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Groton Conn.

Miracle on Scituate Reservoir: The Pilgrim Airlines Fiery Emergency Landing

Pilgrim Airlines Flight 458, a regional commuter airline founded in 1962, left LaGuardia airport bound eventually for Boston on what should have been a routine flight. It made three stops in Connecticut: Bridgeport, New Haven and Groton.

It was February 21, 1982. The fight would be routine until the last leg of the trip.

Flight 458 was a de Havilland Twin Otter 10-passenger plane with two pilots. In Groton, a fresh cockpit crew took over, Capt. Thomas N. Prinster, 36, and First Officer Lyle W. Hogg, 27. They took off from Groton at 3:10 p.m. and climbed to 4000 feet.

Twin Otter

Trouble For Pilgrim Airlines 458

Prinster noticed ice forming on the windshield about 15 minutes into the flight. He knew, as all pilots do, that icing can have catastrophic results. Even an eighth of an inch of ice can disrupt the airflow over the wings, making an airplane unflyable.

Prinster routinely activated the de-icing system. Soon thereafter, he and Hogg noticed what seemed like gray smoke coming from under the control panel. They also realized the de-icer also didn’t work because it didn’t clear the windshield. The pilots soon realized they had a fire on board.

Prinster immediately contacted T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I., requesting clearance for an emergency landing. Fire crash crews would await Pilgrim Airlines Flight 458 at the airport.

Tom Prinster in 1983

Now the gray smoke turned black and thick. The pilots could neither see out of the windshield nor see their control panel. They smelled a strong scent of isopropyl alcohol, which operated the de-icing system. The alcohol was spraying into electronics system, setting it ablaze.

The pilots opened their windows to try to vent the smoke, grab a breath of air and get their bearings. By now black smoke was seeping back to the passenger cabin. That caused one of the passengers to come to the cockpit. Seeing open flames under the control panel, he tried to swat them out with his coat — to no avail. Returning to the passenger cabin he tried to break open a window to vent the now-almost-smothering smoke. Again he failed.

Scituate Reservoir

The pilots realized that they had no hope of reaching Green Airport. They had to find someplace for a forced landing if they were to have any chance of survival. Out the side windows their heads went searching for some semi-safe place they could try to land. Their faces froze while their pants and clothing burned. Yes, they were actually on fire, but to abandon the controls was sure death.

Scituate Reservoir. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Flying blind, they desperately searched for someplace to try and set down.

Dropping to 1,400 feet, Prinster spotted what would turn out to be the snow-covered and hopefully frozen Scituate Reservoir. Would it hold them? Did they have any choice?

Prinster set about setting the twin turbo prop down on the reservoir in the midst of a cockpit inferno. As they touched down in the snow on the ice the port main gear collapsed and the starboard wing sheared off. The tail section also went, taking with it a female passenger, later found dead still strapped in her seat.

Survivors of Pilgrim Airlines 458

The fire was so intense it melted the earphones on the pilots heads, and when they went to escape they door was welded shut from the intense heat. Prinster had to make his escape through the side pilot’s window, and that was no mean feat for the 6′ 4″ captain. It was an amazing accomplishment getting the plane down in a fire like that with the loss of only one life.

Despite their extensive burns, the pilots led their surviving passengers to shore. Soon rescue personnel arrived on the scene and took Hogg and Prinster to Rhode Island Hospital. The captain was in critical condition with burns over 50 percent to 70 percent of his body. He lived, though, until passing away in 2018 with, as he said, a 70 percent reupholstered body.

Honors

In recognition of their astounding feat the pilots went to the White House to meet President Reagan. They received awarded the Rhode Island Life Saving Medal by Gov. Joseph Garrahy.

Lyle Hogg in 2015. He became president of Piedmont Airlines. Photo courtesy PR Newswire.

They were inducted into Rhode Island Aviation Hall of Fame and received the Flight Safety Heroism Award. Prinster received the Lt. General Harold L. George Civilian Airmanship Award by the Order of Daedalians.

Today a memorial commemorates their heroism at the Prinster-Hogg Park in Scituate, R.I.

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. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Rise and Fall of the Fore River Shipyard

The Fore River Shipyard started out as a farm in East Braintree, Mass., when Thomas Watson bought it.

Watson had loaned money to his boss, Alexander Graham Bell, to help him develop the telephone. He was the same Watson who Bell had summoned through the phone with the words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”

Thomas Watson

Bell repaid his assistant with a 10 percent share in what would become the Bell Telephone Co. Watson sold the shares and bought the farm, where he started work on marine engines. His company, the Fore River Engine Company near the Weymouth Fore River, would give birth to one of the largest shipyards in the country, if not the world.

Fore River Shipyard

Under Watson’s leadership, the company’s reliable, high-quality engine acquired a reputation that spread throughout the Eastern Seaboard.

The depression following the Panic of 1893 turned out to be a godsend for the fledgling yard. The U.S. Navy awarded two contracts to build two destroyers, the USS. Lawrence (DD-8) and the USS Macdonough (DD-9). This boondoggle was augmented with an award to build the U.S. lightship LV-72. These would be the last ships constructed in East Braintree. In 1901, the yard moved to Quincy Point.

USS Rhode Island, ca. 1904

In 1902, the keel was laid for the USS Rhode Island (BB-17). Launched in 1904, the Rhode Island took part in the two- year around-the-world cruise of the Great White Fleet. The USS Vermont (BB-20) was also built there and launched in 1905.

