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Keene NH

George Dilboy, Greek Lad, Wipes Out a German Machine Gun Nest

Gen. John Pershing called him one of the 10 greatest heroes of World War I. The City of Somerville, Mass., remembers him with a bust, an athletic field and a stadium. Three presidents honored him. So who was George Dilboy?

He was a 22-year-old Greek-American who died heroically at Belleau Wood in France. He had already fought in four wars on three continents when he fell while wiping out a German machine gun nest.

His commanding officer called the feat one of the most impressive sights he had seen. And the desecration of his grave created an international incident.

George Dilboy

George Dilboy was born Feb. 5, 1896 in Alatsata near Smyrna in what is now Turkey. He had six brothers and two sisters. As his father later said, they felt Turkish persecution. The family began immigrating to the United States.

George and one of his brothers arrived in Somerville, Mass., in 1908, to join their father. George went to school, and got a job in the laundry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also worked as a busboy at the Georgian Café. At the age of 16 he returned to his native land and fought for Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

George Dilboy

Then he came back to the United States, where he went to work at the Copley Square Hotel. However the summer heat forced the hotel to close. So he found a job working in a shoe factory in Keene, N.H. There he enlisted in the New Hampshire National Guard in June 1916. As a guardsman he served in the Mexican border campaign. Then in 1917, he joined the Army’s 103rd Infantry Regiment, 26th Division.—known as the Yankee Division.

George Dilboy undoubtedly had more battlefield experience than most of the men who enlisted as National Guardsmen in the Yankee Division.

The Western Front

Sent to France in the fall of 1917, the Yankee Division fought German attacks in the spring. On July 18, 1918, his company had orders to control the Bouresches railway station as part of the Allied counteroffensive at Belleau Wood.

Marines fighting in Belleau Wood

According to the New York Times, Nov. 5, 1923, German machine guns were punishing Dilboy’s platoon. His lieutenant started to go to the front to see how this nest could be flanked. A young lad with an automatic rifle jumped up and said: “Lieutenant, I can wipe out these men.”

The lieutenant answered, “Go ahead.”

Dilboy threw himself flat and wriggled through a wheat field, killing several machine gunners with automatic fire. A German sniper shot him twice, but he kept going. When he reached the machine gun nest he found two remaining Germans. He then stood up and received a burst from the machine guns, which cut off his right leg. Dilboy fell on his back and pushed himself forward with his left foot. He turned his head, aimed and killed the two men.

“Lying on his back, with his right hand uppermost, the lad motioned to his platoon to go forward, and died with a smile on his face,” the Times reported.

They buried his body on the battlefield, now the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, along with 2,000 marines and soldiers who gave their lives in the victory at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery

Medal of Honor

Col. S.M. Shumway, his commanding officer, said,

It was one of the most impressive sights I experienced in the War. George Dilboy died facing the enemy, carrying on as long as there was the faintest whiff of breath in his body. He routed the enemy alone. He was as fine a soldier as ever served under the Stars and Stripes.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the authorization to award George Dilboy the Medal of Honor. In January 1919 the medal was presented to his father, Antonios Dilboy. “We came to this country from Smyrna, where my boy and other children were born,” he said. “We know and have felt the persecutions of Turkey.”

At his father’s request, George’s body was moved to his home town of Alatsata. Seventeen thousand people were said to have lined the streets watching his coffin carried into the church.

Desecration

But in 1922, Turkish troops occupied Alatsata. They broke open his coffin, scattered his bones and stole the flag.

The grave desecration infuriated President Warren G. Harding, who sent the USS Litchfield to bring back Dilboy’s remains. Harding also demanded an apology from Turkey. A Turkish guard of honor brought the boy’s remains to the battleship, with a new U.S. flag.

On Nov. 12, 1923, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. President Calvin Coolidge presided at the ceremony.

Headstone of George Dilboy at Arlingtonn National Cemetery.

Somerville named an athletic field and stadium after him. The stadium fell into disrepair, so the city rebuilt it in 2008. A bust honoring him stands in front of Somerville City Hall. VFW posts in Keene and Somerville were named after him.

He is believed to be the first Greek-American to win the Medal of Honor.

With thanks to Carved in Stone: The Story of George Dilboy by Richard Rozakis.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery By US gov – https://web.archive.org/web/20050405022608/http://www.abmc.gov/images/am1w.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6986605. George Dilboy headstone: By Arlington National Cemetery – http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ANCExplorer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44946194. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Massachusetts Camouflage School that Taught How To Razzle-Dazzle

In 1917, the U.S. government set up a camouflage school for women artists in Marshfield Hills, Mass. About five dozen women artists came to the month-long training camp to learn how to camouflage cars, locomotives and battleships. Their work would help save lives on the European front and in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic during World War I.

Painting of the Mauretania in razzle-dazzle

Camouflage was a very big deal during that war, though deception had been part of armed conflict since the Trojan Horse. But not until World War I did camouflage become an official branch of warfare. Architects, artists, cabinetmakers, stage designers, carpenters, ironworkers, chemists – and women artists — brought camouflage to a new level.

The so-called camoufleurs designed uniforms that disguised soldiers as rocks, as sky, as ice. They painted designs on guns and covered them with camouflaged nets to hide them from aerial surveillance. And they tried to make artillery emplacements invisible to the enemy.

