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john winthrop

Puritan Easter, or The Devil’s Holiday

John Winthrop famously wrote in his journal that the Arbella departed for the New World on Easter Monday – March 29, 1630. But the Puritan Easter would soon disappear from his records.

Portrait of John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Society. No Puritan Easter for him.

Upon arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop and his fellow Puritans took pains to avoid even mentioning the word “Easter.”

The Puritans wanted to abolish all references to pagan gods and popish rituals. The Bible didn’t mention holidays, they reasoned, so saints’ days and feast days were nothing more than Roman inventions.

“They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday,” they liked to say.

No Puritan Easter for Samuel Sewall either

Judge Samuel Sewall, the Puritan diarist born in 1652, once wrote in his journal that he’d been given an almanac. He crossed out all the papist holidays in the new book. “I blotted against Feb. 14, Valentine, March 25, Annunciation of the B. Virgin; April 24, Easter; Sept. 29, Michaelmas; Dec. 25 Christmas; and no more,” he wrote.

Puritan Easter

The early Puritans didn’t like Easter any more than they liked Christmas. They banned Christmas in 1659, fining anyone five shillings for celebrating the holiday. They ignored Easter, Whitsunday and other holidays. May Day celebrations, which included the hated Maypole, were punished severely.

The Puritans did loosen up one Anglican tradition. Unlike the Anglicans, they allowed marriage to take place during Lent. And they sometimes observed Fast Day on Good Friday.

Puritan Easter worship, without the ‘Easter.’

Easter posed a few problems, though. It always fell on a Sunday, and Puritan preachers weren’t sure what they should say in their sermons. The usual solution was to preach about something other than Easter.

They also couldn’t ignore Easter, because they determined Election Day by the Easter calendar. Election Day was actually one of the four important secular holidays the Puritans celebrated, along with Commencement Day, Thanksgiving and Training Day.

Puritans thought it unchristian to use the names of heathenish deities. For a while, they managed to abandon the word ‘Monday’ and all the rest of the days of the week, as well as the names of the months.

So Sunday, derived from the Teutonic name for its sun deity, Sonntag, became simply the first. Monday was the second, Tuesday the third, and so forth.

The Puritans also called the months by numbers, with March being the first and February the twelfth.

Eventually, the traditional names for days and months crept back into the Puritan vocabulary.

Devil on the March

Sir Edmond Andros, bigoted papist

The Puritans weren’t the only people living in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Anglicans, Huguenots and Catholics, for example, had also immigrated to the New World.

When King James II took the English throne, he consolidated the northeastern colonies. Then in 1686 he appointed Sir Edmund Andros governor of the Dominion of New England.

It wouldn’t end well. Neither James nor Andros were fans of the Puritans. And the Puritans considered Andros a “bigoted papist.”

When Andros came to Massachusetts, he restored the popish holidays, celebrated royal holidays and allowed a Maypole in Charlestown. Puritan minister Increase Mather was appalled. The devil had “begun his march of triumph,” he wrote.

The Puritans had forced Anglicans to hold services in the open air. Andros wrangled with the Puritan theocracy, and he insisted on holding Anglican services at Old South Meeting House. On Good Friday in 1687, he ordered the sexton to open the doors of Old South and ring the bell for ‘those of the Church of England.’ Whether Andros persuaded or coerced the sexton is not known, but the doors opened, the bell rang and the service went forward.

The Puritans could not forgive that particular affront. They revolted in 1689 and sent Andros packing back to England.

This story about Puritan Easter was updated in 2022.

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Six Irish Landmarks in New England

There’s more to Irish-American history than the Great Hunger, the Kennedys and ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ Irish Catholics came to New England along with the Puritans, who encouraged the Scots-Irish to settle along the frontier. You’ll find some of the earliest Irish landmarks radiating out from Boston — in Southern Maine and across the New Hampshire border, for example.

The Irish fished off the New England coast when New Hampshire and Maine belonged to Massachusetts. They built Catholic churches when Paul Revere was making bells, and they carved canals when John Quincy Adams was president. They ran the gamut of social class, from household servants to one of Ireland’s greatest philosophers, who lived in Rhode Island.

Then between 1815 and 1845, as many as 1 million Irish immigrants came to ‘Amerikay,’ looking for opportunity.

Today Irish-Americans concentrate in the Northeast, where one in five New Englanders claims Irish ancestry. Boston is the most Irish city in the country. Nearly half the residents of Scituate, Mass., along Boston’s South Shore, are of Irish descent.

