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Calorie Counting Gets Its Start in Connecticut

For most of human history food was something you found or grew and then gladly ate to stay alive. There was little thought to its quality or nutritional value, let alone calorie counting.

That began to change in the 19th century as scientists discovered thermodynamics (the study of heat and energy). They then applied that knowledge to improving the efficiency of steam engines. They used those same concepts of heat and energy to study how different foods improved the health and value of livestock and increased their capacity for work. Eventually, one man turned to studying nutrition and work in people. He thereby caused future generations to scrutinize food labels, to obsess over weight and exercise and to count calories.

Portrait of Wilbur Atwater. National Agricultural Library.

The Weight Watcher

Wilbur Olin Atwater was born in New York in 1844 and grew up in Connecticut and Vermont. He earned a degree in agricultural chemistry from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., in 1865. He then received a doctorate in the same field from Yale University four years later.

Atwater chose a good time to get interested in the science underlying agriculture. The 1862 Homestead Act gave some 400,000 American families land on which to start new farms and raise livestock. That same year, the Land-Grant College Act (or Morrill Act) gave land grants to the states to establish colleges focusing on A&M—agriculture and the mechanic arts. Agriculture was big business and it drove the economies of most states. Atwater’s made his initial contribution to that economy by studying the mineral content of various fertilizers. Then he went to Europe.

Connecticut Experiment Station

In Germany, he spent two years studying physiological chemistry and visiting European experimental agriculture stations. He returned to Wesleyan University in 1873 to become the school’s first professor of chemistry. Inspired by European agricultural stations and their research on crops and fertilizers, Atwater persuaded Wesleyan and the Connecticut Legislature to establish an agricultural station in the basement of Judd Hall at Wesleyan. By 1877, a permanent Connecticut Experiment Station was established at Yale University.

Years later, Atwater and colleagues persuaded Congress to establish experiment stations at the land-grant colleges previously created by the Morrill Act. The 1887 Hatch Act resulted from those efforts. Atwater became the director of the second agricultural experiment station at Storrs Agricultural College in Connecticut. In 1888, the Office of Experiment Stations was created to monitor and appraise the research of the state-level stations. Atwater served as its first national director. Eventually, the work of the stations was turned into Farmers’ Bulletins so farmers and ranchers could keep up with the latest findings about feed, fertilizers and crop management.

Exiting the respiration calorimeter. National Agricultural Library.

Measuring Heat

Returning to Germany again, Atwater observed his European colleagues using thermodynamic principles to study respiration and metabolism in livestock. He thought it would be instructive to do similar studies on people. When he returned to Wesleyan, Atwater built a “respiration calorimeter” to study human metabolism.

Atwater’s calorimeter, an enclosed four-by-eight-foot chamber, could measure a test subject’s body heat during exercise, oxygen intake, carbon dioxide output, and the amount of energy provided by various foods. Atwater then used his students as most of his test subjects; some of whom may have wanted extra cash, a better grade or both. Over several years, Atwater and his guinea pig students quantified the dynamics of metabolism and determined the balance between food intake and energy output. He called that measure of food energy the Calorie.

Calorie Counting

Calorie comes from the Latin, calor, for heat. The French scientist Nicolas Clément used it as a unit of heat in the early 19th century. The Calorie (large “C”) actually is 1,000 calories (small “c”) or one kilocalorie. This is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. Atwater determined the caloric content of foods using a “bomb calorimeter,” which burned whole foods or individual samples of fat, carbohydrates and protein and measured the resulting heat. Atwater’s system, for example, found protein contained 4,000 calories per gram, as did carbohydrates. Fat contained 9,000 calories per gram.

Exercise bicycle. National Agricultural Library.

This research was more than ivory tower information for scientists and scientific journal editors. His 1896 report to the Department of Agriculture, “The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials,” listed the calories and nutritional content of 500 different foods. With that data, Atwater then made practical recommendations for economical diets that still would provide sufficient nutritional value. He emphasized the importance of an inexpensive and balanced diet that included more proteins, beans and vegetables in place of carbohydrates and indigestible fiber. Atwater also concluded Americans consumed too much fat and sugar and did not exercise enough—conclusions still true today.

4,000 Calories a Day?

“A woman with light exercise, for example, required 2,300 calories per day, while a man with a corresponding activity level needed 2,830 calories,” according to a Century magazine article Atwater wrote in 1888.

