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Seven Fun Facts About the Boston Mackerel

Mackerel gets short shrift in the annals of New England history. Overshadowed by the cod, the lobster, even the clam, the mackerel actually contributed significantly to New England’s prosperity. (Until it didn’t.)

Scomber Scombrus is the mackerel that made at least some New Englanders rich. People call it the Atlantic mackerel, Boston mackerel, Norwegian Mackerel or Scottish mackerel after the places where a lot of it gets caught. The Boston fish winters in deep water offshore around Virginia, then migrates north in spring and summer. It likes company, traveling in huge schools sometimes 20 miles long.

Scomber Scombrus

The word “mackerel” seems to strike people as either nasty or funny. “Mackerel snapper” was an insult aimed at poor Catholic immigrants from Europe. “Mackerel” used to refer to a prostitute or pimp. “Holy Mackerel” has served as a catchphrase for radio comics and Chicago Cubs’ broadcasters, though Batman’s Robin tended to use “Holy” with other nouns, like “Crimson Skies of Death.”

A 20^th century Provincetown historian, George Bryant, liked to talk about the fish because he felt people ignored its importance.

“When you look at the 19^th century homes and institutions … you have to think of mackerel,” Bryant told the Wellfleet Historical Society in a speech in 2001.

During the 1850s, mackerel fishing employed more Cape Codders and brought in more money than any other kind of piscatorial enterprise. “Mackerel, more than codfishing or whaling, created what was probably the most prosperous era in Cape Cod history,” wrote Seth Rolbein for the Cape Cod Fishermen’s Alliance.

Here are seven other fun facts about the mackerel.

1. It Stinks to High Heaven

Mackerel have a unique tendency to spoil quickly. As a result, the adjective “stinking” appears before the noun “mackerel” more often than before any other fish in English literature, according to The Cambridge Economic History of Europe.

Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV tells Prince Hal, “You may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.” In America, U.S. Sen. John Randolph described Secretary of State Edward Livingston as utterly corrupt. “He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight,” he wrote. You get the picture.

2. A Holy Expletive

The expression “Holy Mackerel” dates to at least 1803, the first known written record of it. Because mackerel deteriorates quickly, it had to be sold on the day it was caught — at least before refrigeration. So some English towns let fishmongers sell mackerel on Sunday. No other fish enjoyed that privilege; thus it obtained its sanctified status.

Eventually, the English did figure out how to salt, can and refrigerate the fish.

You don’t want to know what this smells like

The phrase got even more popular in the 1920s as a catchphrase with the Amos ‘n Andy radio show.

3. Mackerel Changed Commercial Fishing in 1816

The Year Without a Summer, 1816, was also known as The Mackerel Year.

Six inches of snow fell in June and every month of the year had a hard frost. Temperatures dropped to as low as 40 degrees in July and August as far south as Connecticut.

At the Fishing Grounds, 1851, by Fitz Henry Lane

The Year Without a Summer had a big impact on New England. Crop failures caused hoarding and big price increases for food. People went hungry. Farmers gave up trying to make a living in New England and started heading west. Politicians who ignored the melancholy plight of their constituents found themselves out of office.

Alewife numbers fell because of the cold weather along the Atlantic coast. Alewives, the first to arrive in spring, fed people and livestock in those lean months. Without that sustenance, fishermen sailed to mackerel fisheries farther away — something they hadn’t done.

Even after New England warmed up in 1817, fishermen continued to fish offshore. And for decades, mackerel remained an important food and export product.

4. The Jig Brought Death to Millions of Mackerel

Around 1815, a Cape Ann fisherman named Abraham Lurvey invented the jig. It’s simply a hook with a shiny piece of metal at the top of it. The shiny metal attracts mackerel without bait, and it lets a fisherman catch a lot more fish since he doesn’t have to spend time baiting the hook. Fishermen didn’t even need to handle the fish; they could simply flick it off the hook and throw the jig back in the water.

Jigs

By 1820, word of the efficient new technique spread. At the same time, huge schools of mackerel began to show up off the New England coast. During the 1820s, hundreds of men and boys starting going after the stinky fish. Mackerel boats got bigger and jigs got slimmer. Mackerel fishing grew into a serious commercial venture, with packing houses in Hingham, Gloucester, Boston and all over the New England coast.

Over the next 15 years, mackerel fishing grew exponentially. In 1816, New England fishermen caught less than 8 million pounds. In 1831, they landed 175 million pounds.

5. Fickle, Then Just Overfished

Mackerel are notoriously fickle. Some years they show, some years they don’t. Five years after that huge haul in 1831, the catch fell by half.

Purse seining off Gloucester, Mass.

Then by 1850 landings had come back in a big way, helped by the innovation of purse seining. To purse seine, men in two small boats encircle a school of fish with a net, close it and haul them in.

Purse seines were huge. In the 1850s they were as long as 800 feet and as deep as 100 feet.

in 1851, about a thousand men fished on 940 vessels off the New England coast. Then, over the next few decades, fishing got a lot more efficient. Boats got bigger and purse seines got enormous. By the 1870s, the biggest seines measured 1,350 long and 150 feet deep.

The season also got longer as boats started taking early spring trips. Then in 1882, the first steamer left Tiverton , R.I., in search of mackerel. It wasn’t the only one.

