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Haverhill NH

In 1781, Vermont’s Thomas Johnson Got Trapped Between the Americans and British

In 1781 Thomas Johnson put himself squarely between both sides fighting the American Revolution. Johnson served as a colonel in the colonial militia. He oversaw British prisoners who surrendered at Fort Ticonderoga, but people questioned his loyalties.

Much of Vermont refused to take a side in the Revolution, making it a haven for loyalists and dangerous for patriots.

Men from Newbury, Vt., loyal to the patriot cause moved across the river to Haverhill, N.H., because the northern portion of the Connecticut River became a de facto boundary. British scouts routinely traveled through Vermont, picking up intelligence and capturing Americans. But they rarely crossed the Connecticut for fear of being captured themselves before they could retreat across the river.

The Connecticut River, separating Fairlee, Vt. and Orford, N.H.

Thomas Johnson

Johnson and American general Jacob Bayley stayed in Newbury, however, dodging the British scouts when they passed through in 1778, 1779 and 1780. But Johnson’s luck was about to run out.

Johnson got a job building a grist mill in nearby Peacham in 1781. He had the rocks for the foundation collected and brought to Peacham and traveled there himself in March to begin the work. British scouts in the area heard their old enemy had strayed from the safety of the Connecticut River. Johnson’s diary entry for March 8, 1781 tells what happened next.

Three British soldiers and an officer with a gorget (historical reenactment)

“This morning about 12 or 1 o’clock, I awaked out of my sleep, and found the house beset with enemies. Thought I would slip on my stockings, jump out of the window, and run. But before that, came in two men with their guns pointed at me, and challenged me for their prisoner.”

They marched him through the woods. First they stopped at St. John’s, then Montreal, then Chambly and then Three Rivers. For eight months, Johnson’s British captors questioned him. He equivocated, feigning little interest in the American cause.

Finally, he was freed and allowed to return home to Newbury on parole. The conditions were simple:

He would return to Canada if the British requested it;
He would do nothing to oppose British interests;
And he would assist British scouts if called upon.

Distress

Under the suspicious eye of his neighbors, who questioned his true allegiance, Johnson wrote to George Washington. With the British, he explained, he had learned something of their plans. The British had failed to attack from the North in 1781 because they lacked provisions. But, he cautioned, they planned another attack.

Johnson further warned that the hills of Vermont were rife with loyalists who would support the British endeavors. By aiding Washington, Johnson violated the terms of his parole. So he pleaded in a series of letters for a formal exchange of prisoners, which would release him from his obligations to the British.

“My position grows more distressing,” he wrote, “I have been exposed by the infirmity or imprudence of a gentleman, one that we could not have expected it from.”

Washington regretfully declined, though he did meet with Johnson to hear the particulars of what he had learned while in British captivity.

The Oxbow

Back in Newbury, Johnson was wary of his position, and rightfully so. In June of 1782, Johnson was summoned to meet a party of British scouts. They had positioned themselves on a ridge above the “Great Oxbow,” a bend in the Connecticut River. They wanted Johnson’s help in planning an assault, during which they planned to capture Johnson’s neighbor and fellow officer, Jacob Bayley.

The Connecticut River from Newbury

Bayley was plowing in the field by the Oxbow with his sons. Having learned the precise location of his house, the British planned an attack that night. Returning home, Johnson decided he must act. On a slip of paper he wrote the phrase: “The Philistines are upon thee, Sampson.”

Because the British watched Bayley in the field, he could not deliver the message directly. Dudley Carleton, Bayley’s brother-in-law, carried the message to the field. As he passed by, he dropped the note for his brother-in-law to see.

Bayley understood the warning and, leaving his sons plowing, he surreptitiously made his way home, and from there across the Connecticut. When the British raided Bayley’s house, they found little of value. But they were quite sure they knew who had told Bayley they were coming.

In their next visit to the area, they would have received approval to burn Johnson’s property and take him prisoner again. There wasn’t a happier man in Vermont than Thomas Johnson when the peace treaty with Britain was signed, relieving him of any obligations to the British and saving his property.

All his life, however, Johnson was dogged by questions and rumors about his loyalty dating back to the difficult days of 1782.

Thanks to: Historical sketches of the discovery, settlement, and progress of events in the Coos country and vicinity, principally included between the years 1754 and 1785. Image: British soldiers By Tommc73 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48557811. This story last updated in 2022.

