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Lowell Mass.

Ellen Robbins, Flower Painter and Perennial Prank Victim

What was it about Ellen Robbins that inspired people to play practical jokes on her?

She made a good living as a flower painter in the 19^th century. Her gorgeous botanical watercolors sold well, in bound books and in frames. She grew up in shabby gentility, helped along by her well-to-do family and friends.

Wildflowers by Ellen Robbins. Chromalithograph. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Summers she spent in fashionable resorts, winters in her Beacon Street studio. Artists more high spirited than she frequented those places, which may explain why Ellen Robbins was the butt of so many jokes. She was prim, temperate, careful. She preferred nature to the social ramble, and she didn’t like displays of wealth, which she considered vulgar.

Toward the end, though, Ellen Robbins got a good laugh on everyone else.

Ellen Robbins

She was born in 1828 in Watertown, Mass., the youngest of seven children. Her father owned a factory, but his business failed and he died when she was two.

She described herself as a plain, sickly child with a lame foot. She grew up poor, but with prominent neighbors and cousins—Maria White, who married James Russell Lowell, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis were both cousins. Her relatives also included a leading family of Watertown, the Thaxters, through whom she would discover the artists’ colony on the Isles of Shoals.

Autumn Leaves, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

As a child, she loved to paint. As the youngest, her sisters played jokes on her. They told her sugared almonds were spiders, which she believed. When presented with the treat, her sisters held out their hands for her almonds, which she gave them.

She attended the School of Design in Boston on the suggestion of her cousin, William Abijah White, an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Then, needing to support her family, she got a series of jobs trying to design prints for textiles., For a time she worked at the Merrimac Printworks in Lowell, Mass., and at the Manchester Printworks in Manchester, N.H.

But she never got the hang of it, so she gave up and went home to Watertown. There she attended Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman‘s School of Design, which taught her what she needed to know about watercolor.

Flower Painter

She excelled at painting watercolors of flowers, and decided to create books of spring flowers as they came. Each book had 20 paintings and sold for $25. Here having wealthy friends and relatives paid off. Cousin Hollis Hunnewell bought one for another cousin, a countess living in Paris. Philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway bought another.

“I now began to feel my good fortune had begun,” she wrote.

Ellen Robbins in her studio, photograph by J. Appleton Brown

She then contributed a watercolor of autumn leaves to an exhibit of amateur paintings. Several people who liked her paintings asked her to give lessons, and so she took a class of seven students. Ellen remembered how Susan Cabot Lowell Sohier brought a melon basket filled with flowers to paint, a Herculean task.

Eventually she began giving private lessons She continued to attract pupils, and after many years she had seven classes a week, at $150 a class. Her students came mostly from Boston’s old moneyed families.

“In my classes, when those came, I lived for two hours each day in the fashionable world; and after hearing of balls and parties, the rest that followed in my simple home was most grateful,” she wrote.

The Cool Kids

In addition to Boston’s elite, Ellen Robbins had entree to an expatriate community of American artists in Rome. One of its members, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, had been a close friend since childhood.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

Hosmer had a relationship with the leader of that expatriate group, the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. When Cushman was performing in Boston, she visited Robbins’ studio and gave her tickets to her shows. She also gave her a recipe for shampoo that supposedly thickened hair. But the shampoo had red lavendar as an ingredient. When Ellen used it to wash her mother’s hair, it turned pink.

Charlotte Cushman by William Page, 1853. National Portrait Gallery.

Another member of Cushman’s group, sculptor Margaret Foley, suggested Ellen sell her paintings through a Summer Street gallery eventually known as Doll & Richards. The gallery accepted her work, which sold out in a matter of weeks. Henry Ward Beecher was her biggest customer.

She took a studio at the corner of West and Tremont streets in Boston, later at 6 Beacon Street. There she made friends with John Appleton Brown and his wife, who had a studio next to hers.

Asters, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

She kept boxes of butter and sausage on the window ledge overlooking Beacon Street. One day she got a postcard from her landlord remonstrating her for putting food on the window ledge. She went next door to share her indignation with Appleton Brown, who made a show of sympathizing with her. But then his mouth twitched and she realized he had sent the postcard.

