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The Nutshell Studies: Frances Glessner Lee and the Dollhouses of Death

In 1929, a depressed, divorced 51-year-old society matron decided to take up murder as a hobby. Frances Glessner Lee had just closed her New Hampshire antiques business, and she was looking for something to do. Chance and a family friend led her to create 20 crime scenes in dollhouses. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Frances Glessner Lee

Frances Glessner Lee for years featured her macabre dollhouses in weeklong training seminars for homicide detectives at Harvard. They’d spend hours figuring out how her dolls got bitten, stabbed, hanged, beaten and shot. Lee provided them with exquisitely crafted and accurately proportioned clues. A pencil made from a toothpick had real lead in it, while nail polish blood spatters were scientifically accurate.

“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this,” filmmaker John Waters told the New York Times after seeing her work.

Dorothy Dennison, a high school student, was found dead in the Parsonage Parlor after her mother reported her missing. She’d gone to the store to buy hamburg meat. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Godmother

Plump and grandmotherly, Frances Lee had no business dabbling in criminology. She was a woman for one thing, and she had no formal education. But she used her money, her connections and her passion for dollhouses to change the way police investigate murders. Her philanthropy earned her the nickname “godmother of forensic science.”

Her most visible legacy – her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death — survives to this day and is still used to train detectives. Several books have been written about them. In 2017 the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum displayed the restored dollhouses for three months. The exhibit attracted 100,000 visitors, wowed by the extraordinary craftsmanship and attention to detail.

The Creator of the Nutshell Studies

Frances Glessner was born March 25, 1878, in Chicago, an heiress to the International Harvester fortune. She grew up pampered and protected inside a stone fortress, a Prairie Avenue mansion designed by H.H. Richardson.

The Glessner House as it neared completion. Photo courtesy Cornell University Library.

The Glessner house stood out as a monumental architectural masterpiece among the other Gilded Age mansions on Prairie Avenue. Frances’ mother, an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, decorated the house in impeccable Arts and Crafts style.

Frances had one sibling, older brother George, who suffered from hay fever. The family doctor advised the Glessners to take George away from Chicago during hay fever season. So they built a summer home on 1,500 acres in Bethlehem, N.H., called The Rocks. Family friend Frederick Law Olmsted landscaped the estate. Both Frances and George would move there permanently as adults.

Harvard

When George reached college age, he went to Harvard. Frances wanted to join him and study medicine, but her father – her “jailer,” she once called him – wouldn’t let her. Instead, her parents sent her to Europe with an aunt for 14 months and encouraged her to pursue music and the crafts.

At Harvard, her brother formed a close friendship with George Magrath, a brilliant medical student. Magrath would later have a major impact on Frances’ life. Back then, he and her brother liked to jump on their bicycles and race each other to big fires in Cambridge or Boston.

The year before graduation, in 1893, George Magrath joined the Glessner family at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. The next year, Magrath spent three days with the Glessners at The Rocks in New Hampshire. In his thank you letter to Mrs. Glessner, he wrote, “My visit besides being the source of much immediate pleasure has left with me the refreshing picture of a corner of the universe where the beautiful and the ideal are very fully realized and where true happiness exists.”

Lonely and Terrified

Frances found little happiness. She once wrote at 73, “This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life I have lived.”

In 1898, just shy of her 20^th birthday, Frances Glessner married Blewitt Lee, a lawyer 10 years her senior. She barely knew him. Her father built them a house near his own in Chicago, and they had three children. Frances left her husband several times and then finally divorced him in 1914. Her father packed her and the children off to Santa Barbara in disgrace.

When Frances created her Nutshell Studies, most of the victims were women who died violent deaths at home. Perhaps she was commenting on her own marriage. Or was she expressing her feelings about the domestic role foisted on her?

After World War I she moved east, splitting her time between Boston and The Rocks. She and her daughter, Frances, opened an antiques shop in New Hampshire. But that enterprise ended just before she checked into Massachusetts General Hospital in 1929 for surgery.

Coincidentally, her old friend George Magrath was there, too.

Could this be a clue to a murder? In the 1930s, homicide detectives didn’t get any training to to determine whether it was or not. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

George Magrath

Florence Glessner Lee and George Burgess Magrath had such a close friendship that people wonder if they were lovers. Lee’s biographer, Bruce Goldfarb, doesn’t think so. He told an audience at the Kansas City Public Library that Magrath was probably gay.

Magrath was also eccentric. He ate one meal a day, typically at midnight at the St. Botolph’s Club. Big and rugged, he wore his hair long, smoked a calabash pike and always wore a flowing Windsor tie.

He had one weakness, wrote Goldfarb. Alcohol. Magrath maintained a steady state of intoxication. Perhaps he needed to self-medicate during a lifetime in which he investigated 21,000 deaths and testified in 2,000 trials.

