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Lakes Region

The 1790 Census: New England by the Numbers

Just after the American Revolution, Gilmanton, N.H., ranked as the 30^th biggest municipality in the United States. The Lakes Region town was bigger than Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh, Trenton, Louisville, Cincinnati and Savannah, according to the 1790 census.

New Hampshire, in fact, had four towns among the 30 largest in the country, including Londonderry, Portsmouth and Rochester. Only four New England states belonged to the union then, but they were home to 19 of the 30 biggest cities and towns in the country. Back then, one in four U.S. citizens lived in New England.

The region’s power and influence in the early Republic can be inferred from the 1790 census, the first taken in the United States. It didn’t last long. The westward migration had already begun in 1787, from a minister’s house in Ipswich, Mass. As people migrated west for land and opportunity, new cities and towns began to eclipse those of New England.

Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn served as U.S. Marshal for Maine during the 1790 census. Painting by Gilbert Stuart.

The 1790 Census

In 1790, there were 93,000 people living in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including the District of Maine. A year after the federal government took the 1790 census, 86,000 Vermonters officially joined New England.

Massachusetts alone held nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population, and Boston ranked as the third biggest municipality. Only New York and Philadelphia had more people. Census takers counted Boston’s population at 18,320 — about the size of contemporary Hopkinton, Mass.

Jonathan Jackson served as U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts during the 1790 census.

Today, only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population lives in Massachusetts, and Boston has slipped to the 24th biggest city.

Census taking in 1790 was an inexact science. Congress ordered U.S. marshals to take it. Each state had only one marshal, so the marshal appointed assistants to count people. The 650 enumerators had nine months to collect the data and post the results in two public places. Then they stored the results in the federal courthouse.

The U.S. marshals in New England included Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn for Maine, Jonathan Jackson for Massachusetts, John Parker for New Hampshire, William Peck for Rhode Island and Philip Bradley for Connecticut.

Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both questioned whether the census could count everyone. During a time of difficult travel and communication, the enumerators probably missed some people. And they deliberately missed all Indians not taxed, for example.

In the end, the census takers managed to count just under 4 million people.

A pitcher commemorating the 1790 census

Urban vs. Rural

The vast majority of Americans lived in the country in 1790. New Hampshire was one of the more urban states, with more towns in the Top 30 rankings than Connecticut, which only had New Haven and Hartford. New Hampshire, in fact, had more municipalities in the Top 30 than Pennsylvania, which had almost three times the population.

Today, New Hampshire’s biggest city – Manchester – ranks 259^th, the only New Hampshire municipality among the top 300 U.S. cities.

Massachusetts was similarly urban, though some towns had not yet started to grow into cities – Worcester, Springfield and Fall River, for example, were all smaller than Gilmanton, N.H. Lowell didn’t even exist.

But the towns in Massachusetts that ranked in the top 30 might surprise you. In ascending order, they were Plymouth, Beverly, New Bedford, Taunton, Middleborough, Sherburne, Newburyport, Gloucester, Marblehead and Salem. Salem was bigger than Richmond, Va., and Albany, N.Y. Middleborough, Mass., was also bigger than Albany.

New England, in fact, had five of the 10 largest urban places in the United States: Boston, Salem, Mass.; Newport, R.I.; Providence, R.I., and Marblehead, Mass.

Connecticut had a significantly more rural character then than it does now. New Hampshire’s population was denser, especially along the southern border. The Connecticut towns of Stamford, Waterbury and Danbury had fewer people than Gilmanton. Bridgeport, now Connecticut’s biggest city, wouldn’t incorporate for another 30 years.

Westward Ho!

The center of the U.S. population has steadily moved west and slightly south, as people migrated and new states joined the union. New England’s presence steadily declined.

Ten years after the 1790 census, only 15 New England cities ranked in the top 30, despite having added Vermont. And in 1820, New England had just 13 of the biggest cities and towns.

