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Frederic Tudor in 1806 Brings Cocktails and Ice Cream to the Rest of the World

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In 1805, Frederic Tudor decided to make his fortune by selling ice to people in tropical climates.

Most people thought the 23-year-old was crazy, but Frederic Tudor knew something most people didn’t. His wealthy family had the luxury of an ice house, and he had experienced the joys of cold mixed drinks and ice cream in the summer. He figured he could get the rest of the world addicted to the stuff.

And so in 1806, he launched his business by sending to Martinique a brig full of ice cut from his family’s pond. He told his sales agent to give it away to bartenders.

“A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again,” Frederic Tudor wrote.

His first venture failed, and so did his second, third and fourth. In the end, Frederic Tudor made his millions and revolutionized the way the world ate and drank.

Frederic Tudor

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Frederic Tudor

He was born in to a Brahmin family on Sept. 4, 1783, the day after the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution. His father, William Tudor, had studied law in John Adams’ law office, become George Washington’s first judge advocate general and started a lucrative law practice in Boston.

William Tudor liked to live large and followed the new upper-class fashion of drinking alcoholic beverages with ice. His 23-year-old son Frederic seized on the idea of bringing the luxury of ice from Massachusetts lakes and ponds to the tropical masses in the Caribbean.

In 1806, he sent his first shipment of ice to Martinique amid much derision. “No JOKE,” reported the Boston Gazette. “A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.”

Ice turned out to be a harder sell than Frederic Tudor imagined. He was trying to sell it to people who had never once experienced anything cold. They didn’t have ice houses, and they didn’t know how to keep ice from melting. He and his partner – his brother William – lost money on the deal. William dropped out of the business, founded the North American Review and co-founded the Boston Athenaeum.

Failure

Frederic Tudor stubbornly persisted, sending another shipment of ice to Cuba. Again he lost money.

So did his father – in a real estate speculation gone disastrously wrong. Frederic Tudor kept shipping ice, losing money but learning ways to keep ice cold. Sawdust, for example, worked better than straw.

But then Frederic Tudor spent parts of 1812 and 1813 in debtors prison after his business partner swindled him.

He kept going. “Let those laugh who win,” he wrote.

He borrowed money, bought ice in Massachusetts and an icehouse in Cuba and set sail for the Caribbean. “Pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf,” he wrote. Finally, he made some money on his crystal blocks of Yankee coldness.

Smash

Frederic Tudor expanded his business to Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, developing new sales techniques along the way.

He gave bartenders free ice for a year after teaching them how to keep it frozen in a ‘refrigerating jar’ and how to make cocktails like the Smash. He sold ice to Havana coffee shop owners and the keeper of the Tivoli Gardens after teaching them how to make ice cream.

During one mild winter, he faced an ice shortage. So he sent  his ship’s captain to take a detour to Labrador and hack off part of an iceberg. Tudor also ventured to the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine to find enough ice to ship.

In 1825 came another big turning point: Frederic Tudor met Nathaniel Wyeth, a hotel owner. Wyeth invented a horse-drawn ice plow that cut ice from ponds far more cheaply and efficiently than the laborious hand labor then used. Tudor hired Wyeth as his foreman and expanded his ice-cutting operation.

Harvesting ice

India

In 1833, Frederic Tudor gambled that a shipment of ice would survive the voyage to India. He was right. The arrival of the ice caused a sensation, especially among the colonial British administrators.

Henry David Thoreau heard about it. He watched as Tudor’s men divided Walden Pond into a chessboard pattern and cut ice into square, two-foot blocks. “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges,” wrote Thoreau.

The same year he sent ice to India, Frederic Tudor, 50, met 19-year-old Euphemia Fenno. They married the next year and had six children.

Ice King

Frederic Tudor finally achieved the success he craved, earning the nickname ‘Ice King.’ At one point he owned ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Ala., Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Sri Lanka and Singapore.

But he had created a market for ice too big for one company to serve. By 1855, 12 companies shipped ice from the Boston area.