Travels

Reflecting on her success, she wrote, “My pictures were in great demand, and everything seemed to help me, for I was almost alone in the painting of flowers, and had relatives who were interested in my success, helping in a financial way.”

Another cousin, Henry Durant, who founded Wellesley College, hired her to paint a frieze at Wellesley (now gone).

She then built a studio in Bar Harbor, where she sold her flower paintings for many summers. But Bar Harbor began to attract wealthy swells, so she changed summer venues to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.

Hyacinths, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

There at her family’s hotel, poet Celia Thaxter hosted many artists and literati of the day. Some of them enjoyed playing practical jokes on Ellen Robbins. One night they sneaked a parrot into her bedroom.

Thaxter’s granddaughter remembered how the high-spirited Hassam played another joke on her.

Childe Hassam and Appleton Brown greatly annoyed a most temperate fellow artist, Levi’s cousin Ellen Robbins, by sneaking into her studio and filling her Franklin stove with empty champagne bottles. She was not amused when, the next damp day, she tried to light her fire and was choked by smoke.

Celia Thaxter’s garden at the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam

In 1873, she had saved enough to go to Europe with her sister. Again, a wealthy friend helped her out. Two days before she sailed, John Cummings, a wealthy banker, walked into her studio and handed her a letter of credit for a thousand dollars. He told her he wanted her to see Switzerland and Germany.

In London she befriended May Alcott, whose sister Louisa May, had written the blockbuster children’s novel, Little Women.

Ellen Robbins Gets the Last Laugh

The joke was on everyone else in 1893.

Back home in Watertown with her sisters, Ellen, then in her 65th year, fell gravely ill. As she lay in her sickbed, the Young Men’s Republican Club gave a dinner in town. Toward the end of the dinner, the Episcopal minister made some remarks, and ended by pointing to some flowers on the table. He said they reminded him of Miss Ellen Robbins, who painted such realistic flowers. He then added that “she is lying very ill at her house tonight.”

The next day, Ellen’s sister Martha ordered a sewing machine from a man who also worked as an undertaker. He delivered the sewing machine in his undertaker’s wagon. A Mr. Hartwell, who worked in the paper mill nearby, happened to look out the window just as the wagon left the house. One of his workmen had a sister who boarded at the Robbins’ house, and he told Mr. Hartwell Ellen would be the one taken away by the undertaker.

Wildflowers No. 2, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

Mr. Hartman went to tell the minister, who stopped by to pay a condolence call. Startled when he saw Ellen on the sofa embroidering, he said he was pleased to see her looking so well. A stream of visitors followed the next day, all commenting on how happy they were to see Ellen looking so well.

A neighbor, Miss Mary Fitch, wanted to attend her funeral. Mary’s sister heard that a funeral would take place the next day at 2 p.m., and assumed that meant Ellen Robbins would be laid to rest. Mary went to the funeral service, and viewed the remains – of a bald old man wrapped in a shroud. “Oh, how changed,” she said. She soon figured out she’d gone to a stranger’s funeral.

Ellen Robbins lived another 12 years, dying at the age of 77.

With thanks to Reminiscences of a Flower Painter, parts I and II, by Ellen Robbins for the New England Magazine, Vol. 14, 1896. This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Paintings of New England Spring

Artists have probably created far fewer New England spring paintings than of any of the three other seasons. After all, New England has so little spring. The cold gray months morph into mud season and then black fly season. And then, suddenly, it’s the Fourth of July and summer.

And yet New England’s artists have managed to capture what is appealing about the brief New England spring. Maple sugaring. Apple blossoms. Bird’s nests. Brilliant, clear light on sunny days. Romantic moonlit nights.

So here are six paintings of New England spring, one in each state.

New England Spring by Moonlight

May Night by Willard Metcalf. National Gallery of Art.

Willard Metcalf painted May Night, one of his best works, while at the Old Lyme artist colony in Connecticut.

Metcalf was born into a working class family in Lowell, Mass., in 1858. He began painting at 16 and opened a studio in Boston at 18. Early success allowed him to study in Europe for five years.

