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6 Places That Appear in Currier & Ives Prints

Currier & Ives produced thousands of hand-colored lithographs that together create a panorama of the mid-19^th century.

The firm got its start in Roxbury, Mass., before hitting on its formula for success in New York City. It produced two kinds of prints: rush prints of news events and stock prints of American life, including landscapes, religion, entertainment, sports, games, home life and city views.

Currier & Ives’ most popular and enduring images are of the New England countryside, especially in winter. The iconic prints define rural New England at its most picturesque.

Currier & Ives prints can be quite valuable, and are among the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H., the White House, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn., and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Here are 6 New England places depicted in stock prints by Currier & Ives

East Rock, New Haven, Conn.

George Durrie created the archetypal Currier & Ives images of charming, quaint rural scenes: horse-drawn sleighs, haying, gathering wood, sugaring off and coming home for Thanksgiving.

Durrie was born in Hartford in 1820 and settled in New Haven in 1842. He painted nostalgic genre scenes of the New England countryside near his home. He also made painting trips to New Jersey, New York and Virginia. His winter scenes are probably the most popular of all the Currier & Ives prints and still appear on Christmas cards, calendars, plates and posters.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell exactly where Durrie’s barns, gristmills and ice-covered ponds actually are (or were). Durrie painted several scenes at the Jones Inn (pictured above), identified as near Farmington, Conn. There is a historic house in Farmington once owned by Belinda and Clare Jones. Could it be the same?

One New Haven scene painted by Durrier is easy to identify: East Rock.

East Rock

Here’s what it looks like now:

Mount Desert Light

Mount Desert Light is the farthest land from which a New England coast lighthouse shines its beacon. It is more than 20 miles from the nearest port at Mount Desert Island and sits on a rock that’s 17 feet above sea level at its highest point. Perhaps that’s why Currier & Ives misnamed the print as Desert Rock Light. The auction company Skinner sold a print of it in 2008 for $711.

Desert Rock Light

The current granite tower replaced a short wooden tower in 1847. The lighthouse was automated in 1977 and transferred to the College of the Atlantic in 1998. Today it is used as an ecology research station specializing in humpback and finback whales.

Mount Desert Light in 1892

Boston, Mass.

Currier & Ives printed detailed views of 40 cities by Charles Parsons and his son, Charles R. Parsons. The view of Boston appeared in the Boston & Beyond exhibit at the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library in 2008.

This map of Boston is dated 1873, the year after the Great Boston Fire destroyed 800 buildings. (The city quickly rebuilt.) The Currier & Ives print was apparently sketched before the fire.

Here’s a more recent view of the city:

Franklin Pierce Homestead, Hillsboro, N.H.

Nathaniel Currier printed this lithograph of the birthplace of Franklin Pierce in 1852, before Pierce took office as president of the United States, before he became one of the most hated men in America and even before Currier went into business with Ives. Pierce was actually born in a log cabin next door while his father, former Gov. Benjamin Pierce, built the homestead.

Today the Pierce homestead is a National Historic Landmark, open to visitors during the summer season. It doesn’t look a whole lot different than it did in the days of Nathaniel Currier.

Yacht Squadron, Newport, R.I.

Currier & Ives nautical prints were popular then and they are popular now. In 1932, a dozen Currier & Ives experts selected what they considered the 50 best large Currier & Ives prints. The New York Sun printed one a day for 50 days. The series was so popular that another 50 ‘best of’ small prints were chosen and run in the newspaper. The two lists stimulated market demand for Currier & Ives prints.

Nautical themes are among the most popular prints, and they can command high prices even today.

The Philadelphia Print Shop, for example, lists the print of the Clipper Ship Dreadnought off Sandy Hook on Feb. 23, 1854 at $4,200.

Yacht Squadron shows yachts, a steamboat and several rowboats in a harbor at Newport, R.I.

Here’s how Newport looks today:

Lake Memphremagog, Newport, Vt.

Lake Memphremagog is a glacial lake between Newport, Vt., and Magog, Quebec. It’s 31 miles long and mostly in Quebec.

The name Memphremagog is derived from the Algonkian language and means ‘where there is a big expanse of water.’

The Currier & Ives print from 1860 shows a shepherd with three sheep, sitting on a knoll looking across lake with islands and Owls Head in the background.

