Tag:

Montpelier Vt.

The Largest Historic District in Each New England State

Identifying the largest historic districts in New England was no easy task because, let’s face it, we’re dripping with history. You can barely throw a rock in New England without hitting a historic building, landscape, cemetery, lighthouse or waterfront.

Since we decided to do it by state, we found Rhode Island especially challenging because of Providence and Newport. Both cities have extensive collections of historic buildings. We opted for Ocean Drive in Newport, as it contains 1,509 acres.

So if you have a yen for taking in a lot of history some weekend day, these might fit the bill.

Wethersfield Historic District

six largest historic districts wethersfield

Wethersfield Historic District

English settlers from Massachusetts founded Wethersfield in 1634, making it the first European settlement in Connecticut. The historic district, tucked between Hartford and Rocky Hill, covers 1,300 acres. It contains 1,200 buildings with about 100 dating to colonial times.

The town itself evolved from a struggling early colonial outpost. It then emerged as a transportation hub and contributed many soldiers to the American Revolution. Then eventually it rose to prominence as home to the Wethersfield onion.

Work on officially protecting the historic district began in 1962. In 1970, the National Park Service placed it on the National Register of Historic Places. The district has many residents and businesses, making for a lively ambience. Most famously it also contains the Silas Deane House (1766), the Joseph Webb House (1752); and the Isaac Stevens house (1790). They belong to the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum. open to the public. So is the Town Green, which stretches nearly a half mile.

Joseph Webb and Isaac Stevens houses

Colonial and Federal style houses surround the green, and many retain their original character. They offer excellent examples of the carpentry used by skilled builders who mostly worked as shipbuilders.

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

Maine, the largest state in New England, naturally has several large historic districts. The Schoodic Historic District in Acadia National Park takes in more than 1,000 acres of raw natural seascapes. The Castine Historic District, with its rich colonial history, takes up about 1,800 acres on the southern end of the Bagaduce Peninsula. Meanwhile, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, near Poland and New Gloucester, sits on somewhere between 1,700 and 1,900 acres of land.

Founded between 1782 and 1784, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village was a settlement of Shakers – a religious group that grew out of the Quaker, Methodist and Camisard sects of Protestantism.

Shakers lived communally, worked hard and practiced celibacy. That ultimately spelled the dwindling of the Shakers. Sabbathday Lake was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Despite the shrinking population of Shakers, Sabbathday Lake remains a working Shaker Village. It has 18 buildings, and six are open to the public. The museum welcomes summer visitors to view Shaker crafts and learn about the history of the group. Tours of the village are offered Monday through Saturday throughout the summer. The village is closed on Sunday, though the public may attend a weekly religious service.

Nantucket Island

The Oldest House

All 30,000 acres of Nantucket belong to the National Historic Landmark District. The island is considered the finest surviving example of a late 18th-century New England seaport town. America’s whaling industry started on Nantucket in the late 17th century, as the colonists imitated the original Native American whalers.

The Old Mill

By 1774, 250 American ships engaged in whaling; 150 of them came from Nantucket. But then whaling declined. Shifting sandbars also prevented ships from entering Nantucket Harbor, and a fire in 1846 destroyed the business section.

Historic preservation didn’t begin on the island until 1897. Then someone donated a windmill built in 1746 was donated to the Nantucket Historical Association. Eight hundred structures built before the Civil War survive, including Sankaty Light, built in 1850.

Another historic property, the Jethro Coffin House, dates to 1686. But as Nantucket prospered, residents built larger houses in the Federal and Greek Revival styles. Orange and Main streets offer the best examples of those grand old homes.

R.H. Macy ran a dry goods store on Main and Fair streets, today commemorated by a plaque. Nearby is the Pacific National Bank, where on the roof Maria Mitchell discovered a comet.

The island’s fortunes changed with the arrival of wealthy summer visitors. Some put the island on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s most endangered list in 2000. That’s because they tore down houses, gutted rehabs and built too-large homes on inappropriate sites.

