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Isles of Shoals

The Oldest Lighthouse in Each New England State

The oldest lighthouse in the country would have been in New England had the British not blown it up during the American Revolution. Today, Boston Light is the second oldest lighthouse in the country — and the oldest in Massachusetts.

Lighthouses and history go together like — well, ‘New’ and ‘England.’ Many of the coastal beacons predated the United States itself, but, like Boston Light, were replaced with newer, better versions.

Each New England state has multiple lighthouses. Maine, with its long coastline, has 57, while New Hampshire has only two along its 18 mile coast. Vermont actually has six.

But which are the oldest? Here, then, is a list of the oldest lighthouse in each New England state.

New London Harbor Light

Built in 1801, the New London Harbor Light is not only Connecticut’s oldest lighthouse, it is the tallest.

New London Harbor Light

The colonial Connecticut legislature in 1760 decided to build the first lighthouse at New London, then one of the busiest whaling ports in the colonies. The government sold lottery tickets to raise 500 pounds to pay for building it. In 1781, Benedict Arnold led a British raid on New London and burned the town, but the stone lighthouse and keeper’s cottage survived the attack.

Connecticut ceded New London Harbor Light to the United States in 1789, and 11 years later Congress voted money to rebuild it.

Abisha Woodward, a New Londoner, built the 80-foot-tall octagonal stone tower.

Lighthouse keepers were political appointees, and Martin van Buren appointed John Munn at New London Harbor Light. Munn lost his job in 1841 after van Buren lost reelection, and before he left he blackened the reflector and trashed the lamps. His successor, a popular fisherman named John Mason, took weeks to repair Munn’s vandalism. But after Mason served only four months as keeper, Munn wrangled his job back, outraging the locals. The controversy died down when Munn passed away and Mason took his place.

The Bureau of Lighthouses automated the New London Harbor Light in 1912, and auctioned the property. Today the lighthouse remains in private hands, but New London has others. Today, you can see five lighthouses from Pequot Avenue — and learn more about lighthouses at the Coast Guard Museum.

U.S. Coast Guard Museum, 15 Mohegan Ave., New London, Conn.

Portland Head Light

You may know the Portland Head Light as the Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse. The General Court of Massachusetts appropriated $750 to build it on the shores of Cape Elizabeth in 1787. Three years later, the U.S. government took responsibility for lighthouses and provided $1,500 to finish the job. President George Washington reminded the contractors the government didn’t have much money, so they should take building materials from the fields and shores.

Portland Head Light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine

Sixteen whale oil lamps first lit Portland Head Light on Jan 10, 1791.

One of the strangest shipwrecks in history took place at Portland Head Light on Christmas Eve, 1886. The three-masted bark Annie C. Maguire rammed right into the ledge by the lighthouse, though the crew plainly saw the light before the disaster. The keeper, Joshua Strout, along with his family and volunteers used a ladder as a gangplank to rescue all 14 aboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard decommissioned Maine’s oldest lighthouse in 1989. Today Portland Head Light, which sits next to 90-acre Fort Williams Park, has a museum within the former keeper’s quarters and a seasonal gift shop.

1000 Shore Rd., Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Boston Light

One would almost think Boston Light was cursed, given the trouble that befell the people who associated with it and the number of attacks it sustained from fire, lightning and warring armies.

Boston Light

There had been beacons on Brewster Island before to signal the approach of enemies and ships. The Boston merchant who petitioned the General Court to build Boston Light died before construction began. The first lighthouse keeper drowned. So did the second. The third lighthouse keeper had to clear his name after he was unfairly blamed for a fire in the light.

Fire broke out again and lightning struck the lighthouse several times. During the American Revolution, the Americans burned the wooden parts after the British captured it. When the British evacuated Boston, they left a time charge in Boston Light and blew it up.

A second Boston Light was built in 1783, and it is now the second oldest lighthouse in the United States. (The oldest is in Sandy Hook, N.J.)

Massachusetts gave Boston light to the federal government in 1790. In 1813, lighthouse keeper Jonathan Bruce and his wife watched the battle between the USS Chesapeake and the HMS Shannon. Just before dying, the wounded Chesapeake captain told his men, “Don’t give up the ship.” The crew gave up the ship anyway nine minutes later.

The military extinguished the light during World War II as a security precaution, and relit it on July 2, 1945. The Coast Guard decommissioned Boston Light in 1998, but it remains staffed by a keeper who acts mostly as a tour guide.

The National Park Service conducts tours of Boston Light twice daily on summer weekends.

Little Brewster Island, Boston, Mass.

White Island Light

The oldest of New Hampshire’s two lighthouses: White Island Light.

White Island Light, also known as Isles of Shoals Light, was built in 1859, though the New Hampshire light station had been around since 1821.

Thomas Laighton famously took the job as lighthouse keeper after losing the election for New Hampshire governor in 1839. He sold his business in Portsmouth, moved his family to the small archipelago known as the Isles of Shoals and vowed he’d never set foot on the mainland again.