He then moved around the Northeast, teaching and painting portraits and illustrations. Then he moved to Gloucester, Mass., and devoted himself to landscape painting. His friend Childe Hassam encouraged him to join the Old Lyme artist colony, where he could find high thinking and low living.

May Night depicts the home of Miss Florence Griswold, who founded the Old Lyme colony. In 1907, Metcalf won the Corcoran gold medal for it, along with a $3,000 purchase price. But Old Lyme probably lost its charm for him when his wife ran off with one of his students that year. The painting now belongs to the National Gallery of Art.

Metcalf then spent time at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, where he painted many landscapes of the changing seasons. One critic called him “the poet laureate of the New England hills.”

The Corcoran Gallery held a major exhibition of his work in 1925, the year he died of a heart attack at age 66.

Spring on a Farm

Spring, by Winslow Homer. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Winslow Homer, born in Boston, Mass., in 1837, learned watercolor at his mother’s knee. He apprenticed to a lithographer for a few years, but hated it. For the next 20 years he illustrated life in Boston and rural New England as well as battlefield scenes during the Civil War.

He then moved to New York, but traveled frequently, painting all the way. In the spring of 1878 he produced 50 watercolors, admired for their fluidity and sparkle. Spring, painted on a farm, is one of them.

Homer eventually grew reclusive around 1880. His family owned an estate on Prout’s Neck in Maine, and Homer moved into the carriage house. He painted the sea in Maine, traveling to the Caribbean during the winter and sometimes to the Adirondacks.

Though he also painted in oil, Winslow Homer knew he’d done something transcendent with his watercolors.

“You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors,” Homer once said. He hung some of his exquisite watercolors on the walls of the rental cottages. Now they’re in museums or private collections. His 1878 watercolor Spring belongs to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

‘As if the year were all springtime’

Still Life with Robin’s Nest by Fidelia Bridges. Private Collection.

Fidelia Bridges, born in 1834, was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. She only painted birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility.

She ‘paints as if the year were all springtime,’ wrote one critic.

Bridges was often lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.

Fidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Her parents’ death when she was 15 impoverished her family, but wealthy patrons allowed her to study art in Philadelphia and Europe.

She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., along the Housatonic River. She also sold her work to Louis Prang, who invented the American Christmas card in Boston. For a time she worked as governess for Mark Twain’s children.

Girl on Rock

Spring by Maxfield Parrish. Illustration for Life magazine, 1922 Easter edition

The landscape of Vermont and New Hampshire inspired Maxfield Parrish in 1922 to create lush, romantic paintings like Spring.

Parrish belonged to the Cornish Art Colony from 1898, when he and his wife built a house in Plainfield, N.H. He downplayed his own abilities, calling himself “commonplace” and “a mechanic.”

He used an ancient technique to paint, starting with a monochrome underpainting and then layering transparent glazes. It made him rich and famous. His 1922 painting Daybreak was the most popular art print of the 20^th century, appearing in one out of every four households.

His painting Spring appeared as the Easter cover art for Life magazine April 6, 1922. Parrish then got sick of painting lissome nymphs in outdoor settings. No more girls on rocks, he told the Associated Press in 1931. From then until his death in 1960 he abandoned illustration and painted landscapes.

Apple Trees in a Meadow

Apple Trees in a Meadow by Edward Bannister. High Museum

Edward Bannister stunned the judges of the art competition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. When he came to receive his gold medal, they were astonished to discover they’d awarded it to an African American.

After winning the prize he prospered as an artist, working out of his studio in Providence, R.I.

Bannister credited his wife, Christiana, with everything he accomplished. She ran several hair salons and told him to devote himself to his painting. Once his paintings started to sell, they spent summers in a cottage on Narragansett Bay. He often painted en plein air.

In 1890, Bannister painted Apple Trees in a Meadow, a familiar sight during the New England spring.

Bannister died in 1901, and his work fell into obscurity. He has since been rediscovered. Apple Trees in a Meadow now belongs to the High Museum in Atlanta.

New England Spring, Vermont Style

American Forest Scene–Maple Sugaring by Arthur Tait

You may well recognize this lithograph as a Currier and Ives, originally sold as a cheap and popular print but now quite collectible.