Fishermen began to worry about overfishing. They tried to pressure Congress to limit the mackerel season. In 1884, the U.S. mackerel catch broke its own record, exceeding 180 million pounds. Still Congress dithered.

In 1885, the mackerel fishery collapsed. “The business is virtually ruined,” reported Maine’s Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics in 1887. Men had fished off of North Haven for eight months “and had not even wet their seines,” the Bureau reported. It blamed large seining operations.

The poor landings in 1885 and disastrous landings in 1886 finally forced Congress to act. The first federal fishing law banned spring fishing starting in 1887.

6. Caused the Worst Fishing Disaster Ever

In 1841, a fleet of mackerel fishermen from Truro got caught in a fierce gale while fishing off Georges Bank. Only two of nine vessels made it home.

The 57 men and boys in the seven other fishing vessels had no such luck. All died at sea, and only a few of their bodies recovered.

First Congregational Parish of Truro, where a monument to the lost fishermen stands.

All 57 lived within two miles of each other. They were related to nearly everyone in town. Eight were Snows and eight were Paines. And three were boys not yet 13 years old.

During one of his trips to Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau recalled asking a man in Truro, “Who lives in that house?” The man then replied: “Three widows.”

The town, with a population around 2,000, had 105 widows. Young women became reluctant to marry fishermen.

An obelisk in Truro’s Congregational Church yard commemorates the 57 October gale victims:

Then shall the dust return to the
earth as it was and the spirit shall
return unto God who gave it.

Man goeth to his long home and the
mourners go about the street.

7. Overshadowed by the Sacred Cod

There is a holy mackerel in the Massachusetts Statehouse, less famous than the Sacred Cod, which dangles from a balcony in the House of Representatives.

The Sacred Cod

The cod is viewed as essential to the welfare of the early commonwealth and the foundation of many New England fortunes. The mackerel , not so much.

It gets far less attention than the Sacred Cod

In the spring of 1933, the Sacred Cod made national news when Harvard pranksters stole the 4’11”-long wooden fish. No one has bothered to try to spirit away the Holy Mackerel in the Senate chamber. It’s a brass sculpture, part of the chandelier that illuminates (one hopes) the deliberations underneath. No one so far has tried to steal it.

With thanks to W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea.

Images: Fine fish in the basement at Takashimaya Department Store – Kyoto, Japan, by Donna Cleveland via Flickr, CC By 2.0.

Holy Mackerel: By Montanabw – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83792746. Image: First Congregational Parish of Truro By Judy Moehle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518277. Purse seining Parks, Gordon, photographer. On board the fishing boat Alden, out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Fishermen pulling in their net, in which they hope to have trapped a school of mackerel. The big boat stands by ready to go alongside and receive the catch on her decks. United States Essex County Massachusetts Gloucester, 1943. June. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017856605/. Sacred cod By Liberma – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64703916.

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How To Talk With a Boston Accent (Not for the Faint of Haht)

The Boston accent has brought many an actor to grief, especially these days as films about the city just keep coming. George Clooney famously botched it in Perfect Storm, but not as badly as Kevin Costner did in 13 Days. Mark Wahlberg, who grew up in Southie, gets it down perfectly, of course. So does Matt Damon, even though he grew up across the river in the People’s Republic (Cambridge).

Back in the day, actors used to have to lose their Boston accents if they wanted work. Leonard Nimoy, who grew up in the West End, had a wicked bad one. He got rid of it before he won the part of Spawk from Stah Trek.

One reason actors have such a hard time with the Boston accent is its complexity. Dropping the ‘r’ is only part of it. You have to put it back in some places, sometimes where it doesn’t belong. And you also have to say ‘aw’ for ‘o’ or ‘ah’ (‘hawkey’ for ‘hockey’). But you only do that sometimes – knowing when is the key.

And then on top of the weeid (weird) pronunciation, you also have to master the slang that goes with the accent.

Bahston.

R-less Boston Accent

If you want to sound smaht, you’ll describe the ‘r-less’ Boston accent as ‘non-rhotic speech.’ You’ve no doubt heard the quintessential non-rhotic Boston phrase: ‘Pahk the cah in Hah-vahd yahd,’ right? And you pronounce all the vowels the way you say ‘ah’ at the dentist.

Or do you?

Good luck findin’ pahkin’ anywhere neeah Hah-vid Yahd.

Actually, Bostonians pronounce the ‘r’ when it comes before a vowel, though they do it softly. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear a Bostonian say, ‘pahk the cahr in Hah-vahd yahd.’ But if he had more than one vehicle, he would ‘pahk the cahs in Hah-vahd yahd.’

Plus, Bostonians talk fast, and they tend to mush their consonants together. So ‘Hah-vahd’ usually sounds more like ‘Hah-vid.’

And when you drop the ‘r,’ remember your voice goes up in pitch.

Got it?

Jordan’s Furniture, Boston Accent Style

There’s more than that to the way Bostonians deal with their ‘r’s. When the vowel is ‘er,’ you don’t drop the ‘r.’ So, “The Gahd’n went crazy when Larry Bird stole the ball.” Boston has at least two gahd’ns: Boston Garden and the Public Garden. Both are just ‘the gahd’n.’

Another signature sound of Boston speech: ‘or’ comes out as ‘aw.” So ‘Jordan’s Furniture’ sounds like ‘Jawdin’s Furnichah.’