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Andrew Dexter Builds Boston’s First Skyscraper, Causes First Banking Collapse

In 1807, Andrew Dexter began building the tallest building in America, a temple of finance that soared an unheard-of seven stories — and caused the young republic’s first major bank collapse.

The Exchange Coffee House

The skyscraper was the Exchange Coffee House, a product of the commercial ambitions that seized the country. It also resulted from the unregulated banking system that allowed swindlers like Andrew Dexter to flourish and fail.

The Exchange Coffee House went up in smoke nine years after it opened. People could see the fire as far away as New Hampshire and Maine. But even before the flames started, the Exchange Coffee House had caused plenty of damage. It destroyed banks as far away as the Michigan Territory.

Dexter’s failure ‘was one of the most direful events in the economic history of New England,’ wrote historian Horace White in 1911.

Andrew Dexter, Jr.

Born on March 28, 1779, in Brookfield, Mass., Andrew Dexter was named after his father, a prosperous textile merchant. He grew up in Providence, graduated from Brown and moved to Boston to take up the law. Dexter then studied with his uncle, Samuel Dexter, later named the third U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

In 1808, he married Charlotte Morton, the daughter of Perez Morton and niece of Fanny Apthorp, who committed suicide after giving birth to Perez Morton’s illegitimate child.

Andrew Dexter by Gilbert Stuart

Coffee, a luxury beverage at the time, marked the people who drank it as cosmopolitan, as elite. As Dexter began to amass wealth, an ambition seized him. He wanted to build an enormous exchange that would serve as Boston’s financial nerve center – and serve coffee.

Gospel of Ascent

Jane Kamensky, author of The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse, explained the expansionary zeitgeist that influenced Andrew Dexter

“The gospel of ascent seeped into every sphere of life in the early republic, from farm house to schoolhouse to courthouse to countinghouse to meetinghouse,” she wrote. “And wherever it touched, aspiration took shape. In the slaveholding south and the rural north and the ever-expanding backcountry, aspiration pushed relentlessly at the horizontal: a hunger for more acres, farther shores.

In Boston, aspiration was vertical, wrote Kamensky.

Speculators and Swindlers

Back in the early days of the Republic, banks issued notes that customers could exchange for gold or silver. People conducted business by exchanging the notes at a discount, which depended on the bank’s reputation and its distance from the people doing business. A bank note that could be exchanged in Boston, for example, was more valuable to Boston businessmen than a note that had to be exchanged in Providence.

Charlotte Morton Dexter by Gilbert Stuart

Some banks were established far from commercial centers because of the difficulty in exchanging notes for specie. Speculators and swindlers bought or established banks in far-away places so they could issue notes that would take a long time, if ever, to redeem.

The discount rate was set by traders doing business in the street. Dexter intended the Exchange Coffee House to be a place where they could trade bank notes indoors. It would also have a coffee room, reading rooms, conference rooms, a hotel, dining rooms and business offices.

A Marvel

The Exchange Coffee House took two years to build. As it rose from Salter’s Court, so did Dexter’s ambition. In the end he built a vast exchange floor, a 40-by-60-foot atrium framed by pillars on each floor that grew more ornate as they rose to the ceiling. A sumptuous Coffee Room was furnished with imported mahogany furniture, velvet draperies, china from Canton and silver from the Andes. Even the privy was a marvel: It was four stories high with windows on every floor.

The Rev. William Bentley

People came long distances to see the fantastic building. The Rev. William Bentley recorded in his diary on Nov. 14, 1808:

For the first time saw the Exchange but the naked front, without anything but its own surface on the line of the street, is not capable of affording a view but of a very large building.

Exposure and Flight

There were more tales than customers. Traders preferred to do business on the sidewalk, even when it rained. Then President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo slowed commerce in New England. Dexter could rent only a third of the offices. The bar stood empty, and the hotel barely had an occupant.

That wasn’t Andrew Dexter’s problem any more. To finance his dream, he had started or taken control of the Berkshire Bank in Pittsfield, Mass., the Farmers’ Exchange Bank in Gloucester, R.I., the Penobscot Bank of Bucksport, Maine, the Coos Bank of Haverhill, N.H., and the Detroit Bank, housed in the first brick building in Michigan. He issued hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank notes while building his ever-more-grandiose skyscraper.

