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The Story of the Famous Berwick Sponge Cake – and Why it Disappeared

Once, when people traveled by rail, there was a delicacy that you simply had to have if you could get it: the famous Berwick sponge cake. When the Boston & Maine stopped in North Berwick, Maine, travelers got off and headed for a tiny restaurant nearby. There they would buy the light and lemony confection.

The famous Berwick sponge cake with raspberries (it’s great with fruit)

Charles Dickens, during his 1868 tour of America, made his acquaintance with the Berwick famous sponge cake on his way from Portland to Boston. Eleven-year-old Kate Smith (later Kate Douglas Wiggin) happened to travel on the same train as the writer she revered. When the train stopped in North Berwick, she looked out the window and saw Charles Dickens standing on the platform. Years later, she remembered,

His hands were plunged deep in his pockets (a favorite gesture), but presently one was removed to wave away laughingly a piece of the famous Berwick sponge cake, offered him by Mr. Osgood, of Boston, his travelling companion and friend.

In 1901, Domestic Science Monthly magazine lamented the disappearance of the famous Berwick sponge cake. A reader wrote that she still made it from the original recipe. Even today, you can find Internet recipes for the famous Berwick sponge cake, long after the Boston & Maine stopped dropping passengers off in North Berwick.

Origin of the Famous Berwick Sponge Cake

North Berwick, as a gateway to Maine, got quite a lot of rail traffic. After 1873, the Western and Eastern Divisions of the Boston & Maine crossed in North Berwick, according to the North Berwick Historical Society.

North Berwick in 1910

That 1901 story in Domestic Science Monthly recounts how in 1845 a Boston & Providence clerk named William C. Briggs lost his leg in a railroad accident in Maine. Those early railroads could barely afford to defend damage suits. But Briggs said,

“Build me a restaurant in North Berwick, and stop every train five minutes there, and I won’t sue.”

So the railroad built a restaurant, and Mrs. Briggs made sponge cake according to a secret recipe. The cake became famous, and the Briggses shipped it all over the United States in boxes.

In 20 years Briggs retired, rich, but lost all his money in speculation. The restaurant closed, and “no one now knows the secret of the Berwick sponge cake.”

Another Version

But an alert reader from Rockland, Maine, wrote to the Domestic Science Monthly with the old Berwick sponge cake recipe:

Beat 6 eggs 2 min. Add 3 c. sugar and beat 2 min. 1 1/2 c. flour with 2 tsp. of cream of tartar; beat 1 min. Add 1 c. cold water with 1 tsp. of soda; add grated rind and juice of 1 lemon; beat 1 min. Add 1 1/2 c. flour and pinch of salt; beat one min. Bake 40 min.

And the magazine also corrected the quote from Mr. Briggs, “Just put me up a roof where my wife may support me, and I will ask no more.” (Though how it got either quote is open to question.)

Greatness Thrust

As the story of the famous Berwick sponge cake gets retold, Mrs. Briggs emerges more clearly.

The New York Times in 1894 picked up a story from the Portland Transcript with the headline, “How the Berwick Sponge Cake Had Its Greatness Thrust Upon It.”

The newspaper describes the eating of the famous Berwick sponge cake at the restaurant as “an event of consequence inseparable from travel over the Eastern Railroad.”

One day in the 1860s a Mrs. B was mixing some cake dough when someone called her to another room, the newspaper reported. She left the dough on the table. Her daughter, then five or six years old, emptied something into the dough, the name of which the author was not at liberty to mention. (Cream of tartar? Baking soda?) Mrs. B. decided to bake the cake anyway, as the ingredient wouldn’t harm anyone.

Boston & Maine passing through Saco, Maine, around 1879

“The result was the Berwick sponge cake in all its glory,” wrote the newspaper. All who ate it praised the delectable compound, and it became famous with travelers. They would buy whole loaves and carry them on their journey or take them home.

Mrs. B. retired from the railway dining room business in 1879, having made a comfortable sum, mostly from cake sales. Eventually she got very ill, and summoned her son-in-law to tell him the recipe. He then sold it to a commercial baker.

Just Desserts

Finally, Arthur Wellington Brayley gave Mrs. B. her due in his 1909 book, Bakers and Baking in Massachusetts, Including the Flour, Baking Supply and Kindred Interests, from 1620 to 1909.

“Of the many cakes made in Massachusetts, none have a wider reputation and in their day larger sales than the Berwick sponge cake,” wrote Brayley.