Nathaniel Currier started off in Boston but eventually moved to New York. Once he hit on the formula of dramatic scenes of newsworthy events, he was on his way. He teamed up with James Merritt Ives and they expanded into scenes of city life, portraits, politics, boats and landscapes.

The firm made prints from the work of the most celebrated artists of the day: Eastman Johnson, George Inness and Thomas Nast. It also employed its own artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who specialized in sporting scenes.

New England winter scenes proved especially popular. Snow, however, is not unknown during a New England spring.

Arthur Tait, a British-American artist, painted American Forest Scene—Maple Sugaring. Though he lived in New York, we’re choosing to call this a Vermont scene, as it produces more maple syrup than any other state.

Currier and Ives lasted 72 years before going out of business.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Spring by Parrish, Plum Leaves via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0; Robin’s Nest (1863, private collection) public domain PD-US.

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Six Stops From the People’s Guide to Greater Boston

One of our favorite books is the People’s Guide to Greater Boston, a tour guide that goes beyond the usual listing of tourist attractions.

The authors — Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis — take readers to sites of “oppression, resistance, organization or transformation.” Stops include the homes of wealthy opium smugglers, slaveowners, mill owners and imperialists.

People’s Guide

Published by University of California Press People’s Guides series, it also presents themed tours, such as a One Percent Tour of Greater Boston, a Malcolm and Martin Tour and a Sacco and Vanzetti Tour.

The Elias Hasket Derby House.

The One Percent Tour, for example, features the home of the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, the home of 18th-century millionaire Elias Hasket Derby in Salem and Elmwood, where British lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver lived in Cambridge.

To give you an idea of the places to which the book takes the reader, we bring you six stops from the People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

1. Noah Worcester House, Brighton

Marker for Noah Worcester house between these triple-deckers. image courtesy @ 2021 Google

The U.S. Postal Department erected a small monument between 437 and 439 Washington St. in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. It looks like a headstone, but it marks the home of Noah Worcester, Brighton’s first postmaster.

Worcester was more than a postmaster, however. He worked as a writer, a minister and a pioneer in the American peace movement.

Born in Hollis, N.H., in 1758, he marched to Boston with his father’s militia company at 16. He narrowly escaped imprisonment during the Battle of Bunker Hill. He later fought in the Battle of Bennington. The carnage he saw on the battlefield helped persuade him to give peace a chance.

Worcester married, had children and entered the Unitarian ministry in New Hampshire. He published arguments defending the Unitarian creed, which brought him to the attention of prominent clergymen William Ellery Channing and John Lowell. They invited him to come to Boston to edit a new publication, The Christian Disciple. He accepted, and then he started the Massachusetts Peace Society.

In 1814, he wrote a treatise, A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, considered a classic of antiwar writing. He also received an appointment as Brighton’s postmaster, but his daughter Sally apparently did all the work.

Channing, in a tribute to him, wrote,

He was struck, as no other man within my acquaintance has been, with the monstrous incongruity between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of Christian communities; between Christ’s teaching of peace, mercy, forgiveness, and the wars which divide and desolate the church and the world.

437-439 Washington St., Brighton

2. Parmenter Street Chapel, North End, Boston

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be here. Image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be across from the North End branch of the Boston Public Library. In its courtyard was a sand garden. Not just any sand garden (we’d call it a sand box) but the sand garden that launched a thousand playgrounds across the country.

It began with a doctor who saw children playing in sand gardens in Berlin’s public parks. She brought the idea back in 1885 to the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, a reformist group of upper-class women. Poor immigrants had flooded into Boston, and the ladies didn’t think the children had enough open space for play. They believed structured, supervised play in and around sand gardens would teach working-class, immigrant children morality and manners. It would also improve health and hygiene and turn the children into good U.S. citizens.

Neighborhood mothers supervised the children at first, but then MEHA hired “matrons” to take over. Within five years they supervised 21 sand gardens in Boston, augmenting the sandbox play by leading singing and dancing. Ten years after the first pile of sand was dumped on Parmenter Street, 39 cities had at least one playground.

The Parmenter Street Chapel is gone, replaced by a large brick building that houses a theater and apartments.

20 Parmenter Street, North End

3. United Fruit Co. Headquarters, Boston

United Fruit’s staff in Jamaica at a time when the company was promoting tourism.

