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Methuen Mass.

The Working Girls Vacation Society: Keeping the ‘Sin’ Out of ‘Single’

During the Gilded Age, hundreds of thousands of young women worked long hours for low pay in sweat shops and factories. Some couldn’t get enough to eat, and some contracted tuberculosis in the crowded, dirty workplaces. Upper-class women came up with a way to help them: The Working Girls Vacation Society. It gave certain girls a two-week, supervised vacation in the country.

Unchaperoned co-ed bathing at Coney Island, 1897. Not the kind of vacation sanctioned by the Working Girls Vacation Society.

The rich ladies were as concerned about the morality of the working girls as much as their health. They worried the girls, once outside the home, would succumb to the blandishments of men or, worse, turn to prostitution. Getting them away from the temptations of the city and into the wholesome countryside seemed like a good way to prevent that.

And so in Boston and New York they started working girls vacation societies or clubs. They then sent the girls for two weeks to one of more than a dozen country homes — in rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey. There they got three square meals a day, fresh air and in some cases medical attention.

They could read and knit and learn how to make paper flowers. On Sunday they went to church. They helped with the housework, a nod to the rich ladies’ preference that they find a morally safer line of work as domestic servants.

Doubtful Attractions

Led by copper heiress Grace Dodge, wealthy women philanthropists after the Civil War started the YWCA and a network of working girls clubs. The reformers then saw a need to to keep the girls from going unchaperoned to vaudeville shows, amusement parks, dance halls and sporting events. In 1894, Edith A. Sawyer described in The Churchman the horrors of a such a places, “where crowds congregate, and where there are electric lights, cheap music, pink lemonade and ‘merry-go-rounds’.”

The horror!

In such public places, they believed, the working girls could succumb to sinful temptations presented by men.

“There being so few week-end resources, the public amusement places with their doubtful attractions are all that is left,” reported Far and Near, the journal of the national coalition of working girls’ clubs, in 1890.

The Working Girls Vacation Society

Katharine W.D. Herbert, wife of a wealthy stockbroker, founded the Working Girls Vacation Society in 1883 as an offshoot of the New York Working Girls Club. She was a philanthropist known for donating thousands of pieces of carved jade to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Herbert was “struck with the monotony of their ceaseless toil year in and out.”

To start the vacation club, she and her wealthy friends held a bazaar and raised nearly $1,000. She set up an advisory board that consisted of prominent men and half a dozen ministers.

The Society then found homes. In East Haddam, Conn., three houses and three barns once owned by the Working Girls Vacation Society is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1890, the Society’s social worker, Annie White Strathern, furnished one of the farmhouses as a vacation home for young working women.

Phebe Howell House 1834 aka Rose Cottage of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society

The Getaway Spots

Other vacation clubs and houses formed in Boston and New York during the Gilded Age, offshoots of the YWCA, the Working Girls Club in New York and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

The New York Working Girls Vacation Society eventually had 10 houses. Uplands and Hillcrest in the Adirondacks, for example, were gifts of George Dodge, Grace Dodge’s uncle.

Girls could go to Connecticut, to Farmington Lodge in Farmington, Breezy Cottage at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, and to two in Westport, including Green Cottage in Green’s Farms. Or they could stay at lodgings in New York: at Elmcote in Chester or Neversink Manse in Huguenot.

New York’s Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society had two vacation houses, one in Bellport, Long Island, and one at Big Indian in the Catskills.

Boston’s working girls went to Fernside in Princeton, Mass., Good Rest in Lancaster, Mass., The Homestead Inn in the Temple Hills of New Hampshire and one in Methuen, Mass., called The Girls Boarding House.

Churches and settlement houses also maintained vacation homes for working girls; so did Bloomingdale’s, which had a vacation house in Long Branch, N.J., for its employees.

The Working Girls Vacation Society Vacation

The wealthy ladies realized some working girls didn’t like to accept charity, so they charged a nominal fee – about $3 – for a two weeks’ vacation. They’d lend money to those who couldn’t afford it. Some got a free ride.

But you couldn’t go if you had a reputation as a floozy. Harriet Comstock in the Christian Observer in 1907 made it clear that girls with loose morals weren’t welcome. The society sent “the better class of working girls to beautiful country homes for pure fun,” she wrote. [Emphasis added.]

How much fun? Certainly not too much.