Amherst Village District

Amherst, N.H., was named for Lord Jeffery Amherst, commander of all British forces in North America. The town then became the first Hillsborough County seat in 1769, but county government moved to either Nashua or Manchester. That left the central village barely touched by change, and today it’s one of the prettiest places in New England.

In Amherst, Horace Greeley was born, Franklin Pierce got married and Daniel Webster argued cases.

Today the Amherst Historic District comprises more than 1600 acres and 120 buildings. They come in Federal, Georgian and Greek Revival styles. They’re clustered around the Village Green. There the town holds a large old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration. In winter, there’s a Christmas tree lighting and, throughout the summer, band concerts.

Ocean Drive Historic District

The view from Ocean Drive

The Ocean Drive Historic District developed when the new grand mansions on Bellevue Avenue pushed development south. Ocean Drive begins near Bellevue Avenue, follows the shoreline to Brenton Point State Park and then ends just south of Fort Adams.

The roadway winds through rolling green hills, rocky cliffs, pastures and summer houses. Those include early 18th-century farms and Eidlitz’s Swiss Chalet of 1854. Frederick Law Olmsted designed some of the landscape.

The homes are much more private than on Bellevue Avenue. But they include some architectural gems: the neoclassical Beacon Rock estate by McKim, Mead and White. There’s also a stunning French chateaux by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson and Bonniecrest and a Tudor English mansion converted to condos. Hammersmith Farm, where Sen. John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier, is also along Ocean Drive.

Commercial buildings are generally the clubhouses of private beaches. Gooseberry Beach is private but open to the public.

Montpelier Historic District

State Street, Montpelier Historic District

Montpelier, Vt., has the largest historic district in Vermont listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The city, Vermont’s state capital, grew up around government, But it also got help from industry powered by water from the Winooski River and its North Branch.

Montpelier has Federal style mansions and Greek Revival homes that survived the town’s economic boom after the Civil War. In fact, the historic district has 563 main properties along with bridges, dams and cemeteries. The city also has vibrant neighborhoods and busy downtown and business districts. It proves history doesn’t have to be boring. (We never thought so, though.)

Vermont Statehouse

The district has five churches designed by architects between 1865 and 1874. It also includes Italianate mansions and brick commercial buildings built after two fires in 1875. From the 19th and 20th centuries, the district has elaborate French Second Empire and Queen Anne homes as well as buildings deemed historically important. The Greek Revival Statehouse was carefully restored in the 1980s.

The Vermont History Museum, next to the Statehouse, has maps of the historic district.

Images: Sabbathday Lake By Jamie Ribisi-Braley – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35399926. Montpelier By AlexiusHoratius – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23102071. Vermont Statehouse By Jonathanking – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21731245. Amherst Civil War monument By Smuttynoser at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10372554. And Ocean Drive, By Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3966356.

This story about the largest historic districts updated in 2023.

1 comment 4.6K views

The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20^th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

56 comments 13.6K views

Six Historic New England Diners

The diner has a long and proud history in New England, from its roots outside of a Providence newspaper to today’s retro lunch car offering comfort food and local banter. Once ubiquitous, they had their own language, customs and architecture. Some New England diners even have a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

Their status as historic landmarks probably would have come as a shock 150 years ago. Back then, diners served their blue-plate specials from discarded railroad cars near mills and factories. People in polite society associated them with bad manners, greasy food and low-class factory workers–as well as denizens of the demi-monde. Because diners sometimes attracted disreputable characters, Buffalo, N.Y., and Atlantic City, N.J., benned them for a while.

Worcester Lunch Car No. 773 in Somerville, Mass.

Then the diner got a makeover when manufacturers started producing shiny, train-car-style “lunch wagons,” with stools and a counter. Hundreds of actual diners were manufactured in Worcester, Mass., by the Worcester Lunch Car Co. starting in 1906. Then the Jerry O’Mahony Diner Co. began making them in New Jersey in 1917. By 1925, “lunch car” had morphed into “diner.”

