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When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned (and Partied) in Westport, Conn.

In 1920, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, Conn., so he could write, she could swim and they could both party their brains out.

The Fitzgeralds reigned as the king and queen of the Jazz Age. He was 23, she was 19, and their reckless high spirits – plus their drinking — had gotten them kicked out of several New York hotels.

American literature probably owes a debt of gratitude to the New York hotel managers who disinvited the Fitzgeralds. It was in Westport, after all, that Scott met a wealthy neighbor who inspired Jay Gatsby.

About a year after Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, they visited his family in Minnesota. Here Zelda is pregnant with their only child.

Westport

When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, the town had not yet evolved into a tony New York suburb. But it was getting there. A 50-mile train ride to Times Square brought commuters to Times Square, and it began to attract literary and theater types from New York.

In the Fitzgeralds’ era, Westport brought literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, Dorothy and Lillian Gish and Broadway producer John Williams for weekends in the country. A New York culture took root in the town, and by 2014, the local historical society exhibited many of the 767 New Yorker covers produced by artists living in and around Westport.

Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Martha Stewart, Sandy Dennis, Harvey Weinstein and Shirley Jackson all made their homes in Westport.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in this Westport, Conn., house. Image Courtesy Google Maps.

How Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned

The Fitzgeralds blew into town in a secondhand sports car in May of 1920. Neither had a clue how to keep house, so closets filled with dirty laundry and neither of them cooked. Eventually they hired a house boy named Tana.

Earlier that year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, sold out within four days of publication. It won him celebrity, a healthy income and Zelda’s Sayre’s hand in marriage.

Scott and Zelda wed on April 3, 1920 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and frolicked in New York City. But Scott needed to get back to writing his second novel, and so they honeymooned in Westport from May to September. Zelda rented a large colonial home where he had a separate room in which to write. She could also swim every day. Their neighbor, a multimillionaire named F.E. Lewis, let her cut across his property to walk to Compo Beach.

Compo Beach

Lewis had inherited a fortune – what would amount to $300 million in today’s dollars — and he lived on a 175-acre estate called Longshore.

Today, it’s the Inn at Longshore, hosting corporate events and destination weddings. Back then, Lewis threw extravagant parties that Scott and Zelda attended. They weren’t the only celebrities he invited. Dancer Anna Pavlova, magician Harry Houdini and movie star Marie Dressler came too. At one party he featured camels, elephants, vaudeville acts and a cowboy and Indian show. Theatrical producer David Belasco, mentioned in the Great Gatsby, came, and John Philip Sousa wrote music for one of his parties.

Drinking Again

When Scott and Zelda didn’t go to New York for weekend parties they invited friends to stay with them. They drank heavily and fought often.

A Princeton friend came to visit and wrote,

Went to visit Fizgeralds in Westport…stayed drunk for two weeks straight. Atmosphere of crime, lust, sensuality, pervaded the home.

Another classmate, critic Edmund Wilson, found the couple ‘reveling nude in the orgies of Westport.’

They tore along the Boston Post Road in their sports car with occasional stops at roadhouses to replenish their gin supply. Then Zelda wrecked the car by driving over a fire hydrant.

At a party, they reported a false fire alarm. According to one story, the firefighters asked where the fire was and Zelda pointed to her breast and said, “Here.”

Westport from across the Saugatuck River in 2010

Gatsby

After the Fitzgeralds honeymooned in Westport, they moved to a New York City apartment near the Plaza Hotel. They later moved to Great Neck, Long Island, from 1922 to 1924, then to Paris, all the while spiraling downward into alcoholism, madness and early death. Scott managed to finish only four novels.

For many years, people thought Scott Fitzgerald patterned the setting for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, on Long Island.

Then in 1996, a New Yorker writer named Barbara Probst Solomon asked whether Gatsby included a blend of their time in Great Neck and that first beachy summer when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport?’

Author Richard Webb, Jr., grew up in Westport, and he was sure the answer was yes. In 2018 he published his book, Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut 1920.

The book that tells the story of how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport.

The title alludes to the ending of Gatsby, one of the most famous in American literature:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This story about how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport was updated in 2023.

Images: Westport in 2010 by WalkingGeek via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Compo Beach by Carol M, Highsmith, estport United States Connecticut, 2011. August. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012630296/.

