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A.C. Gilbert, The Man Who Saved Christmas (and Invented the Erector Set)

In 1918, America was at war. The country needed to devote all of its industrial might to victory in Europe. A war council considered banning all toy production and prohibiting gift-giving at Christmas. It took A.C. Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, to save Christmas.

Gilbert led a remarkable life. He was a medical doctor, an Olympic gold medal winner, a magician, a toy millionaire, a big-game hunter and, most of all, a kid at heart.

A.C. Gilbert and his Erector Set

He wore old gabardine suits and rubber soled shoes, and he always carried a pipe that he sometimes stuck into his pocket while lit. In late October 1918, he brought a satchel full of educational toys to Washington, D.C., and let a room full of Cabinet secretaries play with them.

He persuaded them that children needed toys because the nation needed scientists and engineers. The war council decided to give Santa free rein after all.

“The toys did it,” Gilbert said.

A.C. Gilbert

Alfred Carlton Gilbert was born in Salem, Ore., on Feb. 13, 1884. His strict Congregationalist father, a banker, “viewed his son with puzzled pride,” according to his obituary.

Though frail, he had a competitive streak, winning a tricycle race at the age of seven. As a boy, he turned the family barn into a fire department, cutting a hole in the haymow floor and installing a wooden pole and cots. A neighbor would set a small brushfire while he and his friends would pretend to sleep on the cots. The neighbor then rang an alarm, and the boys would rush to the fire in a wagon rigged with a 110-foot garden hose.

Gilbert loved magic, and practiced his tricks relentlessly. He got so proficient he once matched a professional magician trick for trick. “My boy, you will be a great success,” the magician said.

Olympic Gold

Gilbert also loved athletics, but only grew to 5 feet 7 inches and weighed 135 pounds. Still, he excelled at track, gymnastics, wrestling and boxing. Gilbert attended Pacific University, where he met and later married Mary Thompson. While dating, he’d put one arm around her and practice magic tricks with his free hand, she recalled.

A.C. Gilbert as a young athlete

He went east in 1904 to study medicine at Yale, but he didn’t intend to open a physician’s practice. Instead, Gilbert wanted to stay in sports as a health advisor.

He competed at the Olympic games in London in 1908, winning a gold medal for pole vaulting. During the trials he set a world record; he was the first man to top 13 feet.

After earning his medical degree in 1909, he borrowed $5,000 from his father and started the Mysto Manufacturing Co. in New Haven. The company made magic kits for kids – cards, interlocking rings, instructions. Soon he opened a store in New York.

Erector Set

One day in 1912 he rode into New York on the train. The railroad was converting from steam to electricity, and Gilbert watched the construction out the train window. The network of girders erected to carry the electricity lines fascinated him. He thought, “What fun to make things with miniature girders.”

At home that night he and his wife sat at the dining room table and cut miniature girders out of cardboard. He then asked a local toolmaker to make him a set from steel.

The Erector Set flew off the shelves. Gilbert renamed his company after himself, and it thrived. It turned out chemistry sets, electric trains, tool chests, minerology sets and, into the 1960s, magic sets.

For more than 50 years, the A.C. Gilbert Co. ranked as the top producer of learning toys n the world.

“I’ve remained a boy at heart and only introduced items that appealed to me. I figured they would appeal to all boys,” he said.

He insisted on punching the time clock just as his employees did, and he stood in line with them in the morning. The company offered benefits like paid maternity leave and health insurance contributions. From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, A.C. Gilbert employed as many as 5,000 people, the largest employer in New Haven.

Vintage Erector Set.

World War I

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, President Wilson appointed government officials to the Council of National Defense. He tasked them with coordinating resources and industry for the war effort. The war council turned the country’s industrial might to making war materiel, banning the manufacture of nonessential goods.

The council asked A.C. Gilbert to make munitions instead of toys, and he did. It asked him to promote War Bonds, and he did. Then the war considered banning gift-giving at Christmas.

A.C. Gilbert could not let that happen.