In 1790, Massachusetts had 9.7 percent of the U.S. population. Twenty years later it had only 6.5 percent, as four states had joined the union. And in 229 years, the Bay State has slipped from fourth to 15^th place.

Gilmanton has grown a little from its base of 2,613 in 1790, when it had an ironworks and a half-dozen villages and parishes. In 2017, 3,734 lived in the town. But Gilmanton never again appeared on the list of the top 30 cities and towns in the United States.

For a list of the Top 30 cities, click here.

This story was updated in 2021.

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Samuel Whittemore, The Oldest, Bravest and Maybe Craziest American Revolutionary

On April 19, 1775, British soldiers left Samuel Whittemore in a pool of blood alongside a stone wall in Menotomy, Mass. As they retreated from the Battles of Lexington and Concord, they had shot the old farmer in the face. Then they bayoneted him at least six times and clubbed him, apparently, to death.

When his family found his body, they thought he was dead. But a doctor patched up Samuel Whittemore and the 78-year-old lived.

For another 18 years.

But then it took 230 years for Massachusetts government to acknowledge the old man’s heroism that day.

The British retreat from Lexington and Concord.

Samuel Whittemore

Samuel Whittemore was born on July 27, 1696 in Charlestown, Mass., to Samuel Whittemore and Hannah Rix. He had some education, married twice, had a daughter and farmed land in Menotomy, then part of Cambridge, now Arlington.

Whittemore was no spring chicken when he fought the French in Canada. He had reached his mid-40s when he enlisted as a private in Col. Jeremiah Moulton’s Third Massachusetts Regiment. Whittemore participated in the capture of the French fortress at Louisbourg in 1745. During the conflict, he captured an ornate sword from a French officer. The weapon would reappear in the American Revolution.

The capture of Louisbourg, the most celebrated English victory in all the French and Indian wars.

More Fighting?

The story then gets murky about Samuel Whittemore. According to some, he fought in the French and Indian War, again fighting the French in Canada. And in 1763, at the ripe old age of 67, he led troops against Chief Pontiac in the Great Lakes region. During hand-to-hand combat, the legend goes, Samuel Whittemore took a pair of dueling pistols from the opponent he bested. Or perhaps he took them off the body of a dead warrior.

Historians have found little documentation of Samuel Whittemore’s military service after he served in King George’s War. But they have found records of his resistance to the British Parliament, not as a fighter but as a civic leader.

The Town of Cambridge, to which Menotomy belonged, elected him to a committee in 1768, after the repeal of the Stamp Act. The committee instructed the town’s representative to the General Court on how to vote. That same year, Cambridge elected him as a delegate to the Massachusetts Committee of Convention, which objected to Parliament’s revenue acts and the quartering of troops in Boston.

And late in 1772, the people of Cambridge elected 76-year-old Samuel Whittemore to the town’s Committee of Correspondence. The committee stridently objected to the Tea Act and cautioned,

If we cease to assert Our rights we shall dwindle into supineness and the chains of slavery shall be fast rivetted upon us

The British Retreat

Then came the skirmishes in Lexington and Concord. News traveled fast throughout the countryside, and hundreds of militia men from nearby towns came to harass the British as they retreated to Boston.

Samuel Whittemore left his field in Menotomy, gathered his old weapons and positioned himself behind his stonewall.

When the regiment passed by, Samuel Whittemore stood and shot point-blank at a British regular with his musket. Then he took out his dueling pistols and shot two more soldiers to death.

The old farmer then grabbed his ornamental sword to fend off the British soldiers who swarmed over him. It didn’t go so well. The British shot him in the cheek, bayoneted him and beat him with the butts of their rifles.

Samuel Whittemore then fades from the historical record until his death on Feb. 2, 1793, at the age of 96. He was laid to rest in the Old Burying Ground in Arlington.

The Massachusetts Legislature declared him the official state hero in 2005, though the Senate got his age and dates wrong in the proclamation.

The stone marker memorializing him also gets a few things wrong.

