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Hampton NH

6 New Deal Projects Still in Use

The New Deal put tens of millions of people to work and changed the landscape in every New England city and town. It put sidewalks on streets, bridges over rivers, hiking trails in forests, seawalls on beaches and public buildings in cities and towns. Much of the New Deal legacy is still in use and still visible today.

President Franklin Roosevelt insisted relief programs provide jobs and not handouts. Over eight years, the Works Progress Administration alone employed more than 8 million Americans. The Civilian Conservation Corps put 3 million young men to work at a monthly wage of $30 — $25 of which had to be sent home.

Roosevelt intended to revive the ideals of civil society, collective governance, and social well-being. He took a special interest in building post offices because they were so rooted in the life of a community. He insisted his home post office in Hyde Park, N.Y., be modeled after one of the oldest houses in the town. His friend and relative Olin Dows painted the murals, which depicted both Roosevelt and Dows ancestors who lived in the Hudson Valley.

Southington Post Office Mural

Southington Post Office lobby. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

In Connecticut, the U.S. Treasury Department built or expanded more than 25 post offices and paid for more than 25 post office murals between 1934 and 1943. (Click here for a list of New Deal projects in Connecticut.)

Typically, the government oversaw the way federal buildings were embellished. But during the Depression, artists were struggling along with the rest of the work force. During the New Deal, government for the first time aimed to support and encourage artists. Such noted artists as Reginald Marsh, Rockwell Kent, Philip Guston and Ben Shahn were hired to paint post office murals.

Artists vied for mural contracts by submitting sketches in national and regional competitions. The winners were chosen for their skill and for the way they showed ordinary citizens, their community and their history.

A goal of the post office mural program was to link people to an earlier time and place when Americans faced great obstacles and overcome them.

In the East Hartford post office a mural illustrated “The Stop of Hooker’s Band in East Hartford before Crossing the River.” In New Haven, it was the “Pursuit of the Regicides.” Torrington remembered its native son in “Episodes in the Life of John Brown.”

Other Connecticut post offices depicted the industrial or agricultural heritage of their communities. In the Southington Post Office lobby, a mural shows the town’s industry, agriculture and landmarks. It was painted by Ann Hunt Spencer, who studied art in Paris and received the Kosciuszko Foundation’s scholarship in 1937 for study and travel in Poland.

The post office is at 125 Main Street in Southington. For a list of WPA post office murals in the United States, click here.

Acadia National Park

CCC boys building Otter Creek Road in Acadia. Photo courtesy National Park Service.

By the time of the Great Depression, Acadia National Park was nearly 20 years old. It was mostly overgrown and inaccessible. Its facilities were few and far between, not nearly enough for the park’s many visitors.

Superintendent George Dorr dreamed of improving the park, and he saw his chance in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He asked Roosevelt for a camp at Acadia. Eventually some 3,000 poor boys, mostly from Maine, came to Acadia for six months or longer to work as part of Roosevelt’s ‘Tree Army.’

The CCC ran three camps in and around Acadia National Park. They opened new trails and improved old ones, planted thousands of trees, made fire roads, fought fires, built footbridges and constructed two campgrounds, Blackwoods and Seawall. They built Ocean Drive, which loops around the park with stunning views of the coast and opened hiking trails to Echo Lake, Long Pond and Beech Cliff.

To find other New Deal projects in Maine, click here.

Cape Cod Bridges

The Sagamore Bridge.

The Cape Cod Canal celebrated its grand opening in 1914. Its private owners hoped to cash in by charging tolls for shipping traffic. Mariners avoided the canal, though, because three drawbridges over the canal were such a navigational hazard. The canal enterprise lost money.

The U.S. government eventually took over the Cape Cod Canal. In 1933, the Army Corps of Engineers began building the Sagamore and Bourne highway bridges in the same spots as earlier bridges.

The Corps hired Fay, Spofford & Thorndike to design and supervise construction of the bridges so they would allow large oceangoing ships to pass below.

The Boston architectural firm of Cram and Ferguson was hired to design the appearance of the bridges. The firm’s principal, Ralph Adams Cram, pioneered the Gothic Revival Style of architecture in buildings such as The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, Emmanuel Church in Newport, R.I., the Princeton University Chapel and many buildings at Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He is honored with a feast day in the Episcopal Church of the United States.

