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Clement Moore, Hebrew Scholar and Reluctant Author of ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’

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Clement Moore took far more pride in the Hebrew dictionary he wrote than in A Visit from St. Nicholas, which he also wrote.

clement-oore-santa-nastHe never even intended to publish the poem also known as Twas the Night Before Christmas. He thought it too unscholarly. Moore came up with it for the private enjoyment of his children — but then things got out of hand.

Clement Moore, To the Manor Born

Clement Clarke Moore was born July 15, 1779, on a large estate called Chelsea in Manhattan. His father, Benjamin Moore, served as the Episcopalian bishop of New York and twice as president of Columbia University. His mother, Charity Clarke, was the daughter of the wealthy landowner who owned Chelsea.

Clement Moore visitMoore would later inherit Chelsea and subdivide it into what is now the Chelsea section of New York. But his wealth didn’t stop him from working. He taught Biblical Learning and, later, Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Moore wanted people to remember him for his opus, the first American Hebrew dictionary, Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language In Two Volumes, published in 1809.

His dictionary, a guide to the literature of heaven, hell and sacred things, is largely forgotten. Instead he is remembered for creating the American conception of Santa Claus from the mid-19th century until today. It is arguably the best-known poem written by an American.

Illustration from the 1864 edition of Clement Moore’s poem A Visit from St. Nicholas

Merry Christmas

Moore wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas for his six children in 1822 as a Christmas present. Then a friend copied it and submitted it to the Troy, N.Y., Sentinel.

Clement Moore

The newspaper published it on Dec. 23, 1823, and for many years thereafter. It wasn’t until 1837 that he was identified as the author. Moore himself didn’t acknowledge authorship until 1844 – and only because his children insisted.

Sometime in the 1850s, Moore bought a home in Newport, R.I., and stayed there in the summer.

The house is known as ‘Cedars,’ ‘Clement C. Moore House,’ and ‘The Night Before Christmas House.’ It still stands at 25 Catherine St., though it has been broken up into apartments. Some people have claimed he wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas in Newport. The Redwood Library tells us that’s unlikely as the house hadn’t been built when the poem was written.

Clement Moore left his mark on Newport. He was one of 26 people who donated money for what would become Touro Park. He died at his Newport home on July 10, 1863.

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s book, Italian Christmas Cookies, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now in paperback on Amazon; just click here.

This story about Clement Moore was updated in 2023. 

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The Six Oldest Synagogues in New England

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The oldest synagogues in New England were built well after the first Jewish settlers arrived.

Touro Synagogue, the only surviving synagogue from the Colonial era, was consecrated in 1763, nearly a century after the first Sephardic Jews arrived in Newport, R.I.

Several synagogues in New England were built on bequests from Judah Touro, the son of the Touro Synagogue’s hazzani. In his will he left endowments to 23 Jewish congregations in 14 states—including Hartford and Boston. (He also saved the Bunker Hill Monument.)

New England’s oldest synagogues were all built in cities within walking distance of their congregation. Many of them have since been converted to other uses, as their members moved to the suburbs.

Here are the six oldest synagogues in each New England state.

Beth Israel, West Hartford

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Charter Oak Cultural Center, formerly Beth Israel Synagogue. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Connecticut law allowed only the Christian religion until 1843. That year, Hartford Jews asked the General Assembly for the right to worship. Lawmakers passed a law that said, “Jews who may desire to unite and form religious societies shall have the same rights, powers and privileges which are given to Christians of every denomination.’

When the law changed, Connecticut Jews immediately incorporated two congregations: Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden and Congregation Beth Israel in Hartford (now West Hartford).

A small group of mostly German Jews organized Beth Israel as an orthodox congregation. For 19 years it was the only Jewish congregation in Hartford. In 1855, Judah Touro left in his will money for the congregation to buy its first building, a former Baptist church. After a fire destroyed the building, the congregation in 1876 hired an Irish architect to design what is now the oldest synagogue in Connecticut.

Beth Israel moved to its current building in 1936, leaving its synagogue to become the Charter Oak Cultural Center.