The modern photograph is taken from Owls Head.

Photos: East Rock neighborhood, By Emilie Foyer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31125004; Boston from Long Wharf, By Chris Wood (User:chris_j_wood). – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=984357; Newport sailboats, By chensiyuan – chensiyuan, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9070731; Currier & Ives prints courtesy Library of Congress.

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Women’s History Quiz

It’s women’s history month, time to find out how well you know your women’s history. You’ll probably do well if you’re a faithful reader of the New England Historical Society.

Here’s the quiz:

[mlw_quizmaster quiz=4]

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New England in Early Film

A century before the film Manchester by the Sea was nominated for six Academy Awards, New England played many a starring role on the silver screen.

Connecticut’s own Katharine Hepburn created the iconic New England woman in 1933 as Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She spoke to the entire region’s unvarnished character (well, except maybe for Newport) with her pronouncement, “I loathe elegant society.” See the trailer here.

Katharine Hepburn as Jo in Little Women.

New Englanders brought the film industry to maturity as actors, producers, cinematographers, studio owners and financiers. And it was a New Englander who helped move it out west.

New England in Film

“From the early days of projected motion pictures, representations of New England appeared on screens wherever movies were seen,” wrote Karen Sheldon, co-founder of Northeast Historic Film.

Five major New England themes run through American films, according to Sheldon. They are small town life vs. city values; Yankee characters, often the sage rustic; family secrets; seafaring tales; and haunted New England.

Lon Chaney starred in the 1909 film The Miracle Man, in which New York con men try to use a faith healer to collect money in a small New England town. George M. Cohan, who considered North Brookfield, Mass., his home, wrote the screenplay. Watch the surviving parts of it here.

Bette Davis in The Way Back Home

The Yankee rustic appears in the 1931 film Way Back Home. Philips Lord, a radio personality from Hartford, Vt., created the Seth Parker character, a clergyman and backwoods philosopher based on his real-life grandfather. Way Back Home was also the film debut of Bette Davis, who owned a farm in Sugar Hill, N.H., and often shopped at the Carol Reed shop in Littleton, N.H. (See a clip from Way Back Home here.)

Secrets, Sailors and Ghosts

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a story about a family secret, was made into film for a third time in 1926 starring Lillian Gish, which you can watch here. It would be made for the big screen two more times, including the disastrous 1995 version starring Demi Moore. It was also made for television three times. (“This will not do,” wrote Roger Ebert in a review that gave the film one-and-a-half stars.)

Lobby card for the 1934 version of The Scarlet Letter.

Playwright Eugene O’Neill, took the family secret theme to new heights (or depths) with plays that were adapted for film, including Long Days Journey Into Night and Desire Under the Elms.

During the 1920s, at least a half-dozen films featured the salty New England sailor, presaging George Clooney in The Perfect Storm and Casey Affleck in The Finest Hours decades later. Rin Tin Tin foils bootleggers in 1924 off the Maine coast in The Lighthouse by the Sea. The Pearl of Love in 1925 was based on a Harriet Beecher Stowe novel also about the Maine coast. John Barrymore starred as Captain Ahab in The 1924 movie, The Sea Beast. (Watch the love scene here.)

Still from The Sea Beast

Stephen King is only the latest in a long line of writers whose stories about haunted New England appear in film. The Salem witch trials happened here, after all.

Maid of Salem, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert in 1937, is a story about a girl who falls in love with an adventurer and is sentenced as a witch. Watch it here.

At least a dozen movies inspired by the Salem witch trials have been produced since then, from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost.

The Movie Business

Before film production moved to California, there were dozens of film studios in New England, including the Eastern Film Corporation in Rhode Island, the Commonwealth Photoplay Corporation in Massachusetts and Dirigo Pictures and Pine Tree Pictures in Maine.

Thomas Ince, film’s first tycoon, was responsible in part for the industry’s migration out west.

Thiomas Ince in 1918

A native of Newport, R.I., he invented the shooting script and the five-reel film, created the first movie studio and put the producer in charge rather than the cameraman and the director. Ince died in 1924 after a sojourn on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht with Charlie Chaplin and Marion Davies.

Another New Englander, G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, helped bring the film industry out of its infancy with his innovative cinematography.

