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Married to a Murderer, H.W. Mudgett

Clara Lovering eloped with 17-year-old Herman Webster Mudgett before a New Hampshire justice of the peace in 1878. She didn’t expect him to abandon her and the son born two years later.

Clara Lovering Mudgett

Nor did she realize until later that she was lucky to escape the marriage alive.

Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Dr. H.H. Holmes, lured victims into an elaborate ‘murder castle’ during the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. He may have killed as many as 200 people, though he admitted to only 27. He also ran elaborate life insurance scams, which led to his arrest and conviction.

Clara Lovering was a beautiful young woman from a prominent family in Loudon, N.H. It wasn’t until he was caught in Boston 16 years later that she learned the truth about the man she loved.

H.W. Mudgett

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, N.H., on May 16, 1861, a month after the Civil War broke out. His parents, Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, were devout Methodists and strict disciplinarians. Levi, a farmer and a violent alcoholic, beat his children and locked them in the attic when they misbehaved.

Herman Mudgett

Herman was a mama’s boy who spent a lot of time reading Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. He also liked to invent things.

Young Mudgett stood out at school, Gilmanton Academy, as a small, odd and unusually bright boy. On his way to school he had to pass the office of a village doctor who left his door unlocked.

Mudgett’s schoolmates found out he was afraid of the doctor’s office and dragged him to it, he later claimed ‘struggling and shrieking.’ They brought him face-to-face with a grinning skeleton.

“It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to a child of tender years and health, but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession,” Mudgett claimed — from his prison cell.

Gilmanton Academy

More likely, wrote Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City, ‘far from struggling and shrieking, he merely gazed at the skeleton with cool appreciation.’

Trouble seemed to follow him even as a boy. His only friend died from a fall when they were playing alone in an abandoned building. And he developed a hobby of dissecting animals.

Clara

Herman Mudgett developed courtly manners, a dapper wardrobe and a winning way with women. He graduated high school at 16, and got a job as a teacher in Alton, N.H. There he met Clara Lovering, whose father represented the district in the New Hampshire state Legislature.

Clara was intensely attracted to Herman, but bothered by his insistence on sex. After courting for more than a year, they eloped on July 4, 1878.

She gave birth to their son, Robert Lovering Mudgett, in 1880 in Loudon, N.H. By then Herman Mudgett tired of teaching and went to work as a clerk in a Concord, N.H., grocery store. For a year he lived in Concord while his wife lived with his parents in Gilmanton. He decided he wanted to be a doctor. Clara agreed to support Herman through medical school.

Gilmanton, N.H., in 1910.

He enrolled in the University of Vermont‘s medicine program in Burlington, frequently visiting his young family. Clara supported him ‘doing services to various people’ (probably sewing), according to newspaper reports.

After a year Herman Mudgett transferred to the University of Michigan, a medical school that emphasized dissection. She joined him in Ann Arbor, but after a year they decided she’d be better off at home in New Hampshire.

His Michigan professors recalled him as a roue who breached his promise with a widow from St. Louis. He stole cadavers, mutilated them and tried to collect insurance money by saying they died in an accident.

During the summer of his junior year he took a job as a traveling salesman for a book publisher in Northwestern Illinois. He kept the proceeds and fell in love with Chicago.

Life After Medical School

Herman Mudgett graduated in 1884 and set out to find a place to practice. He tried Portland, Maine, where he got another sales job. In his travels he discovered Mooers Forks, N.Y., where he was hired as a grade school principal. He corresponded with Clara by mail, and he visited her several times. He contributed little to support his family.

In Mooers Forks, he was rumored to have caused the disappearance of a boy seen in his company. He also plotted – but didn’t execute – an elaborate life insurance fraud involving a cadaver.

In October of 1888, he visited Clara and Robert at home and told them he had business in Chicago. He didn’t want her to join him. That may be because he had already married another woman. Clara took him to the train station in Concord, and didn’t see or hear from him again for six years.

Clara decided she would have to support herself and her young son. She learned dressmaking in Concord, then set up a successful shop in Tilton.

“There is a modest little tin sign tacked on a simple white building on Main st. opposite the hotel, right in the center of this seminary village, which reads, “Mrs. C.A. Mudgett, Dressmaking,” reported the Boston Globe. She lived in an apartment above the store with her son.

Torture Chamber

Meanwhile, Herman Mudgett was working insurance scams around the country. According to the Boston Globe, “On one occasion Holmes insured his own life for $20,000. Then he went to a hotel in Rhode Island, wearing a beard. He got a body, took it two miles from the hotel, cut the head off, and buried the rest. He shaved, went to the hotel, registered under a new name and asked for Holmes. They said he had gone out, but was staying at the hotel. The swindler took the head, charred it in the hotel furnace and tried to identify it as his own. This particular scheme fell through.”

