Tag:

Hingham Mass.

Abe Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors (Cavaliers and Baptists, Too)

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Unifier, didn’t talk much about his Puritan ancestors. Nor did he talk much about his ancestors from Virginia, where the original Anglican settlers were known as Cavaliers.

He had good reason to hide the fact that his ancestor Samuel Lincoln had come to Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration. Lincoln also downplayed his Anglican, or Cavalier, ancestors who settled in Virginia.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

“Exposing either of the ancestral strands could have been politically risky,” wrote David S. Reynolds, in his recently published Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.

Lincoln had to try to unify the country. So he hid his Cavalier and Puritan ancestors and claimed dubious Quaker roots. The North and the South found Quakers an acceptable compromise, something that would have astonished the early Puritans.

Puritan Ancestors vs. Cavaliers

During Lincoln’s presidency and afterward, people viewed the Civil War as a contest between Puritans and Cavaliers. More recently, Kevin Phillips in his book, The Cousins’ Wars, made the same argument. He maintained the American Civil War was merely an extension of the English civil wars.

The argument has some truth to it. Puritans from eastern England largely settled New England. Anglicans, or Cavaliers, from the west fled Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan uprising and settled in Maryland and Virginia.

The Puritan Northerners prized liberty, innovation, education, reform and hard work. From the southern point of view, they were fanatical, narrow-minded, money-grubbing commoners who disturbed the peace.

Prince Rupert of Rhine, considered the quintessential cavalier

In contrast, the Cavalier southerners thought of themselves as hospitable, chivalrous, traditional and aristocratic. Northerners called that oppressive, decadent and unjust – especially in regards to slavery.

In the late 1850s, The New York Herald wrote, “The people of the North and those of the South are distinct and separate.” They think differently, wrote the Herald, and they spring from a different stock. Different in every way, they cannot coalesce.

“The Puritan and the Cavalier…will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”

Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors

Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was born out of wedlock to a poor young woman who’d been taken advantage of by a plantation owner. Lincoln proudly described his mother as “the daughter of a nobleman…so-called of Virginia.” He told a friend he had inherited through his mother his brains and ambition from his Virginian grandfather.

Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, had qualities associated with his Puritan ancestors: piety, honesty and lack of pretension.

Lincoln learned that his ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, had settled Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration in 1637. He had come from Hingham in Norfolk County, a hotbed of anti-Anglican sentiment. His pastor arrived a year later, excommunicated for his radical views. Samuel Lincoln helped fund and build the Old Ship Church in 1681.

In 1848, Lincoln spoke in Dorchester and mentioned his Puritan ancestors, describing himself as one of the “Hingham Lincolns.”

Samuel had two brothers, and he and his wife had 11 children, so within the first generation Hingham had 60 Lincolns. Another Massachusetts Lincoln with Puritan ancestors from Hingham was Levi Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general and governor of Massachusetts. His son, Levi, Jr., also won election as governor of Massachusetts, and another son, Enoch, served as governor of Maine.

Samuel’s son Mordecai moved to Scituate and brought smelting furnaces to Massachusetts. Mordecai’s son, also Mordecai, married Hannah Saltar. Their son, John, was Abraham Lincoln’s great-grandfather.

Obadiah Holmes

Significantly, Hannah Saltar was descended from Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist and therefore a heretic in Puritan eyes. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts in 1651 ordered him whipped 30 times in public.

An engraving of Obadiah Holmes about to be whipped.

News spread about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. Baptist minister John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre with a book that included a description of Holmes’ whipping. That put pressure on the Puritans to allow more religious freedom.

But Lincoln had no interest in summoning the memory of his illustrious Baptist ancestor. Baptists in Lincoln’s time reminded people of the divisions over slavery. The Baptist church in 1845 split apart into northern and southern conferences over the issue.

So Lincoln didn’t tell people during his campaign for president about his Puritan ancestors. Or about his Baptist or Cavalier forbears. He said he came from Quakers who left Berks County, Pa., for Virginia.

Mordecai’s son Mordecai had moved to Berks County, Pa. But it’s unlikely they were Quakers.