He was born in Roxbury, Mass., in 1872. Bitzer developed early cinematic technologies and techniques such as the fadeout, the soft focus and the close-up. Like other cameramen of his day, he traveled the country shooting scenes of real life. Seeing Boston By Streetcar on film in 1906 was once such film.

Moguls

Joseph P. Kennedy

Louis B. Mayer, who co-founded MGM, got his start in the film business in Massachusetts with the purchase of a burlesque theater in Haverhill. It was nicknamed the ‘Garlic Box’ because it catered to poor Italian immigrants. Mayer cleaned up the theater’s reputation by showing a religious film when it opened in 1907. He bought more theaters, eventually controlling the largest theater chain in New England before moving west.

Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the president, only ran his movie studios from 1926 to 1930, but he is credited with launching the talkie revolution and creating the modern entertainment conglomerate. He was the first financier to buy control of a studio – actually, he bought three — rather than build it up.

For a list of films with New England themes or locations, click here. For a story about award-winning films shot in New England, click here.

This story last updated in 2022.

With thanks to Northeast Historic Film.

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The Penobscot Expedition, America’s Forgotten Military Disaster

The Penobscot Expedition during the American Revolution was the worst naval disaster in American history until Pearl Harbor. That a huge force of men, ships and guns failed to take a small British fort in Maine has been largely forgotten.

The failed military maneuver also damaged Paul Revere‘s reputation. On Sept. 6, 1779, Lt. Col. Revere was placed under house arrest. He was charged with ‘unsoldierlike behavior … which tends to cowardice’ during the Penobscot Expedition.

Penobscot Expedition by John Thomas Serres

Penobscot Expedition

In 1779, British warships and troop transports sailed into Bagaduce (now Castine, Maine), on the Penobscot Bay. Seven hundred British troops built a fort to defend Canada, deny timber to the rebels and interrupt their privateering. Ultimately they intended to settle the outpost as a haven for Loyalists. The British planned to call it New Ireland.

Maine then belonged to Massachusetts, and the colony’s leaders soon got word of the British presence on its soil. Civilian officeholders of the commonwealth decided to force them out. They called up the militia and commandeered ships from the Massachusetts Navy, the Continental Navy and the fleet of privateers.

The Penobscot Expedition included 40 vessels, nearly 2,000 seamen and marines, 100 artillerymen, 870 militia and 350 guns.

Civilians planned the operation with little military input, and badly trained part-time soldiers carried it out. Commodore Dudley Saltonstall and Brigadier General Solomon Lovell had joint command of the expedition. Saltonstall was timid and indecisive, while Lovell had little field experience.

Paul Revere took charge of the artillery train. He didn’t have much military training, but he had repaired the guns damaged when the British evacuated Boston.

When the massive flotilla left Boston Harbor, everyone expected it to capture the garrison – even the British. They hadn’t taken into account the expedition’s shortcomings.

Arrival

The Penobscot Expedition on July 25, 1779 sailed into the harbor outside of Bagaduce. There stood an earthworks fort protected by three sloops in the harbor. Though the Americans seemed to have a decisive advantage, the British had more military experience. They also had a favorable geographic position and better coordination between land and sea forces.

The Americans took control of a small battery on an island off the coast. Then a force of 600 militiamen advanced along a steep bluff. Suddenly they found themselves within a few hundred yards of Fort George.

Revere wanted to storm the fort, but Lovell ordered a siege. Saltonstall refused to clear the harbor of the three British ships. For two weeks the militiamen sat outside the fort. Lovell wouldn’t attack the fort until Saltonstall attacked the fleet, but Saltonstall wouldn’t attack the fleet until Lovell attacked the fort.

Meanwhile, the dithering allowed the British to build up the earthen walls of the fort and request reinforcements.

Stone structure (reconstruction of a magazine, perhaps) at the site of Fort George.

Terrible Day

On Aug. 13, a British relief fleet arrived and Saltonstall ordered a retreat – up the Penobscot River.

“…[A]n attempt to give a description of this terrible Day is out of my Power,” Lovell later wrote.

Paul Revere

During the panic that followed, Adjutant Gen. Peleg Wadsworth gave Revere an order. Revere was to send his brig carrying artillery to help evacuate a schooner drifting toward the British fleet. Revere initially refused, then followed Wadsworth’s orders.