Here, then, are six Irish landmarks, one for each New England state. If you know of an interesting Irish landmark, please note it in the comments section.

1. Isles of Shoals, N.H.

Detail from Isles of Shoals painting by Childe Hassam

Before England destroyed Ireland’s merchant marine, Irish merchants traded with the American colonies as early as the 1630s. Irish fishermen from Galway and Waterford settled the Isles of Shoals, an archipelago of tiny islands nine miles from the Maine and New Hampshire coast.

By 1653 Europeans built a permanent settlement on the Isles of Shoals, a thriving entrepot where they caught fish, salted it and sold it on the world market. Fishermen named Kelley, Haley and McKenna lived on the islands with their families.

By 1645 as many as 600 residents lived on Hog (now Appledore) and Smuttynose Islands in Maine. When Massachusetts annexed Maine and tried to tax the Shoalers, most of them floated their homes over to Star Island in New Hampshire.

“For many years the Islands were a little kingdom and government of themselves and had a constantly increasing prosperity,” according to Michael J. O’Brien in the Journal of the American Irish Historical Society. They were a hard-drinking lot, and John Winthrop took a dim view of them.

By 1680, Roger Kelley was chief magistrate and described as “King of the Isles” and “Captain of the Isles.” Andrew Haley was described in 1680 as “King of the Shoals.”

The islanders abandoned their home during the American Revolution, and the islands developed into a summer colony for artists and writers. Childe Hassam frequently painted them.

No manmade Irish structures remain on the islands, but on a summer’s day a trip to the Isles of Shoals is a rare delight that evokes the fishermen’s past. The Isles of Shoals Steamship Co. offers several kinds of tours of the island.

2. Whitehall, Middletown, R.I.

Whitehall today

Bishop George Berkeley had achieved celebrity as an Anglo-Irish philosopher by the time he stepped onto dry land in Newport, R.I., on Jan. 23, 1729. He came to America because he intended to open a college in Bermuda. He believed the Protestant religion had lost ground, and America was the likeliest place to make up for what went missing in Europe.

Berkeley was born in his family castle in County Kilkenny. By the time he arrived in Rhode Island, he had already established a lasting reputation as a philosopher, taken holy orders in the Church of Ireland and risen to Dean of Derry.

Berkeley and his new wife bought a farmhouse in what is now Middletown, R.I. When he enlarged the home he called Whitehall, he remodeled the door case in Palladian style, introducing Palladianism to America.

In addition to Whitehall, Berkeley left several Irish landmarks. While Berkeley awaited funds for his college to arrive, his wife gave birth to a son, who survived, and a daughter, who didn’t. They buried Lucia Berkeley in the Trinity Church yard in Newport.

Berkeley also wrote a book in America, preached at nearby churches and founded the Philosophical Society, which became the Redwood Library. Fittingly, he also wrote the poem, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.

Back to England

The money for his college never arrived, so he departed for England in September 1731. He gave his library and Whitehall to Yale College, stipulating the income from the property support three Yale scholars.

Yale then rented the building as an inn for many years. The portrait painter Gilbert Stuart’s grandfather ran it, once hosting Dr. Alexander Hamilton.

Whitehall was long neglected until 1899, when the Colonial Dames of America got a 999-year lease on it. They then commissioned Norman Isham to restore two rooms. Today it functions as the Whitehall Museum House, at 311 Berkeley Ave.

For information about visiting hours in the summer, call 401 846-3116 or email [email protected].

And yes, Berkeley, Calif., took its name from Rhode Island’s prominent visitor.

3. Lockwood-Mathews Mansion, Norwalk, Conn.

Lockwood-Mathews Mansion

Irish were scattered throughout Connecticut well before the Great Hunger and even before the American Revolution. Some came as convicts or redemptioners — indentured servants. Amos Richardson, an early settler of Stonington, Conn., in 1653 wrote that a ship bringing Irish servants to Connecticut arrived in Boston. He bought four.

Irish women outnumbered Irish men. With few skills and little money, many of them became domestic servants. The money was better than in the mills, preferred by native Protestant girls who didn’t want to work in other people’s homes.

There were thousands of Irish servants in Connecticut. In 1880, the census showed 4,789 Irish-born women domestics in Connecticut; that grew to 5,571 in 1900. Almost half were younger than 25.