Winning over a skeptical public about calorie intake and exercise was not made easier by the fact that the beefy Dr. Atwater looked as if he enjoyed 4,000 calories a day. Worse perhaps, his research showed that people generated heat (energy) from alcoholic beverages (7,000 calories per gram). In other words, alcohol had nutritional value. This did not win him any friends in the Methodist Church or the temperance movement, and he belonged to both. Nonetheless, Atwater and his colleagues had started a “scientific eating” movement.

World War I

During World War I, the U.S. Food Administration used publications and good old-fashioned propaganda to make calorie counting a familiar concept to the larger public. The government then rationed certain foods for shipping to allies and encouraged the public to seek out alternative foods of similar nutritional content. The Food Administration, for example, would encourage citizens to substitute a piece of beef (500 calories) for extra helpings of beans. The government also deemed rationing and not overindulging at the dinner table both healthy and patriotic. Many restaurants even started posting calorie counts on their menus so customers could keep track of their mealtime calories during the war.

WWI Food Sign. Library of Congress.

After the war, rationing ended, but calorie counting did not. Fashion, foods, lifestyles and economies changed, and people tried to change with the times. As a result, dieting became common. Diet and Health, the first diet book published in the U.S., sold 2 million copies and stayed in print from 1918 to 1939.

Atwater died in 1907. He started a food revolution with his analytical research and turned the old French word calorie into a mantra and an obsession that lives on in the 21st century. Though today’s calorie counters may have to switch to counting joules—a more common international unit of energy that equals 0.239 calories (small “c”).

Measuring respiration. National Agricultural Library.

For more information:

Check out the Mayo Clinic Calorie Calculator to see your recommended daily calorie intake.

Visit the USDA’s Food Data Central for calorie and nutrient information about various foods.

See Scientific American’s July 2015 special issue on “The Science of Food.”

The author of this story, Edward McSweegan, is a Rhode Island microbiologist who writes about infectious diseases and history. This story was updated in 2022.

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Oliver Otis Howard, The Mainer Who Founded Howard University

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard thought he was fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to free any slaves.

Howard had earned the nickname of “the Christian General” for his deep, overbearing piety. His men didn’t always appreciate his hectoring them about the Ten Commandments or the evils of booze.

His moral certainty led him to great achievements and to terrible deeds. He founded Howard University, which educated 150,000 freed slaves. But he later led a massacre of women and children belonging to the Nez Perce tribe because they wouldn’t move to a reservation.

Oliver Otis Howard by Matthew Brady

But sometimes Oliver Otis Howard couldn’t rely on his moral compass. During the Civil War, he faced a puzzling dilemma: Should he disobey orders and allow a fugitive from slavery her freedom?

Oliver Otis Howard

Born in Leeds, Maine, on Nov. 8, 1830, his mother sent him away to live with relatives after his father died when he was very young. He graduated from Bowdoin College at 19, and went on to West Point. A diligent student, he ranked fourth in a class of 46.

In 1856, he was a lonely young soldier stationed in Florida, far from his wife and baby boy. Seeking comfort, he attended a Methodist prayer meeting and experienced a spiritual awakening. He felt a “new well spring within me, a joy, a peace & a trusting spirit.” He sensed God had destined him for great things.

His military career, like the rest of his life, veered from highlight to lowlight. He won the Medal of Honor for leading a charge at the Battle of Fair Oaks, which cost him his right arm. But he suffered ignominious defeats at Chancellorship and Gettysburg. His men started calling him “Uh-Oh” Howard.

Freedmen’s Bureau

After the Civil War he led the Freedmen’s Bureau, a Reconstruction program that helped former slaves. The Bureau had hundreds of agents in the South distributing food and medicine and finding jobs and schooling for the new citizens.

Howard issued an order to divide up land from confiscated plantations and give it to the people who’d worked them as slaves. But while he vacationed in Maine, President Andrew Johnson reversed his order. In the end, anyone who’d received the promised 40 acres and a mule had to give them back.

Johnson viewed Oliver Otis Howard as a fanatic, and he tried to stymie him at every turn. Howard eventually concluded southerners were still fighting the Civil War and wouldn’t change their attitudes. So he turned his energies to education, and he established a school that bears his name today – Howard University. He served as president from 1869-1874.