In 1991, the Connecticut Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford conducted a survey of 46 historic synagogues in the state. By the mid-1990s, 15 of Connecticut’s oldest synagogues were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, more than any other state at the time.

21 Charter Oak Ave., West Hartford, Conn.

Shaarey Tphiloh, Portland

Shaarey Tphiloh’s first synagogue, Portland. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1900, Portland had 80 Jewish families among its 50,000 residents. The oldest had arrived in the 1860s from Poland and Russia, and many were clothing and dry goods merchants. They had shops in the Lower Munjoy Hill area.

Up until 1900, three orthodox congregations worshipped in members’ homes, in rented spaces or at the Middle Street synagogue of the Sharith Israel congregation. The congregation ran a B’nai B’rith lodge, a Hebrew elementary school and a Jewish cemetery in Cape Elizabeth.

That year, the two other congregations decided to band together, build a synagogue and hire a rabbi. By 1904, the congregation raised enough money to build Shaarey Tphiloh, ‘Gates of Prayer,’ on Newbury Street. The first rabbi, Isaac Marcus, was a Russian who held services in Yiddish. Not until 1917 were services held in English.

Rabbi Marcus was followed by Rabbi Chaim Shohet, a distinguished Talmudic scholar who disagreed with the temple’s board of directors when it fired the cantor. The board then fired Rabbi Shohet, and according to legend moved his chair from the sanctuary to the bathroom. Some members of Shaarey Tphiloh followed him to Congregation Adas Israel on Middle Street.

Shaarey Tphiloh followed its congregation to the suburbs after World War II and built a new synagogue on Noyes Street in 1956. In 2016, the shrinking congregation moved to a smaller building nearby.

145 Newbury St., Portland, Maine

Beth Israel, Boston

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The first Beth Israel synagogue. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Puritan Boston didn’t exactly welcome Jews or any other outsiders, so the city’s Jewish population remained tiny for its first two centuries. In the 1830s, Boston’s booming commerce attracted Jewish immigrants from the German provinces, as well as second- and third-generation Jews from other U.S. cities. They were peddlers, shopkeepers, merchants, opticians, furriers, jewelers and tailors.

Boston’s first significant Jewish congregation started when young Jewish families and single men gathered at a bris for the firstborn son of a Polish capmaker. They decided to organize, Ohabei Shalom, and elected a German jeweler and real estate trader as its president.

Ethnic rivalries eventually tore the congregation apart. The Poles, or ‘Polanders,’ lived in the North End; the upwardly mobile Germans, or ‘Bayards,’lived in the South End. Services had been conducted according to the more formal German customs, but the Poles soon outnumbered the Germans, rejected the Bavarian rabbi Joseph Sachs and began to conduct services their own way.

In 1854, 25 families from southeastern Germany broke from Ohabei Shalom along with Rabbi Sachs. They tried to keep the name Ohabei Shalom partly because Judah Touro had left money in his will to the congregation. A two-year lawsuit followed, and the dissidents lost. They called themselves Kehillah Kedosha Adath Israel, or Congregation Adath Israel.

(Rabbi Sachs, by the way, left Boston in 1869 to start a school in New York. His sons, Julius and Samuel, married the daughters of Marcus and Bertha Goldman. Samuel Sachs and Marcus Goldman founded Goldman Sachs.)

Massachusetts’ Oldest Synagogue

In 1885, Temple Israel built what is now the oldest synagogue in Massachusetts on Columbus Avenue. It was designed in a historic revival style, popular in German-speaking lands, called Rundbogenstil. With twin towers and a rose window, the synagogue reflected the growing wealth and prestige of its members. Today that first synagogue is the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

In 1906, the congregation built Temple Israel on Commonwealth Avenue as a replica of Solomon’s Temple. The congregation then moved to the suburbs and in 1967 sold the building to Boston University, which now uses it for large lectures and events.

Temple Israel began building another massive synagogue in 1926 near the Brookline border, but the stock market crash of 1929 put a halt to construction. Today Temple Israel, the largest Reform congregation in New England, holds services in its modern synagogue on Longwood Avenue near Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital.

