nearly 300 landed in Boston and 160 in Newport. Nantucket hosted 133, Provincetown 62, and New Bedford 36. Portland, Maine, saw 50 U-boat victims. Other ports included New London, Conn., Falmouth, Mass., Eastham, Mass., Point Judith, R.I., Gloucester, Mass., Southwest Harbor, Maine, Rockland, Maine, and Brighton, Mass.

Southwest Harbor

The Navy had a harder time keeping a lid on the news that U-boats had attacked fishing vessels.  The Germans targeted fishermen because the Navy used them as observers. They had radio transmitters and “confidential fishermen observer kits.” They even got carrier pigeons to carry messages to shore.

On the same day the Torvanger picked up two U-boat victims from the Mattawin, U-432 shelled two Gloucester fishing vessels. The Ben and Josephine and the Aeolus were fishing southeast of Thacher Island. The Germans let the captains and crew escape in dories before delivering the coup de grace.

Mount Desert Rock, off Mount Desert Island

The survivors rowed for 14 hours, finally landing on Mount Desert Rock. They were interviewed at the Coast Guard station, then taken to the high school gym in Southwest Harbor, Maine. Local residents brought cots and bedding, baskets of food, fish chowder, hot coffee and dessert. The survivors then took a bus home, and their story appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times.

“When the full news became known, enthusiasm for the offshore fisheries declined sharply,” wrote Charles Dana Gibson, a relative of the Ben and  Josephine’s captain, Guiseppe Ciaramitaro.

The Lark

Just before dawn on June 13, 1944, U-107 fired two torpedoes and missed the 148-ton fishing vessel Lark, sailing off Cape Sable. The U-boat then fired a warning shot, and 25 of the 27 men aboard jumped into lifeboats. The U-107 then strafed the rigging, the pilot house and the hulls, damaging the boat and destroying two sails.  When dawn broke, U-107 slipped away. The captain, who’d stayed with the vessel, started the engine, picked up the men and made it back to his home port of Boston. There it tied up at a public pier on the morning of June 15.

The Navy decided to use the U-boat attacks as a publicity stunt, inviting the press to cover the story. The Navy pointed out it was the first time in two years anyone had seen enemy U-boats on the northeast fishing banks. That was a lie.

Why Lie?

Few today know that more than 5,000 people died in the Battle of the Atlantic — more than twice as many as at Pearl Harbor. The government did its best to cover it up. The Navy blamed torpedo attacks on boiler explosions or simply issued cryptic statements that a boat sank. During the early part of the battle, the Navy falsely claimed it had sunk far more U-boats than it actually did.

The news media also agreed to government censorship, which helped to hide the military’s incompetence in protecting shipping and the lives of merchant seamen.

Not until the spring of 1943 did the United States build enough oceangoing military strength to destroy U-boats faster than the Germans could build them.

Thanks to Eric Wiberg, author of U-Boats in New England, and uboat.net, on both of which this story relied heavily. 

Images: First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. Mount Desert light-station, looking N. Maine, 1894. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005688368/. Lifeboat, survivors rescued and General Greene, The Coast Guard at War: Assistance XIV, prepared in Public Relations Division Historical Section, Oct. 30, 1944.

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The Portuguese Farmers Who Made Falmouth Strawberries Famous

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In 1892, Manuel Viera Martins retired from whaling and bought a cottage in the Waquoit section of Falmouth, Mass. He and his 11-year-old son cleared the scrub oak and pitch pine off the land with axes. Then they planted strawberries. The next spring they picked their first crop. Over the next four decades, hundreds of farmers from the Portuguese islands would grow millions of Falmouth strawberries. They made the Cape Cod town the largest producer of the tasty fruit in Massachusetts—and, for a time, the United States.

Portuguese farmers in Falmouth

Today, Tony Andrews’ pick-your-own strawberry farm remains one of the last vestiges of the Falmouth strawberry juggernaut that peaked around World War II. But the Portuguese islands still have a presence in Falmouth. Kale soup is on restaurant menus, linguica and choriza on sale in the local grocery stores. St. Anthony’s Church celebrates a Day of Portuguese Mass.

And on Pentecost Sunday, the Holy Ghost Society honors its patron saint with a festa, serving free sopas to anyone who comes.