Laighton bought four of the nine islands and wrangled the federal appointment as lighthouse keeper. His daughter Celia wrote a poem about the island’s sandpipers, which the Atlantic magazine published. Laighton later built a summer resort on another island in the Isles of Shoals, and Celia Laighton Thaxter became one of America’s most popular writers. She maintained a salon on the Isles, hosting such luminaries as Childe Hassam, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

New Hampshire’s oldest lighthouse was built of brick with a cast iron lantern.

The island is closed to the public, but you can get close to White Island Light in an excursion boat.

White Island, Rye, N.H.

Poplar Point Light

Built in 1831 in North Kingstown, R.I., Poplar Point Light is not only Rhode Island oldest lighthouse, it’s the oldest with a wooden tower in the United States.

Wickford, R.I.’s, protected harbor off Narragansett Bay allowed the village to develop as a shipping point for trade between local plantation and international ports.

Poplar Point Lighthouse

Congress agreed to spend $3,000 for a light at the entrance to Wickford Harbor, and local contractors finished it by the end of 1831. The Poplar Point Light guided sloops and schooners in and out of the harbor’s wharves.

By 1838, a Coast Guard survey concluded the light wasn’t needed, but Poplar Point Light stayed lit. By 1870, the government decided to build a new lighthouse at Old Gay Rock to guide the burgeoning ferryboat traffic. Albert Sherman bought Poplar Point Lighthouse at auction for $3,944.67. By 1932, Edith Grant owned the lighthouse and built a large house around it. The Shippee family bought the building in 1962, and has lived there since.

Poplar Point Light is not open to the public, but Rhode Island Bay Cruises and Save the Bay offer lighthouse cruises that may go near. They usually run between May and October.

Juniper Island Light

The oldest lighthouse in Vermont: Juniper Island Light in Lake Champlain.

Juniper Island Light is not only the oldest lighthouse in Vermont, it’s the oldest cast iron lighthouse left in the United States. Originally a lantern on a post on Juniper Island marked the entrance to Burlington Harbor until a 30-foot-tall brick tower, the first on Lake Champlain, replaced it. That fell to a tower of cast iron in 1846. The lighthouse guided thousands of ships into Burlington Harbor, for many years the second busiest lumber port in the United States.

After 108 years of service, an automatic light on a tower replaced the Juniper Island Light. A state senator named Fred Fayette bought the island and the lighthouse in 1956. Careless campers started a fire that destroyed the lighthouse keeper’s house in 1962. Fayette’s 11 children inherited the island after his death and in 2001 began to reconstruct the keeper’s house with reclaimed bricks. They later restored and painted the tower.

Juniper Island, Burlington, Vt.

Images: Portland Head Light, By Rapidfire – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7161757; Boston Light By Dpbsmith at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1663166. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Autumn Paintings of New England (And How They Look Today)

New England’s fall foliage inspires so much imagery we were pretty sure we could find six autumn paintings of New England. Then we thought we could identify each location and find a current photo, with help from Google Maps, Wikipedia and our own archives.

Sure enough, we found a painting of an identifiable scene in each New England state – all beautiful, of course, and all of autumn. We even found photos of the subjects of some of the six autumn paintings from the artist’s vantage point.

Here then are six autumn paintings of New England, one for each state.

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Reflections of Old Lyme by Guy Wiggins

We naturally turned to the village of Old Lyme in New London to find an autumn landscape painting.

Old Lyme was the site of an artist colony, arguably the largest and most important in the United States for 20 years from about 1900. It started when Florence Griswold and her sister Adele fell on hard times, as had New London. The Griswold sisters began to rent rooms to boarders in their family’s old Georgian home. When New York artists learned about the picturesque seaside town, they flocked to Miss Florence’s art colony.

Guy Wiggins, who painted Reflections of Old Lyme, was one of the youngest members of the Old Lyme art colony. He painted with his father, Carleton Wiggins, also a landscape artist. Guy Wiggins was better known for his paintings of New York skyscrapers in winter.

The painting was in the archives of the Caldwell Gallery in Hudson, N.Y.

Today, the Old Lyme Art Colony lives on as the Florence Griswold Museum (open from May through October), and Old Lyme has regained its prosperity.

Old Lyme today, courtesy Google Maps.

Mount Katahdin

Mount Katahdin by Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, born in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, was a renowned Modernist artist who painted manly, rugged scenes of fishermen, mountains and rocky seashores. He often painted Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain in Baxter State Park.

He moved to New York to embrace Greenwich Village Bohemianism, then in 1901 began a pattern he would repeat throughout his life: He left New York for Maine for the first of many summers. Hartley would forever bounce between the city and the country, tiring of one, then the other. In 1937, after a long stint in Europe, he returned to Lewiston, declaring he wanted to become ‘the painter of Maine.’

He made no money and almost abandoned art at the age of 29. Then he got a job as a handyman as a utopian community in Eliot, Maine, and continued to paint. He decided to continue as an artist after he put on a successful one-man show at the home of one of the community members.