As the British bore down, the Americans burned and sank their own ships, then disappeared into the woods. Revere and the others made their way back to Massachusetts.

In the end, Americans lost all their ships but one, which the British captured. The Americans lost 470 men; the British only 13.

Commenting on the later exploits of John Paul Jones and the Ranger, Abigail Adams wrote on Dec. 13, 1779, “Unhappy for us that we had not such a commander at the Penobscot expedition.”

Court Martial

Recrimination followed the disaster. Dudley Saltonstall was court martialed and dismissed from the Continental Navy. He then turned to privateering.

A Massachusetts committee of inquiry investigated Paul Revere. Wadsworth charged him with disobeying his orders. Lengthy testimony also showed Revere’s arrogance had earned him enemies.

Though the committee didn’t rule one way or the other on his actions, the charges sullied Revere’s reputation. He tried to clear his name and demanded a full court martial. More than two years later, a military panel exonerated him.

If you enjoyed this story about the Penobscot Expedition, you might like to read about Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec here. This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Fort George By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34096704

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When Sardines Were Bigger Than Lobsters, Maine Women Had Good Jobs

In the Downeast town of Stonington, Maine, the women used to listen for the factory whistle, which blew when a boat came in loaded with sardines.

A sardine factory worker, identity unknown.

They hustled to the long, low wood building on the wharf. They donned rubber aprons, took their positions on the cold, slippery floor and picked up their scissors. There amid the awful clatter of machinery they snipped the heads and tails off the tiny fish. Then they packed them into the tins, careful to avoid cutting their fingers on the sharp edges.

For thousands of women, life revolved around the cannery when Maine was the hectic hub of the sardine business. Nearly every town along the coast had at least one small sardine factory. Some had more than a dozen.

Now the sardine factories are all gone, and stories of the women who worked there would be forgotten were it not for three amateur historians.

“What was very poignant was that many of the women that we interviewed said that they would return to work at the factory if it were open today,” said Gail Sytsema, a Stonington summer resident. “There was a marvelous sense of support amongst the women in a job that was so challenging.”

Sytsema used to take a daily walk along Stonington Harbor by the old sardine factory – now the Isle Au Haut boat service. She grew curious about the people who once worked there. Sytsema enlisted Sharon Hellstedt and later Trish Brierley in finding out more. The women spent the next five years combing the state of Maine, researching the sardine industry, collecting artifacts and interviewing former workers.

Stonington Sardines

The Stonington sardine factory today

Stonington lies at the southern tip of Deer Isle, where lobstering is now the biggest industry. Back in the day, it used to be cutting granite and catching and packing sardines.

Like many sardine workers, Anita Oliver had fond memories of work at the Stonington cannery.

“We could talk all day, laugh,” she said. “That was the best time of my life.”

Oliver was speaking on a video produced in 2012 by Stonington’s Opera House Arts and researched by the three friends. In the video, Oliver and four former sardine workers — Ann Eaton, Janet Nevells, Catherine Larrabee and Kathy Eaton Gray — talk about the good old days in the cannery.

The video is on display at the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society as part of an exhibit about the cannery. The Maine Coast Sardine History Museum tells the story in Jonesport, once home to 15 sardine canneries. The Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport has produced a video about the Jacob Pike, a sardine carrier (view it here).

A Short Sardine History

There is no actual ‘sardine’ fish; they are pilchards, small oily fish in the herring family. They were once a luxury food, while lobster was food for poor people.

Sardines were served with special little dishes and forks. Before Prohibition, bartenders set out sardines and crackers instead of popcorn and mixed nuts. In 1935 Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland started a sardine tasting club in London.

During World War II, sardine canneries flourished with large government orders for the troops. Sardines then became the ramen of convenience food, a staple of every workman’s lunchbox and Friday night supper for the poor immigrant family.

The industry reached its peak in the early 1950s, with nearly 6,000 workers at more than 50 canneries in Maine.

Stonington

Stonington’s first sardine cannery started in 1867. A state-of-the-art sardine factory was built on the harbor in 1911. It became the town’s largest employer, with more than 100 employees, mostly women. Women were quicker at packing the small tins.