Mudgett’s torture chamber, or “castle,” in Chicago

Mudgett moved to Chicago and began calling himself Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. He bought a pharmacy, and the owner mysteriously disappeared. Across the street he built a three-story building with living quarters, torture chambers, trapdoors and chutes into the basement kiln. During the Columbian Exposition he opened his home as a hotel for unlucky visitors to the fair. He seduced his female guests, swindled them, killed them and burned their remains.

He also married a third women without divorcing Clara or his second wife.

Mudgett was finally jailed in St. Louis for selling mortgaged goods. He brought a fellow inmate in on one of his schemes. When Mudgett failed to deliver, the inmate tipped off authorities.

Returned Wanderer

In early October 1894, Clara Mudgett got a typewritten letter that her husband sent to his brother in Jamaica Plain from Indianapolis. He explained he was in a train wreck that fractured his skull, then confined in a Minneapolis hospital where he completely forgot who he was. He gradually came to his senses and worked so he could earn enough to come home, set up a business and support his wife and child.

Clara wrote to him, and he responded he was leaving Chicago for Tilton via Montreal. He then sent her a letter from Montreal where he said he was detained on business.

Mudgett was actually hiding out in Burlington, renting a house with the wife of an accomplice he had murdered. He tried to kill her by planting a bottle of nitroglycerine in the basement and asking her to bring it to him. She wisely refused.

One day he went to pick up his mail in Burlington and saw Pinkerton detectives in the post office. He quickly disappeared.

Homecoming

At noon on Monday, Nov. 5, 1894, Herman Mudgett arrived in Tilton by train and found out where Clara and 14-year-old Robert were living. ‘The home-coming was a joyous one for the wife,’ reported the Globe. “The wife hugged and kissed the returned wanderer, wept over his narrow escape from death and long illness, desiring no further explanation of his absence, satisfied with his being home at last and for always, for he had told her so.”

They had a festive family dinner, and then he went to visit his parents in Gilmanton for a few days. He returned to Tilton for about a week, then said he had business in Boston. But Pinkerton detectives were on his trail, and arrested him on Saturday, November 17.

A Boston Globe reporter came to Clara’s house and asked her about her married life. She told him, then asked why. When the reporter told her of her husband’s arrest, she burst into tears and said, “Perhaps he has another wife, too, somewhere.”

Moyamensing Prison. The execution of H. H. Holmes, scene while he was making his final address. Sketched in the Prison by Newmar, Times artist. From Holmes’ Own Story (1895) by Mudgett, Herman W. https://archive.org/details/HolmesOwnStory1895

Mudgett was tried for murder in Philadelphia and hanged on May 7, 1896. Robert became a certified public accountant and city manager of Orlando, Fla.

At the age of 46, Clara Lovering married John Peverly and moved to Vallejo, Calif. She lived to be 95 years old, dying on March 9, 1956. She is buried in Canterbury, N.H.

This story was updated in 2023.

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William Mitchell Kendall: The Man Behind the Post Office’s Famous and Unofficial Motto

William Mitchell Kendall never delivered a single piece of mail, but he gave the United States Post Office its most famous motto.

Born in 1856 in Jamaica Plain, Mass., to a prominent family – the nephew of astronomer Maria Mitchell – Kendall trained at Harvard and MIT. In 1882 he joined the New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, the preeminent design firm of its day.

Mail Carrier in Woodstock, Vt. (Library of Congress)

The principles – Charles McKim, Stanford White and William Mead – were men about town, flashy and larger than life. Their focus was more on broad architectural statements, not on minor details. But they hired the best draftsmen in the world. Kendall was a detail man, credited with smoothing and polishing the work of the firm’s other architects.

William Mitchell Kendall, Partner

Stanford White died in 1906 in an explosive murder, and Kendall rose in the firm to fill his shoes as partner. But he had none of White’s panache or flair for high living. By then the work of the firm began to decline in originality. Mosette Broderick, author of When Architecture Could Fashion a Nation, noted that the firm’s work began to look like a parody of its earlier designs.

“Kendall was a mean, small-minded man who took precedent as his only cue,” she wrote. “They began repeating themselves in the 1890’s, and you can spot the details on their later buildings lifted directly from their earlier ones.”

Sketch of William Mitchell Kendall.

Nevertheless, American institutions clamored for the Beaux-Arts architectural style that the firm executed. Cities, universities, railroads and libraries filled the firm’s schedule with demands for public buildings.

McKim, Mead & White’s style reflected the chip on the American shoulder as the nation emerged as a world power starting in 1880. The firm’s buildings had rich decorations with grand arches and entryways, facades laden with sculptural ornamentation and detailed design.

Kendall’s work can be seen throughout New York and New England. He contributed to the design of the Boston Public Library.