In 1876, a wealthy New York family named Mathews was looking for a country retreat in Connecticut. They bought a 48,000-square-foot mansion in Norwalk because they knew they could find enough servants to maintain the home. That’s because Norwalk had a Catholic Church, St. Mary’s, which attracted many Irish parishioners. St. Mary’s had been burned by Know Nothings in 1854.

The Mathews family had 10 Irish servants by 1880. They worked 10-hour days with only Sunday mornings and an afternoon off. They cleaned the floors and walls, polished silver, lit gaslights, tended the fireplaces.

The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion is now a house museum that includes renovated servants’ quarters.

The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion is at 295 West Ave., in Mathews Park, near the Stepping Stones Museum for Children.

4. Millville, Mass.

The Millville lock, one of many Irish landmarks in the town

Irish stonemasons first came to the Blackstone River Valley around 1825 to build the Blackstone Canal, which linked Worcester with Providence. The last of the big New England canals, it had 49 locks along 45 miles long. By 1827, 1,000 Irish canal builders cut granite for locks, dug the trench and built the tow path.

Joseph Banigan created Millville’s Irish identity. Banigan fled the Irish potato famine and arrived in Rhode Island in 1847 at the age of eight. He left school at the age of nine, and before he turned 30 he raised enough money to found the Woonsocket Rubber Co., which made boots and shoes.

In 1877, he bought some rundown mills and water rights in Millville across the border in Massachusetts. He turned the complex into a state-of-the art mill, adding 80 new houses for workers and a schoolhouse – known as Banigan City and Banigan City School.

98 Percent Irish

Banigan hired hundreds of Irishmen to work at the mill. By some estimates, Millville was 98 percent Irish from the late 19^th century to the 1980s.

By 1893 Joseph Banigan was the leading importer of rubber in the United States – and Rhode Island’s first Irish-Catholic millionaire. He sold his rubber company to the U.S. Rubber Co. cartel and became president, but didn’t last long. He started the Banigan Rubber Co. in Millville.

Banigan was ruthless toward his mostly Irish labor unions, but donated millions to orphanages, hospitals, nursing homes, schools and churches. He built Providence’s first skyscraper, the Banigan Building. Banigan died unexpectedly in 1898.

Shortly after his eldest son was born in 1900, an Irish worker named Fred Hartnett moved from Woonsocket to Millville to work at the Banigan mill. The son, Charles Leo, grew up to become a Hall of Fame catcher for the Chicago Cubs. He was better known as Gabby Hartnett.

Today, some of Millville’s worker housing can be found in the Main Street Historic District of Millville, which encompasses the village center of the town. You can hike and cross country ski to the Millville Lock along the 3.7 mile Blackstone River Greenway. A section of Rte. 122 from Millville to Blackstone is dedicated to Charles Leo “Gabby” Hartnett.

5. Arthur Birthplace, Fairfield, Vt.

Chester A. Arthur’s birthplace.

Many Irish came to the United States via Canada. They’re called two boaters, and they inspired the first presidential birther controversy.

Britain had imposed tariffs to the United States, but not to Canada, to encourage immigrants to populate the commonwealth. So empty boats that brought lumber to Britain from Canada offered cheap fares on the return trip. But Canada had few jobs and business boomed in America.

The Irish came from St. Jeans by steamboat to the Vermont communities of Burlington, Plattsburg and Whitehall. Some then moved on to Fairfield, Underhill, Moretown, Middlebury and Castleton.

Nathaniel Hawthorne described the Irish in Burlington in a travel sketch in 1835. He found them everywhere lounging around the wharves, he wrote, “swarming in huts and mean dwellings near the lake,’ and ‘elbow[ing] the native citizens’ out of work.

Fairfield, Vt., a farming community, had an unusually large Irish population.

After the War of 1812, Fairfield lost its Yankee farmers to Genesee or Ohio ‘fever.’ They gave up their rocky, hilly farms for the flat, rich land of western New York and the upper Midwest. They left behind cheap land, which the Irish had craved since the English had made it nearly impossible for Catholics to own land in Ireland. Fairfield was also near Catholic churches in southern Quebec, only two towns away.

By 1840, Fairfield’s population rose to 11.5 percent Irish. Chester A. Arthur’s Irish father came to Fairfield. The future president was then born in Fairfield in 1829. That aroused the suspicion of his political enemies. Opponents accused him of being secretly Canadian.

