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The Kettle Holes of New England (12 Other States Have Them Too)

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You’ll find thousands of kettle holes in New England, but you won’t find them everywhere in the United States. They can be ponds, lakes or bogs, but they always result from an iceberg that calved from a glacier and then melted.

Geologist Robert Thorson calls them “fossil icebergs” in his book, Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds.

Kettle holes came about with the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet, which covered much of Canada and the northern United States. The icebergs it left behind got covered with sediment until they melted.

Kettle holes dimple the landscape south of the Great Lakes, Adirondacks and New England mountains. They then end around the 37th parallel along the southern borders of Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia. Thorson calls them a “blue galaxy” within 19 “kettle states.”

Collectively, writes, Thorson, “they form a galaxy of approximately 100,000 blue dots on the American landscape. Ranging from the parched prairies of the western high plains and the foggy, boggy moorlands of eastern Nantucket, this galaxy is widest near the center between Michigan’s upper peninsula and central Indiana.”

America has two famous kettle holes, one mythical, the other with mythical status. They are Lake Wobegon in Minnesota and Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Though fictional, Lake Wobegon is clearly one of Minnesota’s many kettle lakes, wrote Thorson. He has also observed central Minnesota’s kettle holes most resemble the ones in New England.

Thoreau had a spiritual relationship with Walden Pond, calling it “heaven beneath us.” “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” he wrote.

Sunset at Walden Pond

Following the Kettle Holes

In the early 19th century, New Englanders began migrating west, showing a preference for northern kettle country, wrote Thorson. They left their imprint on the kettle states in architecture, urban design and industry. Cleveland’s Public Square and Detroit’s Penobscot Building provide just two examples.

Minnesota, wrote Thorson, was the only state outside of New England to which Thoreau traveled. When he visited, he noticed that half the people he met came from Massachusetts and the lumbermen all came from Maine.

New Englanders’ attraction for kettle holes made sense since they’d long used them for drinking water, trapping beavers, growing marsh hay for livestock,  fishing and hunting, making bog iron, growing cranberries and wild rice and cutting refrigeration ice.

Wondering where there’s a kettle hole in your state? Here’s a short list of them.

The Gift of the Glacier

Anderson Pond, aka Blue Lake,

“The entire Connecticut landscape is a gift of the glacier,” writes Thorson.

The Connecticut River Valley, New England’s breadbasket, was once a tropical salt lake. The glacier then dredged the lake and dammed it to form another shallow one that threw sand onto the shore. The valley drained 12,000 years ago leaving rich soil suited to farming. It also left the kettle holes that dot the landscape around Hartford.

A small kettle hole in Branford helped give birth to American limnology, the science of lakes. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Yale zoology professor, used Linsley Pond in Branford to teach students about ecology, according to Thorson..

The glacier also deepened an old river channel along shat is now the Connecticut shoreline. Then the sea level rose to create deep water harbors from Greenwich to Stonington. Marshes and kettle holes behind the beaches then developed as the sea level slowly rose. One such kettle hole, Anderson Pond in North Stonington, encompasses 57 acres ideal for boating, canoeing or kayaking.

Development threatens the health of Connecticut’s kettle holes, which are highly sensitive to climate change and water pollution. When Thorson wrote his book in 2009, home buyers increasingly looked to freshwater shorelines. They had concerns about rising sea level, increasing hurricane strength and the high cost of flood insurance.

Kettle Holes, a Kame and Blue Clay

Otter Ponds

Kettle hole junkies in Maine can find a series of kettle holes just outside of Portland. The Portland Water District opened the Sebago Lake Land Reserve in 2005 for recreation and admiring kettle holes. They include Half Moon Pond, Otter Ponds and Snake Pond.

Visitors can also see a kame slope left by the Laurentide glacier when it retreated.  It also created a ridge of sediment known as the Presumpscot Formation.  When the ice sheet melted into streams, the water carried sediment like silt and clay to the ocean. The silt left behind — the Presumpscot Formation — runs from the Maine and New Hampshire coasts inland. Mainers call the sediment “blue clay” and used it for brickmaking in colonial times.

Kettle Holes For Drowning Certain People

Scargo Lake, one of Cape Cod’s biggest kettle holes

Cape Cod has more than a thousand ponds and lakes and almost 500 of them are kettles – “enough to drown every gossip in,” people used to say.

The Laurentide ice sheet began to head south about 25,000 years ago, reaching Cape Cod and the Islands. When it retreated, it carved out a sand and rock formation called a moraine.