In 1929, Magrath needed treatment for a severe bacterial infection of his hands. He had served as the Suffolk County Medical Examiner since 1907, the first medical examiner with training in pathology. (He shared the office with Dr. Timothy Leary, father of the LSD crusader of the same name.)

Turning Point

Recuperating at Mass General with Frances, George Magrath entertained – no, enthralled — her with stories about his work. He had examined corpses in the Boston Molasses Flood, solved the Frederick Small case and proved a gun belonging to Niccolo Sacco had killed a victim in an armed robbery.

He said he refused to rely on hunches during his investigations. And he told her no medical school gave adequate training for medical examiners, while detectives had no training at all. George and Frances talked about the evils of elected coroners, vulnerable to political pressure during murder investigations.

Frances Glessner Lee left the hospital with renewed purpose. She began reading up on criminology and collecting books and papers on the subject. In 1931, she gave Harvard Medical School $250,000 to endow a chair of Legal Medicine for George Magrath, who had taught there for years.

In 1934 she donated 1,000 books to Harvard to start the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. Magrath, she said, had practically invented the field. The library opened in 1938 with training tools such as specimens of insects that infest corpses.

Then George Magrath died on Dec. 11, 1938.

The Nutshell Studies

By then, Frances’ father, mother and brother had died and she could dispose of the family fortune as she liked. So she made dollhouses.

It was a popular hobby among wealthy women of the era. Frances Glessner Lee had a friend in Chicago, Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who created exquisite dioramas documenting European and American rooms over seven centuries.

The gorgeous Thorne miniature rooms now reside at the Museum of Fine Arts. Glessner’s lived-in, sometimes shabby homes belong to Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

She created lower-middle-class shacks, poor tenements and workers’ modest houses. Sex workers, housewives and farmers lived in them. For each dollhouse of death, Frances compiled case notes and witness statements drawn from real murder investigations.

In this “Pink Bathroom” Nutshell Study, Mrs. Rose Fishman, a widow, was found dead on the bathroom floor by the building janitor after people complained of a smell. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

She named her Nutshell Studies after a police saying, “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The Case of Annie Morrison

In one of the nutshell studies, Annie Morrison lies face down on the ground underneath her second-story porch. A wet rag and a clothespin lie next to her. According to the notes Frances wrote, an undertaker discovered a bullet in Annie Morrison’s chest. Her husband owned a revolver with a .22, but he denied murdering his wife. He said he had been sitting in the kitchen when he heard a noise. Out on the porch he found laundry blowing in the wind and a chair resting against the porch railing.

Did the husband do it? The solution to the crime had less importance than the ability to read clues, according to Frances.

Mrs. Agnes Butler, a neighbor, heard the Morrisons quarreling that morning. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Making the Nutshell Studies

Frances began making her nutshell studies in a workshop at The Rocks with carpenter Ralph Mosher and his son Alton.

They made everything to a 1:12 scale, the standard of the day. Frances consulted a forestry professor at Yale to find woods with fine enough grain to look real at that scale. She even knitted tiny clothes using pins and a magnifying glass. The Nutshell Studies had working mousetraps and carpet sweepers, real newspapers reproduced in miniature and murder victims that wore underwear under their bloodied clothing.

Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory, his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda Mae Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor. This is a detail from the crime scene, called Three Room Dwelling. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Once Frances bought a tiny, solid gold electric mixer, made for a charm bracelet, and painted it gray so it could sit on a miniature kitchen counter. After spending thousands of dollars on a miniature cabin, she took a blowtorch to it and half burned it down.

Nutshell Studies Get Studied

In 1943, the New Hampshire State Police named Frances as their educational director and commissioned her as a captain. From then on she liked people to call her Captain Lee.

In 1945, Captain Lee brought her Nutshell Studies to Harvard’s Medical Law department for the first of the twice-yearly Frances Glessner Lee Seminars on Legal Medicine. She brought in speakers from around the world and invited 25 to 30 police officers.

For a week, trainees spent the morning listening to lectures, then after lunch they examined the Nutshell Studies in a dark room. They got a flashlight, case notes, witness statements and 90 minutes to analyze the crime scene. Frances didn’t make them all murder scenes. Some depicted accidents and suicides that just looked like murder.

The week ended with an elegant banquet at the Ritz-Carlton, planned to the last detail by Frances Glessner Lee. She bought a set of gilt-edged china for $8,000 to be used only for her seminars.