Many Greek immigrants who arrived in New England found jobs and, later, business opportunities in the diner business. They often started as “bubble dancers” (dishwashers) — one of the few jobs they could get. They worked hard and saved their money. The owners eventually exhausted themselves running a business 24/7, and sold out to their Greek employees. Diners named “Athenian” and “Olympian” began to proliferate throughout the Northeast.

The Golden Age

Diners peaked in the 1950s, when the United States had about 6,000 of them. The Northeast, though, had the densest concentration with 2,000. Fast-food chains then overtook the diner for cheap, quick meals, putting an end to the Golden Age of Diners. Less than half of the original U.S. diners survive.

Since the New England Historical Society first published this story several years ago, two of the six diners mentioned have closed. High food prices, scarce workers and COVID have driven diners out of business. Sometimes the owner just retired and no one wanted to buy the business.

Diner sign, Shrewsbury, Mass. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Many of the diners that survived have adapted their food. You’re as likely to find Belgian waffles and quesadillas on the menu these days as you are to find Adam and Eve on a raft.

Diner LIngo

People love diners for their fast, cheap comfort food, their friendliness and the local repartee across the counter. Perhaps all that camaraderie accounts for the diner’s rich nomenclature. Or perhaps diner slang arose from the colorful mix of people who eat and work there.

Some diner slang made its way into the mainstream: “eggs over easy,” “sunnyside up,” “BLT” and “joe.” Other, more entertaining diner lingo stays on Bald-headed row (the line of counter stools).

Champs in Woonsocket, R.I., 1979. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Diner menus generally include such items as the ‘mystery in the alley’ (hash), “virtue” (cherry pie) and “bun pups” (hot dogs). You can order eggs 33 different ways: as “broken hen berries” (scrambled), “kiss the pan” (over easy), “two dots and a dash” (two fried eggs and a strip of bacon), “wrecked and crying,” (scrambled eggs with onions} or “drown the kids” (boiled).

Order “beans to go,” “belly warmer,” “cup of mud” or “dirty water” and you’ll get coffee. With milk or cream it’s “blonde,” with sugar it’s “blonde and sweet” or “hot blonde in the sand.” Add Irish whiskey and it’s a “Joe O’Malley.” A cup of weak coffee might draw a complaint that it’s “all arms and legs.”

Biblical references abound: ‘Noah’s boy’ means a ham slice, while “first lady” refers to an order of ribs. “Adam’s ale, hold the hail,” means water, no ice. “Adam and Eve” refers to two poached eggs. “Adam and Eve on a raft” means on toast, “on a log” means with sausage.

A Diner Claim To Fame

Louis’ Lunch in New Haven

The founding myth of the hamburger starts with slang. In 1900, a customer rushed into a New Haven lunch wagon called Louis’ Lunch and ordered his meal to go. “Louie! I’m in a rush, slap a meatpuck between two planks and step on it!,” he said. The owner, Louis Lassan, put his mix of ground steak trimmings between two slices of toast. Thus the burger (“Wimpy,” “Bessie” or “hockey puck”) was born.

The fourth generation of the Lassan family still runs Louis’ Lunch, now in a brick building.

Here are six other New England diners where you can probably order “whistle berries” (baked beans) and a “bow-wow in the hay” (hot dog with sauerkraut).

Modern Diner

Modern Diner

Providence, R.I., is the undisputed home of the diner. In 1858, 17-year-old Walter Scott, a part-time pressman at the Providence Journal, needed some extra money. So he began selling sandwiches and coffee to newspaper workers from a horse-drawn wagon. By 1872, Scott’s side hustle made him so much money he quit his job as a printer. Others followed his success, often staying open late or around the clock for night-shift workers.