Falmouth Strawberries

Manuel Viera Martins, nicknamed Tio Calhau, may not have been the first Portuguese islander to plant strawberries in Falmouth. Local lore bestows that honor on John Emerald. While working at a gardening job, the story goes, Emerald saw some strawberry runners sprouting from a trash heap. He then took them home and planted them in the sandy soil of East Falmouth.

Whatever the case, the two men’s lives followed the trajectory of most of the Portuguese islanders who settled in East Falmouth. They came from the Azores, where poverty and oppression made for harsh living conditions. Later they came from Cape Verde.

St. Michael’s, one of the Azorean islands From which Falmouth strawberry farmers came. They also came from Pico and Faial

Most settled first in the cities of Southeastern New England – New Bedford, Fall River, Taunton and Providence. To this day the region has the densest concentration of people with Portuguese ancestry in the United States.

After settling in the cities the Portuguese islanders came to Falmouth, returning to their farming roots. They found work on cranberry bogs, farms and as day laborers. Then they bought land. Falmouth had plenty, and it was cheap – a dollar or two an acre. Cape Codders viewed it as worthless, but the Azoreans saw something else.

Immigration

Tio Calhau, born on Pico in the Azores in 1855, shipped out on a New Bedford whaler, the Kathleen, as a young man. He landed in New Bedford after four years at sea and collected his 1/140th share of the voyage’s profit. Then he signed up for another voyage on the Kathleen in 1875, and when it anchored in the Azores he jumped ship and went home.

Tio Calhau then married Maria Josefa Rodrigues, and in 1883 they immigrated to New Bedford. Tio Calhau took another whaling voyage, but when he came home Maria put his foot down: No more whaling.

In 1914, immigrants from Brava, Cape Verde, looking ashore from the Savoia as the await the disembarkation process to be finished. Photo courtesy New Bedford Standard-Times.

Whaling had brought many Portuguese immigrants to the United States. When whaling died out, the textile mills that replaced it drew more. Many took the packet service between New Bedford and the Azores, eventually a nine-day steamship ride.

By 1900, 142 people of Portuguese descent lived in Falmouth, then a town of 3,000. Of the 55 who had immigrated, 54 came from the Azores; the rest were born in the United States.

That was when the strawberry farms began to take off. By 1922, Falmouth had 300 acres of strawberry fields, many along the Davisville road. Most farmers had only 10 or 20 acres, but a few had 60 or 70. Altogether they extended over six to seven square miles. “One million quarts of them left her fields the past season!” gushed Cape Cod Magazine that year. And new land was being cleared every year.

Strawberries

Frank A. Waugh came to Cape Cod in 1920 to write about the Falmouth strawberries for The Country Gentleman. The Portuguese farmers had identified an agricultural opportunity overlooked by many, he wrote.

“Up until quite recent times agriculture had been considered a negligible institution on Cape Cod,” wrote Waugh. “Some persons, not excluding the natives, have indeed considered it a joke.”

Alice Valerio in 1930

(Waugh did note one exception: the cranberry.)

“These Portuguese farmers are honest, thrifty, hard workers and remarkably intelligent in their management of this somewhat complicated industry,” wrote Waugh.

He asked Manuel Garden, one of the leading Portuguese strawberry growers, how he cleared his strawberry land. “With my own hands and an axe,” Garden said.

The Emeralds

John Emerald (Americanized from Amaral) had two brothers, Frank and Manuel, who arrived from the Azores in 1898 and 1900, respectively. They married, had families, and grew strawberries, along with turnips, corn, potatoes, carrots and raspberries.

Early in the morning, Manuel would work on his farm on the Davisville Road, then bike to Penzance Point in Woods Hole to work as a landscaper on one of the estates. Then he rode home and worked his strawberry field until it got dark. Bit by bit he acquired more land. At first he’d buy an acre or two for $1 “and other considerations.” Eventually he could afford an acre of cleared land for $100.

Emily Emerald and her father Manuel

Manuel married Estrella Farias in 1903, and they had eight children. The Emerald clan reigned over Falmouth strawberries. Manuel’s brother John started shipping his strawberries in refrigerated railroad cars to Boston. When others followed, a local side hustle grew into a regional industry. Boston buyers knew the Falmouth strawberries as fern berries because the pickers packed them in layers of ferns.

The growers formed two cooperatives to market the berries, which sold in New York, Maine, New Hampshire,  Montreal and Quebec. At peak season, the railroad ran a special Berry Train.

