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Six Fun Facts About New England Olympians

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Hundreds of New England Olympians have won, lost and placed in the summer games since they restarted in Athens in 1896.

New England’s colleges, especially the Ivies, produced many, but not all of the region’s Olympians. Some came from humble backgrounds, though a Rockefeller won a gold medal in 1924.

Some parlayed their Olympic fame into sporting careers, while others distinguished themselves in other fields.

Here, then, are six fun facts about New England Olympians.

1. Boston Sent Most of the First New England Olympians

Nine of the 14 Americans who competed in the 1896 Olympics came from either the Boston Athletic Association or the Suffolk Athletic Club of South Boston.

The Suffolk Athletic Club sponsored James B. Connolly, born in South Boston to poor Irish immigrants. He won the first event– the triple jump – thus becoming the first Olympian since the Athenian Zopyrus won the pankration in 385. Or maybe it was the Armenian Varasdates who won at boxing in 369.

James Connolly, one of the first New England Olympians (and one of the first modern Olympians)

He took home a silver medal (gold medals weren’t issued then) and an olive laurel wreath. He almost didn’t make it because a thief stole his wallet on the way to the games.

Connolly went on to have a successful writing career. He published more than 200 short stories and 25 novels, and he ran for Congress twice as a Progressive Party candidate. He lost both times.

The Suffolk Athletic Club also sponsored Thomas Burke in those first games. Burke, a second-year law student at Boston University, won the 100-yeard dash and the 400-yard run. He thus became the first person to win two events in the modern games.

Burke, too, followed a career as a writer. He worked for the Boston Journal and the Boston Post.

2. Margaret Abbott Wins in High Heels

Margaret Abbott never knew that she was the first woman to win an Olympic event.

She competed in the 1900 Paris Olympics, which coincided with the Paris Exposition and was treated as a sideshow. Called the Championnat Internationaux instead of the Olympics, it stretched out over six months and received little media attention.

Margaret had spent her early years in Boston but moved to Chicago when her mother, Mary Abbott, got a job there as literary editor of the Chicago Herald. Mother and daughter both took up golf as members of the Chicago Golf Club. Then in 1899 they moved to Paris, where Margaret studied art with Rodin and Degas. Her mother worked on a travel guide.

Margaret Abbott in her golf togs.

The Championnat Internationaux only allowed women to compete in five sports: golf, tennis, croquet, sailing and equestrianism. Mother and daughter entered the golf tournament held on Oct. 4, 1900, with no idea that it was an Olympic game.

Margaret won the tournament, despite wearing high heels and a long, tight skirt. She never realized she’d won an Olympic game. Only after her death did a University of Florida professor, Paula Welch, figure it out. Welch also served on the Olympic board of directors.

Margaret Abbott returned to Chicago, where she married the well-known humorist Peter Finley Dunne. Her son, Phillip Dunne, also won recognition as a Hollywood screenwriter. She died in 1955 in Greenwich, Conn.

3. Harry Hillman, the Raw Egg Man

A rogue wave washed over the deck of the steamship that carried the US. Team to the 1906 summer Olympics in Athens, injuring Harry Hillman and several other athletes. Hillman suffered a knee injury that Impaired his performance, and he won no medals.

Perhaps he took comfort in the fact that the Olympic Committee didn’t recognize the 1906 games.

Harry Hillman, who became a long-time coach at Dartmouth

It did, however, recognize the 1904 games, in which Hillman won gold medals for the 400-meter race, the 200-meter hurdles and the 400-meter hurdles. And in the 1908 games, also recognized, he won a silver medal in the 400-meter hurdle.

The next year he set an odd world record that no one has broken. He and Lawson Robertson ran a 100-yard three-legged race in 11 seconds.

Hillman went on to coach track at Dartmouth from 1910 until he died in Hanover, N.H., in 1965. As track coach, he urged his hurdlers to swallow raw eggs. He believed them “excellent for the wind and stomach.”

4. Eight New England Olympians From Yale

Elis have won 107 Olympic medals, including the gold medal for rowing in the 1924 Olympics. The team, called the Yale Eight, had two members who had illustrious careers.

Captain James Rockefeller

James Rockefeller captained the team and later led the bank that became Citigroup. His grandson said he took more pride in his Olympic medal than in his banking career.

New Haven native Dr. Benjamin Spock rowed on the Yale Eight as well. Later, as America’s most famous baby doctor, he warned against putting young children into “excessive competition.”

5. Albina Osipowich, Worcester’s Sweetheart

Albina Osipowich was a 17-year-old high school student from Worcester when she boarded a steamship bound for the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. She belonged to the U.S. Olympic swim team, which also included two future Tarzans: Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. When she returned to Worcester weeks later, 100,000 people greeted her and fellow Worcesterite Harry Devine, a boxer who had won a bronze medal. She had catapulted to world fame by winning two gold medals.

The U.S. women’s Olympic swim team. Osipowich is third from left.

Osipowich had so excelled at swimming she trained at the Boys Club, mostly competing against boys. She nearly didn’t make the Olympic team, though, because she came down with the flu just before the trials. But she made it, breaking a world record while winning the 100-meter freestyle and winning the 400-meter relay.

The people of Worcester collected $4,000 for her tuition to Pembroke, then the women’s college of Brown University. In 1930, Brown let her swim in the Colgate-Hoyt Pool, the first woman to do so.

She met and married a basketball player, Harrison Van Aken. They raised two children and until her death in xxx she rarely talked about her Olympic glory.