Near this spot Samuel Whittemore, then 80 years old, killed three British soldiers, April 19, 1775. He was shot, bayoneted, beaten and left for dead, but recovered and lived to be 98 years of age.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Raging Blizzard That Killed Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox in 1819

Samuel Tarbox and his wife are still remembered nearly 200 years after they froze to death in a fearful March snowstorm. To this day, some people in Maine’s Sebago Lakes Region refer to a fierce snowstorm as a ‘real tarboxer.’

It had snowed for three days when Samuel Tarbox ventured out of his house in the town of Standish, Maine. He set out to the local gristmill to have a bag of corn ground, but collapsed on his return. His wife went to find him and she, too, perished.

The sad tale reached the ears of their 67-year-old neighbor, Thomas Shaw, who wrote bad but popular poems for a little bit of money. Shaw sold printed copies of MOURNFUL SONG, On a man and wife, who both froze to death in one night, on Standish Cape, so called. (Read it here.)

Shaw sold his ballad for pennies in nearby Portland, where sailors picked it up and took it to distant lands. And Nathaniel Hawthorne, the teenaged nephew of the Tarboxes’ neighbor, supposedly watched the burial of Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox.

The mournful ballad of Samuel Tarbox and his wife

The Storm of 1819

The winter of 1818-19 had had remarkably little snow. People had hardly had to use their sleighs.

Then on March 25 came the great snowstorm. “Probably more snow fell at this time than has ever fallen during a single storm in this town since its settlement,” wrote Francis Gould Butler in his history of Farmington, Maine.

“The depth was estimated from three and one-half feet, and the surrounding country is blockaded for several days.”

The storm, according to some accounts, lasted nine days.

The Tarbox Tragedy

Samuel Tarbox left his starving family at their home in Standish with a bag of corn to have it ground. He reached the gristmill, but on his return the heavy bag of cornmeal proved too much for him in the heavy snowdrifts. He tied the bag to a low-hanging branch, then struggled home through the snow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Just outside his yard, Samuel Tarbox collapsed. He cried to his wife for help. Inside the house, Mrs. Tarbox thought she heard her husband call over the howling wind. So she told her five children to stay inside the house, and to blow a horn so she could find her way back, according to Hidden History of the Sebago Lakes Region.

Mrs. Tarbox (her first name is lost to history) found her husband lying just a few feet from her door. She tried to move him, but couldn’t. So she covered him with her woolen cape and hat, then set off to a neighbor’s house for help. But she didn’t get far. Mrs. Tarbox collapsed not far from her husband.

Meanwhile the frightened Tarbox children blew intermittently on the horn for two days. Finally a woodsman came upon the frozen bodies of their parents.

Thomas Shaw

Thomas Shaw wrote folksy poems he called mournful ballads and sold them on broadside sheets in Portland and the other Cumberland County towns.

Bon in 1753, he had come to Standish as a 10-year-old with his father. He grew up on the frontier of Cumberland County before churches or schools were built. In 1775, he joined the Continental Army.

Thomas Shaw had no formal education, but as he wrote in his journal, “I learned to read and write a little, and in the year 1775 I began in my ignorant way to write spiritual songs . . . and some of them I have got printed.”

The subjects included the fall of the Gorham meeting house, Captain Adams’ shipwreck and the hanging of Drew, which he and his son watched in Portland in 1808.

He sold thousands of the ballads for six and a quarter cents apiece. In his poem about the Tarbox tragedy, Shaw had two coffins printed at the top.

The mournful song did not go down as great literature, with lines such as “She left her children then with speed To help her husband then in need, Through cold and wind in a deep snow, God knows what she did undergo.”

Betsy Tarbox

The tale of the Tarbox tragedy may have inspired a greater writer than Thomas Shaw. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 14, visited his Aunt Susan and Uncle Richard Manning in Standish in 1819. He reportedly stood by an upstairs window and watched in horror as Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox were buried.