Mount Katahdin

Marlborough Street, Boston

Frederick Childe Hassam, a New Englander through and through, painted many landscapes of the region throughout his life. Born in the Dorchester section of Boston in 1859, he was related to Nathaniel Hawthorne on his mother’s side.

Despite an uncle’s offer to send him to Harvard, Hassam dropped out of high school at 17 and got a job at Little, Brown & Co. He then worked as an engraver and an illustrator, until 1893 when he had his first solo exhibition of watercolors. The next year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to stop calling himself ‘Fred’ and use his middle name instead. Hassam often painted the Isles of Shoals when he visited Thaxter at her salon there.

Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam painted in Massachusetts in Gloucester and Provincetown, and at Connecticut art colonies in Cos Cob and Old Lyme.

He married Kathleen Maud Doane in 1882 and moved to Boston’s then-tony South End. Hassam began painting Boston cityscapes – an unorthodox choice at the time.

Later, Hassam painted cityscapes in Paris and New York. He died in 1935, and for years he was considered one of the abandoned geniuses of American Impressionism. He was rediscovered in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his paintings sold for millions.

Marlborough Street in 2017

Mount Washington

Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington by Albert Bierstadt

More than 400 artists painted landscapes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire beginning at the turn of the 19th century. They wanted to promote the region and sell their paintings. It worked. Their dramatic images of a mountain wilderness attracted tourists from northeastern cities, especially in the summertime.

Albert Bierstadt was known for his paintings of the American West and considered a member of the Hudson River School. He was born in Germany in 1833, but his family moved to New Bedford in 1850. He studied art in Boston, and developed an interest in topography. It was natural for him to be drawn to Mount Washington, the tallest mountain on the East Coast.

Bierstadt studied painting in Germany for several years before returning to New Bedford. He painted Autumn in the Conway Meadows Looking Towards Mount Washington in 1858 just as he was getting noticed as an artist. The next year he headed west. There he was inspired to paint the large landscapes that gained him enormous popularity.

Mount Washington today. Not much has changed.

Sakonnet Point, R.I.

A Breezy Day: Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, by Thomas Worthington Whittredge, courtesy Amon Carter Museum

The Great Hurricane of 1938 destroyed nearly all the buildings in the seaside village of Sakonnet Point in Little Compton, R.I.

Thomas Worthington Whittredge got there many years beforehand. Like his friend Albert Bierstadt, he was a member of the Hudson River School of Art. Like Bierstadt, he was famous for his paintings of the West.

Whittredge was born in 1820 in Ohio, and studied painting in Europe with Emmanuel Leutze. Leutze used Whittredge as a model for George Washington and his steersman in his iconic painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Worthington Whittredge painted A Breezy Day–Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island, sometime around 1880. Four years later, Sakonnet Light was built. Preservationists made sure the historic lighthouse is still there.

Sakonnet Point. July 2012. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Bob Slater’s Hill, South Royalton, Vt.

Bob Slater’s Hill by Edward Hopper, courtesy Huntington Museum of Art

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death in 1967.

He is mostly associated with Cape Cod, Boston’s North Shore and New York City, but he spent some little-known time in and around South Royalton, Vt. He visited first in 1927 and then in the latter 1930s.

Hopper painted two dozen known works of Vermont, all watercolors and mostly ignored until rediscovered and assembled in an exhibit recently. Many of the scenes he painted then haven’t changed much.

Wagon Wheels Farm, July 2019. Image courtesy Google Maps.

There is actually a book and an entire blog devoted to Finding Edward Hopper in Vermont, both by Bonnie Tocher Clause. Of the painting Bob Slater’s Hill, she writes,

From the window of the upstairs guest room on Wagon Wheels Farm, Edward and Jo Hopper looked out over another South Royalton hill — Jigger Hill, or “Bob Slater’s Hill,” as Edward dubbed it. He recorded his fascination with the changing light and shadows in a watercolor, a striking study of contrasting views, near and far… In Bob Slater’s Hill and others of the Vermont watercolors, Hopper captured the particular shade of yellowish-green that’s a harbinger of fall in Vermont.

It isn’t clear to us which hill is “Bob Slater”s” or “Jigger” Hill. But today a historical marker stands in front of the old farm, with the message, “Tourists Accommodated 1937-1942.” It notes that the Hoppers stayed there, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt (not at the same time).

Image of Mount Katahdin By TJ aka Teej – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091663. This story was updated in 2021.

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Six New England Places With a Unique Name

The early English and Scots-Irish settlers tended not to give a new settlement a unique name.

Many New England place names came from towns and shires in England and Ireland. The Puritans even named groups of towns in New England after groups of towns in England: Boston and Lynn, for example, were next to each other in East Anglia as they were in Massachusetts. So were Worcester and Leominster, and Amesbury, Salisbury, Newbury and Andover.

In Rhode Island, the geography of England was mimicked in Warwick and Coventry and in Bristol and Newport. In New Hampshire, Sandown and South Hampton are next to each other as they were in England. And, as in England, there was once a Gosport on the Isles of Shoals next to Portsmouth in New Hampshire.