6. Collegiate Olympians, By the Numbers

New England colleges have produced hundreds of medal-winning Olympians. Through 2016, Harvard students took home 108 medals, with Elis close behind at 107. But they only rank eighth and ninth in the country behind the big California, Florida, Texas and Michigan schools.

Dartmouth has produced 63 medal winners, Brown 37, Boston University 23, Northeastern 18 and UConn 14. Williams and MIT students have each grabbed 12.Those in the single digits include

Middlebury 5
Boston College 3
Holy Cross 2
UNH 2
Brandeis 1
Community College of Rhode Island 1
Emerson College 1

Wondering who those lone winners are?

Brandeis fencer Tim Morehouse ’00 who scored a silver medal with the U.S. men’s sabre team at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Simon Shnapir of Emerson College won a bronze in team figure skating in 2014. His partner, Marissa Castelli, studied at the Community College of Rhode Island.

This story updated in 2022.

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The Book that Taught Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln How To Speak

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In 1830 and 1831, a 12-year-old Maryland slave and a 22-year-old backwoods store clerk picked up the same book – the Columbian Orator. Published by a New England school teacher, it taught Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln how to become two of the greatest speakers of their century.

Both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln lived very different lives from Caleb Bingham, the Dartmouth-educated publisher of the Columbian Orator. However they shared his thirst for knowledge and adopted the ideals expressed in the book: liberty, freedom, anti-slavery, patriotism and religious faith. Those ideals got the book banned in the South during the 1850s.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln both learned a lot  from this book.

The actor Ossie Davis, who recorded several of Douglass’s speeches, credits the Columbian Orator with more than teaching oratory.

“Frederick Douglass validated his manhood by giving Edward Covey, his surrogate slave master, a good whipping,” wrote Davis. “What inspired his fists was not only manly rage, but liberating knowledge–knowledge gained in part from his reading of the Columbian Orator. I read it now and the words still inspire and inflame.”

Caleb Bingham

Caleb Bingham was born in Salisbury, Conn. on April 15, 1757, a descendant of Roger Conant, the Puritan leader who founded Salem, Mass. Salisbury was a primitive town, with a log cabin for a church and no real school. The local minister tutored young Caleb Bingham.

“I well remember, when I was a boy, how ardently I longed for the opportunity of reading, but had no access to a library,” Bingham wrote in 1803.

Eleazar Wheelock

He attended Dartmouth College rather than Yale because he was related to its founder, Eleazar Wheelock. Bingham graduated as class valedictorian in 1782 and went to work as master of Moor’s Charity School for Native Americans, which Wheelock also ran. He moved to Boston in 1784 to start the town’s first school for girls, located on State Street. He and his wife had two daughters.

After Boston officials decided to reform its schools, Bingham ran a co-ed public school.

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State Street, Boston 1800.

Moral Courage

He was a ‘modest and sometimes even timid man but there were at least, two occasions on which he showed that there was no lack of moral courage, when his course was clearly indicated by duty,” wrote his friend and biographer, William Fowle. In one case, he stood up at a town meeting at Faneuil Hall and demanded the town pay his salary.

In the second, he faced down a mob attacking a constable who arrested people who ran whorehouses and gambling dens. Caleb Bingham let the frightened constable into his house and then opened the door to the angry rioters. He said, “Fellow citizens, you are breaking the laws, and I command you in the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to disperse. I am a magistrate.” The mob vanished.

He stood six feet tall, with light blue eyes and hair in the style of George Washington. Until his death he dressed in the style of the revolutionary generation: cocked hat, black coat, knee breeches and shoes with silver buckles.

Publishing

Caleb Bingham published the first textbook of English grammar used in the Boston schools, the second in America. Bingham’s rival, Noah Webster, wrote the first. Bingham gave it the title, “The Young Lady’s Accidence, or a short and cozy Introduction to English Grammar; designed principally for the use of Young Learners, more especially those of the Fair Sex, though proper for either.”

noah-webster

Noah Webster

Webster’s spelling book sold more than Bingham’s, but Bingham’s readers outsold Webster’s.

Fowle described Bingham as cheerful and lively, traits reflected in Columbian Orator and The American Preceptor. The Orator remained in print until late in the 20th century. It included essays, speeches, poems and dialogues that dealt with moral education and citizenship.

Bingham retired from teaching in 1796 and opened a one-room bookstore at 44 Cornhill Street.

gerry

Elbridge Gerry

Gov. Elbridge Gerry appointed him director o the state prison, and he ran for state senate a number of times. However, he affiliated with the Republican Party and never got elected, though his bookstore served as the headquarters for local Republicans.

He died on April 6, 1817 and was buried on Copp’s Hill in Boston’s North End.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

Like Caleb Bingham, both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had scant access to books in their youth.

Frederick Douglass learned about the Columbian Orator when he worked in a Baltimore shipyard, turning over his earnings to Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia had tried to teach him to read and write, but Hugh told her to stop. “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” Auld told his wife.

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Frederick Douglass in 1848.

Douglass, then known as Frederick Bailey, wanted knowledge. Some white boys he knew on the Baltimore streets told him they were studying the Columbian Orator. Douglass saved up 50 cents from surreptitiously shining boots, and one day he walked into Mr. Knight’s bookstore and bought the book.

He then devoured its contents, calling it his “rich treasure.”

“Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he wrote in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. He especially liked a dialogue between a master and a slave and one of Richard Sheridan’s speeches on Catholic emancipation.

“These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest,” wrote Douglass. ”

They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.”