In the run-up to the Civil War, American ships carried more tonnage of ice than any other commodity except for cotton.

People had come to view ice as a necessity to preserve food and medicine. When the Civil War broke out, two-thirds of Boston and New York households received ice deliveries every day.

And in 1862, a bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bartenders Guide, with recipes for America’s cocktails – most of which used ice.

Wenham Lake Ice

Between 1844 and the early 1850s, the remarkably pure ice from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts became a fashionable luxury among the British aristocracy. The best London hotels put up signs advertising Wenham ice. It was said you could read a newspaper through a block of Wenham Lake ice two feet thick.

frederic-tudor-wenham-lake

Wenham Lake today

Wenham ice inspired the popularity of cocktails like sherry cobblers and mint juleps in London. No fancy dinner party was complete without it, and Queen Victoria insisted on it.

A competitor to Frederic Tudor, the Wenham Lake Ice Co., had promoted the stuff.

By 1850, Norway and Sweden began to export ice. One ice company bought Lake Oppegaard in Norway and rechristened it “Lake Wenham.”

Aftermath

Frederic Tudor died in 1864, his fortune said to amount to $200 million in today’s dollars. His estate in Nahant, Mass., became a country club. His great-granddaughter Tasha Tudor illustrated nearly 100 children’s books and received many honors for them.

The ice business thrived, with Massachusetts supplying ice around the world from ponds in Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Ayer, Stoneham, Wakefield, Woburn, Andover and Lynnfield.

By 1880, 22 icehouses stored 30,000 tons of ice next to Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain. In Vermont, 5,000 men cut ice on Lake Champlain.

But artificial refrigeration eventually overtook the need for natural ice. The commercial ice maker, invented in 1854, allowed people around the world to make their own ice for cocktails and ice cream.

How To Make a Smash

Dissolve sugar in water in a cocktail shaker; add mint and spirits. Shake well with ice and strain through a fine strainer into a rocks or old fashioned glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish.


Images: Wenham Lake By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029494. Ice harvesting: Cutting the cross sections with a saw–ice harvesting, Conneaut Lake, Pa. Pennsylvania Conneaut Lake, 1907. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018652316/. This story about Frederic Tudor was updated in 2023. 

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In 1867 the First New England Snowbirds Travel South – ‘Feeling Young and Frisky.’

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In 1867, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin, tiring of New England’s cold climate, visited Florida for the first time. They were instantly smitten, bought a home complete with orange groves, and for the next 17 years were regular New England snowbirds.

Florida Department of Agriculture, immigration department brochure, designed to appeal to New England snowbirds.

Not content to merely enjoy the beautiful, warm Florida winters, Stowe did what writers do — she wrote about the beautiful state and soon attracted so many visitors she regretted it.

Stowe, who spent most of her life in Connecticut, first learned of the beauties of Florida from her son Frederick. Wounded in the Civil War at Gettysburg, Frederick had turned into a drunk and, most likely, a heavy opioid user. Alarmed by his health, Stowe, at age 56, took him up on his suggestion that she buy land in Florida.

New England Snowbirds

Frederick had learned from soldier friends that after the war, with the collapse of plantations, many properties were available for a song. Stowe consequently bought a large property on the St. Johns River in Mandarin, Fla., now part of Jacksonville. She then established Frederick as the manager of the groves.

house

The Stowes on their porch in Mandarin.

Frederick failed miserably at the business. He had no background in farming. After trying to battle his addiction, he would soon head west and join the merchant marine. It’s not clear when or how he died.

Harriet and husband Calvin, meanwhile, were thoroughly smitten with the Florida sunshine. She began writing columns for her brother Henry’s New York newspaper, The Christian Union. Today hte stories would pass as Florida real estate advertisements aimed at New England snowbirds. They told of, “Three Vermont brothers, exhausted by the long, hard winters there,” who traveled to Florida and farmed their way to happiness.

