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The Great Lakeport Fire of 1903 Destroys a New Hampshire Village

Laconia, N.H., suffered several devastating fires over the centuries, but none so damaging as the Great Lakeport Fire of 1903.

A fire in 1846 wiped out much of Laconia, then known as Meredith Bridge and comprised of mostly wooden buildings.

The Lakeport Fire of 1903

Then on Nov. 11, 1860 a fire destroyed two-thirds of Laconia’s downtown business district. It started in a hotel stable and quickly spread, ruining all but two dry goods stores in the town. The town had only two fire engines and Meredith Village and Sanbornton Bridge came to help put it out.

Two Disasters

In 1902, Laconia suffered the first of two disasters within six months when an explosion destroyed the Masonic temple. The most imposing edifice in town, it housed two floors of Masons, the post office, city offices and a hardware and dry goods store.

It started with a fire, probably caused by a gas leak, and then the powder magazine in the basement exploded. The blast prostrated spectators and damaged many nearby buildings. It seemed a miracle that the explosion didn’t kill anyone, and eight inches of snow on the roofs kept the fire from causing further damage.

Conditions that spring, however, proved ideal for a devastating fire in Lakeport Village.

Great Lakeport Fire

Lakeport in 1903 was a bustling village of factories, homes, churches and an electric plant, located a mile-and-a-half north of downtown Laconia. It’s also five miles south of the Weirs Beach resort. At the center of Lakeport sits a power dam on the channel between Paugus Bay, an arm of Lake Winnipesaukee, and Opechee Bay.

The spring of 1903 had been exceptionally dry, so dry the National Weather Service would have put out a red flag warning. Strong winds gusted on the morning of May 26, when a fire started in the H.H. Woods hosiery mill. The alarm sounded at 2 PM.

The fire quickly spread to a lumber yard and Laconia Electric Lighting Co. The wind drove it uphill, carrying embers as far as four miles to the north and east.

Help arrived quickly by train from Concord, Franklin, and Dover. Tilton and Meredith brought help as well. The Laconia firefighters had only primitive firefighting equipment, though, and mostly pulled the engines themselves.

Burning Itself Out

Within four hours the fire consumed almost every building within 150 acres. It quite possibly ran out of buildings to burn, and stopped climbing when it came to flat land, according to the History of the Laconia Fire Department. The fire pretty much burned itself out, and firefighters called the conflagration under control at 6 PM.

The fire destroyed 108 homes, two churches, two factories, two blacksmith shops, a vacant mill, the fire station and the electric light plant. For the second time in a year, Laconians miraculously escaped death. Losses were estimated as high as $461,000, and 650 people lost their homes.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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Wonderland, Revere’s Brief, Brilliant Million-Dollar Amusement Park

In 1903 and 1904 the face of American public amusement changed with the successful opening of two new parks in Coney Island: Luna Park, which replaced Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park, and Dreamland, originally to be called Wonderland. Together with Steeplechase Park, they gave the relatively small Brooklyn district a high concentration of state-of-the-art attractions and rides.

Entrance to Wonderland through the Administration Building on Walnut Street, as it appeared in 1906.

Entrepreneurs in other cities saw the large crowds drawn by such parks and the potential profits. And so they started to construct their own amusement parks. They often named them after the Coney Island parks, with the result that Luna Parks, Steeplechase Parks, Coney Islands and Wonderlands blossomed across the country.

Because they all wanted the same high-draw popular rides, the parks were superficially very similar. Most had more than one of the popular attractions from the Coney Island parks. Those included a Shoot the Chutes water ride plunging into a central lagoon. They also had a LaMarcus A. Thompson Scenic Railway, a Tower of Light, a Fighting the Flames show and a Wild Animal Show.

The Wonderland Park that went up in Revere was another of these enterprises that hoped to cash in on such appropriated glory. Revere’s Wonderland, however, was larger and more impressive than most.

Revere’s Wonderland

It got its start with John Joseph Higgins, a real estate agent and a recent transplant to Chelsea, Mass., from Savannah, Ga. Higgiins managed to obtain almost 25 acres of land near Revere Beach. Located near the new narrow gauge railway, it was easily accessible from Boston – much more so than Norumbega Park to the west or the newly-opened Paragon Park on Nantasket Beach in Hull.