Backwoods Boy

Abraham Lincoln read it in the winter of his 22nd year. He had little formal education, as his family lived far from schools and his father hired him out as a farmhand. He read what books he could.

obadiah-holmes-lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Lincoln was working as a boatman and a general store clerk in New Salem, Ill., in 1831. But he had political ambitions and would run for the General Assembly the next year. Caleb Bingham, through the book, taught him how to speak. Not like a backwoods hick, but like a gentleman with ‘a proper attention to accent, emphasis and cadence.’

Lincoln lost that first bid for the General Assembly. Later, he would succeed, all the way to the presidency of the United States.

Both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, despite their lack of formal schooling, delivered some of the greatest speeches in American history. Douglass’s best speech is remembered as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and Lincoln’s as the Gettysburg Address.

With thanks to Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln by John Stauffer and Caleb Bingham by William Fowle in Educational Biography: Memoirs of Teachers, Educators, and Promoters and Benefactors of Education, Literature, and Science ed. By Henry Barnard.

Image of Columbian Orator By Bjoertvedt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73782814. This story was updated in 2022.

 

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Six Historic New England Football Fields

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Football, once called the Boston Game, was played on many historic New England football fields since the 19th century. And New England has made many contributions to the development of the sport.

As early as 1827, New England college students played an organized football game. New England jocks formed the first organized football club (there’s a plaque on Boston Common about it). The National Football League also played its first night game in New England.

But even more significant, a New England college was the birthplace of modern football and the modern football stadium.

New England even had an NFL championship before Tom Brady and Bill Belichick joined the New England Patriots – in fact, before they were born.

Here, then, are six historic football fields or their exact locations, one in each New England state.

Yale Bowl

Yale Bowl

Had it not been for an architect named Charles Ferry, the Superbowl might be called something else. Ferry designed the Yale Bowl Stadium as – well, the first bowl-shaped football field.

Fill was used from the field to form an elliptical berm around the stadium. Ferry designed the exterior in a neo-Gothic style, and acid was poured on it to make it look old.

For some reason Ferry failed to include locker rooms in the stadium; Yale football players must walk 200 yards from the Smilow Field Center. They enjoy the walk, but the New York Giants who played there in 1973 and 1974 did not.

The Yale Bowl was finished in 1914 with 70,896-seats and renovated in 2006 with 61,446. No stadium in the United States is older and larger than the Yale Bowl. It inspired the shape of the Rose Bowl, the name of post-season college football games and the name of the premier football contest in the world.

It isn’t just the modern stadium that began at Yale. So did modern football.  A former Yale football star named Walter Camp set the rules for today’s game over the course of 15 years in the late 19th century.

Whittier Field

Hubbard Grandstand at Whittier FIeld

Hubbard Grandstand at Whittier FIeld

The first organized intercollegiate football game in Maine was played in Lewiston between the Bates team later known as the Bobcats and the Tufts team later known as the Jumbos on Nov. 6, 1875.

But almost from the beginning, Bates has had a football rivalry with the Bowdoin Polar Bears, one of the oldest college rivalries in the country. It started when a Bates player wrapped the college’s garnet-and-white scarf around Bowdoin’s statue of a polar bear. Bowdoin players wrapped their black-and-white scarf around Bowdoin’s statue of a bobcat. But Bates students have soaked the scarf in gasoline and set it on fire after a football win.

Bates fans call their opponent “Blowdoin,” “Harvard rejects” and “plantation boys.” Bowdoin students taunt “dirty Lews,” referring to Lewiston’s poverty. Both sides call the other “safety school.”

All Bates-Bowdoin games take place on Bowdoin’s historic Whittier Field, which opened in 1896. It features a track where Olympic champion Joan Benoit Samuelson trained.

Boston Common

Amateur football played on Boston Common 1909, photo by Lewis Hine. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Amateur football played on Boston Common 1909, photo by Lewis Hine. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In the 18th century, football started out in the United States as something like the medieval European sport of mob football. The game had unlimited players, and one of its few rules disallowed manslaughter and murder as ways to move the ball.

By the 19th century, mob football moved to college campuses as an intramural sport. Each college played by its own rules. A Harvard tradition known as Bloody Monday started in 1827, with the freshmen playing the sophomores. Winslow Homer illustrated the game in an engraving called Class Day at Harvard University in 1858. The game often ended with injuries, so college administrators finally banned it.

By then, another version called the Boston Game grew popular at East Coast prep schools. It used a round, inflatable ball introduced in 1855. Graduates of Boston’s elite prep schools formed what some consider the first organized football club. They called it the Oneida Football Club.

The Oneidas played pickup teams from 1862-65 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members of the club dedicated a small stone monument on the Common that claims it never allowed a point. The inscription reads, “On this field the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865. The Oneida goal was never crossed.”

Dartmouth College Green

Football on Dartmouth's green

Football on Dartmouth’s green

In 1867, Dartmouth had its own version of football, called Whole Division. Seniors and sophomores played juniors and freshman in chasing after a ball. Every ambulatory student played the game.

Nine years later, three Dartmouth students put up rugby-style goal posts on the campus green for football games. The Dartmouth administration didn’t sanction the game and tore down the goal posts by commencement. One of the three students, Lewis Parkhurst, later donated the money for Dartmouth’s main administration building, Parkhurst Hall. The football team would later be called Big Green.

Dartmouth played its first intercollegiate football game against Amherst College in 1881, by a touchdown. The score: 1-0. That auspicious start for Big Green came before a crushing 53-0 loss to Harvard in 1882 and an even worse loss to Yale in 1884 by a score of 113–0.