The Modern Diner came to nearby Pawtucket in 1940. The National Register of Historic Places added it to its list in 1978 because of its status as one of two Sterling Streamliners still in existence. (The other is the Salem Diner in Salem, Mass.)

According to the National Register of Historic Places nomination form,

the Sterling Streamliners’ modernism was intended to attract a prosperous, “with it” clientele who attached positive associations to the whole concept of modernity –a concept with much currency in the 1930s.

The J. B. Judkins Company of Merrimack, Mass., made the Moderne Sterline Streamliners in the late 1930s and early ’40s.

The Modern Diner has another distinction: Custard French Toast. The Food Network’s Top Five Restaurants show in 2015 named it number one on its list of the top five diner meals in the United States. Custard French Toast consists of Texas toast dipped in batter laced with vanilla pudding and topped with fruit.

You’ll find the Modern Diner at 364 East Ave in Pawtucket, R.I.

Henry’s Diner

Henry’s Diner

When Henry’s Diner opened in Burlington in 1925, society ladies and the local church objected to its unsavory presence. But diners were rebranding themselves during the ’20s. Manufacturers started making their lunch cars with booths, thinking that would attract women. Henry’s went along, putting flowers in windowboxes and waffles on the menu.

On the outside, Henry lacks the gleaming chrome of the typical diner. But inside, the decor is decidedly retro, with cheerful orange booths that may or may not appeal to the ladies.

At Henry’s, they make almost everything from scratch. That would include their famous Belgian waffles. And of course you can get pure maple syrup, as you can in almost all Vermont diners.

Henry’s opens seven days a week for breakfast and lunch. The diner has a children’s menu and some Greek specialties on offer, such as souvlaki and gyros.

You can find this classic old New England diner at 155 Bank St. To find out about other Vermont diners, click here.

Makris Diner

Makris Diner. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

You may not find a better example of the 2,000 diners made by the Jerry O’Mahony Co. than the Makris Midtown Diner in Wethersfield, Conn. The O’Mahony company churned out diners in Elizabeth, N.J., until 1941.

Makris still has the original nameplate, with O’Mahony’s motto, “In our line we lead the world.”

Back in the day, Makris’ stainless steel Moderne architecture differentiated it from its neighbors on the Berlin Turnpike. Between 1942 and 1965, the turnpike served as the main route from Hartford to New Haven. It became one of the great neon strips of the Northeast, with diners, dairy bars, hot dog stands, motels, drinking places, bowling alleys and dance halls.

To catch the motorist’s eye amid all that commercial clutter, businesses adopted colorful, kitschy atchitecture. The sleek, stainless-steel look of the Makris diner sent a message to drivers: “We’re clean and modern.”

Today, Makris serves traditional diner food, but it also caters to Connecticut’s ethnic groups. The menu has included a kielbasa omelette, poutine, Greek pork chops and huevos rancheros.

Makris Midtown Diner is at 1797 Berlin Turnpike south of Hartford.

Eat at Moody’s

Bald-headed row at Moody’s

Anyone who travels through Waldoboro on U.S. Route 1 in Maine knows Moody’s Diner. Percy and Bertha Moody started Moody’s in 1927 with three tiny cabins on the old Atlantic Highway. Their children (nine of them), grandchildren and great-grandchildren expanded the business over the years to include18 cabins, a 104-seat diner and a gift shop. Along Bald-headed row, locals catch up with the gossip over bottomless cups of coffee.

Moody’s specializes in a hot turkey sandwich and half-pound hamburger along with pie. Gourmet magazine asked for its walnut pie recipe, Saveur magazine called its Whoopie pie a ‘1999 food find’ and the Culinary Hall of Fame gave a gold medal to Moody’s blueberry muffins. You can also get “Eve with a lid on” (apple pie).

Customers in the know order breakfast with cheddarwurst, a cheese-infused sausage. Moody’s gift shop sells T-shirts that state, “Pie fixes everything.” Photographs of world travelers wearing Moody’s T-shirts cover one of the walls.

