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8 Things You Didn’t Know About New England Olympians

Ever since a Bostonian won the first event in the first modern Olympics, New England has sent more than its share of Olympians to compete for athletic glory.

New England Olympians have done especially well in the winter Olympics, winning a share of gold medals disproportionate to their states’ populations.

James Connolly, the first-ever U.S. Olympian to win a medal.

Tiny Vermont can claim four Winter Olympics gold medals. New Hampshire has six, Connecticut has five and Massachusetts has 16 – third most in the country, despite ranking 14^th in population. Even Rhode Island can boast a Winter Olympics gold. The only New England state without a gold medal in the Winter Olympics is Maine.

Here, then, are eight facts about New England Olympians you may not know.

New England Olympians

The town of Norwich, Vt., with 3,000 residents, produced 11 Olympians and accounted for three Olympic medals. Nine of its Olympians competed in the winter Olympics, including ski jumpers Mike Holland and Jeff Hastings and skiers Hannah Kearney, Betsy Snite and Tim Tetreault.
Penny Pitou is a well-known name in New Hampshire for her eponymous travel agency, but she is also the first American skier to win a medal in the Olympic downhill She won silver medalsin both the downhill and giant slalom events at the 1960 Olympics. Pitou grew up in Center Harbor, N.H., but moved to Laconia with her family at 15. As a freshman at Laconia High in 1953, she hid her hair under her hat and competed on the boys’ ski team.
Nine of the 14 Americans who competed in the first modern Olympics in history came from the Boston Athletic Association or the Suffolk Athletic Club of South Boston. James B. Connolly, born in South Boston to poor Irish immigrants, won the first event– the triple jump — in the 1896 Olympics in Athens. He took home a silver medal (gold medals weren’t issued then) and an olive laurel wreath. He almost didn’t make it because a thief stole his wallet on the way to the games.
Many people know four players from the ‘Miracle on Ice’ hockey team of 1980 all attended Boston University and all came from Massachusetts. They included team captain Mike Eruzione, starters Dave Silk and Jim Craigand Jack O’Callahan. But few people remember the five Massachusetts players from the 1924 U.S. hockey team, which won the silver medal: Irving Small, Willard Rice, Justin McCarthy, John Lyons and John Langley.
New Haven native Dr. Benjamin Spock won a gold medal for rowing in the 1924 Olympics as a member of the Yale University rowing team. Later, as America’s most famous baby doctor, he warned against putting young children into ‘excessive competition.’
The Boston Skating Club has produced more national championsthan any skating club in the country, including Olympics medal winners Dick Button, Nancy Kerrigan and Tenley Albright.
Dorothy Hamill was Paraguay’s sweetheart, too.
Two-time Olympic skier Tom Corcoran was born in Japan and spent his childhood in Quebec, but he spent most of the rest of his time in New Hampshire. He attended the Emerson School, Philips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College. In 1965 he founded the Waterville Company and began developing the Waterville Valley Ski Resort, which he ran until 1990.
Figure skater Dorothy Hamill grew up in Greenwich, Conn., She made her mark in the 1976 Winter Olympics when she took a gold medal in the ladies’ singles competition – and started a fashion trend with her sassy bobbed hair and large glasses. The media dubbed her ‘America’s sweetheart.’ She also invented a skating move known as the ‘Hamill Camel. She later married, and divorced, Dean Paul Martin, the son of entertainer Dean Martin.

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The Oldest Bank in Each New England State

The oldest bank in a state isn’t necessarily the first one chartered. Banks have had their difficulties over the years and many failed or were swallowed up by other banks.

Bank of America, for example, started out as the Providence Bank in Rhode Island in 1791. It became the Industrial National Bank in the 1950s, morphed into Fleet Financial Group in the 1990s, bought Shawmut and BankBoston, and then was acquired by the Bank of America in 2004.

Here, then, are brief histories of the oldest bank in each New England state. If you know of other old banks with interesting histories, please include them in the comments section.

Liberty Bank

Historic Main Street district in Middletown, Conn.

In 1844, a young merchant from Old Saybrook named Frederick Sheffield rode his horse to Middletown, Conn., and deposited $8 in the Liberty Bank. Six months later he deposited another $18.

