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From the Biblical to the Bizarre: Puritan Names

Puritans considered child-rearing one of their most important duties in life, and it began with the name given to the newborn. Puritan names in early New England were meant either to remind a child of moral qualities, Biblical characters, family relations or a dead sibling.

Sometimes that didn’t go so well for the child.

Take Mahershalalhasbaz, for example. Or Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.

You just hope the Puritans allowed nicknames.

All those crazy names stemmed from the ‘Puritan naming revolution’ that took place in England in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries.

Why the Puritan Names

So-called hortatory names encouraged good Christian behavior.

A Puritan minister compared a good name to “a thread tyed about the finger, to make us mindful of the errand we came into the world to do for our master.”

A five-year-old girl aboard the Mayflower had the name Remember. Perhaps her parents wanted her to think of England.

Some Puritans went to extremes when naming their children, like the parents of Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon. Shorter names include Mortifie Hicks and Humiliation Scratcher.

Not all the hortatory Puritan names invited ridicule. Puritans named their daughters Hope and Constance, for example.

Increase Mather, born in 1639, was so named in the midst of the Great Migration of Puritans. “Increase” meant “…the never-to-be-forgotten increase, of every sort, wherewith God favored the country about the time of his nativity.”

The hortatory Puritan names didn’t always work. Ffly-from-Fornication Bull, for example, got pregnant in a woodshed owned by a Puritan named Goodman Woodman.

Family Values

Increase Mather

The New England Puritans valued family ties, and children often had the surname of a grandparent as a first name. So Increase Mather named his son Cotton after his maternal grandfather, John Cotton.

Puritans often named their firstborn after their mother or father (never a godparent, considered Popish).

The Puritans loved to name their children after people in the Bible. In 17^th century New England, 80 percent of children had Biblical names. Boston Puritans gave 90 percent of their children first names from the Bible. An even greater percentage of children in Concord — 91 percent — had Biblical first names; in Hingham, 95 percent.

In 17^th century Massachusetts, Puritans named half of all girls Sarah, Elizabeth or Mary for their moral qualities. Obedient, hard-working Ruth was also one of the popular Puritan names. So were the names of the female prophets, Anne, Hannah, Deborah and Huldah.

Yes to John, No to Jesus

John was the most popular of the Puritan names for boys, followed by Joseph, Samuel and Josiah. Not so popular: Moses, Adam, Abraham and Solomon.

Not all Biblical names were equal. Almost never did the Puritans name their children Jesus, Angel, Emmanuel or Christopher. The Puritan minister Thomas Adams explained, “Emmanuel is too bold. The name is properly to Christ, and therefore not to be communicated to any creature.”

Michael and Gabriel, the archangels, were popular names in Anglican Virginia but not in Puritan Massachusetts. The Puritans thought they were ‘not fit for Christian humility.’

But why Notwithstanding Griswold and Maybe Barnes? Maybe their parents shut their eyes, opened the Bible and pointed at a word.

Bizarre Puritan Names

The really bizarre Puritan names came with the small percentage of immigrants from the county of Sussex in England. A 17^th century list of jurors from that county included Make Peace Heaton and Be Faithful Joiner. Also from Sussex: Fight the Good Fight of Faith White, God Reward Smart and Kill Sin Pemble.

But Dancell-Dallphebo-Marke-Antony-Dallery-Galleiy-Caesar takes the cake for the longest and weirdest name.

The minister Adams objected to such extreme Puritan names. “[I]t is a petulant absurdity to give [children] ridiculous names,” he wrote. “The very rehearsing whereof causeth laughter.”

Praise God Barebone

Some parents gave their children names meant to remind them of the world’s evil. Humiliation Hynde doubled down on that effort: He named both of his sons Humiliation Hynde.

Praise-God Barebone, a leather worker, served in Parliament in 1653. Oliver Cromwell had handpicked him and other ‘godly men’ to serve after the Puritan victory in the English Civil War. It was called the Barebones Parliament, rather than the Praise-God Parliament.