600 Columbus Ave., Boston, Mass.

Temple Israel

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Temple Israel Synagogue, Portsmouth, N.H. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The first of New Hampshire’s Jewish synagogues was built in Portsmouth in 1905, though Jews had lived in the city since the 1790s. For more than a century they worshipped in private homes. They buried their dead in public cemeteries or in Jewish cemeteries in Dover and Somersworth.

Abraham and Rachel Isaac, Portsmouth’s first Jewish settlers, came from Prussia in 1789. He started out as an auctioneer, then opened a china shop. The Isaacs worshipped at their home on State Street, observed religious holidays and closed the store on Saturdays. They adopted a son, who moved away and married a minister’s daughter.

Abraham died in 1809: A local poet wrote his epitaph, including the words, “A faithful steward and an honest man.” Rachel moved away to be close to her son. For 50 years there was no record of Jewish people in Portsmouth.

By 1880, about 16 Jewish families lived in Portsmouth. By 1900 that number nearly doubled. In 1905 a Jew named Morris Port came from Newburyport and persuaded Portsmouth’s Jewish community to organize. By 1911 they had a rabbi, bylaws, the name of Temple Israel and a rented space in which to hold services. In 1912 they bought the old Methodist church on State Street and redecorated it in 1912.

The Jewish community grew around the synagogue in an area known as Puddle Dock, now Strawbery Banke. There were two kosher butchers, a Jewish bakery and three Jewish grocery stores.

Temple Israel renovated the building in 2007 and today congregants still sit on pews that date to 1827. A plaque stands outside Temple Israel, proclaiming it the first permanent Jewish house of worship in New Hampshire.

200 State Street, Portsmouth, N.H.

Touro Synagogue, Newport

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Touro Synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Touro Synagogue, consecrated on Dec. 2, 1763, is the only synagogue built in Colonial America that still survives. Newport easily had the largest Jewish population in colonial New England, and Touro Synagogue is by far the largest and grandest of the early synagogues.

In 1658, 15 Sephardic Jewish families that escaped the Inquisition via Barbados arrived in Newport. They left a permanent mark on Newport by establishing a cemetery in 1677. Several more waves of Jewish families arrived from Curacao in 1690 and from New York in the mid-18th century. For all that time, Newport’s Jewish population met for worship in private homes.

Many Jews prospered as merchants in the sea trade. What is now Bellevue Avenue was lined with Jewish shops. By 1758 the Jewish population had so grown in size and prominence a permanent house of worship was needed.

Newport architect Peter Harrison, born and trained in England, volunteered to design the synagogue.  He planned a building with a plain Georgian exterior that hides an elaborate interior. (Harrison also designed the Redwood Library in Newport and King’s Chapel in Boston.)

Isaac Touro, born in the Netherlands, the synagogue’s first hazzan, or minister. Grateful for England’s protection, he was a Loyalist and stayed in Newport when the British captured the town in 1776. Three years later he moved with the British to New York, where he had to depend on charity. In 1782 he moved to Kingston, Jamaica and died a year later.

Two of Touro’s sons, Judah and Abraham, became quite wealthy and gave generously to Jewish and Christian causes. Abraham gave enough money to maintain Touro Synagogue and the cemetery.

Washington and the Oldest Synagogue

Many of the congregation had been Loyalists like Isaac Touro and left with him for New York. The Jeshuat Israel congregation dwindled and disappeared for a time, but in 1790 it was still functioning.

That year, George Washington famously visited Newport. Moses Seixas, a leader in the Touro Synagogue sent him a letter thanking God for a nation that did not tolerate bigotry.

Washington’s reply strongly supported religious freedoms for non-Christians. The government of the United States ‘gives to bigotry no sanction,’ Washington replied. The letter is recited annually at the synagogue.

The Jeshuat Israel congregation dwindled and turned Touro Synagogue over to a New York congregation, Shearith Israel. Jeshuat Israel reformed in 1903 and leased the building for $1 a year from Shearith Israel.

In 1946 the Touro Synagogue was designated a National Historic Site. Sixty-five years later, Jeshuat Israel tried to sell some of its historic artifacts. A lawsuit resulted. In an opinion written by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a federal court ruled the Shearith Israel congregation owned the Touro Synagogue. In August 2022, a judge ruled that Shearith Israel could not evict the Jeshuat Israel congregation. Jeshuat Israel then sought a long-term lease.