Click here for visiting hours to the Chester A. Arthur birthplace.

6. Neal Dow House, Portland, Maine

Neal Dow house, not one of the favorite Irish landmarks

The waves of Irish who fled the Great Hunger in the mid-19^th century faced poverty, disease and discrimination. In Portland, Maine, Mayor Neal Dow didn’t just discriminate, he attacked. Dow warred against the Irish with his temperance crusade. He had, after all, called them ‘rum-swilling foreigners.’

Dow famously feuded with an Irish bootlegger and brothel owner named Mrs. Margaret Landrigan. She called herself Kitty Kentuck. A two-boater from County Cork, she arrived in Portland in the 1840s. Her husband then left her with two sons, and she began selling liquor illegally.

Kitty Kentuck bought property in Portland, but went to jail for repeated liquor offenses from 1846-1851. Neal Dow’s estranged cousin John Neal defended her, and the two men attacked each other in the newspaper. Neal called her ‘a poor, but generous, kind-hearted Irish woman.’ Dow then countered she kept ‘a notorious groggery’ that caused police more trouble than any other.

Many Irish Landmarks in Portland

Kitty remarried, continued to bootleg and ran a sailor’s boardinghouse and brothel. Every deep-sea sailor supposedly knew the lyrics to a song about the pleasures one could find at Kitty’s. She spent time in the county jail for prostitution, and her building burned in the Portland fire of 1866. She then built a shanty where she died, presumably murdered. Police suspected Kitty’s son Michael of killing her, but never charged him.

Neal Dow’s house belongs to the Portland Irish Heritage Trail at 714 Congress St. Now a house museum (click here), it’s one of 58 Irish landmarks along the trail.

Images: Whitehall PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21354546; modern Whitehall, By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23611134; Lockwood Mathews Mansion By Noroton at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6199774; Millville Lock courtesy Library of Congress. Arthur birthplace By Gerald L. Hann – camera, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37860210 This story about Irish landmarks was updated in 2023.

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Into the Trenchers: Seven Strange Facts About Dinner in Colonial New England

The colonists who first began settling in New England in the 1620s brought what furnishing they could from Europe, but they were largely on their own when it came to setting up housekeeping. As colonists sat down to dinner in colonial New England, they had functional, but primitive, surroundings.

A look around their dining room would bear little resemblance to what we see today – or even what colonists had just a few decades later.

A dinner in colonial New England: “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe

1. Napkins Aplenty

If you looked around an early colonial home, the large supply of napkins would probably surprise you. Given the meager belongings of a typical colonist, it might seem they put on quite a show in accumulating an exorbitant supply of napkins. Not so. They had plenty of napkins because they ate much of their food with their hands. Napkins were vital.

2. Spoons Featured in Dinner in Colonial New England

When not eating with their hands, colonists dined with spoons and knives. Indeed, many recipes produced stewed and soggy meat – called spoon meat – ladled up and eaten by spoon. The New England boiled dinner still occasionally appears on a restaurant menu.

new-england-living-standards-john-winthrop

Portrait of John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Society.

The colonists barely even heard of forks. Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop had the first recorded fork in America, which he obtained in 1633. Doubtless he was the envy of many.

Most families had at least one silver spoon, but generally accepted wooden spoons as tableware along with knives of varying quality.

3. Salt

One essential element at every table during dinner in colonial New England was a salt cellar or “standing salt.” A container that held salt, it indicated where you stood in the pecking order of the house based on where you ate relative to the salt.

The salt cellar could be quite large and decorative or plain and simple. The colonists placed the standing salt near one end of the table where the heads of the household sat. Important guests sat “above the salt,” meaning near the table’s head. Children and less-revered guests sat at the other end of the table, “below the salt.”

4. Into the Trenchers

The colonists consumed most of their food from a trencher – a wooden dish carved out like a trench. A larger plate – pewter or wood – would hold the main meal, and individual portions could be distributed into trenchers.

An English trencher from some time between 1500 and 1700.

Trenchers were generally oblong or square, and people ate directly from them. But you wanted to be wary of who you sat next to during dinner in colonial New England. Diners generally shared a trencher with at least one neighbor. An early Connecticut church deacon received the cold shoulder from his neighbors when he carved enough trenchers so that each of his children could have one. It was deemed excessive and showy.

5. Dinner on the Board

Dining tables were often covered with cloths similar to table cloths today. But they were called board cloths, because tables were little more than a board laid across two sets of legs.

