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Hinsdale NH

The New Hampshire Volcano That Promised Untold Riches

As early as 1735, residents living along the New Hampshire-Vermont border reported a New Hampshire volcano erupted violently.

The inhabitants of Fort Dummer in Brattleboro, Vt., gave the story its greatest boost when they reported one night that they heard rumbling. The earth shook, they said, and flashes of light shot through the sky.

It was so jarring that the people at the fort sent out an expedition the next day to scour Mount Wantastiquet in New Hampshire. The mountain, also known as West River Mountain, lies on the border between Hinsdale and Chesterfield.

Near the top of the mountain, the searchers found an indentation and some strange rocks, which they took as signs of an eruption.

Volcanic Scam

The volcano next played a part in an apparent scam carried out by a travelling con man working the area around 1774. He persuaded several residents they could find silver in the earth under the site of a volcanic eruption. For a fee, he would instruct them where to dig.

After prolonged mining at the mountain’s top and at its base, the townspeople concluded that there was no silver to be had. The only thing that had been had was them.

But the story of the volcano went unchallenged.

The New Hampshire Volcano

Full Moon Over Kilauea (1887 painting by Jules Tavernier.

A lawyer named Daniel Jones had colleagues who’d heard about the New Hampshire volcano. They asked him to investigate and report back. So he traveled to the mountain and reported on his findings.

He then found the mountain 12 miles north of the Massachusetts line on the east side of the Connecticut River and opposite the mouth of the West River.

“On the south side of the Mountain, about eighty rods from the summit, there has been an eruption,-perhaps not within the present, or last century,” he concluded. “The peasants, in the neighborhood of the Mountain, discovered this place, and became possessed with the idea of gold dust being in the mountain.”

Those peasants, he wrote, believed the gold dust melted into a solid body by the extreme heat of the mountain’s explosion. As a result, they went to work in search of the supposed treasure.

“After fruitless searches, they formed larger connections, entered into covenant with the proprietors of the land, and with one another, to make search for all kinds of mine and mineral.”

Jones concluded something had exploded. He didn’t believe, though, that he saw definitive evidence of a volcano.

Timothy Dwight and the Volcano

The volcano next crops up in Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York, published in 1821.

Timothy Dwight

Dwight, the president of Yale College, visited Hinsdale, N.H., in 1798 to examine the mountain. He’d heard it was ‘to a very humble degree volcanic.’

Dwight went to see a Mr. Butler of Hinsdale, and he took him to West River Mountain. About 150 feet from the summit they found a pit, 60 or 70 feet deep. The inhabitants had dug it with the hope of finding ‘some species of ore.’

But Dwight reported they could only look down into the pit.

He heard the volcano story from Mr. Butler and some people he’d found at an inn. They told him that 23 years ago, ‘the people of the neighborhood were alarmed by a loud noise, proceeding from this mountain, and resembling the sound of cannon.’

The Pine Tree

“A Mr. Barrett, who visited the place, found a hole, forced through the mountain by a blast, evidently as he thought the result of intestine fire,” wrote Dwight.

Barrett described the hole as about six inches in diameter. Nearby, a pine tree was covered with a black mineral substance. The substance had been ‘forced violently out of the passage,’ he said. It consisted ‘chiefly of melted and calcified iron-ore strongly resembling the scoriae of a blacksmith’s forge.’

Someone had cut down the tree, however, but Dwight saw the substance stuck to the rocks and the earth. The substance couldn’t be broken off without a violent effort, he wrote.

“From the whole appearance it was completely evident that it was driven against the cliffs in the same liquid state,” he wrote.

And, he saw two holes below the pit that he decided animals couldn’t have made.

“They must have been formed by a blast of air from the bowels of the mountain,” Dwight then concluded.

The Volcano Dies Out

Dwight brought specimens of the vitrified ore to Yale, along with some yellow ochre he found.

Over the next several decades the New Hampshire volcano received publicity in newspapers throughout America.

Several decades later, geologists concluded the New Hampshire volcano was not a volcano. Instead, they theorized, the residents heard the sound of a rock slide, and in the darkness they mistook it for a volcano.

But then the story of the volcano gained credibility through repetition over many years until geologists could thoroughly investigate it.

But those who would love a New Hampshire volcano should take heart. Geologists describe the Ossipee Mountains, north of Lake Winnipesaukee, as the remains of a volcanic ring dike.

Ossipee Mountains

Ossipee Mountains: By Jrclark at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15450885

This story was updated in 2022.