For more than fawty (forty) years, Barry and Eliot Tatelman blanketed the airwaves with comical Jordan’s Furniture commercials. “We don’t sell those cheap sets that fall apaht,” they’d say. “You can tell when you open a dressa draw!”

Not only do they get the accent right, they even sold a chair once called the Boston Accent.

Jawdin’s Furnichah has an ImAX theatre in Reading. Really.

That Pesky O

As audiobook narrator Matt Haynes points out, Bostonians don’t substitute ‘aw’ for ‘o’ if preceded by an ‘s,’ ‘ng,’ ‘f,’ ‘l’ or ‘th.’

Boston Mayor Kevin White used to say ‘mother of God’ a lot. It came out ‘muh-thuhr aw Gawd.’

Or you might get ‘stawpped in Bahston by a statie for bangin’ a U-ey.’ (Translation: ‘stopped in Boston by a state policeman for making a U-turn.’)

The Intrusive R

Bostonians like to add ‘r’s’ at the end of words, like ‘Linder’ and ‘idear.’ Many people remember President Kennedy’s trouble with the Russians in ‘Cuber.’ But the Kennedys don’t really have a Boston accent. They have a Kennedy accent, a unique (some say pretentious) mix of the Transatlantic and Boston accents. So don’t mimic Mayor Quimby on the animated television series, The Simpsons, unless you’re making fun of a Kennedy.

You can listen to JFK pronounce “Jordan Marsh” in a Kennedy accent in this video here.

JFK delivers a speech in a Kennedy accent.

Boston politicians naturally have their own lingo. They raise campaign funds at a ‘time.’ They disclose damaging information about an opponent (‘oppo’) by ‘droppin’ a dime on’ or ‘diming out’ that person. Campaign volunteers ‘hold a sign’ for a candidate. It’s a good way to ‘get on the state’ (a sweet job, say at Massport) if your candidate wins.

In real Bostonspeak, the intrusive ‘r’ also shows up where ‘r’s’ don’t usually go — like before a vowel. So if you want to know where your muthah went, you might say, “Is Mar upstairs?” (Thanks to Matt Damon for that one!)

Or you might find yourself ‘soring wood’ or ‘making a withdroral from an ATM.’

Talk Fast and Drop Your Consonants

In the entire United States, only people in Oregon and Minnesota talk faster than Bostonians. So consonants often get left behind. “Why did you…?” equals “Whyja?” “Did you eat already?” becomes “Jeet orreddy?”

If the answer to “Jeet?” is no, you could go for chowda (chowder) or a spuckie (a sandwich, though that’s fading). Wash it all down with tawnic (tonic, also fading) or soder (soda), the proper names for carbonated soft drinks. Finish it off with a Hoodsie (ice cream cup). But ‘hoodsie’ also refers to a pretty teen-aged girl. She probably wears earrings in her PSDS (pierced ears).

When you buy b’daydas (the noble spud) at the Stah Mahket (Star Market), you probably need a carriage (shopping cart). Bring your pockabook (pocketbook). Same goes for the fahmisee (pharmacy) and the packie (liquor store).

‘Bubbler,’ for some reason, refers to ‘water fountain’ in both Boston and Wisconsin. Good luck finding one. And if you order a regular coffee from the Dunkies onna conna, you’ll get cream and sugar in it.

One on every conna.

Place Names per the Boston Accent

Medford, a city nawtha Bahston, is ‘MED-feh’ or ‘MEH-feh’ to someone who doesn’t live there. But to someone who does live there, it’s ‘MED-fid’ or ‘MEF-id.’ No one ever calls it Medford.

Many Massachusetts place names have consonants on paper but not in reality. So Worcester becomes Woostuh, Leicester Lestuh, Gloucester Glosstuh.

Bahston has a lot of neighborhoods you can get to on the T: the Nawth End, Southie, Dot or Dawchestah, JP (Jamaica Plain) and Rozzy (Roslindale). West Roxbury is generally just West Roxbury. Townies live in Charlestown, once the armored-car-robbery capital of the world.

If you happen to drive around Bahston, you might find yourself on an av – Dotav (Dorchester Avenue), Massav (Massachusetts Avenue) or Commav (Commonwealth Avenue).

A lot of people go down the Cape, maybe to P-town. The traffic on the expressway can back up for days (a long time), so you might have to take the breakdown lane (shoulder). But they got rid of the rotary (traffic circle) just before the Sagamore Bridge, and that helps a little bit.

[Ed note: Bostonians will give directions to lost Midwesterners with the extremely unhelpful, “Before you get to…” As in “Before you get to where the old K-Mart used to be.” Most directions also include the Dunkies onna conna (the ‘Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner’), also extremely unhelpful because there’s a Dunkies on every conna.]

Other Boston Accented Place Names

Before you get to the Cape (grr), you’ll hit the Irish Riviera, also known as the South Shore. Scituate (Sit-u-it) and Marshfield (Mahshfield) form the epicenter of the Irish Riviera, where some wealthy people live in Ka-chingham (Hingham) and Deluxebury (Duxbury). Not-so-wealthy Quincy has a z (Quinzy), though the sixth president’s name doesn’t.

Re-VEE-ah (Revere) lies just nawtha Boston and PEA-biddy (Peabody) lies nawtha Revere. You might hear someone say, “Dawn breaks over Marblehead,” a version of ‘duh’ that refers to the coastal town next to Salem.