The identical bridges were both opened on June 22, 1935. A miniature copy of the bridges was used for the John Greenleaf Whittier Bridge, which connects I-95 from Newburyport to Amesbury.

On a summer day, the two bridges might together carry 130,000 vehicles.

Manchester Airport Terminal

The Manchester Airport terminal and tower.

The New Deal brought dozens of improvements to New Hampshire: the Hampton Beach seawall, town halls in Dover and Nashua, the Concord library, Cannon Mountain Ski Resort, schools, post offices and bridges.

The New Deal also brought to Londonderry in 1937 an Art Deco style airport terminal and control tower. The building evolved into the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, now the fourth biggest airport in New England. It carries more than 2 million passengers a year.

The 1937 terminal continued in service until the airport was expanded in 1995. The terminal was slated for demolition, but saved by the airport, the New Hampshire Aviation Historical Society, the City of Manchester and the Town of Londonderry. It is now home to the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire.

You can visit the historic terminal on Friday and Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm and on Sunday from 1 pm to 4 pm

McCoy Stadium

McCoy Stadium scoreboard.

Thomas P. McCoy was the colorful mayor of Pawtucket who wore shamrock-patterned ties and a red rose in his lapel. The undisputed head of the city’s Democratic Party, he was nicknamed ‘The Prince of Pawtucket.’

McCoy used his political clout to get a baseball stadium from the New Deal. He laid the cornerstone on Nov. 3, 1940.

McCoy had chosen swampland called Hammond Pond as a building site, which guaranteed years of employment for hundreds of workers. Vehicles and equipment were swallowed overnight in the bottomless muck. In the end, the stadium cost more to build than the assessed value of Fenway Park.

In 1945, Mayor McCoy died suddenly. The stadium was named after him and dedicated to his memory in 1946.

McCoy Stadium struggled for years, intermittently attracting farm teams for the Boston Braves, the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Red Sox. In 1977, a Canadian businessman named Ben Mondor bought the Pawtucket Red Sox out of bankruptcy and visited McCoy stadium. “What a dump,” he said. He turned around the team and the stadium, making it a family-friendly place where Girl Scouts camped overnight on the outfield, children got free medical checkups and fans saw their birthdays and weddings celebrated on the Jumbotron.

Future Hall of Famers have played at McCoy. In 1981 the Pawtucket Red Sox played the longest game in baseball history against the Rochester Red Wings. Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken, Jr., played against each other in the 33-inning game.

McCoy Stadium was renovated in 1992 and expanded to seat 10,000 in 1999, surviving efforts to abandon it.

To see other New Deal projects in Rhode Island, click here.

Stowe Mountain Resort

Stowe Mountain Resort.

Vermont’s New Deal history – in fact, Vermont’s history – can’t be told without state forester Perry Merrill. When the Civilian Conservation Corps started up in the 1930s, few states were prepared with projects. Merrill had the foresight to draw up a long list. He had already led long-range conservation, flood control and forest management projects following the Great Vermont Flood of 1927.

Vermont was originally scheduled to get four CCC camps. Merrill wrangled 30 camps from Washington, with nearly 41,000 men working in them from 1933-42. CCC crews planted more than a million trees, built dams and cleared more than 100 miles of roads.

Merrill had seen ski areas built in Scandinavia and understood how they provided jobs and recreation. On his list of projects were ski trails on Mount Mansfield. The CCC boys built the Ski Master, the Overland, the Perry Merrill, and Lord, the S-53, and the Nose Dive.

They also made a large parking lot for several hundred cars. In 1940, state officials signed a lease with the Mount Mansfield Company to build a ski lift up Mount Mansfield.

Today, that CCC project is the Stowe Mountain Resort — the premiere ski resort East of the Mississippi.

Photos: McCoy Stadium scoreboard, By Giants27 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16035253.

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Jane Pierce, New Hampshire’s Unlikely First Lady

In January of 1856, a radical physician from Massachusetts, Charles Robinson, won election as governor of Kansas. President Franklin Pierce declared him and others in his government to be revolutionaries and ordered their arrest. Pierce’s wife, Jane Pierce, interceded and her husband agreed to free Robinson from confinement in a miserable prison.

Lobbying her husband was one of the few political actions undertaken by Jane Pierce – other than imploring hm to leave politics and never return. Jane was one of the first ladies of the United States least suited to the position.