Hezekiah vs. Amos

The New England Puritans often named a child after a dead sibling. In Concord, Mass., Ephraim and Elizabeth Hartwell, married in 1732, had five children named Ephraim, Samuel, John, Elizabeth and Isaac. By 1740, they all died from throat distemper. The Hartwells then had nine more children; five had the names of the ones who died.

The New England Puritans also kept in mind their station in life when naming their children.

Historian David Hackett Fischer makes note of the name of Hezekiah, the king of Judah. It appeared on early New England muster rolls 10 times as often for officers as for enlisted men. But Amos, the name of a simple herdsman, was generally more common among the rank and file, he wrote.

With thanks to Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer. This story about Puritan names was updated in 2022.

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The 6 Tallest Trees in New England

Once New England had the greatest forests and the tallest trees in the world. They were a major attraction for English colonists and their sponsors, who coveted the huge white pines as masts for the King’s Royal Navy. The Crown reserved the biggest pine trees, which government agents marked with three slashes called the King’s Broad Arrow.

The laws protecting the trees for the King were honored more in the breach than in the observance. Pine trees became a symbol of resistance, and images of them appeared in flags.

The New England Flag

Tall trees exercised a fascination over people apart from their political context. Societies formed to identify champion trees. And today, many states maintain registries of their tallest and biggest trees.

The Tallest Trees

In 1940 a nonprofit called American Forests started the National Register of Big Trees and named the Wye Oak in Maryland as the national champion for more than 60 years. But measuring the tallest trees isn’t always an exact science, and most champions yield their place to new specimens. Either another tree grows taller or the champion is felled by disease, weather or real estate developers.

We did our best to identify the tallest tree in each state. But who knows? A storm could have felled it since it was last measured. If you know of a tree taller than the ones mentioned – or if any of those trees have fallen – please comment below.

Connecticut’s Gold Standard

Pinchot Sycamore, one of Connecticut’s tallest trees.

The most famous tree in Connecticut, other than the Charter Oak, is the 104-foot-tall Pinchot Sycamore in Simsbury. It’s 28 feet around and at least 200 years old — if not 300 years old. It was named after Gifford Pinchot and officially dedicated to the conservationist in 1965.

The big old sycamore sits on the east bank of the Farmington River near the base of Talcott Mountain. Floodlights illuminate it at night, and canoers can launch their boats nearby. For a while the Pinchot Sycamore tied the largest sycamore with a specimen in Bath County, Virginia, until a bigger one in Ashland, Ohio, surpassed them both.

The Pinchot Sycamore, though, is not the tallest tree in Connecticut. That honor belongs to a 144.6-foot-tall white pine in a small forest in West Cornwall called Gold’s Pines, named after the man who purchased it in 1870, Theodore S. Gold. The forest grew to 46 acres, and then 56. It now belongs to the Housatonic State Forest as one of the few old growth forests in Connecticut.

“Here, even on the brightest of blue sky days, the gentle wind makes a thunderous noise as it passes through,” wrote one hiker who waxed elegiac about the canopy of the ancients.

You can reach Gold’s Pines on Rte. 128, just right of the Little Guild of St. Francis animal shelter. Gold’s Pines also boasts a 127.8-foot-tall Tulip tree.

Maine’s Unofficial Champ

Yarmouth Dutch elms, possibly the tallest trees in Maine once.

There are no reliable height measurements in Maine available, according to the Monumental Tree index. Maine has its own registry of big trees, which it updates periodically but is considered unreliable. Maine residents nominate trees for the honor of appearing in the registry. The 120-foot white pine in Morrill is the unofficial tallest tree in Maine.

Maine, however, can claim the tallest chestnut tree in North America. The tree is 115-feet high, 20 feet higher than its closest competitor. Only a few dozen chestnut trees remain in Maine, as chestnut blight wiped out large stands of the trees from Maine to Georgia in the early 1900s.