In East Haddam, the girls’ supervisor carefully noted their weight gains and the amount of milk they drank as measures of their health improvement. The responsibilities of the trained resident social worker included “instruction in crafts such as making paper flowers and tooled leather purses, and leading hikes and motoring excursions to local sites.”

Every Friday evening the girls came up with their own entertainment, and they went to dances held in the recreation center.

At Fernside in western Massachusetts they could read, sew, walk, take a drive in a wagon or do nothing. At least the old mansion had a theater where they could put on amateur theatricals.

In 1890, Far and Near described a typical vacation, perhaps overselling the “fun” part.

How the girls enjoy the complete change from work and worry to good country air, the tramping to the mountains and the places of interest, or, if at the seaside, the bathing; the dances in the barn, the games and the music. On rainy days fancywork, crocheting, knitting, and reading make the time fly as if on wings.

Prayers Twice a Day

In 1913, Hugh Thompson reported the working girls chafed at the restrictions during their getaways. Thompson wrote in “The Vacation Savings Movement,” in Munsey’s Magazine:

[T]hey were unpopular because of the restrictions imposed on the inmates. In most of them the girls had to live by rigid rule; there was no freedom of action. The situation was summed up by a saleswoman who told an investigator: “Why, you can’t even look at a man if you go there! I do not want to be bound to go to prayers twice a day.

The general feeling, Thompson wrote, was that the self-supporting women who worked so hard wanted absolute freedom to rest or seek innocent amusement.

A U.S. sweatshop, around 1890.

They also may have resented their benefactress’ condescension. Harriet Comstock, who promoted the Working Girls Vacation Society in her writing for church magazines, described a missive from the society’s secretary. The secretary had written to a vacation home supervisor about a working woman:

“I am sending you a little forlornity; try to make her think she is in heaven.”

2-1/2 Percent

The 1900 census reported 261,081 unmarried working women between the ages of 10 and 35 living in the state of New York. By 1909, the New York vacation societies hosted about 1400 working girls a year, according to Amy E. Spingarn. “A trifle over 2-1/2 percent are provided for,” she wrote.

Springarn had conducted a survey on vacation resources for working girls and reported her findings in “Summer Vacations for Working Girls” in the The Survey.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Their income, she wrote, ranged from $1 a week to $16 a week, and their average age about 20. The vacation societies charged a few dollars, but most come free. The girls are factory workers, sales clerks, teachers, dressmakers and stenographers. Sometimes the girls didn’t have clothes, and sometimes the Society repaid the family for lost wages.

Tuberculosis

“Do the people of New York City realize how many working girls have tubercular and cardiac trouble?” the New York Vacation Club Society asked the editor of the New York Times in 1923.

Some of the girls with symptoms of tuberculosis went to the Adirondacks for treatment. They could stay at Hillcrest year-round for treatment.

Article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1907

Anna Buchanan, the assistant treasurer of the Working Girls’ Vacation Society, in 1891 gave an example of a working girl helped by a visit to Santa Clara in a letter to The Christian Union.

One of these was a young dressmaker, who was very feeble and had a bad cough. She was sent to the mountains, where she not only gained strength, but her cough disappeared, and she came home comparatively well, and ready for her winter’s work.

Dining room at “Uplands,” Santa Clara. The caption read, “The good fellowship among the girls here makes it seem more like a school than a sanitarium.”
The Circle, volume VIII, No. 1, July-August, 1910, p. 9

In 1945, the Working Girls Vacation Society of New York shut down. Katharine Herbert died that same year.

The New York Working Girls’ Vacation Society mission continues as a successor organization, the Stony Wold-Herbert Fund, which provides grants for study and research in pulmonary diseases.

In East Haddam, the owner of the Phebe Howell House is undertaking a historically accurate restoration of the Phebe Howell House, aka Rose Cottage. You can see pictures at Facebook.com/WorkingGirlsVacationSociety.

Images: Coney Island bathers Campbell, Alfred S. On the beach, Coney Island. New York, ca. 1897. Elizabeth, N.J.: Alfred S. Campbell, Publisher, April 20. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005677854/. Fernside By Izzysanime – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21538381. Merry go round Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. The carousel, or merry-go-round, at Richland Carrousel Park opened inin downtown Mansfield, Ohio. United States Ohio Richland County Mansfield, 2016. -10-07. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016632407/. Sweatshop By Unknown – http://americansformorality.com/civilrights/civilrights.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27485325.