Rave Reviews

With her seminar and her Nutshell Studies, Frances Glessner Lee had a huge hit on her hands. In 1948, Erle Stanley Gardner attended to find plots for his Perry Mason novels. He wrote that police sought invitations to the seminars the way girls who aspire to be actresses sought bids from Hollywood. William P. Hancock, chief of the Maine State Police, raved about it, calling it the best of all the training sessions he attended. [botz]

Lee branched out, developing training courses for police officers in other states. Her granddaughter said she loved to be surrounded by young men in uniform. They called her “Mother.”

Marie Jones, a prostitute, was discovered dead by her landlady, Mrs. Shirley Flanagan. Her boyfriend claimed she’d committed suicide. Photo by Laurie Shaull.

Aftermath

Frances Glessner Lee died in New Hampshire on Jan. 2, 1962. Her friend Erle Stanley Gardner wrote her obituary in the Boston Globe. “I collect characters as other people collect postage stamps, and Capt. Lee was one of the rarer items in my book.” He dedicated his story, The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom, to her.

Harvard disbanded the Department of Legal Medicine in 1967, and loaned the Nutshell Studies to an alumnus appointed as Maryland’s chief medical examiner. Since then they have resided at Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, still used as a training tool.

Corinne May Botz in 2004 published a book of essays and photographs about the Nutshell Studies. Susan Marks released a film, “Of Dolls and Murder, in 2012.” Then in 2017, the Renwick Gallery restored them and put them on exhibit.

Now the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests uses The Rocks as the North Country Conservation & Education Center.

Though many of the old Prairie Avenue mansions are gone, the Glessner House remains as a museum.

This story last updated in 2023.

With thanks to The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz and 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics by Bruce Goldfarb and Judy Melinek.
Images: Frances Glessner Lee by By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61712759. Nutshell Studies all by Lorie Shaull – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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The Portsmouth Fires That Turned the City to Brick

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

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

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

1^st Portsmouth Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historic North Church in downtown Portsmouth.

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

2^nd of the Portsmouth Fires

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

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

Portsmouth’s Market Square in 1853.

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

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

Last of the Portsmouth Fires

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

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

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

Market Square, well after the Portsmouth fires

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

After the Fires

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

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

Jefferson Street in Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke Museum.

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

With thanks to Dennis Robinson, The Three Fires of Christmas, SeacoastNH.com, 2005. Images: North Church By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34161214. Gov. John Langdon House By Daderot – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5643711. Jefferson Street By Ken Gallager (Ken Gallager from en.wikipedia) – Author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15734947. This story about the Portsmouth Fires was updated in 2024.

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Four Days in May: The 1942 Rhode Island Forest Fires

On May 1, 1942, fire leveled more than 300 acres in the Limerock section of Lincoln, R.I. The source of ignition was at first thought to be ashes from a wood chopper’s pipe. The fire – the first of the 1942 Rhode Island forest fires — destroyed a cord of wood, damaged a garage and threatened three homes.

On the same day, 250 acres burned in Johnston on the Rohrig Estate. It took 60 firefighters to save a Scout camp and a farm from the blaze.

Again on the same day, firefighters fought a 350-acre forest fire at White Rock just northwest of Westerly. Only a wind change saved a number of houses in the fire’s path, something State Fire Service workers and 80 men from three towns couldn’t accomplish.

Manpower was scarce, as the United States had entered World War II six months earlier, and tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders joined the war effort. But the fires would only get worse over the next few days – and suspicions would grow about the source of the 1942 Rhode Island forest fires.

Westerly Fire Chief Columbus Pasetti believed arson started the fires. But 15 wildfires would burn all over Rhode Island over the first four days in May. The cause might have been even worse than arson.

Fire Bug

As soon as firefighters smothered the Westerly blaze, they got called to a four-acre fire at the Cook Farm. But the State Fire Service men had already broken off to extinguish a fire in Coventry.

The Coventry fire took two days to put out and spread into West Greenwich, where it mushroomed into a 40-square-mile inferno. By then it consumed a dozen homes and leveled camps and barns.

Rhode Island officials were convinced they had a fire bug on their hands.

1942 Rhode Island Fires

On May 2 alone, fires broke out in the western Rhode Island towns of West Greenwich, Scituate and Coventry. In the eastern part of the state, a fire started in Newport among fallen timber from the 1938 hurricane around Tonomy Hill.

Officials said the fires, the biggest in Rhode Island memory, had been set deliberately.

A call for help went out. Soldiers from Fort Devens and sailors from Quonset Point joined the crusade to extinguish the fires. All available apparatus in the area responded, as well as equipment from as far away as Warren and Bristol.

A thousand people fought the Rhode Island fires by then, but still they couldn’t extinguish them.

Army and Navy officials said they dispatched more men to help. Governor J. Howard McGrath issued a public appeal for another thousand men.