Eventually, trucks replaced trains. They left after sundown to make the then-seven-hour round trip to Boston. At the industry’s height in 1947, Falmouth sent 32 trucks to market each night, carrying a total of 13 million quarts of strawberries. That amounted to half the commonwealth’s strawberry crop.

Child’s Work

Children worked in the strawberry fields along with their parents.  They fed and watered livestock, chopped kindling and filled the woodbox. As an adult, Joe Medeiros recalled school children walking the family cow to a pasture across the road from the school. “Come three o’clock, when they let us out of school, I’d call my cow,” he said. “The other guy would get his cow and we would walk home down Davisville Road.”

Because strawberries ripened over just a few weeks, children were allowed to leave school to pick them. Whole families picked strawberries. Bea Emerald, Manuel’s daughter, remembered picking 275 boxes of strawberries in one day when she was seven years old.

The Falmouth strawberry farms kept expanding, and they ran out of pickers. Most farmers hired about 10 pickers; the Emeralds had 25.

Bea Emerald would take the train to the Portuguese neighborhoods in Wareham, to knock on doors looking for pickers. If she didn’t find enough there, she’d go to New Bedford and Providence.

Strawberry pickers

By the Great Depression, when so many looked for work, 3,000 strawberry pickers came to Falmouth during the harvest when the town’s population was only 5,000.

Farmers built sheds on the property to house them. Picker sheds on the Davisville Road survived well past the zenith of the Falmouth strawberry industry.

Many pickers were Cape Verdeans, who had emigrated because of a severe drought in 1904. They earned two cents a quart.

The Church Built by Falmouth Strawberries

Devout Roman Catholics, the Portuguese farmers got permission from the diocese in 1911 to build their own church. They would call it St. Anthony’s, after the patron saint of the Azores. Farmers gave all the money from the berries picked on the peak Sunday of the harvest to the church. St. Anthony’s became “the church that strawberries built.” All the labor for the church was donated, and St. Anthony’s celebrated its first Mass — in Portuguese — in January 1924.

St. Anthony’s merged with St. Joseph Guardian of the Holy Family Parish in 2021.

Walking to church

Falmouth’s Portuguese communities also formed fraternal societies, such as The Fresh Pond Holy Ghost Society and the East Falmouth Holy Ghost Association. The Fresh Pond Society still puts on a festa in June. The celebration starts with a procession that takes a crown and a scepter to an altar, music, an auction and lots of Portuguese food — sopas, jag, cacoila and bacalhau, along with hot dogs and chips.

A third wave of immigration has contributed to the vibrancy of Portuguese culture in southeastern New England. It began in 1957, when a year of volcanic eruption devastated the Azorean island of Faial. Sen. John F. Kennedy then sponsored the Azorean Refugee Acts, which led to 100,000 Azorean refugees coming to the United States over 10 years. Today more Azoreans live in the United States than in the Azores.

Demise of Falmouth Strawberries

World War II brought the beginning of the end to the Falmouth strawberry boom. The war itself created a labor shortage, as people could get jobs with defense manufacturers or on the military installations on Cape Cod.

Soldiers from Camp Edwards would march up the Davisville Road to train for amphibious landings. The children who lived on the Davisville farms stood on the roadside and poured fresh strawberries into their helmets.

Strawberry growers tried to adapt to the wartime conditions. They held a picking competition between the sailors at Woods Hole and the soldiers at Camp Edwards. In 1944, German POWs at Camp Edwards went to work picking strawberries.

Tony Andrews

Antonio de Andrade, born in 1905 on Cape Verde, arrived in Providence as a 21-year-old sailor. He changed his name to Tony Andrews, and with his uncle bought 17 acres of land in East Falmouth in 1927. They cleared it and farmed it and expanded it to 50 acres. Nearly half had strawberries growing on them.

Tony Andrews bragged he could plant 5,000 strawberry plants in one day without machinery. But as pickers got hard to find, Andrews turned his farm into a successful pick your own operation during the mid 1950s.

Postwar development gobbled up the Falmouth strawberry farms, which dwindled to 150 acres in 1955, then to 12 in 1984. Of those, eight belonged to Tony Andrews. He died in 2006, and his seven children put the farm on the market. In 2018, the Town of Falmouth bought the farm for $2 million.  People can still pick strawberries on it in June.