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The Hope and Despair of Acadian Exiles, 1755-1766

In the winter of 1755, two Marshfield, Mass., selectmen knocked on the door of the Michel family, seven Acadian exiles. They brought bad news: The two oldest sons, 23-year-old Francis and 15-year-old Paul, had to go into involuntary servitude. Francis would work for a farmer, Paul as a sailor, though he suffered from debilitating seasickness.

New England had no love for the French families living among them. But the French families — Acadian exiles — had no choice because the British had resettled them there by force.

Acadian Exiles

When the French and Indian War raged in Nova Scotia, French families refused to take a loyalty oath to the British ended up in exile. The Acadian refugees who landed in Puritan New England bore the stigma of their Catholic religion — and of their poverty.

Beginning in 1755, the British took nearly 10,000 Acadians from their homes and forcibly deported them to the British colonies and to England. They confiscated or burned the Acadian exiles’ houses and farms, and deliberately separated families.

The colonies, Massachusetts and Connecticut, treated the Acadian exiles like prisoners of war. They could not practice their religion, nor could they move from town to town.

The Michel family had more luck than most. They survived the disease-ridden voyage to Boston, and the family stayed together. The two eldest sons threw off their indentures and worked for wages. The town even helped feed and shelter them.

French and Indian War

Map of Acadia

For many years the French and British fought over Acadia. The region included Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, parts of southern Quebec and northern Maine.

By 1713 the British took control and demanded loyalty from Acadians. Most refused, earning the nickname “French Neutrals.” That posed a problem for the British, since the French far outnumbered them in Acadia.

Gov. William Shirley

Massachusetts officials also worried about the Acadians. Gov. William Shirley feared for the safety of Massachusetts merchants and sailors in Acadian waters. Usually three or four boats from Boston anchored there at a time.

In 1751, the French began to build Fort Beausejour in nearby New Brunswick. Shirley began recruiting forces to kick them out of Acadia. Troops that left Boston in May of 1755 captured Fort Beausejour in June.

Le Grand Derangement

Illustration of the Acadians listening to the deportation order.

On Sept. 5, 1755, the expulsion of the Acadians began. The British announced they would seize the homes and property of the French Neutrals. The Acadians called it Le Grand Derangement.

The British lured Acadian men into churches under false pretenses and then locked them inside. They seized others in their homes and their fields. Their wives and children had to feed them at gunpoint until ships took them away. The British took over their farms and livestock, pillaging and burning their homes to make sure they wouldn’t return.

Estimates vary, but the British rounded up as many as 10,000 Acadians out of a population of 12,000. On Oct. 8, 1755, they boarded ships provided by Thomas Hancock, uncle of John Hancock. The ships sailed to the 13 British colonies in North America and to France. Several thousand died of disease, starvation and drowning.

John Winslow, the second in command in Nova Scotia, described the scene. They “began to Embarke the Inhabitants who went verry solentarily and Unwillingly. the women in Great Distress Carrying Their Children In their arms.”

Others, he wrote, carried their decrepit parents in carts in scenes of confusion, woe and distress.

Acadian Exiles in Massachusetts

On Nov. 15, 1755 the first overcrowded ships filled with sick, hungry Acadian exiles arrived. There hadn’t been enough food for the journey and many died of smallpox or malaria.

A deportation ship

Nearly 2,000 Acadians sailed into Boston Harbor to be parceled out to the colony’s 98 towns. The General Court gave overseers of the poor the power to ’employ, bind out or support’ the Acadian families. That generally meant indentured servitude.

The first ship, the sloop Seaflower, entered Boston Harbor with 206 destitute Acadians aboard. They then continued to arrive until the French and Indian War ended in 1763. Once on shore, the colony treated them like convicts.

Thomas Hutchinson in 1750.

Some took pity on the Acadian exiles. As a member of the General Court, Thomas Hutchinson tried to keep families together and helped write letters petitioning the Legislature. He may have helped Joseph Michel write a letter asking that his sons be released from their indenture. In Westborough, Ebenezer Parkman (grandfather of historian Francis Parkman) befriended Simon Leblanc and gave work to his children.

More often the Acadian exiles were feared and hated. A letter to the editor of the Boston Gazette cautioned the Acadian exiles could escape in stolen ships. Or they could destroy the town or powder house, ‘heated with Passion and Popish zeal.”

If there were any Catholic priests in Massachusetts, they weren’t allowed to say Mass. Acadians who wanted to get married did so by laymen and hoped they could renew their vows in front of a French priest some day in the future.