All workers from the Works Progress Administration and the state Department of Public Works were dispatched to the scene. Volunteers poured into the area, but were only allowed to fight the fire if they had some equipment. Some volunteers went in with as little as a shovel or a burlap bag. The situation was growing desperate.

Warwick announced a special police motorcycle patrol to protect their woodlands.

All told, 3,000 volunteers and firefighters fought the Rhode Island fires.

Louttit School

At least 75 volunteers and firefighters received injuries in the fire. They were treated at a makeshift hospital at the Louttit School in West Greenwich (now the town’s public library). The school also served as a headquarters for the whole firefighting operation.

The Providence Police radio patrol set up two heavy-duty transmitters at the Louttit School, communicating via six portable sets.

The U.S. Army set up a mobile field kitchen to feed the hungry men. Emergency canteen units from the Red Cross and Civil Defense Women’s Ambulance and Transportation Corps also arrived at the scene.

The Louttit School, now the West Greenwich Library

Martial Law

It’s still May 2, and Governor McGrath declares martial law in Coventry, West Greenwich, Scituate and in parts of three other towns. Blue-uniformed state guardsmen along with 200 soldiers with loaded rifles now patrolled the roads of those towns.

Suddenly 20 of those state guardsmen found themselves trapped by flames as the fire surrounded them. They managed to escape.

Another guardsman, while going to his backpack tank, got disoriented and had to run for his life as the flames leaped ahead of him among the tree tops. He finally found refuge in a swamp.

Damage

Another story unfolded when a grandmother, a mother and three children ran for their lives as the fire raged around them. They found salvation in a nearby brook. As the fire passed over them, they made their way through the smoldering forest to a highway where a motorist picked them up and brought them to safety.

They had watched as their home, their barn and their garage burned to the ground. Their dogs and all their livestock perished, except for one pig.

Among the buildings destroyed in the Rhode Island fires was a storage facility with 250,000 board feet of lumber owned by the federal government. Firefighters barely saved another building with 1.25 million board feet of federal lumber in it.

Coincidence? It was widely believed, according to the New York Times, that it might be sabotage. No one, however, made the official charge.

Enemy Action?

Author Ian Fleming wrote once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Governor McGrath said he saw Army aerial photos that showed the fires starting up in widely separated areas. The conditions at the time were not conducive to flying sparks igniting fires in those far-apart places.

James R. Simmons with the Federal Fire Service strongly hinted that the Rhode Island fires were suspicious. Of the 15 fires that erupted almost simultaneously, many started near federal lumber storage areas – the location of which was confidential.

Gov. James Howard McGrath

May 3

On May 3, yet more Rhode Island fires broke out, four to be exact: two in Assonet, one in Somerset and one in Tiverton. One hundred men took three hours to check the Tiverton blaze by a backfire.

Fire also raged in the Moosup Valley section of Foster along the Connecticut border. Rhode Island and Connecticut fire forces struggled to halt the progress of that conflagration.

At 9 p.m. that night, Governor McGrath announced that all of the fire seemed to be under control. Mopping-up operations would continue into the next day to make sure the fires were out. By the end of May 3, the last 1,500 firefighters straggled home as the nightmare seemed to be at an end.

A Wider View

What caused the Rhode Island fires? We have seen experienced professionals speculate that arson or maybe sabotage started them. Remember, Governor McGrath saw Army aerial photos showing many fires starting at the same time.

Was there a precedent for this? Here’s a bigger view.

On April 20, 1942, Forest Ranger J.B. Fortin reported 20 fires starting almost simultaneously on Sunburst Mountain in Brevard, N.C. They developed into huge forest fires.

Fortin, a veteran ranger, had never seen anything like it. On his first radio call, he said it had to be saboteurs. The outbreak of fires in Brevard went on for a week.

Then later that month 168 fires broke out in New Jersey — coincidentally near an Army base. Those fires grew so tremendously that a call went out for shock troops of citizens to help extinguish them along with 2,500 soldiers. The fires eventually consumed 5000 acres, according to the New York Times.

William Breuer in his book The Air Raid Warden Was a Spy, entitled one chapter The Eastern Seaboard Set Ablaze. The FBI was going to investigate all of these fires, but never revealed what they found.

So were all of these fires sabotage?

Maybe.

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

1942 was a bad year for fires. The Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston killed 660 people that year. Read more about them here and here.

This story was updated in 2024.

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The Civilian Conservation Corps, a Young Man’s Adventure

During the depths of the Great Depression, a 17-year-old boy from Warren, R.I., enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

He did it to help support his family, but his time in the Civilian Conservation Corps turned into the adventure of a lifetime.

The CCC started when President Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Emergency Conservation Act on March 31, 1933. His goal: to generate jobs for young men suffering from an almost 25 percent unemployment rate.