Fore River Submarines

John Philip Holland, an Irish engineer, developed the first submarine officially commissioned by the U.S. Navy. The Navy launched his sub, called the USS Holland, in 1900. However, the boat needed improvement. Its storage batteries gave off toxic fumes that killed the crew.

John Holland in one of his submarines.

Nonetheless, the Imperial Japanese Navy entered into a licensing agreement with Holland and contracted with the shipyard to build five submarines. After completing the subs, the yard then disassembled them to ship to Japan, presumably for use in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).

Submarines for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Fore River Shipyard.

Holland worked on improving his first designs, and came up with the USS Octopus (SS-9), launched in 1906.

The Octopus was the first American submarine built in the yard, but not for John Philip Holland. The Electric Boat Company had purchased the Holland Torpedo Boat Company. However, EB didn’t have a yard of its own, so it subcontracted with Fore River to build what turned out to be 69 American subs up until 1922.

Electric Boat, now a subsidiary of General Dynamics, today has a shipyard in Groton, Conn., a fabrication plant in Quonset, R.I. and a design and engineering facility in New London, Conn.

Pre-World War I

We jump ahead to the pre-WW I years. The thriving Fore River Shipyard built and launched destroyers, submarines, merchant ships and four battleships. Bethlehem Steel, the main supplier for the yard, finally bought it to protect its interests in 1913.

Joseph P. Kennedy ca 1914

The yard then began to ramp up production in anticipation of entering World War I. In 1917, a 28-year-old Irish-American named Joseph Kennedy started working as an assistant general manager at the yard now known as Bethlehem Fore River, later Bethlehem Quincy.

In that job, Kennedy got to know Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant secretary to the Navy. Roosevelt later appointed him ambassador to the United Kingdom.

World War I

In 1918, the Bethlehem Fore River Shipyard built an impressive 18 destroyers, 10 submarines and six merchant ships. Altogether, the yard built 71 destroyers during World War I, more than all the other U.S. shipyards combined.

Bethlehem Fore River even built a destroyer, the USS Reid, in a record-breaking 45.5 days.

The Roar Turns to a Whimper

During the Roaring ‘20’s and then the Depression years, the Quincy yard produced a whole series of naval ships: submarines, destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers, as well as merchant ships. Among them, the “Queen of Flattops,” the USS Lexington (CV-2) in 1927.

“Lady Lex” started out as a battlecruiser, but the Washington Naval treaty of 1922 ended the construction of all new battleships and battlecruisers. So the Navy converted the ship into one of the first aircraft carriers. When a drought in late 1929 caused hydroelectricity shortages in Tacoma, Wash., Lady Lex’s turbo-electric propulsion system supplemented the city’s electricity.

The launch of Lady Lex.

During the Great Depression, the yard built the USS Wasp (CV-7) and a few other ships. But business slowed, and employment dwindled to 812 by 1931.

World War II

The specter of World War II brought a surge of construction that started in 1938.

Employment reached 17,000 in 1941. By 1943, the payroll at the Fore River Shipyard reached–in today’s dollars– $1.63 billion.

James J. Kilroy worked as an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard during World War II. He said he used the famous phrase, “Kilroy was here,” to mark rivets he had inspected as ships were built. Later, sailors would find the phrase in places like sealed hull spaces. Kilroy later won election as a Massachusetts state representative, and the phrase was engraved on the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Another interesting employee joined the shipyard as a welder in 1942: 20-year-old Florence “Woo Woo” DiTullio. The nickname Woo Woo developed because groups of men would holler out “Woo Woo!” when she walked by. She paved the way for 2,000 women who would work at the yard during the war. She came to be known as Winnie the Welder.

Over the course of the war, some 32,000 people worked at the Fore River Shipyard. They built and launched many destroyer escorts and landing ships from the yard.

They built a second USS Lexington (CV-16) to replace the first, sunk early in World War II.

Fore River Shipyard workers eventually built 71 destroyers during the war, more than any shipyard in the country. To support this output they built a boiler plant at Fields Point in Providence, R.I.

USS Massachusetts in Battleship Cove.

They completed and launched the USS Massachusetts (BB-59) in 1941. Her crew called her “Big Mamie.” She can still be toured today at Battleship Cove, at Fall River, Mass., a testament to the quality of the work at Fore River. One of the welders who worked on the Massachusetts and the aircraft carrier Lexington came from Barrington, R.I.–Leo Caisse, my father, who learned his trade while serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Fore River Postwar Years

The postwar years were not kind to the Fore River Shipyard. The world had too many ships. In 1954, the yard did win orders for five destroyers, five tankers and a fleet oiler.

However, in 1955 the shipyard bid on some of the Forrestal-class aircraft carriers, but lost them to the Newport News and New York naval yards. The navy, however, awarded Fore River contracts for the building of four frigates as a consolation prize.

After the war, shipbuilding continued and included some noteworthy ships, including the USS Bainbridge (DLGN 25) and the USS Long Beach (CGN 9), both nuclear-powered guided missile ships. Fore River also built destroyers, frigates, the liner Independence and the supertanker Manhattan, among the first ships to traverse the Northwest Passage.

A Texas Tower

Interestingly, the Fore River Shipyard built two radar towers in the 1950’s, Texas Tower 2 and Texas Tower 3. These were U.S. Air Force Air Defense Command platforms, similar to oil drilling platforms, placed along the East Coast to detect Soviet bombers. Texas Tower 4, built in Maine, tragically collapsed in a winter storm in 1961, killing all 28 men off the coast of Long Island.