The cannery also provided work for fishermen, seiners and truck drivers.

Ann Eaton’s husband a fishermen making $50 a week. They had one child and one on the way. It was pretty obvious she had to get a job. At the sardine factory she found income, empowerment and lasting friendships.

The work was hard and the women worked quickly, as they were paid by the can. The women talked and joked all day. Sometimes they played practical jokes on each other. “We had some good times,” said Janet Nevells. “You couldn’t leave your table,” said Catherine Larrabee, one of her victims.

Red Feed

A sardine packing card

Many women taped their fingers to protect them. “You could get some good little can cuts,” said Ann Eaton.

Sometimes their hands broke out in sores and bled in reaction to bacteria from undigested red feed, a small marine crustacean eaten by the fish. Red feed also caused the fish to break down as they were handled.

The women rebelled against the red feed. Some left their tables. left the building. Some put the affected fish down the flume – a hole near the tables where the heads and tails were thrown. The boss then made sure they didn’t use fish with undigested red feed.

Changing the Law

Work wasn’t steady. The women worked when the factory whistle blew or later when the radio station in Rockland told them to go to work. When they worked a cumulative number of hours, they were eligible for the unemployment benefits to which they contributed.

But a quirk in the law said cannery workers had to work steadily through their shifts to receive unemployment. If a worker took a half hour off during the month, she couldn’t collect her benefits.

The women protested it wasn’t fair. They didn’t know when they’d work, and sometimes they couldn’t avoid picking up a child or going to a dentist appointment.

Maine Statehouse

In 1979, Anita Oliver and Donna Stinson went to the unemployment office and were told they’d never change the law. They went to the Maine Legislature in Augusta.

“We said we believe in it and it’s time something was changed because it’s not right,” Oliver said. “I said if you’re the sole provider of a family and you don’t get a paycheck for a week, what are you going to do, fall on the state?”

Their representative introduced a bill to correct the injustice. It passed.

Gov. Joe Brennan came to Deer Isle for a fundraiser and asked to see them. “You changed that law,” he said. “We were so happy because everyone said you couldn’t do it,” Oliver said.

End of the Line

The recreated sardine factory office at the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society.

But time was running out for the sardine factory. Tastes were changing, and other kinds of convenience food replaced sardines. Tuna fish was marketed to the masses with great success.

Sandy Oliver, a food historian who lives on Islesboro, said tuna dealt a body blow to the sardine industry.

“Marketing matters,” she told the Bangor Daily News. “What tuna fish producers did in the 1950s and 1960s was remarkable.”

Sardine Factory, by Leslie Landrigan

Overfishing Sardines

There were other reasons for the death of the U.S. sardine industry: Overfishing. Regulation. Globalization.

Ann Eaton could see that overfishing would doom the factory, which also packed fish steaks.

“They would come in with these big fish, and they were full of spawn,” she said. “They did it for years. We could see it. They said, ‘You keep this up. You’re killin’ em’.”

New environmental and safety codes also killed the industry. In Stonington, the waters around the factory turned red on days when the sardines were packed in tomato sauce, yellow when they were packed in mustard. The factory burned coal, so soot and dust settled on clothes drying on nearby lines. And the wooden floor was a fire hazard.

In 1992, the Stonington sardine workers hung up their aprons for the last time.

It would have cost too much to bring the cannery up to code, Eaton said.

The Stonington sardine factory shut down suddenly in 1992. “We never dreamed it would close,” said Kathy Eaton Gray. Seventy women lost their jobs. Some went to work housekeeping for a local motel or working for the new nursing home.

All along the Maine coast, canneries were bought, stripped and closed as the industry consolidated and moved offshore. There are still huge sardine factories in Portugal, China, Australia and India.

On April 18, 2010, Stinson Seafood, the last sardine factory in Maine, closed in Prospect Harbor.

There’s no question the sardine workers regret the death of the industry. “If that factory was there today, I’d want to work there,” said Ann Eaton.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Maine Statehouse By Albany NY at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8502630

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Six Colonial Uprisings Before the Revolution

The Boston Tea Party was just one of several colonial uprisings before the shot was heard ‘round the world on April 19, 1775. Anger toward the British had been growing throughout New England — and not just about tea.