Nathan Appleton and other Boston merchants grew suspicious of Dexter’s ‘country’ bank notes. In 1808, they took their story to the press. Shopkeepers began refusing banknotes from Dexter’s banks. Appleton and his friends sent agents to Dexter’s far-away banks to redeem the notes that Boston shopkeepers had accepted as currency. The banks couldn’t exchange the notes for gold or silver, and the extent of Dexter’s fraud began to be realized. Dexter could no longer pay his workmen, and hundreds, if not thousands of them were wiped out.

Avoiding Disgrace

When the Farmer’s Exchange collapsed, it turned out Dexter had issued $760,000 in bank notes. The bank had a total of $86 in gold and silver on hand.

Andrew and Charlotte Dexter slumped off to Nova Scotia in 1809 to avoid prosecution. During the War of 1812 they moved to Athens, N.Y., to take advantage of that state’s lenient bankruptcy rules. By 1817, Dexter’s father had died and Dexter used his inheritance to speculate in Alabama real estate. He founded Montgomery, moving his family there in 1819. Charlotte Dexter died shortly after they arrived. Andrew Dexter continued his real estate speculation in Texas and Mexico, but died broke on Nov. 2, 1837, in Mobile, Ala.

The Exchange Coffee House had long gone by then. New owners completed it, but it never achieved the success Dexter anticipated. It then changed hands several times until Nov. 3, 1819, when a fire totally destroyed it. The remains of America’s first skyscraper smoldered for months. Three years later, another, less grand coffee house exchange was built on the site.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Ithiel Town Revives Greek Architecture and Covered Bridges

New England would look a lot different today if Ithiel Town hadn’t created covered truss bridges and Greek Revival architecture.

The Bath-Haverhill Bridge in Grafton County, N.H. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

An architect as well as a builder, he popularized the Greek Revival style in the early 19^th century, though he also worked in the Federalist and Gothic styles.

Ithiel Town

He was born in Thompson, Conn., on Oct. 3, 1784, to Archelaus and Martha Johnson Town. He studied with Asher Benjamin in Boston. His first known commission was the Asa Gray House in 1810.

Asa Gray House. Photo by By George M. Cushing, photographer. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Federal style house was built in Cambridge, Mass., for the first head of the Harvard botanic garden. Asa Gray, the most important American botanist of the 19th century, lived in the house later on. So did English ornithologist Thomas Nuttall. The National Register of Historic Places lists the house, also a National Historic Landmark.

Samuel Wadsworth Russell House. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1828, he designed the Samuel Wadsworth Russell House in Middletown, Conn., for Samuel Russell, founder of the largest American trading house in China. The house set a new standard for luxury and grandeur and also helped launch the Greek Revival style of architecture in the United States.

Wadsworth Atheneum by Carol Highsmith. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Mansions, Churches, Public Buildings

The next year, Ithiel Town and Andrew Jackson Davis formed one of the country’s first architectural firms. They designed the state capitol in New Haven and, in Hartford, City Hall and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

One of Town’s most important early works was Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, Conn. Built from 1814-16, it was one of the first Gothic Revival churches in the United States.

The Skinner-Trowbridge House. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Town built a number of mansions, including his own, on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven. Charles Dickens called it ‘the most beautiful street in America,’ and the two George Bushes lived on it for a time. It was part of a development by James Hillhouse, a congressman and Yale’s treasurer for 50 years. . He laid out a road and then planted elm trees along it. Houses had to be set back 50 feet from the street and homeowners had to hire a leading architect to design their homes. So Aaron Skinner commissioned Town to build the house above. Yale bought it in 1978 and restored it for the International Center for Finance.

Ithiel Town’s Lattice Truss

Interior of the Contoocook Railroad Bridge showing the Town lattice truss. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Ithiel Town was an engineer as well as an architect. In 1820 he received the patent for a wooden truss bridge known as Town’s Lattice Truss. It used criss-crossing diagonal planks fastened to the top and the bottom of the structure, which eliminated the need for large, expensive timbers.

The Bath-Haverhill Bridge is the oldest existing Town lattice truss, and one of the oldest covered bridges in the country. It was in service for 170 years until it was bypassed in 1999.

Ithiel Town died on June 13, 1844.