He credits Mrs. Mary Ann Pettengill, born in Newburyport, Mass., in 1813. She married for her second husband William Briggs, a clerk in a railway freight office who shortly after their marriage lost a leg. They then opened the restaurant at North Berwick, where hungry passengers bought her sponge cake.

“Such was its excellence that its reputation spread far and wide,” wrote Brayley. In the early 1850s, a Mr. Meyer of Boston got the rights to sell the cake, and sold it all over the world. Then the express train came, and the restaurant began to wane. So Mary Ann Briggs closed the restaurant and moved to Boston, where she died in 1898.

But the famous Berwick sponge cake lived on. The Oak Grove Farm Creamery sold it from a bakery under the ownership of J.W. Alden, located at 2220 Washington Street, Roxbury.

This story updated in 2022.

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When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned (and Partied) in Westport, Conn.

In 1920, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, Conn., so he could write, she could swim and they could both party their brains out.

The Fitzgeralds reigned as the king and queen of the Jazz Age. He was 23, she was 19, and their reckless high spirits – plus their drinking — had gotten them kicked out of several New York hotels.

American literature probably owes a debt of gratitude to the New York hotel managers who disinvited the Fitzgeralds. It was in Westport, after all, that Scott met a wealthy neighbor who inspired Jay Gatsby.

About a year after Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, they visited his family in Minnesota. Here Zelda is pregnant with their only child.

Westport

When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, the town had not yet evolved into a tony New York suburb. But it was getting there. A 50-mile train ride to Times Square brought commuters to Times Square, and it began to attract literary and theater types from New York.

In the Fitzgeralds’ era, Westport brought literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, Dorothy and Lillian Gish and Broadway producer John Williams for weekends in the country. A New York culture took root in the town, and by 2014, the local historical society exhibited many of the 767 New Yorker covers produced by artists living in and around Westport.

Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Martha Stewart, Sandy Dennis, Harvey Weinstein and Shirley Jackson all made their homes in Westport.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in this Westport, Conn., house. Image Courtesy Google Maps.

How Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned

The Fitzgeralds blew into town in a secondhand sports car in May of 1920. Neither had a clue how to keep house, so closets filled with dirty laundry and neither of them cooked. Eventually they hired a house boy named Tana.

Earlier that year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, sold out within four days of publication. It won him celebrity, a healthy income and Zelda’s Sayre’s hand in marriage.

Scott and Zelda wed on April 3, 1920 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and frolicked in New York City. But Scott needed to get back to writing his second novel, and so they honeymooned in Westport from May to September. Zelda rented a large colonial home where he had a separate room in which to write and she could swim every day. Their neighbor, a multimillionaire named F.E. Lewis, let her cut across his property to walk to Compo Beach.

Lewis had inherited a fortune – what would amount to $300 million in today’s dollars — and he lived on a 175-acre estate called Longshore.

Today, it’s the Inn at Longshore, hosting corporate events and destination weddings. Back then, Lewis threw extravagant parties that Scott and Zelda attended. They weren’t the only celebrities he invited. Dancer Anna Pavlova, magician Harry Houdini and movie star Marie Dressler came too. At one party he featured camels, elephants, vaudeville acts and a cowboy and Indian show. Theatrical producer David Belasco, mentioned in the Great Gatsby, came, and John Philip Sousa wrote music for one of his parties.

Drinking Again

When Scott and Zelda didn’t go to New York for weekend parties they invited friends to stay with them. They drank heavily and fought often.

A Princeton friend came to visit and wrote,

Went to visit Fizgeralds in Westport…stayed drunk for two weeks straight. Atmosphere of crime, lust, sensuality, pervaded the home.

Another classmate, critic Edmund Wilson, found the couple ‘reveling nude in the orgies of Westport.’

They tore along the Boston Post Road in their sports car with occasional stops at roadhouses to replenish their gin supply. Then Zelda wrecked the car by driving over a fire hydrant.

At a party, they reported a false fire alarm. According to one story, the firefighters asked where the fire was and Zelda pointed to her breast and said, “Here.”

Gatsby

After the Fitzgeralds honeymooned in Westport, they moved to a New York City apartment near the Plaza Hotel. They later moved to Great Neck, Long Island, from 1922 to 1924, then to Paris, all the while spiraling downward into alcoholism, madness and early death. Scott managed to finish only four novels.

For many years, people thought Scott Fitzgerald patterned the setting for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, on Long Island.

Then in 1996, a New Yorker writer named Barbara Probst Solomon asked whether Gatsby included a blend of their time in Great Neck and that first beachy summer when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport?’