The Tea Party itself wasn’t a protest against taxes. It was a protest against a corporate tax break – to the East India Company. The giant corporation was near financial collapse, though it had an abundance of unsold tea. Parliament agreed to bail out the company. The Tea Act of May 10, 1773 exempted the East India Company from the tea tax, making it easier to sell in the colonies. The Act also allowed the company to sell directly through agents, bypassing the colonial middlemen.

The East India Company was in effect granted a monopoly that allowed it to sell cheaper tea, threatening independent colonial merchants. The Tea Act also set a precedent of Parliament taxing the colonies without the colonies having a say in the matter.

Not for the last time did a corporate bailout anger Americans. An embargo was declared on tea, and on Dec. 16, 1773, 60 men dressed as Indians dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Thought it was the best known of the colonial uprisings, it wasn’t the only one inspired by British exploitation. Throughout 1774, protests of the Tea Act spread to New York, Annapolis, Charleston, S.C., Greenwich, N.J., and York, Maine.

The British also angered colonists with aggressive enforcement of customs, disputed rulings over land claims and confiscation of pine trees for the Royal Navy. They caused the Pine Tree Riot in New Hampshire, the Gaspee Affair in Rhode Island and the rise of the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont.

Here are six colonial uprisings that occurred in each of six New England states before the Revolution.

Colonial Uprisings in Vermont

The Catamount Tavern in a late 19th-century photograph

Since New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth began selling grants to lands west of the Connecticut River in 1749, Vermont was disputed territory. New Yorkers – called ‘Yorkers’ — claimed the lands were theirs. Settlers holding the New Hampshire grants disagreed. The competing claims landed in court.

In 1764, King George III decreed the land belonged to New York. Settlers on land with overlapping claims had to pay a second time for their grants. The situation deteriorated and surveyors were threatened with violence. In 1770, Ethan Allen formed the Green Mountain Boys during a meeting at the Catamount Tavern in Old Bennington.

The Green Mountain Boys drove off surveyors and New Yorkers, occasionally destroying property and manhandling tenants. New York’s royal governor, Thomas Tryon, cracked down on the Green Mountain Boys with a law that imposed the death penalty for interfering with a magistrate and criminalized meeting of more than three people for unlawful purposes in the New Hampshire Grants.

On March 13, 1775, several men took possession of the courthouse in Westminster to prevent the next day’s session. The court officers attacked, killing two men. Allen and a group of Green Mountain Boys met in Westminster to prepare a petition to the King.

A month later, the American Revolution broke out. Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, along with Benedict Arnold and members of the Connecticut militia, captured Fort Ticonderoga.

Allen planned both the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and the Battle of Bennington at the Catamount Tavern. Today the site of the Catamount Tavern is marked by a granite and copper statue on Monument Avenue.

New Hampshire Pine Tree Riot

A Weare, N.H., sawmill, ca., early 20th century

On April 13, 1772, Ebenezer Mudgett was arrested by the sheriff and his deputy for unlawful possession of pine logs reserved for the King’s Royal Navy.

A surveyor had found illicit white pine logs at Mudgett’s sawmill in Weare, N.H. Other loggers and mill owners nearby had been discovered with the King’s trees. They agreed to pay a fine. Mudgett refused. Upon his arrest, though, he agreed to come up with the money on the next day. The sheriff and his deputy let him go and spent the night in Quimby’s Inn.

The next morning, Mudgett and 20 men with soot-blackened faces burst into the sheriff’s room and began beating him to their heart’s content. They removed the floorboards above the deputy’s room and beat him with poles. Then they cropped the ears of the officials’ horses and sheared their manes. The sheriff and his deputy left town to jeers and catcalls.

Eight rioters were identified and charged with rioting and assault. The judge let them off with a light fine.

A millstone marks the site of the Pine Tree Riot where Quimby’s Inn once stood on Rte. 114, South John Stark Byway near the Avon store on Eastman Hill.

Gaspee Affair

The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles deWolf Brownell, c1892

On June 9, 1772, the British customs schooner HMS Gaspee ran aground in Narragansett Bay while chasing a local vessel, the Hannah. Rhode Islanders had long endured the Gaspee’s harassment of local shipping and its arrogant captain, William Dudingston.