Homesick Mainers (or anyone for that matter) can order Moody’s homemade donuts and Whoopie pies by mail.

To see a five-minute video about Moody’s, click here.

Miss Worcester Diner

The Miss Worcester Diner, built in 1948 by the Worcester Lunch Car Company, sits across the street from the site of the company’s plant, closed in 1957 and now gone. The company used it as a showroom diner and a place to test new features.

The Worcester Lunch Car Company made 651 diners and shipped them all over the Eastern seaboard. You can tell the manufacturer because of the characteristic Gothic-style lettering. You can find others in the Massachusetts area: the Miss Florence in Northampton, the Boulevard Diner in Worcester, the Rosebud Diner in Somerville and Casey’s Diner (see below).

Today Miss Woo is known for large portions and stuffed French toast. BuzzFeed listed it as the first of 21 diners you must visit before you die.

The National Register of Historic Places lists the Miss Worcester Diner. Stop in for lunch or breakfast at 302 Southbridge St.

Peterborough Diner

The Peterborough Diner, the first Worcester Lunch Car made with green and cream, has kept much of its historical character. It arrived in its current location on Depot Square in 1949 with the motto, “The Diner With Distinction.”

Peterborough is a picturesque town in the heart of leaf-peeping country, New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region. Locals savor the diner’s friendly atmosphere, reasonable prices and onion rings.

The Peterborough Diner is located at 10 Depot St. and serves breakfast and lunch, seven days a week from 7 am to 3 pm.

Honorable Mentions

Casey’s Diner

Casey’s is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) operating diners. The Worcester Lunch Car Co. built it in 1922 as a horse-drawn lunch wagon. After a few years in Framingham, Mass., Fred Casey bought it, moved it four miles and put it on a foundation.

Its 10 stools have supported five generations of the Casey family. Casey’s s signature menu item is a hot dog on a steamed bun that snaps when you first bite into it. Casey’s also has the distinction of a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. 36 South Ave, Natick, Mass.

The Red Arrow Diner

The Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, N.H., welcomes everyone, including presidential candidates. In 2014, the Associated Press reported,

you really can’t run for president without grabbing some grub at the Red Arrow Diner. Every four years during New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, pretty much every White House wannabe makes a pilgrimage to this tiny almost 100-year-old diner tucked onto a side street of the state’s largest city.

The Red Arrow has a tradition of “de-virginizing” customers. When patrons come in for the first time, employees ring a bell and give them a sticker saying they’ve been “de-virginized.” Hillary Clinton, however, refused de-virginization. You can get de-virginized yourself at 61 Lowell St.

Photos: Miss Worcester Diner, By Improbcat – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7813073; Peterboro Diner, Av John Phelan – Eget arbete, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27555305; Central Diner, By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21355747. Henry’s Diner by By Farragutful – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117649261. Modern Diner By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21733520. Casey’s By Totrcs – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3851566. Red Arrow By Amidamelio – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130701038.Louis Lunch By amanderson2 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/amanderson/48763944691/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125792016. Rosebud Diner By Vistawhite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20292754.

This story was updated in 2024.

4 comments 2.8K views

Why Vermont Declared War on Germany Months Before Pearl Harbor

Nearly three months before Germany declared war on the United States, Vermont declared war on Germany.

Montpelier, where Vermont declared war on Germany.

Pearl Harbor, of course, triggered the United States’ entry into World War II. Two days after the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. The assault surprised Hitler as much as anybody, but he declared war on the United States on December 11. The next day, the U.S. reciprocated.

Vermont beat everyone to the punch. On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s Legislature reinterpreted a military order issued by President Roosevelt to establish a state of armed conflict with Germany.

Why War?

Was this another example of Vermont’s iconoclasm? The state always went its own way, having been established as a republic in 1777 before joining the United States. It was the first to ban slavery, the first to provide for a state university – and a Vermonter was the first to photograph a snowflake.