The Mannings, who had no children of their own, adopted the youngest Tarbox child, Betsy. Hawthorne, who spent some of his youth in nearby Raymond, Maine, later described her in his diary:

“I can from my chamber window look across into Aunt Manning’s garden, this morning, and see little Betty Tarbox, flitting among the rosebushes, and in and out of the arbor, like a tiny witch. She will never realize the calamity that came upon her brothers and sisters, that terrible night when her father and mother lay within a few rods of each other, in the snow, freezing to death. I love the elf, because of her loss; and still my aunt is much more to her than her own mother, in her poverty, could have been.”

Two of Hawthorne’s short stories, The Gentle Boy and My Kinsman, Major Molineux, deal with young people cut off from their families. Betsy Tarbox may have inspired them..

This story about the Tarbox family was updated in 2023.

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Six Strange Rocks of New England, From the Eubrontes to the Man-eating Stone of Glastonbery

It should be no surprise that New England’s stony soil should produce a goodly number of strange rocks. They have such nicknames as the Devil’s Footprint, the Narragansett Runestone and the Man-eating Stone of Glastonbery.

Folktales grew up around some of New England’s strange rocks, like the one about the devil’s footprint in Maine. Scientific research explained some of the others, like the dinosaur tracks named the Connecticut State Fossil.

In some cases, like the Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee, there has never been a satisfactory explanation for how they got that way.

Here then are six strange rocks, one in each state, along with the stories that go with them. If you know of any others, please share them in the comments section.

The Connecticut State Fossil

Eubronte, one of Connecticut’s strange rocks

In 1802, a Massachusetts farm boy named Pliny Moody came across dinosaur tracks in Holyoke, Mass. That was the first of many discoveries of dinosaur tracks in the sandstone of the Connecticut River Valley.

Eubrontes is the name given to the footprint, not the dinosaur. Edward Hitchcock, the president of Amherst College, studied fossils in Holyoke, Mass., and gave them the name. He concluded, wrongly, the tracks were made by large birds.

On Aug. 23, 1966, Edward McCarthy was bulldozing a path for I-91 in Rocky Hill, Conn., when he overturned a block of sandstone imprinted with six three-toed footprints. The land turned out to be a former lakebed riddled with dinosaur tracks, the largest in North America.

Scientists confirmed the importance of the Rocky Hill dinosaur tracks, which are about a foot long. The highway was moved and the lake bed was designated a Connecticut state park. Scientists found about 2,000 of the three-toed tracks, which have been linked to the Jurassis-era Dilophosauris.

The Connecticut Legislature designated the Eubrontes fossil as the official state fossil in 1991. Other state legislatures were doing the same around that time. They did so in Massachusetts (therapod tracks in Granby), Maine (Pertica quadrifaria,a plant, in Baxter State Park) and Vermont (Beluga whale skeleton in Charlotte).

Dinosaur State Park, 400 West St., Rocky Hill

Devil’s Footprint

The devil’s footprint is said to be in the cemetery wall.

Next to the meeting house in North Manchester, Maine, lies a cemetery surrounded by a wall with a strange rock in it. The rock, in the corner of the wall, has three imprints said to be the devil’s footprints. One looks like a cloven hoof, the other two look human. Someone conveniently spray painted them red.

There is a story that goes with the rock, which may or may not be true (probably not). Years ago, a crew of construction workers was clearing a path for Scribner Hill Road when they came upon a boulder that could not be moved. One of the workmen exclaimed he’d sell his soul to the devil to move the rock. The next day, the rock was moved and the construction worker gone. The devil left his footprints on the rock as a reminder of the deal.

The North Manchester Meeting House, built in 1793, is still used as a church.

144 Scribner Hill Rd., North Manchester

Dighton Rock

Of all New England’s strange rocks, Dighton Rock, is the most studied.