Author Richard Webb, Jr., grew up in Westport, and he was sure the answer was yes. In 2018 he published his book, Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut 1920.

The book that tells the story of how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport.

The title alludes to the ending of Gatsby, one of the most famous in American literature:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This story about how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport was updated in 2022.

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An 1839 Romance Novel Rescues Seth Warner From Obscurity

Green Mountain Boy Seth Warner might have been a forgotten Revolutionary War hero had he not appeared in an 1839 romance novel. The story had it all: heaving bosoms, manly countenances, hardy sons of liberty, deadly strife and shocking racist descriptions of Indians.

Seth Warner for decades was the unsung hero of the Battle of Bennington, rescuing New Hampshire’s John Stark from a rout. He also led a successful rearguard action at the Battle of Hubbardton.

Stark got all the plaudits for Bennington (actually fought in Walloomsac, N.Y.). But then, 52 years later, New England’s best-known novelist wrote a popular adventure story featuring the noble, brave and handsome Charles Warrington – Seth Warner. “Warrington” fights gallantly at the Battle of Hubbardton and gets the girl, aka the “rosebud in the wilderness.”

The author, Daniel Pierce Thompson, not only rescued Seth Warner from obscurity, he stamped the Green Mountain Boys on the national consciousness. He also probably taught Danielle Steele a few tricks.

General Stark at the Battle of Bennington (NYPL). No Green Mountain Boy in the picture.

Battle of Bennington

At the Battle of Bennington on Aug. 16, 1777, John Stark’s patriots routed a detachment of soldiers fighting under British Gen. John Burgoyne. After the redcoats retreated, the patriots’ discipline broke down. The men scavenged for valuables among the captured and killed troops. Some laid down and rested, while other tended to the wounded.

But then a second detachment of Burgoyne’s troops arrived and began to pummel the patriots. Stark came close to calling for retreat when Seth Warner arrived with 350 fresh troops and supposedly said, “Stand to it, my lads; you shall have help immediately.”

Bennington helped turned the tide of war. Casualties convinced the Indians to abandon the British. They also contributed to Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga, which convinced the French to join the patriot war effort.

Stark won renown as the hero of the Battle of Bennington, and people in New Hampshire can still quote his words at Bennington, “”There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” (They also remember Stark’s other famous quote, “Live Free or Die!”)

Decades after the Battle of Bennington, several prominent Vermont writers thought Seth Warner deserved more credit for saving the day. Daniel Pierce Thompson belonged to that group. And so he wrote a romance novel, The Green Mountain Boys.

You can still buy the book!

Fictional Seth Warner

The author introduces Seth Warner as Charles Warrington, in the full bloom of vigorous manhood. He opens the novel as a Green Mountain Boy captain, evading the Yorkers who seize the property of settlers with grants from New Hampshire.

The “maliciously smiling” Yorkers declare Warrington an outlaw, “poltroon,” “audacious scoundrel” and “bold rascal.: ‘Warrington’ at the same time cautions, “the storm of a new war is gathering over us.” (That would be the American Revolution.)

There’s a girl, of course – a “rosebud in the wilderness.: Warner/Warrington, though, can’t yet storm the citadel of her womanhood because there’s a”‘hedge about her too high for his leaping.”

The Green Mountain Boy roams the woods one day when he stumbles across “a young lady of the most interesting exterior” attempting to escape a rude fellow who grasped her garment.”

“Back, ruffian, back!” exclaims Warrington. “Unhand the lady, or you die on the spot!”

One can only imagine Seth Warner rolling over in his grave.

Green Mountain Boy

In the novel, traitors leer, maidens blush, rapiers deliver finishing blows and redcoats retreat like scampering satans. Indians fare poorly; the good ones are still savages or red scamps, the enemies are hell-hounds.

The author skips over the Battle of Bennington, but pours on the purple in describing the Battle of Hubbardton.

Statue of Seth Warner

Observers gaze in “silent awe” upon the “grand and thrilling spectacle.” The maidens, of course, watch with heaving bosoms as the Green Mountain Boys “unflinchingly engage in deadly strife” with the “gorgeous and disciplined bands of their outnumbering foes.” The “fires of a thousand death-tubes blaze fiercely.”

The British bring reinforcements, though, and in stilted language one observer says, “There is no hope, then, that our troops can long withstand this fresh and formidable onset.”

One of the characters asks if a colonel died in battle by saying, “Has that noble fellow then indeed been added to the honored catalogue of martyrs in our glorious cause?” (“Did he die?” would have served the purpose just as well.)

