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Leo Caisse

Four Days in May: The 1942 Rhode Island Forest Fires

On May 1, 1942, fire leveled more than 300 acres in the Limerock section of Lincoln, R.I. The source of ignition was at first thought to be ashes from a wood chopper’s pipe. The fire – the first of the 1942 Rhode Island forest fires — destroyed a cord of wood, damaged a garage and threatened three homes.

On the same day, 250 acres burned in Johnston on the Rohrig Estate. It took 60 firefighters to save a Scout camp and a farm from the blaze.

Again on the same day, firefighters fought a 350-acre forest fire at White Rock just northwest of Westerly. Only a wind change saved a number of houses in the fire’s path, something State Fire Service workers and 80 men from three towns couldn’t accomplish.

Manpower was scarce, as the United States had entered World War II six months earlier, and tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders joined the war effort. But the fires would only get worse over the next few days – and suspicions would grow about the source of the 1942 Rhode Island forest fires.

Westerly Fire Chief Columbus Pasetti believed arson started the fires. But 15 wildfires would burn all over Rhode Island over the first four days in May. The cause might have been even worse than arson.

Fire Bug

As soon as firefighters smothered the Westerly blaze, they got called to a four-acre fire at the Cook Farm. But the State Fire Service men had already broken off to extinguish a fire in Coventry.

The Coventry fire took two days to put out and spread into West Greenwich, where it mushroomed into a 40-square-mile inferno. By then it consumed a dozen homes and leveled camps and barns.

Rhode Island officials were convinced they had a fire bug on their hands.

1942 Rhode Island Fires

On May 2 alone, fires broke out in the western Rhode Island towns of West Greenwich, Scituate and Coventry. In the eastern part of the state, a fire started in Newport among fallen timber from the 1938 hurricane around Tonomy Hill.

Officials said the fires, the biggest in Rhode Island memory, had been set deliberately.

A call for help went out. Soldiers from Fort Devens and sailors from Quonset Point joined the crusade to extinguish the fires. All available apparatus in the area responded, as well as equipment from as far away as Warren and Bristol.

A thousand people fought the Rhode Island fires by then, but still they couldn’t extinguish them.

Army and Navy officials said they dispatched more men to help. Governor J. Howard McGrath issued a public appeal for another thousand men.

All workers from the Works Progress Administration and the state Department of Public Works were dispatched to the scene. Volunteers poured into the area, but were only allowed to fight the fire if they had some equipment. Some volunteers went in with as little as a shovel or a burlap bag. The situation was growing desperate.

Warwick announced a special police motorcycle patrol to protect their woodlands.

All told, 3,000 volunteers and firefighters fought the Rhode Island fires.

Louttit School

At least 75 volunteers and firefighters received injuries in the fire. They were treated at a makeshift hospital at the Louttit School in West Greenwich (now the town’s public library). The school also served as a headquarters for the whole firefighting operation.

The Providence Police radio patrol set up two heavy-duty transmitters at the Louttit School, communicating via six portable sets.

The U.S. Army set up a mobile field kitchen to feed the hungry men. Emergency canteen units from the Red Cross and Civil Defense Women’s Ambulance and Transportation Corps also arrived at the scene.

The Louttit School, now the West Greenwich Library

Martial Law

It’s still May 2, and Governor McGrath declares martial law in Coventry, West Greenwich, Scituate and in parts of three other towns. Blue-uniformed state guardsmen along with 200 soldiers with loaded rifles now patrolled the roads of those towns.

Suddenly 20 of those state guardsmen found themselves trapped by flames as the fire surrounded them. They managed to escape.

Another guardsman, while going to his backpack tank, got disoriented and had to run for his life as the flames leaped ahead of him among the tree tops. He finally found refuge in a swamp.

Damage

Another story unfolded when a grandmother, a mother and three children ran for their lives as the fire raged around them. They found salvation in a nearby brook. As the fire passed over them, they made their way through the smoldering forest to a highway where a motorist picked them up and brought them to safety.

They had watched as their home, their barn and their garage burned to the ground. Their dogs and all their livestock perished, except for one pig.

Among the buildings destroyed in the Rhode Island fires was a storage facility with 250,000 board feet of lumber owned by the federal government. Firefighters barely saved another building with 1.25 million board feet of federal lumber in it.

Coincidence? It was widely believed, according to the New York Times, that it might be sabotage. No one, however, made the official charge.

Enemy Action?

Author Ian Fleming wrote once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Governor McGrath said he saw Army aerial photos that showed the fires starting up in widely separated areas. The conditions at the time were not conducive to flying sparks igniting fires in those far-apart places.

James R. Simmons with the Federal Fire Service strongly hinted that the Rhode Island fires were suspicious. Of the 15 fires that erupted almost simultaneously, many started near federal lumber storage areas – the location of which was confidential.