As president of the Toy Manufacturers of America, Gilbert wangled a meeting with the war council. They gave him 15 minutes to persuade them not to kiss off Santa at Christmas.

American Flyer locomotive

Gilbert packed a bag with toy submarines and trains, picture books and air rifles, and took the train to Washington.

As he sat outside the office of Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, bureaucrats walked past and glanced at his toys. He tried to hide them behind his satchel.

A.C. Gilbert Saves Christmas

Finally his name was called. A naval guard inspected his toys before he could bring them in.

Gilbert spread the toys out on the table. Daniels focused on a toy submarine, asking where one could buy it.

Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels. He liked the toy subs.

Secretary of Commerce William Redfield pushed a toy train around the table. “I learned the rudiments of engineering on an engine like this,” he said.

Interior Secretary Frank Knight Lane picked up a book on aviation.

According to the Boston Post, Gilbert told the war council.

The greatest influence in the life of a boy are his toys.

A boy wants fun, not education. Yet through the kind of toys American toy manufacturers are turning out, he gets both. The American boy is a genuine boy, and he wants genuine toys. He wants guns that really shoot, and that is why we have given him air rifles from the time he was big enough to hold them.

It is because of toys they had in childhood that the American soldiers are the best marksmen on the battlefields of France.

Finally, he said, toys that educate help boys visualize their future.

The Post ran a photo of Gilbert with his Erector Set above the caption, “The man who saved Christmas.”

Not for the Money

After the war, A.C. Gilbert Co. grew into the largest toy company in the world. “He did it for the satisfaction of competition and to accomplish his goal more than he did it for money,” recalled Herb Pearce, Gilbert’s former plant manager.

Gilbert with his ever-present pipe

Gilbert called his workers “co-workers,” not “employees.” He visited the night shift once a week to see how things were going, and almost always found something to change or improve.

The company had a credit union, offered free legal advice and threw a Christmas party for children. Co-workers could take their grievances directly to the man they knew as A.C.

But the company really stood out, said Pearce, because of its broad range of manufacturing equipment and skills. It had big presses, screw machines, die casting and toolmaking equipment. It made its own dies and plastic molds, did its own printing, made its own boxes, formed its own wires. In addition to toys, the Gilbert company made small appliances as well as educational toys.

A vintage Gilbert chemistry set

Then in 1938, Gilbert bought American Flyer, a struggling toy train manufacturer. During World War II, the company retooled its electric train factory to make parachute flare casings.

“I love to see the wheels go ’round, love to see people develop, it’s not for profits alone,” he told the New Yorker in an interview. “Sure, that’s part of it because no one has any fun going busted, but I know this: just the object of making money has never meant anything to me.”

Living in Paradise

Glibert made plenty of money, however. He bought a country estate in Hamden with two lakes, a golf course and a lodge filled with his stuffed big-game trophies. He shot every kind of American game that had any importance, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

His Paradise Farm had a dairy herd and a pasteurization system that provided milk for the company cafeteria. He bred hunting dogs and champion German shepherds. Gilbert also developed Old Orchard Road in North Haven, one of the town’s finest residential neighborhoods.

At 70, when he wrote his autobiography, he titled it, The Man Who Lives in Paradise.

The U-238 Atomic Energy Lab

In 1950, the A.C. Gilbert Co. introduced the U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, one of the companies few flops. It carried a price tage of $49.50, about $530 today.

The kit included Electroscope, Spinthariscope, a cloud chamber, four glass jars containing uranium-bearing ore samples and batteries. It also featured a comic book, “How Dagwood Split the Atom.” The instructions suggested playing hide-and-seek with hidden radioactive samples and a Geiger counter.

The atomic energy lab didn’t sell because of its price tag rather than its danger.

In 2006, Radar Magazine listed it as the second most dangerous toy of all time. First on the list: lawn darts.

The Gilbert cloud chamber

The A.C. Gilbert Legacy

A.C. Gilbert died in Boston on Jan. 24, 1961. His son, also A.C., had been running the company, but it didn’t survive long after the founder’s death.