You know it as Chiquita Brands International, now in North Carolina, but it started out on Long Wharf as the Boston Fruit Company in 1870. In 1899, the company merged with its rival, the Tropical Trading and Transport Company. They named themselves the United Fruit Company. From about 1900 to 1903, the multinational also known as ‘the Octopus’ had its headquarters at 60 State St. A plaque marks the site, now a skyscraper.

Within a decade of the merger, United Fruit grew into a banana empire, the largest agricultural enterprise in the world. At its height in the mid-1950s it had 100,000 employees, a fleet of merchant ships and 1,500 miles of railroad in Latin America. It also had few scruples.

60 State St., former home of United Fruit, according to the People’s Guide.

In 1954, United Fruit worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Arbenz had had the temerity to redistribute land to the people of Guatemala. United Fruit owned 70 percent of Guatemala’s private land in 1942, according to the People’s Guide. Arbenz’ overthrow led to three decades of military dictatorship and war in which U.S.-backed forces killed 200,000 Guatemalans.

Another legacy of the United Fruit Company: the many Afro-Caribbean immigrants who came to Boston on United Fruit ships.

The company then moved to 131 State Street in 1903, then to 1 Federal Street and finally to 80 Federal Street.

60 State Street, Boston

4. Walter E. Fernald State School, Waltham

The Fernald School, now closed.

Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward’s husband, founded the school in Boston in 1848 to care for people with developmental disabilities. Political correctness hadn’t entered the lexicon yet, so Howe called it the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children.

The school moved to Waltham in 1887 under the leadership of Walter E. Fernald, a proponent of eugenics. Later it took his name. The school began to conduct scientific experiments, and to take children who had no developmental disabilities. They just came from poor families.

In 1946, the school started The Science Club, run by scientists from MIT. They enticed boys to join the club with promises of trips to the beach, Red Sox games and gifts. The boys ate a special diet that included cereal with milk. They didn’t know, nor did their parents, that the scientists had laced their food with radioactive tracers.

Quaker Oats Co. sponsored the experiment on the boys – without their parents’ knowledge or permission. The National Institutes of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission also paid for the project.

In 1993, former Fernald students sued Quaker Oats and MIT. They settled out of court for $1.85 million in 1998. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported the studies were morally troubling though the doses involved were low and the children probably weren’t harmed. It also questioned the fairness of selecting institutionalized children.

The Fernald School closed in 2014.

200 Trapelo Rd., Waltham

5. Wamesit, Lowell

The former site of Wamesit, according to the People’s Guide

Middlesex Community College sits at the place where the Merrimack and Concord rivers meet. The land, once called Wamesit, belonged to a village of praying Indians from the Pennacook tribe. The Pennacook came to Wamesit to gather and to trade before English missionaries converted them to Christianity in the 1640s.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook leader, may have agreed to let missionaries establish the praying village as a way to curtail land grabs by the English. It didn’t work, of course. During King Philip’s War, neighbors murdered several of the Indians despite their peaceful and friendly attitudes toward the English. Wamesit disappeared after the war, its people either killed, captured or fled.

33 Walkway, Middlesex Community College, Lowell

6. Maypole Hill Park, Quincy

Maypole HIll. image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

A marker on Maypole Hill memorializes Thomas Morton, an English colonist who infuriated the Puritans who lived nearby at Plimoth Plantation. Morton, a lawyer, established a trading post and settlement he called Merrymount and invited his friends, including Native Americans, to party there. Morton had no problem with same sex relationships, which also angered the Puritans.

On May 1, 1627, Morton and his pals put up an 80-foot maypole, which the Puritans viewed as pagan. When he did it again a year later, they marched over, chopped it down and sent Morton back to England.

He returned, and they arrested him again, seized his property and deported him a second time to England.

Morton returned again 10 years later. The Puritans imprisoned him again, and he died in 1647.

A marker indicates where Morton’s Maypole once stood, and the seal of the City of Quincy marks the site of his trading post.

90 Samoset Ave., Quincy

End Notes to the People’s Guide

Images: Middlesex Community College, By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16292989; 60 State St. By Frankg – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2542027. Derby House By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002977.