There were already amusements going up along the recently refurbished Revere Beach Boulevard, and Coney Island had shown the advantages of concentrating the amusements in one central location.

Somehow Higgins made the acquaintance of Floyd C. Thompson, who had spearheaded an attempt to build the largest amusement park in the world in Coney Island. Thompson bought up Steeplechase Park and nearby property. He intended to tear down most of the amusements and construct a completely new park.

The deal fell through when the consortium he put together could not raise enough funding to complete the purchase. This left Thompson and his co-investors on the edge of bankruptcy. But the experience left Thompson with contacts for performers, crowd-pleasing acts and architects of rides. He threw himself into the construction of Wonderland Park in Revere, lining up railroad and mining magnates as investors and contacting ride inventors.

A photograph of the Shooting the Chutes ride from the Wonderland Souvenir Book. You can see how the boat leaps into the air.

The Rides

The centerpiece of the park was, as in many of these parks, a Shoot the Chutes ride. A light skiff was drawn up a long ramp to a tower at the top, then released with a lubricating base of water. The boat would achieve such a high speed sliding down the ramp that it would skip across the surface of the lagoon like a stone. Thompson managed to acquire the largest Shoot the Chutes ride in the world, built for the 1904 St. Louis exposition. It had two tracks, so that boats could be released alternately from each side.

The front of the LaMarcus A Thompson Scenic Railway (which was next to the Beautiful Orient).

Revere Beach already had a Scenic Railway ride, but it was not constructed by the originator of that ride, LaMarcus Adna Thompson (no relation to Floyd). Floyd Thompson visited the Thompson Scenic Railway company and arranged to bring the first Thompson Scenic Railway to Massachusetts. The ride featured a railway track that undulated up and down with a gentle sinusoid rather than the high plunges and sudden turns that characterized later roller coasters. It took passengers to a separate building that housed dioramas of scenes from Venice and Vesuvius and other places around the world. Then it returned them along the undulating track to their starting point.

Descent Into Hell Gate

One of the most popular attractions of the St. Louis exposition had been the ride Creation, invented by magician-turned-ride inventor Henry Roltair. Dreamland at Coney Island had installed a somewhat reduced version of the ride. Wonderland attempted to obtain the rights to a copy of Creation, but the deal fell though.

The front of the Descent into the Hell Gate Ride.

They ended up with their own copy of another Dreamland attraction instead: Attilio Pusterla’s Descent into the Hell Gate. This ride took the passengers on a boat through a spiral track toward a center point where it dropped suddenly down into a lower level. The lower level was decorated as a cave populated by demons and mythological creatures. The riders disembarked and were brought to the throne of Satan himself, before emerging back into the sunlight.

Top view of the Descent into the Hell Gate ride from Attilio Pusterla’s patent, showing the spiral track the boats ran on (and, in dashes, the “underground” path they took after they dropped down).

Fighting the Flames

Another feature, virtually essential in amusement parks, was the Fighting the Flames show. This, too, had been a hit at the 1904 St. Louis fair. Both Luna Park and Dreamland at Coney Island imitated the show. They opened their copies within a few weeks of each other.

The “Fighting the Flames” postcard. This color postcard is a drawing, but it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the “set”, judging from photographs, and it depicts the show as it must have appeared during a night show.

Thompson contacted the leading theatrical agent in New York to get the talent to build his own. The show featured an entire city square constructed in an amphitheater with 3,500 seats. Twice a day, actors would stage a street scene, in the midst of which a fire would break out. Real retired and off-duty firemen would then rush in with examples of the latest fire-fighting and rescue gear to put out the faux conflagration.

Wonderland also had a Hale’s Tours, a sort of virtual reality ride. Patrons sat in a replica of a Pullman railroad car and watched a motion picture of a railroad journey, seen from the point of view of the engine, projected on the front wall. The amusement park also had a ballroom and restaurant, a wild animal show, a circus ring and an infant incubator exhibit. It had a Japanese Village, complete with a miniature Mt. Fuji, and a Beautiful Orient Near Eastern attraction with camels, a bazaar and belly dancers).