‘Lynn, Lynn, City of sin, You never go out the way you came in,’ refers to the North Shore city with a reputation for vice and corruption. Back in the 1990s, one mayor tried to change the city’s image with a new name – Ocean Pahk. He failed. You still won’t go out the way you come in.

To get to Woostuh or anyplace westuh Boston, you take the MassPike. Accents start changing westuh Woostuh.

The MassPike

Spawts Teams

Bostonians embrace spawts (sports), with even more fervor than they embrace politics.

The Sawx (Red Sox) play at Fenway, where players hit homers over the Green Monster and past the Pesky Pole. Only Ted Williams could hit one into the Red Seat. The Big Dig (highway construction project) created a tunnel named after him, ‘The Ted.’

Don’t try to beat Tawm Brady heeah.

The Pats, or the Patsies, play in Foxboro, where Tom Brady once played as the Goat (greatest of all time). He might have gotten a tunnel too, if he hadn’t gone to Tamper Bay.

The B’s or the Broons (Bruins) and the Celtics play at the Gahden. Bawby Oah was the greatest Broon evah, but has yet to get a tunnel.

Four colleges play hawkey in the Beanpot tournament every year: Boston College, Boston University, Harvard and Northeastern. If you get a law degree from BC and went to BC and BC High, you’re a Triple Eagle. A graduate of both Harvard and Harvard Medical School is a 4-Her. To a kid from Somerville (or Slumerville), a Harvard student is a Bahney (Barney).

If you find all of this baffling, but you want to fit in as a Bostonian, there’s a simple remedy: Talk fast and hate the Yankees.

Want to know how to talk with a New Hampshire accent? Click here. For Rhode Island, click here, for Connecticut click here and for Maine, click here. And stay tuned for Vermont and Western Mass.

Images: Harvard Square and Harvard Yard By User:Chensiyuan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9954526; Jordan’s Furniture By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41771437; Boston By Riptor3000, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2839215; Dunkin’ Donuts by By Michael Rivera – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57287297. The MassPike By Nathan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23296975. This story was updated in 2023.

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How the Codfish Started the American Revolution

The American Revolution was to some extent a fight over the big, stupid, slow-moving codfish.

Codfish were by far colonial New England’s biggest export. The codfish was so important to New England that John Adams made sure the British allowed U.S. fishermen access to the Grand Banks and other banks off Newfoundland as part of the Treaty of Paris.

Adams believed the fledgling country needed a thriving fishery in order to have trained mariners who could serve in the navy. The U.S. Congress agreed with him, and in 1792 decided to pay fishermen a bounty for catching codfish.

The codfish had special importance to Massachusetts, where to this day the wooden Sacred Cod hangs above the chambers of the commonwealth’s House of Representatives.

The Sacred Codfish

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all the money New England made overseas. Livestock came in a poor second, at 20 percent.

When the American Revolution broke out, 10,000 New Englanders worked as fishermen, or eight percent of the adult male working population.

In Massachusetts, Marblehead and Gloucester ranked as the top fishing ports, with Salem, Beverly, Cape Cod, Ipswich and Plymouth heavily engaged in fishing.

The fisheries had a multiplier effect, generating income for people engaged in overseas trade, timbering, shipbuilding, ship rigging, sail making and other waterfront industries.

But powerful British plantation owners and fish merchants viewed the colonial fishing fleets as a threat to their own business. In 1733, they began to pressure Parliament to crack down on their colonial competitors. Their increasing success inhibited the New England economy and fomented much of the anger that led to revolution.

Dried Codfish

In the early 17^th century, New England fishermen didn’t venture far from home. They fished in small boats near the shore.

But later in the 1600s they began to fish offshore in two-masted schooners with crews of seven or eight men. The skipper recruited the crews, chose where to fish, navigated and counted the fish. Sharesmen handlined for cod and processed the catch. The cuttails – inexperienced boys and young men – cut bait, baited the hooks and processed the catch.

Fishing schooner L. A. Dunton at Mystic Seaport.

By the time they reached 30, most fishermen retired from the trade or died from drowning, fishing accidents or fever caught in the West Indies. It was a physically demanding job in a profane work environment.

Nor was it always pleasant, as the fishermen cut up and salted the fish on board ship.

But as historian Christopher Paul Magra pointed out, “the nature of work in the commercial cod fishing industry uniquely prepared fishermen and fish merchants to play leading roles in securing American independence.”

The French

In the 18^th century the market expanded for dried codfish, which contained 80 percent protein. New England fish merchants began to ship dried codfish to the Catholic countries of Europe, where the Pope was declaring more and more meatless feast days. Dried codfish also fed the burgeoning slave populations on West Indian sugar plantations.

By the middle of the 18^th century, New Englanders shipped most of their dried codfish to the West Indies and exchanged it for sugar, molasses and rum. They found the French island plantations sold sugar cheaper, and the French slave populations grew faster, than the British. Plus, the New England fish merchants had so much fish to sell they couldn’t unload it all on British customers.

Slaves planting sugar cane in Antigua.

So the New Englanders began to trade with the French. But the powerful British plantation owners did not appreciate the British colonists buying from their French competitors. So they persuaded Parliament in 1733 to pass the Molasses Act. It imposed duties on imported – that is, French – sugar, molasses and rum. Parliament reenacted the law every five years, but rarely made sure it was enforced.

