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Needham Mass.

Fred Marriott Sets the Speed Record in a Steam Race Car

Fred Marriott was the chief mechanic at the Stanley Steam Carriage Co., when the company owners asked him to race a steam car at a nearby track. Though gasoline-powered cars would soon eclipse the steamers, Marriott set a speed record that no one would break for a century.

Fred Marriott in the Stanley Rocket, 1907.

The Stanley Steamer, invented by a pair of Maine twins, was the first automobile sold in commercial quantities. F.O. and F.E. Stanley made and sold more than 10,000 cars from an old bicycle plant in Watertown, Mass., between 1897 and 1914. Fueling the cars involved uncoiling a hose from the side of the car and putting the free end into a horse-watering trough.

A Stanley Steamer racing in 1903.

Fred Marriott

Marriott was no kid when he began racing. He was in his 30s, having been born in Needham, Mass., on Dec. 31, 1872.

At first he raced locally at the Readville Race Track, where autos and horses set speed records and politicians, socialites, sportsmen and gamblers mingled.

Then in 1906 the company built a steam-powered race car using an aerodynamic design. They called it the Stanley Rocket. Three-feet wide and 16-feet long, it was described as an upside-down canoe. Made of canvas and glue, it weighed 1,600 lbs., but carried 1,000 lbs. of steam per square inch.

Fred Marriott in the Rocket.

Fred Marriott went down to Ormond Beach in Daytona, Fla., with the Stanley Rocket. On Jan. 23, 1906, he set the land speed record. He sat on the floor of the Rocket with his foot on the brake as the steam pressure built up, then let go and WHOOOSH!

He drove one mile in 28-1/5 seconds, or 127.6 miles per hour. That record wasn’t broken for a steam machine until 2009.

Career Ender

In 1907, Fred Marriott tried to break his own speed record in an improved version of the Stanley Rocket. He hit a rut going about 150 mph. The car went flying and broke in half when it hit the ground. Marriott was injured, lost an eye and gave up racing. He described what happened:

I shouldn’t have tried to shatter all records…She wasn’t heavy enough. I thought I could make her do two hundred. But that confounded combination of speed, light weight and treacherous sand spun me around, shot me eighteen feet in the air. it was the last time I ever raced a car.

The wreck of the Rocket in 1907.

He continued working at the Stanley Steam Carriage Co., where he kept a log book, recording the model type, serial number and date of delivery for every car produced from 1904 to 1923.

Fifty years after he broke the record, an automobile collector tried to persuade Marriott to return to Daytona to celebrate, but he wouldn’t. Fred Marriott died shortly thereafter, on April 28, 1956.

In 2012, Marriott’s granddaughter brought his medals to PBS’s Antiques Road Show for an appraisal. The appraiser put a value on his medals and trophy at between $12,000 and $18,000, and $5,000 for the log book.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Astonishing Voyage of the Northern Light

One spring night in 1853, Capt. Freeman Hatch sailed the Northern Light into Boston Harbor, having accomplished an astonishing feat of seamanship.

Northern Light

He had set a record for sailing between San Francisco and Boston, a record that still hasn’t been broken by a single-hull vessel. And he did it without a hand raised against a member of his crew — unusual at the time for Yankee captains, who meted out discipline with heavy hands.

Northern Light was a clipper ship, of course.

She was designed by Samuel Hartt Pook, New England’s first independent naval architect. He was known for building speedy ships. The Briggs Brothers built her in their South Boston shipyard and launched her on Sept. 25, 1851. She had an angel dressed in white and holding a flaming torch as her figurehead.

National Sport

By then, racing around Cape Horn had become the national maritime sport. Sportsmen placed bets on which ship would make the fastest run between San Francisco and the East Coast, and nearly all the clipper captains raced against another ship.

In 1852, Hatch set sail from Boston in the Northern Light. He had bad luck and took 118 days — a respectable time — to reach San Francisco. He was angry, though, at being beaten by two New York clipper ships, the Trade Wind and the Contest.