Everyone Likes Quakers

In the run-up to the Civil War, Quakers had broader appeal than Baptists, Cavaliers/Anglicans or Puritans/Congregationalists. Both southerners and northerners could tolerate them. The North saw Quakers as opponents of slavery, the South as a group unlikely to go to war over slavery.

By 1886, the perception grew that Lincoln served as a bridge between Puritans and Cavaliers. A Georgia newspaper editor named Henry Grady described Lincoln as both:

From the union of colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, came he who stands as the first typical American…Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than the Puritan, greater than the Cavalier, in that he was American.

With thanks to David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln and His Times, published in September 2020.

Images: Samuel Lincoln sign By Timothy Valentine – https://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3232950290/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5821709. This story last updated in 2022.

0 comment 609 views

John Hersey Tells the Truth About Hiroshima

After the Aug. 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, the U.S. government censored the truth about the terrible carnage the atomic explosion wrought. John Hersey, a 32-year-old war correspondent, told the truth about it.

Bomb blast minutes after it went off over Hiroshima.

Hersey wrote 31,000 words that described in detail the effects of nuclear warfare on survivors. His editor at the New Yorker magazine decided to devote its entire Aug. 31, 1946 issue to it, something never done before or since. Roger Angell, a New Yorker editor, wrote that Hersey’s prose was “so stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis as to place each reader alone within scenes laid bare of all but pain.”

In 1999, the 36 members of New York University judged Hiroshima the finest piece of American journalism in the 20th century.

John Hersey

He was born June 17, 1914, the son of staunch Congregationalist parents, Grace Baird and Roscoe Hersey. They were so staunch they became YMCA missionaries to China, and John was born in Tientsin. He only spoke English as a second language. He learned to speak Chinese first.

His family came from old Puritan stock. His ancestor William Hersey settled Hingham, Mass., in 1635, along with a few others that included Abraham Lincoln’s ancestor.

John Hersey

At the age of 10, John Hersey returned to the United States, attending public school in New York and then the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. From there he went on to Yale, where he joined Skull and Bones and lettered in football. He then did graduate studies at Cambridge University. Soon afterward, he got a job working as a Time correspondent. In 1940, he went to the magazine’s Chongqing bureau then covered the fighting in Europe and Asia for Newsweek.

In the winter of 1945-46, Hersey reported on the reconstruction of Japan for the New Yorker. While in Japan, he read a reprint of the journal of a German missionary who survived the bombing in Time magazine. Hersey visited the missionary, who introduced him to others.

Six Survivors of Hiroshima

Those six survivors formed the nucleus of Hiroshima.

The book famously begins with the activities of those six characters when the bomb went off at exactly 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her desk and was turning her head to speak to the woman who sat next to her.

Hiroshima after the bombing

Dr. Masakazu Fujjii was sitting down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood at her kitchen window watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit, lay in his underwear on a cot on the third floor of his order’s three-story mission house reading a magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, walked down one of the hospital corridors carrying a blood specimen for a Wassermann test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hiroshima Methodist Church pastor, paused at the door of a rich man’s suburban house with a handcart full of things he had evacuated in fear of the bombing raid everyone expected.

A Sensation

Hersey described the bomb as a ‘tremendous flash of light cut across the sky’ that seemed like a ‘sheet of sun.’

“A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors,” wrote Hersey. “They still wonder why they lived when so many others died.”

In less than two years, the book had been reprinted in 80 periodical publications, translated into 11 languages and sold more than 600,000 copies.

Hiroshima in October 1945

“Its 31,000 words suffice because they abstain from the smallest judgment or moral positioning, and leave the reader to deal with the consequences and the questions,” wrote Angell. The restrained flow of his words, his characters’ conversations and the burnt-out city made it feel like an ancient tragedy, he wrote.

Unmatchable

“The achievement was unmatchable. Could he ever again write anything quite like it? “The puritan in Hersey told him not only that he couldn’t but also that he shouldn’t, or not with the same ease,” wrote his biographer, Jeremy Treglown.

Hersey went on to considerable achievement. He wrote two dozen books and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel A Bell for Adano, along with many other journalism prizes. He taught at Yale and served as master of one of its residential houses.