Creating smooth lumber was a difficult task for early colonists, so boards were often rough. In some cases, boards were created from crates received from Europe. In at least one case, a colonial family constructed a thick board with trenchers carved into the top.

6. Tankards, Cups and Porringers

Glass was a rare commodity among early colonists. A bottle might be considered such a valuable item that it was mentioned in someone’s will. Many people owned silver cups, though they were a luxury and not every-day ware. Southerners generally had more silver than New Englanders.

Fancy pewter tankard

Though the wealthier New Englanders had pewter in New England, they drank from wooden vessels. The normal beverage containers included tankards constructed like small barrels, hollowed-out wooden cups and leather cups fashioned to hold liquids during dinner in colonial New England.

For other uses, many homes had porringers, small bowls, to hold soups and stews. They often had handles so they could be easily drunk from. As for how people drank their beverages, they often had a single large tankard, a small bowl really, which they passed around the table at a meal and shared, refilling as necessary.

7. Have a Seat

Seating at the earliest colonial dinners was a luxury – and not a very luxurious one at that. People squeezed in together on benches placed alongside the board. When the benches filled, guests, and usually children, had to stand during dinner in colonial New England.

Colonists did enjoy one advantage to having so few implements: It made cleanup rather quick.

Thanks to Home Life in Colonial Days, by Alice Morse Earle.

This story about colonial New England dinner was updated in 2022. Images: Pewter tankard By geni – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3790239. Trencher By David Jackson, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9977639.

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A City Upon a Hill: JFK Cribs From John Winthrop

John Winthrop was not a minister, but he preached a sermon to his Puritan followers on July 2, 1630 that went down in history as the City Upon a Hill speech.

John Winthrop. American Antiquarian Society

Winthrop delivered his sermon on July 2, 1630. He was 43 years old and he had been in the New World 18 days. His second son, Henry, had just drowned, and another Puritan ship, the Talbot, had arrived after 14 passengers died during the voyage.

Winthrop hadn’t left the Arbella when he delivered his sermon. In it, he listed the qualities he hoped the Puritan colonists would show to the world: communal charity, affection and unity.

He called it ‘A Model of Christian Charity.’ He had no idea that another 43-year-old – a U.S. senator about to become president of the United States — would repeat his words. From on top of a hill.

City Upon a Hill

“For we must consider that we shall be as a City Upon a Hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us.”

Kennedy delivers the City Upon a Hill speech

Three hundred thirty one years would pass before President-elect John F. Kennedy climbed the Massachusetts Statehouse steps on top of Beacon Hill to deliver his farewell speech to the General Court.

He had flown into Boston the day before and spent the night in the small Beacon Hill apartment that had served as his official home since 1946.

In 11 days he would take the oath of office as president of the United States. He had already orchestrated the ceremony: Robert Frost would read a poem and Marian Anderson would sing the Star-Spangled Banner. He chose formalwear for men and the Fitzgerald family Bible for swearing the oath.

On January 9, 1961, Kennedy met with the Harvard Board of Overseers to banter with students. He then drove back to Boston to deliver his first speech since the election.

He entered the Massachusetts House of Representatives chamber to thunderous applause. And then he delivered his famous City Upon a Hill speech.

Too Good?

Kennedy said Massachusetts had always been his home, whether he’d been in Washington, London or the South Pacific (carefully omitting the years his family lived in New York). It wasn’t provincial pride, he said, that caused him to hope his grandchildren would be born in the commonwealth. It was the contribution Massachusetts made to the nation’s greatness.

“The enduring qualities of Massachusetts—the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant—will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation’s executive mansion,” he said.

“They are an indelible part of my life, my convictions, my view of the past, and my hopes for the future.”

Kennedy reminded his audience that history would judge public servants on their courage, judgment, integrity and dedication.

“We must always consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”

Afterward, people compared the speech to Abraham Lincoln’s farewell to the citizens of Springfield, Ill. Kennedy fretted that it was too good, that it would overshadow his inaugural address.

It didn’t.

JFK inauguration

The inaugural speech included the famous line that every Baby Boomer knows by heart:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

To read the whole City on a Hill speech, click here. To hear the speech, click here. And to watch part of the speech on youtube, click here.

With thanks to Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America By Thurston Clarke and John Winthrop: Colonial Governor of Massachusetts, by Michael Burgan. This story was updated in 2022.