Jane Pierce

Jane Means Appleton Pierce with her third son Benny

Portrait of Jane Pierce with her third son Benny

The marriage of Franklin Pierce and Jane Means Appleton was an unlikely one to begin with. Pierce had attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where Jane’s father had presided as president.

Jane was born March 12, 1806, in Hampton, N.H., the daughter of the Rev. Jesse Appleton and Elizabeth Means Appleton.

Her father was a strict religious zealot, prone to compulsive dieting to offset his sedentary lifestyle. He held a fanatical devotion to his duties and to his goal of making Bowdoin students more pious. He slept but four hours a day for years.

In 1809, Jesse Appleton moved his family from Hampton to take the post at Bowdoin. He died 10 years later at the age of 47. The Appletons left Brunswick, Maine, one year before Franklin entered the college in 1820.

The couple would meet in New Hampshire years later when Franklin was pushing 30 and Jane in her late 20s.

Devout and Depressed

Jane was, like her father, stick thin. She was smart, but devout in her faith. Prone to depression, it’s not clear how Jane and Franklin came to meet, though he would have likely known her brother at Bowdoin.

He was a dashing, young congressman with a thirst for liquor who enjoyed Washington’s social whirlwind. She was a lifelong teetotaler with a strong dislike of society.

Jane married Franklin Pierce in a house on Amherst Village Green in New Hampshire.

Overriding her family’s objections, Jane married Franklin in 1834, and the two lived in Concord, N.H. Franklin pursued a successful career as a lawyer. Though he gave up politics at her request in 1842, Franklin secretly urged friends to put his name up to become the Democratic nominee for president. He received the nomination and won office in 1852, much to his wife’s disappointment.

Jane Pierce bore the death of all three of her children, the last just months before the Pierces were to leave New Hampshire for Washington. She spent the first half of Pierce’s presidency in mourning, refusing all political and social responsibilities. Jane Pierce had prayed that Franklin would lose the race for presidency, and she believed in a divine connection between deaths of her children and Franklin’s political activities.

First Lady Jane Pierce

The White House and Later

She did eventually take an interest in politics and attended congressional hearings. Her biographers say that when Dr. Robinson was imprisoned, she convinced her husband to release him. Robinson was one of the anti-slavery activists fighting to turn Kansas into a state where slavery was illegal. Franklin Pierce, on the other hand, supported a pro-slavery government. Nevertheless, he yielded and released Robinson.

Franklin Pierce

When Franklin’s presidency ended, he and Jane undertook an effort to restore Jane’s health and happiness. They toured the Caribbean and Europe. He even dabbled in sobriety, but the effort failed. Depressed and suffering from tuberculosis, Jane Pierce spent her final days with her sister in Andover, Mass,. until she died in 1863.

At the end, the two were ideologically divided over the Civil War, with Jane taking the abolitionist side and Franklin opposing war with the South. Franklin resumed his heavy drinking and would follow Jane to the grave in 1869.

This story about Jane Pierce was updated in 2022.

Image of Amherst Village Green: By Fraser Fulford – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62121493.

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Secrets to a Long Life From Holders of The Boston Post Cane

When the Town of Westmoreland, N.H., gave its Boston Post Cane to 113-year-old Mary Ray in 2008, she was believed to be the third oldest person in the world. Born in 1895 on Prince Edward Island, she was the second oldest when she died two months short of her 115^th birthday. A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, she often ate cake and ice cream after a game.

Mary Ray

Year after year in town after New England town, the board of selectmen presents the gold-knobbed cane to a very old person. It often hapens in the presence of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Often the recipient receives gifts or pins or plaques. A newspaper photographer snaps a photo and a reporter records a witty or poignant comment.

Usually the reporter asks the secret to a long life. The answers then range from luck to clean living to daily exercise. An awful lot of Boston Post Cane holders seem to love the Boston Red Sox.

On May 5, 2011, 100-year-old Ruth Green threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park. The Lunenberg, Mass., holder of the cane, she had seen six Red Sox titles.

Boston Post Cane

Edwin Grozier

The tradition of awarding the Boston Post Cane to a town’s oldest resident began in 1909, when Boston Post owner Edwin Grozier dreamed up the publicity stunt. The Post reigned as the most popular newspaper in New England for a century until it folded in 1956. William Beals founded it in 1831 along with Charles G. Greene, younger brother of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene.