The Japanese Village, including its own miniature Mt. Fuji. The attraction features a Japanese torii gate, several bridges, tea shops, a jiu-jitsu demonstration, and a lecture on the recent Russo-Japanese war.

Changes

The attractions at Wonderland didn’t stay static. The circus acts changed every week, for example. The theater that housed Gillette’s Dog and Monkey Circus the first month was used for the musical revue The South Before the War for the rest of the summer.

The Beautiful Orient attraction as it appeared in 1906. If you look closely you can see a camel in front (the exhibit had a camel barn in the back). The banners hanging in the archways read “Turkish Wrestlers”. The attraction also featured “muscle dancers, which we would call “belly dancers,” and were considered scandalous at the time.

Even larger changes occurred from year to year. Although the large attractions – Shoot the Chutes, Hell Gate, the ballroom – remained every year, many of the others changed. So for the second year The Beautiful Orient gave way to the Florida Alligator Jungle (despite keeping its domes and minarets). The South Before the War became Willard’s Temple of Music, an attraction called The Fatal Wedding (a magic illusion) was replaced by a giant glass-walled water tank called Under the Sea.

The next year Willard’s Temple of Music became Paradise – The Show Beautiful. Under the Sea became Pilgrim’s Progress (a funhouse), and the Florida Alligator Jungle became Darktown. For that third season, the Fighting the Flames show was replaced by Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show.

Panic of 1907

By the end of the third season, however, Wonderland was virtually bankrupt. A large part of the reason was the Panic of 1907, a recession on the same scale as the more recent one of 2008. It sapped discretionary income and many amusement parks around the country, their business drying up, were forced into bankruptcy as well. Revere’s Wonderland was able to keep going with some financial sleight of hand. With some severe belt tightening, they were able to keep Wonderland going, and actually turned a profit in 1909. But the park continued to decline, possibly because so much of the park had to be shuttered, but also because it was not directly on Revere Beach, and was losing business to attractions along the Boulevard. Wonderland closed at the end of the 1910 season.

Cover of the 1906 Souvenir Book. The painting on the cover is from early 1906 and represents the park as it was then visualized, not as it was when built. But it’s very close in appearance. Things such as the large fountain in the foreground and the large round building on the right were never constructed.

It was not an uncommon fate. Of six amusement parks named “Wonderland” that had opened in the United States in 1905 or 1906, five had closed by 1911. The original park that gave these their name – Dreamland in Coney Island – was in financial straits in 1910. It finally closed when a fire started, ironically in that park’s Descent into the Hell Gate ride. The resulting conflagration destroyed the entire park.

Fireproof

That would not have happened at Revere Wonderland’s Hell Gate ride. Revere’s park had been especially constructed to be fireproof. It had non-flammable materials where possible, asbestos sheeting between walls, fire-resistant roofing materials and plenty of fire hydrants. It also had its own in-house fire department, separate from the one used in the Fighting the Flames show.

The leading fire insurance magazine of the day wrote those features up as an example of safe and fireproof construction. In its five years of operation Wonderland never suffered a serious fire. But that still couldn’t preserve it from bankruptcy.

The author of this story, Stephen R. Wilk is a scientist, engineer and author who lives in Saugus. His previous books include Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon and How the Ray Gun got its Zap!, both from Oxford University Press. He also writes genre fiction and a semiregular column for the Optical Society of America.

Check out more pictures of Wonderland at www.lost-wonderland.com. You can purchase Lost Wonderland: The brief and Brilliant Life of Boston’s Million-Dollar Amusement Park by Stephen R. Wilk from the University of Massachusetts Press or from book stores like bookshop.org.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Wallingford Tornado of 1878 Unleashes Terror on an Unsuspecting Town

The Wallingford Tornado of 1878 ranks as one of the worst natural disasters to ever strike Connecticut. It caused so much damage the ruined town center became a tourist attraction.

The town then was a burgeoning community of about 4,000 people along the Quinnipiac River. Many of its residents were Catholic immigrants who worked in two large silver factories.

The Wallingford Tornado wasn’t the only destructive tornado to hit Connecticut. The state has, along with western Massachusetts, a tornado alley that has experienced some of the worst damage in U.S. tornado history.