Enough to drown every gossip in

Scargo Lake in Dennis is one of the biggest kettles on Cape Cod. It covers 60 acres with an average depth of 25 feet and 1.3 miles of shoreline. It’s been been stocked with game fish since before 1911, when the commonwealth’s Division of Fish and Wildlife first surveyed it. People can swim from Princess Beach, the primary swimming beach.

Many myths and legends have sprung up about Scargo Lake and yes, they involve a Native American princess.

According to one version, Princess Scargo of the Nobscusset tribe fell in love with a handsome young native on his way into battle. He gave her four fish as a token of his love in a wooden bowl. Or maybe he gave her three fish in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

She put the fish in a tiny pond and awaited his return. Only one of the fish lived during a long, dry summer. Her father called together all the women and children to dig a pond “as wide as an arrow’s flight.” The dirt and rocks they dug up formed Scargo Hill, on top of which Princess Scargo could watch her fish and await her true love’s return.

And that’s why Scargo Lake is shaped like a fish.

A Much Photographed Kettle Hole

Lake Chocorua ready for a picture

The surface of Lake Chocorua on most days exhibits a stunning reflection of Mount Chocorua in the White Mountains. That makes it one of the most famous kettle holes in the Northeast and a popular subject for photographers.

Located in Tamworth, N.H., Lake Chocorua owes its pristine water to the lack of development around it. For five decades, the Chocorua Lake Conservancy has worked to protect the watershed with conservation covenants and easements. Forests now buffer the lake, and motorboats are forbidden by law.

New Hampshire boasts two other well-known kettle holes in the world of limnology: Pea Porridge Pond in Conway and Madison and the much-studied Mirror Lake in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.

Rhode Island’s Kettle Holes

Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge, full of kettle holes

In Rhode Island,  moraines on Block Island and near Charlestown are about as old as Cape Cod — and as full of kettle holes.

The Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge has plenty of them. Once used for farming, it got turned into a military base during World War II, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station Charlestown. Then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated it a refuge in 1970.

Today shrubs and grassy reclaim the old runways, used as part of the trail network that goes past salt marshes, kettle holes and forests. Birdwatchers love it, as they’ve recorded 310 species of birds within the refuge.

Ninigret belongs to a complex of five wildlife preserves along Rhode Island’s south coast that also include Trustom Pond, John H. Chafee at Petaquamscutt Cove, Block Island and Sachuest Point. The Kettle Pond Visitor Center at Ninigret offers information about all five.

A Spectacular Sight

Kettle Pond, one of many kettle holes in Groton State Forest.

When the Laurentide glacier retreated north, it scraped out yet another moraine in northeastern Vermont. Melting icebergs then  filled Vermont’s kettle holes and kettle bogs.

Kettle Pond State Park near Marshfield belongs to seven state parks in Groton Forest. The Civilian Conservation Corps created many of the trails and shelters among the trees.

A hiking trail circumnavigates the pristine waters of Kettle Pond, which, as its name suggests, is a kettle hole. The hiking trail offers a swimming beach, primitive shelters and the call of the loon. Climb nearby Owl’s Head for a spectacular view of the pond.

With thanks to Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds by Robert Thorson. 

Images: Ninigret By Greg Thompson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, via Flickr, Public Domain. Cape Cod aerial view NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. Lake Chocorua By Jdahlem21 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5323618. Otter Ponds By NewtonCourt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106790726. Kettle Pond By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60968369. Walden Pond at Sunset by Tim Hettler via Flickr, CC by 2.0.

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Six Iconic Summer Paintings of New England

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New England has no shortage of summer paintings. For centuries, artists have fled cities in summer for the cool air by the seashore or in the mountains. Or perhaps they just took a short train ride from New York or Boston.

They first ventured forth to the White Mountains in the early 19th century. They explored almost as much as they painted. Later their paintings promoted tourism.

Then summer art colonies began burgeoning throughout New England. In addition to the White Mountain painters, New Hampshire had Cornish and Dublin. Connecticut had Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Massachusetts had Provincetown, the Berkshires, Gloucester and the Lynn Beach Art Colony. Maine had Ogunquit, Monhegan and Skowhegan – as well as every other island and coastal community.

Even tiny Rhode Island and Vermont had their own artist colonies. Vermont had the Dorset painters, and painters favored the South Kingstown hamlet of Matunuck.

So here are six summer paintings, one for each New England state.

The Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but in summertime he ventured to various artist colonies. Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Miss Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.

Hassam, observed the New York Times, was a priest high in the councils of the increasing tribe of American Impressionsts.

Hassam painted The Couch on the Porch in 1914 in Cos Cob. The art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.

One critic wrote that Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s.

Instead of historical scenes or famous people, the impressionsts painted landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life. They relied on natural light, quick brush strokes and a bright palette.