Howard University

Howard explained the importance of Howard University in his 1908 autobiography. In the South, white people who opposed educating black people wouldn’t permit any room or building for use as a school. From 1865-67, mobs all over the South burned schools and churches used as schools. They flogged teachers and drove them away. A number of times, they murdered them.

Howard University started on three acres in Washington, D.C. Classes began in 1867 with five students, all daughters of the school’s white founders. Though it emphasized teacher training, Howard added a law school, a medical school and a seminary under its first president.

Howard University, 1868

Eventually, black students and faculty would outnumber whites, and Howard today produces more black doctorates than any other university. Alumni include Toni Morrison, Andrew Young, Kamala Harris and Thurgood Marshall.

Founders library at Howard University

Enemies

Oliver Otis Howard’s efforts on behalf of the former slaves earned him plenty of enemies, and they got him charged with corruption in running the Freedmen’s Bureau. After years of litigation the courts exonerated him, but he nearly went bankrupt paying his lawyers. And in 1872, Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For his next act, he moved west to kick Indians off their land. He commanded the Department of the Columbia from Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. His men pursued and slaughtered Nez Perce Indians who refused to move to a reservation.

Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce resistance to Howard’s campaign to remove them from their land.

In Howard’s mind, he tried to do for the Indians what he had tried to do for freed slaves. He was giving them land on which they could lead good Christian lives, only they refused. Finally corralled into a reservation in Oklahoma, many died of disease.

Oliver Otis Howard at Governors Island in 1893.

Howard finally commanded the Atlantic Military Division at Fort Columbus on Governors Island in New York before retiring in 1894 as a major general. Then in 1896 he founded Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., to educate “mountain whites.”

He died in 1909 in Burlington, Vt., on Oct. 26, 1909. He lies buried in Lakeview Cemetery.

Greatly Puzzled

How did Oliver Otis Howard’s moral compass swing so wildly from educating freed slaves to slaughtering Indians?

One incident early in his career illuminates his thought process. He prided himself on following orders, and had difficulty resolving the moral dilemma that created.

Just after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, the 30-year-old Oliver Otis Howard commanded a brigade. He and his men were garrisoned on a farm just west of Alexandria, Va.

First Battle of Bull Run

Abraham Lincoln aimed to quell the southern rebellion without touching slavery. He felt he had to, otherwise the loyal border states might also rebel. Military commanders were to return escaped slaves to their owners.

Howard was entertaining visitors from Waterville, Maine, when a picket guard brought a frightened young woman to him. He described her as “tall straight, healthful and active,” with a boy of about two years old in her arms.

He saw the woman’s terror, and reassured her. In his autobiography, he recounted the incident.

“What do you wish?” I asked. “Sir, I’m a slave woman, and this here’s my child. Let me and my child go free!”

Property?

Meanwhile, a poorly dressed, shrill, sallow white woman was ushered in. “That there woman is my slave,” she said. “I have always treated her well, and here she is. She has run off. Now, sir, you must send her back to me, for she is mine. She and the boy, they’re my property.”

I found myself under most stringent orders not to harbor any slave property. The white woman, seeing my embarrassment, became more and more excited, and soon began to use abusive language, directed partially to me, but mainly to her slave.

The woman kept pressing her child to her breast and with her large eyes filled with tears continued to look toward me, repeating: “Oh! my child, my child!”

Howard realized he had to decide the case. He turned to the white woman and said, “There’s your property, take it!” She replied, “But I can’t take it. She’s stronger than I! You must give me a guard.”

That was too much for Howard. He said, “No, no, I will not give you a guard. I will never use bayonets to drive a poor girl and child into bondage.”

Both women went away, and the young fugitive found her way to Washington, D.C., and to freedom. His guests from Maine, ardent abolitionists, chastised him for his hesitation.

What to do with enslaved people presented a quandary until another New Englander, Benjamin Butler, declared them “contraband of war.”

Read Oliver Otis Howard’s account of the incident in his autobiography here. Image of Howard University PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13705310. Founders Library By Derek E. Morton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74173648. This story was updated in 2023.

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When Massachusetts Abolished the State Police

In 1875, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts abolished the state police department. It was only 10 years old, the first state police force in the country, but Massachusetts had had enough.