Sister Yard

In 1964, the General Dynamics Corporation purchased the Fore River Shipyard. It became the sibling shipyard to Electric Boat. General Dynamics invested heavily in the yard, including a 1,200 ton crane nicknamed Goliath capable of lifting up to a thousand tons.

During its tenure in Quincy, General Dynamics built all kinds of naval support vessels and civilian merchant ships as well as several nuclear submarines. Then it shifted all that work to Electric Boat. From the 70’s to the 80’s, 10 liquefied natural gas tankers were built in the yard. Many of them are still in service today.

The yard built and delivered five (MPS) Maritime pre-positioning ships to the U.S. Navy between the years 1985-86. From two miles at sea, these vessels could deliver and support, with all their supplies, 4,000 Marines for 30 days.

Return of the Salem

By the 1980s, the U.S. simply had too many shipyards, and Quincy failed to win any contracts. That led to the closure of the Fore River Shipyard that year.

USS Salem

Eventually, General Dynamics sold off the equipment, and none of the efforts to reopen Quincy as a shipyard succeeded. On a brighter note, the USS Salem (CA-139) returned to its birthplace to become the main attraction for the United States Naval Shipbuilding Museum at the former Quincy yard in 1994.

With thanks to the Haze Gray and Underway Naval History Information Center, http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., 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.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Lighthouse Keepers, the Ultimate Social Distancers

Ever since George Worthylike climbed the steps to light the lantern at Boston Light in 1716, lighthouse keepers have practiced an extreme form of social distancing.

Boston Light

For many years, lighthouse keepers got their job through political patronage. The work offered a steady income and a place to live, as lighthouse keepers had to work from home to keep that light going from sundown to sunrise.

But lighthouses often stood on barren ledge far out to sea, and life could get lonely for the keeper and his family. Some lighthouses are said to be haunted by the ghosts of lighthouse keepers driven mad by the monotony and isolation.

The problems faced by lighthouse keepers, in fact, sound very much like the challenges faced by people under shelter-at-home orders during the 2020 health crisis.

Getting a decent haircut, for example, can be hard when you live 25 miles out to sea. Such was the case with Mrs. Roscoe L. Fletcher, who described her lonely life to a newspaper reporter on Jan. 2, 1943. She was married to the lighthouse keeper at Matinicus Light, well off the coast of Rockland, Maine.

“I am enclosing a photo of a lighthouse haircut. It may be amusing to those who can have a choice of numerous barbershops at any hour of the day,” she wrote. “If my husband doesn’t have an opportunity, on account of weather conditions, to get his hair cut at either of the islands, I have to get up the courage and try.”

Lighthouse Keepers Fight Boredom

In the days before Netflix, boredom posed a serious problem for lighthouse keepers. In the 1890s someone visited Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse, which sits on a rock off the coast of Scituate and Cohasset in Massachusetts. The keeper told the visitor, “The trouble with our life here is that we have too much time to think.”

Minot’s Ledge Light in a Storm (Harper’s Magazine)

Elson and Connie Small were stationed in Maine lighthouses for 29 years–without electricity until 1946. Connie wrote, “Cooped up on a rock together for months on end, seeing no one else, we’d sometimes get mad at each other.” Eldon would go off by himself to the engine house, or Connie would go stand on a ledge by the sea for several hours.

Lighthouse keepers often kept themselves busy with gardens, but some of the lighthouses on the Maine coast sat on barren rock. At Saddleback Ledge, the lighthouse keeper managed to grow some pea vines, potatoes and oats from his trash. Keepers brought dirt from the mainland to Mount Desert Rock and Boon Island to make container gardens.

In 1876, the Lighthouse Board started sending about 40 books in wooden cases to the most isolated lighthouses. There were 50 little libraries that first year, another hundred the next. By 1885, there were 420 libraries. The keepers had to exchange them every three months during the quarterly inspection. No one knows how long they lasted, but there were 351 libraries by 1912.

Lightships

Lightship crews faced the same monotony and isolation that lighthouse keepers did. Lightships were essentially floating lighthouses with a beacon and a fog signal. They had to be manned 24/7 with a good lookout at all times

At the Brenton’s Reef Lightship, crews had to serve 20-21 days on and 10 days off. In 1905, the New York Times reported,

The sailors say that before they have been ten days on a shift they are bored to death of one another’s company. For five days or so at the start they play checkers and chess, and have an occasional game of cards. That soon palls. [. . .] Five days before it is time for shore-leave some of the men are scarcely on speaking terms.

Nantucket Lightship

Bernie Webber, in Lightships, Lighthouses, and Lifeboat Stations: A Memoir and History wrote on a Nantucket Lightship WAL-534, a captain and chief engineer didn’t get along. They were the only two who ate in the wardroom. They hung a curtain down the middle of the table so they didn’t have to look at each other during meals.

Worse than Nantucket may have been the South Shoals Lightship, which combined the horrors of isolation with the pitching and rolling of the sea. An old whaling captain once said, “The loneliest thing he had ever seen at sea was a polar bear floating on a piece of ice in the Arctic ocean; the next loneliest object was the South Shoal Lightship.”

The crewmen aboard the Nantucket lightships found a way to alleviate their boredom: making baskets. Hence the Nantucket Lightship Basket, which today sell for hundreds of dollars.