Parliament

By 1764, the British planters convinced Parliament to pass the Sugar Act, which put a tariff on sugar and banned the import of non-British rum.

Parliament did something else to harm New England fishing interests: It banned trade with the French in North America. British fish merchants in the West Country did not like the colonists trading with fishermen in Newfoundland – they wanted to do it themselves.

Edmund Burke

This time, Parliament ordered the Royal Navy to enforce the Sugar Act. British ships from Halifax began to seize New England’s fishing vessels. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman, condemned the Sugar Act. He described it as corrupt heads of state creating a monopoly to generate revenue and to use the military to enforce that monopoly.

The Sugar Act

The Sugar Act meant most of the dried fish processed in New England could not be sold. New Englanders retaliated by boycotting British goods. At the same time, fishing vessels lay idle in Massachusetts harbors and fishermen looked for work.

As tensions mounted between Britain and the colonies, some members of Parliament proposed a moratorium on the New England fishing industry. On March 30, 1775 – less than two weeks before the shot heard round the world – Parliament passed a law that limited New England’s trade to Britain and the British West Indies. It also banned New England ships from the fisheries off Canada. Under the law, ships couldn’t even carry fishing tackle unless granted special permission.

Revolution

Unsurprisingly, New England’s cod fishermen played a disproportionate role in combating the British. Their role in the war led leaders like Adams to argue the fisheries served as nurseries for fighting men.

They helped lay siege to British forces at Boston, and they converted their fishing vessels into warships. The fishing fleets turned into privateers or became part of state navies, the Continental Navy or the coast guard.

Glover’s Regiment crossing the Delaware with Gen. Washington

Fish merchants like Marblehead’s Elbridge Gerry and Jeremiah Lee used their commercial contacts in Spain and the West Indies to buy military supplies for the patriots.

And a former fish merchant played a key role in one of the most famous actions of the American Revolution. John Glover and his men ferried George Washington and the Continental Army over the Delaware River on Christmas Eve, 1776.

With thanks to The New England Cod Fishing Industry and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution by Christopher Paul Magra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: L.A. Dunton By Ad Meskens – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20754268.

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When Mussolini Stiffed Gloucester, Mass., for $1 Million

In 1923, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini refused to pay a Gloucester seafood company for a shipment of salt cod.

Mussolini’s action nearly bankrupted the company, but it changed the way we eat. Today we owe at least partial thanks to the Italian Fascist for creating products that are now household names: Gorton’s, Birdseye and Sylvania.

Benito Mussolini

Gloucester

By the time Mussolini seized power in 1922 Gloucester, Mass., had long thrived as a major fishing port. The city’s fishermen primarily caught, cured and sold cod, a big, dumb fish easy to catch. For centuries, salt cod served as a staple that fed slaves and the working poor. Some historians consider salt cod the most important fish on the planet.

Cod

But by 1923, the public was losing its appetite for salt cod, preferring fresh fish. Gloucester’s largest fishing company, Gorton’s, was no doubt relieved and happy to get a $1-million-plus order for salt cod from the Italian government.

When the shipment of salt cod reached Italy, Mussolini ordered it seized and refused to pay Gorton’s. The company faced bankruptcy.

The next year, an eccentric inventor named Clarence Birdseye moved to Gloucester and rescued Gorton’s.

Drying salt cod in Gloucester

Slade Gorton

Slade Gorton, originally a Rhode Island mill worker, came to fishing by accident. He moved to Cape Ann to oversee the Annisquam Cotton Co., but a fire leveled the mill when Gorton was 51. Out of a job, he helped his wife run a boardinghouse by catching and curing fish for her boarders.

Gorton’s thrifty wife bought a fishing schooner and rented Rockport’s Motif No. 1 for a shop. “We are now in the fish business,” she said, according to lore.

Gorton’s sons joined the business and it prospered.

On March 31, 1906, Slade Gorton made a stunning announcement: It would merge with three other Gloucester fishing operators, creating the largest fishing company on the East Coast with 55 vessels and thousands of employees.

Clarence Birdseye

The year after Mussolini stiffed Gorton’s for the salt cod shipment, Clarence Birdseye moved to Gloucester so he could work on freezing fresh fish. He and a few others then opened the General Seafoods Company.

Birdseye had spent five years trapping furs in Labrador, where he noticed how the Eskimos preserved fish. They put them in barrels of brine, where the sub-zero temperatures quickly froze them. The fish tasted fresher and better than fish frozen at higher temperatures in freezers.

Birdseye mimicked the Eskimos’ method with a $7 investment in an electric fan, a cake of ice and a bucket of brine. With that apparatus he flash froze haddock.

After his move to Gloucester, he played around with ways to freeze and package seafood, vegetables, meat and fruit.

The nearly bankrupt Gorton’s turned to Birdseye for help developing a way to freeze fish. Over the next few years, they came up with a product that ended up in millions of U.S. households: frozen fish sticks in a family-size box with the Gorton logo on it – a fisherman in a yellow slicker.

Fish sticks

Today, Gorton’s of Gloucester is now a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Nippon Suisan Kaisha. It still packages and sells frozen seafood in supermarkets, but it also sells fish sticks to McDonald’s.

Will It Play in Springfield?

Meanwhile, Clarence Birdseye continued to tinker with freezing techniques.