Gov. James Howard McGrath

May 3

On May 3, yet more Rhode Island fires broke out, four to be exact: two in Assonet, one in Somerset and one in Tiverton. One hundred men took three hours to check the Tiverton blaze by a backfire.

Fire also raged in the Moosup Valley section of Foster along the Connecticut border. Rhode Island and Connecticut fire forces struggled to halt the progress of that conflagration.

At 9 p.m. that night, Governor McGrath announced that all of the fire seemed to be under control. Mopping-up operations would continue into the next day to make sure the fires were out. By the end of May 3, the last 1,500 firefighters straggled home as the nightmare seemed to be at an end.

A Wider View

What caused the Rhode Island fires? We have seen experienced professionals speculate that arson or maybe sabotage started them. Remember, Governor McGrath saw Army aerial photos showing many fires starting at the same time.

Was there a precedent for this? Here’s a bigger view.

On April 20, 1942, Forest Ranger J.B. Fortin reported 20 fires starting almost simultaneously on Sunburst Mountain in Brevard, N.C. They developed into huge forest fires.

Fortin, a veteran ranger, had never seen anything like it. On his first radio call, he said it had to be saboteurs. The outbreak of fires in Brevard went on for a week.

Then later that month 168 fires broke out in New Jersey — coincidentally near an Army base. Those fires grew so tremendously that a call went out for shock troops of citizens to help extinguish them along with 2,500 soldiers. The fires eventually consumed 5000 acres, according to the New York Times.

William Breuer in his book The Air Raid Warden Was a Spy, entitled one chapter The Eastern Seaboard Set Ablaze. The FBI was going to investigate all of these fires, but never revealed what they found.

So were all of these fires sabotage?

Maybe.

Leo Caisse, the author of this story, passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

1942 was a bad year for fires. The Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston killed 660 people that year. Read more about them here and here.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The New England Defenders of the Alamo

Among the defenders of the Alamo, at least eight came from New England to start a new life. Those lives were cut short, like all the others besieged for 13 days in the old Spanish mission.

This is the story of those men who traveled from every New England state for a piece of land to support a home and a family.

Gone To Texas

After the Mexican Revolution of 1824, the Mexican government offered very generous land grants to people to come and settle in the region of Texas. The government offered the grants on condition the recipients become Mexican citizens and adopt Catholicism.

This project succeeded so well that within a few years Americans outnumbered Mexicans in Texas. As many as 135,000 U.S. citizens made the move.

In fact, so many left their homes in the States that when they didn’t pay their taxes the tax rolls commonly noted GTT, “Gone to Texas.”

As you will see, many of these men made their way to Texas via New Orleans. They did it because the river network was the easiest way to travel among the states. If you could connect with the Ohio River you could then connect with the Mississippi and then on down to New Orleans and, finally, across into Texas.

The Americans in Texas began to petition the Mexican government to change the requirements for the land grants. When that failed, they really started to agitate.

The Alamo

General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna moved the Mexican Army into Texas to quell the unrest and bring the Americans to heel. It culminated in a 13-day siege at the Alamo, a makeshift fort that had once served as a Spanish mission.

About 100 men had been stationed at the Alamo. Before the siege began, William Travis and James Bowie, who would eventually co-command the fort, arrived with some reinforcements.

The siege began on Feb. 23, 1836, when Santa Anna marched 1,500 Mexican troops into San Antonio. He raised a blood-red flag demanding unconditional surrender. In response, the defenders of the Alamo fired off an 18-pound cannon, which volunteer militiamen – including two from New England — had dragged all the way from New Orleans.

The two sides skirmished for 10 days. Travis knew the garrisoned men couldn’t stand up to the Mexicans, so he wrote letters to Texas and the United States begging for supplies and reinforcements.

He sent his final and most famous appeal for help to the people of Gonzales, Texas, addressed “To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world.”

I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch.

New England Defenders of the Alamo

Travis gave the letter to a Rhode Islander named Albert Martin, who commanded the regiment from the town of Gonzales, 70 miles to the east. Martin carried the letter to Gonzales, and then returned to the Alamo with his regiment. Among the men who would earn the title of the ‘Immortal 32,’ was a fellow New Englander, John Flanders.

The Gonzales Regiment sneaked through enemy lines after dark and made it back into the Alamo.

The Mexican Army finally began to move on the Alamo in the early hours of March 6. The defenders fended off two attacks, but couldn’t withstand the third.

Among the last of the Alamo defenders to die were the Invincibles, artillerymen who manned 12-pound cannons from the chapel.