Lighthouse Keepers’ Ghost

For some asocial keepers, lighthouses were an introvert’s heaven. For others they amounted to sheer hell.

The isolation of the Phippsburg, Maine, lighthouse, for example, drove the lighthouse keeper to madness and murder. Today a piano-playing ghost is said to haunt Seguin Lighthouse. The story goes that the lighthouse keeper in the mid-1850s bought his wife a piano to keep her from getting bored. But she only had one piece of sheet music. And so she played the same song over and over and over, driving her husband mad. Finally he chopped the piano to bits, then killed his wife and himself. Sometimes people say they hear piano music floating on the breeze at Seguin Island.

Ernie

New London Ledge Light, a short tower atop a squat building on a hunk of ledge in the Thames River, actually lies within the borders of Groton. Ledge Light’s fame rests with a ghost named Ernie, real name (according to a psychic) John Randolph. Ernie opens and shuts doors, turns the television on and moves things around.

New London Ledge Light

The story of Ernie, aka John Randolph, goes like this: During the 1920s, John Randolph brought his wife to live on Ledge Light after winning an appointment as lighthouse keeper. His wife couldn’t stand the loneliness of living on a tiny island with all the lights of the city beckoning to her a mile away. She began flirting with fishermen and harbor pilots, and one day she left John Randolph. Desolate, John Randolph climbed to the top of the lighthouse, cut his throat and fell 65 feet to the ground.

Ernie’s legend lived on, but one lighthouse keeper’s daughter didn’t believe it. Barbara Beebe Gaspar’s father kept the light going during the 1930s, and she concluded the story of Ernie arose from bored and lonely lighthouse keepers.

In 1987, a Coast Guard crew member stationed at Ledge Light wrote in the logbook:

“Rock of slow torture. Ernie’s domain. Hell on earth—may New London Ledge’s light shine on forever because I’m through. I will watch it from afar while drinking a brew.”

New London Ledge Light By Moondancedryad – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21656592. Lightship Nantucket By ArnoldReinhold – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70975216.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Mysterious Stone Structures of New England

Everyone knows that stone walls cover the New England landscape like honeycombs. But far fewer people know about the region’s hundreds of mysterious stone structures.

In the 1930s, someone estimated that New England had 250,000 miles of stone walls. In the following decades came inventories of the region’s stone structures, which some believed to be ancient.

A stone chamber. This one is in Leverett, Mass.

A stone chamber in Leverett, Mass.

Some of those ancient stone structures are oriented to the stars and planets. They also stand near megaliths, cairns or dolmens. A few have what are probably stone beds or sacrificial altars.

Speculation now runs rampant about the origins of the mysterious stone structures. Did medieval Irish monks, American Indians or Vikings build them? Or did the English colonists just built them as root cellars?

Most noteworthy, just three Northeast counties account for the majority of stone structures in North America: Putnam County, N.Y.; New London County, Conn.; and Windsor County, Vt.

Massachusetts has the densest concentration of beehive-shaped stone chambers like those built by Culdee monks in Ireland. The state has 105 sites containing stone structures.

Connecticut also has quite a few at 62, New Hampshire has 51 and Vermont has 41. Tiny Rhode Island has only 12 stone structures, but still more than Maine, which has only four.

Some speculate that perhaps ancient voyagers frequently traveled the Merrimack, the Thames and the Connecticut rivers. They then built their stone structures along those routes.

Here, then, we bring you ancient stone structures (or maybe colonial root cellars), with at least one in each New England state.

Gungywamp, Groton, Conn.

Gungywamp stone circle

New England colonists found many stone buildings, when they arrived. Typically they were one story high, circular or rectangular and as long as 30 feet. Many had roof openings that allowed a little light to illuminate the interiors.

As a result, early mercenaries to the Northeast wrote about ‘Indian stone castles.’ Furthermore, John Winthrop the Younger in 1654 received a letter from John Pynchon of Springfield, Mass. Pynchon heard ‘a report of a stone wall and strong chamber in it, made all of stone, which is newly discovered at or near Pequot.’

The 100-acre Gungywamp archaeological site in Groton, Conn., contains such stone structures as beehive chambers, petroglyphs, a double circle of stones, cellars and walls. All date back hundreds of years.

Some of the structures are thought to be Native American and perhaps had ceremonial functions. Colonial settlers built others with purposes such as root cellars and birthing chambers. Some features of the site suggest they were originally built as fortifications.

There is plenty of speculation about the purpose of the Gungywamp stone structures. Some theorize that 8th-century Irish monks built certain structures. They argue ‘Gungywamp’ means ‘church of the people’ in Gaelic. Others say it is an Indian word.

Gungywamp’s most famous chamber is the so-called ‘calendar chamber.’ Archaeologists suspect the colonists originally used it for storage for a nearby tan bark mill. A vent at one end of the chamber aligns with the spring and fall equinoxes. It thus allows a shaft of sunlight to fall directly on a smaller chamber within the larger structure.

Gungywamp is preserved, but many of the structures stand on private land. It can be toured virtually here. Visitors can tour the Gungywamp through the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center. More information is available here.

Hirundo Stone Structures, Alton and Old Town, Maine

Hirundo Wildlife Refuge

The Red Paint people of Maine once settled in the Hirundo Wildlife Refuge, a wetland preserve. Archaeologists discovered artifacts from the 7,000-year-old village along the Wabanaki Trail.