And in 1878, it took the Wallingford Tornado just moments to inflict terrible destruction on an unsuspecting town.

An empty shell left by the Wallingford Tornado. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

Connecticut Tornado History

Connecticut ranks only 43rd in the United States for tornado frequency, and most Connecticut tornadoes are weak. But occasionally an intense tornado strikes, and the state’s dense population gives the weather system more opportunity to wreak havoc. A Connecticut tornado can cause as much damage as its Midwestern siblings.

The first record of a Connecticut tornado happened in 1648. The settlers didn’t have much to say about it, other than on June 14, a ‘great tempest’ toppled trees somewhere near Hartford.

Then on June 20, 1682, a tornado destroyed forests in southern Connecticut. In the worst hit town, Shelton, the tornado left scarcely a tree standing along a half-mile-wide path.

During the Four State Tornado Swarm of 1787, at least five tornadoes starting in New Britain struck Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, killing two in Wethersfield. The first went from New Britain to Coventry in Connecticut, while another traveled from Killingly to Mendon, Mass. A third struck northeast of East Windsor and the fourth injured two while moving from Northborough, Mass., to Framingham, Mass. The fifth hit Rochester, N.H.

The Worcester tornado of 1953, one of the 25 worst tornadoes in U.S. history, killed 90 people in a 90-minute terror spree.

And back in Connecticut in 1979, the Windsor Locks tornado was one of the most destructive in history, killing three people and causing millions of dollars of damage.

Damage caused by the Wallingford Tornado.

The Wallingford Tornado

The Wallingford tornado struck furiously around 6 pm on Friday, Aug. 9, 1878. The black funnel cloud appeared over Mt. Tom and hit the Community Lake and created a 200-foot-high water spout.

Then it headed for the center of town.

Wallingford was completely unprepared for the disaster. The Wallingford Tornado ripped up trees from their roots, destroyed orchards and tore down at least 40 houses and 50 barns. It caused a fire to start, but fortunately rain put it out quickly.

The Wallingford Tornado also took off the top two floors of the new brick schoolhouse, wrecked the windmill, a brick factory and the Catholic church. The collapsing buildings killed most of the victims.

All that took two minutes.

In the end, the storm killed 34 people, mostly Catholic, at the rate of one person every four seconds. The tornado severely injured another 28 people and inflicted minor injuries on 42.

The Wallingford Tornado also uprooted telegraph and telephone wires, cutting off communication. A 12-year-old boy named John Hoey rode on horseback to Meriden, the next town, to seek help. Within an hour of the tornado touching down, trains began to arrive with rescuers. Seven doctors came a half hour later and turned Town Hall into a hospital.

Aftermath

The Catholic Church buried 25 of the victims on Sunday, two days after the Wallingford Tornado struck. Ten thousand people came to the funeral.

Over the next few days, special trains carried thousands more sightseers to see the destruction. They could buy refreshments to help raise money for the survivors. Factories in New Britain closed to workers could travel to Wallingford to view the carnage.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Bombshell That Tested 2 Friends: Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton

Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton formed a close, lifetime friendship during the American Revolution.

But during the Siege of Yorktown, Alexander Hamilton nearly got his friend Knox killed. He was fortunate that Knox was good natured enough to forgive him.

Both had youth, ambition and the esteem of George Washington. The bear-like Henry Knox, 31, had famously led a cannon train from upstate New York to Boston during the dead of winter. Washington aimed those cannons at the British soldiers occupying the city and forced them to evacuate. He then made Knox, a Boston bookseller, his artillery commander.

Hamilton was about six years younger and much smaller than Knox. He had served as Washington’s chief aide, drafting his letters and orders. He had a thirst for glory and an impulsiveness that sometimes caused him to take unnecessary risks. John Adams called him ‘conceited’ and a ‘puppy.’

Henry Knox, on the other hand, was far more prudent. And according to the French officer, the Marquis de Chastellux, he had a buoyant disposition. “He was ‘ingenious and true; it is impossible to know him without esteeming and loving him,” wrote Chastellux.

Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox.

Siege of Yorktown

Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox met in New York during the war and formed a close friendship. During the Siege of Yorktown, Washington assigned Hamilton a command of light infantry, while Knox remained in charge of artillery.