Gilbert had a showroom in New York called The Gilbert Hall of Science, a forerunner of today’s science museum. Today, the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop in Hamden has an exhibit on A.C. Gilbert. It also collects and studies the products and legacy of A.C. Gilbert and his company.

The Erector Set has a legacy of its own. Bill Sewell, a Yale Medical School student, in 1948 built a heart bypass device in 1948 with Erector Set parts and an Erector Set motor. origins of the artificial heart.

Then in the early 1990s, Mark Summers had an assignment to build a virtual reality ride for Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim. He used Erector set parts to design a way for cars to fly over the virtual-reality screen.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian created his suicide machine from an Erector set, old toys and some jewelry.

* * *

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

With thanks to the Library of Congress Inside Adams blog, A.C. Gilbert’s Successful Quest to Save Christmas and to Mental Floss, A.C. Gilbert, The Toymaker Who (Actually) Saved Christmas.

Images: Atomic Energy Lab By Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62037438. Early Erector set: By Cullen328 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75997438. Santa: CCO public domain. American Flyer locomotive: By James G. Howes, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6096168. Gilbert Chemistry Set By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3344050. Cloud chamber By Science History Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29337436. This story updated in 2023.

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Samuel Morse Paints 38 Masterpieces (And Then Invents the Telegraph)

Samuel Morse as a young man wanted nothing more than to be an artist, an aspiration upon which his Puritan parents frowned. But they saw how much he wanted it, and so they finally acquiesced.

He traveled to Europe to study painting. In the early 19th century, the United States had no museums to speak of. Young artists went to Europe to learn how to paint and sculpt.

The Gallery of the Louvre by Samuel Morse

Morse improved tremendously while studying in London. He then established himself as a portrait painter in the United States, but he wanted to do more. So he returned to Europe and threw himself into studying Renaissance art. In Paris, Morse decided to create a giant painting that featured European masterpieces. He wanted to give art students in America a chance to study the Old Masters without having to travel to Europe.

The painting, called The Gallery of the Louvre, flopped. Critics liked it, but the public didn’t.

Fortunately for Samuel Morse, he had a side hustle.

Samuel Morse

He was born April 27, 1891, to Jedediah Morse and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese Morse in Charlestown, Mass. His father, a stern Calvinist minister, had, like his son, another interest. Jedediah Morse was an avid geographer.

Known as Finley, Morse attended Phillips Academy in Andover and then, at 14, Yale College. At Yale, he studied religious philosophy, mathematics and the science of horses (really). He also studied electricity under Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day. He made enough money painting to support himself during college.

Samuel Morse self-portrait, 1812

After college, his father apprenticed him to a bookstore owner, but he insisted he wanted to be an artist. Finally, his parents acquiesced. In 1811, they sent him to London to study painting with a noted American painter, Washington Allston.

Young Americans went to Europe in those days because they wanted to excel in their work. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied medicine at the Ecole de Medecine. Charles Sumner became an abolitionist after attending lectures with black students at the Sorbonne. James Fenimore Cooper, already a successful author, wrote several books in Paris and started writing about politics for newspapers.

“In this country, young in the arts, there are few means of improvement,” wrote Samuel Morse’s father in a letter of introduction for his son.

A Painter’s Life

In London, Morse improved rapidly under Allston’s tutelage. Upon his return to the United States he began to win portrait commissions. He painted John Adams, James Monroe, Eli Whitney and Noah Webster.

In 1818 he married Lucretia Pickering Walker in Concord, N.H. They moved to New Haven, but Morse led the itinerant life of a painter, chasing commissions in Washington, D.C., New York and Charleston, S.C. He eventually opened a studio in New York City.

In 1825 he was working in Washington, D.C., on a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, then visiting the United States. Lucretia gave birth to their third child, and then died of a heart attack in New Haven. Morse’s father sent him the news in a letter, but Lucretia had been buried for several days by the time he got the letter and returned to New Haven.