Among the bogs and ancient burial grounds are at least 18 curious stone piles, clearly made by humans. But by whom and for what? And when? No one know. Most are 6-1/2 feet in diameter and a foot and a half high.

The University of Maine owns the Hirundo Wildlife Refuge, which is open dawn to dusk all week long.

Upton Stone Chamber, Upton, Mass.

Nashoba Brook Chamber

The largest and probably best known stone chamber in Massachusetts is the Upton Stone Chamber near Worcester in Upton.

It includes a tunnel that connects to a roundish beehive room. A stone slab sits on top. In 1989, two archao-astronomists concluded that people used the chamber between 700-750 A.D. to study the Pleiades. Around 670 A.D., they used it to view the summer solstice.

To see photographs from 1944 of the Upton Stone Chamber, click here. The Upton Heritage Park is at 18 Elm Street.

Thirty miles away in Acton, an underground stone chamber in the Nashoba Brook Conservation Area is known as the ‘potato cave.’ Residents had long assumed the structure was a root cellar. A 2006 excavation found evidence people stored food in it in the 18th or 19th century. Some argue Indians built it before the colonists arrived. Still others say railroad workers lived in it during the 19th century.

You can visit the restored chamber at the Nashoba Brook Conservation Area in North Acton on the easterly side of Main Street (Route 27), toward Westford and Carlisle.

American Stonehenge, Salem, N.H.

America’s Stonehenge

During the summer solstice, a procession of people banging drums softly come to America’s Stonehenge. They aim to honor Mother Earth.

America’s Stonehenge is a 30-acre complex of standing stones, underground chambers and stone walls in North Salem, N.H. As the largest collection of stone structures in North America, it includes dolmens, or horizontal stone slabs on vertical stone uprights. It also has cromlechs, or circles of standing stones and barrows, or tombs. There’s a secret bed, an echoing oracle chamber, a sacrificial altar stone and a stone-lined speaking tube that gives the impression the altar is talking when someone speaks into it.

Radiocarbon dating confirms that the structures were built as many as 4,000 years ago.

The written record doesn’t mention the ancient stone structures until 1907, in History of Salem, New Hampshire by Edward Gilbert. He wrote that a family named Pattee owned the land, called Mystery Hill, and had many of the stones carted away for construction in Lawrence, Mass.

A retired insurance executive named William Goodwin bought the site in 1937. He had it excavated and became convinced Irish Culdee monks built the site about 1000 A.D. The monoliths are astronomically aligned, leading to the conclusion the stones were used as a prehistoric calendar.

Mystery Hill was renamed America’s Stonehenge and as a result gets 15,000 visitors a year. The site can still be used as an accurate yearly calendar.

Queen’s Fort, Exeter, R.I.

Queen’s Fort

The Queen’s Fort and Queen’s Bed Chamber in Exeter, R.I., have colorful legends about them. In its later years, the Queen’s Fort supposedly sheltered hermits and bandits.

Archaeologists and historians associate the fort with a man named Stonewall John, a talented stone mason who may have been Narragansett or English. He may have built the stone fort to protect King Philip during King Philip’s War (1675-78). The colonists made one of their first attacks on the fort during the war.

Within the fort a chamber – six square feet with a seven-foot ceiling and a sand floor – was perhaps built for the Narragansett queen Quaiapen (also called Matuntuck). She supposedly hid out at the site during King Phililp’s War before moving somewhere else, where she died. Some have also suspected that Quaiapen and Stonewall John were lovers.

Many archeologists have since dug at the site. Today the Rhode Island Historical Society owns it, and the National Register of Historic Places includes it on its list. You can get to it via a series of trails in Exeter that surround the property. Find more information here.

Stone Structures in South Woodstock, Vt.

Eastern Vermont has some of the densest concentrations of ancient stone structures in North America. An inventory of Vermont’s stone chambers compiled by the New England Antiquities Research Association found 52 stone chambers. They discovered them in 23 towns in five Vermont counties, particularly Orange and Windsor.

In 1975, a retired marine biologist from Harvard announced his discovery: On Vermont’s stone structures he found inscriptions in a dead Celtic language called Ogam. He concluded Celts from the Iberian peninsula carved them around 1000 BC. They all faced east and many had inscriptions. And some have symbolic markings, while others have Celtic place names.

But critics of the theory counter that Celts would have left other evidence that they’d settled in New England. But no one found any such evidence.

Still, Vermont farmers told stories of their great-grandfathers’ plows uncovering stone huts. So in 1977, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation studied the stone chambers in the state. They concluded the stone structures did not serve as stone burial vaults, charcoal or lime kilns, potash burners or iron furnaces.

One of the biggest and best known stone chambers is called Calendar II in South Woodstock, Vt. Calendar II measures 10 feet by 20 feet on the inside, the same geometrical ratio as the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. And the door aligns with the solstice sunrise.

A Norwich University professor studied aerial photographs of Vermont and discovered another mystery. He found odd hexagonal patterns made of stone walls and ditches. But many had no relation to current and traditional land use patterns. The mystery remains unsolved.

Notes on Mysterious Stone Structures

Images: Gungywamp By Randal J. (en:User:RJFerret) – Own work (own photo), CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7714677; Nashoba Brook Stone Chamber, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20548479; Leverett Stone Chamber By BittyRed – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46106121; American Stonehenge, By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123562; Queen’s Fort, By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49496088; Stonehenge CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=195581. Hirundo Wildlife Refuge By Namiba – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69290251.