A Boston merchant offered Hatch a new suit of clothes if he beat the Trade Wind on the return voyage. He didn’t think the Contest was beatable.

Northern Light

The Trade Wind left on March 10, the Contest two days later, and Northern Light the following day. Early in the race, Hatch easily passed the Trade Wind, earning his suit of clothes, and took off after the Contest.

Cape Horn

He caught up with his rival at Cape Horn, dangerous because of its high winds, strong currents, tall waves and icebergs. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that only the most experienced seamen could “be trusted to drive these saucy, wild clippers against Cape Horn howlers.”

Northern Light and Contest sailed in company for a day or two. The Contest then sailed ahead, but Hatch drove the Northern Light until he was 40 miles ahead at the equator. Hatch, a thorough clipper ship captain, wrote one maritime historian, ‘never allowed his ship to suffer for want of canvas.’ On the clipper ship’s fastest day she sailed 354 miles.

When Northern Light sailed into Boston, Contest was picking up her pilot off the New Jersey Highlands. Morrison, described her entrance into Boston Harbor:

…with skysails, ringtail and studdingsails set on both sides, alow and aloft, she slipped into the Narrows of Boston Harbor on the evening of May 27, 1853, just seventy-six days, five hours, from San Francisco.

Early the next day, Hatch went ashore, hired a hack and drove to the home of Northern Light’s owner, James Huckins. He woke Huckins from a sound sleep and said, “Here I am with the Northern Light, but I’ve strained her dreadfully getting here!”

All Huckins cared about was that he’d beaten the Contest. “I don’t care a damn how much you’ve strained her,” he said.

Aftermath

In the early 1860s, Freeman Hatch retired from the sea. He moved to Needham, Mass., with his wife, Lydia, and took up the practice of alternative medicine.

Northern Light met her end on Jan. 2, 1862, when she sailed out of Havre and collided with the French brig Nouveau St. Jacques. The French vessel sank, and Northern Light sustained so much damager her crew soon abandoned her. Two vessels picked up the captains and crews and took them to the British ports of Falmouth and Cowes.

Hatch died in 1889 and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in his hometown of Eastham, Mass. His gravestone reads:

Freeman Hatch, 1820-1889

He became famous making the astonishing passage in the clipper ship Northern Light from San Francisco in 76 days 6 hours — an achievement won by no mortal before or since.

With thanks to Shipmasters of Cape Cod by Henry Kittredge. This story was updated in 2021. Image: Cape Horn CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57801..

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Thoreau and Wyeth: Born Under the Same Sign, 100 Years Apart

When Andrew Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917, exactly 100 years to the day after the birth of Henry David Thoreau, his father was delighted.

Wind From the Sea, courtesy National Gallery of Art

Henry David Thoreau was a favorite of the Wyeth family, which produced some of the best-known artists and artworks of the 20^th century. N.C. Wyeth, the Needham, Mass.-born patriarch, characterized himself as “unconventional, democratic, free and careless of formalities, contemptuous of restraint, and with a wayward enthusiasm.” Much like Thoreau.

N.C. Wyeth considered schools a menace, and hired tutors to educate his sons and daughters at home. He taught Andrew to love the writings of Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau.

Andrew Wyeth painted scenes close to home and close to nature. He endowed his landscapes and subjects with a haunting mysticism. In a 1961 interview, he said,

If what I’m trying to do has an value at all, it’s because I’ve managed to express the quality of the country which I live in … So what is important about my pictures, I feel, is a sort of organic thing of country … being able to express it symbolically.

Wyeth and Thoreau

Andrew Wyeth split his life between Chadd’s Ford, Pa., and Cushing, Maine, just as Thoreau only rarely strayed from Concord, Mass. He never got drawn into city life. He painted very much according to Thoreau’s Transcendental belief that people understand the world around them through intuition and imagination.