“The St. John’s is the grand water-highway through some of the most beautiful portions of Florida; and tourists, safely seated at ease on the decks of steamers, can penetrate into the mysteries and wonders of unbroken tropical forests.”

Oranges, Peaches and Flowers

She wrote glowingly of a land where flowers were to be had all winter long, the delights of sailing could be enjoyed in the dead of winter and trees were weighted down with oranges, peaches and other fruit.

Harriet_Beecher_Stowe

The first of the New England snowbirds

In one letter, according to the biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, she wrote: “Feeling quite young & frisky. I feel as if I had wings. Everything is so bright & the air is so soft.”

“The great charm, after all, of this life, is its outdoorness,” she wrote. “To be able to spend your winter out of doors, even though some days be cold.” She sang the praises of sitting with windows open, hearing birds daily, eating fruit from trees and picking flowers from hedges all winter long.

“This you can do,” she wrote, “and this is why Florida is life and health to the invalid.”

She threw in occasional warnings in her writings about the excessive heat of the “three formidable summer months, July, August, and September.” That factor, she said, argued against a permanent relocation. Stowe herself retained her year-round residence at Hartford.

Stowe described perfectly how legions of New England snowbirds would migrate between North and South.

“Florida is peculiarly adapted to the needs of people who can afford two houses, and want a refuge from the drain that winter makes on the health,” she wrote. “As people now have summer-houses at Nahant or Rye, so they might, at a small expense, have winter-houses in Florida, and come here and be at home.

New England Snowbirds Raise Property Values

calvin-stowe

Calvin Stowe

“There are thousands of acres of good land, near to a market, near to a great river on which three or four steamboats are daily plying, that can be had for five dollars per acre and even less than that.”

Property values, she trilled, were always increasing.

Meanwhile, Stowe’s publishers pressed her to write another novel. Her influential 1852 book Uncle Tom’s Cabin had outsold all books but the Bible. The public wanted more.

Instead of a new novel, Stowe cobbled together a collection of her writings on Florida, with some fresh material, and sent the whole pile along to her publisher to be issued in book form as Palmetto Leaves.

st-johns

St. Johns River

Though students of Stowe consider it one of her lesser works, for Florida Palmetto Leaves marked a turning point. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin started the Civil War, Palmetto Leaves touched off the great Florida land rush that continues today. Though Harriet Beecher Stowe was not the first Northerner to grab up Florida property, she was the most outspoken about it. The Tampa Bay Times concluded that Stowe “created the Florida tourist industry as we know it.”

Flowers in Her Hair

In Florida, Stowe had a reputation for her eccentricities. She wore flowers in her hair and spent days on end walking and collecting them. She would lapse into long silences. But she stayed true to her activist roots, raising money for schools and churches in her adopted state and advocating for freed slaves.

Her Florida activities have been characterized in many ways, depending upon who is evaluating them. To southerners bitter over northern exploitation of the calamitous aftereffects of the Civil War she was just another carpetbagger. For historians who bristle at her patriarchal and sometimes insulting view of freed slaves, she was a meddling do-gooder. To progressives at the time she was an activist motivated by her desire to improve the country. And to the governor of Florida, who welcomed Stowe and other northerners to the Statehouse with a band and celebration, she represented cash and development.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/new-england-snowbirds-stowe-capital.jpg

Harriet Beecher Stowe welcomed at the Florida State Capital for encouraging New England snowbirds to come to Florida.

In all, Beecher and her husband made the trip south for the winter 17 times. By the end, she and her home were a tourist attraction. Her readers and celebrity friends frequently visited. A steamboat carrying tourists would blow its horn when it arrived in front of the New England snowbirds’ house. If she was in a good mood, she would wave. Occasionally she entertained tourists who dropped in, sometimes even charging for the privilege of a tour of her property. Other encounters were less friendly. In one instance when uninvited tourists picked orange blossoms, Calvin waved them off with his cane.