The newspaper distributed the cane to 700 towns in the Post’s circulation area in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. They were made by J.F. Fradley and Co., a New York manufacturer, from ebony shipped in 7-foot lengths from the Congo. A 14-karat engraved gold knob topped the cane.

The towns only loaned the canes. Upon the recipient’s death, they were to be returned to the town. Sometimes that didn’t happen. Two Massachusetts towns, Dover and Watertown, lost the canes for a century before finding them and reviving the tradition. The cane belonging to Lee, Mass., was found in the rubbish in Charlton, Mass., after 50 years. Farmingdale, Maine, recently got its cane back in two pieces, so now the recipient gets a plaque, as do many. Someone stole the Leominster, Mass., cane from the town offices during a renovation project. It later turned up on eBay. The town contacted the seller and ‘reacquired’ it.

Controversies

The Boston Post Cane Information Center has tracked down the canes from 494 towns of the original 700. The site reports several town, such as Florida, Mass., never got canes but made up their own.

According to the site, the Town of Barre, Mass., in October 2015 presented canes to Bess E. Difley and Warner F. “Bill” Smith, the only two recipients known to be born on the very same day — July 29. 1914.

John Smith, first Boston Post Cane recipient in Grafton, N.H.

In Hudson, Mass., two people born the same year got into a fight over who should have the cane. The selectmen wrote to the Boston Post, asking what they should do. The newspaper told them to do what they wanted, so they retired the cane. Then Hudson brought it back in 2004 and gave it to Col. Adelbert M. Mossman, 96.

In the early 1970s, Hampton, N.H., retired the cane. Selectman Ashton Norton called it too much of a pain. “We were having problems with people in nursing homes, and there was no way to find out who was the oldest or who was a native,” Norton said. “Then we’d give the cane out, and we’d get complaints that we didn’t give it to the right person. It got to be so much trouble the board decided to leave it in the town office building.”

Fear of the Cane

“People started to fear getting the cane,” said Hampton Town Clerk Jane Kelley. “The cane would be given out, and within a week, that person would be dead. It was awful.”

Nantucket put a stop to the tradition around 1998, when it became clear the cane was not a good omen for its residents.

In April 2006 the Bow, N.H., Board of Selectmen extended the time between the death of a Boston Post Cane holder and awarding the honor to a new citizen from 45 days to 60 days, ‘for respect and grievance purposes.’

In Unity, Maine, several people declined the cane because they didn’t want their neighbors knowing their ages.

Patten, Mass., gave the Boston Post Cane in 2006 to Lillian Perry Wheaton, age 96, at their Pioneer Days celebration. Lillian refused to take it home with her because she considered it bad luck.

Longevity Secrets

Others enjoy receiving the cane, especially if they get a party in their honor. As her 108th birthday approached in September 2016, Mary Cousins of Deer Isle, Maine, said she didn’t know the secret. “All I know is that I’m here, and I’m very thankful and happy for that.”

Cane holders often credited their longevity to work, genetics, God’s will, friends, family and exercise. In March 2011, George Barner received the cane from Kennebunk, Maine, at 102. He attributed his long life to playing tennis and not smoking. Gordon Maddix of Berwick, Maine, forced himself to walk every day.

When Virginia Day Zimmerman of Monson, Maine, received the cane, she still swam every morning from Memorial Day to her birthday at the beginning of October.

Florence Brayson in Exeter, Maine, shared the secret to a long and happy life: Keep your mouth shut and mind your business. Anne-Marie Veilleux, 99, of Jay, Maine, said she never let anything bother her. Myrtle Mileage, of Mexico, Maine, said, “I just do as I please. I hear only what I want to hear.”

In 2009, Foxborough, Mass., passed its cane to Harry Cederlund, age 100. He said he lived long because he ate well, didn’t smoke or drink and left the window open at night to let in fresh air.

But take heart, smokers and drinkers. Lillie Young Weissenberger received the cane in 2011 in Washington, Maine, at 94. Asked if she drank or smoke or caroused, she smiled and said, “Oh, yes. We hung around with racing people, remember. We did all of that!”

Boston Post Cane: Not Funny

Some Boston Post cane holders demonstrated it’s never too late to get started.