The Warren boy at first was too young to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. You had to be 18 to enlist. But in October 1935, the government lowered the age requirement to 17, and he signed up. The teenager met all the other requirements. He was unemployed, unmarried, physically fit and his family was on relief — like tens of millions of other American families.

He earned $30 per month {about $570 today), but he had to send $25 home. That beat the $21 per month that regular U. S. Army soldiers made at the time. The money the CCC boys sent home supported an estimated 12 to 15 million family members.

The Civilian Conservation Corps 141st Company. Leo Caisse is in the middle row, second from right.

Go West, Young Men

The Warren boy was sent to Fort Adams in Newport for physical conditioning and evaluation, just as all other enrollees in the nation did at their local Army depot. At the end of their two weeks of training and evaluation, he received his final physical and inoculations. For some of the boys it was the first time they saw a doctor.

The Civilian Conservation Corps assigned the Warren boy to the 141^st company posted at Burlingame in Charlestown, R.I. He was issued a blue denim work suit and a renovated Army olive drab uniform with CCC patches. (Roosevelt thought the uniforms looked shoddy and in 1938 ordered the Navy to design a spruce-green uniform.)Then he took the CCC oath.

civilian-conservation-corps-burlingame-beach-house

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this beach pavilion at Burlingame State Park.

His company, like several others, was transferred out West, which had more forest work and fewer unemployed young men than in the East. He had to get his parents’ permission because of his age.

He took a train cross country from Fort Adams to a campsite at Triangle Lake near the Town of Junction City, Ore. There they became the 2108 Company of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In Oregon, the teenager and his company built fire guard service stations, fire lookout towers, trails and shelters. They fought forest fires when needed, a hallmark of the CCC wherever they were.

Cowboys and Mountain Lions

The young man earned a truck driving license issued by the Department of the Interior. He learned to operate a bulldozer, tractor and a jackhammer. He also learned welding, a skill he would later use in helping to build the USS Massachusetts at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass.

In Oregon, he served a maximum of four six-month enlistments, all that the CCC allowed and was honorably discharged on June 23, 1936.

Leo Caisse

He returned to Warren, but after a little more than a year he re-enlisted in 1937. This time was assigned to the 2130^th company in Casper, Wyo.

In Wyoming, his Civilian Conservation Corps company built bridges, roads and a dike, according to National Archives records. He fought fires, of course, and some members of his company fought coal fires. While in Wyoming, he also learned another skill: how to evade a mountain lion in the wild.

Later in the 1950s he told stories to his son about how he knew real cowboys and Indians out West. That was really intriguing because it was the heyday of cowboy shows on TV and Cowboy Town in Plainville, Mass. His name was Leo Caisse. He was my father and he passed away when I was very young.

It has been a revelation researching his adventures and it has given me a sense of pride that he and so many others benefitted from this program, which began the green movement.

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Roosevelt’s Tree Army developed many public parks that still stand today as a living legacy to their work.

Less obvious today was the improved health and well-being of the boys who joined.

Enlistees were so undernourished due to the Depression that they gained an average of 12 pounds each. When issued their uniforms, it was the first time most of them got new shoes.

Many camps had two movies a week with state-of-the-art equipment, chaplain services, lending libraries, organized sports and vocational education. President Roosevelt mandated that all enrollees learn to read and write in the service if they hadn’t achieved literacy yet.

The Civilian Conservation Corps offered 603 different courses nationwide. They often had camp newspapers, wrote poetry, composed songs and put on plays, as well as engaged in organized sports with other camps and local teams.

A Civilian Conservation Corps pillow

The men celebrated holidays in camp, including Mother’s Day. In one instance, they invited their mothers to camp for a dinner and the boys put on a skit for them. In another, the commanding officer collected 25 cents from each man to send home a special pillow to their mothers.

The Army ran the CCC, but the state or national park service would select the projects. Since fascism was on the rise overseas, the Army was careful not to drill the Tree Army. Nor did it allow saluting or weapons training.

Still, many Civilian Conservation Corpsmen who joined the Army were automatically inducted as corporals or sergeants, depending on their leadership experience in the Corps.

Following are summaries of the Civilian Conservation Corps in each New England state.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island had eight camps, but they did not all operate continuously or simultaneously. Fort Adams served as their state headquarters.

In the very beginning at least two Rhode Island companies were sent to other states: one to Rangeley, Maine and another company (about 200 men) to Vermont. Later they went to Oregon and Wyoming.

Rhode Island eventually enrolled 15,900 men out of 2.5 million men who served nationally.

civilian-conservation corps-goddard-state park

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this structure and many fireplaces at Goddard State Park in Rhode Island.

Massachusetts

Over 100,000 men served in the Massachusetts Civilian Conservation Corps, which brought together two wasted resources: young men and the land.