The Cycledrome

The Cycledrome in Providence.

The Cycledrome in Providence.

Providence Steam Roller was the first New England team to won the NFL championship — in 1928. The Steam Roller – not the Steamrollers – was so named as an unstoppable force of athletic prowess. It played in a stadium built for bicycle races called the Cycledrome.

The team was founded in 1916 by Providence Journal staffers, a judge and a real estate developer. It soon became a regional powerhouse and was considered the best independent team in the country. The Steam Roller began playing NFL teams in 1924. It did so well against them the owners decided to join the NFL in 1925. In 1928 the Steam Roller won the NFL championship with the best winning percentage in the league. Each player got a gold watch.

six historic football fields providenceA peek into the Steam Roller’s finances in 1927 showed one of the team’s major expenses was 15 percent of the gate receipts to the Cycledrome. The NFL took 1 percent of gate receipts, visiting teams took $2,475 and the players – all of them — earned $1,972 in salary. That left the team almost $6,000 in the black that year. Financial difficulties eventually doomed the team at the end of the 1931 season.

The Steam Roller made history in 1929 in a November game scheduled against the Chicago Cardinals. A storm made the field unplayable. They decided to play a night game three days later on Nov. 6 at nearby Kinsley Park, which had just gotten lights. The ball was painted white and 6,000 people came to watch.

The two football fields are now parking lots. The Cycledrome is a parking lot and a Peter Pan bus station between I-95 and Rte. 1. Kinsley Park is a parking lot at the corner of Kinsley and Acorn streets.

Athletic Park

An early University of Vermont football team

An early University of Vermont football team

At the intersection of Intervale and Riverside roads in Burlington, Vt., is a highway plaque marking the site of Athletic Park. It was located on the streetcar line between Burlington and Winooski. The University of Vermont’s football team played there from 1887 until 1906.

Vermont’s football history is otherwise limited. Only two players in the NFL even attended college in Vermont: Washington Redskins receiver Pierre Garcon played just one season at Norwich University before transferring, and Seattle Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka graduated from Middlebury College.

Vermont high schools have produced only three NFL players: Joe Shield, Jason Foster and Bob Yates, according to the Burlington Free Press. Shield didn’t produce a single statistic in just three games for the Green Bay Packers in 1986, and Yates never started a game in five seasons as an offensive lineman for the Boston Patriots from 1961-65.

The third, Jason Foster, a former Tampa Bay Buccaneer, was known for receiving a 5 on the Wonderlic test, the second lowest score in NFL history. Wonderlic is an intelligence test in which a score of 10 suggests literacy.

Photos: Yale Bowl BBy Parkerjh – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103979446.  This story last updated in 2022.

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Six New England Ghost Towns

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Though people typically think of ghost towns as belonging to the Old West, New England actually has plenty. Villages that once supported schools and post offices disappeared, leaving only cellar holes and maybe an abandoned building or two.

The Great 1938 Hurricane created several ghost towns along the coast. War, recession and lousy farmland created other ghost towns. A highway and a reservoir produced more.

Below, we describe six of the most interesting New England ghost towns to explore. In 2017, we added a list of several others in each state. If you know of other ghost towns, please mention them in the comment section.

The Gay City Ghost Town

ghost-towns-gay-city

Split rock formation in Gay City State Park.

Gay City in Hebron, Conn., was anything but. The village survived for 80 years until drunkenness, feuds, business failures and murder turned it into a ghost town.

Elijah Andrus founded Gay City as a community of Hartford religious zealots in 1796 . It attracted about 25 families, mostly from the Gay family.

Religious leaders served rum to all male members of the community during religious services, either to lure worshipers or as part of the sect’s religious practice. The result: drunken brawls. A group of the settlement’s first families packed up and left. Andrus abandoned his followers in 1800. John Gay became president of the community.

In 1804 the settlement earned the name Factory Hollow when it built a woolen mill along the Blackledge River. The mill burned down in 1830, triggering another exodus. A paper mill briefly revitalized the town.

Many of Gay City’s remaining young men died in the Civil War. Then the paper mill burned, and the town pretty much disappeared. But not before lurid tales of murder circulated.

Just before the Civil War, a popular old jewelry peddler disappeared, perhaps murdered by a village charcoal burner. A human skeleton, believed to be the peddler’s remains, were found in a charcoal pit.

When a teenage boy was late for work at a blacksmith forge one day, his boss  made sure he would never be late again. He murdered the boy with a butcher knife. No one was ever convicted of either murder.

Gay City’s former existence is suggested by stone foundations, several grass-filled cellar holes and a few tombstones. Since 1944 it’s been a state park, Gay City State Park, with 10 miles of walking trails through forest and swamp, a small beach and swimming area.

Other Connecticut Ghost Towns

Johnsonville Village started out as a thriving mill town and became a tourist attraction after the mill shut down and its inhabitants left. In 2017, the Philippine church Iglesia ni Cristo bought Johnsonville Village.

The 1938 hurricane wiped out Little Danbury, a collection of rustic beach cottages on Long Island Sound in southeast Fairfield.

Rumors of ghost activity plague Dudleytown, an 18th-century village in Cornwall abandoned in the 19th century. Philanthropists maintain the land as a private land trust.

People call Bara-Hack ‘the Village of Voices,’ because they hear voices in the place where the Pomfret village was abandoned in the 1890s.

Perkins, Maine

ghost-towns-perkins-maine

The ferry to Perkins

Perkins, Maine, abandoned in the 1940s, lies between Richmond and Dresden. It includes Swan Island, Little Swan Island and some tidal flats within the Kennebec River.