Unique Names

The Scots-Irish did the same. As the earliest pioneers after the Puritans, they named their frontier towns after home. New Hampshire has a Derry, Dublin and Antrim; Massachusetts a Colrain and a Charlemont; Maine a Belfast, a Limerick and a Newry. Both Vermont and New Hampshire have a Londonderry, and Connecticut has a Waterford.

But sometimes the first settlers simply named a place after its geographic features, like Marshfield, Mass., and Rockport, Maine.

Others named their towns after heroes, like Washington, Warren, Hancock and Adams. Generally, individuals only had towns named after them after the American Revolution, though one New Hampshire governor was the exception that proved the rule.

There are at least six New England places that have a unique name found nowhere else.

Mianus, Conn.

The Mianus River

Mianus is a village along the Mianus River that lies in three other districts in Greenwich, Conn: Riverside, Greenwich and Cos Cob.

It began as a project of the Veterans Administration and the Town of Greenwich to build 40 starter homes for servicemen returning from World War II and their families. During the Baby Boom there were 90 children in Mianus, and they played in the nearby woods and along the river and harbor. A writer named Jack T. Scully grew up there and wrote a book of poems celebrating his elegiac childhood, called Mianus Village.

The unique name is pronounced ‘maɪˈænəs,’ which made it the butt of jokes on the reality show Jackass.

Mianus is also known to antique inboard marine engine enthusiasts because it was home to the Mianus Motor Works, founded in 1889.

The area was given its unique name by English settlers in the 17^th century, who called it Mianus after the chief of the Siwanoy Indian tribe.

Kennebunk, Maine

The King’s Highway in Kennebunk, Maine.

A large sign once proclaimed, “Kennebunk, the only village in the world so named.” The locally famous billboard boasting the town’s unique name was attached to the Kesslen Shoe Mill on Route One.

‘Kennebunk’ was an Abenaki Indian word meaning ‘the long cut bank,’ which refers to the long bank behind Kennebunk Beach. The town’s presence on the Kennebunk and Mousam rivers made it an early center of shipping and shipbuilding. Later, manufacturers built mills on the rivers to make textiles, leatheroid, shoes and luggage.

Today Kennebunk is a bedroom community and a destination for upscale tourists attracted by its beaches and shopping. The town was overshadowed by its neighbor – also with a unique name. Kennebunkport was often in the world’s news when President George H.W. Bush summered there at his family compound.

Kennebunk today is home to the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, historic buildings, the 1799 Inn, Tom’s of Maine and the Brick Store Museum.

Dracut, Mass.

The historic Old Yellow Meeting House in Dracut.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook sachem who brokered peace in the Merrimack River Valley, spent most of his life on what is now Dracut, Mass.

It was known as Augumtoocooke until Passaconaway’s daughter Bess sold the land in 1665 to Captain John Evered, whose family was associated with Draycot Cerne in northern England. (Evered had earlier been in charge of the execution of Mary Dyer.) The land was sold for ‘four yards of Duffill and one pound of tobacco’ and given the unique name of Dracut.

Dracut belonged to Chelmsford until 1701, when it formally separated. Part of Dracut was set aside as a Praying Town for Christianized Indians. Dracut’s paper and textile mills attracted French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Modern real estate development swallowed much of the town. What isn’t a suburb of Lowell is now part of Lowell, which annexed large parts of the town. Dracut has a population of about 30,000 and still retains some rural landscapes and historic buildings.

Henniker, N.H.

The Mill Pond in West Henniker

Henniker, a bucolic New England town near Concord, prides itself on being ‘the only Henniker on earth.’ It was chartered before the American Revolution and named for British merchant Sir John Henniker, an unusual practice at the time.

Christopher Lenney argued that towns named ‘directly and unequivocally for persons are largely of post-Revolutionary vintage’ in Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England. “The custom was un-English and only became widespread in the 19th century, when antipathy to the practice had broken down.”.

New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth broke with that tradition when he dispensed land grants and charters in Vermont and New Hampshire, naming them after friends in high places to win their support for his westward expansion. Henniker, which received its charter in 1768, had been known as Todd’s Town and New Marlborough until Wentworth decided to name it after his friend.

Today Henniker is home to New England College, Pat’s Peak and the Old Depot No. 6 book barn.

Burrillville, R.I.

The Moses Taft House in Burrillville, R.I.

Burrillville, R.I., broke off from Glocester in 1806 and named itself after a favorite son, James Burrill, Jr. Burrill had established himself as a leader of Rhode Island by the tender age of 34. He had become Rhode Island’s attorney general at 25 and was elected a U.S. senator in 1817. Shortly before he died on Christmas Day in 1820, he delivered an eloquent speech opposing the Missouri Compromise, which banned free blacks and people of mixed race from settling in Missouri. That clause ‘was entirely repugnant to the Constitution of the United States’ he said, because it created separate classes of citizens.