That $26 grew to more than $32,000 in 1994, when Sheffield’s descendants closed the account. It was the oldest individually owned savings account in America.

Liberty Bank was founded in 1825 as a mutual savings bank to help the poor and working class become thrifty. The bank’s headquarters complex includes its original location at Samuel Southmayd’s pharmacy on the corner of Main and Williams Streets in Middletown. They are part of the Main Street Historic District, and they include the former post office built in 1916, the Middletown Savings Bank built in 1928 and the Old Banking House Block built in 1796 and 1815.

Since 2000, Liberty Bank merged with several other smaller banks and is now the third largest as well as the oldest bank in Connecticut, with 56 branches and about 700 employees. It introduced a checking account to offer rebates of other banks’ ATM surcharges and built an affordable housing complex in Norwich, Uncas Condominiums.

Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution

Maine’s oldest bank, Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution was founded in 1827 as a social good, a way to encourage low-income people to save money.

The Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution was chartered during a flurry of charters for savings institutions along the East Coast. The first was founded in Boston in 1816, and within three years savings banks were incorporated in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Hartford, Providence and Salem, Mass.

Today it has eight branches along the coast of Southern Maine, employs about 200 people and has assets of about $900 million.

State Street Bank and Trust

An early incarnation of the State Street Bank

Massachusetts Gov. John Hancock in 1792 signed the first charter for Union Bank, the forerunner of the State Street Bank and Trust Co. It was the third bank in Boston, located at the corner of State and Exchange streets. Its first president was Hancock’s lieutenant governor, Moses Gill.

The bank was tied to Boston’s shipping industry, and has always celebrated the city’s maritime history. The bank’s offices featured ship models, prints, harpoons and figureheads, and published about two dozen monographs about Boston’s shipping past.

The monographs, wrote one collector, “hold a unique place in Boston publishing history for a number of reasons, including their high level of scholarship, the elegant printing and presentation of the volumes, the very many rare photographs and illustrations first published therein, and the magnanimity of the great financial institution which made them available to the public.”

The bank’s interior was described as looking like a New England merchant’s counting house of the late 18^th century, including the period furniture.

In 1924, Massachusetts Investors Trust chose State Street Bank as custodian of the country’s first mutual fund. The importance of that development wouldn’t become clear until years later.

In the 1970s, State Street decided to move away from retail banking and commercial lending, and into the high-tech world of processing asset management, global custody, 401(k), retirement plan accounting, and trusteeship of debt securities

A series of mergers and moves resulted in the bank’s current structure. Today it is a subsidiary of the State Street Corporation, the third largest asset manager in the world with $2.45 trillion under management. State Street Corporation is responsible for the custody and administration of 11 percent of the world’s assets. It is the oldest bank in Massachusetts and the second oldest bank in the country next to the Bank of New York, founded eight years earlier.

Bank of New Hampshire

Bank of New Hampshire in Laconia, N.H.

In 1832, the Meredith Bridge Savings Bank in Laconia received its first deposit: $10.50. Its charter had been signed by Franklin Pierce the previous year. Thirty-eight years later it would change its name to the Laconia Savings Bank, and so it would remain until 2012, when it became the Bank of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire’s oldest bank was founded as a mutual savings bank, owned by its depositors, and it has remained that way ever since. In 1994, the bank began acquiring other banks, and today has 24 branches throughout the state.

The Bank of New Hampshire boasts of its support for such nonprofit organizations as the Laconia Public Library, Lakes Region Childcare, the Bedford Public Library and the Children’s Museum of Portsmouth. It has $1.5 billion of assets under management.

Washington Trust Company

Historic downtown Westerly, R.I.

The Washington Trust Company was chartered by the Rhode Island legislature in 1800 to furnish loans and savings options for residents of the Westerly area. More importantly, it also had responsibility for issuing bank notes. The federal government at the time did not issue currency as we know it today, and paper notes were from time to time in short supply. This made bank currency essential to a functioning economy.

Named for President Washington, the Washington Trust Company was known as Washington Bank. It became the first bank in the nation to issue currency that bore Washington’s portrait — a full 69 years before federal currency would bear his likeness. It was just the third bank chartered in Rhode Island history.

In the earliest days of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the bank insisted that its reliance on the values of Yankee thrift and frugality made it so sound that it had no need of FDIC insurance. Congress eventually forced all banks to participate in the insurance system, regardless of the health of their balance sheets.