Dighton Rock has mystified people since before the colonization of America. The rock is an 11-foot-high boulder covered with ancient petroglyphs of an unknown origin. It once rested on the shore of the Taunton River, but it now has its own museum (operated by appointment only) in Berkley, Mass., once part of Dighton, Mass.

Visitors to the strange rock will be in good company as Cotton Mather, George Washington and dozens of scientists have attempted to decode the meaning behind the writing on it.

Some theories: A message left by Norse explorers, Native American symbols and a message from God. So far no consensus exists as to the rock’s significance, and its meaning remains a mystery.

Dighton Rock State Park, Bayview Ave, Berkley

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

The Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee

Seneca Ladd was many things: Piano maker, carriage maker, mill owner, banker (He was one of the founders of the Meredith Village Savings Bank), amateur meteorologist, and geologist.

New Hampshire’s Lakes Region well remembers his legacy. But his most unusual accomplishment remains a mystery. One day while workmen were digging on his property in Meredith sometime in 1872 or earlier they uncovered an egg-shaped object buried at a depth of two feet and encased in clay.

The object, by far the smallest of our mystery stones, is a carved stone bearing markings that remain unidentified. Ladd himself thought his “egg” was Native American in its origins and he displayed it for the curious for much of his life. The egg still baffles scientists as to what exactly it is. Ladd’s daughter gave the object to the New Hampshire Historical Society in 1927, which then displayed it in its Museum of New Hampshire History in Concord.

New Hampshire Historical Society, 30 Park St., Concord

Quidnessett Rock

Wickford, R.I.

Quidnessett Rock, also known as the Narragansett Runestone, is a strange rock in North Kingstown, R.I., with a somewhat shaky pedigree.

Rhode Island historians first paid attention to the 2.5 ton rock around 1984. The rock bears a series of unusual markings that some claim look like markings made by the religious sect known as the The Knights Templar. This faction claims the stone is a marker, probably documenting a land claim that dates to before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

However, Edward Brown of Providence came forward to clarify that he and his brother made the markings on the rock as young boys in 1964, though not as a hoax. They did it just for fun, he said.

Others view the rock as a nuisance. A resident of Pojac Point in North Kingstown caused a kerfuffle when he lifted the rock and dropped it farther out to sea to slow the onslaught of visitors to the stone. After someone caught him he retrieved the stone, now on permanent display in Updike Park in the Village of Wickford. It makes as good an excuse as any for a trip to the charming village.

Updike Park, 89 Brown St., Wickford

Man-Eating Stone of Glastonbery

The Green Mountains

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared on Glastonbery Mountain, four without a trace: Middie Rivers (1945); Paula Jean Welden (1946); James Tedford (1949); Paul Jephson (1950); and Frieda Langer (1950).

Rivers, an experienced hunter, knew the area. Welden, a Bennington College sophomore, disappeared while hiking the Long Trail. James Tedord, a veteran, vanished on a bus exactly three years after Paula Welden disappeared. Jephson, an eight-year-old boy, went missing from the family truck while his mother fed some pigs. And Langer disappeared on a hike near the Somerset Reservoir. Her body was then found seven months later in an area that had been carefully searched.

In 2009, a writer named Joseph Citro suggested an explanation in his book, The Vermont Monster Guide: The man-eating stone of Glastonbery Mountain. In it, he wrote,

“No one alive has seen this dangerous anomaly on Glastonbury Mountain. Native Americans knew of it, and warned people away. We can only imagine it as a sizable rock, large enough to stand on. But when someone stands upon it, the rock becomes less solid, and, like a living thing, swallows the unfortunate trespasser. A number of disappearances have been reported on Glastonbury Mountain. Could all these vanished folks have stepped inadvertently on this hungry stone?”

Citro dubbed the area, part of the Green Mountains, the Bennington Triangle.

Glastonbery Mountain, Glastonbery

To read about the strange rocks that form mysterious stone structures of New England, click here.

Images: Wickford, R.I., By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20433895; Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18574963; Green Mountains From the nek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22873955. This story about strange rocks was updated in 2022.