By 1885, declining health kept the Beechers from continuing as New England snowbirds to Florida. Calvin died in 1886. Harriet, under the care of her remaining children, died in 1896.

This story about New England snowbirds was updated in 2023.

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

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“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

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 20th 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.

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

sundown towns movie

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. 

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I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day — Hope Surfaces from Despair

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On Christmas day in 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired to write the poem we now know as the Christmas carol, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. It was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

I heard the bells on Christmas Day was born out of Henry Wadsworth Longellow’s depression.

Longfellow had fallen into a depression in 1861 when his second wife Frances died. She had been sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes on fire. Henry had rushed to her aid and tried to smother the flames. But by the time the fire was out, Frances had been burned beyond recovery.

She died the next day. Henry, burned badly as well, was too sick to attend her funeral.

The death marked a turning point in Longfellow’s life. His physical appearance changed dramatically as he began growing his beard because the burns disfigured his face. Mentally, he sank into depression.

Fanny Appleton Longfellow with sons Charley and Erny

Winning Frances’ affection had taken Longfellow years, and their 18-year marriage was the happiest time of his life. In the wake of her death, he spent much of his time translating other works and less on his own creation.

Christmas 1862

On Christmas day in 1862 he would record in his journal:  “A merry Christmas’ say the children, but that is no more for me.” And even 18 years later he would still be mourning Frances’ loss, when he wrote The Cross of Snow:

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face–the face of one long dead–
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.

Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.

There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

In 1863, Longfellow suffered another blow. The poet was a staunch abolitionist, but he, like the entire country, was troubled by the Civil War. His son Charley in March of 1863 had decided that, regardless of his father’s wishes, he would join the fight. He ran off to Washington to enlist in the 1st Massachusetts Artillery.

Dear Papa

A friend posted a letter for him after he left:

Dear Papa

You know for how long a time I have been wanting to go to the war I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer, I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good God Bless you all.                                                                                   Yours affectionately

Charley.

Charley’s commanding officer soon discovered the boy’s influential family ties, and promoted Charley to lieutenant. Charley believed his aunt had probably helped procure the commission for him.

Charley Longfellow and friend, D.H.L. Gleason, 1863

Longfellow feared for his son’s future. In June, Charley came down with fever. Longfellow went to Washington and brought him back to spend summer on leave at the family cottage in Nahant, Mass.

Though committed to the fight, the romance of war was stripped away for Charley in the coming months of battles. In one letter home, he described seeing a fellow soldier lose his leg and other close calls:

“They may talk about the gaiety of a soldiers life but it strikes me as pretty earnest work when shells are ripping and tearing your men to pieces.”

In November, Charley’s own luck ran out. At New Hope, Va., his unit was engaged in a battle and he was shot. The bullet went through him from back to shoulder, just nicking his spine.

Again Longfellow had to travel to Washington to retrieve his son from the hospital. They arrived back at their Cambridge home on December 8, and a grim Longfellow set about the months-long process of trying to nurse his son back to health.

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

The circumstances challenged his resolve, but he was inspired when he heard the bells. He found in them a message that peace would come again to the troubled nation. They inspired him to write the poem, Christmas Bells.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said:
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Charley never did return to fight, despite his wish to. He was honorably discharged in February of 1864. Longfellow’s poem, published originally in a magazine, would be set to music in 1872, but with the middle stanzas often removed.

Charles Appleton Longfellow

To hear Burl Ives sing I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, click here.

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious cookies. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

This story about the carol, ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,’ was updated in 2022.

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A Brief History of the Boston Brahmin

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There’s more to being a Boston Brahmin than simply having an early Puritan ancestor, graduating from Harvard and living on Beacon Hill.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

Boston Brahmin and President, John Quincy Adams, by George Peter Alexander Healy

You must not flaunt your wealth. You must shun glitzy resorts and you must be thrifty, perhaps traveling by T. The one new suit you buy a year must adhere to the Boston Brahmin dress code, now known as preppy. You must speak in your own British-sounding dialect. (To hear it, click here.)