Departation of the Acadians

Acadian Exiles

At first, the Acadian exiles had some freedom. Some took jobs as sailors and left for Canada. In response, the General Court passed a law in April forbidding Acadian exiles to work as sailors. Soon after, lawmakers ordered them to stay within the boundaries of their assigned towns.

Marbleheaders complained about the 37 Acadians they got stuck with. The exiles could escape by water, but the town would have to support them if they didn’t.

An Acadian fisherman named Belloni Melancon ended up in the frontier village of Lancaster. He apprenticed his son to an artisan to earn money, but the artisan beat him so badly he couldn’t use his arm for a month. Then the town got sick of supporting the destitute Melancons. Some townspeople took Belloni’s crippled wife from her bed and threw her into a cart.

Melancon then petitioned the General Court to let him move to Weymouth, where he could earn a living as a fisherman. The General Court allowed him to go to Weymouth and fish, and the state paid for his rent and wood.

On The Town

Thomas Hancock by John Smibert

The towns expected the General Court to reimburse them for the expense of keeping the Acadian exiles. The General Court in turn expected payment from Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia expected payment from Great Britain. Only Massachusetts helped pay to feed, house and clothe the Acadian exiles who couldn’t support themselves.

In Newton, only two of the 13 Acadian exiles could work, since most were children. The town billed the General Court for a six-month supply of food for them: 206-3/4 pounds of pork, 166 quarts of milk and 10 bushels of Indian meal to the Acadians.

In Methuen, Laurence Mius protested in the fall of 1756 that he worked for two months, but received only three rods of old cloth, two pounds of dried cod and a pound of pork fat. The overseer of the poor chased him with a poker and beat him so badly he spit blood for a day.

In Wilmington, John Labrador and his seven children lived in a house with no roof. He complained when the house flooded, and a town councilor told him to build a boat and navigate in it.

Not Wanted Here

Early on, Massachusetts officials tried to get rid of some of the refugees. Thomas Hancock outfitted a vessel to take some of them to North Carolina in May 1756. But the Acadian exiles overpowered the crew and forced their way back.

Massachusetts asked New Hampshire to take in some of the Acadians, but New Hampshire refused.

Some Acadian exiles were confined to the workhouse or hospital in Boston. But then in 1760, colonial troops returned from the war. The sick Acadian exiles were turned out of the hospital to make room for the sick and wounded troops.

In 1762, French forces occupied St. John’s in Newfoundland, galvanizing the Acadians. In response, the British rounded up more Acadians and put them aboard five English vessels headed toward Boston. But then the Massachusetts government refused them permission to land and sent them back to Halifax.

Map of deportation

Acadian Exiles in Connecticut

Acadian exiles began arriving in New London, Conn., in late 1755 and continued through the next year. In the end, 400 arrived in Connecticut and went to 50 different towns. Haddon received three, Hartford 13, Wethersfield nine, Farmington 14, and so forth.

A 76-year-old man and his seven grandchildren went to Woodbury in the winter of 1756. The malnourished, vermin-ridden cousins had been separated from their parents. The town’s overseer of the poor put the children to work for joiners and farmers.

On Jan. 2, 1757, four adults described as ‘skeletal,’ ‘naked’ and ‘having the itch, vermin, etc.,’ staggered into Woodbury for a joyous reunion with their children. The British sent the parents to Annapolis, Md. They then spent a year petitioning officials to let them reunite with their children.

War Ends

Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the Acadian exiles had 19 months to leave the British North American colonies for any French colony. They began petitioning to go home to Nova Scotia, to Quebec, to France, or to the French West Indies, specifically Saint-Domingue (Haiti).

However, they had to pay for their own transport.

In 1766, 900 Acadian exiles in Massachusetts gathered in Boston and decided to return to their native land. They marched 400 miles through the wilderness. Many died along the way. Then in Acadia they found the English had taken over their farms. They found new homes in the counties of Digby and Yarmouth.

Many found their way to Louisiana, where they are called Cajuns.

The Michel Family

Petition of Joseph Michel

The Michel family belonged to the lucky ones. A wealthy Marshfield landowner, Nathaniel Ray Thomas, supported them briefly. The town helped pay for wood for cooking and heating, let the family use a cow for milk and eventually paid for Joseph Michel’s funeral.

Michel then petitioned the General Court for help. He argued that Francis and Papul already had jobs and the indenture should be considered null and void. The General Court investigated and finally agreed with Michel. Since the Acadian boys were willing to work, they shouldn’t be forced into indenture, the Court decided. The family then stayed in Marshfield after the war ended.