Seth Warner Gets Deathless Laurels

Daniel Pierce Thompson skips the Battle of Bennington, perhaps because the novel approached 400 pages. So when “nature was again enrobing herself in the leafy glories of summer,” he quickly summarizes the battle. It “immortalized the name of the Roman Stark” and “covered the Green Mountain Boys with deathless laurels.”

Warner/Warrington gets the girl in the end. At their wedding he wears his lace-trimmed uniform, she is “richly and tastefully dressed” in an array of spotless white. They utter their vows in tender pathos. Then the ultimate Green Mountain Boy, Ethan Allen. Two more Green Mountain Boys marry their blushing maidens. Then they all presumably live happily ever after.

You can read the whole book here.

Daniel Pierce Thompson

His action and adventure stories sold well into the 1900s, but Daniel Pierce Thompson had day jobs as well. A Montpelier lawyer, he also held a number of political posts including probate judge and secretary of state. He cofounded the Vermont Historical Society and joined the Republican Party early in its life.

Daniel Pierce Thompson

Thompson was famous in New England for his novels through the 1840s and 1850s until Nathaniel Hawthorne eclipsed him. He died in 1868. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was descended from him.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Statue of Seth Warner By Jkb24 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61464961.

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The Rise and Fall of the Connecticut Borough

For over 200 years Connecticut has had a somewhat unique type of local government – a borough, of which nine currently survive. The borough has provided public services that its parent town would not or could not afford.

Vermont, with its incorporated villages, is the only other New England state that allows similar responsibilities below the town level. (Notably, Connecticut had two incorporated villages—Litchfield and Wethersfield—during the nineteenth century).

In the six New England states, the town formed the original basis for local government. In Connecticut, towns began to form in the 17th century. By the end of the 18^th century, towns geographically encompassed the entire state.

These creatures of the state used tax revenues for building and maintaining roads, caring for the poor, providing education, and for several administrative and regulatory purposes. However, in the 19^th century residents in some towns eventually wanted a broader range of public services. So to achieve their aims, they sought permission from the state to create an incorporated borough that would be located within and subordinate to the town government.

The Borough of Bridgeport

Bridgeport became the first borough by special act of the state General Assembly in October 1800. It was located in part of the town of Stratford on Long Island Sound in the southwestern part of the state. Originally called Pequonnock in the 17th century, it was renamed Newfield around 1777. Starting as a farming and fishing community, it grew into a bustling whaling, shipbuilding, and trading port after the mid-18th century.

Based on its prosperity, the citizenry sought and received permission for a borough to supply more services. The act of incorporation of the borough provided for the election by secret ballot of a warden (chief executive), six burgesses, a clerk, treasurer and bailiff. Among the initial powers granted: the right to sue and be sued; purchase, hold, and convey real and personal property; levy taxes; layout highways; create a fire department; and make by-laws (e.g., regarding markets and commerce, streets, wharves, anchoring and mooring of vessels, trees, animals, buildings, burial of the dead and public lighting).

Since the borough was subordinate to the town government, its residents had dual residency and paid both town and borough taxes. In 1821 the Town of Bridgeport—including the Borough of Bridgeport–were separated from the Town of Stratford. In 1836 the borough became the City of Bridgeport.

More Boroughs

Clinton, Conn., 1881. Killingworth lies on the upper left. Map courtesy Library of Congress.

Four other boroughs were soon created near Long Island Sound. A year after Bridgeport, Stonington was incorporated—currently the oldest continuous borough in the state. Guilford followed in 1815, then both Killingworth and Essex in 1820. Killingworth disincorporated in 1838—the first to do so—with the creation of the town of Clinton. Essex disincorporated in 1854 and Guilford in 1939.

After 1820, boroughs formed within inland towns. Although agriculture dominated economic activity in the early 19th century, manufacturing enterprises slowly began to develop across the state. Their success depended upon navigable rivers, a sufficient labor supply and competent management. This was clearly evident in the last half of the nineteenth century, especially within or near towns in the Naugatuck Valley.

Manufacturing grew because of greater interconnections of the railroad, telegraph and telephone systems. Further population growth and increased incomes then fueled a desire for boroughs to provide more governmental services. Thus, between 1800 and 1899, 39 boroughs were created.

Hats, Brass, Pins

Birdseye view of Danbury, Conn., in 1875. Map courtesy Library of Congress.