Attitudes toward a centralized police force were very different in the 19^th century than they are now. Americans generally preferred a vigilant citizenry rather than a standing army to control disorder and crime. They distrusted powerful central authorities, especially in rural areas.

And in Massachusetts, they didn’t like the state police seizing their booze.

Some of Massachusetts’ first state police officers: John Gilman, Charles Hair and William King.

The Constabulary

On May 16, 1865, Gov. John Andrew signed a bill into law creating the Massachusetts State Constabulary. By then the temperance movement had taken hold in Massachusetts, but people brazenly flouted the laws governing alcohol. And so that first state police force had as its mission the enforcement of the alcohol laws, as well as suppressing gambling and houses of prostitution.

Up until then, cities and towns left crime control up to local constabularies and police. The state had little to do with the local police and the local courts.

But local constables tended to be part-time, unsalaried officials who served for a year. They didn’t get paid much, but did get rewarded for making arrests, serving warrants and producing witnesses. Constables often had to collect taxes, which made the officeholder unpopular and the office undesirable. As a result, inexperienced men who wanted to avoid trouble got the job, but they tended not to keep it for long.

Private crime-fighting associations filled the gaps left open by the amateur constables. Property owners formed such associations to prevent theft and pursue horse thieves. Banks formed them to go after counterfeiters and temperance organizations formed them to rampage against rum.

During the 19^th century, New England had at least 72 protective societies — like the Worcester Association for the Protection of Fruit or the Pownal Association to Counteract and Detect Horse Thieves and Robbers — in more than 100 towns.

state-police-society-for-the-mutual-aid-against-thieves

The Worcester society for the mutual aid against thieves at work.

The State Police

But times were changing. In 1855, Massachusetts passed a version of Maine’s dry law, which banned alcohol — except for medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes. It was honored more in the breach than in the observance.

So shortly after the Civil War, Massachusetts established the state constabulary to crack down on purveyors of alcohol. Andrew appointed Gen. William Sterling King, shot 21 times at the Battle of Antietam, to head the first state police force in the United States.

Over the next 10 years, about 360 state police constables served an average of 2-1/2 years. Most had fought in the Civil War. They came from all walks of life and from all over the globe.

Booze Busters

The state constabulary got off to a fairly good start. They had to protect attendees at the Methodists’ annual meeting in Wesleyan Grove on the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Ground in August 1865. Five constables received the assignment and won praise for their performance.

Martha’s Vineyard Campground Tabernacle in the Wesleyan Grove, Oak Bluffs

But they also began to shut grog shops, saloons and rum mills. During the first six months of their existence, they won convictions for 1,404 liquor sellers. Many more liquor dealers agreed to cease operations, but they anticipated (correctly) the Legislature would repeal prohibition.

They also started to seize large quantities of alcohol. In December, 1869, for example, Deputy Constable Amasa H. Tolman was involved in the seizure of 80 gallons of ale and three-and-a-half gallons of spirits in Boston.

They didn’t win many friends, though, for grabbing people’s booze.

Someone shot at Constable William McKay from a wooded area in North Adams because he seized so much liquor. McKay once confiscated 60 barrels of beer and stored them in his barn, butthen someone tried to blow up the building with nitroglycerin.

Adding to the unpopularity of the state police was the shooting death of a brick-thrower in Westfield, Mass., in 1867. The constables had raided a gambling den, which started a riot, and a constable shot a rioter about to throw a brick at him. When the rioter died, the sheriff arrested the constable, but he was not prosecuted.

In 1870, the Legislature cut the state police budget, and 72 constables were suspended from duty. Many of the laid-off constables agreed to work for half pay.

Local Sovereignty

For the first decade of its existence, in fact, the Massachusetts General Court repeatedly tried and failed to abolish the state police. It wasn’t just the controversy over liquor seizures and prosecutions, though. People did not want a police force controlled by a powerful centralized government.

On May 18, 1874, the Boston Post wrote an editorial against the state police.

The whole system of a State Police is extraneous to the spirit of true local sovereignty. That a power from without should be imposed upon the people … is fatal to the soundness of the theory from which such a police force draws its life.

Ten years after the state police force began, the Legislature abolished it. They replaced the booze-busting constables with a small detective force and charged it with quelling riots and helping prosecutors find evidence. Then in 1879 lawmakers abolished the detectives and replaced them with ‘district police.’ Two men in each district had only limited duties.