The chestnut was discovered last year in a forest in Lovell, near the New Hampshire border. The forest was once part of an artist colony, Hewnoaks, founded by artist Douglas Volk (1856-1935) and his wife. Volk’s wife donated the property to the University of Maine Foundation.

Maine was once home to the largest Dutch elm tree, nicknamed Herbie. Planted in 1793 on Main Street in Yarmouth, Herbie grew to 110 feet tall with a circumference of 20 feet. Children watched some of its diseased limbs being cut off and cried, “What are you going to do to Herbie?”

Herbie finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease and fell to the ax and chainsaw on Jan. 19, 2010. A section of the trunk’s base was displayed at the 2010 Yarmouth Clam Festival. You can now see it outside Yarmouth’s town hall.

Jake Swamp

Along the Mohawk Trail, where you’ll find some of Massachusetts’ tallest trees.

The tallest tree in Massachusetts has a name: Jake Swamp. It’s a 163.2-foot white pine in the Trees of Peace Grove in Mohawk Trail State Forest. The forest, located in Charlemont, Hawley, and Savoy, has 83 trees reaching 148 feet, the largest collection of tall white pines in New England. It was discovered by Robert Leverett, a big-tree hunter and co-author of The Sierra Club Guide to Ancient Forests of the Northeast.

In 1996 Leverett helped found the Eastern Native Tree Society. Its members search for old stands in remote places and for giant trees in parks and cemeteries. When Leverett discovered the tallest white pine in Massachusetts, he named it after Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp Tekaronianeken.

Jake Swamp founded the Tree of Peace Society in 1982. He traveled around the world planting Trees of Peace near places such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and Constitution Hall in Philadelphia. A year after his death in 2010, trees were planted around the world on October 18 on what would have been his 70^th birthday. A Tree of Peace was planted in his honor in Huntington Park, Mass.

Reader Norman Schell personally measured another giant tree in Massachusetts: the Sycamore on Rte. 47 in the center of Sunderland. A sapling when the United States ratified the Constitution, it measures 32 feet in circumference. It is acknowledged as the oldest and largest Sycamore tree east of the Mississippi.

New Hampshire’s Skinny White Pine

White pines, probably the tallest trees in New Hampshire if not all of New England.

The tallest tree in New Hampshire is a white pine measuring 166.1 feet tall on a private estate in Claremont. It was declared the new New England champion by the Native Tree Society. It’s a mystery to us who owns the estate, but if you’re in Claremont just look for a tall stand of white pines. The tallest one is ‘extraordinarily skinny,’ according to Robert Leverett, one of the men who measured it.

There were also extraordinarily tall white oaks in the Claremont stand. “The 115.2-foot white oak blew my mind,” wrote one big tree hunter. “The growing conditions have to be superb to support such a height for white oak so far north.”

Additionally, the Bradford Pines Natural Area in Bradford has trees over 200 years old and over 150 feet tall. Randy Redford believes they may be the tallest trees in New Hampshire, if not all of New England. They even have lightning rods on them.

A sugar maple in Ossipee was believed to be the biggest in New England until it fell in 1846. It yielded 3,300 board feet of lumber and nine cords of firewood.

According to legend, a pine cut on the site of Dartmouth College reached a height of 240 feet. But many doubt the species can grow so tall.

The Mighty Tulip

Tulip trees, the tallest trees in Rhode Island.

Several tulip trees have been identified as Rhode Island’s tallest tree.

According to the Cranston Herald, the tallest tree in Rhode Island is at 975 Warwick Neck Ave. in Warwick. The Rhode Island Champion Tree List of 2014 shows a Warwick tulip tree measuring 126 feet high as the tallest in the state.

The Native Tree Society, however, claims a 115.7-foot tulip tree on the ‘Nathaniel Green’ site in Kingston. They could be referring to the University of Rhode Island Campus.