Burrillville originally comprised 60 square miles but lost land to Massachusetts over a border dispute. Now part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, Burrillville once had many mills, now gone or shuttered.

St. Johnsbury, Vt.

St. Johnsbury, Vt.

St. Johnsbury was organized in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in 1790, a time when the un-English custom of naming towns after individuals began to take hold.

St. Johnsbury was named for Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, also known as J. Hector St. John, a French writer living in New York. St. John wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, a book praising American agriculture.

St. John befriended George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and he corresponded with Ethan Allen, who wanted to name the town St. John. The writer suggested St. Johnsbury, realizing that several places already had the name St. John.

St. Johnsbury became a minor manufacturing center where the Fairbanks family made its famous platform scales. By the 1940s, St. Johnsbury was the world’s largest manufacturer of scales, maple sugar and candlepins for bowling.

Today it is a quintessential Victorian industrial town with a large historic district that encompasses the Railroad Street District, Main Street, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum and the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium.

Photos: Dracut Old Yellow Meeting House, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26184431 ;Henniker Congregational Church and Historical Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3380925. This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Loyalist Houses

A Loyalist House was likely to be seized and sold when the American Revolution broke out. Many colonies passed laws that let them confiscate the property of known Loyalists, criminalizing dissent against the war and raising revenue for the war effort.

Many Loyalists fled to Canada or England. The British government compensated some for their loss, but tried to pressure the United States into giving restitution. Under the Jay Treaty of 1794, the U.S. agreed to ‘advise’ the states to return Loyalist property. Some families are still trying to get their property back.

Connecticut took a more lenient approach than the other New England states in confiscating Loyalist houses. It waited until four other states had passed confiscation laws. Local officials also dragged their feet in identifying Loyalist properties.

Vermont, on the other hand, eagerly seized Loyalist property in order to pay for the Green Mountain Boys.

Here, then, are stories of six Loyalist houses and their fate during the American Revolution.

Henry Whitfield House

A Loyalist house in Connecticut, owned by Joseph Pynchon on the eve of the Revolution.

When Joseph Pynchon purchased the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, Conn., he was supposedly seeking a relaxing summer retreat. His timing was not good.

The Whitfield House, built in 1639, has the distinction of being the oldest house still standing in Connecticut.

The structure was built by Henry Whitfield, one of Guilford’s founders, before there was even a town in Guilford. Its stone walls helped it serve as a garrison for townspeople. It would later become an investment property for a wealthy English landlord who rented it to tenant farmers. Pynchon bought the house in November of 1772.

Originally from Springfield, Mass., Pynchon inherited substantial wealth. He had Loyalist political sympathies. He also joined the Sandimonians in New Haven, an obscure religious group that originated in Scotland. Not only was he a Loyalist, the Sandimonians were pacifists, giving Pynchon’s Patriot-leaning neighbors two reasons to be suspicious of him.

Fearing persecution, Pynchon sold the Guilford house just a week before the Declaration of Independence was signed, and he spent much of the war in exile under British protection. He returned to Connecticut when the danger cleared and Loyalists were allowed to reestablish ties to their homeland. Among Pynchon’s descendants was Thomas Pynchon, one-time president of Trinity College, and novelist Thomas Pynchon.

As for his summer house, today it has left the family that bought it from Pynchon and is now a museum.

248 Old Whitfield St, Guilford, CT 06437

William Pepperrell House

The William Pepperrell House, Maine’s most prominent Loyalist house.

William Pepperrell led the Siege of Louisbourg during King George’s War in 1745, but his house in Kittery, Maine, predates that heroic maneuver by 63 years.

Pepperrell was the son of William Pepperrell, a fisherman who had lived and prospered on the Isles of Shoals before moving to the mainland in 1680. The senior Pepperrell married the daughter of John Bray, a wealthy shipwright, and went into business with his father-in-law. Soon Pepperrell was one of the richest men in New England and owned most of Kittery Point.

The junior William Pepperrell was born in the house in 1696. He joined his father in business and continued the family’s rise by marrying the granddaughter of Samuel Sewall, one of the Salem witch trials judges.

Pepperrell joined the Massachusetts militia and rose to colonel. It was he who assembled volunteer soldiers for capturing the Fortress at Louisbourg, trained them and financed the expedition. After the fortress fell, King George II awarded him a baronetcy.

Pepperrell served as acting governor of Massachusetts in 1757 and died two years later. His grandson, born William Pepperrell Sparhawk, inherited the house after agreeing to change his name to William Pepperrell. The third William Pepperrell remained loyal to the English king on the eve of the American Revolution. He fled to England with his wife, who died of smallpox on the way in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pepperrell died in London.

Massachusetts deemed the house Loyalist property and put it up for auction. In 1790 the house was purchased by Col. Samuel Smallcorn, and Daniel Frisbee bought some of the property. In 1973 the Pepperrell House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is privately owned.

94 Pepperrell Rd. (Rte. 103), Kittery, Maine

Isaac Royall House

Isaac Royall House.