A short train ride took Twachtman’s friends from New York City to Greenwich. Some stayed at his home or boarded at the Holley House, now known as the Bush-Holley House. The colonists included such artists as J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid and Theodore Robinson, as well as writers Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather.

Summer, North Haven

The American Impressionists just loved to paint young women in white dresses outside in bright sunshine. Frank Weston Benson mastered the theme in many of his summer paintings.

Frank Weston Benson, was born in Salem, Mass., and he grew up with a love of the outdoors. As a boy he spent many hours duck hunting in the marshes around Salem.

In 1882, when he turned 21, his parents gave him $2,000 for a trip to Europe. He studied the old masters as well as the work of Claude Monet. When he returned, he established himself as an artist, married and had four chldren, which he frequently painted.

“I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes,” he once said.

He enjoyed success as an artist, winning many medals for his work. During the summer, Frank Weston Benson painted on the Maine island of North Haven, as well as in the New Hampshire towns of New Castle and Dublin. He painted Summer in 1909 using his wife and three daughters as models.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photos-frank-weston-benson-painter-light/

Eventually, critics derided his paintings as “too pretty,” so he returned to his first love. Benson mastered waterfowl etchings, and even designed the second Federal Duck Stamp.

Cape Cod Morning, Truro

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death at 85 in 1967.

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod, creating a number of summer paintings. He explained why he chose the Cape in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous – perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

He loved to suggest the inner life of human beings, something he called “a vast realm.” He also once said all he wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Cape Cod Morning, painted in 1950, is quintessential Hopper. He captures a feeling of tension and isolation, as well as sunlight on the side of a house.

Saco River, White Mountains

In the 19th century, hundreds of artists traveled to the White Mountains to paint the splendor of what was then wilderness.

White Mountain art started in 1826, when a widely reported tragedy began to attract people to the region. Nine members of the Willey household perished in a landslide.

Then Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, born in 1837 in Portsmouth, N.H., started out as a businessman in Boston. However, he switched to landscape painting full-time, which turned out to be a good career move. A member of the Hudson River School of Art, he specialized in marinescapes. However, he did make painting forays into the White Mountains, including Summer on the Saco (Mount Chocorua).

Second Beach, Newport

There was nothing middle-class about this scene of Second Beach in Newport, R.I. Worthington Whittredge, a late-Hudson River School painter, painted it in 1878-1880. Newport then ruled as a fashionable summer resort for the Gilded Age elite.

Southern planters had begun coming to Newport to escape the summer heat in the mid-19th century. Northerners then started to arrive and to build lavish summer cottages. When Whittredge painted Second Beach, Newport was still on the way up. The Vanderbilts, for example, had yet to build two of the most opulent “cottages,” the Breakers and Marble House.

This summer painting shows fashionable people dipping their toes in the water and a horse-drawn carriage at the other end of the beach.

Swimming Hole, Arlington

Though born in New York City suburb, Norman Rockwell created the iconography of 20th century small town New England.

Rockwell’s career followed the Golden Age of Illustration a period of brilliant book and magazine illustration. It ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. Rockwell began his studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1911. Inspired by such Golden Age illustrators as Howard Pyle, Rockwell decided to devote himself to illustration.

For 20 years he worked for Boys Life magazine, living in New Rochelle with his wife and three sons. But by 1938, he needed a restart, so he bought a farmhouse in Arlington. Rural Vermont inspired him to develop into the teller of fictional stories about small town America.

He had no interest in the natural beauty around him. Instead, he sought out diners, dentists offices and schoolhouses.

In 1945, he decided to paint a salesman who takes a dip into a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

Rockwell painted his neighbor George Zimmer, who posed as the salesman. It made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, one of seven for which Zimmer modeled. Many of Rockwell’s summer paintings appeared on Post covers.

Rockwell paid close attention to details. In Swimming Hole, he tells the story of the salesman making a long drive and stopping at a swimming hole. He parks his car and methodically takes off his shirt and tie, hangs it up, lays his glasses on a newspaper and then his cigar on a shoe.

“George Zimmer, my model,” Rockwell said, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.”

 

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

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“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations.  From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts.  A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

  • Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
  • One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s:  “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
  • A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

sundown towns movie

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen. 

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Marion Donovan, Westport Housewife, Defeats Diaper Rash and Makes $1 Million

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Marion Donovan was always destined to be an inventor. Inventiveness was in her blood. Her brothers, father and uncle had all invented ingenious factory machines. But Donovan’s inventions would come in a more domestic setting.