Perkins once had nearly 100 residents. They built ships, farmed and harvested ice. Wealthy summer people discovered the island and built summer homes there. Thomas Handasyd Perkins, the China trader, was its most famous resident. He paid to have the town incorporated, and so the town took its name from him.

By 1918 the population dwindled to 61, and the town was disincorporated. The Great Depression and pollution in the Kennebec River delivered the final blows. No one lived there by 2000.

Preservationists are trying to preserve 13 the buildings in Perkins, some of which date to the 1750s. The town is protected as the Steve Powell Wildlife Management Area.

Other Maine Ghost Towns

Flagstaff got its name from the flagstaff Benedict Arnold planted on the Arnold Expedition to Quebec. A dam on the Dead River submerged the town in 1950.

Riceville in East Hancock grew up around a tannery, then died after the tannery burned.

Ligonia Village was once a neighborhood in South Portland. Today it’s a ghost neighborhood comprised of oil tanks and a cemetery on the spur from Main Street to Route 295 or Veteran’s Bridge.

Whitewash Village, Mass.

ghost-towns-monomoy-lighthouse

Monomoy Lighthouse

A Cape Cod ghost town disappeared for the usual reason coastal villages disappear: A hurricane blew it away.

Whitewash Village on Monomoy Island off Chatham was established in 1710 with a tavern for sailors. The town took its name from whitewashed rocks, traces of which people could still see in 1864.

The town grew to about 200 people, who fished in the deep natural harbor. They packed and dried cod and mackerel for markets in Boston and New York, and they sold lobster to mainlanders.

The town at its height had a school, for 16 students, cottages, storage sheds perfumed with fish oil and the Monomoy House, a lodging house and hotel.

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine  described Whitewash Village in 1864. “Around the light-house are two or three cottages, and still a mile beyond stands “Whitewash Village,” composed of the Monomoy House (a weather-beaten, barracky, amphibious structure, fishermen and coasters’ fitting-store on the first floor, lodging-house and excursionists’ inn on the second.”

Harpers called the Monomoy House ‘amphibious’ because the sea came part way up the front stairs during certain winter tides. “The inmates go a visiting in boats,” reported the magazine. Sometimes the boys had to wade to school, carrying the girls.

“In fact, the little territory dotted by Monomoy village is a battle-ground between sand on the one side, and wind and water on the other,” wrote Harper’s.

Sometime in the 19th century, Monomoy Village lost the battle to the wind and water.The only evidence of it that remains is Monomoy Lighthouse.

Other Massachusetts Ghost Towns

The War of 1812 created Dogtown, located between Rockport and Gloucester on Cape Ann. People moved inland to avoid attack and then moved back to the coast, leaving Dogtown a ‘wilderness of pirates and witches.’ A millionaire named Roger Babson hired unemployed stonecutters to carve inspirational sayings into Dogtown’s boulders.

Catamount in Colrain once had a schoolhouse said to be the first to fly the American Flag. Catamount is now a state forest.

You need diving gear to find four ghost towns in Worcester County: the Quabbin Reservoir submerged Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott starting in 1938.

A New Hampshire Logging Town

Lincoln, NH

Lincoln, NH, sister to Zealand

Once overgrown logging camps, inhabitants left the White Mountain ghost towns after they stripped the mountains bare of trees.

But follow Route 302 through Crawford Notch, you’ll come upon what used to be the village of Zealand. From 1875 to 1885, Zealand had a post office, a school and 80 to 250 men who lived there to cut trees for timber baron J.E. Henry of Lincoln.

The relentless Henry was the region’s largest lumber operator, working from 1881 to his death in 1912

His men worked 11-hour days regulated by 47 posted rules, 28 of which concerned the proper care of horses. Mr. Henry paid each of his men in person while carrying a gun on his hip, and he brooked no arguments.

Henry wanted to leave Zealand, sell the mountain it sat on and move to nearby Lincoln. A hotel company planned to build the Mount Washington Hotel facing Henry’s mountain. Henry offered to sell the mountain for a price too high for the hotel company.

Henry threatened to put up charcoal kilns and burn every tree in sight. He sent in a crew of men to start cutting trees and hauling bricks. The hotel company, fearing a burned-over mountain would spoil their venture, paid the timber baron his price.

From 1886-1903 fires destroyed the town and the valley. Very little evidence of the village remains among the trails and campgrounds, which include Sugarloaf.

Other New Hampshire Ghost Towns

Johnson grew up around a sawmill and Little Canada around a mill and a kiln in Lincoln, another town that grew up from J.E. Henry’s logging operations. Residents abandoned Johnson and Little Canada, but Lincoln survives.

Another logging ghost town, Livermore, lies about 16 miles west of North Conway off U.S. Route 302.

Jonathan Warner and some others founded  the town of Kilkenny in 1774 in northenmost Coos County. Named after Kilkenny, Ireland, no one lived there as of the 2010 census.

Hanton City, R.I.

Hanton City along Route 116 in Smithfield, R.I., started as a colonial settlement also known as the Lost City.

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Its overgrown remains consist of several stone foundations, a defunct dam, scattered stone walls and a burial site with three readable names: Alfred, Eliza and Emor Smith.

There’s little else to show a town once existed there, save for Hanton City Trail in Smithfield and Hanton Road in North Smithfield.

Some say a small band of runaways from slavery built Hanton City after choosing to live in the wilds of Smithfield.