National Bank of Middlebury

The State of Vermont chartered the National Bank of Middlebury in 1831. It operated out of the Middlebury Hotel until 1845 when it opened its first building. The bank became a federally chartered bank in 1865.

In 1885 the bank suffered a setback when an investment in the National Bank of St. Albans failed. The National Bank of Middlebury was among a group of banks that were shareholders who were asked to contribute funds to make good the deposits and debts of the St. Albans institution. The banks sued to escape liability, maintaining that they were not responsible for losses beyond their own investments. In 1888, however, the courts ruled that the National Bank of Middlebury, in addition to the others, must contribute to paying the St. Albans bank’s debts. Middlebury was ordered to pay $19,642 in the case.

After the banking crisis of 1933, during which Franklin D. Roosevelt closed the nation’s banks, the National Bank of Middlebury reopened and was declared one of the nation’s soundest banks. Today it is the oldest bank in Vermont.

Images: Liberty Bank, By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19384631; Westerly, R.I., By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4422975

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Peyton Place – A Town, Its Scandals and the Woman Who Told the World

The dirty novel Peyton Place landed like a bombshell in 1956, a surprise hit by an unknown author. The critics panned it, the public loved it, the town it pictured resented it – and for the next 13 years it was a staple of American entertainment.

Grace Metalious

Peyton Place became shorthand for secret scandals, mostly involving sex. Its author, Grace Metalious, was a New Hampshire schoolteacher’s wife whose own scandals were anything but secret. She was a mother of three and, by all accounts, a lousy housewife who drank, swore, wore baggy jeans and cheated on her husband.

She based some of Peyton Place on the town she lived in with her family, Gilmanton, N.H.

“To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture,” Metalious once said. “But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot — all kinds of strange things crawl out.”

The people of Gilmanton felt victimized by Peyton Place, but it was Grace Metalious who was the book’s real victim.

Grace Metalious

Metalious was born Grace de Repentigny on Sept. 8, 1924, to poor Franco-American parents in Manchester, N.H. Her father, a merchant seaman, left the family when she was 10.

She graduated from Central High School, married George Metalious at 19, and gave birth to three children. Since her childhood she dreamed of being a writer. She began writing Peyton Place at 30, while George taught school in Gilmanton.

Scene from Peyton Place, the film

The fictional town of Peyton Place has shady streets, white church steeples, traditional New England houses and brick mills along the Connecticut River. But beneath the bucolic surface lurk ugly secrets.

In the book, Rodney Harrington, a rich kid, dies in a car crash while ogling a topless women driving with him, and Constance MacKenzie lives in fear that the illegitimacy of her daughter will be discovered. Metalious based the character of Selena Cross on a woman from Alton, N.H., who killed her father after he raped her. The story was uncovered by crusading reporters including a young Ben Bradlee.

She insisted Peyton Place was based on several places in New Hampshire – including Durham, where her husband attended the University of New Hampshire; Gilmanton, where he taught school; and Laconia, where her favorite bar was located.

Peyton Place, The Book

The book Peyton Place, published in 1956, was a smash hit, selling 100,000 copies in the first month. The average first novel sold 3,000 copies — if the author was lucky enough to get it published.

Promo for the film Peyton Place.

Critics trashed the book. Manchester Union-Leader publisher William Loeb called it ‘filthy sewage.’ Grace Metalious responded, “Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend, and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.”

Peyton Place was one of the most widely read novels in American history. One in 29 Americans read it (mostly in secret), according to one estimate.

“If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste,” Metalious said.

Fame

Peyton Place was followed in 1957 by a hit movie of the same name starring Lana Turner and set in Camden, Maine. As many as 500 locals appeared as extras.

Lana Turner and betty Field in Peyton Place.

At first Peyton Place didn’t attract many moviegoers, but then Lana Turner’s daughter stabbed Turner’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, and the film took off. It received nine Academy Award nominations.

The book and the movie made Grace Metalious rich — and reckless. She carried on a stormy affair with a Laconia DJ, divorced her husband and burned through millions of dollars. She took a floor at the Plaza hotel, ordered champagne by the case and flew chartered flights to the Caribbean.