Maude Thomas of Falmouth, Mass., received the cane at age 108 in 2010. She worked as an office manager at an architectural firm in Boston into her 80’s, enrolled in Harvard University and received her degree at age 75.

Doris “Granny D.” Haddock got the cane by Dublin, N.H., at age 95. She became famous when she walked across the continental United States between the ages of 88 and 90. She then lived another five years after receiving the cane.

Goffstown, N.H., gave the cane to May Gruber on her 100^th birthday in 2012. She had led the Pandora knitwear company, run a 10K at age 65 and held a sign during the Occupy Wall Street protest at 99.

Becket, Mass., gave its cane to Margaret Peg Lynch, a sitcom pioneer who created the Ethel and Albert comedy series. When she got the cane, she thought about doing a show on Ethel and Albert getting older. But, she said, she couldn’t think of anything funny.

This story about the Boston Post Cane was updated in 2022.

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The Cold Friday of 1810

The legendary Cold Friday of 1810 brought such terrible winds and frigid temperature that people talked and wrote about it for generations.

Tales of the killer weather event made their way into town histories, journals and court records long after it happened on January 19. They told of the many people who froze to death while traveling along the highways. The wind blew down houses, barns and vast numbers of timber trees. Ships wrecked, cattle froze in their barns and old people died of hypothermia inside their homes. It was so cold pens wouldn’t write though they were right next to the fireplace.

Winter in the country: a cold morning. by Currier and Ives, courtesy Library of Congress.

What made the Cold Friday so lethal was the sudden, steep drop in temperature that caught people unaware.

Sudden Plunge

Several jourrnals claimed the mercury dropped 100 degrees in Boston in less than 24 hours, from 67 to 33 below zero, Michael R. Doyle reported in 2005. Though the ice in the harbor did freeze to Spectacle Island, that may have been an exaggeration.

The more scientific minds at the American Register reported the mercury dropped from 48 degrees on Thursday to nine below zero on the cold Friday. In Portsmouth, N.H., it went from 54 on Thursday to minus 12 on Friday — and minus 13 on Saturday.

Joseph Dow, in his History of Hampton, N.H., described how the plunge in temperature surprised some local farmers:

“…[I]n Hampton, the morning was so mild, several farmers set out for Newburyport, with ox-loads of potatoes, beguiling with neighborly chat the tedium of the slow progress.

“On the return, the cold became so intense and the wind so violent, all suffered extremely, and one man who had rashly left his overcoat at home was only saved from perishing, by wrapping himself in the blankets that had covered the potatoes.”

Cold Friday Redux

So memorable was the Cold Friday that a mention of it 20 years later meant the listener understood it to mean January 19. Asked to recount a date in a New Hampshire court case, the witness simply said it happened on the “Cold Friday, 1810.”

Henry David Thoreau, one o the two loves of Louisa May Alcott

Henry David Thoreau thought of the Cold Friday during the winter of 1857, the coldest ever in New England. On Jan. 11, 1857, he wrote in his journal:

“Mother remembers the Cold Friday–very well–She lived in the house where I was born–The people in the kitchen Jack Garrison–Ester–& a Hardy girl drew up close to the fire–but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.”

Few people ventured outside. The New England Farmer reported, “very little going from place to place. Farmers piled on the wood and attended to their cattle, and that was about all for the day.” Anyone who had to go outside for an errand that could not be deferred, ‘sped over the ground like squirrels and were fortunate if they returned with no flesh from the intensity of the frost.’

One intrepid little girl named Rebecca Ramsdell braved the cold to walk a mile to school in Henniker, N.H. Her teacher, who awarded medals to his most punctual students, gave her the prize. She kept it during the term. In fact, she kept it her whole life. The Henniker Historical Society has a picture of her at age 100 with the medal. (See it here.)

Casualties

In Woburn, Mass., Joseph Brooks, a 50-year-old Revolutionary War veteran, and his cousin Benjamin, 45, had no such luck. They went into the forest to cut wood during the mild afternoon of January 18. They were found frozen to death on January 20.

The Rev. William Bentley

People even died without going outside. Salem diarist William Bentley reported in his diary.