End Notes

For an alphabetical list of the Acadians/French Neutrals exiled to Connecticut, click here.

For a list of the Acadians/French Neutrals exiled to Massachusetts – and to the specific towns they were parceled out to – click here and here.

Photos: Map of Acadia 1754 By Mikmaq – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1351882; Portrait of Thomas Hancock, By Cullen328 (Jim Heaphy) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18351503. With thanks to The Acadian Diaspora by Christopher Hodson and Le Grand Derangement 1755-1766, The Acadian Exile in Massachusetts by the Massachusetts Secretary of State.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Robert Rogers Writes 28 Rangers Rules

More than 250 years ago, Robert Rogers wrote 28 rangers rules for guerilla warfare that are still being used by the U.S. Army Rangers.

Robert Rogers (artist conception)

He was a colonial frontiersman from New Hampshire who fought in the British Army during the fourth French and Indian War and the American Revolution. He commanded the Queen’s Rangers, a company of 600 men he selected himself. The British were shocked that he picked Indians and freed slaves. His unconventional tactics (for the British, anyway) were so effective the Queen’s Rangers became the chief scouting arm of the British Army in America.

And they became a legend known as Rogers’ Rangers.

Rogers’ Rangers

Robert Rogers was born Nov. 7, 1731 in Methuen, Mass., but grew up on the frontier in what is now Dunbarton, N.H.

As a teenager he fought in the third French and Indian War (also known as King George’s War), guarding the frontier from Indian raids.

He served in the New Hampshire militia in Captain Daniel Ladd’s Scouting Company and in Ebenezer Eastman’s Scouting Company. As a private he learned the essentials of guerilla warfare.

In 1755, he arrived in Portsmouth, N.H., to muster men for a light infantry company. Indians were raiding the frontier border, and Rogers found willing recruits among the frightened and angry New Hampshire men.

They wore distinctive green uniforms. Most of the time they operated in the Lake George and Lake Champlain regions of New York.

When money ran short, Rogers paid for his men’s provisions and equipment from his own pocket.

The British thought his tactics and equipment unconventional, but realized they worked. Rogers Rangers, for example, fought and won the Battle of Snowshoes – on snowshoes – in January 1757.

28 Rangers Rules

That year on Rogers Island (named after him) he wrote the Rules of Ranging, a manual for guerilla warfare. Rogers Island was a British fortress strategically located in the Hudson River. So many troops stayed there during the French and Indian War, the only larger North American communities were New York and Boston.

Rogers trained his men on the island. He gave his men live fire exercises, which the British thought a waste of ammunition.

And he taught them his rangers rules. For example, men should march single file, far enough apart so one shot couldn’t go through two men.

If they reached marshy ground, they should spread out abreast so they would be hard to track.

The rangers rules dictated that men take a different route home so they wouldn’t get ambushed. They shouldn’t cross a river by a regular ford because the enemy watches them.

And they shouldn’t pass lakes too close to the water or the enemy might trap them.

After the war ended, Robert Rogers went to England to get paid for his services. He didn’t. But while there he made some money publishing his journals, A Concise Account of North America and a stage play, Ponteach [Pontiac]: or the Savages of America (1766), which portrayed American Indians in a sympathetic way.

Fact Follows Fiction

In 1937, Kenneth Roberts wrote a novel about Rogers Rangers called Northwest Passage. In it, he made up Standing Orders from the 28 rangers rules. Roberts’ version of Roger’s rangers rules is now included in the U.S. Army Ranger Handbook.

“Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured, sixty rounds powder and ball, and be ready to march at a minute’s warning” is taken from:

“All Rangers are to be subject to the rules and articles of war; to appear at roll-call every evening, on their own parade, equipped, each with a Firelock, sixty rounds of powder and ball, and a hatchet, at which time an officer from each company is to inspect the same, to see they are in order, so as to be ready on any emergency to march at a minute’s warning; and before they are dismissed, the necessary guards are to be draughted, and scouts for the next day appointed.”

During World War II, Ranger commander Lt. Colonel William Darby read the 28 rangers rules to his troops. Today, the 75th Ranger Regiment follows an amended version of the rangers rules.

Photos: An artist in 1776 guessed what Robert Rogers looked like in his prime. It probably doesn’t look like him. Rogers Rangers from a painting by Don Troiani, via Wikipedia. This story about Roberts Rangers rules was updated in 2023.

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