For many years, he lived on Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard. He married an ex-girlfriend of John F. Kennedy, Frances Ann Cannon. Over dinner in New York, Kennedy told Hersey the story of how his PT boat sank. Hersey wrote it for the New Yorker, later used as campaign literature for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

His second wife, Barbara Day, was the ex-wife of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. They had a summer home in Key West, which they shared with his friend Ralph Ellison. John Hersey died there on March 24, 1993.

Aftermath of Hiroshima

In 1985, Hersey wrote a follow-up to Hiroshima, again for the New Yorker. In it, he wrote,

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory.”

With thanks to This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell and Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima by Jeremy Treglown. This story was updated in 2022.

0 comment 303 views

The Puritanical Controversy Over the Meetinghouse Stove

Perhaps nothing revealed the puritanical contempt for comfort so much as the absence of a meetinghouse stove. The Puritans believed their religious zeal could warm them in unheated buildings, even in freezing New England winters.

The Old Ship Church in Hingham, Mass., didn’t have a stove until 1822. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

And it did get cold. Samuel Sewall on Jan. 24, 1686, reported in his diary, “The communion bread was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates.”

No matter how cold it got, no matter how much coughing in the meetinghouse, the Puritans brought babies were in on the Sunday after their birth to be baptized – with cold water.

Alice Morse Earle wrote in 1891 that people still alive remembered a universal and ‘noisy turning up of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.’

Some Puritan churches like the Old South Meeting House allowed foot stoves. But they recognized the danger of fire. In December 1771 the sexton of Old South had instructions to search the meetinghouse for any foot stoves left behind and to take them home. The owner then had to retrieve them and “make reasonable satisfaction” to the sexton for his trouble.

Other congregations were more puritanical – or at least more fearful of fire. The First Church of Roxbury banned foot stoves in its rebuilt meetinghouse after it burned down in 1747. Congregants warmed their feet instead with hot stones in baskets, or fur bags or even the family dog.

Enter the Meetinghouse Stove

The meetinghouse stove at the Society of Friends, Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Puritan congregations gradually relaxed and began to accept the meetinghouse stove. The comfort-loving libertines of Hadley, Mass., bought an iron stove for their meetinghouse in 1734.

Warmth did not come to the Puritan meetinghouse without controversy.

In 1819, the Puritans of Brimfield, Mass., finally acquiesced and decided to buy a meetinghouse stove, but one old parishioner refused to contribute. He said good preaching kept him hot enough without a stove. Members of the Old Ship Church in Hingham, Mass., held fast against warmth until 1822, nearly 150 years after the building went up in 1681.

Henry Ward Beecher

The Puritans of Litchfield, Conn., provided an entertaining drama over the introduction of the meetinghouse stove. The same thing may have happened in other towns. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher told the story.

The meeting started on a warm Sunday after the installation of the meetinghouse stove, but no one lit a fire. A deacon’s wife, unalterably opposed to the stove, thought it was lit. The imaginary fire so overheated her she fainted and got carried out of the church. A man who favored the meetinghouse stove then approached it, warming his hands and making sure his coat didn’t get scorched.

Even the Puritans thought that was funny.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image: Interior of the Old Ship Church By Michael Carter – https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelcarter/269096379/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6286653.

6 comments 379 views

The Great Salem Fire of 1914 Burns Half the City Out of Their Homes

The Great Salem Fire of 1914 was one of the last great urban fires of the era. It followed the Portland, Maine, fire of 1866, the Chicago Fire of 1871, the Boston Fire of 1872 and the Chelsea, Mass., fire of 1906.

After the fire. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

After the Salem fire. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The conflagration cut a swath a half-mile wide and a mile-and-a-half long through the city. Miraculously, the fire killed only three people, but injured 60. Even more people died from the strain of losing their homes.

The firestorm gobbled up 1,376 buildings, leaving homeless 18,000 people – nearly half of Salem’s population. The conflagration destroyed so many businesses that 10,000 people lost their jobs.

Early Warnings

Salem had long been susceptible to fire, but the city’s growth after the turn of the century made it more so. Since 1905, an influx of immigrants swelled the population by 28 percent to 48,000. More than 5,000 newcomers arrived in the four years since 1910. They were Irish, Italian, Polish and French-Canadian immigrants come to work in the mills, the wharves and the tanneries. They jammed into neighborhoods like the French La Pointe.