With thanks to Sopas, by Lewis A. White, Strawberry Farming by Jennifer Stone Gaines and The Emerald Family of East Falmouth by Richard Kendall. 

Images: Strawberries By Marcus Vegas from Tallinn, Estonia – Delicacies, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4208712  St. Michael’s By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92988433. Vintage images of Falmouth via youtube, St. Anthony’s, Falmouth, MA, Living History.

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A Poorhouse in Each New England State

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The poorhouse was once a very real and often feared part of life in New England.

Poorhouses evolved from the English poor laws of the 16th and 17th centuries. They required the community, most often the town, to take responsibility for its poor residents.

During the earliest days of colonial New England, the poor often relied on families and neighbors for help. In Plymouth Colony, for example, most towns kept a herd of cattle to farm out to families in want. While poor families had the cows in custody, they could get milk and birth calves.

Eventually overseers were elected to find work for able-bodied people and help for those too old or feeble to work. A poor tax supported the overseer and the almshouse, the poorhouse or the poor farm.

The cost of caring for the poor caused some communities to warn out people who seemed likely to fall into poverty. Sometimes towns drove entire families away.

Benjamin Franklin didn’t think much of Boston’s first poorhouse, established in 1660. “There is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken and insolent,” he wrote in 1766. (Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher and companion, lived in a Massachusetts poorhouse.)

Other Massachusetts towns auctioned off their poor to the lowest bidder, a system called vendue. In 1786, Malden, Mass., auctioned Mary Degresha off to the lowest bidder, who earned six dollars a week for housing and taking proper care of her.

Often, poor people hired out to work as servants or laborers, a practice that bordered on slavery. Such abuse inspired change in the early 19th century, and the practice of hiring out gradually declined.

Financial panics — 1817 and 1837 — touched off waves of poor farms, as did the Irish migration during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s.

The poor were kept out of sight, on farms down back roads or in walled-off buildings. By the late 19th century, states were building asylums for the mentally ill. After the turn of the century, poorhouses declined and mostly old people lived in them.

Middletown, Conn., Alms House

Middletown Alms House

Middletown Alms House

Since the 17th century, Connecticut’s poor law required towns to take care of their impoverished residents. In the earliest days of the colony, blood relatives and neighbors provided for people in need. By the time of the American Revolution, towns began to build almshouses for the poor.

The Middletown Alms House,  built around 1812. is one of the oldest poorhouses still standing in the United States.

It still stands on Silver Street between the Connecticut River and the old Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane. In 1920, the Report of the State Board of Charities reported, “The bedrooms and beds appeared to be in excellent condition and the inmates seemed contented and well cared for.  About thirty-five acres of land are attached.”

That year, 64 of Connecticut’s 168 towns had a poorhouse or town farm. Other towns sent their poor away, sent them to the loweest bidder or placed them in asylums and hospitals.  By the end of the decade, only 50 towns still ran almshouses.

In 1853, Middletown moved its poor to a more remote location on Silver Street.

Click here for more information about Connecticut poorhouses.

Portland, Maine, Almshouse

Portland poorhouse

Portland poorhouse

After the American Revolution, Maine put its poor in the hands of overseers, who paid people to take them into their homes for a year.

Mercy Lovejoy and her five children, for example, were auctioned off in 1817 to a farmer who fed and clothed them in exchange for their labor. The town of Livermore paid him $3.95 for the six Lovejoys.

Larger cities and towns began to build almshouses and poor farms. The bodies of inmates who died in custody were shipped in barrels or boxes to the medical school at Bowdoin College.

Portland  may have had a workhouse since 1763. In 1803, the town established an almshouse next to the poor farm (now on the site is an ice arena). Portland police rounded up homeless people and sent them to the almshouse, which strictly regulated inmates’ behavior. Those who could had to work ‘cheerfully and faithfully.’

Portland closed the poor farm and almshouse around 1900 for a more modern hospital and workhouse. A cemetery on the property was dug up in 1904, and taken to a pit at Forest City Cemetery in South Portland.

Today a brick barn behind the Portland Expo still stands, the only remnant of the Portland almshouse and poor farm.

Falmouth, Mass., Poorhouse

Falmouth Poorhouse

The Falmouth poorhouse was built as a tavern in 1769. Then the War of 1812 caused a depression across Cape Cod, and the tavern owner packed up and left for Cincinnati. The town moved the tavern 4-1/2 miles next to the Methodist Cemetery, and it became the Falmouth Poor House.