It wasn’t until 1921 that the Massachusetts state police force began to take its current shape. That year, the Legislature enlarged the agency to 50 officers stationed in barracks across the state. Their job: to enforce the law in rural areas that didn’t have adequate police forces.

With thanks to State Police in the United States: A Socio-historical Analysis by H. Kenneth Bechtel; Stop, Thief! Private Protective Societies in Nineteenth-Century New England, by Ann-Marie Szymanski in The New England Quarterly; and The First To Serve by Ronald J. Guilmette. Images: Wesleyan Grove By LisaHendricks – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2847459.7. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Beautiful Buildings Designed by Asher Benjamin

Asher Benjamin, a young country housewright, published a book in 1797 that is responsible for the way much of early New England looked.

Asher Benjamin

He was only 24 when he wrote The Country Builder’s Assistant. The book arose from his dissatisfaction with the large, lavish and expensive handbooks imported from England that most builders relied on.

In writing the book, Asher Benjamin popularized a new style of architecture known today as the Federal style.

Charles Bulfinch and Thomas Jefferson had adopted it already. Though just a poor boy recently released from apprenticeship, Asher Benjamin encountered Bulfinch’s work when he built a stone spiral staircase in Bulfinch’s Old State House in Hartford in 1795.

Asher Benjamin

Born to a poor family in Hartland, Conn., in 1773, Asher Benjamin’s father died shortly after his birth. He was apprenticed as a housewright to a local builder until 1794, the year before he worked with Bulfinch.

He spent the first 30 years of his life in the Connecticut River Valley designing buildings from Suffield, Conn., to Greenfield, Mass., to Windsor, Vt.

His first pattern book, published when he was just 24, helped to spread an urbane Federal style that adapted English designs to the scale and wallet of New England. He published the book when living in Greenfield, Mass., where he built two large houses and started a family with his new wife, Achsah Hitchcock.

Then he moved his family to Windsor, Vt., where he built the Old South Congregational Church. Windsor was too small for his big ambitions, though. Benjamin moved to Boston, where he designed a number of public buildings. He also won election as alderman in 1823 and 1824. He ran as a member of the “Middling Interest,” middle class artisans an businesspeople opposed to the Federalists (but not the Federal style).

Significantly, he also took as an assistant Ithiel Town, inventor of the covered truss bridge.

Asher Benjamin would publish six more handbooks on design. They contained anything a housewright could hope to know, including patterns for frontispieces, architraves, cornices, doors, fireplace mantels, dormer windows, pilasters, balusters and fences.

As architectural historian Talbot Hamlin writes:

“…he, more than any other person is responsible for the character we roughly call ‘Late Colonial.

Here, then, are six buildings designed by Asher Benjamin, one in each New England state. If you know of another one, please include it in the comments section.

Center Church on the Green

Asher Benjamin’s Center Church on the Green.

The Center Church on the Green has been a New Haven institution since 1639, when the Puritans established the parish. The first minister, John Davenport came with Theophilus Eaton to settle New Haven. By the 19^th century, the First Congregational Church was New Haven’s most conservative, socially prominent congregation.

By 1814 they’d already gone through three meeting houses. For the fourth, they bought the plans from Asher Benjamin, who sent them from Boston. Ithiel Town directed construction of the church, making some modifications.

Not coincidentally, the Center Church on the Green resembles the much-admired St. Martin in the Fields in London. So do many other North American churches. Its architect, Charles Gibbs, wrote a popular pattern book that made its way to the United States, and Benjamin borrowed from it. Like the London church, the Center Church on the Green has three doors, a pediment, a cupola, and a double row of rectangular windows.

The church, by the way, was built over the colony’s ancient burial grounds on the Green. So the basement has many old burial stones in it, and people call it the Crypt.

250 Temple St., New Haven, Conn.

The Black House

The Black House, today the Woodlawn Museum.

John Black came to Maine from England at the age of 18, sent by the Dutch bank Hope & Co. to assist its U.S. agent, David Cobb.

Cobb, a Massachusetts congressman, had served on George Washington’s staff. Hope & Co. hired him to take care of property it had bought from William Bingham, a wealthy Philadelphian. Bingham had speculated in a huge tract shortly after the Revolution, then sold half of it to Hope & Co. in the financial panic of 1792.