Downward Spiral

Grace Metalious wrote three more books, none of which sold as well as Peyton Place. For the last five years of her life, she drank a fifth of liquor every day.

Grace Metalious in 1957

She dumped her Laconia DJ, reunited with George Metalious and parted again. Then she had an affair with a married British journalist. On a trip to Boston, she collapsed and ended up in Beth Israel Hospital. Grace Metalious died days later on Feb. 25, 1964, of cirrhosis of the liver.

Hours before she died, she changed her will to leave her entire estate to her British lover, who promised to take care of her children. Her family successfully contested the will, but it turned out she had $41,174 in the bank and debts of more than $200,000. Years of high living, gifts to friends and an embezzling agent left her insolvent.

Promotional photo showing the cast of Peyton Place in 1968.

In 1964, seven months after Grace Metalious died, ABC aired a prime-time soap opera based on the novel. (The producer refused to call it a soap opera, instead calling it a ‘high-class anthology drama.’) It launched the careers of Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal, among others. Peyton Place ran until 1969.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed this story about Grace Metalious, you may also want to read about other Franco-American writers here. If you’re interested in towns with hidden scandals, you may want to read Bar Harbor Babylon by the authors of this post.

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How the New England State Names Came to Be

New England state names came from a variety of sources. The English, French, Italians and Native Americans all had a hand in creating them. And, of course, someone had to name the region itself.

The New England State Names, sort of

When Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame sailed up the coast and first laid eyes on the coast of New England, there was no doubt what he would call it. The land virtually spoke to him. Nothing else would do. It shall be called: North Virginia.

If the colony of Virginia could be named for Queen Elizabeth, the virgin queen, why not the rest of the colonies? Wait, scratch that. King James thought a better idea was “New England.” And, as you might imagine, everyone responded that, of course the king was right. Brilliant! New England it must be! Stupid to think anything else…

The New England State Names

And so our region got its name. Today we take for granted our New England state names. Around 400 years ago, however, colonists, would-be colonists, kings and queens scratched their heads trying to figure out what to call these lands they intended to settle.

The name had to be appropriate, as this responsibility was taken seriously. Then the name had to pass muster with the king or queen sponsoring the voyage that brought the discoverer to the land. And, finally, it had to stick with the people who would use it.

Through this roundabout manner, the New England state names we use today came into place.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire has one of the most straight-ahead names among the New England state names. The English explorer/colonizer John Mason sought and received a grant of land, roughly half the area between the Merrimack and Kennebec River. And the grant called the property New Hampshire, after the county of Hampshire in old England.

Though he may have named New Hampshire, Mason never actually set foot on it. He died in 1635 before making his first trip to his new colony, and eventually Massachusetts took control of the territory for a while. But the name was a keeper.

Maine

The naming of Maine is less straightforward and its origins less certain than the other New England state names. While Mason received the southern part of the land area between the Kennebec and Merrimack Rivers, the northern portion was granted to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, another early colonizer.

Charles I nixed New Somerset

But how did Gorges settle on Maine? It’s not completely clear. The original charter splitting the territory from New Hampshire named it Laconia. Derived from the name of the region in Greece, it also gives us the root for the word ‘laconic,’ appropriate for Maine. However, it never took as the official name.

Gorges himself is on record proposing the area be called New Somerset, after his home in England. King Charles, however, hated that name. He declared that the land would be known as the province or county of Mayne. Which seems official enough, but throughout the next decades the name was still discussed and debated.

How did Maine finally win out? One suggestion is that the name cleanly distinguished between the islands off shore and the mainland, and for a while people called it simply the mainland. Whatever the final reason, Maine it was and Maine it is.

Gorges was another colonizer who never saw his colony. He never got to Maine, though he paid to help found the Popham Colony. He was destitute upon his death and his son sold all the land covered by the charter to Massachusetts in 1677. It would take the state nearly 150 years to get its independence back.

Massachusetts

When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, they found the Algonquins already had a name for the place. They called it Massachusêuck, which meant “about the great hill.” It was a reference to Blue Hill and the native American tribe that populated that area. William Bradford and company kept right on using it.

William Bradford

Now why did Bradford not assign Massachusetts a name of English choosing? Sensitivity to the rights of Native Americans? Political correctness? Unlikely. He probably simply adopted what the locals called it to better communicate.