N.C. Wyeth once wrote about an open window in a way that echoed Thoreau’s observations about nature. It also foretold one of his son’s most famous paintings:

To all outward appearances, an extremely modest and commonplace vista, confined as it is by the four sides of the window frame and cut into eight exact panels by the window sashes, it is a scene that might be almost anywhere on earth. It is stripped of any glamour whatsoever, not a detail is outstanding or sensational; in fact, it is a glomeraton steeped in utter commonplaceness and seems doomed to eternal oblivion … but a resurgent gust of wind sweeps across the tiny area! The lilac leaves shudder and fold themselves back into broken heart shapes of new-wet luster, then frantically restoring themselves into position to be swept again and again into bright-varnished and twisted shapes. The tawny patch of long grass bends and leans into agitated motion, and the gray thin limbs of the spruce trees sway up and down in a ghostly slow dance. The deep gloom of the forest beyond remains still, like darkness.

Just His Imagination

My imagination is suddenly whipped into an almost exalted appreciation of the magnificence of the little isolated and unrelated scene before me, and I am astounded at its vast beauty and its sublime importance, and am made to realize, in one poignant spasm, that before my eyes exists the profoundest beauty, the greatest glamour and magnificence possible for human sight and spiritual pleasure.

Read what he wrote in his journal on his 40th birthday.

With thanks to The Art of Andrew Wyeth, by Wanda M. Corn. This story updated in 2022.

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The Stunned Musical Reaction to JFK’s Assassination

Boston Symphony Hall filled with gasps and sobs when Concertmaster Erich Leinsdorf broke the news of JFK’s assassination.

Symphony Hall in Boston

The concert had begun at 2 pm as scheduled with a Handel Concerto Grosso and broadcast by WGBH. Then people started slipping out of their seats to find out if the rumors about the news from Dallas were true.

The orchestra then played the second work, the premiere of William Sydeman’s Study for Orchestra No. 2. Those who left the hall returned and whispered the news to their seatmates.

During the 15-minute intermission, some of the orchestra members huddled around a 24-inch television set in the basement and watched Walter Cronkite deliver the news about the president’s death.

“We were stunned,” said Joseph Silverstein, a 29-year-old violinist. “I was just trying to grasp the reality of it.”

The News of JFK’s Assassination

Concertmaster Erich Leinsdorf telephoned William Shisler, the librarian for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He told him to pull the sheet music for Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and bring it to the musicians.

Shisler, scoring music in the BSO’s library, had heard the news in a telephone call from his wife.

Shisler remembered:

The musicians were already there on the stage, in their places and of course the hall was filled with people. I had to tell each of the musicians as I was handing out the music what was going on.

Leinsdorf stepped forward and, in faltering voice, broke the news to the audience of JFK’s assassination.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a press report over the wires. We hope that it is unconfirmed, but we have to doubt it.

The president of the United States has been the victim of an assassination. We will play the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony.

People gasped and sobbed. Some fled the hall. Most stayed and listened.

As the orchestra played, the concertgoers came to their feet, bowed their heads and then stood for the entire 12 minutes of the march.

(Listen to the announcement here.)

Then Leinsdorf raised his baton, and instead of a routine concert featuring Rimsky-Korsakoff, the Boston Symphony Orchestra played the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

“The Eroica’marcia funebre is one of the great moments in music,” wrote Boston Globe reporter Margo Miller. “The dread beat of the march cannot be disguised. Yet there is a middle section of the movement, a time of incredible energy and involvement, somehow, or so it seemed Friday, expressing eternal hope.”

Comfort in Music

When they learned of JFK’s assassination, some of the musicians thought the concert should be cancelled. But Henry Cabot, the president of the BSO’s board of trustees, told them to stay. On the day his father died, he went to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for comfort, he said.

Shisler couldn’t listen to the WGBH broadcast afterward. He continued as the BSO’s librarian until his retirement in 2014 — after 61 years with the orchestra. He also played viola in the Boston Pops and worked as Arthur Fiedler’s personal librarian, assistant and chauffeur.

This story about JFK’s assassination was updated in 2022. Image of Symphony Hall By Digfarenough – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2098161. .

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