Black married his boss’s daughter, and David Cobb apparently approved the match. He gave the couple 300 acres in Ellsworth.

Built between 1824 and 1827, the mansion is based on Plate 54 of Asher Benjamin’s The American Builder’s Companion, published in 1806. Bricks for the house came from Philadelphia and Boston masons took three years to build it.

Three generations of Blacks lived in the mansion until 1928, when the family gave it to the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations. Today the trustees run it as the Woodlawn Museum, which includes the house, outbuildings, hiking trails, a formal garden and the only regulation size croquet court in the state.

The contents of the house are the same as when the last Black died in 1928, so ‘entering the house is like stepping back at least 100 years in time,’ according to the National Park Service, which lists it on the National Register of Historic Places.

West Maine Street on Route 172, Ellsworth, Maine

Old West Church

The widely copied Old West Church in Boston.

The first Old West Church was built in 1737 in Boston’s West End, which today is actually the north part of the city. British soldiers used it as a barracks before the American Revolution. They tore down the tower in 1775 because they suspected the rebels were signaling from it.

The church had a history of rebellious sentiment. One of its pastors, the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, was a revolutionary who befriended Samuel and John Adams, John Hancock and Robert Paine.

Timbers from the wrecked first church formed part of the African Meeting House in Boston, also designed by Asher Benjamin.

In 1806, the Old West congregation commissioned Asher Benjamin to build a new church. He designed it with a 3-1/2 story porch divided into three bays. The National Park Service called it an ‘early and highly successful example of a monumentally scaled church constructed in the then-new Federal-Adamesque style.’

Though widely copied, the church almost fell to the wrecking ball several times. But several times a rescuer saved it. After functioning as a library for many years, the Methodist Church bought it in 1961. Today the Methodists use the building as a church while urging people ‘to do justice, love mercy and hustle humbly.’

Benjamin designed many other buildings in Boston, including the Exchange Coffee House, the Charles Street Meeting House, Headquarters House, the Fourth Meeting House of the First Church, the William Ellery Channing House and the Charles Playhouse.

131 Cambridge St., Boston

Nashua Manufacturing Co.

Clocktower Place, part of the mill complex designed by Asher Benjamin.

After winning election as Boston alderman at the age of 50, the ambitious Asher Benjamin probably aimed at a higher office. But he fell into financial distress and declared bankruptcy in 1825. So from 1825 to 1827, he went to work to Nashua, N.H., supervising the construction of canals, locks, roads, mill buildings and churches for the new Nashua Manufacturing Co. He even designed worker housing and decided where the company should plant shade trees.

The mill complex, modeled on Lowell’s farther south, succeeded, and Nashua’s population swelled from 100 to 1200. The company churned out cotton textiles until it sold to Textron in 1945, which shut down the mills in 1948.

Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the mill district, and some of the buildings now serve as an apartment complex called Clocktower Place

Two Clocktower Place, Nashua, N.H.

Washington Lodge No. 3

asher-benjamin-washington-lodge-no-three

Washington Lodge No. 3, courtesy Google Maps.

We had a hard time finding an Asher Benjamin house in Rhode Island. His most prominent building in the state, the Rhode Island Union Bank, has been demolished.

But his influence was so pervasive we thought there must be some building with a link to Asher Benjamin. We finally found it in a Masonic Temple, Washington Lodge No. 3 in Warren.

The lodge had 58 original members, of which 21 were sea captains.

asher-benjamin-washington-lodge-corniceasher-benjamin-washington-lodge-cornice

An Asher Benjamin cornice

Built in 1796 or 1798, the building has beams salvaged from British frigates sunk in Newport Harbor during the American Revolution. The federal style detailing on the outside of the building includes a ‘modified cornice from Asher Benjamin,’ according to the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission.

The building served as Warren’s Town Hall and the Warren Academy during the early days of the Republic.

Inside, visitors will find a surprise: Egyptian-themed frescoes painted by Max Muller, a Mason and recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. There was a well-known Max Muller who studied Orientalism, traveled to Egypt and taught college in Philadelphia, but we don’t know if it’s the same person. Perhaps our readers can help us.

The second oldest building in Warren after the Baptist Church of Warren39 Baker St., Warren, R.I.

Old South Church

Old South Church, one of four buildings in Windsor designed by Asher Benjamin.