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6 Places That Used To Be Part of a Different State

For centuries, New England’s borders were anything but stable, and New Englanders didn’t agree on what they were. Maine was once part of Massachusetts, New Haven and Plymouth were separate colonies and Vermont belonged to New Hampshire – or was it New York? At least six places – cities, towns and parts of towns – used to belong to a different state until a border dispute was settled.

Of course all of Maine once belonged to Massachusetts, but that’s a separate story.

Here then, are six places that used to be part of a different state. Or so it was claimed.

Enfield and Suffield, Ct.

The Southwick Jog

Enfield and Suffield — two towns in Connecticut — began their American history as part of Massachusetts.

The two towns’ transition from Massachusetts to Connecticut took 162 years to fully accomplish.

The confusion about which state owned the towns dates back to 1642. With Connecticut seeking a charter from the King of England, Massachusetts officials decided it would be wise to survey the southern border of their territory.

To carry out the assignment, Massachusetts hired two English surveyors — Solomon Saffery and Nathaniel Woodward.

The two men had determined the border’s location by using the most southerly point of the Charles River for reference. From there, they established a point from which they could draw a line directly westward. But when they drew the line, the two surveyors actually placed one end of the line at the wrong location. The result was a diagonal line that extended some seven miles below where Massachusetts’ border was supposed to end.

This mistake set off the 162 years of fighting. Rightly or wrongly, people have pilloried Saffery and Woodward over the years. Some historians had said the pair were drunks, and that explained the mistake. Others have said they were unqualified — that they were sailors, not surveyors (though Woodward, at least, had a track record as a surveyor).

More charitable historians have suggested the instruments available to surveyors at the time were not the most reliable. Further, they note, Saffery and Woodward took a shortcut to their surveying — extrapolating from mathematical calculations rather than walking the land. They had to, in part, because they worked on land the Indians considered to be theirs.

Back and Forth to a Different State

Regardless, at first Massachusetts had the upper hand in the debate (Connecticut didn’t even have a charter). However, Massachusetts had one difficulty in maintaining its claim: it was clearly wrong. Every time surveyors from both Massachusetts and Connecticut investigated, they concurred Saffery and Woodward got it wrong in 1642.

In 1713, the two colonies got together and reached an agreement. Though the 1642 line was wrong, they both agreed to accept it with regard to the towns of Suffield, Enfield and the newer town of Woodstock. The towns would stay in Massachusetts. In return Connecticut would receive unsettled land in Massachusetts as payment.

A stake marks the southernmost point in the “Southwick jog” of the Massachusetts-Connecticut boundary. Seen from East Street in Granby, Conn.

The 1713 compromise satisfied everyone but the people who lived in the disputed towns. They still wanted to be part of Connecticut — probably because Connecticut had lower taxes and a more progressive government. In 1749, the disputed towns declared themselves part of Connecticut. This later prompted residents of Southwick, now bounded on three sides by Connecticut, to petition to join Connecticut, too.

This eroding away of Massachusetts was too much for its officials to accept. But negotiations had to be put on hold while the American Revolution was decided. Finally, in 1804 representatives from the two states got together and agreed that Southwick would stay in Massachusetts. The others would stay in Connecticut. The result was a small, square cutout in the border known to this day as the Southwick Jog. In Southwick today you can stand at the corner of Two States Road and Two States Avenue.

Seavey’s Island, Maine

Seavey’s Island

When Maine became a state in 1820, her 95,640 people lived in 232 cities and towns that had already been incorporated by Massachusetts.

Maine’s border disputes with Canada erupted in 1838 with the bloodless and often comical Aroostook War. The boundaries were famously settled by Daniel Webster.

But it was New Hampshire that caused the most recent border dispute.

The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, created in 1800, lies in the middle of the Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery, Maine. It was cobbled together over the years from five islands, now called Seavey’s Island.

The federal government owns the island, and for decades the U.S. Navy viewed it as part of New Hampshire – hence the name, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

Different State

Shipyard workers come from New Hampshire, which doesn’t have an income tax, and from Maine, which does. New Hampshire shipyard workers had to pay Maine income tax because Maine claimed Seavey’s Island.

In 2001, New Hampshire went to the U.S. Supreme Court and tried to get Seavey’s Island back.

New Hampshire claimed it owned the Piscataqua River to the Maine shoreline. Maine claimed the boundary between the two states ran down the middle of the river.

Unfortunately for New Hampshire, it had agreed in a 1977 lawsuit over fishing rights that the border ran between the middle of the river.