The town fenced the land and later built a barn, which allowed it to reclassify the poorhouse as a work house. Anyone who refused to work would be confined in a cell or farmed out indefinitely.

In 1878 the poorhouse turned into a poor farm, which actually supported itself by selling food. It wasn’t closed until 1960. The seven people remaining in the poorhouse went on welfare and moved to hospitals. The poorhouse now stands empty.

Strafford, NH, County Almshouse

The Strafford County poorhouse

The Strafford County poorhouse

New Hampshire had a system of ‘poor in, poor out,’ with some poor people living at home. They got some help from the county, but they had to work.

Unlike the other states, which made their towns care for the poor, New Hampshire by 1866 required the county to provide for them. Each of New Hampshire’s 10 counties had a county poorhouse.

New Hampshire’s poor people generally had to qualify for help by living in a town and paying taxes for seven consecutive years. A 1904 U.S. government report summarized New Hampshire poor laws as follows:

The parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren of any poor-person, if of sufficient ability, are liable for his support. Town paupers requiring complete maintenance, except honorably discharged veterans who must be supported outside the almshouses, as well as those without town settlement, are cared for on county poor farms … The overseers have authority…to bind out paupers, and to apprentice children.

A fire destroyed the main building of the Strafford County almshouse in 1881, killing 13 people. The county replaced it with a large, three-story brick almshouse, designed to shelter 300 people. The insane asylum was also located at the site.

Twelve years later, the insane asylum burned to the ground, killing 40 of 44 inmates. “Forty Crazed People Burned to Death,” reported the local newspaper on March 10, 1893. “At the window could be seen the tortured faces of the demented inmates, now raging and howling fiends.”

A controversy broke out about conditions at the county farms, especially for children. By 1898, the county moved most poor children into foster care.

In 1907, Strafford County built a jail next to the almshouse, and in 1970 built the county nursing home in front of it.

Dexter Asylum, Providence, RI

Dexter Asylum

Dexter Asylum

Rhode Island philanthropist Ebenezer Knight Dexter bequeathed the funds for the Dexter Asylum when he died in 1824. He left his Neck Farm to the Town of Providence and stipulated that a wall surround it.

Previously, caretakers bid to the town for the job of taking in poor people.

Dexter left oddly specific instructions for the wall, which took eight years and $12,700 to finish.

The Asylum, a working vegetable and dairy farm, housed the poor, elderly and mentally ill. By the 1840s most of the residents were Irish immigrants indentured for six months. Men and women lived separately and only saw visitors once every three weeks. They had bread and tea for dinner.

The Asylum meted out punishment to those found guilty of drinking, immoral conduct, loud talking, disrespectful behavior or faking illness to avoid work. They confined such miscreants to a jail cell for three days and kept them on a short allowance of food. They confined the mentally ill in ‘maniac cells.’

By 1849, 190 residents overcrowded the poorhouse. Some of the mentally ill transferred to the new Butler Hospital. Eventually the Asylum capped its population at 100.

The Asylum then shut down in 1957, and playing fields replaced its gardens.

Today part of Providence’s poorhouse survives as the rough stone wall bordering Brown University’s Olney-Margolies Athletic Complex

Burlington, Vt. Poorhouse

Burlington Poorhouse

Burlington Poorhouse

In Vermont during the 19th century, towns or groups of towns built poor farms and poorhouses.

Burlington established its first poorhouse in 1816. During the Civil War, it filled with the families of deceased soldiers and with the families of draftees whose pay hadn’t reached them yet.

Many French transients came to Burlington from Canada in the depression after the Panic of 1873, while the Irish arrived during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s.

The Burlington poorhouse sheltered several hundred long- and short-term residents who slept on straw mattresses. In 1871, for example, 62-year-old resident Jerusha Waters was a crippled long-term resident. Mary Marks, 73, was blind and had lived there for 19 years.

Most, though, lived at the poorhouse for a short time, perhaps a couple of months. Often they arrived in the winter when they ran out of heating fuel and returned home in warm weather.

By the turn of the century, poorhouses fell into disrepute. Burlington’s poor were then directed to local affiliates of the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Elizabeth Lund Home for unmarried mothers and private nursing homes.