This story about mysterious stone structures was updated in 2023.

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Six New England Presidential Visits and the Stories Behind Them

New England is full of sites that hosted past presidential visits as the country’s leaders came north in search of votes, campaign cash or just a vacation. Here are six of them:

Providence, 1843

Market Square, Providence, 1844.

In 1843, President John Tyler’s presidency was reeling. Tyler was the first vice president to ascend to the presidency because the incumbent died. His detractors let him know it. They dubbed him the ‘Accidental President’ or ‘His Accidency.’

By 1843, Tyler was facing dramatic turnover in his cabinet. His efforts to negotiate the annexation of Texas into the United States was causing an uproar, since Taylor wanted it to join the United States as a slave-holding state.

Buffeted by Washington, Tyler decided to take his program to the people. He headed north, and the wildly popular response encouraged him to mount a third-party bid for office in 1844.

Tyler arrived before dawn on June 15 at Stonington, Conn., where a crowd of 2,000 greeted him.

Travelling north toward Rhode Island, the crowds began swelling around North Kingstown. The New York Herald noted that Providence was unprepared for the huge outpouring of people eager to see the president:

The curiosity to see him was immense. The Common Council of Providence mismanaged everything most horribly; a mob surrounded the cars, and set all order at defiance. An old man cried out, “Here, I’ve had my pocket picked of my pocket book.”

Tyler traveled the streets to Brown University and back to Market Square, where he ate at the Franklin House, an inn that used to stand across from the Market House.

Across the river he did some handshaking at the first indoor mall in America, the Westminster Arcade: “The president then went into a queer looking place called Westminster, and shook hands with 5,000 people,” reported the Herald.

A delegation from Lowell, Mass. buttonholed Tyler and persuaded him to visit that city, as well. He traveled there after the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument. There he learned of a new disaster brewing for his administration – his attorney general had died. The president decided to return to Washington rather than continue his tour, but his spirits were greatly improved.

Tyler finally dropped out of the 1844 race when the Whigs approved his plan to annex Texas.

The Westminster Arcade remains open to this day in Providence. Today it’s a shopping destination with two stories of apartments.

Sargent’s Purchase, N.H., 1869

Stereo-graph photo of Ulysses Grant atop Mount Washington in 1869.

In the summer of 1869, Washington’s heat drove the new president, Ulysses S. Grant, to visit New England with his wife and children.

On Aug. 27, 1869, the Grant family climbed Mount Washington. They took the three-year-old cog railway, the first cog railway in the world. Sylvester Marsh designed the railway for the mountain’s steep grade. The train has cog wheels that mesh with a toothed rail in the center of the track.

It wasn’t the first train the Grants took on that vacation. They rode from Newport, R.I., to Boston, where a large crowd greeted them. They took another train to Nashua, N.H., where they were again greeted by thousands of well-wishers. On they went to Manchester, where Grant toured the printing department of the Amoskeag Mills and greeted some 3,000 millworkers lined up to see him.

In Concord, Grant told the welcoming crowd that it was his first visit to New Hampshire and he was sorry an injury prevented him from shaking hands.

At 9 a.m. the next day, the presidential party left the Crawford House in Crawford Notch, N.H., for what was then called the Sky Railroad. According to news reports, the president was particularly struck with the simplicity and safety of the air brake.

The Grants seated themselves in the car and moved skyward. A cannon was fired when they reached the summit and the president was told the Harvards had lost the boat race. “Well I am very sorry to hear it,” Grant said.

After lunch, the presidential party headed to Littleton and then Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

The Cog Railway to the top of Mount Washington has never stopped operating.

Brattleboro, Vt., 1877

Brooks House, Brattleboro, Vt.

Until 2000, history counted the election of 1876 the closest contest for the White House ever. Rutherford B. Hayes, an Ohio Republican, won the Electoral College. Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, won the popular vote.

The two parties hammered out the compromise of 1877, in which Hayes got the White House and the Democrats got everything else. They won an end to the Reconstruction period of federal control of the South.

Without federal troops to intervene when African-Americans were harassed, Democrats soon took control of the southern statehouses. Their anti-black policies that survived for decades.

As a longtime supporter of Reconstruction, Hayes wanted to “wipe out the color line.” His efforts at promoting racial harmony failed. Perhaps no one could have succeeded.

In his first months in office, Hayes had to authorize the military to repulse Mexican criminal bandits terrorizing the border and put down the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

He needed an escape, and Vermont was the tonic. Hayes’ grandfather, Rutherford, built a home at West Brattleboro in 1780. His son, also Rutherford, built at Dummerston before moving to Delaware, Ohio, where the president Rutherford Hayes was born in 1822.

On his 1877 return visit, Hayes stayed with his cousin William Bigelow in West Brattleboro. Bigelow was said to be the wealthiest man in Vermont at one time. A large reception was held at the Brooks House in Brattleboro, and the time spent in Vermont restored Hayes’ outlook.

Vermont would retain a special place in Hayes’ life. After leaving office, he was a regular visitor. Some reports held that he had become engaged to Mary Ann Hayes Bigelow, who had been host to Hayes in 1877 with her husband William. The wedding had been delayed because of the death of Mary Ann’s son Russell, and Rutherford died before it could take place.

Hayes ordered Dummerston Granite shipped to Ohio from the family’s Vermont homestead and used it as the base for the stone that marks his and his wife’s grave.