Maine got Seavey’s Island.

Fall River, Mass.

Fall River. The pink section at the bottom was once Tiverton.

Fall River started out as a rural outpost of the Plymouth Colony. In 1694, its southern neighbor Tiverton was incorporated as part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which by then had merged with Plymouth. In 1746, Tiverton was annexed to Rhode Island colony by Royal Decree. (So were Little Compton, Barrington, Bristol and Cumberland.)

In 1856, Tiverton decided to spin off its northern industrial section. It was called Fall River – Rhode Island. Five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court moved the state boundary to create one Massachusetts city of Fall River.

Bellows Falls, N.H.

The International Paper Co. in Bellows Falls, Vt., starred in the final chapter of the border wars between New Hampshire and Vermont in 1934. These disputes had gone on for hundreds of years, predating Vermont’s creation as a state.

In the 1600s, governors of both New York and New Hampshire were merrily giving away sections of Vermont to their friends. The King of England intervened in 1624. He established the New Hampshire border as the western edge of the Connecticut River. This border was largely accepted, though a group of dissidents in New Hampshire decided to secede in the 1770s. In 1778, the 22 New Hampshire towns from Chester to Haverhill declared themselves part of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vermont (after toying with and rejecting the idea of creating a new state altogether called New Connecticut).

New Hampshire took the news badly. It threatened to withdraw support for the American Revolution and to send 1,000 troops into Vermont to restore its borders. Even George Washington had to get involved in whipping the towns back into line. Under pressure from the Continental Congress, Vermont announced it was rejecting the towns’ bid to secede and returning them to New Hampshire.

Bellows Falls at high flow.

When Vermont was granted admission to the union as a state, one condition was that it renounce all claims to any lands to the east of the western edge of the Connecticut River as measured at low water. That settled the matter for more than 100 years, but the Vermonters would once again challenge New Hampshire.

Power struggle

From 1909 on, New Hampshire towns tried to assess taxes on power plants, canals and the International Paper Company’s mill at Bellows Falls in Vermont. The logic was this: the mill was powered by water in the river and, to get access to that water, it had to extend part of its plant beyond the low-water mark and into the middle of the river. Hence the subject properties were in New Hampshire. Vermont sued. The correct location of the border, it now asserted, was the center of the river.

As the dispute dragged on, some novel solutions were proposed – including diverting the Connecticut River altogether to move the border with it.

But swift and steady are the wheels of justice. Well, steady at least. In 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court finally settled the matter, granting New Hampshire ownership of the entire river to the western low water mark. By that time, International Paper Co. had abandoned its Vermont plant, for unrelated reasons, and the Bellows Falls economy was in a tailspin.

Pawtucket, R.I.

Fall River’s neighbor Pawtucket, R.I., comes from the Algonquin name ‘River Fall.’ And when the U.S. Supreme Court in 1861 gave Fall River, R.I., to Massachusetts, it gave Pawtucket, Mass., to Rhode Island as a consolation prize.

The original Pawtucket actually consisted of several towns. Part of it was known as Rehoboth, east of the Blackstone River. Rehoboth was part of Plymouth Colony. West of the Blackstone River a thriving industrial town (thanks to Sam Slater) was part of North Providence.

In 1828, Massachusetts carved out part of Rehoboth and called it Pawtucket, Mass. Pawtucket, Rhode Islanders were not happy.

After the Supreme Court gave Pawtucket, Mass., to Rhode Island, the North Providence land west of the Blackstone River went to Pawtucket. The two towns – East Pawtucket and West Pawtucket — then incorporated as the city of Pawtucket.

A Different State 4X

Windham County, Vt. Vernon is circled in red.

Vernon, Vt., received a charter as Northfield in 1672 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth, who grabbed much of Vermont for his own state, gave part of Vernon to another town he chartered, Hinsdale.

By 1779, four states claimed Vernon (then Hinsdale) due to bad surveying and squabbling over ownership: New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Vernon has successively had the names Northfield in Hampshire County, Mass.; Hinsdale in Cheshire County, N.H.; Hinsdale in Cumberland County, N.Y.; and Hinsdale in Windham County, Vt.

But the Hinsdale in Windham County, Vt., had a problem On the other side of the Connecticut River sat a Hinsdale, N.H. The Vermonters wanted their own identity and voted in 1802 to change the name to Vernon. They supposedly chose it after President George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon.

This story about places that belonged to a different state was updated in 2022.