Boston Public Library

He designed the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vt., as well as the city’s City Hall. Kendall designed the canopy that sits atop Plymouth Rock. Kendall also designed the Arlington Memorial Bridge, complete with its gold statues, that crosses the Potomac River between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Neither snow nor rain

Perhaps his most lasting contribution to American culture however, is found in New York City where he designed the James Farley Post Office. Originally named the General Post Office, the building opened in 1912. It gave the postal service its unofficial motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

James A. Farley Building

The line is translated from the work of Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote a similar line describing the courier system in ancient Greece. It was a logical fit with Kendall’s grandiose style, and he ordered it inscribed on the facade of the building. And ever since the motto has been associated with the U.S. Postal Service.

Kendall would continue working right up to his death in 1941 in Bar Harbor, Maine, at the age of 85. His later works can be found in several European cemeteries, in the form of memorials to the World War I war dead.

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New from the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy today!

Images: James Farley post office By Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK – Old Post Office, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64140947. Sketch of William Mitchell Kendall The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “William Mitchell Kendall.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. This story last updated in 2024.

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Six Historic Downtown Department Stores

In the time before Amazon, downtown department stores used to provide a special shopping experience. People dressed up when they went to visit downtown department stores, plastic charge cards in hand. They often stayed for the day, patronizing nearby theaters, banks, restaurants and other stores, maybe Kresge’s or Woolworths.

Downtown department stores played a vital role in local economies — and to a city’s identity.

They offered convenience, modernity, style and elegance: the best and latest merchandise, large selections and top quality. And the great downtown department stores prided themselves on gracious service.

At Christmas, downtown department stores took on magical qualities with festive shop windows, patient Santas and evergreens and twinkling lights everywhere.

Downtown department stores have pretty much disappeared, replaced by suburban shopping malls, which in turn are falling prey to Amazon.

Here are some memories of six downtown department stores that once graced New England:

Department Store Historic District

G. Fox, the most beloved of Hartford’s downtown department stores

Customers from the entire region of central Connecticut traveled to Hartford for the city’s three leading downtown department stores: Sage Allen & Co., Brown Thomson & Co., and G. Fox & Co. Now, along with the 1889 Sage Allen sidewalk clock and the G. Fox warehouse, they belong to the Department Store Historic District.

Henry Hobson Richardson, of Trinity Church fame in Boston, designed the Brown Thomson building, and Cass Gilbert designed both the Woolworth Building in New York and G. Fox in Hartford.

If you couldn’t find an item in one of those stores, you probably couldn’t find it. At Brown Thomson you could buy a Cadillac along with a full line of automotive supplies.

Hartford’s department stores appealed to all the senses. At Sage Allen, the aroma of spicy sticky buns pulled customers into the downtown basement. Shoppers also loved G. Fox’s cream-cheese-and-date-nut-bread-sandwiches.

None of the downtown department stores treated their customers as well as G. Fox. If a customer wanted to return a spool of thread, a vehicle from the G. Fox fleet would pick up the thread.

Since 1847, the store always offered free home delivery, first by wheelbarrow, then by horse-drawn carriage, then by car and truck. In 1947, G. Fox marked its 100th anniversary by delivering packages by helicopter. On Christmas Eve, G. Fox kept a small staff and drivers on standby until midnight for desperate parents who needed an emergency Christmas gift.

Everyone in central Connecticut knew exactly where to meet someone at the clock — the Sage Allen sidewalk clock, a landmark since 1889. The clock disappeared after a windstorm damaged it and finally returned in working order in 2007.

All three of Hartford’s great downtown department stores are sorely missed. They disappeared in the early 1990s, felled by two large regional malls.

884-956 Main St., 36 Talcott St., Hartford, Conn.

Porteous

Portland’s Congress Street Porteous today

Porteous, Mitchell and Braun opened in 1904 on Congress Street in Portland, the largest department store in Maine. Porteous boasted ‘lavish and delightful’ Christmas decorations of colored lights, thousands of yards of greenest evergreen and ‘truly fascinating show windows.’

Two years after it opened, the store advertised in the Chamber of Commerce Journal of Maine. “We have spared neither time, money, nor inventive genius, to make this store … THE Christmas Store of the City and State.” The merchandise was “peculiarly and ideally correct for Holiday gift giving. Every nook and corner of this splendid building radiates the true Christmas spirit. COME AND SEE WHAT WE HAVE DONE FOR YOU!”

And the people did come to see the spectacular store decorations and awe-inspiring toy and doll departments.

One shop window displayed an old-fashioned circus. Inside the store, hundreds of decorated Christmas trees, Christmas baskets and red holly bells wowed customers.

The store hit its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, expanding to shopping malls in Auburn, Bangor and Presque Isle, Maine, Burlington, Vt. and Newington, N.H.

The Texas-based Dunlaps store chain started running Porteous in 1993. By the late 1990s it began closing stores because it couldn’t compete with other retailers. By 2003 Dunlaps shut the doors to the last Porteous store in Presque Isle. The flagship store in Portland closed just short of its 100^th birthday that same year. The store is now home to the Maine College of Art.