But Vermont wasn’t just trying to be different. Vermont declared war on Germany for a good reason.

In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Non-officers earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

Soldiers from nearby Fort Ethan Allan at the Champlain Valley Exposition at Essex Junction, Vt. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

For example, Marjorie Kenney Haselton, a war bride pregnant with a small child, worried frantically about money. From Massachusetts, she wrote to her draftee husband about her finances. She received $80 a month. Her expenses were $20 for rent, $36.50 for milk and groceries, $8.55 for utilities and $6.95 for insurance and laundry. That then left $8 for clothing, medicine, heat in winter months, newspapers, periodicals and amusements.

Why Vermont Declared War

Recognizing many such cases of hardship, the Vermont Legislature wanted to award a bonus to Vermonters called up to serve.

In September 1941, lawmakers got their chance. The Legislature held a special session to bail out the University of Vermont, then facing a financial crisis.

Lawmakers not only appropriated money to bail out the university on September 16, they voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees.

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

President Roosevelt signs declaration of war against Germany.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters.

Armed Conflict

Vermont lawmakers seized on the chance to redefine ‘armed conflict.’ They called it a state of national emergency in which the president orders armed force to protect lives or property endangered by any hostile foreign power.

In other words, Vermont declared war on Germany.

According to historian Vic Henningsen, the act caught national attention. One newspaper praised the state:

“The rest of the nation, perhaps, may be satisfied by assurances and euphemisms of our national leaders to the effect that we are not at war and have no intention of entering upon a shooting war with the [Germans] or their Axis henchmen. But not so Vermont.

“Vermont sees things clearly and is willing to pay for its vision.”

Image: “VermontMontpelierCapital2709w” by Walter Jeffries. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons. This story about how Vermont declared war on Germany was updated in 2023.

4 comments 3.8K views

Cracking the History of the Uncommon Common Cracker

Every so often when you’re looking through a book of old New England recipes, you’ll find one that calls for the common cracker. Well, there are plenty of common crackers around. Saltines come to mind.

But the common crackers these recipes call for are actually a specific type of common cracker. And these days, they’re anything but common.

vermont-common-cracker

If you dropped back in time, say 30 years, you’d know exactly what the recipe needs. Well into the 1970s, the common cracker was ubiquitous throughout New England.

But to get the full picture, you’d need to step back in time a bit further, to the days when fresh bread was not easy to buy and before science took over the business of baking. With preservatives and cellophane and cardboard packaging, today you can commonly eat crackers made anywhere in the world.

But in the early 1800s, that wasn’t the case. Baking science hadn’t evolved so, and the common cracker solved a problem for hungry families needing a staple that would keep for months.

Inventor of the Common Cracker

If you want to figure out who invented the first common cracker, you probably won’t have any luck. They went by many names and many bakers produced them, with small variations in size. The Boston Cracker in Massachusetts, the Portland Cracker in Maine, the Montpelier Cracker in Vermont, and so forth.

American crackers, themselves, first came into existence in Newburyport, Mass. — or so the story goes– in the bakery of Theodore Pearson. There he created pilot biscuits.

Sailors, soldiers, explorers and travelers have carried some variation of cracker with them for centuries, as far back as you can imagine. The Newburyport version of this was called hard tack (among other things).

Hard Tack

Hard tack consists of an unleavened water and flour baked to within an inch of its life. It will last virtually forever. Hard tack produced for the War of 1812 was stored and then brought out for use in the Civil War, for example, none the worse for wear. Soldiers and sailors preferred it only slightly to starvation.

But hard tack soon gave rise (forgive the pun) to more elegant crackers for domestic use. The addition of yeast, a rising period of 24 hours (and more) and a long period of kneading, followed by baking and drying, resulted in a puffy white cracker with a hard thick outer shell. Voila! The common cracker.