Brochure for Baby Boaters invented by Marion Donovan

Brochure for Baby Boaters invented by Marion Donovan

Marion Donovan

Born in South Bend, Ind., on  Oct. 15, 1917, her mother died when she was seven. Her father raised her. He and his identical twin brother had invented a lathe tool used to make automobile parts and gun barrels. They ran the South Bend Lathe Works, which Marion visited often after school. Her father encouraged her to innovate new things, and helped her design a new kind of tooth powder when she still went to elementary school.

She graduated from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania, and then went to New York City for a job as assistant beauty editor at Vogue magazine. In 1942, she married James Donovan, gave up her job and moved to Westport, Conn., to raise their three children.

Marion Donovan

Donovan put her mind to one of the major issues a young mother faces: keeping a baby dry and comfortable. The state-of-the art technology at the time was cloth diapers fastened with safety pins and covered with rubber baby pants.

The rubber pants produced diaper rash, but not using them produced a wet baby and a sopping crib. Lightning struck one day for Donovan when she took inspiration from her shower curtain. She began the design process of cutting and sewing the curtain into what she would name the “Boater.”

The Boater

The Boater was a simple plastic sheath into which a diaper was inserted. It was then snapped in place around the baby, swaddling it in comfort while protecting the furniture. Because it still allowed some air circulation, it minimized diaper rash. And snaps to keep it in place avoided sticking the baby with safety pins.

Donovan just had one other problem to conquer: the ignorance of the manufacturing industry. She approached the firms selling products to moms, only to hear repeatedly that they had no need for her innovation.

Undeterred, Donovan tapped into her familiarity with manufacturing and made the Boater herself. When the Boater debuted in 1949, she realized instant success. Saks Fifth Avenue couldn’t keep them in stock.

Disposable Diapers

By 1951, companies could see the commercial potential for the Boater. Donovan sold the rights to her Boater patents for $1 million. But she hadn’t finished innovating. Having worked with the Boater for years, she pursued the next logical innovation in diapers: the disposable diaper.

Again, Donovan tried to interest companies in her idea, but they had no interest. Who would want disposable diapers?

Donovan then turned her entrepreneurial mind to other inventions. They included a space-saving closet hanger system and soap dish insert that minimized soap scum buildup. Over time she accumulated 20 patents. Finally, she trained as an architect at Yale and then designed her own home in Greenwich, Conn.

As for the disposable diaper: evolution was impossible to stop. Europeans created and sold disposables. As their success blossomed, American companies quickly fell in line and Victor Mills created the first American disposable for Proctor & Gamble in 1956 – Pampers.

This story updated in 2022. 

 

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New England Places To Visit, From Presque Isle, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn.

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[jpshare]The New England Historical Society introduces a new weekly feature, New England Places. We plan to suggest places to visit based on our stories the previous week, our calendar items and anything else that strikes our fancy. Look for New England Places on Saturday mornings to help you plan your weekend.

New England PLaces greenwichNo matter where you live in New England, you are within driving distance of a Carnegie Library. Still standing are 92 of the 95 from Norwalk, Conn., to Presque Isle, Maine, all donated by Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Of those, 68 are still public libraries and six are still college libraries. (Click here for a complete listing.)

The interior of Mount Holyoke’s Williston Library, donated by Carnegie, was designed to resemble Westminster Hall in England. Mount Holyoke has a beautiful campus worth visiting even without getting inside the library. Check the calendar here for a schedule of campus tours.

You can combine shopping with history by visiting the Abercrombie & Fitch outlet in Freeport, Maine. It used to be a Carnegie Library.

Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library

Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library

This week we wrote about the controversy that erupted in Greenwich, Conn., when the United Nations announced plans to build a new city in northern Greenwich and parts of Stamford and North Castle. Greenwich is a lovely suburb, with 34 sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including nine historic districts, an African Methodist Episcopal Church and a lighthouse. Even the Merritt Parkway is considered historic.

Greenwich offers parks, miles of walking trails, the Bruce Museum (closed Easter) and the Bush-Holley House and Museum (also closed Easter), once an art colony and now headquarters of the Greenwich Historical Society. For suggestions about what to do in and around Greenwich, check the Stanton House Inn blog here.

 

Saturday marks the birthday of an important New Englander: navigator Nathaniel Bowditch (1779). The Nathaniel Bowditch House in Salem, Mass., is a National Historic Landmark and one of Salem’s many magnificent Federal Style homes that you can see while on your way to the Peabody Essex Museum, open this weekend. The PEM started as the East India Marine Society in 1799, founded by sea captains and supercargoes who sailed beyond Cape Horn. Most would have been aided by Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator. The museum, which charges admission, is currently exhibiting paintings of the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam and “Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age.”