522 Congress St., Portland, Maine

Filene’s

Filene’s Christmas decorations, 1950. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Filene’s got its start as Filene’s Sons and Co. in 1881. William Filene, a German-Jewish immigrant from Prussia, had arrived in Boston in 1848 and began building up his small empire of little retail shops.

Filene’s sons, Edward and Lincoln, made the store a household name after inheriting it in 1901. Edward pioneered the store’s basement annex, thronged by bargain-hunters week after week. The annual wedding dress sale drove brides-to-be into frenzies and usually made the local news.

One suburbanite born in 1946 remembers the glory years of Boston’s downtown department stores: “We went “in town” for everything,” ML told the history of department stores. “You would never consider buying a winter coat locally – you always made a trip to Filene’s, Jordan Marsh, R. H. Stern or R. H. White.” Filene’s actually sent photographers to customers’ homes to take baby pictures — or you could go to the store for that first communion photo.

Shoppers at Boston’s downtown department stores at Downtown Crossing pre-1956. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

At Christmas, the store shook off its humbler aspect, decked out and decorated for Christmas. It became a centerpiece of Boston’s Downtown Crossing, along with rival Jordan Marsh.

From 1930 through the 1990s, Filene’s stores sprang up in malls throughout America.

The 1990s brought on the store’s shrinkage, however, and in 2006 the name Filene’s disappeared from the retail landscape, merged with Macy’s. The former flagship Boston store now houses the Irish retailer Primark’s first U.S. store.

10 Summer St., Boston, Mass.

Varick’s

Varick’s is on the right

Elm Street was the place to be in Manchester, N.H., at Christmas. When the shifts ended at the gargantuan Amoskeag mill yard, workers went to Elm Street to mingle with friends, have a meal and spend their paychecks at the shops that lined the street.

In the heart of the shopping district was the John B. Varick Co. at 809-819 Elm St. For years it was the largest hardware store outside of Boston, but it also sold a huge variety of merchandise, including sporting goods, jewelry, silver, fishing gear, seeds, toys, luggage and radios. Varick’s stocked up on silverware at Christmas, a popular item during the season.

Varick’s was founded in 1845 by John P. Adriance. His nephew John B. Varick came to work in the store at age 16, and two years later bought the company from his uncle with a partner. Varick ran the business for 53 years until his death in 1902. Sons Thomas and Richard took over the store, and by 1916 they owned the Varick Building, half of the Varick-Sullivan Building and three warehouses, two of which were next to railroad tracks and could handle seven cars of freight at once.

Varick’s offered low prices because of low insurance rates, no rent, ideal freight conditions and its ability to buy in large quantities without borrowing money, The Granite State Monthly explained.

The store also boasted an early and massive sprinkler system. The reason? Fire wiped out the store in 1888, 1892 and 1914. The last fire gutted the five-story store brick building after it reached the sporting goods department and ignited powder and cartridges.

John B. Varick’s sons had died by 1943, and the business was sold to the Gould family after World War II. By 1951 the company closed its doors. Today the building includes retail space and apartments.

819 Elm St., Manchester, N.H.

Westminster Arcade

Westminster Arcade, the granddaddy of Providence’s downtown department stores. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Providence’s Westminster Arcade, built in 1828, is the first indoor shopping mall in America. In the heart of downtown Providence at Westminster and Weybosset Streets, it’s a long narrow building with European-style skylights, Greek columns weighing 13 tons each and granite walls. Inside, walkways were lined with shops that had interior-facing windows displaying their wares.

Cyrus Butler built the arcade, and at first people called it Butler’s Folly because it was so far from the town’s retail district. Eventually three sisters opened a fashionable hat shop in the building. The shop was popular and other retail establishments located nearby on Westminster Street.

“I have a wonderful memory of my mom bringing my brother and me to the Arcade at Christmastime,” remembered Audra Wooten. “It was so festive and exciting to see as a child.”

The three great department stores that grew up on Westminster Street – Shepard’s, Cherry & Webb and Gladdings – decked themselves out for the holiday, and if you got lost you waited for your parents under the tall, neon-lit Shepard’s clock.

The Arcade survived a fire and three hurricanes, but never made money and was nearly torn down in 1944. The Metropolitan Museum of Art called it one of the finest commercial buildings in the history of American architecture.

In 1976, it received National Historic Landmark status. The building fell into disrepair, and by 2008 it had emptied. Developers restored it and by 2013 converted the building into retail space and tiny apartments.

65 Weybosset St, Providence, R.I.

Montgomery Ward

Montgomery Ward, one of Burlington’s downtown department stores.

Church Street in Burlington, Vt., has long been a busy downtown shopping corridor lined with impressive brick buildings. At Christmas, the lighted trees along Church Street imparted a festive holiday air.

Montgomery Ward’s 515th store opened on Church Street in Burlington on Dec. 28, 1929. It missed the Christmas season though plasterers, carpenters and painters tried to get it done in time by working around the clock.