You should probably marry a relative. Fortunately, you have plenty of choices, including Appletons, Bacons, Cabots, Codmans, Coolidges, Crowninshields, Forbes, Hunnewells, Lodges, Lowells, Parkmans, Perkins, Russells, Saltonstalls, Shattucks, Shaws and Winthrops.

You must eat roast beef on Sunday night and cold leftovers on Monday. That’s  where the expression ‘cold roast Boston’ comes from. It was a favorite of Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a Brahmin who persistently failed to stay out of the newspaper.

boston-brahmin-william-weld

William Weld

According to the Boston Brahmin code, you must only be mentioned in the newspaper when you are born, married and died.  But many Brahmins, like Weld, couldn’t help but generate ink by taking high government office. Or running colleges, winning literature prizes or founding prep schools and orchestras. Or actually running newspapers themselves, like Boston Brahmin Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee.

Brahmin Coined

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., coined the phrase in 1861 in his novel Elsie Venner. In it he described Boston’s aristocracy as the “Brahmin Caste of New England.” Holmes wrote they believed destiny had set them apart to create a shining city on a hill. And they embraced the values of their Puritan forebears: hard work, thrift, culture and education.

Many Boston Brahmin families made their fortunes as merchants and financiers before Holmes published his novel. If you hadn’t made your money by then, the only way into the caste was to marry into it.

Some Brahmins were already wealthy when they arrived in the early 17th century. Weld used to joke that his ancestors sent the servants ahead on the Mayflower so they could prepare the summer cottage.

Brahmin Oliver Ames, on the other hand, made his own fortune. He started manufacturing shovels in 1803 in Easton, Mass. His sons, Oliver, Jr., and Oakes, then accumulated enough money to underwrite the Union Pacific Railroad. His grandson, Frederick Lothrop Ames, was an original stockholder of General Electric, and the family’s real estate holdings enabled them to build the Colonial Theatre and parts of MIT. They also built the Ames Building,  the tallest building in Boston from 1893 to 1919. Another grandson, also Oliver Ames, won election as the 35th governor of Massachusetts.

Boston Brahmin vs. Boston Irish

Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., as a young man.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., as a young man.

The Boston Brahmin had no love for the Irish immigrants who arrived on famine ships during the 1840s. Young Brahmins founded the Immigration Restriction League in 1894 shortly after they graduated from Harvard. The League had as its champion Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who sponsored a bill in Congress that would have required newcomers to pass a literacy test to enter the country

As the Irish began to accumulate wealth and power, the Brahmins found themselves having to make concessions. In 1901, March 17 was declared a holiday. Of course it’s St. Patrick’s Day, but to save face the Brahmins called it Evacuation Day. It marks the day in 1776 when British troops left Boston.

Boston Brahmins founded the New England Watch and Ward Society, a puritanical group of private citizens active from 1878 to the 1920s. It made Boston a target of scorn and – unintentionally – heightened interest in the books and plays it banned.

Brahmins also founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Peabody Essex and Isabella Stewart Gardner museums, WGBH, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Athenaeum.

They followed their Puritan ancestors who started Boston Latin School, the first high school in the country. Brahmins founded elite college preparatory schools like Choate (now Choate Rosemary Hall), Groton, Andover and Phillips Exeter. Then they sent their children and grandchildren to them.

WASPy Snobs

John Lowell, Jr.

John Lowell, Jr., founded WGBH.

Sociologist Harriet Martineau visited Boston in the 1830s and concluded its Brahmins were “perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own “first people,” as any in the world.”

Novelist John P. Marquand lampooned the circumscribed life of the Boston Brahmin in The Late George Apley. When Apley’s grandfather moved to the South End, he was shocked to see a man in shirtsleeves across the street. So he sold his house the next day and retreated to Back Bay.