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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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The Vermont Country Store, Nine Surprising Facts

You can’t have missed the catalog for the Vermont Country Store in your mailbox, and you may well have visited one of its two actual locations.

Inside the store in 1946.

And even if you haven’t set foot in the store, you know what it’s like: the quintessential country store, with a pot-bellied stove, bolts of calico and glass jars filled with licorice whips and smarties.

The Vermont Country Store carries foods that have disappeared from modern store shelves, including Indian pudding, maple sugar, dandelion greens, balsam soap, yellow eye beans, dried apples and common crackers. The store also peddles a little retro nostalgia, selling Lifebuoy soap, Jubilee kitchen wax, Turkish taffy, Postum and Fuller Brush brooms.

But the history of the store and the people who founded it is probably not quite what you think.

The Vermont Country Store

For starters, the Vermont Country Store began as a mail order catalog, not as a general store. And the physical structure was originally an inn that founders Vrest and Mildred Orton restored as a replica of his father’s country store in North Calais.

Vrest Orton had a long career as a writer, publisher and editor before founding his country store. About his career change he wrote, “I have done all I could to influence men’s minds and nothing much came of it. Now I have decided to influence their stomachs.”

Here are nine other things you may not know about the Vermont Country Store and its founders:

1. A Chase & Sanborn Coffee ad inspired Vrest Orton to open the Vermont Country Store. During World War II, he worked as a speechwriter and propagandist for the Pentagon when he saw the ad: Four old men sitting around a checkerboard on a barrel near a potbellied stove as a shopkeeper pouring sugar onto a scale. After seeing the ad, he vowed to go back to Vermont full-time and revive an old-fashioned, authentic country store.

2. Vrest, a proponent of enlightened rural living, wrote an article in 1929 arguing that Vermont should secede from the United States. It should also squash everything ‘unVermontish,’ including ‘summer camps and hot dog stands,’ ‘tourists who patronize natives’ and ‘factories belching smoke.’ He wanted to forbid foreigners to buy land in Vermont unless they grew food on it.

3. The Saturday Evening Post gave the Vermont Country Store a huge boost when it ran a story in 1952 called The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains. It brought so much traffic they had to add to the back of the original building. And they eventually opened a second location in Rockingham, Vt.

4. Vrest maintained a warm friendship with Robert Frost for 25 years. He published a book of poems and remembrances after Frost died, called Vermont Afternoons with Robert Frost.

The Vermont Country Store.

36 Items

5. Mildred’s Christmas card list formed the basis for their first mail-order catalog in 1945, as soon as the war ended. They printed it on newsprint on the printing press in the garage and mailed it to about a thousand people. It had 12 pages and advertised 36 items. Mildred and Vrest wrapped products in brown paper and tied them with twine. Today 50 million store catalogs go out a year.

6. The Ortons were also friends with horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft came to visit the Ortons at their primitive farm near Brattleboro. Though a city boy who’d lived in Providence and New York, Lovecraft loved the experience. He learned to build a fire and round up cows. During his visit, the Brattleboro Reformer reported A Weird Writer Is In Our Midst.

7. As a young man, Vrest Orton worked for H.L. Mencken in New York City. He co-founded The Colophon, a book collector’s magazine, as well as the Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, Vt. He also co-founded Vermont Life magazine.

8. Vrest and Mildred together wrote a pioneering cookbook about wholegrain cookery in 1947, well before healthy eating became fashionable. Cooking with Whole Grains, still in print, includes recipes for regional foods such as Southern Johnnycake and Vermont Indian Pudding.

9. The National Register of Historic Places lists the Vermont Country Store as the first restored and operational rural general store in America.

Store interior: By The Vermont Country Store – The Vermont Country Store, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5372687. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Historic Buildings With a Clerestory

The clerestory window makes a lot of sense in New England because of the short, short days during the long, long winter. The clerestory brings in much (and much-appreciated) light.

Technically, a clerestory is a high section of wall that contains windows above eye level to bring in fresh air as well as light. Sometimes people confuse them with widows walks, at least from outside.

One can find a clerestory window in all kinds of buildings. Here are six historic buildings with a clerestory.

General Henry Knox Museum, Thomaston, Maine

The Henry Knox house in Thomaston, Maine, has a clerestory.

The General Henry Knox Museum is a replica of the mansion the revolutionary leader built in 1794 — but a good replica. By 1871, his house had gotten run down and the Thomaston Railroad backers wanted it for a right of way. So it fell to the wrecking ball.