Camouflage perhaps reached its apogee with razzle-dazzle battleships, a technique the women were to learn at the Marshfield camouflage school. They painted bold geometric designs onto 1,250 US. battleships, no two alike, to confuse the German U-boats about where to aim torpedoes.

RMS Mauretania painted in dazzle. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The fantastic razzle-dazzle designs inspired none other than Picasso to claim the Cubist school of art invented the technique. Artists from the camouflage school left their mark on New England in ways that can still be seen.

Roots of the Camouflage School

A Dublin, N.H., painter better known for his angels made key advances in the science of camouflage. Abbott Handerson Thayer, an ardent outdoorsman, studied animals’ protective coloring. He and his son Gerald in 1909 wrote and illustrated an influential book called Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. The book discussed disruptive patterning (they called it ‘razzle-dazzle’), which breaks up an animal’s outlines. The Thayers also wrote about masquerade, as when a creature mimics something in its environment. And they described countershading, such as the white undersides of animals that make them seem less round and less solid.

Illustration from the Thayers’ book, showing a concealed ruffed grouse.

Abbott Thayer and his friend, fellow Dublin artist George de Forest Brush, proposed camouflaging ships during the Spanish-American War. They failed to interest the military. Theodore Roosevelt later mocked Thayer’s theories about camouflage, calling him ‘a poor lunatic goose.’

But Thayer’s ideas about camouflage reached across the Atlantic. For a time, it seemed, every country adapted his ideas about the strange art of Yankee origin — except for the United States.

Norman Wilkinson, a British artist who served in the Royal Navy Reserves, read the Thayers’ book. During World War I, he served on submarine patrol. When German U-boats began sinking British ships with abandon, Wilkinson suggested using razzle-dazzle camouflage to confuse the Germans.

Template for a razzle-dazzle design on a warship. Courtesy National Archives.

In the summer of 1917, Wilkinson took charge of a special Dazzle Section for the Royal Academy of Art. In a year or so, the Dazzle Section painted about 2,300 battleships in bright abstract patterns. (To see templates for the designs, click here. They’re fascinating.)

Norman Wilkinson painting of a battleship painted in a dazzle design, 1918.

The French had also formed a special camouflage unit in 1915, and called its artists camoufleurs. They, too, painted thousands of battleships in dazzle patterns. And in In Australia and New Zealand, women made camouflage nets to disguise guns from the enemy’s aerial photographers.

Back in the USA

Before the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, a younger generation of U.S. artists began to promote the art of camouflage. They formed the New York Camouflage Society, a group that included Gerald Thayer, Thayer’s cousin Barry Faulkner, Brush’s son Gerome and Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of the Cornish, N.H., sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

They offered their services to the War Department. As usual, the War Department didn’t have much interest. But by the end of July, a military mission sent to Europe recommended the Army Corps of Engineers create a 260-man “camouflage park.” In September, the first recruits reported to camp in Washington, D.C. By December, the camoufleurs had their own section, Company A of the 40th Engineers.

Camouflaging artillery in World War I.

They shipped off to France on January 4, 1918. Barry Faulkner spent the rest of the war in France, camouflaging artillery and machine gun positions.

Upon his return to the States, Faulkner painted murals, most notably the ‘Faulkner Murals,’ which adorn the rotunda of the National Archives. He also painted murals in the Senate Chamber in the New Hampshire Statehouse, Hartford’s Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, and the old John Hancock building in Boston.

Dazzled by the Faulkner Murals at the National Archives.

Camouflage School

When the male camoufleurs went off to war, the ladies took over at home.

On Dec. 3, 1917, newspapers picked up a wire service report that reported about the camouflage school.

“An appeal has been issued to women artists urging them to enroll in a camp for the training of women camouflage workers,” it said. Seventy-five women had already joined and as many as four a day were signing up. Camouflage school would last as long as six months. Before they arrived, the women were urged to practice at home by painting sailcloth with house paint.

As the men before them did, some of the women migrated south to New York City from New England. In 1918, the Army formed the American Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps.

The women worked on camouflage uniforms, trying them out in Van Cortlandt Park and Kykuit, a Rockefeller estate, just north of New York City. Disguised as rocks and trees, they often fooled visitors. One police officer told a journalist in 1918, he knew they were there, “but ye can’t see thim till they move.”

Now you see her…

Now you don’t.

The military soon learned of the public attraction for razzle-dazzle camouflage. Women went to work painting crazy patterns on tanks, ambulance and trucks for parades and other wartime events.

One of those women, Edith Barry, grew up in a wealthy New Jersey family but summered in Kennebunkport. Before the war, she studied painting and sculpture at the Art Students League in New York and abroad, in Paris, Rome, Austria and Spain.

Edith Barry, self-portrait.

Razzle-Dazzle

Barry painted portraits and landscapes, at least until 1918 when she started painting razzle-dazzle camouflage onto military vehicles in New York City. She belonged to a group of camoufleurs who painted bold abstract patterns onto a replica battleship in Union Square.

Women artists painting a replica warship in Union Square. Photo courtesy National Archives.

The ship attracted a great deal of public attention. That, after all, was the point of the exercise as the razzle-dazzle ship served as a recruiting station.