The company had settled on an ambitious plan to expand its stores, but fast. Its mail-order sales had dropped, and its rival Sears was opening hundreds of stores on the outskirts of major cities.

Montgomery Ward decided to challenge Sears in smaller cities, where country people were driving their new cars to shop. By 1930, two out of three Vermont farms had a car, up from one in four a decade earlier.

In 1927 Montgomery Ward had only 36 stores. Two years later, it had more than 500, 200 more than Sears. Architects in Chicago probably designed the one in Burlington, which has wide Chicago windows on the second floor.

The Burlington store announced its opening with an ad in the Burlington Free Press promoting electric washing machines, vacuum cleaners, men’s
suits, ladies’ dresses, automobile tires, radios, and a ‘smart three-piece living room suite covered with peach mohair.’

The company’s timing — the eve of the Great Depression — didn’t help the store’s survival. It lasted only 32 years, closing in December 1961. Various retailers have operated in the building since then, and a bank now uses part of it.

Today Church Street belongs to Burlington’s lively outdoor pedestrian mall.

52-54 Church St., Burlington, Vt.

Photos: Howland-Hughes By GrammarFascist – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44118309. Montgomery Ward by By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 18:32, 22 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29141129. This story about downtown department stores was updated in 2022.

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6 Historic Stagecoach Stops You Can Visit

The history of New England’s post roads and their stagecoach stops mirror the history of the country. The roads date back to the Pequots who used the trails that grew into the post roads for generations. The same trails carried John Winthrop on his journeys from Boston to Springfield.

Traffic on the roads shrank as King Philip’s War turned them into dangerous gauntlets. They expanded again as the war ended and horses made travel more enticing and the mails more efficient.

The heyday of the stagecoaches in the 1800s really drove a blossoming of the post roads. They grew from the first Upper Post Road into a maze of roads that wound their way into every corner of New England.

These stagecoaches created economic booms wherever they went, bringing commerce as well as jobs. Stagecoach stops, needed every 12 to 20 miles or so, were essential, especially in the early days of the stagecoach era. These inns provided income to their owners, and many others: drivers, ticket agents, coach makers, blacksmiths, stable hands and farmers.

Today, the vestiges of the stagecoach era remain with us. Many of the roads New Englanders travel today were once used by the stagecoaches. And along those roads, some of the old stagecoach stops still serve up food, drink and comfort to the weary traveler.

Here are six still open to the public today, one in each New England state:

Old Riverton Inn

The Old Riverton Inn, one of Connecticut’s many, many stagecoach stops back in the day.

Several years before the American Revolution, stagecoaches and stagecoach stops appeared on the Upper Post Road from New York to Boston, and from Hartford to Norwich and Providence. The war interrupted service, but resumed when it wound down. Stagecoach service expanded quickly on the new turnpike roads and postal routes.

Levi Pease began a stage service between New York and Boston on the Upper Post Road. He got the mail contract for all of New England from the U.S. Congress in 1789. Then he expanded his business into Northern New England and to Albany.

By 1827 Connecticut had 26 stage routes. By then it took only 36 hours to travel between New York and Boston vs. the previous six days. Taverns were generally 12 to 18 miles apart. Drivers announced their arrival at stagecoach stops by blowing on a trumpet.

During the early part of the 19^th century, Connecticut developed the most complex network of toll roads in New England. The state had few centers of wealth like Providence or Boston, and market towns competed fiercely for the trade of the back country. Between 1792 and 1839, 1,600 miles of turnpike road were created in Connecticut. The Talcott Mountain Turnpike was a key part of the route from Hartford to Albany.

Jess Ives opened the Ives Tavern or Ives Hotel in 1796 along the Hartford-to-Albany Route in Riverton, Conn. Today it’s known as the Old Riverton Inn and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It overlooks a wild and scenic section of the Farmington River.

The artist who painted murals on the walls of the Hobby Horse Bar also painted murals for the 1936 New York World’s Fair. The inn features bar stools made of saddles on kegs.

For more information about the Old Riverton Inn, click here.

Coach Stop Inn

The Coach Stop Inn, one of the stagecoach stops along the way from Bar Harbor to Maine’s interior.

Stagecoach lines began regular service between Maine towns after the Revolutionary War. The first stages ran between Portland and Portsmouth, N.H., a journey that took three days in 1787. By 1825, a stage could make the journey between Bangor and Portland in 36 hours.

The Coach Stop Inn in Bar Harbor was built in 1804 for newcomers who came to build homes, farms and ships on Mount Desert Island. Known as the Halfway Tavern, it often hosted sailors in the early days. Patrons would arrive by sea and take a stagecoach from the tavern into Maine’s interior towns.

Wealthy patrons charmed by fresh air, beautiful scenery and hiking trails made Bar Harbor a fashionable summer resort during the Gilded Age. In 1947, a fire that burned much of Maine also destroyed some of Bar Harbor’s hotels and mansions. The oldest hotel to survive the fire is now the Coach Stop Inn, a luxurious bed and breakfast.