When the CCC began, Massachusetts had accumulated 100,000 acres, mostly inaccessible to the public. When the Emergency Conservation Act passed, Chief Forester Harold Cook immediately prepared applications for seven camps. He would eventually have 31 camps.

The first enrollees arrived at Fort Devens for medical exams and some basic training and testing to acclimate them to a military routine.

They built roads and trails, overlooks, picnic shelters and log cabins. And they engaged in timber improvement, pest control and forest fire fighting. In the end they planted 12 million trees and improved 170,000 acres of state land. The Massachusetts enrollees collectively sent an estimated $20 million home to their families.

Friends of the Upton State Forest are restoring a former CCC administration building and cottage. At least one former member – and probably many others — was so desperate for work he forged his birth certificate and joined at age 15. He learned construction skills that served him the rest of his working life.

They built the access road to the top of Mount Greylock as well as the Thunderbolt Trail. The CCC created the Savoy State Park, too, and the Elliot Tower in Milton’s Blue Hills Reservation. It still stands today and offers a panoramic view from Boston Harbor to Mount Wachusett. The Blue Hills reception center has a small CCC exhibit that includes memorabilia.

New Hampshire

Bear Brook State Park is one of the few surviving CCC camps that now serve as museums.

Over 37,000 young men served in the CCC in New Hampshire. They built state parks such as Moore Brook and Bear Brook, and ski facilities such as Waterville Valley, Cannon Mountain and the Wildcat Trail at Pinkham Notch. They also fought forest fires, planted trees and built dams, bridges, roads, camp grounds and hiking and bridle trails.

At the Bear Brook exhibit stands a statue of a shirtless Corpsman with an ax. Identical statues stand at the Freetown State Forest, a former camp, and at the Maine State Library in Augusta.

civilian-conservation-corps-acadia-shelter

The Civilian Conservation Corps built many park shelters, like this one at Arcadia State Park in Rhode Island.

Connecticut

Connecticut had a total of 17 camps, and over 30,000 men served in the CCC. Some hadn’t enlisted, but were LEMs – locally enlisted men, such as carpenters and stone masons. Along with their traditional work, the CCC also built nine lookout towers, constructed 123 bridges and developed over 1000 acres of public camping and picnic grounds.

As in all other camps, the Connecticut CCC couldn’t build roads. They did, however, build many truck roads for fighting forest fires.

When a dam broke above Hartford in 1936, it devastated the area. The CCC lent a hand by clearing out 2,950 buildings and 800 other structures.

A CCC Museum in Stafford Springs, Conn., once the administration building for Camp Conner, contains photos, displays, information and artifacts.

Maine

CCC statue in Augusta

Fort Williams in Portland Harbor administered and trained Civilian Conservation Corpsmen for both Maine and New Hampshire. At its height, Maine had 16,686 men, 1,612 supervisors and 1,136 out-of-state enrollees in 19 camps. Additionally, Rhode Island sent 144 to the Rangeley area. The camps closed by 1942, but in their heyday the CCC’s emphasis evolved from emergency relief to job training. The Maine and New Hampshire Tree Army sent home an estimated $4 million.

Their assigned work came from the Maine Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and the National Park Service. It included, much like all the other CCC work roads, trails, recreation areas, erecting buildings, and pest control.

George Dorr, superintendent of Acadia National Park, saw his chance to improve the park in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He asked Roosevelt for a camp at Acadia. Eventually some 3,000 poor boys, mostly from Maine, came to three CCC camps in Acadia. They opened new trails and improved old ones, planted thousands of trees, made fire roads, fought fires, built footbridges and constructed two campgrounds, Blackwoods and Seawall. They built Ocean Drive, which loops around the park with stunning views of the coast and opened hiking trails to Echo Lake, Long Pond and Beech Cliff.

There is a memorial dedicated to the CCC and their work in Maine in Augusta.

Vermont

Vermont was originally allocated four camps but got 30, more than any other state of its size. The reason? The highly motivated State Forester Perry Merrill, a man with great foresight who saw the potential for CCC work.

Some 40,000 men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Vermont. However, only about 11,000 came from Vermont. The other companies transferred from other states such as Rhode Island because Merrill found so much work for them to do.

A massive flood in 1927 had devastated much of the state, and the Vermont CCC boys gained recognition for their flood control activities and dam building. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the 2,000-foot Waterbury Dam along with the Wrightsville and East Barre dams.

They also built many ski slopes, including the Stowe Ski Resort and the Mount Mansfield State Park. They also built 105 miles of truck roads for forest fire fighting and 10 lookout towers.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He has also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College. Leo passed away in 2020, and we miss him very much. This story updated in 2022.

Photos, except for the Civilian Conservation Corps pillow and statue, courtesy Leo Caisse. CCC statue by By DrStew82 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59856211. This story was updated in 2021.