“Several Old Persons perished within doors…Susanna Beadle, aet. 82, attempting to arise from bed was so chilled as to expire immediately.” Bentley wrote. “A woman, also a Widow, chilled, fell into the fire, on the western part of the Town, & escaped with life enough to put out the fire in her clothes but did not call assistance & perished with the cold & found dead in the morning.

“The young man from the Ship going to Beverly Shore not half a mile could not be recovered. A Soldier coming from Salem Fort only to the Farm houses on the Neck, not half a mile, was much frozen……the use of the pen was impracticable unless near to the fire, & even before the fire the water froze on the tables.”

The fierce winds blew ashore several other vessels in the harbor. Capt. James Sears and the crew of the sloop Margaret, carrying a load of plaster from Thomaston, lost their lives at sea.

In Antrim, N.H., the wind blew the roof off the home of Samuel Marshall and his family, and in Farmington, Maine, the home of James Johnson burned.

Saddest Story

The saddest tale of suffering was repeated many times. It happened in Sanbornton, N.H. According to the New Hampshire Historical Society, the wind blew down part of the home of Jeremiah Ellsworth, jeopardizing the lives of his wife and three children.

Mrs. Ellsworth dressed the youngest child and went into the cellar, leaving the other two in bed. Jeremiah Ellsworth went to the home of David Brown, a quarter mile away, seeking help. His feet had frozen, though, and the two men agreed he shouldn’t risk the danger of going back home.

Brown hitched his horse to a sleigh to rescue Mrs. Ellsworth and the children. He found her and the baby in the cellar, the other two naked in bed as the wind blew their clothes off. He covered them with a blanket and put them in the sleigh, but the wind turned the sleigh over and scattered everything.

Mrs. Ellsworth decided to walk to Brown’s house but sank into the snow, benumbed by cold. She crawled to Brown’s house, where she had changed so much her husband didn’t recognize her.

Brown put the children back in the sleigh but the wind blew it over again and tore it to pieces. He could only carry two of the children, so he left the baby, who was dressed, behind on the road. When he reached his home the children were still alive, but died a few minutes later. Brown was too exhausted and frostbitten to find the baby, but later that day a search party found him dead by the side of the road.

The parents lived, but had no more children after that Cold Friday.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Edward Gove and His One-Man Revolution of 1683

What if you started a revolution and nobody came? New Hampshire’s Edward Gove found out in 1683 – and the answer is you are sent to the Tower of London to await your gruesome execution.

Gove’s story is well-preserved in The Gove Book: History and Genealogy of the American Family of Gove, written by William Henry Gove.

Edward Gove

Gove was born in 1630 in London. His father brought him to America around 1647 when he was 17. He gradually moved north from Charlestown, Mass., to Salisbury, Mass., and finally into Hampton in what is now New Hampshire in 1665.

The assault on Mason and Barefoot

In 1679, King Charles II declared that New Hampshire no longer belonged to Massachusetts. Rather, it would be governed as an independent province. At that point, the English hadn’t settled much of New Hampshire, which consisted of four towns: Portsmouth, Exeter, Hampton and Dover.

The colony elected a council to govern itself, which operated until 1683 with Edward Gove as a member. This brief period of self-governance abruptly ended shortly after a royal governor, Edward Cranfield, arrived late in 1682.

Cranfield had two unenviable tasks. First, he had to impose a tax on the colony. Second, he had to deal with Robert Mason. In 1622, Capt, John Mason had gained title to property north of the Merrimack River in Newburyport. But the Mason family had done little with the land.

John Mason had built mills for sawing lumber and milling grain, and he stocked his new colony with cannon and small arms. Upon his death, however, all his work decayed to ruin.

In 1652, a descendant tried to reestablish ownership of the colony. Though he successfully sued one of the settlers occupying part of the land, he could never extract any payment. He returned to England empty-handed.

Robert Mason

With the royal decision to detach New Hampshire from Massachusetts, the time seemed right to Robert Mason to try to enforce his family’s 60-year-old claim to the land. With visions of establishing himself a fiefdom, Mason named himself Lord Proprietor of New Hampshire. He then agreed to pay Governor Cranfield a salary of 150 pounds to go to New Hampshire. Mason also began demanding that the residents of the colony start paying him rent for their land. He agreed to send 20 percent of what he collected back to the king.