After the turn of the 20th century, community members raised money to rebuild the house on a different site but according to the original designs. Those designs include a large clerestory that fills the house with light down to the first floor.

30 High Street, Thomaston

West End Library, Farmington, Conn.

This mini-version of the Boston Public Library has something the BPL doesn’t: clerestory windows.

The National Park Service calls the old West End Library in the village of Unionville in Farmington, Conn., ‘an unusually intact example’ of the nearly 2,000 libraries Andrew Carnegie gave away. Today it looks much as it did when built in 1917: Even the toilet room in the basement is original.

Back around the turn of the century, cities and towns rarely supported public libraries with tax dollars (few, by the way, still do). Local library organizations had a hard time finding a place to store their books. So Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, gave away all of his fortune, mostly to libraries. He singlehandedly doubled the number of public libraries in the United States, giving away 1,689. Of those, 95 were in New England. All but three are still standing, including the West End Library in Farmington.

A nationally renowned architect, Edward Lippincott Tilton, designed the old West End Library, finished in 1917. Like many Carnegie libraries, the West End Library is a miniature version of a famous large library: in this case, the Boston Public Library. But unlike the Boston Public Library the West End Library has clerestory windows directly above the main arched windows in the front and back.

The building operated as library until 1968, when it became a senior center. Then in 1984 the town leased it to the nonprofit Unionville Museum.

The National Park Service called the library ‘a testament to small-town civic achievement.’ It has significance not just as a historic building but as a contributor to the character of the surrounding village of Unionville, a historic district since 1978.

15 School St, Unionville, Conn.

Tate House, Portland, Maine

clerestory-tate-houseclerestory-tate-house

This house has a gambrel clerestory, once popular in New England. Now only two remain.

Capt. George Tate served as Maine’s last mast agent, overseeing the cutting and shipping of white pine trees to England for the Royal Navy’s masts. Tate may have thought the plum job set him up for life, but things began to go south for him.

Tate, born in 1700, moved with his family to the colonies around 1750s. He built himself a fine house in 1755 in what is now the Stroudwater Historic District, a section of Portland cut off from the rest of the city and containing many 18^th and 19^th-century homes.

The king’s first mast agent in Maine, Col. Thomas Westbrook, settled Stroudwater. He built some of the roads, a dam, a bridge, and sawmills and gristmills — in short, an early industrial village that thrived on the processing of white pine trees.

Tate brought paneling and wainscoating from England; the unpainted clapboard exterior disguises the lavish interior. The Tate House has a clerestory gambrel roof, once a common form of colonial architecture. Only one other survives in New England, in the Burnham Tavern in Machias, Maine.

But then in 1770 his wife Mary died at age 60. According to an entry on the findagrave website,

Mary Tate was killed by a booby trap set by her son William to catch thieves. William was convicted of her murder but was later pardoned by George III.

Then, of course, revolution broke out, in part due to resentment of the king appropriating the colonies’ white pine trees.

George Tate lived to be 94, dying in 1794. The house opens to the public in the warmer months.

1270 Westbrook Street, Stroudwater neighborhood, Portland, Maine.

Shaker Barn, Hancock, Mass.

clerestory-round-stone-barn-hancockclerestory-round-stone-barn-hancock

The clerestory in this barn let in light for milking cows and fresh air for preventing hay from combusting.

Shakers established Hancock Shaker Village in 1791, the third of 19 started between 1783 and 1836 Closed in 1960.

Built in 1820, the barn at the Hancock Shaker Village was probably the first round barn in the United States.

A model of efficiency and clever design, the barn has three levels, each with a specific use. The Shakers designed the big fieldstone barn for 52 cows, but it can hold 70. Once constructed, it attracted visitors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who raced each other on foot inside the building.

After a fire, the Shakers replaced the conical roof with a clerestory that let in light and fresh air, which prevented the spontaneous combustion of wet hay.

A ramp takes wagons filled with hay to the third level; because the barn is round, the wagons never have to back up, they simple circumnavigate the barn and exit through the same door they entered.

From the third level, Shakers could pitch hay to the cows on the second level, where they were milked.

The cows’ heads fit into stanchions so they could feed while they were milked. At the cows’ rear ends, the Shakers built trap doors so they could easily shovel manure into the first level. They let it accumulate until they spread it on fields for fertilizer.