Others say the town quarantined people with a communicable disease.

Still others believe Loyalists founded Hanton City during the American Revolution. The patriots exiled several Tories to Smithfield and Glocester in 1776; perhaps they went to Hanton City. Or perhaps a group of Loyalists decided to form an enclave of like-minded people.

Whatever the reason, the land is now owned by the Dow Chemical Company.

Another Rhode Island Ghost Town

The Hurricane of 1938 turned the beach community of Napatree Point into a wildlife preserve.

Lewiston, Vt.

ghost-towns-lewiston-vt.

The village of Lewiston, Vt., ca 1870

Lewiston was a thriving village in Norwich, Vt., with mills and a railroad station across from Hanover, N.H.

For many years coal was shipped to Dartmouth along the railroad, until the college switched to heating oil in the 1920s. By 1930, Lewiston’s mills had all closed and commercial activity moved to White River Junction.

Settlers came to Lewiston in 1765 and named it after Dr. Joseph Lewis, who arrived two years later. In 1950, construction of the Wilder Dam flooded the village’s low-lying farms. In 1967, bulldozers turned Lewiston into a ghost town when they leveled it to make way for a feeder road to Interstate 91.

The railroad and the station survive, unused. Dr. Joseph Lewis’s house is now a pottery studio owned by Dartmouth College. A small road off McKenna Road, Lewiston Hill Road, comprises what was once the village center.

Other Vermont Ghost Towns

Bigfoot supposedly roams Glastonbery Mountain, once home to the logging town of Glastonbery. People mysteriously disappeared on the mountain and Glastonbery turned into a ghost town.

Joseph Ricker founded the farming community of Ricker Basin between Bolton and Waterbury in the 18th century. The steep, rocky soil made farming difficult, and farmers eventually abandoned Ricker Basin.


Photos: Monomoy Lighthouse By Zachary Cava, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Northeast Region via Wikipedia; Hanton City CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1552179; Lewiston, Vt., courtesy the Rauner Special Collections Library.

This story about ghost towns was updated in 2021. 

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How the History of the Petroleum Industry Began in New England

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The history of the petroleum industry started with a chance meeting at Dartmouth College. It set into motion a chain of events that led to the Pennsylvania oil rush and the creation of the American oil industry.

The Drake Well

The Drake Well

George Bissell gets credit as the father of the American oil industry, but other New Englanders deserve it as well.

The cast of characters includes a former high school principal from New Hampshire, a Vermont country doctor, a Maine lawyer, a Yale chemist and a railroad conductor on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.

They made history — of the petroleum industry. So often it’s associated with Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska, but it never would have happened without Yankee ingenuity and capital.

Rock Oil

George Bissell

George Bissell

George Bissell was born Nov. 8, 1821 in Hanover, N.H., the son of Nancy Wemple and Isaac Bissell, a fur trader who died when he was 12. He worked his way through Dartmouth College, then knocked around as a teacher, journalist and school administrator, studying languages and the law in his spare time.

By 1853 he had moved to New York City, where he practiced law at 14 Wall Street. He had a partner, Harvard-trained Jonathan Eveleth.  Eveleth came from colonial New England stock. Born in New Gloucester, Maine, people described him described as “sage, cautious and tenacious.” He, too, had worked as a school principal, in Norway, Maine, after graduating from Bowdoin College.

Seneca Oil

George Bissell returned to Hanover in the fall of 1853 to visit his mother. While there, he stopped by Dartmouth. In the office of Dr. Dixi Crosby, head of the medical school, he saw a bottle of rock oil.

The oil was then marketed as a patent medicine called ‘Seneca Oil,’ after the local Indians who used it to heal deafness, toothaches and rheumatism.  Many Americans believed the Indians had a deep knowledge of natural healing.

Crosby’s son and nephew would then play a big part in starting the petroleum industry. His nephew, Francis Beattie Brewer, had brought the rock oil to him at Dartmouth. Brewer, a physician born in Barnet, Vt., moved to Titusville, Pa., to join his father’s lumber company. Oil seeped out of the ground from oil springs on the lumber company property. Sawmill workers used some of it to lubricate the machinery. They soaked the oil that leaked out of the ground in blankets, and then drained the blankets over barrels.

A Hard Sell

Brewer saw immense potential for oil from the ground. His enthusiasm spread to his cousin, Bissell’s son, Albert, and to Dixi Crosby himself. But not to George Bissell. It took months for Albert Crosby to persuade Bissell to finance a trip to Titusville to inspect the oil springs.

By then, Bissell saw how they could market oil to lubricate the machinery of the burgeoning Mechanical Age. Power looms in the textile industry and the steam printing presses needed better lubricants than what they had — lard.

Bissell also thought rock oil could replace expensive whale oil, coal oil or dangerous camphene as a lighting fluid.

If the cousins, Crosby and Brewer, came back with a favorable report, he and Eveleth would organize a petroleum company. Then they would launch it on the New York stock market.

A Golden Vision

The cousins returned from Titusville with a glowing report. Brewer recalled how they had “stood on the circle of rough logs surrounding [one spring] and saw the oil bubbling up, and spreading its bright and golden colors over the surface, it seemed like a golden vision.”history of petroleum pennsylvania rock oil

In October 1854 Bissell and his partner Eveleth visited Titusville, stopping in New Haven first. There they met James M. Townsend, a speculator living in a boardinghouse.

In November, Bissell, Eveleth and Brewer started a joint stock enterprise, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company. They then bought 200 acres of the Hibbard farm for $5,000.