The elected government of New Hampshire was dissolved and replaced by an appointed king’s governing council. This council first tried to buy off Cranfield by topping Mason’s bribe. It voted him a payment of 250 pounds. Cranfield agreed to the payment, but continued working with Mason.

The governing council grew increasingly annoyed by Mason as he continued to assert that he owned all of New Hampshire. He also denied them trees for fuel and threatened to sell their property. The governing council outlawed his proceedings and almost everyone flat-out refused to pay him rents.

Cranfield, too, started getting frustrated at the colonists’ unwillingness to pay. In Hampton, Edward Gove – a large landowner – boiled over.

Seeming Lunatic

Edward Gove had a history of hotheadedness,. He appeared in court to answer complaints about his foul language and his accusation that his neighbor had stolen property. The time had come, Gove asserted, to defend the liberties of the colonists from Mason and Cranfield.

Gove assembled a group of 12 men who felt, as he did, that the time had come to revolt against Cranfield. The men armed themselves and rode horses from Exeter to Hampton, one man blowing a horn and the others calling for their neighbors to come out and join them in rising up against the tyranny. (Alcohol may have played a role in this endeavor.)

john-winthop-jr.-boston-post-road

Gove’s neighbors not only didn’t pick up arms to join him. They had him arrested. Those who knew him might have viewed the episode as Edward Gove popping off as usual.

To Cranfield, the incident amounted to treason. He had Gove and his fellow riders jailed and then tried. Gove’s neighbors tried to explain to the court that, for Edward Gove, this type of behavior wasn’t terribly unusual nor was he all that difficult to control.

“Edward Gove now of Hampton…was some years since in a strange distemper seemingly lunatic,” one neighbor testified according to the Gove genealogy.

The Tower of London

Another said:

“There be also many more than testify if need be . . . and some that can swear they were in company and did many times help to bind the said Edward Gove hand and foot (when he was out of his head) for fear he should do hurt to himself or others.”

Cranfield held off sentencing the majority of the revolutionaries, but not Gove. He sentenced Gove to death, and a gruesome death at that:

“You, Edward Gove, shall be drawn on a hedge to the place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and when yet living be cut down and cast on the ground, and your bowels shall be taken out of your belly, and your privy members cut off and burnt while you are yet alive, your head shall be cut off and your body divided in four parts, and your head and quarters shall be placed where our Sovereign Lord the King pleaseth to appoint. And the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

The Tower of L ondon today

With that, Edward Gove was dispatched on a ship, lest he be rescued from prison. The colonists sent him to the Tower of London since they did not believe they had authority to actually carry out an execution.

As Edward Gove languished in the tower for more than a year, Cranfield started pressing his case again for taxes and rents.

Pardon

The news outraged the New Hampshire citizenry and further hardened them against Cranfield. In one case, an officer of the government attempted to collect a tax due from people exiting a church in Dover. A young girl knocked him to the ground by striking him in the head with her Bible.

“At other places, the women met the collector of taxes at their doors with scalding water, which proved a perfect barrier to their ingress, and the men with clubs defied their approach, the officers being not infrequently roughly handled.”

In England, newly crowned King James II and his government learned the details of Cranfield’s behavior in New Hampshire. Cranfield, himself, began to doubt whether his plans would ever succeed.

The King pardoned Edward Gove and allowed him to return home, ordering the return of his lands seized by Cranfield. Meanwhile, he recalled Cranfield from his post. When news of Cranfield’s demotion reached New Hampshire a spontaneous committee formed to remove the erstwhile governor. They stripped him of his sword, tied him to a horse and escorted him to the border of Massachusetts. From there he went on his way.

Walter Barefoot

Capt. Walter Barefoot temporarily replaced Cranfield and tried to implement Mason and Cranfield’s tax schemes. He had even less success than his predecessor.

An officer of the governor gets a thrashing with a Bible for trying to deliver a writ.

One oft-told story involved Thomas Wiggins and Anthony Nutter visiting Mason at Barefoot’s home, where Mason was staying. The disagreement over Mason’s claim quickly turned violent. Wiggins tossed Mason into the fireplace and knelt on him on the coals. Barefoot tried to intervene and Wiggins gave him the same treatment, breaking two of his ribs in the process.

Nutter, meanwhile, stood by laughing until Mason reached for his sword. That prompted Nutter to take the sword away. Finally the violence ended when neighbors began entering the house, drawn by the maid’s screams. The rents, needless to say, went uncollected.