Four years before the fire broke out, Selectman Franklin Wentworth warned it would happen. He wrote in a March 29, 1910 Salem Evening News article that the city was in danger of burning down. The city had too many combustible roofs, he argued.

No one, it seemed, paid any attention. Later, Wentworth became secretary of the National Board of Fire Underwriters.

The Great Salem Fire

Watching Their Homes Burn at the Great Salem Fire, June 25, 1914.

Salem was in the midst of a drought on the hot, windy day of June 25, 1914. Early in the afternoon the fire started at the Korn Leather Co. in Blubber Hollow, the leather manufacturing district. Rays of sunlight through a window may have set a pile of celluloid on fire. It caught barrels of a highly inflammable material used to make patent leather — acetone, amalacitate and alcohol.

Contemporary newspaper reports quoted a state official describing what happened. He said the fire started in a shed filled with sheepskin and three barrels filled with highly flammable substances. He didn’t know how the flames originated, but once they did they spread to the barrels and the sheepskins, then up the open elevator well to the third floor. There the floor had been saturated with the flammable substance.

Salem fire at its height. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The first alarm went off at 1:37 p.m. The fire spread so quickly a general alarmsounded four minutes later, and terrified Korn workers had to run for their lives from the burning building.

The block to the east caught immediately. So did the factories to the west. The fire crossed the street and consumed a factory and half a block of brick buildings. It swept down Boston Street and quickly doomed the entire district. Fire alarm boxes were pulled right and left as the fire swept through Salem.

Destruction

Historic Lafayette Street, one of the most beautiful in the city, was ravaged. A change in wind direction spared Chestnut Street and the McIntire Historic District. Ninety percent of Salem’s historic structures escaped the inferno.

The city’s entire French neighborhood was destroyed, including the newly built St. Joseph’s Church. Salem’s Franco-American population dropped to 5,000 from 15,000 after the fire.

Fire apparatus used to put out the Salem fire.

Fire apparatus sent by rail from Boston used to put out the Salem fire. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Firefighters from 21 cities and towns came to help. The Boston Fire Department sent fire apparatus by rail car. Hingham firefighters soaked rugs and clothing in salt water, then laid them on roofs to prevent the fire from spreading. Ten homes were dynamited to stop the fire in its path.

Kittens and Ice

Many of the firefighters were overcome by the intense heat, and lay down in puddles for relief.

Some people panicked and ran into their burning homes, only to retrieve items of little value. One woman seized a small piece of ice, another a pillow and a gallon of oil. A washerwoman saved a new broom. A man saved a watermelon.

A woman gave her husband two hatboxes to take to a safe place. One had his two best suits, the other two kittens. He joined a throng at the docks and decided he could only carry one hatbox, so he threw the one with the kittens into the harbor. He later found he’d thrown out his suits and saved the kittens.

Families sought refuge in public spaces, bringing what household goods they could save to the Salem Common, the Salem Willows, Forest River Park, and the Broad Street Cemetery.

Finally the Salem fire was out, 13 hours after it began. It continued to smolder, though. Three weeks later, Pickering’s coal pile and Ropes’s hay were still burning. Gone were factories, churches, homes, barns, schools, bridges, wharves, coal piles and shops.

The ruined city became an instant tourist attraction. It is estimated 1 million people came to see the smoldering ruins the next day.

Recovery

Even before firefighters extinguished the Salem fire, National Guardsmen handed out cookies and milk.

Fearing civil unrest, Gov. David Walsh had called up 1,700 militiamen. They were ordered to shoot looters on sight, but the only disturbance involved a resident reentering a guarded area.

The National Guard set up emergency aid stations during the fire. The Salem Armory became relief headquarters and clearinghouse for fire victims.

Salem fire victims get fed

Tent cities sprang up at Bertram Field at the high school, Forest River Park and Camp Sherry near the Willows. Food and clothing was distributed. The first business to reopen was a tent barbershop on Boston Street. Guardsmen handed out food, issuing about 6,000 rations a day in breadlines by the tent cities.

Aftermath

Within a year of the Salem fire, the city issued 353 permits for buildings in the burned-over district. Most were one and two-family dwellings. Salem adopted a new building code requiring fireproof construction, widened streets and planted hundreds of shade trees.