For several weeks in the fall, Continental soldiers labored to build a series of trenches and ramparts. Then they’d bombard the British stronghold on the Virginia peninsula.

According to military tradition, the army laying the siege conducted a ceremony called the opening of the trenches. The troops marched to their assigned positions with flags flying and drums beating, then set their flags in the ramparts.

Alexander Hamilton saw a chance to grab the spotlight. He ordered his men onto the ramparts to load and carry their weapons. Fortunately for the soldiers, the British were too amazed to fire at them.

James Duncan, an army captain, wrote that Alexander Hamilton wantonly exposed the lives of his men.

Unsoldierly

Washington had ordered the men in the trenches at Yorktown to shout a warning when they saw a British shell heading toward them. Alexander Hamilton thought that ‘unsoldierly.’

Knox, on the other hand, thought it made sense.

One day, the two men stood in a redoubt when a shell landed nearby, its fuse lit. Soldiers yelled ‘Shell!’ Knox and Hamilton both ran for cover. Knox staggered to shelter with Hamilton clinging to him. Worse, Hamilton made sure Knox was between him and the bomb.

Knox was not pleased. He grabbed the smaller Alexander Hamilton and pushed him toward the explosive.

According to a witness, “All this was done rapidly, for in two minutes the shells burst and threw their deadly missiles in all directions.”

As he brushed the dirt off his uniform, Knox said, “Now, what do you think, Mr. Hamilton, about crying ‘shell’?”

The British surrender at Yorktown.

Knox and Hamilton

It wasn’t the first time their friendship was tested. After Washington retired as president of the United States, a potential war loomed with France. President John Adams reinstated Washington as commander-in-chief, and Washington appointed Hamilton as his top commander.

The move infuriated Henry Knox, who had outranked Hamilton during the Revolution. He wrote a blistering letter to Washington and then retired to Maine.

With thanks to In the Hurricane’s Eye, by Nathaniel Philbrick.

Images: The Siege of Yorktown by John Trumbull, http://www.aoc.gov/cc/photo-gallery/ptgs_rotunda.cfm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1379717. This story was updated in 2022.

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Connecticut Battles Pennsylvania in the Pennamite Wars

The Pennamite Wars between Connecticut and Pennsylvania involved some of the worst brutality of the Revolutionary era. They also resulted in the name of a western state.

Settlers from both Pennsylvania and Connecticut claimed ownership of 23 miles along the Susquehanna River. Called the Wyoming Valley, it had lush, fertile plains that rarely disgorged a stone when plowed.

King Charles II had given the valley to Connecticut in 1662. Unfortunately, he also gave it to Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1768, a development company met in Hartford to divide up the Wyoming Valley into five towns, which they named Plymouth, Kingston, Hanover, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittston.

When the first Connecticut settlers arrived, they found Pennamites – Pennsylvanians – already there.

Fighting soon broke out. And then it broke out again and again for the next 30 years. The bloodiest fight – a massacre, really — in 1778 was later recast as a conflict of the American Revolution.

The Battle of Wyoming, however, had more to do with competition over land than revolution. Its brutality stoked such outrage that George Washington sent Gen. John Sullivan on a scorched earth campaign to retaliate.

First Pennamite War

When 40 Connecticut Yankees arrived in the Wyoming Valley, they set about building two forts, Durkee and Forty, on one side of the Susquehanna River. The Pennamites built forts Wyoming and Ogden on the other side to stop the Yankee encroachment on their land.

The two sides skirmished for years, though accounts vary on the number of casualties and what actually counts as a Pennamite battle.

In 1763, someone murdered a respected Indian chief, Teedyuscung. His son blamed Connecticut and raided a Connecticut settlement, killing more than two dozen people.

But those first conflicts certainly did not claim anywhere near as many lives as the Battle of Wyoming.

Pennamite War forts along the Susquehanna.

Battle of Wyoming

During the American Revolution, the Connecticut militia in the Wyoming Valley got called up to serve in the Continental Army. The departure of hundreds of able-bodied men left the Connecticut settlements vulnerable.