Image: Southwick Job By Dynzmoar – This file was derived from: Southwick-stake.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31670390

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Epitaphs Tell Tales in New England’s Graveyards

Inscribed in stone in hundreds of old New England graveyards are the sometimes sad, sometimes funny epitaphs describing how people lived and how they died.

The moss- and lichen-covered stones tell tales of shipwrecked sailors, elderly ministers, smallpox victims, women who died in childbirth and children who died in infancy.

Old Town Burying Ground, Sandwich, Mass.

Mariners’ Epitaphs

In East Hampton, Conn., an epitaph tells the story of an 87-year-old seaman who died in 1883.

Landsmen or sailors
For a moment avast,
Poor Jack’s main topsail
Is laid to the mast,

The worms gnaw his timbers,
His vessel a wreck,
When the last whistle sounds
He’ll be up on deck.

A Cape Cod fisherman was remembered with a similar wit:

Capt. Thomas Coffin
Born Jan. 7, 1792 Died Jan. 10, 1842
He has finished catching cod,
And gone to meet his God.

Epitaphs That Say How They Died

Some epitaphs focused on the manner of death, such as this on a tombstone in Kittery, Maine:

I was drowned, alas! In the deep, deep seases.
The blessed Lord does as he pleases.
But my Kittery friends did soon appear,
And laid my body right down here.

Rev. Bunker Day of Hinsdale, N.H., wrote an epitaph for Jonathan Tute, who died from smallpox despite his inoculation from the disease.

Here lies cut down, like unripe fruit,
A son of Mr. Amos Tute.

To death he fell a helpless prey,
On April V and Twentieth Day,
In seventeen Hundred Seventy-Seven
Quitting this world, we hope, for heaven.

Behold the amazing alteration,
Effected by inoculation;
The means empowered his life to save,
Hurried him headlong to the grave.

Gravestone of josiah Leavitt

Mrs. Elizabeth Swain must have inspired great respect in life. When she died at 52 on Oct. 7, 1810, a stonecutter chiseled a long remembrance on her tombstone.

In all the endearing relations of
Life, Her conduct was stamp’d with the
Majesty of moral principal which
Commands respect, and with the beauty
Of propriety conciliates esteem
Through her last long and painful
Sickness she evinced the Christian and
With a firm hope in the redemption
She calmly bade the world farewell.

Many infants rest in peace in the old New England graveyards. Typical of the epitaphs for children is this one for 6-month-old Bezaleel Shaw in Old North Cemetery on Nantucket:

My life in infant Days was Spent
While to my parents I was lent
One smiling Look to them I gave
And then descended to the grave.

Indictment

The brother of a dead man in Pelham, Mass., brought charges against his widow – on his gravestone:

Warren Gibbs,
Died by arsenic poison
March 23, 1860 Aged 36 years
5 months and 23 days
Think my friends when this you see
How my wife has dealt by me
She in some oysters did prepare
Some poison for my lot and share
Then of the same I did partake
And nature yielded to its fate
Before she my wife became
Mary Felton was her name.

Erected by his brother
Wm Gibbs

William Gibbs never brought legal charges against Mary Felton Gibbs. Nor did anyone else.

The Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. .

A Connecticut man’s children had this epitaph carved on their father’s gravestone:

Our father lies beneath the sod,
His spirit’s gone unto his God;
We never more shall hear his tread,
Nor see the wen upon his head.

If your last name was Pease, your epitaph might have been similar to the one for Ezekiel Pease, found in a Nantucket cemetery:

Pease is not here,
Only his pod
He shelled out his Peas
And went to his God

Edwin Valentine Mitchell tells us the following well-known New England epitaphs may be apocryphal:

Here lies the body of Saphronia Proctor,
Who had a cold, but wouldn’t doctor.
She couldn’t stay, she had to go,
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

And then this one:

Beneath this little mound of clay
Lies Captain Ephraim Daniels,
Who chose the dangerous month of May
To change his winter flannels.

A Reader Writes

Nathaniel King of Middleton, Mass., wrote that he and his sister rediscovered an old, forgotten graveyard in their town. Her Girl Scout troop later cleaned it up.

“In it there was a really great epitaph,” he wrote.

As you are now, So once was I
Rejoicing in my bloom;
As I am now, you too will lie;
Dissolving in your tomb.

Read more entertaining epitaphs here.

With thanks to It’s an Old New England Custom by Edwin Valentine Mitchell. This story about New England epitaphs was updated in 2023.

Images: Josiah Leavitt gravestone by By dee E. Warenycia, Roseville, CA – via email from author, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5636493.

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