For more information, click here.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn

The most famous of the stagecoach stops, The Wayside Inn.

The Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., boasts that it’s the oldest operating inn in the United States. It has accommodated travelers along the Boston Post Road since 1716. Just a few miles down the road from historic Minuteman National Historical Park in Concord, it began life 300 years ago as Howe’s Tavern. David Howe ran it as an extension of his own home.

David handed the property to his son Ezekial – a soldier in Sudbury’s militia during the American Revolution. The Howe family continued to operate and expand the inn until 1861, serving traffic between Worcester and Boston.

The inn stopped operating as a traditional inn in 1861. The owners converted it into something more like a boarding house and dance hall.

But in 1862, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sealed the inn’s place in history. Longfellow visited the building and published his now-famous Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863. From that time on, the inn was the destination of tourists and literary pilgrims who wanted to see first-hand the inspiration for Longfellow’s book.

In 1923, the inn took another important step into immortality when automobile magnate Henry Ford bought the property. Ford then began the restoration and expansion that gave shape to the inn’s current configuration.

For more information, click here.

Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern

The Coach Stop, one of New Hampshire’s many stagecoach stops in the early 19th century.

In 1786 the legislature in New Hampshire expanded the system of post roads to travel to four sections of the state. Though the earlier post roads moved mail and people between Portsmouth and some points west and north, only later did the routes reach deep into the western portion of the state.

One such line ran from Portsmouth across the state’s southern tier over to Amherst and back, creating the need for taverns and inns along the way.

Londonderry’s Coach Stop Restaurant & Tavern began life in 1810 as the home of the town’s doctor. Later in the 1800s it was maintained as Plummer’s Tavern, located at the junction of two post roads. One carried coaches east and west to Nashua and the other carried traffic north and south to Manchester and Concord. For a map of all stagecoach lines operating in New Hampshire in 1833, click here.

Today the restaurant and inn maintains much of its historical charm, with signs of the original elements of its days as a coach stop remaining intact.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach House Inn

The Stagecoach House Inn, for many years one of the stagecoach stops along the New London Turnpike.

Settlers first came to Wyoming, a historic village in Richmond, Rhode Island, in 1757. Wyoming grew and prospered when the Brand’s Iron Works was founded across the Wood River in Hopkinton in 1787. Sometime around 1800, an inn was built at a strategic crossroads in Wyoming.

Textile mills sprang up in the area, and in 1815 the New London Turnpike opened right past the inn. The new road brought stagecoach riders between Richmond and New London, Connecticut

By 1835, the New London Turnpike – now Route 3 – connected Providence and New London. It proved to be faster and more direct than the Old Post Road, which followed the coastal route. The village thrived, and for many years an inn once known as Dawley Tavern continued as a stagecoach stop.

By the 20^th century, industry began to founder along the Wood River. That, however, allowed Hopkinton and Wyoming to retain much of their historic 19^th century character. The National Register of Historic Places lists almost a square mile of the two villages as the Wyoming Village Historic District. It includes the old ironworks, Greek Revival, Late Victorian, and Federal architecture in both Wyoming and Hopkinton.

Today the Dawley Tavern is called the Stagecoach House Inn at 1136 Main Street.

For more information, click here.

Stagecoach Inn

The Stagecoach Inn, a fitting name for one of Vermont’s old stagecoach stops.

At the start of the 19th century, ancient footpaths connected Burlington and Montpelier in Vermont. In 1805, the 36-mile Winooski Turnpike along the Winooski River was chartered to connect the two major towns.

The old Winooski Turnpike turned into U.S. Route 2, the main highway connecting the White Mountains to the Adirondacks. It cuts through Waterbury, the town where Ben and Jerry’s make their ice cream.

In 1826 either a Mr. Parmalee or a lawyer named Dan Carpenter had a structure built on the corner of the Winooski Turnpike and what is now Route 100. The building served as a tavern and inn for travelers and as a meeting place for locals.

By the mid-1800s, a farming family named the Henrys owned the inn. Their eccentric daughter Nettie married an Ohio rubber baron, Albert Spencer. Nettie smoked cigarettes, chewed tobacco and wore a celluloid eyeshade. She expanded and improved the old family house in Queen Anne Style.

Nettie Spencer died in 1947. The home was later run as a rooming house and fell into disrepair. A young couple from Boston bought the property in 1985 and rebuilt the house. Today it’s the Old Stagecoach Inn, a historic bed-and-breakfast in the center of downtown Waterbury.

For more information about the Stagecoach Inn click here.

This story about New England stagecoach stops was updated in 2021. If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about six Revolutionary taverns here.

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Carl Rettich, The RI Mobster Who Invented Cement Shoes

When Carl Rettich moved to a seaside mansion on Warwick Neck in Warwick, R.I., people thought he was a genteel lawyer named Charles Ryerson who moved to the neighborhood to take care of his elderly father.