Looking for something to do with the kids? Old Sturbridge Village holds Maple Days this weekend, featuring the entire process from tapping the trees to eating the syrup. Click here for more information.

Looking ahead, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford will display jewels worn by the cast in Downton Abbey on Thursday, March 31. A lecture and jewelry trunk show will be with Andrew Prince, who created the jewelry pieces for Downton Abbey and The Young Victoria. Click here for more information.

On Saturdays in Hartford the Connecticut Historical Society is hosting a guided tour of a traveling exhibit of Beatrice Fox Auerbach’s clothes. It includes more than 100 garments, shoes and accessories that once belonged to the woman who ran G. Fox. & Co. For more information, click here.

 

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When Greenwich Kicked Out the United Nations

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Peace after World War II was shattered in Greenwich, Conn., when a United Nations site committee started looking at land for its new headquarters in the tony suburb.

Not in this back yard. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Not in this back yard. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The news came in December 1945 to the Greenwich Time newspaper by Prescott Bush, a resident, banker, future U.S. senator and father of George H.W. Bush. It shocked the town.

Prescott Bush

Prescott Bush

Fifty-one countries formed the United Nations in 1945 in the aftermath of  World War II. They intended the organization to end future wars. But first the U.N. needed a place to meet.

The United Nations Organization site committee, headed by Dr. Stoyan Gavrilovic of Yugoslavia, had chosen a 42-square-mile site. It included nearly all of Greenwich north of the Merritt Parkway and parts of Stamford and North Castle.

It would be called the “Free City of the United Nations,” kind of like Vatican City in Rome. The committee proposed a new railroad spur and four-lane highway. Their wish list also included an airport, a sewage treatment plant, a residential section, a business section, a hotel, power plants, churches, schools, a hospital, fire and police stations. The crowning glory: a 12-story administration building modeled after the Pentagon, for 50,000 office workers.

Greenwich residents took to calling it UNOville. Most of them had one message for the U.N.: Not In My Back Yard.

Greenwich Selected

Cities and towns all across the United States scrambled to lure the United Nations. Sen. Harley Kilgore of West Virginia sent a letter to the committee arguing the town of Berkeley Springs would be much more affordable than Fairfield County. Stamford, Conn., unlike Greenwich, wanted the U.N. Also in contention were Atlantic City, Bear Mountain in New York, Palisades State Park in New Jersey, Glacier National Park in Montana, the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Golf and Nightclubs

Pedro Lopez, a diplomat from the Philippines, explained the attraction of Greenwich. Its idyllic countryside would inspire the meditation and contemplation that would help solve the problems of a suffering and miserable world. Plus, it offered golf, and New York’s nightclubs and theaters were only a short train ride away.

That would be nice for the diplomats, not so much for the residents of Greenwich. Prescott Bush explained the opposition in a letter to the UNO: A thousand families would be displaced and traffic, already a problem, would get worse.

Greenwich lawyer John L. Gray and his law partner Wilkie Bushby then organized a protest meeting at the Greenwich Country Day Schoo. Two hundred fifty people showed up and called themselves the Greenwich People’s Committee. A petition circulated, legal fees were raised, and Town Meeting supported a resolution opposing UNOville.

It wasn’t unanimous. Some residents supported the goals of world peace after the bloodshed of World War II. Others saw business opportunities and rising property values.  However, they formed a distinct minority.

Opponents scheduled a referendum for George Washington’s birthday, but then rescheduled, fearing residents would be on vacation. On March 2, 1946, 73 percent of those voting opposed the U.N. They wanted world peace, just not world peace headquarters in their backyards.

Angry Millionaires

UN headquarters. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

UN headquarters. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The news media couldn’t resist. “The millionaires of Connecticut are angry,” reported the Daily Mail from the UK.  “Arise, Greenwichers, Ye Prisoners of the UNO,” blared a New York Post headline.

For those who didn’t know, the Daily Mail reported Greenwich had ‘mansions with 30 servants to run them’ and ‘golf clubs that cost $400 a year to belong to if you are the type that ‘belongs’.’ The town also offered private beaches, and ‘everything that a man can wish if he is a millionaire.’

Greenwich’s opposition began to sway UNO. The French sided with the protesters, unwilling to displace residents. Australia wanted San Francisco anyway. And Middle Easterners opposed New York because of its large Jewish population.

By October, the Rockefeller family had donated the land on the East Side of New York City, which made that city inevitable.

Greenwich could then breathe a long sigh of relief.


Images: UN Headquarters By https://www.flickr.com/people/flickr4jazz/ – https://www.flickr.com/photos/flickr4jazz/2724390955/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88858853. This story was updated in 2023.

 

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