One of the earliest boroughs with a manufacturing base was Danbury, incorporated in 1822, known for its hat making. Another example was Waterbury, incorporated in 1825, known for its brass industry. Waterbury and Danbury became cities in 1853 and 1889, respectively.

In the latter half of the century, two notable examples were Wallingford and Shelton. Wallingford, incorporated in 1853, became known for Britannia ware and disincorporated in 1958. Shelton, incorporated in 1882, was known for making corsets, paper, bolts and pins. It consolidated with its town in 1915.

Sidewalk No-Nos

In addition to the customary set of by-laws, many boroughs also dealt with special concerns. For example, West Haven and West Stratford, prohibited riding bicycles on sidewalks, while Bethel residents could not fly kites on streets and sidewalks.

Creation of the final six boroughs occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century: Farmington and Ridgefield in 1901, Groton and Woodmont in 1903, Bantam in 1915, and Unionville in 1921. Ridgefield disincorporated in 1921, as did Farmington and Unionville in 1947. Groton became a city in 1964.

Altogether, between 1800 and 1921, 45 boroughs were created. However, between 1800 and 1991 when Stafford Springs became the latest borough to disincorporate, 15 of them disincorporated from their parent town, 15 eventually became cities, four became part of a new town, one (Clifton) became part of a new borough (Winsted), and one (West Stratford) became annexed to Bridgeport.

No New Boroughs

Stonington, Conn., in 1885. Library of Congress.

Two new options for districts may explain why no new boroughs formed since 1921, despite an outward migration from more populated to less crowded areas—a process that accelerated after World War II. One possibility: the creation of special taxing districts. These districts (e.g., fire and utility districts) can offer one or more public services, while remaining independent of their town governments. Although the exact number is unknown, they have continued to proliferate. The other option available for providing more services is a 1957 “Home Rule” law that allows towns to change their form of government (e.g., to create a mayor-council system) to better deal with citizen demands.

Nine Boroughs

Of the nine boroughs that currently exist, the prospects for their continued survival differ. Naugatuck, Bantam, Litchfield, Fenwick, Woodmont, and Stonington—the latter four in summer resort areas—appear to be working fairly well. Naugatuck is somewhat unusual. Known for its rubber production (Goodyear) and naugahyde (a synthetic leather material), it consolidated with its town in 1895 but retained its borough form of government.

Meanwhile, Newtown, Danielson, and Jewett City have encountered budgetary pressures in previous years. Their future is more problematic as their town governments have already taken over many of their functions. So far, the majority of residents of these nine boroughs remain proud and self-protective and would be very reluctant to see them disappear. Thus, an anachronistic type of local government continues to survive.

About the author: Edward T. Howe, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, of Siena College near Albany, N.Y. He has written academic articles about the bell industry in New York, incorporated villages in Vermont, and nationwide taxation of the electric utility industry. He has also written about the small bells made in Connecticut for the New England Historical Society. This story updated in 2022.

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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/church-going-animal-ufpc.jpg

Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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Connecticut Battles Pennsylvania in the Pennamite Wars

The Pennamite Wars between Connecticut and Pennsylvania involved some of the worst brutality of the Revolutionary era. They also resulted in the name of a western state.

Settlers from both Pennsylvania and Connecticut claimed ownership of 23 miles along the Susquehanna River. Called the Wyoming Valley, it had lush, fertile plains that rarely disgorged a stone when plowed.

King Charles II had given the valley to Connecticut in 1662. Unfortunately, he also gave it to Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1768, a development company met in Hartford to divide up the Wyoming Valley into five towns, which they named Plymouth, Kingston, Hanover, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittston.

When the first Connecticut settlers arrived, they found Pennamites – Pennsylvanians – already there.

Fighting soon broke out. And then it broke out again and again for the next 30 years. The bloodiest fight – a massacre, really — in 1778 was later recast as a conflict of the American Revolution.

The Battle of Wyoming, however, had more to do with competition over land than revolution. Its brutality stoked such outrage that George Washington sent Gen. John Sullivan on a scorched earth campaign to retaliate.

First Pennamite War

When 40 Connecticut Yankees arrived in the Wyoming Valley, they set about building two forts, Durkee and Forty, on one side of the Susquehanna River. The Pennamites built forts Wyoming and Ogden on the other side to stop the Yankee encroachment on their land.

The two sides skirmished for years, though accounts vary on the number of casualties and what actually counts as a Pennamite battle.

In 1763, someone murdered a respected Indian chief, Teedyuscung. His son blamed Connecticut and raided a Connecticut settlement, killing more than two dozen people.