Asher Benjamin and his new wife moved to Windsor, Vt., around 1798. There he built the Old South Church, and designed and built three other houses, all since demolished.

The parishioners of the Congregational church had not had a leader for 10 years when Asher Benjamin drew up the designs for a new meetinghouse. The previous pastor, Benjamin Bell, had been accused of unchristian conduct and excommunicated in 1795. The old meetinghouse had deteriorate to such an extent the parishioners agreed to spend $5,000 on a new one.

Asher Benjamin designed the building with seven windows along each side and a Palladian window in the front, but a renovation in 1922 eliminated those architectural elements.

In fact, Old South’s alterations disguise its original similarity to the Asher Benjamin design for a country meeting house. He included that design in The Country Builder’s Assistant, and builders throughout New England used it. One of the keys to the success of Asher Benjamin’s books was his understanding of the country builder’s limitations.

In December 1801 he took out an advertisement for ‘young carpenters, joiners and all others concerned in the art of building.’ He wrote that he hoped to open a school of architecture in his home in Windsor. It probably never happened, as he moved to Boston in 1803.

146 Main St., Windsor, Vt.

Industry and Talents

From Windsor, Asher Benjamin he wrote to Postmaster General Gideon Granger in hopes of getting a commission for a public building in Boston. He didn’t get the job, but he got many others in Boston.

Granger later described Asher Benjamin:

“From a poor boy unaided by friends, by his indefatigable industry and talents in a few years he has raised himself to the first rank of his profession.”

To read the American Builders Companion, click here.

Images: Old West Church By [email protected] – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21361578; Nashua mill complex, By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10608802. This story was updated in 2021.

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William Apess Leads the Bloodless Mashpee Revolt of 1833

William Apess was the perfect person to lead the nonviolent Mashpee Revolt of 1833, an uprising against the Massachusetts government. The commonwealth had controlled the tribe’s lands, but not to the tribe’s benefit.

William Apess (from his autobiography)

Apess (who occasionally spelled his name Apes) was born in 1798 in Colrain, Mass., of Pequot descent. He had a tumultuous family life. His abusive grandmother raised him until the age of five. He was then removed from the home and placed with the Furman family as an indentured servant.

Apess worked for the head of the Furman household as a cooper, and the Furman family saw to it he had six years of schooling.

Despite his kind treatment by the Furmans, Apess’ childhood was a mixed bag. He moved on from the Furman family to live with a Connecticut judge. Later he worked as a household servant for a retired general. The Furmans were Baptists, his later homes Presbyterian, and Apess chafed at the rote repetition of prayers.

Methodism

Frustrated by his indentureship, Furman ran off and joined the army at 15. Later he worked as a laborer in upstate New York. All the while, he grew closer to Methodism. He attended camp revivals, and found inspiration in the spontaneity and fervor of the services. The Methodist meetings were open to all races, an additional appeal.

Apess also wrestled with his own demons. He had a mischievous side and liked to drink, a weakness he worked to control. With the encouragement of friends, he took up public speaking and began ‘exhorting’ at church services. He grew into a full-blown preacher, much in demand.

A Methodist revival meeting around 1839

A Son of the Forest

In 1829, now in his early 30s, Apess published his autobiography: A Son of the Forest. It paints a picture of a matured preacher, and one sensitive to injustice. He talks about the elders in the church hierarchy who placed barriers in his way. And he takes umbrage that the army never paid bonuses promised to soldiers, himself included.

He also analyzes his own upbringing. For example, he writes, he supposes the reader will say, “What savage creatures my grandparents were to treat unoffending or helpless children in this manner.”

But, he writes, that treatment had a cause: the whites.

…[B]ecause they introduced among my countrymen ardent spirits; seduced them into a love for it, and when under its baleful influence, wronged them out of their lawful possessions — that land where reposed the ashes of their sires.

Not only that, he wrote,

…[B]ut they committed violence of the most revolting and basest kind upon the persons of the female portion of the tribe, who until the arts, and vices, and debauchery of the whites were introduced among them, were happy, and peaceable, and cheerful, as they roamed over their goodly possessions.

As a result, the Mashpee scattered.

…[And] now, many of them are seen reeling about intoxicated with liquor, failing to provide for themselves or families, who before were assiduously engaged in supplying the necessities of those depending upon them.