Benjamin Silliman

Benjamin Silliman

Benjamin Silliman

Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. stock did not sell.

They were getting oil by digging pits and ditches, then pumping the oil and water into vats using water power from a sawmill. They sold the oil to patent medicine companies.

Brewer’s father warned his son away from Eveleth and Bissell, calling them “a couple of ‘sharpers.” Brewer ignored his advice, but other investors stayed away.

Except for James Townsend, the New Haven boardinghouse dweller. He agreed to drum up interest among New Haven investors. But he told them he couldn’t do it until they got a scientific report on the commercial value of petroleum.

During the 19th century, American scientific thought was centered at Yale College. Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman was the country’s preeminent chemist. His father, Benjamin Silliman Sr., was also a Yale chemistry professor who developed a process that enabled the commercial production of kerosene.

“We must have him,” Eveleth said.

The $562.08 Report

Silliman, who earned little as a Yale college professor, agreed to write a report on the commercial potential of rock oil for $562.08. The company then forwarded a few barrels of petroleum to the chemist.

Silliman concluded petroleum could be used not just as a lubricant, but as a lighting fluid. He wrote, “the Oil of your Company’ has ‘a much higher value as an illuminator than I had dared to hope.” He arrived at the happy conclusion,

…it appears to me that there is much ground for encouragement in the belief that your company have in their possession a raw material from which, by simple and not expensive process, they may manufacture very valuable products.

The Report on the Rock Oil is probably the most famous consulting report ever produced.

History of the Petroleum Industry

Edwin Drake

Edwin Drake

They were not quite on their way. Silliman’s report attracted investors, but it didn’t tell them how to get enough oil.

James Townsend was elected company president. In 1857, the idea of boring an artesian well was broached, but the board couldn’t agree. Some members, led by Townsend, proposed drilling a well at their own expense. They would then pay the parent company 12 cents a gallon for the oil produced. The board accepted that proposal.

Townsend had become friendly with a garrulous fellow who lived at the same New Haven boardinghouse as he. Col. Edwin Drake was not a colonel but a former conductor on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Rail Road. Townsend hired Drake to figure out how to bore an oil well. His main qualification: He had a railroad pass that let him get to Titusville for free.

The announcement of their intention provoked mirth and ridicule, and “Col. Drake” became “Crazy Drake.”

For two-and-a-half years, Drake toiled in Titusville until Aug. 28, 1659. On that day he famously struck the first oil well in America.

Oil Rush

Drake’s gusher touched off an oil rush that rivalled the quest for California gold. His achievement set off a wave of exploration and investment that established petroleum as a major industry.

The Titusville area after Drake's well was bored. Photo couresty Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Drake Well Museum.

The Titusville area after Drake’s well was bored. Photo courtesy Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Drake Well Museum.

Eveleth would soon die of kidney disease, but Bissell spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying and leasing land in the Titusville area.

Bissell wrote to his wife:

We find here an unparalleled excitement…The whole population is crazy almost … I never saw such excitement. The whole western country are thronging here and fabulous prices are offered for lands in the vicinity where there is a prospect of getting oil.

The Rest of the Story

The men who started the petroleum industry met separate fates.

James Townsend had taken the biggest financial risk. He was bitter. “The whole plan was suggested by me, and my suggestions were carried out,” he wrote. “The raising of the money and sending it out was done by me.”

Brewer served in the Civil War, went into politics and became director of a New York Insane Asylum.

Drake made bad business decisions and gambled his money away. He ended up a poor and ailing old man, finally granted an annuity of $1,500 in 1872 by Pennsylvania.

Bissell became a wealthy philanthropist. One of his donations was for a gym at Dartmouth. He insisted that the gym include six bowling alleys, “in remembrance of disciplinary troubles into which he had fallen as an undergraduate because of his indulgence in this sinful sport.”

This story last updated in 2021.

 

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1816: The Year Without a Summer

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The year 1816 was known as ‘The Year Without a Summer’ in New England because six inches of snow fell in June and every month of the year had a hard frost.

Temperatures dropped to as low as 40 degrees in July and August as far south as Connecticut. People also called it ‘Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death’ and the ‘Poverty Year.’

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

And to this day, scientists don’t agree on what caused the bizarre weather in The Year Without a Summer.

Year Without a Summer

There were warm days in the spring of 1816, but they were followed by cold snaps. In Salem, Mass., for example, it was 74 degrees on April 24. Within 30 hours the temperature dropped to 21 degrees.

Thomas Robbins, the East Windsor, Conn., bibliophile, noticed the late spring. He wrote in his diary, ‘the vegetation does not seem to advance at all.’

On May 12, strong winds and freezing temperatures from Canada killed the buds on fruit trees. Inch-thick ice formed on ponds and streams from Maine to Upstate New York. By the end of May, corn plants froze in central Maine.

Then on June 6, 1816, six inches of snow fell on New England. Clockmaker Chauncey Jerome wrote in his autobiography that he walked to work that day in Plymouth, Conn., wearing heavy woolen clothes, an overcoat and mittens.

Chauncey Jerome

Chauncey Jerome wore mittens in June during the Year Without a Summer.

Flurries fell in Boston the next day, the latest ever recorded. The snow was 18 inches deep in Cabot, Vt., on June 8.  On June 11, a temperature of 30.5 degrees was recorded in Williamstown, Mass. Frozen birds dropped dead in the fields. Some Vermont farmers who had already shorn their sheep tried to tie their fleeces back on, but many froze to death anyway.