In 1926, Marjorie Merriweather Post, the daughter of a food company founder, was yachting off Gloucester. She was served a goose that had been frozen six months earlier, and its flavor impressed her. Marjorie then asked some questions about the goose and learned that Clarence Birdseye had frozen it. So she told her father, and he bought Birdseye’s business in 1929 for $22 million.

Then called the Postum Co., it became General Foods. The company kept Birdseye on staff to research and develop freezing techniques and put his name on their frozen products. Birdseye invented a commercial freezer, freezer cases for grocery stores and wax packages for retail customers.

On March 6, 1930, Clarence Birdseye market tested 27 frozen foods in 18 Springfield, Mass., grocery stores. Consumers loved it.

Birdseye went on to invent quick-drying in 1946. He improved the incandescent light bulb and founded an electric company that became part of Sylvania. By the time of his death in 1956 he had received 250 patents.

General Foods became a multinational food processing corporation that is now part of Altria, formerly Philip Morris.

Image: Clarence Birdseye By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35811599; Fish sticks By BCastle75 – Photo in a supermarket, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20415400. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Historic Barns

Thousands of New England’s historic barns have survived severe weather, westward migration, suburban sprawl and competition from corporate agribusiness.

Often connected to other farm buildings and the farmhouse, they usually had many uses. Historic barns sheltered dairy cows, teams of oxen, horses, hay and crops.

Some historic barns, on the other hand, were built specifically for one purpose, like Connecticut tobacco or Vermont dairy cows.

But typical New England farm families grew a variety of crops and livestock, making and selling anything to support the farm. A New England farmer might sell maple syrup, timber, clothing, hard cider and barrels. He might run a tavern, or rent out his rooms or his beehives.

Big House, Little House…

Northern New England’s historic barns often connect to the house and to other buildings, Thomas L. Hubka described such connected farm buildings as ‘Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn.’

Though you might assume New Englanders connected their houses to outbuildings because of the weather, you would be only partly right.

According to Hubka, the agricultural reform movement beginning in the early 19^th century inspired New England farmers to make their farms more efficient.

So they connected their houses with such outbuildings as barns, ells, chicken coops, sugar houses, woodsheds, workshops and carriage sheds.

Farming as a way of life has waned in New England, but the public appetite for locally grown, unadulterated food is sparking a revival on a smaller scale.

If you have any favorite historic barns in New England, please share them in the comments section.

Windsor Tobacco Barn

Two of Windsor’s historic barns that sheltered shade tobacco. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Tobacco loved the sandy soil of Windsor, Conn., and in 1640 farmers began planting tobacco seeds from Virginia. As cigar smoking grew popular in the early 19th century, Connecticut farmers began to specialize in cigar binders using Broadleaf and Havana Seed. Eventually, they grew a light, tasty tobacco under tents of hand-woven cloth (hence ‘shade tobacco’) to use as wrappers.

By the middle of the 19th century, Connecticut emerged as a leading producer of tobacco. The tobacco Valley ran from Springfield to Hartford.

Tobacco farmers relied on seasonal labor from college campuses in the South, including Morehead College, which sent a young Martin Luther King, Jr., to Simsbury. They also used local child labor. World War II and the passage of child labor laws forced farmers to rely on immigrant workers from Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

Health concerns and competition from mass-produced cigar wrappers caused Connecticut’s tobacco acreage to dwindle.

Windsor produced more shade tobacco than anywhere else in the state. So in 1988, the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society formed in Windsor to preserve artifacts from the era. The historical society’s Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum is located in Northwest Park in Windsor.

135 Lang Road, Windsor, Connecticut

Sabbathday Lake Barns

The Shakers built these classic examples of New England historic barns. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Ann Lee founded the Shaker sect, formally known as the The United Society of Believers, in Manchester, England, in 1847. Lee broke away from the Quakers, and her followers were known as the ‘Shaking Quakers’ because of their ecstatic dancing during Sunday meeting.

After Ann Lee – known as ‘Mother Ann’ – went to prison for her beliefs, she came to America with eight followers in 1774.

The Shakers expanded to 19 utopian communities throughout the Northeast and Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia and Florida. They preached a doctrine of celibacy, self-sufficiency, pacifism, communal living and equality between the sexes.

In 1794, the Shakers formed Sabbathday Lake near New Gloucester and Poland, Maine,

By the 1840s, the Sabbathday Lake Shakers had carved a large enterprise out of the Maine forests. They owned 1,900 acres and 26 large buildings, including barns, a meetinghouse, a blacksmith shop and a large dwelling house.

The Sabbathay Lake Shakers built their barns in the New England style, the most common found in the region. Larger than typical barns in other parts of the country, they have doors at the ends and basements. The Shakers built the Sabbathday Lake barns into the side of a hill, which allowed them to access the upper floor from the ground.

The Shakers peaked in the 1840s, with 6,000 members throughout the United States. Their belief in celibacy would doom them to slow, near extinction.

But for many years during the 19^th century, the simple, self-sufficient Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, sold their products to the luxury-loving guests and the owners of the Poland Spring Hotel.

707 Shaker Road, New Gloucester, Maine

Old Tavern Farm

Like many historic barns in New England, the Old Tavern barn connects to the other farm buildings.

Like many historic barns in Northern New England, the barn at the Old Tavern Farm in Greenfield, Mass., connects to buildings with other uses.

The Old Tavern Farm served many purposes over the centuries, reverting today to its original use as a bed and breakfast.