Asbestos manufacturer Johns-Manville took full advantage of the Salem fire, running an ad under a photo of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Co. that proclaimed:

Unharmed in the Midst of the Great Salem Fire because Roofed with J-M Asbestos Roofing

“The Roll of Honor”

Flying sparks and burning embers were literally showered upon the roof of this raw cotton storehouse of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Co., located in the midst of the recently flame-swept area of Salem, Mass.

Buildings all around it were burned to the ground, as the photograph shows.

Yet this building was absolutely unharmed because protected by J-M Asbestos Roofing.

Salem never rebuilt its manufacturing base to its previous size. The city changed into a college and tourist town and a bedroom community swallowed up by metropolitan Boston.

According to legend, the ghost of Giles Corey, Salem witch trial victim, haunted the graveyard on the night before the fire.

To see 150 images of the fire at the Peabody-Essex Museum’s Phillips Library Digital Collections, click here.

With thanks to Streets of Salem and The Salem Fire by Arthur B. Jones. This story about the Salem fire was updated in 2022.

6 comments 907 views

Sleepy John Sears and the Revolutionary White Gold of Cape Cod

Cape Cod’s once-great salt industry was the brainchild of a retired sea captain nicknamed Sleepy John Sears because of his tendency to nod off during the day.

Onondaga saltworks showing salt being raked from solar evaporation vats of a design copied from the Cape Cod saltworks.

Salt works once lined the coast of the Lower Cape, Massachusetts’ South Shore, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Today they are not only extinct, but pretty much forgotten.

Also forgotten is the importance of salt in peace and in war. Without it, fish, beef, poultry and pork couldn’t be preserved. Salt was a strategically essential but scarce commodity during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. In 1777, New Jersey excused from military service as many as 10 men employed by a salt work.

Sleepy John Sears found a way to produce salt on a large scale during the Revolution and long afterward. Because of his ingenuity, salt was Cape Cod’s white gold through the middle of the 19^th century.

White Gold

Before refrigeration, salt was essential to preserving fish and meat. New England’s fishing industry depended on salt, for without it, cod was a perishable foodstuff rather than a lucrative commodity.

There were no local sources of salt in early America, and the colonists relied on Britain to supply it.

That became a problem as the American Revolution approached. Britain began taxing salt exports and blockaded America’s main source of salt, Turks Island in the Caribbean.

Smugglers were still able to bring in salt from Bermuda and the Bahamas until Gen. William Howe captured New York and Long Island. By the time Howe drove the Continental Army from Philadelphia, he had captured its salt reserves. Washington had sent a desperate message, “Every attempt must be made to save it.”

Profiteers began hoarding salt and the price of the commodity soared. In May of 1776, the Continental Congress issued a pamphlet declaring a bounty of one-third dollar for every bushel of salt made or imported.

That set off a frenzy of colonists boiling seawater for salt. The effort proved futile, as it took two cords of wood and 400 gallons of water to produce a single bushel.

No More Laughter

Sleepy John Sears was already thinking about solar evaporation. Born in 1744 in Yarmouth, he was living in Dennis by the time of the war. His family defended his narcolepsy, saying he had ‘fits of abstraction.’

Sears built the first salt works in the summer of 1776 in Sesuit Harbor. It wasn’t much more than a leaky vat, 100 feet long and 10 feet wide. He hauled seawater one bucket at a time to his salt works. It took 350 gallons of water to produce one bushel of salt. His neighbors laughed at him.

At the end of the summer he produced eight bushels. His neighbors called his salt works ‘Sears Folly.’

During the summer of 1777 he tried again, but only after caulking the vat to make it watertight. That year his salt works produced 30 bushels of salt.

In November 1778 he scavenged a bilge pump from the shipwrecked British Man-of-war HMS Somerset. He rigged it up the next summer so he could pump water by hand from the sea.

He was in business turning seawater into white gold.

Salty John

By 1783, the price of salt had risen to $8 a bushel from 50 cents. Capt. Nathaniel Freeman suggested he use a windmill to pump water. By 1785, Sleepy John Sears rigged up a windmill to pump seawater through pipes – hollow, lead-lined logs – to the vats.

The neighbors stopped laughing. They started calling him Salty John.