This story last updated in 2023.

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When New Englanders Feared a French-Canadian Immigrant Conquest

When French-Canadians came to work in New England’s textile mills in the later 19^th century they sparked conspiracy theories of an immigrant conquest. Even the New York Times claimed that there were secret attempts to turn New England into New France.

Lowell Mill Girls

In its earliest years, women were the main component of New England’s textile workforce. In the 1840s, an increasing number of European immigrants came to operate the textile machinery. Then came the Civil War, a disaster for cotton textiles, New England’s largest 19^th century industry. New England’s mills were devastated by the Union blockade of Confederate ports during the war that hindered southern cotton from reaching northern shores.

Some New England mills closed their doors, while others slashed their hours. A contemporary observer described the result in the flagship mill town of Lowell, Mass.: nine corporations shut down and 10,000 workers thrown “penniless, into the streets.”

After the war, New England’s textile manufacturers found that their workforce had scattered and was not returning to the mills. To save the industry – and New England’s economy – the textile corporations scoured the rural areas of the region. They also searched Europe and Canada for laborers. Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec responded to this call en masse.

Newcomers

In the years between 1865 and 1900, hundreds of thousands of French-Canadians crossed the border in search of work in New England’s factories. By the beginning of the 20^th century, French-Canadian men, women and children comprised 44 percent of the region’s cotton textile workforce.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

During this period French-Canadians established Little Canadas in industrial towns from Lake Champlain to the Blackstone River Valley, and from the coasts of Maine to the Connecticut River. In towns such as Woonsocket, R.I., and Biddeford, Maine, the French-Canadians eventually became the majority, electing their own as mayors.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket. It was built with nickels and dimes from French-Canadian millworkers.

Throughout the region, the newcomers from the North preserved their French language, their Catholic religion and the traditions of their rural Canadian parishes. They established their own schools, and a host of mutual benefit and social organizations. They intended to preserve their French-Canadian identity within the U.S.

A Conspiracy Theory About an Immigrant Conquest

The French-Canadian desire to maintain their language and customs raised alarm bells in New England and throughout the U.S. So did their heavy concentration in densely populated neighborhoods and their ever-increasing numbers. The mainstream press reported on an alleged invasion of New England by immigrants from across the border. Major media outlets including the New York Times, Harper’s and The Nation weighed-in on the political, economic and social implications of this cross-border influx.

In the period between 1880 and 1900, elements in the press spun a conspiracy theory around the French-Canadian newcomers. Some commentators theorized that the Catholic Church had dispatched the French-Canadian workers into New England in a bid to take over the region on behalf of the church. The French-Canadian workers, claimed these conspiracists, would first seize political control of the region. Then, went the theory, Quebec would declare its independence and annex New England to create a revived New France.

Increasing Alarmism

The New York Times repeated these claims on several occasions throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1885, the paper stated that there were plans afoot “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent.” Returning to the story in 1889, the Times stated that this supposed revival of New France would include, “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

Notre Dame of Montreal Basilica

The newspaper’s rhetoric became increasingly alarmist over time. By 1892, the Times opined that French-Canadian immigration was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith…This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

This editorial seems to have imputed subversive intent to the French-Canadians’ mutual aid societies. In fact, these groups offered insurance and other benefits unavailable to French-Canadian Catholics elsewhere. Such groups were not oriented around the conquest of New England. It was simply false to assert that “every adult French Canadian” belonged to them.

Protestant Efforts To Convert French-Canadians

Some Protestant clergy climbed on the immigrant conquest conspiracy bandwagon. They responded with initiatives to convert the French-Canadians. The Congregationalists of Massachusetts supported Rev. Calvin Elijah Amaron, a missionary who established the French Protestant College at Lowell. A few years later, he moved it to Springfield, Mass. A major aim of this college, today known as the American International College, was to train French-speaking Protestant missionaries to go forth and convert the French-Canadians of New England and Quebec.

American International College in Springfield, Mass.