34 Lebanon Mountain Rd., Hancock, Mass.

Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, N.H.

The clerestory in this Georgian house came from an English pattern book.

The Samuel Tenney house at one time or another involved five well-known New Hampshire figures: Dr. Samuel Tenney, who tended wounded soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill; his wife Tabitha, the first best-selling author in America; Tristan Shaw, U.S. congressman; Ebenezer Clifford, inventive master carpenter; and Bradbury Johnson, builder-architect.

Samuel Tenney built the house around 1800 where the courthouse now stands. Born in 1748, he served as a surgeon to the army to the end of the American Revolution. George Washington appointed him acting surgeon general at Valley Forge. After the war he had a long and distinguished career as a judge, U.S. congressman, author and scientist.

Tabitha Tenney was the best-selling novelist in the country for the first half of the 19^th century. Her novel, Female Quixotism, poked fun at the illusions of romance. Published in 1799, the book was still in print when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Ebenezer Clifford and Bradbury Johnson together built several landmark buildings in Exeter, including the First Parish Church, the second Phillips Exeter Academy building and the Atknson Academy building. The two men creatively adapted designs from English pattern books as the gabled clerestory in the Tenney house shows. Clifford, by the way, built and designed a diving bell that he used in the Exeter River.

Finally, U.S. Rep. Tristran Shaw lived in the Tenney house in the early 19^th century. The house was moved to its current location on High Street to make way for the courthouse.

65 High St., Exeter, N.H.

Upper Rockville Mill, Hopkinton, R.I.

The clerestory in this Rhode Island textile mill let more workers work longer.

The Upper Rockville Mill, built in 1844, typifies the granite mill buildings that dotted Hopkinton, R.I., in the 19^th century. What’s different about the Upper Rockville Mill: It used water power well into the 20^th century, and didn’t stop making textiles until the late 1980s or early 1990s.

The Rockville Manufacturing Company built the big granite mill on a hill in 1844, and ever since it has served as the town’s most prominent architectural feature. Like many Rhode Island cotton mills, it had clerestory windows that allowed more natural light and usable work space in the mill’s attic.

Two years later the Seventh Day Baptists built a church, and from then on village life revolved around the mill and the church. Seventh Day Baptists owned the mill, and everyone who worked there belonged to the church. As many as half the workforce were women and children.

The mill made cotton yarn, cloth, fishing line, twine and cord. Since it relied on water power, it could never expand too much, but it could survive for more than a century.

Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Upper Rockville for two reasons: It demonstrates the rise of the textile industry in New England, and how that industry created many mill villages in rural towns. In 1850, Hopkinton alone had more than a dozen mill villages.

332 Canonchet Rd., Hopkinton, R.I.

Christ Episcopal Church, Montpelier, Vt.

Christ Episcopal Church features a large round clerestory window ‘to the glory of Almighty God.’

The neo-Gothic Christ Episcopal Church reflects Montpelier’s growth and prosperity after the Civil War. The parish in 1868 replaced an old frame church built 30 years earlier with a substantial stone building. It had both a 100-foot tower and spire and a stained-glass clerestory window, a key feature in Gothic churches.

The building, though, suffered repeated damage. In 1903, a fire ruined the roof and the interior. Then in 1927 the flood that devastated Vermont also devastated the church, undermining its structural integrity. Though the parish repaired the church, it had to remove the spire in 1963. Then in 2015, a crane collapsed and crashed through the roof. Once again, the church required repair.

Today Christ Episcopal Church stands as one of five historic churches built in Montpelier between 1865 and 1873. All survive and belong to the Montpelier Historic District.

64 State St., Montpelier, Vt.

Images: West End Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Unionville, Connecticut Uploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29970923; Round barn at Hancock Shaker Village: By Bestbudbrian – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51387903; Samuel Tenney House, By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25270039; Christ Episcopal Church By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18509487; Tate House By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28918831.; Upper Rockville Mill By Tmac02892 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6897440. This story was updated in 2022.

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James Mitchell Varnum Wins the Right to a Jury Trial for Rhode Island

James Mitchell Varnum fought against English rule in the American Revolution as one of George Washington’s generals. Then shortly after the war he fought for the rule of English law in a Rhode Island courtroom.

The case, one of the most famous in U.S. history, involved the right to refuse paper money and the right to a trial by jury. It set the precedent that the courts have a right to review and strike down laws deemed unconstitutional.