The Isaac Royall House in Medford, Mass., is one of the few houses in New England that still has slave quarters. The Royalls had the largest number of enslaved people in New England during the 18^th century.

Inside the house is a tea box, said to be among the batch thrown into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.

Puritan leader John Winthrop built the first house on the property along the Mystic River in 1637. It became Charlestown and later Medford. A second house on the property was purchased with 504 acres in 1732 by Isaac Royall, a rum distiller and slave trader from Antigua. He brought 27 slaves with him to Massachusetts. Royall enlarged and remodeled the house between 1733 and 1737, then died in 1739.

Isaac Royall, Jr., inherited the house on his father’s death. He and his family were Loyalists who boarded a ship in Boston as British soldiers marched to the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. They sailed to Nova Scotia and then to England, never returning.

Gen. John Stark then made the house his headquarters. His wife Molly supposedly watched British troop movements from the roof, and George Washington interrogated British soldiers inside.

In 1806, the estate was returned to Isaac Royall’s heirs. They then sold it and gave part of the proceeds to Harvard, which used it to found Harvard Law School. The Daughters of the American Revolution bought the house in 1908 and turned it into a Loyalist house museum.

The Isaac Royall House opens for tours on summer weekends.

In Stratford, Conn., the Judson House, home to the local historical society, also has former slave quarters. They’re in the basement and part of tours through the home.

15 George St., Medford, Mass.

Mark Wentworth House

The Mark Wentworth House.

Henry Appleton, a merchant, built the Mark Wentworth House in Portsmouth, N.H., in 1763. He sold it the next year to Mark Hunking Wentworth, brother of Royal Gov. Benning Wentworth.

Mark Wentworth’s son John was born in 1737 and attended Harvard with John Adams, with whom he formed a close friendship. John Wentworth II, however, remained loyal to the king.

In 1763, John Wentworth went to London on family business. Uncle Benning had been busy selling land grants in Vermont, but the Lords of Trade awarded the province to New York. They were on the verge of recalling Benning Wentworth when John II intervened, so they gave him the governorship.

John Wentworth returned to New Hampshire amidst pomp and ceremony in 1767. Then he moved into his father’s house, where he complained about its small rooms.

Wentworth served as a popular and able governor until resistance hardened to King George III. When a mob pointed a cannon at his front door in June 1775, John Wentworth and his family fled to the safety of Fort William and Mary. He sailed to Boston about a month later and sent his family on to England. On Evacuation Day he left for Halifax.

The New Hampshire government seized the Loyalist house, but saved the furniture and portraits for the family. In 1797 the house was sold, but 13 years later Ebenezer Wentworth bought it back. In 1911 Dr. Charles Wentworth and his sister Susan converted the house into a nursing home. It now houses Wentworth Senior Living.

346 Pleasant St., Portsmouth, N.H.

Lucas-Johnston House

The Lucas-Johnston Loyalist house.

Tucked among Newport, R.I.’s many historic homes is the Lucas-Johnston house. Augustus Lucas originally owned it. He arrived in Newport from France around 1700 and grew wealthy trading in slaves. Lucas’ grandson Augustus Johnston gave the house greater renown when he lived in it. Johnston, a British official, accepted a position as Newport’s stamp agent – in charge of administering the Stamp Act.

As in Massachusetts, Rhode Island agitators protested vehemently against the Stamp Act. Johnston was hanged in effigy, and a mob drove him from his home into hiding until he agreed not to serve as stamp agent. In July of 1776 Johnston again ran into difficulty when he refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary cause. For that, he was imprisoned for a time.

When the British held Newport during the early days of the war, Johnston served in various capacities in the city. When the British left, Johnston left with them. His house was confiscated. He spent a good part of his life arguing for compensation for his losses due to both the Stamp Act riot and the American Revolution.

Today the Lucas-Johnston House is privately owned.

40 Division St., Newport, R.I.

Marsh Tavern

The Equinox Hotel.

In July 1777 Vermont’s Col. William Marsh made a difficult decision. When the American Revolution broke out, Marsh had joined forces with the Green Mountain Boys. But he decided to switch sides and support the Loyalist cause.

Marsh came to Vermont from Connecticut via New York and settled in Manchester around 1765.

When war broke out he joined the Green Mountain Boys with the rank of colonel. But by 1777 he had grown uneasy by the way the Patriots harassed Loyalist Vermonters, and that prompted him to join forces with British General John Burgoyne.

Following Burgoyne’s defeat in Saratoga, the American military let Marsh return to visit family in Dorset, Vt. before his exile to Canada. During the war he acted as a diplomatic adviser and spy handler for the British. He actively lobbied to have Vermont switch sides and join with Britain.

The Vermont government confiscated and sold Marsh’s Manchester property. Marsh always retained hope that he could recover some of his property, but it did not happen. His name lives on, however, at the Equinox Golf Resort and Spa in Manchester where visitors can dine in the historic Marsh Tavern.