In 1891, Amaron published a book called Your Heritage; or, New England Threatened. It was a long-form treatment of the theory that a French-Canadian Catholic cabal planned to undermine New England. In Amaron’s mind, Roman Catholics could not be reliable U.S. citizens since they owed their first allegiance to Rome. The “Romish clergy,” Amaron wrote, forced its adherents into a “moral and intellectual bondage” that is “worse than southern slavery.”

The Gospel Wagon

The Baptists also made efforts to convert the French-Canadians of New England. Statistics cited in the 1906 book Aliens or Americans? by Howard Grose showed that the Baptists expended more resources on missionary activities to convert the French-Canadians than on any other predominantly Catholic group in the United States.

The Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse, in an 1893 article titled The French Canadian in Quebec and New England, compared the effort to convert the French-Canadians to the abolitionist movement. “Slavery in the United States has gone,” Morehouse wrote. “The next great act of emancipation is that which shall free from mental and religious servitude the people of Quebec…”

Henry Lyman Morehouse

The Baptists also fielded a contraption called the Gospel Wagon. A large horse-drawn vehicle, it had a pulpit, organ and lanterns for preaching by night. Missionaries deployed the wagon in Massachusetts and New Hampshire mill towns, preaching Protestantism to the French-Canadian enclaves from their customized vehicle.

Immigrant Conquest Conspiracy Countered

Other voices countered the rhetoric about an immigrant conquest conspiracy. William MacDonald, a professor at Bowdoin College, disputed the notion that the Canadiens were a threat to the region. In an 1896 article in The Nation, MacDonald soberly recounted the facts showing that a French-Canadian demographic takeover of New England was unlikely. MacDonald also summarized the region’s attitude toward the French-Canadians in their midst:

Useful and indispensable as they have become, they are nowhere received with cordiality, or commonly referred to save as an inferior class; even their religion is denounced as un-American, and the influence of the Church little regarded or else misconstrued….As a class, they are treated considerately in public because of their votes, disparaged in private because of general dislike and sought by all for the work they do and the money they spend.

The conspiracy theorists offered little evidence to buttress their claims beyond a handful of utterances from the ultra-Catholic wing of the French-Canadian elites in Quebec. A few firebrands in Quebec had made expansionist noises. But, then as now, the political future of Quebec was hotly debated. There were many views on the subject. There was no semblance of unanimity in Quebec around the notion of a revived New France that would include New England.

Most of the workers coming from French Canada to New England were poor farmers, their non-inheriting adult children, day-laborers and wage earners in small Canadian factories. Their motives for crossing the border were chiefly economic rather than political or religious. Jobs and steady wages were the magnets attracting them southward.

French-Canadians Assert Their Patriotism

While conspiracy theorists were proclaiming that the newcomers were incapable of U.S. citizenship, New England’s small French-Canadian elite were voicing their American patriotism at a series of national conventions held throughout the U.S.

French-Canadian family arriving from Montreal.

At these French-Canadian conventions, speakers pointed to their people’s service in the U.S. military dating to the American Revolution. They also highlighted their historical role in settling the U.S. Midwest. They or their French cousins had founded or helped to found Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, as well as Natchez, Mobile, New Orleans and numerous other cities.

Convention delegates also encouraged their people to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Contrary to the theory that Quebec planned to annex New England, many French-Canadians in the States favored U.S. annexation of Canada.

The End of a Conspiracy

The fear of a French-Canadian conspiracy subsided in the early 20^th century as newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe began to enter the U.S. in increasing numbers. New England manufacturing slowly lost its lead in the textile industry to the U.S. South beginning in the 1920s.

As the mills faded away, the Little Canadas gradually dispersed, a process that continued throughout the 20^th century. And along with these enclaves went the memory of a period when some Americans considered poor French-Canadian mill workers a threat to New England’s way of life.

David Vermette is the author of this story about fears of an immigrant conquest, updated in 2023. He is a writer, researcher and editor born and raised in Massachusetts. He wrote the book A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018).

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The Jack Kerouac Fantasy Baseball Game (Yes, That Jack Kerouac)

Jack Kerouac invented a fantasy baseball game with homemade cards that he played well into adulthood. After he played the games, he wrote them up using the fevered prose he found on the sports pages. At least one critic wrote the Jack Kerouac fantasy baseball game was ideal training for a budding novelist.