Today Brattleboro’s Hotel Brooks is still open and operating as a shopping and dining destination.

Adams, Mass., 1897

Postcard showing statue of William McKinley at Adams, Mass.

Adams and North Adams, Mass., never had a better friend than William McKinley. His trade policies strengthened the textile industry and helped the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company grow to be a world leader in textile manufacturing.

The Plunkett family, who owned the mills, invited McKinley to stay with them twice. In 1897 he was given the honor of laying the cornerstone for the Adams Free Library. To this day the library contains a chair that was especially constructed for McKinley for the occasion.

The Plunketts also arranged for him to give a speech to the thousands of attendees at the Hoosac Valley Agricultural Fair on Sept. 22, 1897.

McKinley would return to Adams for a week stay beginning June 21, 1899, during which he was treated more like royalty. He traveled through Holyoke, Westfield, Pittsfield and Springfield, encountering huge crowds at each.

It was North Adams that pulled out all the stops. The city erected a viewing stand for McKinley to watch a special parade that featured bands, school children, military units and mounted police. Pressed to give an impromptu speech, McKinley marveled at the prosperity manufacturing had brought to the area:

I know something about North Adams from my visit two years ago, but as I rode through the beautiful streets of your city today I must confess I was wholly unprepared to witness its splendid progress and prosperity.

When McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, no town mourned the loss more than Adams. The town erected a statue in his honor that stands to this day in front of the library he dedicated. It was rededicated in 1903.

Poland Springs, Maine, 1921

The summer of 1921 was especially gay at the Poland Springs resort, which the Ricker family had been running in one form or another since 1793. Motor traffic had never been heavier, and the first week in August was filled with dancing, tennis and golf.

Poland Spring House

That week came to a climax with a visit from President and Mrs. Warren G. Harding, who had driven from Lancaster, N.H. There they had been staying with Harding’s secretary of war, John Wingate Weeks.

On Aug. 4, 1921, the Hardings arrived in Poland Springs for lunch after driving 200 miles from Lancaster and stopping at a sanitarium in Oxford, Maine. There the president promised World War I veterans, mostly suffering from gas attacks, that the government would do everything it could to help them.

He had asked that Poland Springs do nothing special for his visit, but the caddies were noticeably excited. The president and his wife ate lunch and then he played a round of golf. That night, Harding left from Portland for Washington on the presidential yacht Mayflower.

The Poland Springs resort is still open and still offering a challenging course for golfers.

Groton, Conn., 1952

President Harry Truman laying the keel for the USS Nautilus.

On Saturday June 14, 1952, President Harry Truman visited the shipyard at Groton, Conn., to celebrate laying the keel for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine ever built.

Truman, who ordered the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, said he hoped it would begin an age where the discoveries that fueled development of the atom bomb would be applied to industry in ways that would benefit society.

Truman envisioned planes and ships powered by atomic energy, as well as power plants driven by this inexpensive new generating process:

Such a possibility would revolutionize the technological basis of our civilization. It could provide the answer to the crying need for sources of power in the underdeveloped areas of the world. It could mean industrial development for areas now held back because they have no supply of coal, or oil, or waterpower.

Truman said he prayed the submarine would never have an enemy and be tied up someday as an historic relic of a threat of war long passed.”

While all Truman’s projections didn’t come to pass, the Nautilus is in fact tied up and open for tourists as a museum and library.

Of course Truman didn’t forget politics in his speech, praising Sen. William Bento for standing up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his red-baiting tactics.

Truman’s private journal hints at a more curmudgeonly president behind the hoopla. He wrote:

“Well here I am, Sunday evening all alone. Margaret came to the Great White Prison for the week end on Friday 13th. I went by train to Groton (rhymes with rotten) to speak on atomic energy for peace time use. Should have flown both ways but my staff decided that it would be bad weather going up. It wasn’t.”

And of the frustrations of the White House life that was coming to a close, he said, “Lesson: Don’t raise your boy to be President of the United States.”

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Six Revolutionary War Battlefields in New England

Revolutionary War battlefields abound in New England, where, after all, the whole thing began. The patriots fought the British in every colony before and during the war, and many of the sites remain undeveloped.

Here is our choice for the best six Revolutionary War battlefields in New England, with one in each state.

Fort Griswold, Connecticut

Fort Griswold, one of the most infamous Revolutionary War battlefields.

Named after Deputy Gov. Matthew Griswold, the Connecticut Colony built the fort in 1775 in Groton to defend the supply depot at the mouth of the Thames River. The fort also protected privateers operating out of the harbor.

In 1781, the traitor Benedict Arnold led a company of British soldiers in an attack on New London. Meanwhile, another British commander, Edmund Eyre, attacked the fort. The British had the advantage. Arnold knew the angle to attack so the American gun positions couldn’t fire effective shots.

The British forces infamously massacred the American soldiers. After Col. William Ledyard surrendered his sword to the British, they ran him through with it. At the time of surrender, six Americans were dead and 20 wounded. When it was all over, 83 Americans were dead and 36 wounded. Arnold went on to burn New London.

The earthen walls of the fort still stand. The Ebenezer Avery House, which sheltered the wounded after the battle, has been restored on the grounds. A Revolutionary War museum also depicts the era.

For directions to Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park, click here. For information from the Friends of Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park, click here.

Fort George, Maine

Fort George, the Revolutionary War battlefield where the Penobscot Expedition ended in ignominy.