The razzle-dazzle battleships also enjoyed popularity among critics, who compared them with crazy quilts at a county fair, a Russian toy shop gone mad and a flock of sea-going Easter eggs. Those critics failed to understand the purpose of the razzle-dazzle: to deceive the eyes about the speed and direction of the ship.

Since then, scientists have tried to ascertain whether the razzle-dazzle camouflage really protected battleships.

The Brick Store Museum..

At war’s end, Edith Barry resumed her art and her world travels. She painted a mural in the Kennebunk post office in 1939 as part of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. Also during the Great Depression she inherited a historic brick building in Kennebunk. She turned it into the Brick Store Museum in 1936. Dedicated to the history of the Kennebunks, it was one of the few museums founded during the Depression.

With thanks to the Camoupedia blog and Camoupedia, by Roy Behrens.

Images: Edith Barry portrait: By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54578744; Brick Store Museum, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18018629. This story was updated in 2022.

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Dutch Elm Disease, the Nightmare on Elm Street

When Dutch elm disease first appeared in southwestern Connecticut, horrified New Englanders responded immediately to save their beloved elms, state agriculture experts wrote in 1935.

“Any disease that threatens the existence of the American elm strikes very deeply in the hearts of all New Englanders,” begins a 1935 pamphlet about the disease published by the Connecticut Agricultural Station.

A surviving New Haven elm

New Englanders have cherished the elm ever since Connecticut and Massachusetts colonists began planting rows of them in the 1750s.

In the mid-19^th century, village improvement societies planted thousands of the stately, fast growing trees. In the summer, their leafy branches formed a cathedral-like canopy over village greens and city streets.

But planting so many of one kind of tree created a monoculture that carried the seeds of its own destruction. The long rows of trees could not resist the pests and diseases that lurked in logs that came from overseas. So when Dutch elm disease arrived, it spread rapidly through those long lines of elms.

The Noble Elm

The map of New England is full of reminders of the elm’s glory days. Three cities – New Haven, Keene, N.H., and Waterville, Maine – call themselves Elm City. Worcester, Mass., has Elm Park. Elm Street in Manchester, N.H., functions as the city’s main thoroughfare. More towns in New England probably have an Elm Street than don’t.

Elm-lined street in Salem, Mass.

And it wasn’t just the manmade elm forests New Englanders loved. Individual trees reached iconic status, most notably, Boston’s Liberty Tree, a white elm. Massachusetts also had the Knight elm in Newburyport, the Howard elm in Ware and the Washington elm in Cambridge.

The Liberty Tree was an elm

In Providence, Elmo stood in front of Brown University’s Watson Institute until Dutch elm disease got it in 2003. Yarmouth, Maine, had a beloved champion elm called Herbie, which succumbed to the disease in 2010.

In 1758, an elm tree was planted in Wethersfield, Conn., which grew into the ‘most magnificent tree east of the Rockies.’

Writers waxed elegiac. New England’s elms, wrote Henry Ward Beecher, are ‘as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.’’ Even the American Forestry Association found its poetic voice in a pamphlet: “On the rockbound coast of New England was founded a friendship between tree and man that has endured for more than three hundred years.

“…So deep became this companionship that when the settlers moved westward beyond the natural range of the elm, they took the tree with them to share their fortunes.”

Towns began naming Elm streets all the way to California.

The Enemy Within

At the height of their glory in 1937, America had 25 million elm trees. But their enemy — Dutch elm disease — had already begun burrowing beneath the bark. The trees just couldn’t resist them.

Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus that attacks the tree’s circulatory system. Certain kinds of elm bark beetle spread it, mostly through the root systems.

Dutch Elm Disease

By the time America sank into the Great Depression, Dutch elm disease had struck in Cleveland. The silent killer had arrived in 1930 on a shipment of logs destined for an Ohio furniture factory. Within two years, Dutch elm disease was killing elm trees in New Jersey.

Connecticut, the gateway to New England, stood between the elm belt to the north and east and the territory where Dutch elm disease started to spread.

The first case of Dutch elm disease appeared in Connecticut in November 1933 in Glenville, where Westchester County in New York joins Fairfield County.

Herbie

Fearing the tree’s extinction, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quickly set up an office to fight the enemy in Stamford. USDA scouts hired men from President Franklin Roosevelt’s new Civil Works Administration to survey elms in Fairfield County.

FDR to the Rescue

Roosevelt, an ardent dendrophile, eventually put thousands of young men to work planting and saving trees as part of his New Deal. Later the Civilian Conservation Corps took part in the fight against Dutch elm disease.

In the fall of 1934 Connecticut began its own survey. Six men traveled the main highways into every town in the state. They inspected 90,000 trees and designated 1,977 as possible victims of Dutch elm disease. Only one had it. However, many of the trees were in poor health and thus susceptible to infestation.

The New England states formed committees to rouse public sentiment on Dutch elm disease. They advised citizens to cut dead or dying parts of trees and burn them, while keeping their healthy trees in good condition by watering, fertilizing and spraying them.

The Hurricane of 1938

For the next few years, federal workers employed by New Deal agencies scouted diseased trees, cut them down and burned them. But Congress only funded the fight against Dutch elm disease in fits and starts, so the disease spread whenever funding dried up.