George Apley also has a family estate in Milton (Nahant or Beverly would have worked as well). He stays at the Boston hotels in New York, London and Paris and doesn’t know what he would have done in life without the Club. (One Boston club, The Tennis and Racquet Club, had rooms heated only by fireplaces as late as 1958.)

T.S. Eliot‘s poem The Boston Evening Transcript gently mocks the Brahmin caste to which he belonged (though his family moved to St. Louis). The Transcript, published from 1830 to 1941, was the paper of record. The Brahmins loved its book reviews, music criticism, college sports page, bridge department and genealogy column.

In 1935, the Atlantic magazine printed a critique of the Brahmin by S. Foster Damon. In it, he wrote, “The Brahmins still lived on the water side of Beacon Street or the sunny side of Commonwealth Avenue, they still dined at two and had ‘tea’ at six, they read the Atlantic and the Transcript, held four receptions a year, escaped the Egyptian heat of summer by moving to the North Shore; sent their sons to Harvard and their dead to Mt. Auburn.”

More to the point was the poem by John Collins Bossidy:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.

The Kennedys most certainly were not Boston Brahmins.

Boston Brahmin by Marriage

Isabella Stewart Gardner became a Boston Brahmin, at least technically, when she married John Lowell Gardner, Jr. However, she didn’t always adhere to the Brahmin code. Gardner posed for a painting in a low-cut dress, walked a lion down the street on a leash and scrubbed the steps of an Anglo-Catholic Church during Lent.

Young John Kerry receives a medal

Young John Kerry receives a medal

Former Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry is a classic example of Brahmin by marriage. His father was descended from Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants who converted to Catholicism. His mother had the Forbes ancestors, and one of her sisters paid for his prep school education.

The Forbes family had made an early fortune in the China trade, built the transcontinental railroad and went on secret missions for Abraham Lincoln. The family made even more money investing in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Allan Forbes headed Boston’s State Street Bank and Trust Company in the 1950s. The family has its own quiet resort, Naushon Island, where a Forbes once grilled a stablehand on his thoughts about the Plantaganets.

When Kerry ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1996, he opposed his distant cousin: William Weld. And when he ran for president in 2004, he followed in the footsteps of other Brahmin presidents and presidential aspirants: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Photo: William Weld, By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50569492. This story about the Boston Brahmin was updated in 2023.

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How the Greek Immigrants Came to New England

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In 1860, U.S. Census takers recorded 328 Greek immigrants living in America. Among them were 40 young men and boys. They arrived after the Greek War of Independence, which had left them orphaned.

Michael Dukakis

Michael Dukakis, son of Greek immigrants

They received college educations in the United States. Most succeeded in their adopted country, while  a few others returned to their homeland.

The orphans were followed decades later by waves of desperately poor Greek immigrants looking for work. The later arrivals didn’t always succeed. But ever since those 40 orphans were brought here, the tiny Greek community has had a disproportionate impact on New England.

Greek-Americans have given us politicians, athletes, actors, scholars and architects. Red Sox first baseman and college football star Harry Agannis, the Golden Greek, was born in Lynn, Mass. And former governor Michael Dukakis and his cousin actress Olympia Dukakis were born in Brookline.

New England has more than a hundred Greek Orthodox churches, which sponsor Greek festivals throughout the year. Greek-Americans gave Manchester, N.H., the Puritan Back Room and the best onion rings in town. They also gave the Greek amphitheater at the University of Connecticut.

Most of all, they gave us the Greek diner, along with spanikopita, baklava, gyros, Greek pizza and the ubiquitous Greek salad.

The 1st Greek Immigrants

The first Greek to land in America is believed to be a sailor named Don Teodoro, who came with Spanish explorer Panfilio de Narvaez in 1528. Indians killed him in Florida.

Lucas Miller

Lucas Miller

The Greek War of Independence brought autonomy to the country in 1832, but it also caused the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians. A Congregationalist missionary society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, brought the orphaned sons of distinguished families to the U.S. for education and conversion to Protestantism.