Castine, located in Downeast Maine, is one of the oldest European communities in North America. Since the early 1600s, French, Dutch and English colonists have built trading posts, forts, missions and permanent settlements there.

In 1779, the British sent troops to occupy Castine with the hope of establishing a colony called New Ireland. They built a fort and named it after King George III.

Massachusetts, alarmed by the British occupation, sent a combined naval and military expedition to capture the fort that summer. Known as the Penobscot Expedition, it had 19 warships and 24 transports. Though the patriots outnumbered the British, they failed to take Fort George and suffered the worst U.S. naval defeat until Pearl Harbor. Paul Revere, in charge of ordnance, ended up court martialed for cowardice and insubordination. He fought the charges and won his acquittal.

Some of Fort George still remains, as does the British canal built in 1779, gravesites of Revolutionary War soldiers and historic houses, taverns and churches. Castine has marked its many historic sites with signs. (Click here for a map.)

Minute Man State Park, Massachusetts

North Bridge, the granddaddy of all Revolutionary War battlefields.

It doesn’t get much better than Minute Man National Historic Park in Lexington, Lincoln and Concord.

The 970-acre park memorializes the opening battles of the American Revolution – and then some.

Lexington Battle Green, site of the shot heard round the world, belongs to the Town of Lexington. The Buckman Tavern sits on the green, which leads to the five-mile-long Battle Road Trail. Patriot militia skirmished with the British regulars along the trail, now a restored colonial landscape that includes the Hartwell Tavern.

In Concord, Daniel Chester French’s famous Minute Man statue stands by the North Bridge, where the colonial militia shot back at British soldiers in the second battle of the day.

The Wayside also belongs to the park. Authors Amos Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Sidney lived there (not all at the same time).

The Town of Lexington owns and maintains Lexington Battle Green, site of the shot heard round the world.

Fort Constitution, N.H.

Fort Constitution and the Portsmouth Harbor Light.

An important skirmish before the war took place in New Castle, N.H. A handful of British soldiers manned Fort William and Mary there in 1774, when tensions rose between the colonies and England. The stone fort stood at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, guarding access to the harbor and to Kittery, Maine (then Massachusetts).

Paul Revere rode to Portsmouth in December to warn patriots that British troops might seize powder and guns at the fort. A raiding party of 400 men then stormed the fort. They subdued the six soldiers inside and took the gunpowder, muskets and cannon.

The fort, renamed Fort Constitution, now belongs to the State of New Hampshire. The Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse stands inside the fort.

Fort Constitution Historic Site is a great spot for a picnic. For more information click here.

Quaker Hill, R.I.

The most famous Rhode Island battle of the American Revolution is called the Battle of Rhode Island or the Battle of Quaker Hill. By August 1778, the British had occupied Newport, on Aquidneck Island, for almost two years. That month, Continental Army troops led by Gen. John Sullivan sailed from Tiverton to Portsmouth and set up a siege on Aquidneck. They planned to drive the British soldiers back to Newport and then recapture the town with the help of French naval forces.

But a hurricane prevented the French naval commander, Count d’Estaing, from attacking the 6,000 entrenched British soldiers. D’Estaing instead sailed his fleet to Boston for repairs. The patriots then tried to withdraw, but the British attacked them in Portsmouth in a valley among three hills. The Americans retreated to Tiverton without a single soldier killed. The 1^st Rhode Island Regiment, comprised of African- and Native-American soldiers, took part in the action.

The 365 acres of the battlefield had no structures on them at the time of the conflict, but since then 36 houses and a barn have been built.

At the intersection of Route 2 and West Main, the state chapter of the NAACP put up a marker to commemorate the 1st Rhode Island’s role in the battle. And a granite memorial stone marks the Battle of Rhode Island on the corner of Union Street and Route 138 in Portsmouth.

A site of another skirmish is nearby. On the night of July 11, 1777, Col. William Barton and about three dozen infantrymen sailed from Tiverton to Middletown and captured British general Richard Prescott in his bed.

Prescott was occupying a farm owned by a Loyalist, despite warnings of inadequate security. That farm, now known as Prescott Farm, was restored with the help of heiress Doris Duke. The public can now visit. Visitors can tour the house where Barton captured Prescott, a windmill, a country store, a guardhouse and a historical vegetable garden. For more information, click here.

Hubbardton Battlefield, Vermont

Vermont’s only Revolutionary War battlefield, in Hubbardton.

The Hubbardton Battlefield in Hubbardton is the site of the only Revolutionary War battle fought entirely in Vermont (or what would become Vermont). (The Battle of Bennington was actually fought in New York state.) It’s also one of the best preserved battlefields in America.

The battle started on July 7, 1777, when British forces caught up with the American rear guard of the forces retreating after they withdrew from Fort Ticonderoga. The Americans, led by Seth Warner, fought with discipline and inflicted heavy casualties on the British. Though they lost the battle, they halted the British and prevented them from pursuing the main American army.

The battlefield itself and the small museum that explains it lie off the beaten path, but they feature stunning views of the Vermont landscape. It’s off Exit 5 on Route 4, between Rutland and New York state.

Click here for more information.

Photos: Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse and Fort Constitution By Kenneth Dupont – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62728239. Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park by By Staxringold via English Wikipedia. Fort George earthworks and cannon by Jerrye and Roy Klotz via Wikipedia. Old North Bridge By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5942756. This story about Revolutionary War battlefields was updated in 2023.

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