The tulip tree has large flowers that sort of resemble tulips. Sometimes it’s called a tulip poplar or yellow poplar, but it’s actually related to the magnolia. Indians hollowed out its wood to make canoes from its light wood, and sometimes people refer to it as a canoewood tree.

The fattest tulip tree, measuring 16 feet around, is in Bristol. Click here for a map of a walking tour of the town’s historic district, where the tree resides.

Vermont’s White Pine

A tall white pine

Vermont’s tallest tree is a 143.4-foot white pine in Arlington, according to the Eastern Native Tree Society. It’s tucked in among one of the state’s best collections of large-diameter white pines, the Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area. There they are safe from development.

The Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area was a 1975 gift to the state from the heirs of Vermont writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Fisher, a tireless social activist, promoted education and prison reform. Though originally from Lawrence, Kansas, Fisher adopted Vermont as her home state.

The Arlington property that is now a protected wildlife area served as Fisher’s writing retreat during a career that produced more than 40 books, both nonfiction and fiction (largely set in Vermont).

Vermont takes its champion trees seriously. The state keeps a registry of its biggest and tallest trees by town and species, from the Dwarf Chinkapin Oak in Bridport to a giant Cottonwood in Hubbardton. To check it out, click here.

You can visit the Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area on Route 7A just north of Arlington.

Photos: Pinchot sycamore: By Msact at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48227856. Pinchot sycamore with people By Marty Aligata – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56461629. Tulip tree: By Timothy Valentine – http://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3583585898/in/set-72157614131871676/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6945589; White pine bough, By DigbyDalton – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28948041. This story about the tallest trees in New England was updated in 2023.

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An Early Puritan Settler Plants White Pease and Gray Pease

The early Puritan settler Thomas Minor may have kept a diary from 1653 to 1684 just to keep track of the days. He lived in partial isolation in the wilds of Stonington, Conn., where calendars were not usually found and the days blended into each other.

The Arbella, reproduction

His diary was published in 1899. It showed how the earliest settlers lived at home and how they reacted to the events of the day. The diary got handed down through the family at his homestead in Quiambaug in Stonington.

Minor came from Somerset County in England to America with the Winthrop fleet on the Arbella in 1630. He quickly rose to prominence in the community. Minor learned the Indians’ language, and Gov. John Winthrop often asked him to negotiate with them. He would also accompany a missionary to read them the gospel in their own language. He also led the militia against the Narragansetts.

Minor took special pride in John Winthrop’s visits to his house. He often recorded how they met at the Old Mill to talk things over.

A Puritan Settler

Between 1630 and 1640, Thomas Minor lived in Salem, Charlestown and Hingham, Mass. Minor and other Puritan settlers then founded New London, Conn., after the General Court granted them land on “the Pequot Colony.” Finally, in 1653 or 1654 he made his permanent home in Quiambaug. The court had granted him land because of his valuable service to the Indians.

His diary shows the wildness of his surroundings. Indians visit frequently, looking for work and payment in clothing. He served in a number of town offices including selectman, treasurer, recorder, brander of horses and leader of the militia.

Thomas Minor had lived in Quiambaug for more than a decade when he made this diary entry on April 14, 1665.

The 14 day of April 1665 we had sowed six bushels of white pease and Two bushels of gray pease in the orchard.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Hope and Glory of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

In the middle of the Civil War, 1,007 African-American soldiers of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment disembarked at Boston South Station with 37 white officers. They then paraded in full dress uniform across Boston Common as a tumultuous throng cheered them on.

Sgt. William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts won the Medal of Honor for his valor at Fort Wagner.

It was May 28th, 1863, and they had trained for several months at Camp Meigs in Readville, Mass. They were on the way to war under the leadership of 25-year-old Col. Robert Gould Shaw.

They marched knowing that the Confederacy had promised to sell black soldiers into slavery if captured, and to execute the white officers.