Santa Anna’s army spared none of the defenders of the Alamo. In the end, between 182 and 257 men died in the battle, while about 600 Mexican troops were killed or wounded. The Mexicans spared a few civilians, who told the story of the Alamo.

The Fall of the Alamo, by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk.

Santa Anna’s cruelty inspired more men to join the Texan Army. Less than two months later, the Texans defeated the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto.

Following are descriptions of the eight defenders of the Alamo.

Albert Martin, Rhode Island

Albert Martin, was born in Providence, R. I. in 1808. He attended the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy in Connecticut which would later move to Vermont and become Norwich University. He left Rhode Island in 1832 with his family and set up a business in Tennessee. From there he and his family migrated to New Orleans, where they set up yet another family business in 1835.

Albert moved to Texas and set up a branch of their general store in Gonzales, Texas, Martin, Cofflin & Co. While there he joined the Gonzales Rangers and the Old 18. When at the Alamo, he was selected by Col. Travis to carry out his famous letter to Gonzales. In response, Martin and 32 men returned to the Alamo. All perished.

It should be noted that a cenotaph was erected and may still be seen, at the North Burial Ground, in Providence, to Martin and the defenders of the Alamo.

Albert Martin’s grave marker in Rhode Island.

Miles de Forest Andross, Vermont

He was born in 1809, in Vermont. He married Elizabeth Peabody in 1822 and had two children. Later he made his way to Texas and died with the other defenders of the Alamo. His name appears on the Alamo cenotaph in San Antonio, Texas.

Robert Cochran, New Hampshire

He was born in Pembroke, N.H., in 1810. He went to New Orleans and then on to Texas. At the Alamo, he was assigned to Captain William Carey’s artillery company and died among the defenders of the Alamo on March 6. Forty years after his death a tiny county in Texas — Cochran County, pop. 3,127 in 2010 — was named for him.

John Flanders, Massachusetts or New Hampshire

He was born in either Salisbury, Mass., or Newton, N.H., in 1810. Flanders was working for his father when they argued over a mortgage. John Flanders wanted to foreclose on a widow, and his father wouldn’t let him.

John Flanders, too, went to New Orleans and then on to Texas. He joined the Gonzales Rangers and was one of the immortal 32 who sneaked into the Alamo to aid the defenders in response to the plea from Col. Travis.

William D. Howell, Massachusetts

He was a medical doctor and had a practice in New York. He too made his way to New Orleans and joined the New Orleans Greys. They became members of Capt. William Brazeby’s infantry company.

Amos Pollard, Massachusetts

He was born in Ashburnham, Mass., in 1803 and grew up in Surrey, N. H. He graduated from the medical school at the Vermont Academy in Castleton, Vt. Married in 1828 to Fanny Parker, they had one daughter. His wife passed away in 1831.

He served as the chief surgeon at the Alamo and set up a hospital within the compound. Historians say he probably died defending the hospital.

He, William Travis, Jim Bowie and David Crockett were the only defenders of the Alamo to have their portraits painted in their lifetimes.

Gordon C. Jennings, Connecticut

He was born in 1780 or 82 (that too is disputed) in Windham, Conn. But whatever the date, he was the oldest of the defenders of the Alamo. He moved from Connecticut to Missouri then on to Texas. He served as a member of Captain William R. Carey’s artillery company. Carey called his unit the ‘Invincibles,’

William Linn, District of Maine

He lived in Boston for a while and then moved to New Orleans. There he joined the New Orleans Greys, two companies of volunteers who supported Texas independence. The Greys later merged with Balzeby’s Infantry.

Leo Caisse, the author of this story, passed away in 2020. He had published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and lived in East Providence, R.I.

Image of William Martin’s grave marker by Swampyank – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22024069. This story last updated in 2022.

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When Annapolis Moved to Newport, RI

The United States Naval Academy is and was located in Annapolis, Md., and that posed a problem with the advent of the Civil War in 1861.

Maryland, a border state with many Southern sympathizers, was plausibly within striking distance of Confederate forces. To protect and continue the Naval Academy, the U.S. Navy moved it from Annapolis to Newport, R.I., for the duration of the Civil War.

Though the Naval Academy only spent four years in Newport, its presence would have a lasting impact on the city. One of the academy’s instructors noted the advantages of Narragansett Bay while there, and he later established the Naval War College in Newport.

Annapolis History

The U.S. Naval Academy had existed for only about 15 years when the Civil War broke out. It was the brainchild of George Bancroft, a historian and statesman appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1845. While serving in that post, he saw the need for training naval officers and founded the U.S. Naval Academy.

The academy began classes on Oct. 10, 1845 in Annapolis with Commander Franklin Buchanan as its first superintendent. It had seven professors and 50 midshipmen. Interestingly enough, that same Buchanan resigned his commission when the Civil War started, and he went on to command the Confederate Naval Force at Mobile, Ala.