Photos: Middletown Almshouse By Steadyjohn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5722133; Strafford County Poorhouse By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34873317. Falmouth Poorhouse By Gabe20770 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95643580. This story about the New England poorhouse was updated in 2023.

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Secrets to a Long Life From Holders of The Boston Post Cane

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When the Town of Westmoreland, N.H., gave its Boston Post Cane to 113-year-old Mary Ray in 2008, she was believed to be the third oldest person in the world. Born in 1895 on Prince Edward Island, she was the second oldest when she died two months short of her 115th birthday. A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, she often ate cake and ice cream after a game.

Mary Ray

Mary Ray

Year after year in town after New England town, the board of selectmen presents the gold-knobbed cane to a very old person. It often hapens in the presence of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Often the recipient receives gifts or pins or plaques. A newspaper photographer snaps a photo and a reporter records a witty or poignant comment.

Usually the reporter asks the secret to a long life. The answers then range from luck to clean living to daily exercise. An awful lot of Boston Post Cane holders seem to love the Boston Red Sox.

On May 5, 2011, 100-year-old Ruth Green threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park.  The Lunenberg, Mass., holder of the cane, she had seen six Red Sox titles.

Boston Post Cane

Edwin Grozier

Edwin Grozier

The tradition of awarding the Boston Post Cane to a town’s oldest resident began in 1909, when Boston Post owner Edwin Grozier dreamed up the publicity stunt. The Post reigned as the most popular newspaper in New England for a century until it folded in 1956. William Beals founded it in 1831 along with Charles G. Greene, younger brother of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene.

The newspaper distributed the cane to 700 towns in the Post’s circulation area in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. They were made by J.F. Fradley and Co., a New York manufacturer, from ebony shipped in 7-foot lengths from the Congo. A 14-karat engraved gold knob topped the cane.

The towns only loaned the canes. Upon the recipient’s death, they were to be returned to the town. Sometimes that didn’t happen. Two Massachusetts towns, Dover and Watertown, lost the canes for a century before finding them and reviving the tradition.  The cane belonging to Lee, Mass., was found in the rubbish in Charlton, Mass., after 50 years. Farmingdale, Maine, recently got its cane back in two pieces, so now the recipient gets a plaque, as do many. Someone stole the Leominster, Mass., cane from the town offices during a renovation project. It later turned up on eBay. The town contacted the seller and ‘reacquired’ it.

Controversies

The Boston Post Cane Information Center has tracked down the canes from 494 towns of the original 700. The site reports several town, such as Florida, Mass., never got canes but made up their own.

According to the site, the Town of Barre, Mass., in October 2015 presented canes to Bess E. Difley and Warner F. “Bill” Smith, the only two recipients known to be born on the very same day — July 29. 1914.

    John Smith, first Boston Post Cane recipient in Grafton, N.H.

In Hudson, Mass., two people born the same year got into a fight over who should have the cane. The selectmen wrote to the Boston Post, asking what they should do. The newspaper told them to do what they wanted, so they retired the cane. Then Hudson brought it back in 2004 and gave it to Col.  Adelbert M. Mossman, 96.

In the early 1970s, Hampton, N.H., retired the cane. Selectman Ashton Norton called it too much of a pain. “We were having problems with people in nursing homes, and there was no way to find out who was the oldest or who was a native,” Norton said. “Then we’d give the cane out, and we’d get complaints that we didn’t give it to the right person. It got to be so much trouble the board decided to leave it in the town office building.”

Fear of the Cane

“People started to fear getting the cane,” said Hampton Town Clerk Jane Kelley. “The cane would be given out, and within a week, that person would be dead. It was awful.”

Nantucket put a stop to the tradition around 1998, when it became clear the cane was not a good omen for its residents.

In April 2006 the Bow, N.H., Board of Selectmen extended the time between the death of a Boston Post Cane holder and awarding the honor to a new citizen from 45 days to 60 days, ‘for respect and grievance purposes.’

In Unity, Maine, several people declined the cane because they didn’t want their neighbors knowing their ages.

Patten, Mass., gave the Boston Post Cane in 2006 to Lillian Perry Wheaton, age 96, at their Pioneer Days celebration. Lillian refused to take it home with her because she considered it bad luck.

Longevity Secrets

Others enjoy receiving the cane, especially if they get a party in their honor. As her 108th birthday approached in September 2016, Mary Cousins of Deer Isle, Maine, said she didn’t know the secret. “All I know is that I’m here, and I’m very thankful and happy for that.”