85 Touro St., Newport, R.I. 

Ohavi Zedek, Burlington

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The old Ohavi Zedek Synagogue.

Ohavi Zedek is the oldest Jewish congregation in Vermont, and its original synagogue is one of the oldest synagogues still standing in the United States.

Eighteen Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mostly Lithuanian, founded Ohavi Zedek  in 1876.  The congregation built the synagogue in 1885, and later sold it to another congregation, Ahavath Gerim.

Most were Lithuanian peddlers who discovered Burlington when they were traveling between New York and Montreal.

In the 1950s, Ohavi Zedek moved to a larger building not too far away. Then in the 1960s, hippies moved to Vermont and more Jews – including Bernie Sanders – followed.

Corner of Archibald and Hyde Streets in Burlington, Vt.

Images: Old Ohavi Zedek By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:00, 24 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29160508. With thanks to Becoming American Jews: Temple Israel of Boston by Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan, Susan L. Porter, Lisa Fagin Davis. Featured image of Touro Synagogue interior: By S.d.touro – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48760457. This story was updated in 2022.

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16 Fun Facts About Noah Webster, the Dictionary Writer Who Was Slightly Nuts

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Noah Webster was an odd duck, a famously fussy lexicographer who not only Americanized the English language but created the idea of American patriotism.

He wrote the first real American dictionary, called, appropriately, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which took him 28 years to finish. His goal: to standardize American speech.

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Noah Webster by James Herring.

He couldn’t afford law school after he graduated from Yale in 1778, so he taught schoolchildren.  His students used books published in England, sometimes pledging allegiance to King George III. They didn’t learn American geography or American history. Noah Webster decided to change all that.

Noah Webster also advised Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, co-founded Amherst College, started America’s first daily newspaper and pushed Congress to pass copyright laws.

He was quirky and odd, thought highly of himself and didn’t always get along with people. But the qualities that made him annoying also made Noah Webster a Founding Father.

Noah Webster in 16 Takes

  1. He personally counted all the houses in every town he visited. Traveling across America in 1785 and 1786, he tallied 20,380 houses in 22 cities. Webster exchanged that information with other people who counted houses.
  2. He had the cheek to chastise George Washington over dinner at Mount Vernon in 1785. Washington mentioned he wanted a Scottish tutor for his step-grandchildren. Webster, then all of 26, told the 53-year-old hero of the Revolution that he should find an American for the job.
  3. A lot of people didn’t like him because of his vanity. When he met Dr. Benjamin Rush at a dinner party in Philadelphia, Rush congratulated Webster on his safe arrival in the city. Webster replied, “Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia on the occasion.” (Eventually, Rush and Webster became friends.)
    george-washington

    George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

    Dumped

  4. He was dumped twice, the first time by a woman who found him too boring, the second time by a woman whose minister told her to marry someone else. Rebecca Greenleaf finally said ‘yes’ to his marriage proposal. “I suspect I am not formed for society,” he wrote to her before their marriage.
  5. He probably had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (see No. 1), often mentioning in his diary his ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety’ and ‘nervous affectations.’ He wrote his famous Blue-Backed Speller and later his dictionaries as a form of therapy.
  6. Webster hated Shakespeare, complaining his language was ‘full of errors.’
  7. He was often broke and in debt, though his wife was rich, his speller sold nearly 100 million copies and he landed America’s first blockbuster book deal, $42,000 over 14 years. He borrowed $1,500 from Alexander Hamilton so he could move to New York and start the country’s first daily newspaper, American Minerva.
  8. Webster wrote the first American dictionary in 1806, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Critics complained it had too many vulgar words. He replied he took out two-thirds of the vulgar words in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, leaving out arse, bum, fart and turd. He did keep piss, boghouse, buggery, sodomy and catamite.

Such a Deal

9. Noah Webster got a good deal on a mansion in New Haven because Benedict Arnold had lived in it. (It cost him only $2,666.66.)

10. Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster wanted to reform American spelling. Unlike Franklin, he succeeded, at least in part. He took out excess letters, like the ‘u’ in colour and honour, the extra ‘l’ in traveler, the ‘e’ on ax and the ‘ough’ in plow. He also reversed the ‘re’ in theater and center. Some of his changes didn’t make it, like bred for bread, wimmen for women, tung for tongue and dawter for daughter.

11. When he turned 20, his father gave him a nearly worthless $8 bill, and told him he was on his own.

12. It took him 28 years to complete his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language. It included 70,000 words, and one in every six words had never been listed in a dictionary before. They included emerging Americanisms like squash, applesauce, hickory, chowder and skunk, as well as words of his own invention: afterwise (wise afterwards or too late); vernate (become young again); zuffalo (a little flute… especially that which is used to teach birds.)

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Emily Dickinson

Noah Webster, Pious Blowhard

13. To write his dictionary, he learned 26 languages, including Old English, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic and Sanskrit.

14. He founded Amherst College with Emily Dickinson’s grandfather, and Emily went to school with Noah Webster’s grandfdaughter. She later wrote that her lexicon (Webster’s dictionary) was her only companion.

15. He was an 18th century sock puppet who anonymously praised his own work and trashed his critics. The phrase ‘sock puppet,’ meaning ‘false online identity,’ made it into Merriam-Webster in 2009.

16. Though his blue-backed speller had no religious content, Noah Webster had a religious experience at age 40 and became a pious blowhard. As he was about to turn 80, he declared that he would rather be a bear and hibernate in winter than “be under the tyranny of our degenerate rulers.” He described Americans as “a degenerate and wicked people.”


This story about Noah Webster was updated in 2023. 

 

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The Glastonbury Cows Get Caught up in the Fight for Women’s Suffrage

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In the early days of the fight for women’s voting rights, Connecticut’s Glastonbury cows got caught in the crossfire.

In June of 1869 the Glastonbury tax collector asked two elderly sisters to pay their road tax early, which they did. Abby and Julia Smith then got a  surprise when the town accidentally billed them for the tax again in October.

When they asked the town to correct the matter, the tax collector, Albert Crane, refused. When they tried to enter Town Meeting to raise the issue, they were turned away because of their sex. And thus, two suffragists were born.

Abby and Julia Smith

The Smiths were wealthy, quite possibly the wealthiest family in Glastonbury. Their father, a one-time clergyman, pursued a career in law. He left his daughters a large land holding, investments and a farm. Their mother left them a sizable inheritance, as well.

Cow Resting in a Meadow, by George Allen Newell

Cows Resting in a Meadow, by George Allen Newell

The frustrated sisters paid the tax a second time, but their lack of political power infuriated them. They began attending women’s suffrage rallies. And with the passing years, their frustration grew. Their taxes went up. And in 1874, they were told they could not delay their taxes in exchange for a 12 percent interest charge – a courtesy afforded other taxpayers.

The Smiths grew convinced that Glastonbury only  raised taxes on properties owned by women, and that they couldn’t delay payment because they were women. They became convinced that modern women needed a vote, and decided to stop paying taxes until they could.

“Taxation Without Representation,” was their rallying cry. The Smiths joined a group of women suffragist activists who chose taxes as their protest weapon. Abby Smith wrote regularly on the topic:

“We have lately sent a day in celebrating the heroism of those who threw overboard the tea; but how trifling was the tea-tax, and how small the injustice to individuals compared with this one of our day!”

The Glastonbury Cows

In 1874, the matter came to a head when the tax collector seized seven cows from the Smith sisters and auctioned them off to pay the taxes. The sisters used a straw buyer to retrieve most of the cows, and the story of the Glastonbury sisters and the Glastonbury cows went international.

As the story spread, it sparked heated newspaper columns. The Smith sisters’ critics argued that the pair received all sorts of services in exchange for their money: roads, schools, police protection, etc. In one clumsy analogy, a writer noted they were like children, who also couldn’t vote. The arguments against the two only made their case stronger.