The leading writer of the Beat generation took his fantasy game with him when he worked as a fire lookout. He played it when he lived in Mexico City and later in his home on Long Island in the early 1960s.

And when he drove to California in one of the epic journeys that he wrote up in On the Road, he brought his fantasy baseball game with him.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, Sports Fan

Kerouac, born March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Mass., loved to watch sports and to play them. A high school football star, he made a diving touchdown that saved the game for the Lowell Red and Grays in 1938. That won him a football scholarship to Columbia College in New York, where he made friends with Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. He later said football stardom gave him more of a thrill than publishing his first novel.

A notebook now in the New York Public Library archives reveals his early and obsessive interest in sports: When he was 14, he wrote, “Pop says he may bring me to a baseball game, Bees-Giants, Sunday. Hotcha. Home run leader is now Kreevich of the White Sox with two today.”

Jack Kerouac, Football Star

Kerouac Fantasy Baseball

The Kerouac fantasy baseball game evolved into an alternative universe into which he could immerse himself completely. Some think he started the game to get over the death of his brother Gerard when Jack was only four.

Unlike rotisserie baseball, the Kerouac game involved imaginary players and teams named after cars or colors: Pittsburgh Plymouths, St. Louis Cadillacs, Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks.

A Kerouac season lasted 40 games, with an All-Star game in the middle and a World Series played at the end.

Each team had a full roster of players, each with his own personality. He patterned Big Bill Louis after Babe Ruth and once had him come to bat eating a hot dog. He gave Earl Morrison eyeglasses and Joe Boston a broken leg. Burlingame Japes, a little left handed hitter, now 40, was once the base-stealing champ.

Kerouac continued to develop the game through the 1950s and into the 1960s. He even moved two teams to the West Coast a year before the real baseball Giants and Dodgers moved to California.

He handwrote or typed up the game stories and pasted them in a composition book. He even described contract disputes and team finances. He gave himself a byline, Jack Lewis, a version of his real first name, Jean-Louis. Once he said he always wanted to work as a sportswriter.

Novelist in Training

His best friends, Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, never knew about the Kerouac fantasy baseball game. He nearly always played it alone.

But one day in the winter of 1961, Newsday sportswriter Stan Isaacs played Kerouac fantasy baseball with him at his home. Kerouac, then 39, lived with his mother on Long Island. Isaacs described the game in a story reprinted in Empty Phantoms : Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac.

The charm of Kerouac fantasy baseball, wrote Isaacs, ‘was the imagination he brought to them, creating wondrous personalities, keeping records, writing stories about the action.’

He had a set of 100 homemade cards, each describing a play such as a line drive to third base or popup to the shortstop. He advanced the game by throwing a projectile against a chart on the wall.

The two writers drank Petri wine while Isaacs’ Blues beat Kerouac’s Browns. From time to time Kerouac’s mother came in to the living room and chastised Kerouac not to make a mess.

“The rally started,” wrote Isaacs, “when his shortstop, Francis X. Cudley (“an Irishman from Boston who stood up at the plate very erect, like a Jesuit”), fumbled a grounder by Johnny Keggs. (“Keggs is an old guy; his neck is seared from the Arkansas sun. He has a brother named Earl who used to be a ballplayer but who now is back in Texarkana selling hardware.”)

The rally then continued when the Blues’ pitcher, Ron Melany, got his second hit.

Kerouac Fantasy Baseball in Esquire

Isaacs later learned that Kerouac had written a story about a baseball game called “Ronnie on the Mound,” similar to the game they’d played. Esquire magazine published it in 1958. “The Ronnie of the story was the same Ron Melaney who beat Kerouac’s Blues for me,” Isaacs wrote.

The New York Public Library staged an exhibit of Kerouac’s fantasy baseball game in 2007. Isaac Gewirts curated “Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats,” and later wrote a book about it.

Fittingly, in 2017, the Lowell Spinners, a minor league baseball team, gave out Jack Kerouac double bobblehead balls. They were double because both his head and his arm moved, the arm to indicate his hitchhiking on the road. Or perhaps his throwing arm in the Jack Kerouac fantasy baseball game.

The Kerouac fantasy baseball collection can be found in the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. This story was updated in 2022.

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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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