Charles Wilson Peale painting of James Mitchell Varnum

James Mitchell Varnum

James Mitchell Varnum was a giant of a man, a competent, energetic self-promoter who liked to live large. He bought land behind the Kent County Courthouse in East Greenwich, R.I., and built a mansion on it. There he entertained a who’s who of the Revolutionary elite, including George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Comte de Rochambeau, John Sullivan and Nathanael Greene.

Born in Dracut, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1748, he began studying at Harvard, but transferred to Brown. By 22 he was married to Martha Child and a member of the bar. He entered the Army when the American Revolution broke out, fought in several engagements and advocated that freed African-American slaves be allowed to enlist. He ended his military service as a brigadier general, and the Rhode Island General Assembly appointed him to the U.S. Congress. Two years later he returned to his law practice.

In September of 1786, a Newport, R.I., cabinetmaker named John Trevett tried to buy a joint of meat from a butcher named John Weeden. Trevett offered paper money, but Weeden demanded hard cash: gold or silver. Trevett then sued.

Under a brand-new state law, Rhode Islanders had to accept paper money as legal currency or pay a fine of 100 pounds. Then the General Assembly passed a law that said anyone who broke the law would not be tried by jury. The reason? They thought no jury would convict someone for refusing to accept paper money, largely considered worthless.

Trevett decided to sue. John Weeden chose James Mitchell Varnum as his defense lawyer. He chose wisely.

The Varnum House Museum

Trial By Jury

James Mitchell Varnum argued, in essence, that depriving citizens of the right to a jury trial violated Rhode Island’s constitution.

But Rhode Island in 1786 did not have a constitution. In fact, Rhode Island didn’t have a constitution until 1842.

It had, instead, the royal charter of 1663 that Charles II had granted the colony. Under the charter the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta and other fundamental laws of England were granted to the people of Rhode Island. After receiving the royal charter, the General Assembly passed a law that guaranteed to freemen trial by jury.

Trevett v. Weeden

In arguing for John Weeden, James Mitchell Varnum made an argument novel for the time. The legislature is subordinate to the constitution, he said, and the courts have the power to decide if the laws it passes are constitutional.

In an eloquent courtroom plea, he asked why did the people endure, ‘a long, painful and bloody war, but to secure inviolate and to transmit unsullied for posterity, the inestimable privileges they received from their forefathers?’

The right to a jury trial was one of those privileges, he said. And power must be limited to protect the liberties of citizens.

The five justices of the Superior Court of Judicature dismissed the case – in essence, a victory for John Trevett and James Mitchell Varnum.

Seventeen years later, though, the case set a precedent for Marbury v. Madison. In that ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts have the power to strike down laws.

Trevett vs. Weeden has since been called ‘one of the earliest and most renowned cases of judicial review.’

The Old Colony House in Newport, where Trevett v. Weeden was heard.

The Aftermath

The controversy didn’t end in that Rhode Island courthouse, however. The General Assembly, which at the time appointed the judges to the state’s high court, called them on the carpet. Lawmakers demanded the five judges appear before it to explain their decision, and then moved to dismiss them.

Judge David Howell appeared and argued for an independent judiciary. James Mitchell Varnum argued the judges were entitled to due process and that the legislature couldn’t just fire them.

The General Assembly’s motion to dismiss the judges failed, but lawmakers got their payback by refusing to reappoint four of them when their terms expired. They also exacted revenge on James Mitchell Varnum by ousting him from his seat in the U.S. Congress.

All this took place as delegates prepared to assemble for the first constitutional convention in the United States. James Mitchell Varnum, hoping to influence the outcome, wrote a pamphlet about Trevett v. Weeden and circulated it in Philadelphia.

One could argue the Trevett v. Weeden trial cost him his life. No longer a congressman, he received an appointment as a supreme judge of the Northwest Territories. In 1788, he made the long journey westward to Marietta, Ohio. But he caught tuberculosis and died on Jan. 9, 1789. He had just reached 40 years of age.

Today, the James Mitchell Varnum House is open to the public during the summer.

The state didn’t officially embrace Varnum’s concept of judicial review until 2004, when it was enshrined in the Rhode Island constitution as an amendment.

Images: James Mitchell Varnum House by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62728157; Old Colony House By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58527502 This story was updated in 2021.

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