Abby and Julia Smith

The supporters of the Smiths, on the other hand, took great pleasure in promoting the story of the Glastonbury cows. Those who didn’t see the rightness of the Smiths’ arguments were, “too stupid to think, too selfish to feel for others, or too cowardly to stand up for the right not yet lifted into popular recognition.”

The Glastonbury cows themselves, meanwhile, became celebrities. Knickknacks woven out of their hair sold like hotcakes at fundraising bazaars that promoted voting rights for women. Julia published a popular book, Abby Smith and Her Cows.

For several years through 1878 the process of seizing part of the sisters’ herd of Alderney cows in lieu of tax payment and the Smiths buying them back continued.

The Glastonbury cows made the Smiths celebrities at rallies and allowed them to testify before Congress. In homes across America, the Glastonbury cows and the Smiths inspired conversations around the dinner table.

In 1878, at the age of 81, Abby died in July. The next year, Julia, age 87, decided to marry for the first time.  Her husband began paying the taxes on her property, and she repaid him in a compromise of love.

Biblical Scholar

Julia Smith did not contain her feminism to tax protests and suffrage. She also published, in 1876, the only translation of the Bible written by a woman. Julia’s father belonged to the Sandemanian school of Christianity, which believed worship needed a conscious, mental act rather than just a spiritual comitment. The apple apparently didn’t fall far from the tree.

Julia, curious about what might have been altered in the King James version of the Bible, decided to translate it herself from Greek, Hebrew and Latin texts. She translated literally and made no effort to update the language or provide context to Biblical stories.

In 1881, Glastonbury voted Crane, the tax collector, out of office. When the town discovered several thousand dollars missing, he said he couldn’t square accounts because someone stole his books.

“I’m not surprised at anything he says,” Julia wrote.

In 1886, Julia died after relocating from Glastonbury to Hartford. Like many early suffrage agitators, she died without seeing women vote. Not until the 1890s would women  vote in some elections in Connecticut, and women wouldn’t vote nationwide until 1920.

This story about the Glastonbury cows was updated in 2021.

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The Endicott Pear Tree, Still Alive in Massachusetts After Nearly 400 Years

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Sometime around 1630, John Endecott planted a pear tree with the hope it would live for generations. He got his wish with the Endicott Pear Tree, believed the oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America.

The Endicott Pear Tree

The tree survived harsh winters, hurricanes, earthquakes, grazing by cows, suburban sprawl and vandals. It was declared a national landmark in 2011. Clones from the Endicott Pear Tree have been planted in at least 17 states.

The Endicott Pear Tree was featured in a 1919 biography of trees called The Historic Trees of Massachusetts. Author James Raymond Simmons called it ‘one of the most quaint and strangely impressive of all the historic trees.’

John Endecott

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John Endecott

Endecott (the name was changed later) scouted the New World with about 70 others who sailed aboard the Abigail in 1628, during the Great Migration of Puritans. He established a small settlement and called it ‘Salem,’ the Hebrew word for peace.

On July 3, 1632, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted Endecott 300 acres of land on “a necke of land lying about three miles from Salem” now known as Danversport, a section of Danvers.

The tree was planted sometime between 1630 and 1649. Endecott may have planted it first on his farm in Salem and then moved it to Danvers. He began cultivating a farm, with a cow barn, house and outbuildings. Endecott also owned the first sundial in America and introduced the ox-eye daisy to the colonies.

He also served as the first governor of Massachusetts until his death in 1665. A descendant, Endicott ‘Chub” Peabody, also served as governor of Massachusetts in 1963. People sometimes called the tree  The Governor’s Tree.

The Endicott Pear Tree

William Endicott with the Endicott Pear Tree, 1925

William Endicott with the Endicott Pear Tree, 1925

John Endecott planted the tree in the presence of his children and workers and said, “I hope the tree will love the soil of the old world and no doubt when we have gone the tree will still be alive,” according to Danvers historian Harriet Tapley.

In 1809, Salem diarist William Bentley sent pears from the Endicott Pear Tree to former President John Adams. Adams planted the seeds and wrote, “I have several young Endicotts … in my garden. They are very flourishing and if I can guard them from accident I hope they will be an ornament to this farm and a comfort to some good citizens 200 years hence.”