The disease found another ally when the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 wiped out millions of trees. The storm barreled through New Haven, Hartford, Springfield and Keene. The storm blew down millions of trees, and for years the elm bark beetles feasted and multiplied on the elm blowdowns.

Woodpile cut from blowdowns from the 1938 hurricane.
Photo courtesy National Archives.

In 1941, Massachusetts reported its first case of Dutch elm disease.

World War II

But then the United States entered World War II, and fighting the Axis powers took priority over fighting Dutch elm disease.

New Haven Green. A 1900 guide, Trolley trips through New England, takes the reader to the corner of New Haven Green. “This plot, with its old elms, fluttering doves, three church spires, and the half-hidden rampart of the college beyond, lends to the city an unforgettable note of peace. It is the most characteristic public square in New England.”

By 1952, the disease had spread throughout New England. Nearly all of New Haven’s elms had died. The Wethersfield elm succumbed in 1953 after reaching 30 feet in circumference and a height of 100 feet.

During the war, however, the U.S. military discovered a nifty new pesticide called DDT. It sprayed the stuff on South Pacific islands to kill malaria-breeding mosquitos. After the war, municipalities began to spray DDT on elm trees to try to save them.

Silent Spring

But then in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out. In the book, she not only warned of the dangers of DDT, she showed it didn’t kill the elm bark beetle.

“Hundreds of towns were killing thousands or millions of birds while not protecting their elms,” wrote Charles F. Wurster, founder of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Silent Spring had a huge impact, especially on New England’s college campuses, according to Thomas Campanella in Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm. When the Williamstown, Mass., tree warden tried to spray the town’s elms, Amherst students rocked his spray truck or lay down in front of it.

Silent Spring is still in pr int

In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT. By the end of the 1970s, Dutch elm disease had wiped out much of New England’s manmade elm forest. According to one estimate, the disease had killed 40 million elms since its arrival in Cleveland in 1930.

Some towns, like Castine and Blue Hill in Maine, were lucky. For some reason, their elm trees escaped the blight.

The Liberty Elm

The elm needed a new approach if it was to survive. In 1967, the Elm Research Institute formed to ‘rally support from the private sector’ for Dutch elm disease research in Keene. The ERI, one of several organizations dedicated to saving the elm, has developed varieties of the tree it calls Liberty elms, more resistant to Dutch elm disease. By 2000, it had planted 250,000 Liberty elms.

Several other varieties and hybrids that resist Dutch elm disease are being developed. The USDA has found people can sometimes save infected trees by pruning and burning infected areas and injecting the tree with a fungicide.

Dutch elm disease, however, is still a threat today.

Surviving New Haven elm: By Msact – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65161929; New Haven Green By Internet Archive Book Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14592924868/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/trolleytripsthro01hart/trolleytripsthro01hart#page/n19/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43213194. Herbie, By Dudesleeper – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3924123. Silent Spring By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48694009. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Sears Houses

In the early part of the 20^th century, you could buy Sears houses for the price of a good pair of shoes today.

Times certainly changed. In 2005, a high-end Sears home sold for $900,000.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 100,000 kit houses from catalogs between 1908 and 1942. They were shipped by rail, with pre-cut lumber stamped for assembly. The company promised a man of average abilities that he could finish the house within 90 days — if he followed the 75-page instruction book.

Sears Houses

Sears got into the business of catalog homes because its building products division was losing money. Frank W. Kushel, who managed the company’s china department, was given the task of turning around building products. He suggested the company sell entire houses in 22 styles and ship them from the factory.

Sears copied the popular housing styles of the day, which included colonial revival features taken from historic New England homes. There’s even one model called The Puritan.

Sears marketed the houses as ‘machine made’ with already cut lumber. “No waste, no mistakes, no big labor bills,” read the catalog copy.

The kits came with nails, shingles, shellac, windows, doors, trim hardware, paint and downspouts. They did not include cement, bricks or plaster. Materials for indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating had to be bought separately.

By 1920, Sears was shipping an average of 125 houses a month. Nine years later, Sears sent 250 houses each month from just one of its four plants. The company boasted it was the world’s largest home builder.

Sears also financed home purchases, and half its homes were tied up in mortgage loans by the time of the Great Depression. The company lost $11 million on defaulted mortgages in 1934, and by 1940 it was out of the house business.

Hamden, Conn.

The C225

Realtors say a Sears house can sell for more because of the enduring quality of the materials and construction.

Sears homes were built throughout Connecticut. In Hartford alone there are dozens, but they are also in Putnam, Hamden, Canton, Shelton, Bethel, Plainville and Torrington.

The 1916 Sears catalog featured testimonials from two men who bought Sears houses in Connecticut.

D.G. Arnold wrote he was ‘well pleased’ with his home, Modern Home No. 119, in Putnam, Conn.

“All the rough lumber, doors, windows, clapboards, flooring, moldings and stairs, in fact everything required to finish a first class house, came from Sears, Roebuck and Co. at a savings of about $500, as compared with local prices,” he wrote. “My builder says he never used better finish and he has had fifty years’ experience.”

L.S. Chapman from Shelton wrote to say he saved several hundred dollars and found the materials better than expected. “Our house, No. C225, is beautiful.

The cottage at Lockwood Farm in Hamden is a Sears house. So are the Cello House, the Viola House and the Second Fiddle House at the Music Mountain in Falls Village, Canaan.