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When Cleveland Belonged to Connecticut

The City of Cleveland and nearly all of Northeastern Ohio once belonged to Connecticut. The land, 3.5 million acres of it, was called the Western Reserve.

It’s why a university in Cleveland is called Case Western Reserve. Towns in Northeastern Ohio have Connecticut names like Norwich, Saybrook, New London, Litchfield, Mansfield and Plymouth. Some of those towns even have New England-style commons and white meetinghouses.

Cleveland-area schoolchildren, at least the ones paying attention, know well the story of Connecticut pioneer Moses Cleaveland. He brought 50 men and women to the shores of Lake Erie in 1796. Less well known is how Connecticut got the land in the first place.

Colonial Imperialism

Moses Cleaveland

For a small colony, Connecticut had big ambitions. It wanted to own parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and much of America’s western frontier – all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

So in 1662, Connecticut’s governor John Winthrop the Younger went to England with the draft of a charter extending the colony’s lands and political rights. He intended to present it to King Charles II and ask for his approval and royal signature.

He had a little problem, though. Connecticut’s Puritans had supported Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. Cromwell deposed Charles’ father, King Charles I. A panel of 59 commissioners – ‘king killers’ – sat in judgment of Charles and signed his death warrant. He was beheaded in 1649. Eleven years later, Charles II returned to the throne and sought revenge on the men who ordered his father’s execution. He had Cromwell’s body dug up and his head cut off for display outside the palace.

Three king killers fled to America, where they found refuge in New Haven. Because of that, Winthrop knew Charles had attitude about Connecticut.

When Winthrop arrived in England, he got an audience with the King. At the start of the interview, Winthrop showed him ‘a rich, massive gold finger-ring.’ The King’s father had given it to his own father, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop, ‘as a mark of honor for valuable political services.’ The gesture moved Charle to tears.

So Charles granted Connecticut a charter extending its north and south boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. No one really knew how much land that meant. That was the same charter hidden in the Charter Oak when Gov. Edmund Andros tried to seize it.

Western Reserve

In Ohio, the Western Reserve was a 120-mile strip of land from Lake Erie to a line just south of what is now Akron and Youngstown.

At the western end of the Reserve, 500,000 acres were set aside for people whose homes were burned by British troops during the American Revolution. The land was called the Firelands and the Sufferers’ Lands. Most of the fire victims sold their claims to land speculators. Few ever settled in the Firelands.

After the American Revolution, Connecticut gave up some of its land to the federal government in exchange for its war debt, but it hung on to the Western Reserve.

Map of the Western Reserve

Meanwhile, prominent and wealthy men formed the Connecticut Land Company to buy the Western Reserve and divide it into lots.

Most of them came from the Town of Suffield, which once belonged to Massachusetts. The speculators included:

Peleg Sanford, the grandson of Anne Hutchinson and later governor of the Colony of Rhode Island.
Pierpont Edwards, the son of minister Jonathan Edwards, uncle of Aaron Burr and ancestor of J. P. Morgan.
Aaron Olmsted, a sea captain who made his fortune in the China trade.
Moses Cleaveland, an able and energetic lawyer and surveyor who had served in the American Revolution.

Sometime around 1795, Connecticut sold the Western Reserve to the Connecticut Land Company for $1,200,000. Cleaveland was sent to survey the land into townships and negotiate with the Indians who lived there.

Becoming Cleveland

Cleveland Skyline

Moses Cleaveland brought a surveying party of 50 with him. Some traveled on horseback, some by boats. The arrived at the mouth of Conneaut Creek and Lake Erie on July 4, 1796.

The group then celebrated its arrival in what would become Cleveland with toasts to the president of the United States, the state of New Connecticut and the Connecticut Land Company.

Then they wished the ‘Port of Independence and the 50 sons and daughters who have entered it this day be successful and prosperous.”

“May these 50 sons and daughters multiply in 16 years 16 times 50,” they toasted. And they wished every person ‘have his bowsprit trimmed and ready to enter every port that opens.”

They then gave three cheers, drank several pails of grog and went to bed.

Cleaveland Becomes Cleveland

On July 22, Cleaveland landed at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. He climbed the bank and saw a beautiful plain that looked like a good place for a city. So he paced out a 10-acre town common that is now Public Square. His followers called the place Cleaveland.

Moses Cleaveland then returned to Connecticut and died there some years later. He never returned to the Western Reserve.