Plus, since the native Americans probably saved the Pilgrims from starvation that first year, perhaps it seemed only right not to go about changing the names of things even if you did intend to appropriate the land.

Connecticut

Connecticut is another of the New England state names derived from a Native American word, Quinnehtukqut (roughly translated ‘the long tidal river’). This was the name the Mohegans gave to the Connecticut River, as early trader and Dutch explorer Adriaen Block learned.

Verrazano didn’t have much luck with the New England state names.

Block did name Block Island for himself. Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano had earlier dubbed it “Claudia” for the queen consort of France. But Block preferred to simply give it his own name, and it stuck.

When it came to Connecticut, however, Block stayed with the name of the river already in use. Perhaps he was trying to communicate with the Native Americans he traded with, or perhaps he wanted to avoid confusion. Over time it got franglicized into Connecticut.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations (its official name) got its name from two incidents. We’ve already mentioned Verrazano was a great one for naming things, just not making them stick. Likewise, when he first found Rhode Island, he noted that Block Island (which he called Claudia) had a striking relation to the Isle of Rhodes. While not necessarily what he intended, map makers branded the whole area Rhode Island. It was one of the few names he created that stuck, at least partially.

Roger Williams (imagined)

When Roger Williams was run out of Massachusetts as a heretic, he settled in Rhode Island. He was so pleased of escaping a trial for heresy he concluded that divine providence had shone down on him. And so he called his new home the Providence Plantations.

Today, the two are melded together in one simple phrase that trips off the tongue so easily that most people have shortened it for ease of use. Score the win for Verrazano.

Vermont

Finally we come to Vermont, perhaps the most obviously named of the New England state names. While all the New England colonies debated their destiny as the push for independence took hold, Vermont had a free-for-all argument.

Should the state join up with France and become a part of New France? Or should it remain English? Should it join with the other colonies in breaking away from England? Or maybe it should be its own country?

Samuel de Champlain (imagined), responsible for one of the New England state names.

Each of these points of view had its own strong supporters over the years, so much so, perhaps, that no one ever managed to dislodge the informal, original name applied to it by explorer Samuel de Champlain.

When Champlain noted Vermont on his 1647 map, he made a simple notation: Verd Mont (Green Mountains).

The Green Mountains

If it was good enough for Champlain, it was good enough for the people of the state and so, with a little Anglicization, the Green Mountain state is today Vermont.

This story about New England state names was updated in 2023.

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The Winnipesaukee Water War and the 1859 Fight for NH Property Rights

On Sept 28, 1859, James Worster led 50 angry farmers, mill operators, loggers and laborers in a vain effort to destroy a 250-foot dam that controlled the outflow of Lake Winnipesaukee. The dam regulated how much water flowed into the Merrimack River and powered the cotton cards, the spinning frames and the power looms of the enormous textile mills in Lowell and Lawrence, Mass. It was just one battle in the Winnipesaukee water war that had gone on for years.

Lake Winnipesaukee by William Trost Richards. Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

People would call the attack on the dam and the fight that broke out afterward the Lake Village Riot. Lake Village now exists as Lakeport, a neighborhood of Laconia, N.H. In 1858, it belonged to neighboring Gilford. A growing commercial hub, it had shops, a foundry, a machine shop and mills powered by the water that flowed from Lake Winnipesaukee to Opechee Bay.

That dam and the powerful out-of-staters behind it had damaged the farms and businesses of the Lakes Region. Fed up with the out-of-state corporations, the New Hampshire men then vented their anger with axes and iron rods.

The Lake Company

The would-be dam destroyers faced a formidable opponent: a hydraulic empire known as the Lake Company, owned by powerful Massachusetts manufacturers. Their giant mills needed hydraulic power to operate their machinery. The mill owners, known as the Boston Associates, had already reshaped the Merrimack Valley with dams and canals. By 1850 they controlled 45 miles of the Merrimack River and produced more waterpower than in all of France.

Amoskeag millyard, 1911

Still they needed more. And so they set up the deceptively named Winnipissiogee Lake Cotton and Woolen Manufacturing Company of New Hampshire, also known as the Lake Company.

Lake Company office in Lakeport, key battleground in the Winnipesaukee water war.