Sears didn’t make all pre-cut houses. There were actually six large companies that made kit houses, but none had the marketing clout of Sears and its famous catalog. Another company, Aladdin, sold enough homes to the Bristol Brass. Co. in 1916 to fill four blocks near the factory in Bristol, Conn.

Bucksport, Maine

The entrance to the Sears Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the Perkins House in Castine, Maine.

Identifying Sears houses has become a cottage industry for fanatics who produce books, blogs, documentaries and even bus tours by the Smithsonian Associates.

Sears enthusiasts argue whether Bucksport, Maine, has a neighborhood full of identical Sears houses – Belfasts, to be precise. Writer Scott Sowers says yes. Rose Thornton, who has made a career of identifying Sears houses, says no.

“The Sears Belfast and the Bucksport Houses are wildly different from one another,” wrote Thornton after examining a photo of a Bucksport house.

(Tangentially, the front doorway of the real Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the historic Perkins House, built in 1769 in Castine, Maine.)

People authenticate Sears houses by comparing them to the models in the Sears archives. That’s usually not enough, since houses are often altered over the years. They must also look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic, shipping labels on moldings or the characteristic ‘SR’ stamped on bathroom fixtures. (For other clues, click here.)

We did track down a Sears house on Lindsay Road in York, Maine.

A Sears house in York, Maine

Longmeadow, Mass.

A Sears Verona, catalog illustration

Sears houses arrived in two railroad box cars in a variety of styles and prices. At the high end was the Magnolia, a four-bedroom, high-ceilinged colonial modeled after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass. It sold for $5,972. (See featured image.)

At the low end was the Natoma, a three-room house that sold for $191. It had no bathroom, but you could buy the outhouse separately.

The Natoma

The Verona was another ‘high-class home,’ according to the catalog, ‘of the Dutch type of colonial architecture.’ An authenticated Sears Verona has been identified at 115 Belleclaire Ave., in Longmeadow, Mass.

A house on Medway St. in Norfolk, Mass., is in contention for being a Sears house. Authentic Sears houses were also assembled in Newton, Easthampton, Boston, Woburn, Springfield, Wrentham, Cohasset and Pittsfield.

Claremont, N.H.

The Castleton, catalog illustration

Two small New England companies also sold kit houses.

The Thayer Portable House Co. operated in Keene, N.H., from about 1920 to 1940. It had grown from the Springfield Portable House Co. in Massachusetts. There was also the Robinson’s-Money-Saving-Mill-Made Cut-to-Fit Houses of Providence, R.I.

Still, Sears was king in New England, shipping homes from its factory in Philadelphia.

Two Sears houses have been identified on Mulberry Street in Claremont, N.H. One was a Castleton; the other, a Lorain. (Click here to read more about these houses.)

The Castleton was promoted as ‘dignified and substantial,’ ‘a well-designed house that will make a pleasant home.’ The Lorain was marketed as a charming six-room colonial with dark shutters, snowy walls and window boxes. You can watch a documentary about restoring a Lorain here.

Middletown, R.I.

The Parkside, an economical Sears house

The Parkside was a cute, economical four-room house sold from 1934 to 1940. There’s an authenticated Parkside at 43 Beacon St. in Middletown, R.I. The current owner did considerable research into the house’s history and put up a website about it. (Check it out here.)

In 1938, the Middletown Parkside sold for $1,372. In 2006, it sold for $222,000. Bob Wolfenden, a military veteran, built the house in 1940 and lived in it for the rest of his life. He was a professional carpenter who became superintendent of the Newport, R.I., Water Department. He and his wife Mildred had no children.

John Little bought the house and enlarged it after his friend Bob died. The Parkside then changed hands several times, became a rental and went into foreclosure. It needed repair by the time the current owner bought it in 2006. You can see pictures of the house over the years here.

Burlington, Vt.

An Alhambra, from the catalog

Burlington, Vt., has so many catalog houses there’s a field guide to them called A Guide to the Catalog Houses of Burlington, Vermont.

Burlington was an ideal market for kits of Sears houses as well as for those of its competitors, Aladdin and Gordon Van Tine. The city’s population grew by 10 percent every decade while growing richer. The expansion of the streetcar network opened up cheap empty land. Burlington could also be reached by two major railroads, making it easy to ship kit houses.

Kit houses cluster in Burlington’s South End, the Five Sisters neighborhood, south of the University of Vermont campus, the New North End and Lakeview Terrace. Of the 30 kit houses identified in the Burlington field guide, 14 came from Sears.

A cluster of Sears houses in Burlington shows the range of styles: A four-square Fullerton and a Westly bungalow were identified on N. Prospect Street. Also:

- A Dutch colonial Lucerne on Catherine Street,
- A colonial revival bungalow called a Crescent on St. Paul Street
- A Spanish Colonial Alhambra on South Winooski Avenue
- A Tudor Revival Barrington at Marian Street.

Images: Perkins House By S437885 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35346344; Sears Catalog House, by InAweofGod’s Creation, Creative Commons license. This story about Sears houses was updated in 2022.

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New England’s Historic Haunted Houses

Haunted houses belong to New England lore as much as Revolutionary battles or clipper ship races.

New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape have populated the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. The region’s special brand of horror even has a name: Gothic New England.