As soon as the Hannah’s captain went ashore, he told the news to John Brown, Rhode Island’s wealthiest merchant. Brown realized the Gaspee would be grounded until midnight. He ordered eight longboats, summoned 100 Sons of Liberty and led a raid on the ship.

Brown’s men shot Dudingston, though not fatally, captured the crew and set the Gaspee on fire.

The British considered the Gaspee attack treason and an act of war. But silence surrounded the perpetrators, and a Royal Commission of Inquiry found it was done by persons unknown.

Rhode Islanders, though, were galvanized by British threats to try and to punish the raiders in England. They began to form committees of correspondence, which acted as shadow governments and catalysts for the American Revolution.

Rhode Island celebrates Gaspee Days every year with a parade and a symbolic burning of the ship. Gaspee Point, where the ship ran aground in Warwick, R.I., is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There is also a plaque in a parking lot on South Main Street in Providence, marking the tavern where the plot was hatched to attack the Gaspee.

2^nd Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party Museum in Fort Point Channel

On March 7, 1774, three months after the Boston Tea Party, 60 men disguised as Indians boarded the Fortune in Boston Harbor. They forced the crew below deck and dumped 30 chests of tea into the water.

Of the 30 100-pound chests of tea destroyed, 16 were from tea merchants Davison Newman & Co. The company, still in business today, was outraged by the loss of their cargo. They petitioned King George III for compensation. In the document, they described how their tea was destroyed ‘by persons, all unknown to the Captain, armed with axes and with force threw the tea in to the Water whereby the same was wholly lost and destroyed.’

Today the Boston Tea Party Museum features two replica ships, reenactments, a documentary and one of two known tea chests from the original event.

York Tea Party

York Harbor, 19th-century painting

On September 15, 1774, the sloop Cynthia sailed from Newfoundland into harbor at York, Maine. Her cargo included 150 pounds of tea for its Loyalist owner, local judge Jonathan Sayward. The Sons of Liberty noted the Cynthia’s arrival and called a town meeting on September 23. The meeting voted to seize the tea over the objections of the ship’s captain, James Donnell, who also happened to be Sayward’s nephew. The tea was stored in another merchant’s warehouse.” That night, “a Number of Pickwacket Indians” (so it was said) broke into the storeroom and carried away the tea.

Two days later, the tea mysteriously reappeared in the warehouse. Some speculate the tea was stolen to establish York’s bona fides as patriotic sympathizers. It may have been returned so Judge Sayward could have his tea without paying taxes on it because it was stolen. Maine tea drinkers benefited from the low price of untaxed tea.

Visitors to York (during he summer and fall) will want to include a stop at the Museums of Old York, a collection of notable properties that includes the old jail, that dates to the 1600s, the Perkins House Museum and the site of the patriot John Hancock’s wharf.

New London Cannon Theft

Map of Fort Trumbull, drawn by a British soldier

Many Connecticut merchants traded regularly through the Port of Boston and sympathized with Massachusetts when the British closed the port. Many Connecticut towns created committees of correspondence and denounced British actions. Mansfield, Conn., passed its own declaration of independence in October 1774. Anti-Loyalist laws were passed, and some Loyalists like the Rev. Samuel Peters were forced to flee to the protection of British troops.

On Dec. 13, 1774 men from New London removed – the British would say ‘stole’ — cannon from the sole fort guarding Connecticut’s coast lest they fall into British hands. The cannon were ‘removed to the country.’

It was nearly a year after the first Boston Tea Party and one day before the New Hampshire militia raided Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth, taking 100 barrels of gunpowder.

The New London fortification from which the guns were taken was Connecticut’s only defense from the Royal Navy. Gov. Jonathan Trumbull described it as ‘a small battery at New London, consisting of nine guns, built and supported at the colony’s expense.” It was also in ruinous condition.

New London, then one of the world’s busiest whaling ports, was vulnerable to British attack because of its proximity to Long Island Sound and the Thames River.

Trumbull recommended a new fort be built. Fort Trumbull was completed on a rocky point of land jutting into the river; the fort was captured in 1781 by turncoat Benedict Arnold and British forces. Today, Fort Trumbull is open to visitors as party of Fort Trumbull State Park.

Photos: Boston Tea Party Museum, By Tim Pierce – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28919099

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