West Yarmouth Salt Works.

The industry spread along Cape Cod’s open coastline, to Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Plymouth, Kingston, Rochester, Hingham and Dorchester as well as Maine. By 1837, there were 78 salt works in Provincetown alone, 658 on the entire Cape.

“Every man living near the salt water had his patch of salt works, if it took his last patch of cornfield or potato yard,” according to Shebnah Rich in his book Truro–Cape Cod, Or, Land Marks and Sea Marks. Building and repairing the worlds employed many mechanics, and making the salt gave jobs to elderly men and boys.

Another inventor devised a sliding cover to keep the vats protected from the rain. Townspeople would race to the salt works to cover them when rain threatened.

Jack Johnson, in his 1944 book Stories of Cape Cod, quotes an old Cape Codder who remembered salt works on his grandfather’s farm.

There were rows and rows of them on my grandfather’s farm. And my grandmother! She had only 14 children. Generally three of them were in arms. Many a time when grandfather and the boys were at the flats (the shore) and a rainstorm came up, grandmother would walk half a mile, carrying one child, leading another, and the three-year-old toddling behind – to the salt works to cover them before the rain came on. Rain freshened the salt, you know.

During the War of 1812, British ships roaming the coast threatened the salt industry. Commodore Richard Ragget of the H.M.S. Spencer threatened to destroy Brewster’s salt works unless the town paid him $4,000. Brewster paid up.

Cape Cod’s vulnerability to military attack and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 contributed to the demise of its salt works. Investment shifted to upstate New York, where a salt springs was discovered in Onondaga

The gradual shut down of Cape Cod’s salt works left 1.425 million feet of wood from the vats. Cape Codders dismantled them and used the wood to build barns and homes.

The last salt work on Cape Cod closed in 1888. Sleepy John Sears did not live to see the demise of the industry he created. He died a rich man in 1817, and was buried in a nondescript grave in West Brewster.

You can see his headstone in the Sears family cemetery at the corner of Airline Road and Old King’s Highway. His epitaph reads, “John Sears, Inventor of the Salt Works, Aged 72 y’rs.”

With thanks to Edible Cape Cod magazine.

9 comments 413 views

Joe Lincoln, Champion Decoy Carver

Joe Lincoln, fascinated by the waterfowl on a nearby pond, began carving miniature decoys as a boy. He grew up to be one of the greatest decoy carvers ever.

Joe Lincoln, detail from photo, Courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

Joe Lincoln

Joseph Whiting Lincoln was born in 1859 in Hingham, Mass., and lived across from the Accord Pond. He probably had a relationship to Abraham Lincoln.

He started carving just for fun. Then as a teenager he sold his first decoy to a sportsman (they were actually used in hunting) and he was off to the races. He chopped the bodies by hand from cedar or pine and then smoothed them with a drawknife. He refused to use power tools because he thought power tools too blunt for decoy carving. The photo was taken in 1926 by longtime Boston Herald photographer Leslie Jones.

The New York Times called Joe Lincoln “a talented Yankee tinkerer and craftsman who could make everything from a camera to a pair of shoes.”

He died in 1938 after spending his life carving decoys from a 10’ by 12’ shed in his yard. Collectors prize his work. In 1986, a wood duck drake by Joe Lincoln sold at auction for $205,000. His work can be seen at the Ward Museum in Salisbury, Md.

Duck decoys

Museum Pieces

The birds portray several attitudes. Some swim, some preen and some have their bills nestled under a wing.

The museum describes a typical Lincoln decoy. It “has a gently raised neck seat that flows into a low rounded chest. Arched backs give way to horizontal tails above flat bottoms.”

Lincoln also typically painted symmetrical lines on his decoys, and he simplified plumage patterns, making a highly stylized image.

He carved a number of different kinds of species, including brants, buffleheads, canvasbacks, goldeneyes, mallards, mergansers, old squaws, pintails, redheads, ruddy ducks, scaups, teals, whistlers, wigeons and wood ducks. He also produced a handful of other species for special orders.

Image of decoys: By schmuck-by-nature – originally posted to Flickr as Decoys, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8943514. This story last updated in 2022.

1 comment 547 views

Newer Posts

Older Posts