Here are stories of six haunted houses, plus some extras suggested by our readers and added in 2017. We use the term ‘houses’ loosely, for they include hospitals, a library, a dormitory, a lighthouse and a fort. But all have drama or sorrow in their past. If you know of other historic haunted houses, please share them in the comments section.

Seaside Sanitarium

Seaside Sanitorium

Is it ghosts that haunt the sinister and bizarre Seaside Sanitorium in Waterford, Conn. — or its past?

In 1936, doctors treated children with tuberculosis with rest, sunshine, fresh air and good food. Seaside was built as a ‘heliotropic’ treatment hospital for children. Gothic Revival architect Cass Gilbert, who also planned the U.S. Supreme Court building, designed the sanitarium. The building faces Long Island Sound, with large terraces and porches for sunbathing.

Drugs made heliotropic treatment obsolete, and Seaside then evolved into a geriatric hospital, a medical hospital and a hospital for the mentally disabled. People accused its staff of abusing the patients, and it had an unusually high death rate.

The hospital finally closed in 1996. Now dilapidated, creepy and boarded up, abandoned playground equipment litters its grounds. The ghosts of abused patients are said to haunt the place.

Lately, there’s been talk of rehabilitating the old building. The State of Connecticut may redevelop it into a lodge.

35 Shore Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Other Connecticut Haunted Houses

Two other former insane asylums in Connecticut have reputations as hospitals of horror: Norwich State Hospital in Preston and Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. Tales of cruelty and abuse in the creepy old buildings fostered rumors of hauntings.

Norwich State Hospital

An early lighthouse keeper named Ernie supposedly haunts the New London Ledge Lighthouse in the mouth of the Thames River. On the night before the lighthouse was automated, a Coast Guard officer wrote in the log: “Rock of slow torture. Ernie’s domain. Hell on earth—may New London Ledge’s light shine on forever because I’m through. I will watch it from afar while drinking a brew.”

Fort Knox

Fort Knox, Maine’s version of the Great Pyramid, was built in the mid-19th century to prevent the British from invading the region. They’d already done it during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

The State of Maine bought the hulking granite fortress on the Penobscot River from the U.S. government in 1923. Back then it cost $2,100.

The fort provides ideal conditions for haunting: it stands next to swirling waters, it’s made of vast quantities of granite and it’s in a cold climate. It also has lots of dark tunnels.

People say they hear footsteps or laughter inside the fort, or they feel someone’s touch. Ghost hunters heard soldiers talking about the Civil War. A retired state trooper saw a white object with no head, arms or legs that moved, then vanished.

The ghost in the duster coat who wanders the fort’s dark, wet tunnels is Leopold Hegyi, the caretaker at the fort from 1887 to 1900. Of Hungarian ancestry, he served as a cavalryman who helped train George Custer’s army before moving to Maine. He then patrolled the fort for 13 years by himself, except when a few soldiers arrived during the Spanish-American War.

The fort hosts an annual paranormal/psychic fair. “Fright at the Fort,” a haunted house fundraiser that helps fund the preservation of the historic site.

Click here for a ghost tracker documentary of Fort Knox.

740 Fort Knox Rd., Prospect, Maine

Other Maine Haunted Houses

A woman in a nightgown climbs the spiral staircase of the Captain Lord Mansion, a Kennebunkport bed and breakfast. Some say she was the wife of Captain Lord, who built the house in 1812, but died before living in it.

Indian chief Taukolexis died by hanging from a tree, and he supposedly haunts the nearby fort, William Henry, now a museum near New Harbor.

The ghost of 19th-century poet Sylvester Beckett rips the bed sheets off guests at Beckett’s Castle, his former summer home on Cape Elizabeth.

Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum today

As an aspiring writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne frequented the Boston Athenaeum, a private library across from the Statehouse. In April 1842 he visited the Reading Room and encountered Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, Harvard’s librarian. Harris sat in his usual chair, reading a newspaper. Hawthorne didn’t think anything about it until later that evening, when a friend told him Harris had died. Hawthorne said that was impossible, as he had just seen him in the Athenaeum.

Then the next day, Hawthorne returned to the Athenaeum only to see Harris in the same chair. The writer speculated he was reading his own obituary. Of the encounter he wrote,

I remember—once at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last, appealing look.

The minister’s ghost isn’t the only creepy thing about the Boston Athenaeum. The library holds a copy of a criminal’s memoirs bound in his own skin.

James Allen robbed and shot a man on the Salem Turnpike. In 1835, Allen received the death sentence for attempted murder and was held in Charlestown State Prison.

Allen then told his life story to the prison warden. Before his execution, he asked that his skin be used to bind two copies of his memoirs. One copy ended up at the Athenaeum after Allen’s family passed it down. It had been used to spank children who misbehaved.

10½ Beacon St., Boston, Mass.

Other Massachusetts Haunted Houses

The Lizzie Borden House

The ghosts of the Borden family roam the halls at the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, now a bed and breakfast. Lizzie Borden famously …’took an axe/And gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done,She gave her father forty-one.”

Jerusha Howe, an early innkeeper at the Wayside Inn before it was the Wayside Inn, rejected many suitors attracted by her beauty. She couldn’t resist an English gentleman who promised to return for her. He never came back, and Jerusha’s ghost waits for her lover in her bedroom, Room 9.