The 54th Massachusetts

A third had worked as laborers, a quarter farmers. There were teamsters, waiters, barbers, seamen, cabinetmakers, a dentist and a druggist. Fathers had enlisted with their sons, and brothers enlisted together. Frederick Douglass’ two sons joined the 54th.

During their march, the soldiers passed abolitionist Wendell Phillips’ house, where William Lloyd Garrison watched them with tears streaming down his face. They then passed the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came out with Henry James, Sr., who saluted his son, an officer in the regiment.

Down State Street they marched, where a gang of rowdies tried to attack them. A large police force, however, repelled the toughs. The regiment then marched in review on Boston Common before Gov. John Andrew and set off to Battery Wharf singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in a thousand voices.

John Andrew

Gov. John Andrew

That stirring moment was largely the work of Andrew, who became Massachusetts governor on Jan. 3, 1861, three months before the Civil War broke out.

Andrew, born in Windham, Maine, on May 31, 1818, was a 42-year-old lawyer who had taken up the abolitionist cause with fervor. He handled the legal defense of runaway slaves and helping to found the Republican Party. He was elected state representative from Hingham, Mass., in 1857, and his popularity as an orator and advocate took him to the governor’s office.

Detractors called him a ‘straight and impractical republican’ and, worse, ‘a lawyer of a low type and a brutal fanatic.’

As governor he immediately began preparing for war, accepting recruits from other states to serve in Massachusetts regiments. In 1862 he began working with Frederick Douglass to win permission to recruit African-American uniformed soldiers for the Union Army.

”If Southern slavery should fall, and colored men should have no hand and play no conspicuous part in the task, the result would leave the colored man a mere helot,” Andrew wrote. They would have ‘lost their masters, but not found a country.’

Paving the Way

Andrew and a group of Massachusetts radicals – radicals because they thought slavery should be abolished – then went to Washington in January to ask President Lincoln for permission to raise a colored regiment. Andrew wanted it to be a model for future African-American regiments.

Henry Augustus Monroe, 13-year-old drummer boy for the 54th Massachusetts.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton granted permission, and the fabled 54^th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was born. It did indeed pave the way for more African-American soldiers.

Seven months after the parade on Boston Common, Robert Gould Shaw led about 600 troops of 54th Massachusetts Regiment in an assault on Fort Wagner at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Nearly half were killed, wounded or captured. Shaw died in the battle, and the Confederates tossed into a common grave with 74 of his men.

Though the 54th Massachusetts failed to take the fort, the soldiers’ skill and courage quelled any doubt about the fighting ability of African-American soldiers.

Heroes of the 54th Massachusetts

William H. Carney received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1900 for rallying the troops at Fort Wagner. Born a slave in Virginia, he escaped and enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts.

During the fighting, Carney rescued the American flag when the standard bearer fell. He carried the flag to the enemy’s ramparts and back, saying “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!”

Henry Monroe joined as a 13-year-old drummer boy for the 54th Massachusetts. He directed maneuvers with his drum during the battle. Later, as a Methodist minister, he described the rebel fort as a “slumbering volcano.” He then explained how it “awoke to action and poured forth sheets of flame from ten thousand rebel fires, and earth and heaven shook with the roar of a hundred pieces of artillery.”

Detail from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ plaster cast for the 54th Regiment Memorial.

(You can see 43 photographs of the members of the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment here, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

By the end of the Civil War, 10 percent of the soldiers in the Union Army were African American, double their population in the North.

Of the 54th Massachusetts, Andrew said,

I know not where, in all of human history, to any given thousand men in arms there has been committed a work at once so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory.

Veterans of the 54th Massachusetts at the dedication of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment on Boston Common, May 31, 1897.

This story last updated in 2022. For the story of Frederick Douglass’ escape to freedom, click here.

Detail of Robert Gould Shaw Memorial By Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2675742.

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