But those first conflicts certainly did not claim anywhere near as many lives as the Battle of Wyoming.

Pennamite War forts along the Susquehanna.

Battle of Wyoming

During the American Revolution, the Connecticut militia in the Wyoming Valley got called up to serve in the Continental Army. The departure of hundreds of able-bodied men left the Connecticut settlements vulnerable.

A British officer named John Butler decided to exploit Pennamite resentment against the Connecticut settlers. He recruited loyalist Pennamites as well as Iroquois Indians (who obviously had their own grievances against settlers) to attack the Yankees. They massed outside of Forty Fort on July 3, 1778.

Another Butler, a Yankee leader with a first name of Zebulon, led some 300 men from the fort to attack the much larger force of about 500 British soldiers, Pennamite Loyalists and Indian warriors. He should have stayed inside the fort.

Accounts of the subsequent massacre probably exaggerated the atrocities committed against the Connecticut Yankees. But the British-led forces claimed to take 227 scalps. Later accounts put the casualties at between 150 and 340 lives.

Atrocities

In 1891, Milo M. Acker presented to the Canisteo Valley Historical Society a toned-down account of the Battle of Wyoming. He described how John Butler’s men attacked Zebulon Butler’s forces, who then panicked and ran.

“Men were transformed into demons, and while Indian marksman skillfully wounded the flying Yankees in the thigh bone, thus disabling them yet saving them for future Tories, both Tories and Indians clubbed and scalped them as they tried to conceal themselves near by or in the water,” he wrote.

One Yankee, a German immigrant named Henry Pencil, hid in the willows on the river’s edge. His brother John, who took the Pennamite side in the conflict, happened to discover him. Henry, already wounded by an arrow, struggled up the bank, crying he would serve John forever if he would spare him.

“’Mighty well,’ was the taunting reply, ‘but you are a damned rebel,’ and the Tory shot him dead,” wrote Acker. “Even the Indians were struck with horror at this deed.”

A captain named Bidlack was thrown on a fire and held down with pitchforks while he burned.

And an Indian queen named Esther forced as many as 18 men to kneel around a rock, wrote Acker. “This fiend in woman’s shape danced slowly around the ring and crushed out their brains in turn, to the rhyme of a monotonous and blood-curdling death chant,” he wrote.

The Pennamite side burned nearly every Yankee house and barn, reducing the Wyoming valley to a smoking ruin.

The Battle of Wyoming

Sullivan’s Expedition

The Indians later denied committing any ritual torture, but the massacre had enormous propaganda value. The Yankees successfully branded the battle as one of Loyalists vs. Patriots. (Ironically, King George III had upheld the Yankee claim in 1771.)

A Scottish poet named Thomas Campbell wrote a poem about the battle, Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale. The poem was so popular that a western territory was named Wyoming after it, no doubt to the bewilderment of the Wyoming settlers.

The summer after the Pennamites massacred the Yankees, George Washington ordered Gen. John Sullivan to retaliate. In 1779, Sullivan led Continental troops and Pennsylvania militia from Easton, Pa., to upstate New York. They methodically torched 40 Iroquois villages and an enormous amount of stored corn and crops.

Many Iroquois starved to death the following winter, and the tribe never fully recovered from the Sullivan expedition. But they continued to harass the Wyoming Valley settlers for years.

Final Years of Pennamite Wars

In 1782, the Continental Congress decreed that the Wyoming Valley belonged to the Pennamites and the Connecticut Yankees had no claim to the land. Unsurprisingly, more violence broke out as Pennamite forces cleared out the Yankee settlers. They nearly succeeded.

Only 2,000 Connecticut Yankees remained, mostly women and children scattered in the woods. They suffered starvation and cold, with only primitive huts of bark and thatch to shelter them from the coming winter. Their enemies possessed all their property — houses, farms and crops.

Armed men from Connecticut and Vermont rushed to the region to defend against the Pennamites. Then in 1787, the Pennsylvania Assembly granted the Connecticut settlers the right to their lands.

By 1799 the final Pennamite War died down, when the new federal government decreed the Yankee lands part of Pennsylvania and the Yankees were Pennsylvania citizens with full rights to their lands.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about how Cleveland belonged to Connecticut.

Map of Connecticut Land Claims: By User:Kmusser – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1290884; the Wyoming Massacre, painting by Alonzo Chappel. With thanks to Kathryn Shively Meier, The Landscape of Indian and White Violence in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1753-1800, in Blood in the Hills
A History of Violence in Appalachia, ed. by Bruce Stewart. This story was updated in 2023.

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