Novelist Edith Wharton built an estate called the Mount in Lenox around the turn of the century. She avidly collected ghost stories, and now visitors say they see ghosts in period dress — even Wharton herself reading — wandering what is now a house museum.

Ipswich has quite a few haunted houses, including the Treadwell-Hale house in North Main Street. It had a ghost that whispered from the top of the stairs to the rear bedroom.

Huntress Hall, Keene State College

Huntress Hall at Keene State College was named after Harriet Huntress, a New Hampshire Department of Education administrator. Her abandoned wheelchair is still stored in the attic of the building, built in 1926. The creaking chair can be heard wheeling around the attic at night, according to students who live there.

Huntress does not like to be mocked and wreaks revenge on anyone who dresses up like her at Halloween. Students who have done so – usually with a gray wig and a wheelchair — failed tests, broke their legs or been involved in bad car accidents.

The genesis of the Huntress haunting is said to be World War II. Keene State was then a teaching school and Huntress Hall was an all-female dormitory. During the war, the U.S. Navy began training pilots at Keene and housed the trainees in Huntress Hall. Huntress was said to hate men and promiscuous women, and it was then that she began to haunt the hall. Some say she is most active when students are having sex inside its walls.

Appian Way, Keene, N.H.

Other New Hampshire Haunted Houses

In the late 19th century, orphans lived in The Chase House on Middle Road in Portsmouth. According to legend, a young girl hanged herself in her room and now haunts the hallway.

Ocean Born Mary, as her name suggests, was born at sea. Pirates boarded the vessel that sailed from Ulster to New England, and the pirate captain heard the cries of a newborn baby — Ocean Born Mary Wallace, of course. He gave her mother a bolt of light green silk, which was later made into Mary’s wedding dress. Mary’s husband died and she moved to Henniker, where her ghost supposedly protects her house from harm.

Belcourt Castle

The Newport mansion Belcourt Castle features a screaming suit of armor, a haunted gold coronation carriage, chairs that toss people off their seats and apparitions dancing in the ballroom.

Belcourt Castle was built by Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the wastrel son of financier August Belmont and grandson of Commodore Matthew Perry. (His brother August financed the Cape Cod Canal.) Richard Morris Hunt designed the mansion according to Perry’s wish to devote the first floor to carriages and stables for his beloved horses. He modeled the 60-room house on Louis XIII’s hunting lodge at Versailles.

Belmont married Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of his best friend William K. Vanderbilt, in 1896, and she began redesigning the mansion. After the Belmonts died, Harold and Ruth Tinney bought Belcourt in 1956 and filled it with their own collection of art and antiques. The Tinneys opened the house to the public for ghost tours and as a museum.

When the Tinneys owned Belcourt, suits of armor stood in a row at one end of the ballroom. People say they’ve heard screams from one suit of armor as the owner relives his death. A spear tip pierced his eye through a slit in the helmet.

A carved wooden statue of a monk brings a ghost of a brown-robed monk along with him. The ghost always appeared in the same room as the statue.

In 2012, the Tinneys sold Belcourt. Read more about it here.

657 Belleview Ave., Newport, R.I.

Other Rhode Island Haunted Houses

During the American Revolution, University Hall at Brown was converted into an army hospital where many soldiers died. A contorted soldier’s face appears in a second-floor window.

The body of Providence Mayor Thomas Doyle lay in state at City Hall after his death in 1886. His ghost is now said to haunt the building, smoking a cigar, moving chairs and whispering.

Edward Hamlin Everett Mansion

Hamlin Mansion

Edward Hamlin Everett got rich as the Glass Bottle King and inventor of the fluted bottle cap. He grew up in Bennington, Vt., and in 1886 married Amy King. Her father owned a Newark glassworks that Hamlin bought before their wedding.

Amy King died suddenly. Some said she committed suicide, others said she was murdered, still others say she drowned while swimming. Her obituary said she died after a severe operation following an unnamed illness.

Everett remarried, but his three grown daughters disapproved of the new wife. When he died, he left most of his wealth to his second wife, leaving only a tenth of it to his daughters. The daughters challenged the will in court, claiming their father wasn’t in his right mind. During the trial, known as The Second Battle of Bennington, the eldest daughter was staying at the house when she said she heard weeping coming from her father’s study.

She went to the room and found her mother lying on the floor, clearly a murder victim. Security guards say doorknobs turn in empty rooms and doors close by themselves. Students say they see a woman in white, roaming the house and grounds. Perhaps it’s the ghost of Amy King Everett.

In 1957, writer Shirley Jackson decided she wanted to write a novel about a haunted house. She began collecting postcards and newspaper clippings of ornate old houses. She likely chose the Edward Hamlin Everett home as the setting for her novel, The Haunting of Hill House. He book, a National Book Award finalist, inspired two feature films and a play.

The court, by the way, sided with the Everett daughters and gave them a third of the estate.

982 Mansion Dr., Bennington, Vt.

Other Vermont Haunted Houses

Hartness House Inn.

James Hartness, a factory owner and Vermont governor, built the Shingle-style Hartness House in Springfield in 1904. He built a labyrinth of tunnels under the house that included a library, workshop, study and bathroom. Today the house is run as a small hotel and his ghost is said to be down there still.