The crime castle of Carl Rettich. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

He actually belonged to the mob and had links to Al Capone.

Carl Rettich

The New Jersey-born Rettich got involved with New York’s criminal underworld at 17. He overheard a plot to kill a wholesale poultry dealer, but kept his lips sealed about the murder. That got him started in the mob-controlled live poultry business. He soon moved on to bootlegging.

Suspected of a 1924 murder in New York, Carl Rettich moved to Rhode Island to run New England’s biggest crime ring during Prohibition.

When the truth about ‘Charles Ryerson’ emerged, so many people flocked to ogle his crime castle that an ice cream vendor showed up to sell his wares.

Prohibition

When Prohibition took effect, speakeasies sprang up all over Rhode Island (and elsewhere). Illegal hooch flowed freely in Kent County: in West Warwick, Old Warwick, Warwick Neck, Arctic, Apponaug and East Greenwich.

Smugglers operated with impunity along Rhode Island’s rugged shoreline, where quiet inlets and coves disguised their activities.

Danny Walsh, a prominent Rhode Island horse breeder, controlled the liquor smuggled into Rhode Island. Carl Rettich joined Walsh and began expanding operations. He bought the 20-room mansion overlooking a cove. The press later nicknamed it the ‘crime castle’ and ‘murder mansion.’

Carl Rettich

He lived large on Warwick Point. People said Rettich threw parties for politicians and ‘high-hat’ friends, during which he showed off his machine gun by firing it on the front lawn. The estate was so isolated the neighbors didn’t complain.

Carl Rettich also had a fleet of speedboats tricked out for smugglers’ every need. They each had three Liberty airplane engines and were plated with armor and layers of New York telephone directories. They would speed out to the 12-mile limit, where they unloaded bootleg liquor from seagoing vessels. Then the rumrunners brought their contraband to a stone dock leading to Rettich’s crime castle. They stored the booze in a secret underground vault before distributing it.

Then Danny Walsh and Carl Rettich had a falling out. Walsh disappeared in February 1933 a day after they argued in public. Rettich was suspected of accepting a ransom of $40,000 for Walsh and then doublecrossing Walsh’s family.

Grisly Tale

The Associated Press ran a story on June 3, 1935, speculating that Walsh ‘was stood in a tub of cement until it hardened about his feet, and then thrown alive into the sea.’ The AP reported it was just a ‘grisly underworld tale,’ and no witnesses had been found.

Police kept looking. An informant tipped them off to Rettich’s criminal activities. He told them Rettich’s crime castle contained a secret vault and an underground tunnel.

In April 1935, police acted on a tip. On the banks of Lake Pearl in Wrentham, Mass., they found the body of Andino Merola slumped over a Chevrolet with a .38 bullet in his head. Merola was a small-time associate of Carl Rettich, and police believed he was involved in the murder.

In July, police got a warrant to search the crime castle. They combed the property, but found no tunnel, no vault. The basement was spotless, with four whitewashed brick posts.

A Few Beer Cans

One detective thought the basement looked too clean. He looked carefully and found a large screw in one of the posts. When he turned it, the cement floor rose slowly to the ceiling, revealing steps that led to a concrete room. But they only found a few beer cans in the room.

Police discover the secret vault. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

On the rest of the property, though, police found an arsenal of weapons, a car with bullet holes in it and stolen money.

Police eventually accumulated evidence implicating Rettich in the disappearance of Danny Walsh, a dozen Massachusetts bank robberies and four murders.

As details about the real Carl Rettich emerged, his crime castle took center stage. On May 5, 1935, a crowd of 15,000 people came to rubberneck the 20-room mansion.

Cement Shoes

Informants told police that Rettich’s gang took Walsh to a dungeon and clubbed him on the head. They put his body in a barrel filled with concrete and dumped it into the ocean.

His girlfriend talked too freely about what happened to Walsh, they said. Rettich’s men took her to the underground vault, killed her and put her feet in a tub of wet cement. Then they dumped her into the ocean. Putting a whole body in wet cement was just too heavy.

No one ever found their bodies. But Carl Rettich spent the rest of his life in prison anyway, convicted on multiple charges for a Fall River mail heist that netted $129,000.

Carl Rettich built his crime empire with help from corrupt public officials. Prosecutors later discovered that Rettich and his gang had paid off Warwick police for three years. An investigation uncovered the bribes, and 11 police officers left the force.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Elizabeth Buffum Chace belonged to old and distinguished Rhode Island families, but she was distrusted and shunned because of her ardent opposition to slavery.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace

Her ancestor Daniel Gould came from England and settled in Newport in 1637. He became a member of the Society of Friends and married the daughter of John Coggeshall, the first president of the Aquidneck Colony who was also a Quaker.

Newport, which is on Aquidneck Island, was a slave market. Between 1709 and 1807, Newport merchants sponsored more than 900 voyages to Africa and brought more than 100,000 slaves to the Americas.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace had reason to believe her Quaker ancestors ‘were somewhat implicated in the African slave trade.’