This story about Edward Gove was updated in 2023.

Image: Tower of London By © Hilarmont (Kempten), CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38250655.

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Dr. Alexander Hamilton Pokes Fun at a Rustic

Dr. Alexander Hamilton had some fun at the expense of a nosy New Englander named Jerry Jacobs who accompanied him on his trip from Newbury, Mass., to Hampton, N.H. He recorded their dialogue as a typical specimen of his conversation with ‘these inquisitive rustics.’ Hamilton did not record what he said to a saucy fellow who ‘made free’ with his pistols, nor with the low rascally company in the house where he fed his horse.

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton had left his home in Annapolis, Md., on May 30 and journeyed north with his slave, Dromo, to York in what is now Maine. The trip, by horseback and boat, took four months.

He published his lively and opinionated travel diary in a book he called Itinerarium, a rare account of colonial American life between 1730 and 1745.

On Aug. 1, 1740, Dr. Alexander Hamilton wrote about his trip to Portsmouth, N.H., in his Itinerarium:

Wednesday, August 1st.This morning proved very rainy, and therefore I did not set out till eleven o’clock. I crossed Newbury Ferry, and rid a pleasant even road, only somewhat stony, and in a perpetual drizzle, so that I could not have an advantageous view of the country round me. At half an hour after one I passed thro’ Hampton, a very long, scattered town.

Having proceeded some miles farther, I was overtaken by a man who bore me company all the way to Portsmouth. He was very inquisitive about where I was going, whence I came, and who I was. His questions were all stated in the rustic civil style. “Pray, sir, if I may be so bold, where are you going?” “Prithee, friend,” says I, “where are you going?” “Why, I go along the road here a little way.” “So do I, friend,” replied I. “But may I presume, sir, whence do you come?” “And from whence do you come, friend?” says I, “pardon me.” “From John Singleton’s farm,” replied he, “with a bag of oats.” “And I come from Maryland,” said I, “with a portmanteau and baggage.” “Maryland!” said my companion, “where the devil is that there place? I have never heard of it. But pray, sir, may I be so free as to ask your name?” “And may I be so bold as to ask yours, friend?” said 1. “Mine is Jerry Jacobs, at your service,” replied he. I told him that mine was Bombast Huynhym van Helmont, at his service. “A strange name indeed; belike you ‘re a Dutchman, sir,a captain of a ship, belike.” “No, friend,” says I, “I am a High German alchymist.” “Bless us! you don’t say so; that ‘s a trade I never heard of; what may you deal in, sir?” “I sell air,” said I. “Air,” said he, “damn it, a strange commodity. I ‘d thank you for some wholesome air to cure my fevers, which have held me these two months.” I have noted down this dialogue as a specimen of many of the same tenour I had in my journey when I met with these inquisitive rustics.

NEW HAMPSHIRE GOVERNMENT
HAVING now entered New Hampshire Government I stopped at a house within five miles of Portsmouth to bait my horses, where I had some billingsgate with a saucy fellow that made free in handling my pistols. I found a set of low rascally company in the house, and for that reason took no notice of what the fellow said to me, not being overfond of quarrelling with such trash. I therefore mounted horse again at half an hour after three, and having rid about two miles saw a steeple in a skirt of woods, which I imagined was Portsmouth; but when I came up to it, found it was a decayed wooden meeting house, standing in a small hamlet within two mile of Portsmouth. 414.

PORTSMOUTH
IN this part of the country one would think there were a great many towns by the number of steeples you see round you, every country meeting having one, which by reason of their slenderness and tapering form appear at a distance pretty high. I arrived in Portsmouth at four in the afternoon, which is a seaport town very pleasantly situated close upon the water, and nearly as large as Marblehead. It contains betwixt four and five thousand inhabitants. There are in it two Presbyterian meetings and one Church of England, of which last one Brown,’ an Irishman, is minister, to whom I had a letter recommendatory from Mr. Malcolm. I put up here at Slater’s, a widow woman, who keeps a very good house and convenient lodging. After I had dined, I waited upon Mr. Brown and he invited me to breakfast with him tomorrow. I returned to my lodging at eight o’clock, and the post being arrived, I found a numerous company at Slater’s reading the news. Their chitchat and noise kept me awake three hours after I went to bed.

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