The farm’s early owners supplemented their farm income by running a tavern – or perhaps it was the other way around. They served neighbors and travelers along the Old Post Road

The tavern also served as a meeting place, a courtroom and a newsroom, noted the registration form for the National Register of Historic Places. The property doubled as a military training field, sports arena, stockyard and fairgrounds.

Samuel Hinsdale inherited the farm from his father, Mehuman Hinsdale, once taken captive by Indians in the 1704 raid on Deerfield. Hinsdale began building on the land in 1740, and by 1747 he operated a tavern.The main house was built around 1820, but the wing was built in 1794 on Hinsdale’s foundation.

Others ran the tavern from 1836 until 1860, when the temperance movement shut it down. The Smith family ran the 160-acre farm from the latter part of the 19th century until 1997.

817 Colrain Road, Greenfield, Massachusetts

Bennett Farm

That cupola on the Bennett Farm’s barn was once a steeple.

Ocean Born Mary’s son Thomas Wallace once owned the land in Henniker that became the Bennett Farm. The son of the legendary New Hampshire woman then sold it to Joseph Lewis in 1777. Its subsequent owners ran it as a tavern until 1848. From that point on, its owners ran it as a typical Northern New England farm.

The barn was built in 1834 as a religious meeting house. Around 1860, the Bennett Farm’s barn burned down, so the farm’s owner moved the meeting house to the farm and converted it to a barn. The top of the steeple blew off during the Hurricane of 1938, leaving a cupola. .

Mark Bennett bought the farm in 1902, and his son Stephen took over when his father died in 1925 and ran it into the 1960s. Stephen’s son now runs the farm.

“Bennett Farm as it survives today conveys the character and scale of a late 19th-early 20th century diversified family farm,” notes The National Register of Historic Places registration form.

11 Bennett Rd., Henniker, New Hampshire

Mount Hope Farm

See Mount Hope’s historic barn at the Saturday farmer’s market held at Mount Hope.

The Mount Hope Farm in Bristol, R.I., includes a mansion built in 1745 and expanded in 1840 and 1895, and two historic barns built in 1860. But it also owes its significance to its storied owners and connected events.

Once the traditional seat of the Wampanoag Indians, Benjamin Church killed King Philip nearby. The colonists then confiscated the land, and the wealthy merchant and slave owner Isaac Royall, Jr., built the farmhouse in 1745. But Royall’s Loyalist sympathies forced him to move to Halifax at the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The State of Rhode Island then confiscated the land again. Proceeds from the sale of Mount Hope went to pay Continental Army officers and soldiers.

William Bradford, great, great grandson of the Pilgrim governor, bought the house in 1783, and George Washington visited him for a week there. Bradford later won election to the U.S. Senate. The farm is also known as the Governor Bradford House, though he only served as deputy governor.

In the early 1950’s, the then-owner, Rudolf F. Haffenreffer, III, deeded Mount Hope and approximately 250 acres of the original farm to Brown University.

“Today, this handsome estate with its historic mansion and beautiful gardens, is an island of tranquility in an increasingly urban landscape,” noted the National Register of Historic Places registration form.

250 Metacom Ave., Bristol, Rhode Island

Shelburne Farms Horseshoe Barn

The Horseshoe Barn at Shelburne Museum.

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, created a classic Gilded Age gentleman farm in Shelburne, Vt.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course.

Among Shelburne Farms’ historic barns is the horseshoe barn, not one of the original buildings designed by architect Robert Henderson Robertson. It was built later as the next generation of Vanderbilts struggled to keep up the farm.

The Webbs’ daughter-in-law, Electra Havemeyer Webb, turned Shelburne Farms into a museum. She wanted a proper setting for the carriage collection, so she searched and found a rare horseshoe-shaped dairy born in Georgia, Vt.

Because the owner refused to sell it, Electra had her staff find, move and assemble hand-hewn beams from 12 historic barns and stone from two gristmills. They finished the 238-foot-long barn in 1949.

In 1957, the museum built the annex to house 150 more vehicles added to the collection.

In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows. It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Bennett Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19490337; Old Tavern Farm By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24500134.

Mount Hope Barn by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28160904.

This story about historic barns was updated in 2023.

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Six Iconic Paintings From the New England States

Iconic paintings capture the essence of a place or a person. American Gothic, for example, reveals the stoic plainness of the rural Midwest in the Depression. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows the tranquility of Parisians at leisure in the 1880s.

But what does New England offer in the way of iconic paintings? We had many from which to choose, but we went with six, one for each New England state.

If you know of other iconic paintings that reveal something essential about your state, please share them in the comments section.

Home to Thanksgiving

Home to Thanksgiving by George Durrie

Many well-known artists have painted scenes from Connecticut, which had several art colonies and quite a few famous artists. But which one painted the most iconic painting?

We went with George Durrie, who painted many scenes in his native Connecticut for Currier & Ives. Home to Thanksgiving – often misidentified as Home for Thanksgiving – was easily the most popular of all his Currier & Ives paintings. It depicts a rural scene near his home in New Haven, and it captures the charm and warmth of a Connecticut farmhouse in winter. And it explores the theme of Thanksgiving, that most New England of all holidays.