Quakers couldn’t sanction the practice, though, and by 1727 began to speak out against the slave trade. In 1780, New England Quakers abolished slavery among its members.

An Abolitionist Is Born

Elizabeth Buffum was born on Dec. 9, 1806, in Smithfield, R.I., to Arnold Buffum and Rebecca Gould Buffum.

She described how she came to be an ardent abolitionist in her book, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences, which she wrote at the age of 85.

When her father was a child, she wrote, it wasn’t unusual for slaves from New York to flee to Rhode Island. A slave family escaped and lived on her grandfather’s farm. Arnold Buffum’s opposition to slavery grew stronger as he aged, and he became the first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Though Quakers officially opposed slavery, they viewed the Buffums with suspicion. They avoided the Buffums because they argued for the immediate abolition of slavery. Many Quakers believed in the gradual abolition of slavery, and that slaves should go to African colonies.

Quaker ministers urged Elizabeth to keep quiet. Her Quaker brother-in-law told her slaves shouldn’t be free because, “I shouldn’t want to see a black man sitting on the sofa beside my daughter.”

The Chace house. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

At 23, she married Samuel Chace, the son of Oliver Chace, who founded several textile mills. Warren Buffett founded Berkshire Hathaway on the Chace mills. The Chaces were also an old Quaker family strongly opposed to slavery.

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace moved to Valley Falls, R.I. They then had 10 children after the first five died.

Jim Crow

The Chaces opened their home to abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Abby Kelley, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone.

Frederick Douglass

They didn’t just fight slavery, they battled racism. In her book, Elizabeth Buffum Chace described how they stood up to Jim Crow in Massachusetts. As she and her husband entered a railroad car in Taunton,

Samuel Rodman, an Anti-Slavery man from New Bedford, and a highly respectable, well-dressed colored man and his wife, from the same town, took seats therein also. The conductor came and ordered the colored people to leave the car. We all remonstrated, of course, but without avail. He called the superintendent, who peremptorily repeated the order. They got out quietly, and we did the same, (but not so quietly,) and retired to the waiting room, leaving the car empty.

The railroad officials added a car for the African-American couple, and the Chaces joined them. “We found them intelligent, agreeable companions,” she wrote.

Underground Railroad

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace also became conductors on the Underground Railroad as more and more people escaped slavery.

Often, she wrote, they were carried by small coastal vessels from Virginia at Norfolk or Portsmouth and carried to New England – Fall River, New Bedford and Cape Cod.

In Fall River, they’d find shelter with Nathaniel B. Borden and his wife — Elizabeth’s sister Sarah — and sent in a closed carriage at night,

…with Robert Adams, a most faithful friend as their conductor. Here we received them, and, after preparing them for the journey, my husband would accompany them a short distance, on the Providence and Worcester railroad, acquaint the conductor with the facts, enlist his interest in their behalf, and then leave them in his care, to be transferred at Worcester, to the Vermont road, from which, by a previous general arrangement, they were received by a Unitarian clergyman named Young, and sent by him to Canada, where they uniformly arrived safely.

She used to give them an envelope with her address on it so they could mail it from Toronto to let her know they’d arrived safely.

Midnight Visitors

They were once awakened in the middle of the night by a mother and her two boys. She had escaped slavery in Maryland, moved to Fall River and quietly earned a living as a laundress. A notorious slave-catcher started snooping around her neighborhood asking about her.

Her friends sent her to the Chace’s house in Valley Falls, where they awaited the arrival of her oldest son, who would bring their belongings.

We kept them three or four days, in hourly fear and expectation of the arrival of the slave-catcher; our doors and windows fastened by day as well as by night, not daring to let our neighbors know who were our guests, lest some one should betray them. We told our children, all, at that time, under fourteen years of age, of the fine of one thousand dollars, and the imprisonment of six months, that awaited us, in case the officer should come, and we should refuse to give these poor people up.

Finally, the 17-year-old son arrived with their belongings and money raised by their neighbors in Fall River.

Once, a light-skinned African-American stayed at their house for 10 days pretending to be a fugitive slave. He was actually an escaped burglar. The Chaces found him very well-mannered and entertaining.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Buffum Chace fought against racial discrimination in the schools and for women’s rights and prison reform.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace died on Dec. 12, 1899. Today , the Elizabeth Buffum Chace House in Warwick, R.I., shelters and aids victims of domestic violence.

Her son Arnold Buffum Chace became a famous mathematician and chancellor of Brown University. Her daughter, Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, became a prominent author. Two of her grandchildren became renowned professors and another grandson was a U.S. Collegiate Tennis champion and is credited with bringing ice hockey to the United States.

This story about Elizabeth Buffum Chace was updated in 2023.

Image of Elizabeth Buffum Chace PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13709459.

5 comments 3.2K views

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