A British officer named John Butler decided to exploit Pennamite resentment against the Connecticut settlers. He recruited loyalist Pennamites as well as Iroquois Indians (who obviously had their own grievances against settlers) to attack the Yankees. They massed outside of Forty Fort on July 3, 1778.

Another Butler, a Yankee leader with a first name of Zebulon, led some 300 men from the fort to attack the much larger force of about 500 British soldiers, Pennamite Loyalists and Indian warriors. He should have stayed inside the fort.

Accounts of the subsequent massacre probably exaggerated the atrocities committed against the Connecticut Yankees. But the British-led forces claimed to take 227 scalps. Later accounts put the casualties at between 150 and 340 lives.

Atrocities

In 1891, Milo M. Acker presented to the Canisteo Valley Historical Society a toned-down account of the Battle of Wyoming. He described how John Butler’s men attacked Zebulon Butler’s forces, who then panicked and ran.

“Men were transformed into demons, and while Indian marksman skillfully wounded the flying Yankees in the thigh bone, thus disabling them yet saving them for future Tories, both Tories and Indians clubbed and scalped them as they tried to conceal themselves near by or in the water,” he wrote.

One Yankee, a German immigrant named Henry Pencil, hid in the willows on the river’s edge. His brother John, who took the Pennamite side in the conflict, happened to discover him. Henry, already wounded by an arrow, struggled up the bank, crying he would serve John forever if he would spare him.

“’Mighty well,’ was the taunting reply, ‘but you are a damned rebel,’ and the Tory shot him dead,” wrote Acker. “Even the Indians were struck with horror at this deed.”

A captain named Bidlack was thrown on a fire and held down with pitchforks while he burned.

And an Indian queen named Esther forced as many as 18 men to kneel around a rock, wrote Acker. “This fiend in woman’s shape danced slowly around the ring and crushed out their brains in turn, to the rhyme of a monotonous and blood-curdling death chant,” he wrote.

The Pennamite side burned nearly every Yankee house and barn, reducing the Wyoming valley to a smoking ruin.

The Battle of Wyoming

Sullivan’s Expedition

The Indians later denied committing any ritual torture, but the massacre had enormous propaganda value. The Yankees successfully branded the battle as one of Loyalists vs. Patriots. (Ironically, King George III had upheld the Yankee claim in 1771.)

A Scottish poet named Thomas Campbell wrote a poem about the battle, Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale. The poem was so popular that a western territory was named Wyoming after it, no doubt to the bewilderment of the Wyoming settlers.

The summer after the Pennamites massacred the Yankees, George Washington ordered Gen. John Sullivan to retaliate. In 1779, Sullivan led Continental troops and Pennsylvania militia from Easton, Pa., to upstate New York. They methodically torched 40 Iroquois villages and an enormous amount of stored corn and crops.

Many Iroquois starved to death the following winter, and the tribe never fully recovered from the Sullivan expedition. But they continued to harass the Wyoming Valley settlers for years.

Final Years of Pennamite Wars

In 1782, the Continental Congress decreed that the Wyoming Valley belonged to the Pennamites and the Connecticut Yankees had no claim to the land. Unsurprisingly, more violence broke out as Pennamite forces cleared out the Yankee settlers. They nearly succeeded.

Only 2,000 Connecticut Yankees remained, mostly women and children scattered in the woods. They suffered starvation and cold, with only primitive huts of bark and thatch to shelter them from the coming winter. Their enemies possessed all their property — houses, farms and crops.

Armed men from Connecticut and Vermont rushed to the region to defend against the Pennamites. Then in 1787, the Pennsylvania Assembly granted the Connecticut settlers the right to their lands.

By 1799 the final Pennamite War died down, when the new federal government decreed the Yankee lands part of Pennsylvania and the Yankees were Pennsylvania citizens with full rights to their lands.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about how Cleveland belonged to Connecticut.

Map of Connecticut Land Claims: By User:Kmusser – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1290884; the Wyoming Massacre, painting by Alonzo Chappel. With thanks to Kathryn Shively Meier, The Landscape of Indian and White Violence in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1753-1800, in Blood in the Hills
A History of Violence in Appalachia, ed. by Bruce Stewart. This story was updated in 2023.

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