Durrie, born in Hartford in 1820, taught himself to paint. He toiled in obscurity for many years, painting wintry landscapes of rural Connecticut. Finally, at the age of 40, Currier & Ives published prints of four of his paintings. Durrie could only enjoy his fame for two years, because he died in 1862. Currier & Ives printed six of his works posthumously.

The WPA Guide to Connecticut praised Durrie as a sort of poet. “One can fairly smell the wood smoke in his frosty air, hear the creak of snow under the sledge runners, the barking of distant dogs, and breathe the atmosphere of the old, snug, cheery farm life of the early nineteenth century.”

The original lithograph stones ended up as landfill for Central Park in New York.

Christina’s World

Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth produced many iconic paintings, but Christina’s World tops them all. In it, Wyeth manages to combine the toughness, beauty and aspiration of a woman who runs a saltwater farm in Maine.

Andrew Wyeth met Christina Olson on the same day he met his wife, July 12, 1939. He picked her up on a date in Cushing, Maine, where he spent summers with his family. She drove him to the Olson farm. Betsy Wyeth vaguely remembered she did it because she’d just learned to drive and wanted to go somewhere. She and Andrew married the next year.

Christina and her brother Alvaro Olson let him set up a studio in a room on the second floor of their farmhouse. Looking out the window one day in 1948, Wyeth saw Christina Olson crawling in the field and got the inspiration for Christina’s World.

He worked on the background for two months, while closely sketching Christina’s hair, body and hands. Betsy posed for the figure.

Wyeth hung the painting in his house in Maine and no one reacted to it. “I thought, Boy, is this one ever a flat tire,” he said.

He was wrong. From then on he started receiving letters about Christina’s World — about one a week. Today it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Breezing Up

Breezing Up by Winslow Homer

Massachusetts offered us many choices for iconic paintings. Rockport’s Motif No. 1 immediately came to mind, but we decided it was the subject, not the painting, that was iconic. Then we turned to Edward Hopper, whose many lighthouses and landscapes all say ‘New England.’ But do they say, ‘Massachusetts?’

Ultimately we settled on Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up, a scene he painted of Gloucester, Mass. Critics call it one of Homer’s greatest paintings. We view it as iconic because it shows a fishing craft, such an essential part of Massachusetts’ history. We also like the forward-looking gaze of the young sailors and the challenge posed by the rough seas.

Breezing Up now hangs at the National Gallery of Art, which calls it “one of the best-known and most beloved artistic images of life in nineteenth-century America.”

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway

willey-family-kensett-painting-mount-washington

Mount Washington From the Valley of Conway by John Frederick Kensett

John Frederick Kensett painted Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway in 1851. By doing so he gave a huge boost to tourism in the White Mountains.

Kensett belonged to the Hudson River School of Painting, which produced iconic paintings of American landscapes. An engraver made a copy of the painting, which was sold to 13,000 subscribers of the American Art Union. Artists copied the painting, and

Currier & Ives turned the engraving into a lithograph in 1860.

The monumental image of the rugged mountain appealed to American sensibilities. A curator called it “the single most effective mid-nineteenth-century advertisement for the scenic charms of the White Mountains.”

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway now belongs to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam

Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam by John Greenwood

Rhode Island artist Gilbert Stuart painted one of the most famous paintings in the history of the world, the so-called Athenaeum portrait of George Washington. But Washington wasn’t a Rhode Islander, so we had to look elsewhere. We found what we were looking for in an irreverent painting of Rhode Island merchants and sea captains.

We liked the roguish maritime theme and the allusion to Rhode Island’s colonial past. Despite the subjects’ barroom shenanigans depicted in the painting, they later made history.

Rhode Island merchants and sea captains commissioned this painting of themselves carousing in a Dutch Guiana tavern sometime around 1755. Then known as Surinam, it was a major Caribbean trading stop. The painter, John Greenwood, a Bostonian living in Surinam at the time, painted himself leaving the tavern with a candle.

The painting includes two future governors of Rhode Island, Capt. Nicholas Cooke, smoking a pipe at the table, and Joseph Wanton, passed out in a chair. The commander of the Continental Navy, Esek Hopkins, talks to Cooke, and Stephen Hopkins, signer of the Declaration of Independence, pours rum on Wanton. The painting, appropriately, bears the title Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam. It now hangs, perhaps less appropriately, in the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Four Freedoms

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

The Grandma Moses painting Fourth of July tempted us, as it belongs to the White House and depicts a quintessential Fourth of July in a folk style. The Bennington Museum holds the largest collection of Grandma Moses paintings, and yet we had to disqualify her for one simple reason: She was a New Yorker.

In the end we settled for one of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings. Rockwell painted them in his Arlington, Vt., studio during World War II to illustrate what the United States was fighting for: freedom from want, freedom of speech, freedom of worship and freedom from fear.

Norman Rockwell, of course, painted many iconic paintings. But which of the Four Freedoms is the most iconic? We chose Freedom of Speech because it interprets the subject of Town Meeting, a uniquely New England tradition. Rockwell painted something that actually happened. Jim Edgerton stood up to oppose the selectmen’s plans to build a new school. He used his neighbors for models, and even borrowed their clothes as props.

The painting appeared in the Feb. 20, 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine’s editor, Ben Hibbs, said of Rockwell’s work, “A great picture, I think is one which moves and inspires millions of people. The Four Freedoms did — do so.”

You can see all the Four Freedoms iconic paintings at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.

This story was updated in 2022.

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