On a brighter note, Bancroft must have been delighted to see the Naval Academy move to Newport even temporarily. Since 1852 he had spent his summers at Rose Cliff, literally down the street on Bellevue Avenue from the newly transferred school. A mansion called Rosecliff replaced Bancroft’s cottage, and the movie The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford, was filmed there.

Leaving Annapolis

Capt. George S. Blake, the Academy’s superintendent, made the decision to move the Naval Academy to a northern site. Not only did he have concerns about the safety of his staff and officer candidates, he knew the Academy’s training ship was a tempting target for the Confederates. For the Naval Academy had been using as a training vessel the most famous ship in the Navy – Old Ironsides, the U.S.S. Constitution.

Old Ironsides during the Civil War

Just weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, the midshipmen and the academy staff packed up lock, stock and barrel. Then 130 midshipmen boarded Old Ironsides and were towed to safety in New York by the steamer Baltic.

They arrived in Newport Harbor by May 8, 1861. The townspeople gave a warm musical welcome to Superintendent Blake, his staff and the student body. Fort Adams gave Old Ironsides a 24-gun salute as she sailed past, and she returned their salute.

The Ladies of Newport

John C. Pegram was a midshipman at the Naval Academy in Annapolis when they packed up Old Ironsides and sailed north. Pegram wrote about his experience in a book, Recollections of the U.S. Naval Academy.

According to his account, they passed Beavertail in Jamestown and then arrived at their destination: Fort Adams. A flotilla of people in small boats met them.

Captain George Rodgers, aboard the Constitution, recognized one older man and two young ladies. He hailed them saying, “How are the ladies of Newport?” To which the man in the small boat replied,” The ladies are for the union, to a man.”

‘Wretched’

Once they moved into Fort Adams, the midshipmen conducted a dress parade each morning on the parade ground. That attracted many onlookers. Old Ironsides also attracted considerable attention. So much so that the onlookers developed into an annoying distraction to the students who took classes on her gun decks. They especially annoyed the plebes – the youngest class — who slept aboard the old ship.

The onlookers weren’t the worst of it. As Midshipman Park Benjamin, a member of the class of 1867, wrote,

Nothing could be more desolate to the plebe whose first experience brought him to these school ships. During the day he sat and studied at one of the desks, long rows of which extended up and down the gun deck, and occasionally marched ashore to the windy recitation rooms, where he contracted bad colds along with a knowledge of arithmetic. The commissary department was always more or less out of gear, and the meals eaten in the blackness of the birth deck by the light of a few ill smelling oil lamps were wretched.

Fort Adams itself proved such a dark and dank environment that the staff and midshipmen soon started moving to homes scattered about the city. As a result, the Naval Academy negotiated to lease the state-of-the-art Atlantic House Hotel at the corner of Pelham Street and Bellevue Avenue.

Move to Luxury

The hotel overlooked the Touro Park and the famous Newport Viking Tower. By September 20, the students left the fort, took up residence at their newfound home and went to work the next day.

The move must have been a godsend. Pegram described it as a move into luxury. Two men to a room, iron framed beds, bureaus, a table and two chairs. A far cry from sleeping in hammocks aboard the ship. They moved in their books, instruments and arms. Their campus boundaries were Touro Park and the surrounding streets, a small world.

Each day they went to open fields on the outskirts of Newport to conduct their parade marches. Pegram said it was not uncommon for the city’s people to see midshipmen doing a double-quick pace down Bellevue Avenue back to their hotel residence.

Midshipmen pose in front of the Atlantic House.

In October 1862, the USS Santee arrived in Newport to serve as a working school for the academy. And later still, the Navy assigned the schooner/yacht America to Newport as a training vessel.

At the conclusion of the Civil War and after four years in Newport, the Naval Academy moved back to its original home in Annapolis, Md., on Aug. 9, 1865.

Luce

One man by the name of Stephen B. Luce had arrived in Newport in January 1862. A lieutenant commander, he received an appointment as head of the Department of Seamanship. Luce became well acquainted with Newport and its harbor.

In 1881, Luce, then a commodore, returned to Newport to command the Navy Training Squadron. Having seen the advantages of Narragansett Bay, he was instrumental in establishing the Newport Naval Training Center. Then in 1884, he founded the Naval War College and served as its first president.

Stephen Luce

Today, Newport remains a major facility for training and the home of the Naval War College, where naval officers come from all over the world for advanced education.

The Atlantic House Hotel was torn down in 1877 and the Parkgate Building was constructed in its place. The Parkgate today has a plaque commemorating the Naval Academy’s presence in Newport.

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the Naval Academy’s move from Annapolis, passed away in 2020. He had published The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

This story was updated in 2022.

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