In 1904, the Boston Globe reported the tree bore fruit during the last season, although the pears were had ‘not of too pleasant flavor.’

A Worthy Shoot

Lucy Larcom wrote a poem to commemorate the Endicott Pear Tree for Arbor Day in 1890:

Who would not be proud to say
Of the deed he does to-day,
If it be a worthy shoot
From an honorable root,
That, when centuries had passed,
Bloom an fruitage still would last,–
Still a growing, breathing thing–
Autumn, with the heart of spring.

In 1964, vandals ripped off the limbs and jumped up and down on them, leaving two trunks five to six feet high. Several weeks later, shoots appeared and the tree grew again. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was erected to protect the tree. Later, a more attractive fence was built.

The Endicott Pear Tree, 1920

The Endicott Pear Tree, 1920

The farm passed down through generations of Endicotts. William Endicott posed in the 1925 photo above with the tree. Ultimately Osram Sylvania bought the farm, and today the land belongs to Massachusetts General Hospital/North Shore Center for Outpatient Care.


To learn about acquiring an Endicott Pear Tree, click here. This story was updated in 2023. 

 

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The Story of How Hebrew Almost Became the Official U.S. Language

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Just after the American Revolution, an English essayist named William Gifford reported that some Americans planned to substitute Hebrew as the official language of the United States.

Ezra Stiles

Ezra Stiles

Gifford got the story from an aide to Comte de Rochambeau, Marquis de Chastellux, who had traveled in America in 1780.

“In the rebellion of the Colonies, a member of that state seriously proposed to Congress the putting down of the English language by law, and decreeing the universal adoption of Hebrew in its stead,” Gifford wrote.

There were good reasons to believe his story. For one, some people believed a linguistic separation would follow the political separation of the United States from Great Britain.

For another, the  New England Puritans brought with them a prejudice toward the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament.

New World Israelites

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William Bradford

The New England Puritans  identified with the Israelites who escaped Pharoah’s oppression by crossing the sea. They viewed the Scriptures as the ultimate authority, and they took their laws from the Old Testament.

William Bradford taught himself Hebrew because he wanted to read the Scriptures in their original language. His gravestone says, in Hebrew, “The Lord is the help of my life.”

And, of course, the Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas.

Appropriately, Plymouth’s Jewish community in 1913 built a synagogue three blocks from Plymouth Rock.

Newport

Newport, R.I., became a center of Jewish settlement in the late 17th century. George Washington in 1790 wrote a letter to the congregation of Newport’s Touro Synagogue. In it, he pledged ‘no assistance to persecution.’

Clement C. Moore, a Hebrew scholar, spent summers at his home in Newport. He wasn’t happy that his reputation rested on his poem A Visit From St. Nicholas.  Moore put more store in his first American Hebrew dictionary, which he published in 1809.

Clement Moore

Ezra Stiles served as pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Newport before he became president of Yale College.  He befriended Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal, who helped him improve his Hebrew.

Stiles sometimes gets credit for proposing that Hebrew replace English as the official language of the United States of America.

Hebrew Schools

As Yale president, Stiles made a course in Hebrew a freshman requirement. By then, the Hebrew words Urim and Thummim (the oracular will of God) were already on the Yale seal, along with the Latin Lux et Veritas (light and truth).

Harvard also taught Hebrew since the 1720s, and so did William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Columbia College in New York required all teachers to know Hebrew.

Noah Webster

During the American Revolution, feelings against the English ran high. As part of a new nation some Americans wanted to establish a separate identity from England.

“The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority,” wrote H.L. Mencken.

Mencken believed that the Englishman William Gifford, as editor of the Quarterly Review, started the story. Gifford hated the United States and, Mencken thought, wanted to mock the new country by claiming it supported Hebrew as its official language.

The story persisted, though, and appeared in The Cambridge History of American Language.

In the end, Noah Webster helped create a uniquely American language. He set the standard for American English with his blue-backed speller and dictionary.

Wrote Mencken,

Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect.

This story about Hebrew replacing English as the official U.S. language was updated in 2023. You may also want to read about the oldest synagogues in New England each state here. 

Image of Touro Synagogue By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58527504.

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