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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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The Early Days of New England Skiing

When members of the Appalachian Mountain Club began hacking ski trails in New Hampshire over Barrett and Temple Mountains in 1927, New England skiing had just started to get popular.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Back then there may not have been a single mile of downhill ski trail on the continent, according to the Jan. 25, 1935 Ski Bulletin. Those first Appalachian Mountain Club skiers finished 20 miles of trail in the southwest corner of New Hampshire.

Then, in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, the Winnipesaukee Ski Club finished trails on what is now Gunstock. The Works Progress Administration further developed the Belknap Mountains Recreation Area.

Skiing at Dickinson’s farm, March 1939.

Dickinson’s Farm

Much early New England skiing took place at mom-and-pop ski areas. Putting up a tow rope and taking in lodgers was a way for farmers to earn a little more money in the off season.

Enthusiasm for skiing spread to a farm in Lisbon, N.H. , in 1936. Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott took pictures of local teenagers skiing on Dickinson’s farm in March 1939. She described the photos:

On Saturday afternoon many high school students come to Dickinson’s farm to ski. Mr Dickenson built a ski tow on his farm three years ago at a cost of one thousand dollars. This is the first year he had made any money, although business is increasing rapidly now. He has a small dairy farm and until the hurricane last year destroyed his entire grove of maple trees he made and sold maple syrup. Lisbon near Franconia, New Hampshire.

Tow rope on Dickinson’s farm.

Cannon Mountain

New England skiing wasn’t just a way for farmers to make money. It also allowed innkeepers to extend their season into winter. Kate Peckett, the daughter of the owners of Peckett’s-on-Sugar-Hill, persuaded her parents to run a ski school on Cannon Mountain.

Kate is also credited with inspiring the Taft Slalom trail on Cannon Mountain, which the Civilian Conservation Corps cut in 1933 as the first racing trail in North America.

In February 1933, the Ski Bulletin called it a “ski run equaled by nothing in the East.”

The CCC also built a parking lot and ski trails on Cannon Mountain. And in 1938, the state of New Hampshire agreed to finance an aerial tramway on Cannon, completed in 1939.

Skiers from Boston relaxing in lodge at North Conway, N.H.

Vermont

The first tow rope in New England was constructed on Jan. 28, 1934 in a former sheep pasture near Woodstock, Vt. Made out of rope, pulleys and an old Model T engine, it gave birth to the White Cupboard Skiway (named after the nearby inn).

Skiers on porch of Mr. Dickinson's home.

Skiers on the porch of Mr. Dickinson’s home.

The Civilian Conservation Corps played a big role in developing Vermont’s ski industry. CCC enlistees built 11 ski trails, mostly in Stow. All but one still exist.

Two Vermonters affiliated with Dartmouth College also helped popularize skiing in New England. When a Swedish student challenged the school’s carpenter, Fred Garey of Thetford, to make a pair of skis, he rose to the occasion. He figured out how to make the eight-foot-long skis from seasoned ash in his kitchen. When he showed them to the Dartmouth students, he realized he had a hit on his hands.

Another Vermonter, Fred Harris of Brattleboro, founded the Dartmouth Outing Club in 1909 as a student. National Geographic ran a story about skiing in New Hampshire in 1920 that featured the club, and Dartmouth’s admissions tripled.

Early New England skiing on the Taft trail on Cannon Mountain.

Maine

When Maine’s first tow rope opened in Fryeberg in 1936, 200 people came to ski and 3,000 came to watch.

Maine’s first Alpine skiing resort, Shawnee Peak in Bridgton, opened in 1938 with a 1,100-foot tow rope.

Today, Maine has more than 100 abandoned rope tow sites.

Skiers at the top of Cannon Mountain.

For more information about New England skiing history, check out the New England Ski Museum at the base of Cannon Mountain or on their website. All photos by Marion Post Wolcott in March 1939, courtesy Library of Congress. This story about New England skiing was updated in 2023.

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