By 1829, Apess was ripe for a confrontation. In the Mashpees reservation on Cape Cod, he found his perfect battleground.

The Mashpee Revolt

Apess had heard rumor that the Mashpees, who numbered several hundred, were in difficult straits and that the tribe was unhappy with the way the state administered its reservation. As he worked his way through Massachusetts, preaching, he began forming a plan. He would go investigate the circumstances of the Mashpees himself. Though a Pequot, he felt kinship with the Mashpees.

Upon arriving in Mashpee, he quickly learned the truth of the rumors. The state overseers allowed the Mashpees’ neighbors to steal from tribal lands. The overseers collaborated with local sea captains and others to cheat the Indians out of pay. The overseers also reached an agreement with white families who took in Indians that they would not educate the children.

And the Congregational minister assigned to the town, funded and overseen by Harvard College, neglected the Indians. Instead, he preached to the small group of white people who attended his church. Rev. Phineas Fish was taking hundreds of dollars in aid intended for the Mashpee and keeping it.

An Indian Methodist minister who could read and write, was well schooled in the ways of the government and held a jaded view of the way whites had treated American Indians was the perfect match to put fire to the Mashpee revolt.

Mashpee. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Declaration of Independence

Apess offered to assist the Mashpee if they wished, but only if they voted to accept him into their tribe to give him standing. The tribe accepted him.

Apess then helped the tribe shape its demands and drafted what amounted to a Mashpee declaration of independence. To the government, the tribe sent three resolutions:

Resolved, That we, as a tribe, will rule ourselves, and have the Constitution; for all men are born free and equal, says the Constitution of the country.

Resolved, That we will not permit any white man to come upon our plantation, to cut or carry off wood or hay, or any other article, without our permission, after the 1st of July next.

And finally:

Resolved, That we will put said resolutions in force after that date, (July next,) with the penalty of binding and throwing them from the plantation, if they will not stay away without.

Harvard, Too

To Harvard, the tribe sent three additional resolutions:

First,

That we will rule our own tribe and make choice of whom we please for our preacher.

Second,

That we will have our own meeting house, and place in the pulpit whom we please to preach to us.

And third,

That we will publish this to the world; if the above reasons and resolutions are not adhered to, and the Rev. Mr. Fish discharged.

The Old Indian Meeting House in Mashpee.

The Mashpee Revolt Takes Shape

When July rolled around, the tribe put its plans into action. A neighbor named William Sampson approached tribal lands and loaded a cart with wood when Apess approached him with six others – Joseph, Jacob and Nicholas Pocknett, Aaron Keater, Charles D. Grasse and Abraham Jackson. They informed him he could not take any wood. Then they unloaded his cart and sent him home.

News of the incident spread quickly. The tribe’s enemies characterized the Mashpee Revolt as a threat of violent uprising. The governor then sent a contingent of negotiators to Mashpee to meet with the Indians.

Apess explained their grievances. The governor’s men urged the Mashpees to have patience. They would present their case to the government. But then Apess and the six men who stopped the theft of wood were arrested and charged with riot, assault and trespass.

Apess was offended at the suggestion that he and the Mashpees would use violence against the government.

The plight of the Mashpee received a sympathetic airing in Massachusetts newspapers, and for a time it appeared real change was coming. The state did release some of its control over the Indian lands and returned self-governance to the tribe. But laws designed to protect Indian property from neighboring towns were rarely enforced.

Harvard remained steadfast in its support of Rev. Phineas Fish, and he continued preaching to the white congregation he had assembled.

Demons

As for Apess, he did a short stint in jail for his part in the protest. His sense of anger at the treatment of the Indians grew. In his account of the protest: Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, he wrote:

Many and many a red man has been butchered for a less wrong than the Mashpees complain of.

In 1836, Apess’ growing fervor for the Indian cause took center stage when he delivered a Eulogy of King Philip. In it, he praised the Indian leader, likening him to George Washington.

Apess’ personal demons, however, continued to plague him. His struggles with alcohol contributed to the breakup of his family and debts cost him his Massachusetts’ property. His frequent drunkenness cost him the support of his friends. By 1839 he had relocated to New York City, and he died there that year.

Images: Old Indian Meeting House By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002569. This story about the Mashpee revolt was updated in 2022.

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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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