Ira Allen, a railroad magnate and relative of Ethan Allen, built the Marble Mansion in 1867 in Fair Haven, Vt. Today it’s an inn, and the ghost of a former owner, dressed in a gray suit, awakens guests by standing over their beds. A young woman supposedly haunts the basement and several ghostly children run around the halls.

End Notes

Photos: Norwich State Hospital, By CLK Hatcher – Norwich Hospital District – Admin BuildingUploaded by LongLiveRock, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15506667; Boston Athenaeum, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802; Belcourt photo by Charles V. Hamm; Hartness House Inn By Tyler Goodrich – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28509336. Seaside Sanitorium by By Victor Solanoy from Silicon Valley, USA – Seaside Sanitorium – Waterford, CTUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29847509.

This story about haunted houses was updated in 2022.

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The Faulkner Murals Come to Life in the National Archives

In 1933, a government building boom was on to lift the nation out of the Great Depression. The new National Archives building in Washington D.C. was to house the nation’s founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Today they’re known as the Faulkner Murals.

Barry Faulkner of Keene, N.H., had been selected to create two great murals that would become known as the Faulkner Murals. They would tell the story of the preparation of the two documents. But how to begin?

Barry Faulkner

Faulkner, born in 1881, owed much of his skill to working with Dublin, N.H., artist Abbott H. Thayer and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Later in life, Faulkner learned a trick that served him well when creating murals about historic figures: find a children’s book about the topic.

Children’s books were written in simple language, focusing on the grand strokes of a story, not the minute details. But at this stage in his career – he was only in his early 40s – he hadn’t discovered that shortcut. So Faulkner immersed himself into reading the history of the founding fathers, trying to focus on the most prominent to bring the stories to life. But he was hopelessly lost. Biographers all tended to exaggerate the traits of their chosen subject and it became nearly impossible to select the characters for his murals.

Who’s Who

Faulkner then consulted John Franklin Jameson, a Massachusetts scholar in charge of collecting manuscripts for the Library of Congress. Jameson had thoroughly studied of the formation of United States. He had particularly emphasized the struggle to control the governance of the new nation and who would profit most.

Jameson quickly helped clear away the mountain of information Faulkner had amassed, giving him thumbnail sketches of the most important players. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as senior statesmen were critical, as was Thomas Jefferson. But he also offered details on the founding fathers from each state. Who operated behind the scenes, and who was outspoken. Who used their positions as record keepers and report writers to direct discussion. And who shaped the great compromises necessary to reach a final consensus.

A section of the Faulkner murals depicting the creation of the Constitution.

Jameson also gave Faulkner one final piece of advice: Make sure he represented every colony. With this new framework, Faulkner set about gathering portraits of the men. Ideally, he wanted four portraits or busts to work from for each character. But some subjects fell far short.

For Josiah Bartlett, who hailed from Faulkner’s own home state, he had only one pencil drawing from which to work. For others, he had only a woodcut. They were “so crude I’m sure the mothers of the men would not have recognized them,” he said.

Moody Founding Fathers

In depicting the crafting of the Declaration of Independence, Faulkner painted Jefferson handing over the finished document. He depicted the other founding fathers to show their likely mood. The more hotheaded seem ready for a fight and the calmer, compromise-minded men posed less enthusiastically.

For the mural about the Constitution, Faulkner became more literal. He depicts Massachusetts’ delegate Nathaniel Gorham with an ungainly sheaf of papers under his arm – probably the makings of his reports that helped create the final document. Elbridge Gerry, meanwhile, is shown in the background.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut brandishes a walking stick, highlighting his demeanor. Faulkner also chose to add a little foreshadowing. The clouds in the Declaration hide a profile of Abraham Lincoln, a nod to the problem of slavery and the Civil War. In his Constitution, Alexander Hamilton carries a sword, a hint of the coming War of 1812.

Faulkner went out of his way to costume the characters appropriately. John Hancock’s attire reflected his great wealth. Southerners with Cavalier origins had fancy dress, but northern Puritans dressed more simply.

The Faulkner murals in the Rotunda of the National Archives.

The Finished Faulkner Murals

Years of work finally reached their conclusion in 1936 when Faulkner took the two murals from his studio and brought them (each 14 feet by 37.5 feet) to the Archives. Inside the rotunda, workers were plastering two large framed locations on the wall in preparation for the installation.

Faulkner recalled the day: “Washington sweltered in the humidity of early October and even the interior of the Archives, whose marble walls are massive as a Roman tomb, was oppressive…they unrolled the pictures on the floor and compared them with the dimensions of the wall spaces. To my horror and dismay each picture lacked a foot and a half in length. “

But the artist’s assistant quickly calmed him, and he simply extended the background to cover the gap.

You can see Faulkner’s work across the country in other murals, including the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. He also created murals at the RCA building at Rockefeller Center in New York City, the Hancock Building in Boston and the Senate chamber in the New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord.

Thanks to: The Faulkner Murals: Depicting the Creation of a Nation, which includes detailed research on Faulkner’s processes and the obstacles encountered in creating the murals.

This story about the Faulkner murals was updated in 2022. Image of National Archives By Kelvin Kay – Photo taken by Kelvin Kay. w:en:Image:NationalArchives2.jpg, which is modified from w:en:Image:Archives.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1346058.

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