Benjamin Harwood, a Bennington, Vt., farmer, wrote in his diary that it rained all night then began to snow from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The heads of all the mountains on every side were crowned with snow. The most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen.

And then it got warm again.

More Cold

Temperatures seesawed up and down throughout the Year Without a Summer, bringing hope on warm days that the crops could be harvested after all. Then sharp cold spells brought despair.

On June 22, for example, temperatures reached 101 degrees in Salem, Mass. But July 4 was cool. Chauncey Jerome wrote it was hard to feel patriotic while watching men play quoits in overcoats.  Then a northwest wind brought a three-day cold spell, with 30-degree temperatures in northern New England, 40 degrees in Hartford and New Haven.

Gov. William Plumer

Gov. William Plumer blamed God for the Year Without a Summer.

The frost destroyed the bean crop in Franconia, N.H., and bean, cucumber and squash crops in Kennebunkport, Maine.  Young plants grew so slowly they were vulnerable to frost, and farmers harvested so little hay they had to slaughter their livestock or feed them oats and corn.

As depressing as the second severe cold spell was the drought that enveloped most of the United States, including New England. “I never saw our street so dry,” complained a minister in East Windsor, Conn.

Gov. William Jones of Rhode Island issued a proclamation designating a day of public ‘Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving,’ noting the ‘coldness and dryness of the seasons’ and the ‘alarming sickness.’ New Hampshire Gov. William Plumer believed the weather was God’s judgment in the earth and urged people to humble themselves for their transgressions.

Fear of famine began to grow during the Year Without a Summer.

Hard Frost in August

Early August was sunny and warm. Farmers planted new crops hoping the growing season might last beyond the first frost in October. On Aug. 13th and 14th, a cold spell froze the corn crop north of Concord, N.H.

On Aug. 20, a short, violent storm struck Amherst, N.H., signaling a steep drop in temperature: 30 degrees within a few hours. It snowed in Vermont. In Maine, farmers wrapped rags around their plants to protect them.

At least the wheat, rye and potatoes were holding up, staving off famine. In Ashland, N.H., Reuben Whitten was able to grow wheat on his south-facing farm. He shared it with his neighbors. After he died in 1847, his neighbors paid for his gravestone and later erected a monument that read:

A pioneer of this town. Cold season of 1816 raised 40 bushils of wheat on this land whitch kept his family and neighbours from starveation.

Hopes of salvaging what remained of the corn crop were dashed by a severe frost on Aug. 28.  Maine and New Hampshire farmers cut up whole fields of corn for fodder.

Rev. William Fogg of Kittery, Maine, summed up the Year Without a Summer: ‘Crops cut short and a heavy load of taxes.’

There were reports of people eating raccoons, mackerel and pigeons.

It warmed up again in September, as usual, but then at sunrise on Sept. 26 in Hanover, N.H., it was 26 degrees. Snow fell throughout the region, and a killing frost froze crops in the field and apples on the branch.

Nettles and Hedgehogs

The drought caused wildfires to break out in the woods throughout New England. Fires in western New York produced so much smoke that sailors were blinded on Lake Champlain.

The Year Without a Summer was especially hard on the poor. The New Hampshire Patriot reported on Oct. 22, 1816, that ‘Indian corn, on which a large proportion of the poor depend is cut off. ‘ Vermont farmers lost much of their livestock, and Vermonters foraged for food such as nettles, wild turnips and hedgehogs.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster lost his bid for reelection during the Year Without a Summer.

Three-quarters of the corn crop was lost during the Year Without a Summer. Prices soared for wheat, grains, meat, vegetables, butter, milk and flour. In Maine, the price of oats tripled and potatoes doubled. Hay was 180 a ton in parts of New Hampshire, six times its usual cost.

The Year Without a Summer brought widespread famines in Europe as well. The bad weather forced a group of poets to remain in their rooms in Switzerland. To avoid boredom and entertain the group, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Making maple syrup

At least the Year Without a Summer had been good for producing maple syrup. Vermonters traded syrup for fish, which is why they called 1816 the Mackerel Year.

Members of Congress seemed insensitive to the suffering of the people and voted to double their own salary. It didn’t go over well. Nearly 70 percent of incumbent U.S. representatives were voted out of office – including Daniel Webster.

After the Year Without a Summer,  Josiah Meigs, commissioner general of the Land Offices, in 1817 began a more systematic approach to observing weather phenomenon. He ordered the 20 Land Offices to take thrice-daily recordings of the temperature, winds and precipitation.

The Frigid Zone

Author Samuel Goodrich visited New Hampshire, observing:

At last a kind of despair seized upon the people. In the pressure of adversity, many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become part of the frigid zone.

goodrich

Samuel Goodrich

The next year started out cold as well, convincing Northeast farmers to migrate to the Midwest.

Rev. Samuel Robbins in East Windsor, Conn., wrote, ‘We have had a great deal of moving this spring. Our number rather diminished.’

At the time, many reasons were given for the weird phenomena: sunspots, deforestation, great fields of ice floating in the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod experiments and, of course, the wrath of God.

Many people believe the Year Without a Summer was caused by a massive volcanic explosion on Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, killing 15,000 instantly. Soon after, another 65,000 perished of disease and starvation. The volcanic ash and debris thrown up into the stratosphere is thought to have blocked the sun and caused a gradual lowering of temperatures.

Lee Foster, NOAA meteorologist, notes that climate data shows 1816 was part of a mini ice age lasting from 1400 to around 1860. The era had unusually harsh winters, short growing seasons and dry weather.


With thanks to The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. This story was updated in 2023.

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