The Lake Company had little intention of manufacturing anything in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. But it did intend to seize control of the Merrimack River’s headwaters. Between 1845 and 1856, the Lake Company stealthily took control of 103 square miles of New Hampshire waters, including Winnipesaukee, Squam, Winnisquam and Newfound lakes.

The company fortified dams and deepened channels. By 1859, the mill owners had a system for raising the level of the lakes during the winter and spring. Then during the summer they opened the floodgates to send waterpower to Massachusetts when rivers historically ran low.

Inequality

The citizens of New Hampshire soon figured out what was going on, and they didn’t like it one little bit. Raising the lake levels flooded farmers’ fields. Lowering the lake levels impeded navigation for shippers and ferryboat owners. It also prevented loggers from sending timber downstream. And it deprived local mills of enough waterpower to run their machinery.

Something else fueled the anger of the farmers, millers, loggers and shippers of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. They grew frustrated with the industrialization along the Merrimack and its impact on New Hampshire’s way of life and its businesses. As New Hampshire’s waters drained away to Massachusetts, they carried away the wealth of the farmers and small business owners to the pocketbooks of powerful industrialists.

The big Lakes Region towns – Meredith, Gilford, Laconia – were gradually shifting from agriculture to manufacturing. It was an economic rearrangement that didn’t reward participants equally. Farms were not only declining, but becoming less profitable. Mill workers barely earned enough to survive. And inequality was on the rise.

Weaving room of an Amoskeag mill.

The Winnipesaukee Water War Begins

Into the breach stepped James Worster, a 50-something farmer and former blacksmith. Worster wasn’t the only New Hampshire citizen angered by the Lake Company’s economic wrongdoing. Others had tried to wreck dams. Others had asked the Legislature to intervene. And others had sued the company.

But none was as fanatical as James Worster. A Lake County agent said “he ought to be in jail or in an insane asylum.” A New Hampshire judge described him as “so much a man of one idea, that it is of no use to talk with him.”

For years that one idea was to loosen the Massachusetts mill owners’ iron grip on New Hampshire’s lake waters. Worster would, in the end, pay a steep price for his quixotic quest – and for failing to recognize that times were changing.

Up until the mid-19^th century, New Hampshire law permitted landowners to destroy a dam upstream if it damaged their property. Worster tried to destroy three of the dams owned by Massachusetts men (and came to grief) between 1847 and 1859. His obsession with the Lake Company would land him in jail.

For years he bounced around New Hampshire, from the Seacoast to Concord to the Lakes Region. With each move, he bought or rented farmland downstream from dams owned by out-of-state mill owners. Whether he deliberately obtained property likely to be flooded is an open question.

Lake Village Dam, where the Winnipesaukee water war broke out

James Worster

In 1847, Worster first tried to fight the Great Falls Manufacturing Co., Massachusetts owners of five cotton mills in New Hampshire. Worster leased farmland in Dover, which flooded when a dam held back the Salmon Falls River. He partially destroyed the dam by tearing off an abutment and cutting down its planking. He then threatened to destroy the whole thing. The company went to court and got an injunction against his further damaging the dam.

Salmon Falls River

Two years later, Worster’s daughter Adeline took on the Lake Company. She co-owned land with him in Tuftonboro on the northeast shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. She sued the company, claiming the Lake Company’s dam at Lake Village flooded their property, causing damage. The court dismissed the case in 1852.

While Adeline Worster’s case languished in the courts, her father got hold of more properties. All of them were flooded seasonally by the Lake Company’s machinations – meadowland in Sanbornton, a farm in Gilford along Paugus Bay, and a share of Rattlesnake Island in Lake Winnipesaukee. In 1853, after the court threw out his daughter’s case against the company, Worster threatened to break down the Lake Village dam.

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A Bloodied Nose

By then, the Lake Company’s people in New Hampshire were keeping a close eye on Worster. The company’s agent, James Bell, obtained from the New Hampshire Superior Court an injunction preventing Worster from interfering with Lake Company property. It couldn’t have hurt that his brother, Justice, Samuel Bell, sat on the court.

Worster then moved to Concord and obtained farmland bordering the Merrimack River in Hooksett. The property lay upstream from another dam that powered the giant Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester. Again it was a dam owned by Massachusetts men. And again it flooded.