3567 Main St, Manchester, Vt.

Images: Lucas Johnston House By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434670; Equinox Hotel By Rolf Müller (User:Rolfmueller) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1352242. This story was updated in 2023.

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Rachel Wall, New England’s Only Lady Pirate

Rachel Wall was hanged in Boston in 1789 for stealing a bonnet, but she wanted to be hanged as a pirate.

A lady pirate

She was New England’s only woman pirate and the last woman to be hanged in Boston.

She was born Rachel Schmidt in Carlisle, Pa., around 1760, to devoutly Presbyterian parents. Rachel left home at 16 because she loved the sea and wanted to live near the waterfront.

Rachel Schmidt married George Wall, a fisherman, and traveled to New York and Philadelphia before they settled in Boston. He left her, and she worked as a maid on Beacon Hill, where, she said, she lived ‘very contented.’

George Wall returned to her and, she wrote, ‘“enticed [her] to leave [her] service and take to bad company, from which I may date my ruin.”

Rachel Wall, Pirate

The couple turned pirate in 1781. They stole a vessel, Essex, and operated near the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast. They waited for rough weather and then disguised the Essex to look as if it had been damaged by the storm. Rachel called to passing ships for help, and when they docked to the Essex the pirates stormed the ship and robbed it.

It worked for a while. They robbed 12 ships of more than $12,000 in cash and plunder and killed 24 sailors.

Then in 1782 George Wall drowned in a storm and Rachel was rescued. She went back to Boston and worked as a maid.

Rachel Wall became notorious in Boston for stealing from ships docked in Boston Harbor. She was repeatedly convicted of petty theft and larceny.

Her biggest mistake may have been choosing the wrong people to steal from. She carried away the ‘goods and chattles’ of Perez Morton, a Revolutionary patriot, a friend of John Adams, a powerful lawyer and future Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

Highway Robber

Finally her life of crime came to an end when authorities arrested her for highway robbery. On March 18, 1789, Rachel Wall suddenly accosted 17-year-old Margaret Bender ‘on the public highway’ in Boston. She took her bonnet, worth seven shillings, and put it on.

Two weeks later, a report of the crime appeared in a newspaper:

As a woman was walking alone, she was met by another woman, who seized hold of her and stopped her mouth with her handkerchief, and tore from her head her bonnet and cushion, after which she flung her down, took her shoes and buckles, and then fled. She was soon after overtaken, and committed to jail.

According to Bender family tradition, Rachel tried to pull out Margaret’s tongue. According to her grandson, “It was said that my grandmother never ceased to deplore the fact that a life was forfeited on her account.” She lived to be 72.

John Hancock

Rachel only lived to 29. On Aug. 25, 1789, she was tried by a jury before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and found guilty, despite her prominent court-appointed lawyer, Christopher Gore. During the trial she admitted to her crimes as a pirate, but denied the highway robbery.

Gov. John Hancock signed the order that Rachel Wall be hanged.

Why such a harsh punishment? The late 1780s were a time when the ruling class believed they were in the throes of an unprecedented crime wave, and responded with capital punishment, writes Gabriel Gottlieb in Theater of Death: Capital Punishment in Early America, 1750-1800.

“By then the protection of property had become the primary agenda of the death penalty in urban areas,” wrote Gottlieb.

Last Words

From the Life, Last Words and Dying Confession of Rachel Wall (1789), From the American Antiquarian Society

On Thursday, Oct. 8, 1789, Rachel Wall was hanged along with William Smith and William Dunogan on Boston Common. Thousands of men, women, and children came to watch the official procession that wound through the streets. They heard the execution sermon and the last words of Rachel Wall as she stood on the gallows.

As the noose was put around her neck, Rachel Wall proclaimed her innocence. The “witnesses who swore against [her] are certainly mistaken,” she said, but “as a dying person I freely forgive them.”’

She said she hoped “my awful and untimely fate will be a solemn warning and caution to every one, but more particularly to the Youth, especially those of my own sex.”

Her last words were

“…into the hands of the Almighty God I committ my soul, relying on his mercy…and die an unworthy member of the Presbyterian Church, in the 29th year of my age.”

This story was updated in 2022.

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Bartholomew Gosnold, the Founding Grandfather of the 13 Colonies (and Namer of Cape Cod)

When Bartholomew Gosnold and his small crew came to anchor on the Maine coast in 1602, an Indian wearing imported European shoes and pants greeted them.

‘Gosnold at Cuttyhunk, 1602’ by Albert Bierstadt, 1858

The Indian in European garb shouldn’t have surprised the British explorers. Many European visitors preceded them to the northeast coast of North America. Basque, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English fishermen and fur traders had made hundreds, if not thousands, of voyages to Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.

In 1517, 50 European ships were counted along the coast of Newfoundland. French explorer Jacques Cartier estimated he saw 1,000 Basque fishing boats off the Gaspe Peninsula in 1534. The Isles of Shoals were established as seasonal fishing and trading posts at the turn of the 17^th century, with hundreds of summer residents.