Preserved hardtack from U.S. Civil War, Wentworth Museum, Pensacola.

The ingenious yankees had dozens of uses for them. Many involved mashing. They commonly used them as thickeners for soup and chowder or mashed and eaten with milk. Later, they split them, buttered them, toasted them and gave them all sorts of toppings. And when potatoes began to take over the chowder, the crackers shifted to the side for crumbling in just before eating.

The folks at The Food Timeline suggest Artemus Kennedy, a baker in what is now Arlington, Mass., originated the common cracker. Kennedy, their research suggests, began baking the crackers at his bakery founded in 1805. He rode around the nearby country on horseback selling them. But no one knows where he got the idea for them.

Early Bakers

Another early baker who dabbled with the cracker was Josiah Bent, founder of the G.H. Bent company in Milton, Mass., in 1801. The company earned a reputation for making water crackers, which Bent prized for their ability to travel well on sea voyages. Bent’s water crackers are smaller than the common cracker, but he made other products as well. Bent definitely made a lot of hard tack for the government, as did Pearce, and the company revived that recipe for Civil War reenactors a century after the war itself ended.

The G.H Bent factory in Milton, Mass.

Perhaps the best known of the common cracker makers was Charles Cross of Montpelier, Vt., and his tireless horse. Charles and his brother Thomas, originally from New Hampshire, founded Cross Bakers in 1828. The business continuously operated for 151 years, evolving into C.H. Cross & Sons before going bankrupt in 1979. Then the firm and its Cross Crackers moved to Claremont, N.H.

In the early days, Cross used a horse-powered treadmill to run the machinery for his bakery. His horse alternated jobs, one day powering the treadmill, the next hauling crackers for delivery. Over time, Cross grew to have a crew of salesmen traveling throughout New England selling his crackers to stores.

But in his earliest days, Cross packed up the crackers and displayed them in barrels. And this is probably how we most associate with common crackers: stored in a barrel that served as a centerpiece of the country store where they were sold. Visitors to the store would be invited to pull up a seat, crack open a cracker and put a piece of cheese on it. In this setting, men resolved the issues of the day, shared news and settled arguments.

Then the barrels disappeared. And as the humorist John Gould wrote, “everything has been on the skids since the common cracker declined.”

Julia Child

The common cracker had a new lease on life given to it by Julia Child, who gave them her stamp of approval for use with chowder. She became rather famously obsessed with cracking the recipe, which she eventually did.

Should you need a common cracker today, there are two companies still selling them: the aforementioned G.H. Bent, known as the Bent Cookie Factory, which has continuously operated since 1801; and Vermont Common Foods, which wholesales them and has a nice collection of recipes for how to cook with them. The company acquired the Cross cracker equipment, which it uses to make them today.

You can order the Vermont Common Cracker from the Vermont Country Store. Click here. This story was updated in 2021.

Images: GH. Bent Co. By Jameslwoodward – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7907262. Hard tack By Infrogmation of New Orleans – Photo by Infrogmation, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4615956

12 comments 6.6K views

Montpelier Vt.

The Largest Historic District in Each New England State

Wethersfield Historic District

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

Nantucket Island

Amherst Village District

Ocean Drive Historic District

Montpelier Historic District

The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

Great Migration

Rise of the Klan

Tales of Sundown Towns

Restrictive Covenants

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

Anti-Semitism

Six Historic New England Diners

The Golden Age

Diner LIngo

A Diner Claim To Fame

Modern Diner

Henry’s Diner

Makris Diner

Eat at Moody’s

Miss Worcester Diner

Peterborough Diner

Honorable Mentions

Why Vermont Declared War on Germany Months Before Pearl Harbor

Why War?

Why Vermont Declared War

Armed Conflict

Cracking the History of the Uncommon Common Cracker

Inventor of the Common Cracker

Hard Tack

Early Bakers

Julia Child

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Thanks for Signing Up!