The Merrimack River in flood, Manchester, N.H.

At 6:30 a.m. on March 7, 1859, Worster and another man showed up on the Amoskeag Company’s dam. A watchman ordered them to leave. They refused. A fight broke out and the watchman knocked down Worster, then in his 50s, three times and bloodied his nose.

That year the Legislature considered a bill to prevent landowners from destroying dams. It moved through committee until Worster and others appeared at the Statehouse and made an enormous fuss. The bill died.

Four months after his attack on the Amoskeag dam, Worster prepared to launch another. The Amoskeag Company’s agent caught wind of his plans and notified the sheriff. In July, Worster showed up with six men, and they started to rip the flashboards off the dam. The sheriff and his deputies then arrived and arrested Worster.

Worster was not only charged with conspiracy, but pressured financially by the Amoskeag Company. An agent bought an unpaid note in Worster’s name and got a lien put on the Hooksett property for nonpayment.

A Losing Battle for the Lake

By the fall of 1859, feelings were running so high against the Lake Village dam that the Lake Company took extra security precautions. The company’s office was practically on top of the dam, and an engineer was told to find “two or three men that would be sure and reliable in case of trouble.”

Lake Winnisquam

In August, Worster complained to the Lake Company that the dam had overflowed his properties along Lakes Winnisquam and Winnipesaukee. At that point he was on trial for trying to destroy the Amoskeag dam, and he was still enjoined from damaging the Lake Company’s dam in Lake Village.

That didn’t stop him.

Dam Trouble

The riot itself was preceded by a skirmish on the morning of Sept. 28, 1859. A few determined men showed up at the Lake Village dam. They intended to remove planking, which would allow the lake water to drain off their properties. They believed they were acting within the law.

When the men showed up, the sheriff arrived and sent them away. Undeterred, they came back in the afternoon and began removing the planking. The Lake Company’s agent, Josiah French, and his assistant tried to stop them. In the course of the struggle, French’s assistant struck one of the men on the hand with an iron bar. Some of them tried to push French off the dam.

The dam attackers left again, only to return around nightfall with a larger crowd. Worster arrived with the 50 men wielding axes and iron bars. They came from as far away as Concord. And they brought with them a law enforcement officer who arrested French and his assistant for assault and battery.

When the officer took the Lake Village agents away, he left the field clear for a serious assault on the dam. Fifty angry men with axes and iron bars bashed away at the hated structure. They did some damage, but may not have realized how hard it would be to destroy a tight, seven-year-old, 250-foot stone dam.

Perhaps they could have demolished the dam, but, according to the Winnipesaukee Gazette, “the big boys” of the village came to rough them up. The big boys were probably reimbursed by the Lake Company for their efforts. “The crowd was summarily dispersed, without much regard to ceremony – some of whom were not handled very lightly,” reported the Gazette.

Prison

A raft of litigation followed the melee. Seven of the rioters were charged with attempting to kill Josiah French by pushing him off the dam. The trial ended in a hung jury.

Squam Lake, another front in the Winnipesaukee water war

French was then sued for assault because he’d clubbed a rioter’s hand with an iron bar. A jury acquitted him.

Worster was charged with contempt for rioting after he’d been enjoined against interfering with the Lake Company’s property. The litigation dragged on for several years, during which Forster lost his temper and attacked the Lake Company’s lawyer.

Finally, he was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison and a $500 fine. Worster then gave the Lake Company no more trouble.

The Lake Company also succeeded in convincing the court to issue an injunction against eight of the rioters similar to the one that landed Worster in jail.

End of the Winnipesaukee Water War

The courtroom victories arising from the Lake Village Riot enabled the Lake Company to consolidate its control over New Hampshire’s water. For the next few decades, the Lake Village monopoly remained intact.

Eventually, the mills replaced hydropower with steam. The Lake Village’s control of the lakes would only be loosened by the decline of New England’s textile industry, which began to move south in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the New Hampshire state government would take control of the Lakes Region water flow.

Today, the state of New Hampshire’s Dam Bureau runs the Lake Village dam. And the dam operator still works out of the Lake Company’s old offices.

We are indebted to Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, by Theodore Steinberg for this story. This post about the Winnipesaukee water war was updated in 2022.

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