Cane holders often credited their longevity to work, genetics, God’s will, friends, family and exercise.  In March 2011, George Barner received the cane from Kennebunk, Maine, at 102. He attributed his long life to playing tennis and not smoking. Gordon Maddix of Berwick, Maine, forced himself to walk every day.

When Virginia Day Zimmerman of Monson, Maine, received the cane, she still swam every morning from Memorial Day to her birthday at the beginning of October.

Florence Brayson in Exeter, Maine, shared the secret to a long and happy life: Keep your mouth shut and mind your business. Anne-Marie Veilleux, 99, of Jay, Maine, said she never let anything bother her. Myrtle Mileage, of Mexico, Maine, said, “I just do as I please. I hear only what I want to hear.”

In 2009, Foxborough, Mass., passed its cane to Harry Cederlund, age 100.  He said he lived long because he ate well, didn’t smoke or drink and left the window open at night to let in fresh air.

But take heart, smokers and drinkers. Lillie Young Weissenberger received the cane in 2011 in Washington, Maine, at 94. Asked if she  drank or smoke or caroused, she smiled and said, “Oh, yes. We hung around with racing people, remember. We did all of that!”

Boston Post Cane: Not Funny

Some Boston Post cane holders demonstrated it’s never too late to get started.

Maude Thomas of Falmouth, Mass., received the cane at age 108 in 2010. She worked as an office manager at an architectural firm in Boston into her 80’s, enrolled in Harvard University and received her degree at age 75.

Doris “Granny D.” Haddock got the cane by Dublin, N.H., at age 95. She became famous when she walked across the continental United States between the ages of 88 and 90. She then lived another five years after receiving the cane.

Goffstown, N.H., gave the cane to May Gruber on her 100th birthday in 2012. She had led the Pandora knitwear company, run a 10K at age 65 and held a sign during the Occupy Wall Street protest at 99.

Becket, Mass., gave its cane to Margaret Peg Lynch, a sitcom pioneer who created the Ethel and Albert comedy series. When she got the cane, she thought about doing a show on Ethel and Albert getting older. But, she said, she couldn’t think of anything funny.


This story about the Boston Post Cane was updated in 2023. 

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A Mountain View Inspires ‘America the Beautiful’

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When a 33-year-old Wellesley College professor reached the top of Pikes Peak on July 22, 1893, she was so moved she scribbled a poem that became America the Beautiful.

The summit of Pikes Peak. Library of Congress photo.

The summit of Pikes Peak. Library of Congress photo.

Katharine Lee Bates was teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs that summer. She later recalled:

One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.

Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates

As soon as she reached her room at the Antlers Hotel she wrote down the poem, which she called ‘Pikes Peak.’ It morphed into America the Beautiful, with music by Samuel A. Ward. Ward found inspiration to write the tune on a ferry boat ride from Coney Island. He used a friend’s shirt cuff to write it down. The first version with Bates’ words and Ward’s music was published in 1910, and it caught on quickly.

Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates was born Aug. 12, 1859 in Falmouth, Mass., to Congregationalist pastor William Bates and his wife, Cornelia Frances Lee Bates. She graduated from Wellesley High School and Wellesley College in 1880. She taught for a few years, returned to Wellesley for her master’s degree, then to Oxford University for a year.

While teaching at Wellesley she also wrote prolifically: poetry, travel books and children’s books. Her second most noted work was a poem called Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride, which popularized Mrs. Santa Claus.

She never married. A colleague once described unmarried women as “a fringe on the garment of life.” She retorted, “I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don’t think I mind not being woven in.”

From 1890 to 1915, she lived with Katharine Coman, founder of Wellesley’s economic department, in a Boston marriage.

America the Beautiful author Katharine Lee Bates later in life

Katharine Lee Bates died in Wellesley, Mass., on Sept. 28, 1929.

America the Beautful, of course, lived on as one of the most beloved patriotic hymns in the United States. Many, many people have recorded it, including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Aretha Franklin and Charlie Rich. Ray Charles delivered one of the most memorable versions during America’s Bicentennial, then reprised it after 9/11. Newscaster Dan Rather cried briefly on The David Letterman Show while reciting the fourth verse just after the attacks, and the song became an alternate national anthem.

Photo of Katharine Lee Bates by RL, Find a Grave. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story last updated in 2023.

 

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