Gosnold was no unlettered workingman come to spend the warm weather months fishing or fur trading. He was an English lawyer who managed to get backing to found a year-round colony in North America. He would try and fail on Cape Cod in 1602, but his voyage had an impact still felt today.

Some historians argue that Bartholomew Gosnold prevented Spain from settling Atlantic coast, allowing the British to establish colonies instead. Dana Huntley in British Heritage argues Bartholomew Gosnold perhaps more than any other single individual is responsible for the establishment of British North America.

His history, “ought to have recognized in one sense as at least the Founding Grandfather of these fair colonies,” wrote Huntley.

Bartholomew Gosnold

Gosnold was to the manor born in 1571 in Suffolk, England. He graduated from the University of Cambridge and studied law in London. But instead of following the law, he grew fascinated by the sea and by stories of New World exploration.

John and Sebastian Cabot made landfall in Maine or the Canadian Maritimes in 1497. Giovanni Verrazzano sailed the Maine coast in 1524. Estevan Gomez became the first European tourist in Bangor in 1525.

In 1597, Bartholomew Gosnold joined the Earl of Essex’s expedition to the Azores. For about a year they privateered against the Spanish, and Gosnold made a small fortune.

In March 1602, he set sail from England in a leaky 39-foot bark, The Concord, with 32 men on board. Sailing due west from the Azores, he reached the Maine coast in May. Exactly where he landed isn’t clear, but the Indian’s clothing certainly indicated others had preceded him across the Atlantic.

An English gentleman aboard the Concord, John Brereton, kept a diary of the trip. Brereton observed the Indians they met in Mane – possibly on Cape Elizabeth or at the mouth of the Penobscot River. They had a Basque shallop with an iron grapple and an iron kettle. The Indian with the imported shoes also wore black serge breeches and a European waistcoat. Clearly the Indians had traded with European fishermen.

Gosnold aimed to be the first to explore Cape Cod, though some European fishermen may have already ventured there.

Cape Cod

The Concord skirted the Maine coastline for a few days, anchored in York Harbor, Maine, and then sailed into Provincetown Harbor. He called it Shoal Hope.

Wrote Gosnold, “Near this cape we came to fathom anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of codfish, for which we altered the name, and called it Cape Cod. Here we saw sculls of herring, mackerel, and other small fish, in great abundance.”

Bartholomew Gosnold sailed around Provincetown, and after a week reached an island he named Martha’s Vineyard, after his daughter who died in infancy. There they spent two days sampling strawberries. The Wampanoags brought them cooked fish, deerskins and tobacco, but Gosnold decided to press on.

Gosnold Monument on Cuttyhunk Island.

They sailed to Gay Head, spent the night in Vineyard Sound and continued to Buzzard’s Bay. They landed on Cuttyhunk, where they found abundant trees, herbs, fruit and, of course, fish. Most intriguing was the sassafras, then commanding a high price because it supposedly cured syphilis.

The men began building a fort, harvesting sassafras and trading with the Indians.

Bartholomew Gosnold left eight men on the island and sailed away for 72 hours – we may never know why. But three days of living off the land and a brief skirmish with Indians dissuaded them from spending the year on Cuttyhunk. Some wanted to return to England; some wanted to stay. They took a vote, and those who favored returning won.

A Short Stay

Breretron, who probably voted to stay, believed they decided to leave because of greed.

“After our bark had taken in so much sassafras, cedar, furs, skins and other commodities as were thought convenient, some of our company that had promised Captain Gosnold to stay, having nothing but a [profitable] voyage in their minds, made our company of inhabitants (which was small enough before) much smaller,” wrote Brereton.

After six weeks on Cuttyhunk, they set sail for England. A regretful Brereton wrote, ‘leaving this island (which he called Elizabeths Island) with as many true sorrowful eyes as were before desirous to see it.’

Legacy

Nonetheless, Bartholomew Gosnold’s voyage to Cape Cod left a greater legacy than people often realize.

He showed a quicker way to reach New England along his sailing route due west of the Azores. The Mayflower followed his chart 18 years later. And Brereton’s journal, published in 1602, popularized the idea of colonizing the Northeastern United States.

Back in England, Bartholomew Gosnold went to work finding backing and recruiting colonists, including John Smith, for a permanent settlement in Virginia. In 1607 he sailed to the colony called Jamestown. But then he died a few months after arriving on August 22, 1607. The colonists buried him inside the fort.

Cross marking what is believed to be Bartholomew Gosnold’s grave.

John Smith acknowledged Bartholomew Gosnold as the founder of Jamestown. He wrote that Gosnold had ‘small assistance’ and worked for many years on the venture.

King James at the time wanted to placate the Spanish, who also wished to exploit the New World. He might have let them colonize North America had Bartholomew Gosnold not prevailed. And you might be reading this in Spanish.

With thanks to The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, by Paul Schneider. This story about Bartholomew Gosnold was updated in 2022.

Images: Gosnold’s grave By Ser Amantio di Nicolao at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26639505. Bartholomew Gosnold monument By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11123218.

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