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The Great September Gale of 1815

When the Great September Gale struck New England in the fall of 1815, few could remember the last time such a devastating storm had hit. That was the Colonial Gale of 1635, which almost killed Richard Mather, the influential Puritan minister.

Historians place the September Gale of 1815 somewhere between a Category 3 and a Category 4, with winds that gusted up to 156 mph.

New England has experienced only three other Category 3 hurricanes since the colonists arrived: the September Hurricane of 1869, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in 1954.

The September Gale of 1815 damaged crops, buildings and ships, killed livestock and people, toppled forests and caused a water shortage for as long as six months in some places. Only the New England Hurricane of 1938 was more destructive.

But, unlike the other hurricanes, the Great September Gale of 1815 ushered in a second devastating weather event: the 1816 Year Without a Summer.

No wonder New Englanders began migrating west in great numbers.

Artists’ rendering of the Great September Gale of 1815.

The Great September Gale

It began on September 22 as a nor’easter, with torrential rain falling along the Atlantic coast for 24 hours. Then a fierce tropical hurricane collided at right angles with the rainstorm and made landfall on Long Island. It proceeded to wreak havoc in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the eastern half of New Hampshire.

Some people noted a respite between the two storms, then a hot, heavy wind that began to blow. In Abington, Mass., a sailor from the West Indies started frequently as if he knew what was coming. When asked why, he said there was a crackling in the air, just the way it had before a terrific wind.

John Farrar, science professor at Harvard, experienced the September Gale in Cambridge, Mass., and described it in a scientific journal.

He wrote that between 9 am and 10 am on Sept. 23, the hurricane began to cause alarm as it toppled chimneys and trees and hurled flying missiles – shingles, slates and wood fragments — down the streets.

“The Charles River raged and foamed like the sea in a storm, and the spray was raised to the height of sixty or one hundred feet in the form of thin white clouds, which were drifted along in a kind of waves like snow in a violent snow storm,” he wrote.

Howling Wind

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., experienced the storm as a seven-year-old living in Boston. Later in life he recalled ‘a general impression of a mighty howling, roaring, banging and crashing, with much running about, and loud screaming of orders for sudden taking in of all sail about the premises and battening down of everything that could flap or fly away.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Nine-year-old John Peabody was standing near the edge of the mill pond in Boxford, Mass., when a gust of wind picked him up, carried him 30 feet and dunked him in the water. His family rescued him.

The wind blew so strongly that people couldn’t keep fires lit inside their homes. It wiped out all kinds of structures from churches to sheds and uprooted orchards and forests.

Falling trees killed some people, while others drowned in shipwrecks along the coast. An estimated 38 people died in the storm, but the death toll was probably much higher.

The tempest smashed vessels from Eastport, Maine, to New York.

It swept away wharves, blew down steeples, destroyed 60 vessels in Boston Harbor and drove a schooner up Main Street in Cambridgeport, Mass.

In the port of New Bedford, the winds drove every vessel but two ashore. The newspapers reported they didn’t have enough room to record the maritime losses.

The wind knocked down 5,000 apple trees in the town of Dorchester (now part of Boston), destroyed the Neponset River Bridge and ruined the First Parish Meeting House beyond repair.

In Danvers, Mass., the Endicott pear tree, planted by Gov. John Endecott around 1630, lost half its branches.

Providence

The September Gale hit Providence hardest, as the wind blew directly up the Providence River. The storm surge caused an extraordinary tide 12-14 feet above high water. Stores and houses reeled and tottered, then plunged into the floodwaters.

The September Gale strikes Providence.

Boats and scows struggled against the churning waters to rescue panicked women and children as the water reached their windows. Vessels smashed against the bridge connecting the two parts of Providence until it swept it away.

The tide forced the ship Ganges against the third floor of the Washington Insurance Building. It drove a brig loaded with livestock onto a wharf, where it stuck. The trapped crew finally took the risk of abandoning ship and crawled along the roiling debris toward buildings still standing. Some people dragged the sailors into their homes through the second-story windows.

The September Gale completely destroyed 500 buildings in the city and left tangled heaps of furniture, lumber, candles, flour, cotton bales, coffee, grain and wrecked boats. When the storm ended, 300 armed men were stationed in Providence to prevent looting.

A Mr. Webb found a sloop standing up at his front door, while Gen. Lippett found a ship in his garden

Salt and Sand

The September Gale drove saltwater 40 miles into the country side. Houses turned white, and the leaves on the trees seemed lightly frosted. Wine grapes harvested in the aftermath of the Great September Gale tasted like salt.

Along the coast and in some places inland, the September Gale caused a shortage of fresh water for weeks, even months.