There are several stories about how Cleaveland became Cleveland. One says a newspaper editor in 1830 discovered that ‘Cleaveland’ was too long for a headline, so he left out the ‘a.’ Another is that Cleaveland’s surveyors spelled it Cleveland on the original map.

In 1800, Connecticut finally gave up its sovereignty over the Western Reserve. Ohio then became a state in 1803.

Map: CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1290884. Photo of Cleveland: By No machine-readable author provided. Avogadro94~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1061960

This story was updated in 2022.

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6 Historic Stagecoach Stops You Can Visit

The history of New England’s post roads and their stagecoach stops mirror the history of the country. The roads date back to the Pequots who used the trails that grew into the post roads for generations. The same trails carried John Winthrop on his journeys from Boston to Springfield.

Traffic on the roads shrank as King Philip’s War turned them into dangerous gauntlets. They expanded again as the war ended and horses made travel more enticing and the mails more efficient.

The heyday of the stagecoaches in the 1800s really drove a blossoming of the post roads. They grew from the first Upper Post Road into a maze of roads that wound their way into every corner of New England.

These stagecoaches created economic booms wherever they went, bringing commerce as well as jobs. Stagecoach stops, needed every 12 to 20 miles or so, were essential, especially in the early days of the stagecoach era. These inns provided income to their owners, and many others: drivers, ticket agents, coach makers, blacksmiths, stable hands and farmers.

Today, the vestiges of the stagecoach era remain with us. Many of the roads New Englanders travel today were once used by the stagecoaches. And along those roads, some of the old stagecoach stops still serve up food, drink and comfort to the weary traveler.

Here are six still open to the public today, one in each New England state:

Old Riverton Inn

The Old Riverton Inn, one of Connecticut’s many, many stagecoach stops back in the day.

Several years before the American Revolution, stagecoaches and stagecoach stops appeared on the Upper Post Road from New York to Boston, and from Hartford to Norwich and Providence. The war interrupted service, but resumed when it wound down. Stagecoach service expanded quickly on the new turnpike roads and postal routes.

Levi Pease began a stage service between New York and Boston on the Upper Post Road. He got the mail contract for all of New England from the U.S. Congress in 1789. Then he expanded his business into Northern New England and to Albany.

By 1827 Connecticut had 26 stage routes. By then it took only 36 hours to travel between New York and Boston vs. the previous six days. Taverns were generally 12 to 18 miles apart. Drivers announced their arrival at stagecoach stops by blowing on a trumpet.

During the early part of the 19^th century, Connecticut developed the most complex network of toll roads in New England. The state had few centers of wealth like Providence or Boston, and market towns competed fiercely for the trade of the back country. Between 1792 and 1839, 1,600 miles of turnpike road were created in Connecticut. The Talcott Mountain Turnpike was a key part of the route from Hartford to Albany.

Jess Ives opened the Ives Tavern or Ives Hotel in 1796 along the Hartford-to-Albany Route in Riverton, Conn. Today it’s known as the Old Riverton Inn and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It overlooks a wild and scenic section of the Farmington River.

The artist who painted murals on the walls of the Hobby Horse Bar also painted murals for the 1936 New York World’s Fair. The inn features bar stools made of saddles on kegs.

For more information about the Old Riverton Inn, click here.

Coach Stop Inn

The Coach Stop Inn, one of the stagecoach stops along the way from Bar Harbor to Maine’s interior.

Stagecoach lines began regular service between Maine towns after the Revolutionary War. The first stages ran between Portland and Portsmouth, N.H., a journey that took three days in 1787. By 1825, a stage could make the journey between Bangor and Portland in 36 hours.

The Coach Stop Inn in Bar Harbor was built in 1804 for newcomers who came to build homes, farms and ships on Mount Desert Island. Known as the Halfway Tavern, it often hosted sailors in the early days. Patrons would arrive by sea and take a stagecoach from the tavern into Maine’s interior towns.

Wealthy patrons charmed by fresh air, beautiful scenery and hiking trails made Bar Harbor a fashionable summer resort during the Gilded Age. In 1947, a fire that burned much of Maine also destroyed some of Bar Harbor’s hotels and mansions. The oldest hotel to survive the fire is now the Coach Stop Inn, a luxurious bed and breakfast.

For more information, click here.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn

The most famous of the stagecoach stops, The Wayside Inn.

The Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., boasts that it’s the oldest operating inn in the United States. It has accommodated travelers along the Boston Post Road since 1716. Just a few miles down the road from historic Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, it began life 300 years ago as Howe’s Tavern. David Howe ran it as an extension of his own home.

David handed the property to his son Ezekial – a soldier in Sudbury’s militia during the American Revolution. The Howe family continued to operate and expand the inn until 1861, serving traffic between Worcester and Boston.

The inn stopped operating as a traditional inn in 1861. The owners converted it into something more like a boarding house and dance hall.

But in 1862, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sealed the inn’s place in history. Longfellow visited the building and published his now-famous Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. From that time on, the inn was the destination of tourists and literary pilgrims who wanted to see first-hand the inspiration for Longfellow’s book.

In 1923, the inn took another important step into immortality when automobile magnate Henry Ford bought the property. Ford then began the restoration and expansion that gave shape to the inn’s current configuration.

For more information, click here.

Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern

The Coach Stop, one of New Hampshire’s many stagecoach stops in the early 19th century.

In 1786 the legislature in New Hampshire expanded the system of post roads to travel to four sections of the state. Though the earlier post roads moved mail and people between Portsmouth and some points west and north, only later did the routes reach deep into the western portion of the state.

One such line ran from Portsmouth across the state’s southern tier over to Amherst and back, creating the need for taverns and inns along the way.

Londonderry’s Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern began life in 1810 as the home of the town’s doctor. Later in the 1800s it was maintained as Plummer’s Tavern, located at the junction of two post roads. One carried coaches east and west to Nashua and the other carried traffic north and south to Manchester and Concord. For a map of all stagecoach lines operating in New Hampshire in 1833, click here.

Today the restaurant and inn maintains much of its historical charm, with signs of the original elements of its days as a coach stop remaining intact.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach House Inn

The Stagecoach House Inn, for many years one of the stagecoach stops along the New London Turnpike.

Settlers first came to Wyoming, a historic village in Richmond, Rhode Island, in 1757. Wyoming grew and prospered when the Brand’s Iron Works was founded across the Wood River in Hopkinton in 1787. Sometime around 1800, an inn was built at a strategic crossroads in Wyoming.

Textile mills sprang up in the area, and in 1815 the New London Turnpike opened right past the inn. The new road brought stagecoach riders between Richmond and New London, Connecticut

By 1835, the New London Turnpike – now Route 3 – connected Providence and New London. It proved to be faster and more direct than the Old Post Road, which followed the coastal route. The village thrived, and for many years an inn once known as Dawley Tavern continued as a stagecoach stop.

By the 20^th century, industry began to founder along the Wood River. That, however, allowed Hopkinton and Wyoming to retain much of their historic 19^th century character. The National Register of Historic Places lists almost a square mile of the two villages as the Wyoming Village Historic District. It includes the old ironworks, Greek Revival, Late Victorian, and Federal architecture in both Wyoming and Hopkinton.

Today the Dawley Tavern is called the Stagecoach House Inn at 1136 Main Street.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach Inn

The Stagecoach Inn, a fitting name for one of Vermont’s old stagecoach stops.

At the start of the 19th century, ancient footpaths connected Burlington and Montpelier in Vermont. In 1805, the 36-mile Winooski Turnpike along the Winooski River was chartered to connect the two major towns.

The old Winooski Turnpike turned into U.S. Route 2, the main highway connecting the White Mountains to the Adirondacks. It cuts through Waterbury, the town where Ben and Jerry’s make their ice cream.

In 1826 either a Mr. Parmalee or a lawyer named Dan Carpenter had a structure built on the corner of the Winooski Turnpike and what is now Route 100. The building served as a tavern and inn for travelers and as a meeting place for locals.

By the mid-1800s, a farming family named the Henrys owned the inn. Their eccentric daughter Nettie married an Ohio rubber baron, Albert Spencer. Nettie smoked cigarettes, chewed tobacco and wore a celluloid eyeshade. She expanded and improved the old family house in Queen Anne Style.

Nettie Spencer died in 1947. The home was later run as a rooming house and fell into disrepair. A young couple from Boston bought the property in 1985 and rebuilt the house. Today it’s the Old Stagecoach Inn, a historic bed-and-breakfast in the center of downtown Waterbury.

For more information about the Stagecoach Inn click here.

This story about New England stagecoach stops was updated in 2021. If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about six Revolutionary taverns here.

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