Some of the orphans came with supporters of the Greek revolutionaries, such as Samuel Gridley Howe. Educated in the United States, they went on to enter the ministry, medicine, law, and education professions, or they succeeded in business.

Michael Anagnos married Samuel Gridley Howe’s daughter and followed him as director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Anagnos hired Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen Keller.

John Zachos became an educational pioneer, teaching freed slaves. Lucas Miltiades Miller served as the first U.S. congressman from Wisconsin. Evangelismos Aspostolides Sophocles  taught Greek at Harvard. George Pericardis taught at Amherst College before amassing a fortune in New Jersey.

Then in the mid-19th century, a trickle of Greek sailors and merchants came to the United States. The merchants set up import-export businesses in American cities; the sailors worked on steamboats in the Great Lakes and Mississippi River.

The Great Wave

Lowell mills today

Lowell mills today

In 1890 came the first great wave of Greek immigrants. They were 90 percent male, extremely poor and looking for work. Most found it in the mills and factories of the Massachusetts cities of Lowell, Haverhill, Lynn, Boston, Peabody, Chicopee, Springfield and New Bedford.

The new Greek immigrants also settled in Nashua and Manchester, N.H., and in the Connecticut cities of Bridgeport, New Britain and Norwich. Between 1890 and 1924, more than 400,000 Greeks arrived in the United States. Many intended to return to Greece with their American earnings.

From 1924 to the end of World War II, the United States closed the door to immigrants. Only about a thousand Greeks arrived each year. And pressure increased on immigrants to assimilate.

World War II and the Greek Civil War devastated the Greek countryside, and once again the United States welcomed Greek immigrants. So from 1947-1967, 5,000 Greek immigrants arrived a year. Then in 1968, Congress relaxed immigration laws and an average of 11,000 Greeks came to America each year until 1979.

The postwar era was the golden age of Greek diners in America. The first diners originated in Providence, and soon Worcester, Mass., was manufacturing now-classic diners. Six hundred diners sprang up in the New York metropolitan area, many in Fairfield County, Conn.

Olympia Dukakis

Olympia Dukakis, daughter of Greek immigrants

In Connecticut, Italians had dominated the pizza business, but they started to retire after World War II. Greek families bought up the pizzerias, and by the late 1970s, 76 percent of Greek families worked in Connecticut pizza shops.

Greek Towns

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the New York-Newark-Bridgeport area has the most people of Greek ancestry in the country, with 202,304.  Boston-Worcester-Manchester ranks second, with  96,871.

Lowell has special importance to the Greek-American community. It had the first and most extensive Greektown. One of the first Greek churches in America was built there in 1906. By 1913 Lowell also had 30 Greek groceries. One of them, DeMoulas Market Basket, started in 1917 and now has 79 stores throughout New England.

The sons of Greek immigrants have also succeeded in politics. Paul Tsongas represented Lowell as a U.S. senator and later became a candidate for president of the United States.

Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who also ran for president, was the son of a Greek immigrant who settled in Lowell. Likewise, Nick Mavroulas grew up in nearby Peabody and became a congressman from Boston’s North Shore. Ted Gatsas served as mayor of Manchester, N.H. And political commentator George Stephanopoulos grew up in Fall River, Mass., the son of a Greek Orthodox priest.   greek-immigrants-diner

The New England community with the densest Greek-American population today is Nahant, Mass., with 5.3 percent. That makes it the ninth most Greek-American community in America. Next comes 16th-ranked Peabody, Mass., with 4.3 percent. Dracut, Mass., follows as the 19th most Greek-American community, with 3.9 percent.

New England also attracts recent Greek immigrants to Massachusetts towns such as Raynham Center, West Falmouth, Watertown, North Lakeville and Arlington.

Photos: Miss Worcester Diner By Improbcat – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7813073. Harry Agannis By Vintage Card Traders, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2293374. If you enjoyed this story about New England’s Greek immigrants, you may also want to read about the region’s Portuguese immigrants here, or Italian immigrants here.  This story was updated in 2022. 

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