In Buzzards Bay, the tide rose so high that it covered farmers’ fields with sand. The saltwater made wells and streams brackish for months and killed corn, grass and trees in cedar swamps.

In Stonington, Conn., the tide rose 17 feet and deluged the town. It demolished the wharves, destroyed all 20 vessels in the harbor and left the town unrecognizable. Gardens and fertile fields turned into sandy beaches. The storm reduced a nearby island of several acres to a small rock.

The September Gale also caused considerable damage in New London, Groton and even Norwich up the Thames River.

No Angry God

By 1815, science was undergoing a transition. People began to pay attention to weather as a scientific phenomenon, rather than a reward or punishment from an angry god.

John Farrar was probably the first to write that the September Gale was a moving vortex and not, as previously thought, ‘the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes made a more prosaic observation in his 1836 poem, The September Gale.

It chanced to be our washing-day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the shirts and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,–
I lost my Sunday breeches!

This story was updated in 2023.

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Girl Power in 1824: The First Factory Strike in America

America’s first factory strike happened just 30 years after America’s first successful textile mill started churning out cotton cloth in Pawtucket, R.I.

It was May 1824, and the mill owners in the burgeoning industrial city had made an announcement.

Sam Slater’s mill. first in the U.S. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

They planned to increase the workday by one hour and cut wages by 25 percent for power loom weavers – that is, for women between the ages of 15 and 30. They were, after all, earning “extravagant” wages – according to the mill owners.

On May 26, 1824, 102 young women along with sympathetic community members blocked the entrance to Sam Slater’s textile mill, shutting them down. The strike spread to other mills.

The Pawtucket Journal reported:

On Wednesday evening a tumultuous crowd filled the streets, led by the most unprincipled and disorderly part of the village, and made an excessive noise — they visited successively the houses of the manufacturers, shouting, exclaiming and using every imaginable term of abuse and insult. The window in the yellow mill was broken in. … The next day the manufacturers shut their gates and the mills have not run since.

The Textile Industry Takes Hold

Sam Slater gets credit for starting the Industrial Revolution in America because he built his water-powered textile mill in 1793. Similar textile mills then sprang up along the Blackstone River and beyond. Industrialization got further boosts from the Embargo of 1809 and the Tariff of 1816, which protected U.S. textiles from British imports. By the Civil War, textiles were America’s most important industry.

Sam Slater

Along with the modern factory, Slater also introduced child factory labor to America. He would seek out children aged 7-13 from poor white families. Then he’d hire them for 40 cents to 60 cents a week. They worked 12- hour days in winter, 16 in summer. Many children hated working in the gloomy and dangerous mills, and some ran away. Their parents sometimes took them away from work because they wanted them to earn higher wages.

Slater also hired entire families, putting them in company housing and forcing them to shop at the company store.

He and other mill owners found workers harder and harder to control. Some sabotaged the factories, stealing property and setting fires. Some showed up late. And some didn’t show up at all.

In 1814, the Pawtucket mill owners petitioned the state Legislature to organize a police force as ‘it has often been found difficult to preserve order and due subordination.’

Slater had another method. He introduced Sunday school for children, who, after working six 16-hour days could get indoctrinated in the Christian virtue of hard work and submissiveness.

1824 Factory Strike

After about 1810, Slater could no longer rely on child labor because he started using the power loom. The machinery was too much for young children, so to run them he hired the second-cheapest workers: young women.

Mill girls

But the ladies proved less submissive than the mill owners hoped. When the Pawtucket factory owners announced the pay cut and the longer work day, the women decided to have none of it.

At the Slater mill, 102 young women started the strike – then called a turnout.

The strike spread to seven other mills, and 500 workers walked off the job. And they didn’t just shut down the mills. They went to the owners’ houses, shouted insults at them and broke their windows. A local judge wrote that the streets were, ‘literally filled with Men Women and Children — making a mob of very daring aspect, insulting the managers of cotton mills in every shape — pulling and hauling — screaming and shouting thro the streets.’

On the last day of the strike, one of the mills burned down in a fire probably set by a striker. The owners agreed to a compromise, the details of which are lost to history. On June 3, the strikers returned to work.

Aftermath of the Factory Strike

We know little of the factory strike from the women’s point of view. But the Pawtucket strike set off a wave of labor organizing in Pawtucket and across the region. In Lowell, Mass., for example, the mill girls went on strike in the 1830s. They also went on factory strikes in Providence, Waltham and Woonsocket, in Lynn, Mass., and in Brunswick, Maine, to name a few.

Child labor would persist, however, as documented by photographer Lewis Hine. In 1938, Congress outlawed child labor, but women still struggle for equal pay.

Image of the Slater Mill (rear view) By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72955211. This story was updated in 2023.

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