Soon thereafter, his father and mother both died. Grief-stricken, he left his children in the care of relatives and moved to Europe.

By 1831 he was living in Paris, where he buried himself in the Louvre.

Marquis de Lafayette by Samuel Morse

Samuel Morse at the Louvre

The young Americans in Paris in the 1830s found the Louvre amazing. On Sundays, people from all walks of life crowded into the galleries.

Morse thought he’d do his countrymen a favor and introduce them to the masterpieces of European painting. He decided to paint the greatest works exhibited in the Louvre — all in one giant painting, six feet high by nine feet long.

Just selecting several dozen of the greatest paintings from the 1,250 hung on the museum’s walls was a task in itself. Morse chose four by Titian, three by Murillo and Van Dyke and two by Veronese, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Guido Reni and Rubens. Leonardo da Vinci only got one — the Mona Lisa.

For months, Morse spent every day in the Louvre from 9 am to closing time at 4 pm. Most days people could find him on a scaffold in front of a masterpiece, sometimes 12 feet above the floor. Or they’d find him moving the scaffold around to another masterpiece. Eventually, the American painter became as much of an attraction as the paintings themselves.

His close friend and fellow expatriate, James Fenimore Cooper, came to the Louvre every day to visit him. At the time, Cooper reigned as the most popular American author due to his Leatherstocking tales.

Morse returned home in the fall of 1832.

He finished The Gallery of the Louvre in the United States, and then put it on exhibit in New York for an admission price of 25 cents.

Box Office Poison

The crowds didn’t exactly flock to see it.

Morse had high hopes for the sale of the painting, thinking he could get $2,500 for it. Cooper had hinted he’d buy it. Morse also thought the painting would help him clinch the commission to paint a mural in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

Cooper didn’t buy the painting, and John Trumbull got the commission for the Capitol Rotunda. Morse sold The Gallery of the Louvre for a disappointing $1,300 to a man named George Hyde Clarke, a neighbor of Cooper’s in Cooperstown, N.Y.

By 1837, perhaps burned out by his Louvre experience, Morse abandoned his art career. “Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me,” he wrote to Cooper. “I have no wish to be remembered as a painter.”

Something Else

Morse, in Paris, had found something else to interest him: the French telegraph outside of Paris.

In 1792, a French inventor named Claude Chappe invented a semaphore system to relay messages faster than post riders could. It included a tower within sight of another tower on top of a telegraph hill. On top of the tower were movable shutters – also called blades or paddles. An operator could move them into different positions to represent different letters of the alphabet.

Samuel Morse in 1840

When an operator in the tower saw the semaphore move on the neighboring hill, he would pick up the message and then send it to the next relay tower. The French used the system along the coast to warn of the approach of British warships. (Massachusetts also used that system for a while.)

Morse talked about the system to his friends in Paris, complaining about its slowness. He often mentioned his idea of communicating messages through an electric wire. Cooper later admitted he thought the idea “chimerical.”

Then on his voyage home aboard the Sully, Morse met Bostonian Charles T. Jackson. Jackson told him about European experiments in electromagnetism. That gave Morse the idea for an electromagnetic telegraph using a system of dots and dashes.

But that is another story. (Read it here.)

In 1982, the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago bought the painting for $1.325 million, the highest price paid for an American painting up to that time.

With thanks to David McCulloch, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.

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James Covey, African Sailor, Helps the Amistad Captives to Freedom

In 1839, a young black sailor named James Covey held the key to freedom for 53 Africans who appeared in a Spanish ship off Long Island.

They couldn’t speak English. They spoke in a strange language no one understood, at least in Connecticut. And there, in a New Haven jail, they awaited a trial to determine whether they were free or slaves.

Amistad

The U.S. Revenue Service had seized them and their schooner, the Amistad, in August 1839. Two Spanish plantation owners aboard the vessel, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, claimed they owned the Africans and wanted them back. The Amistad had carried them from Havana to the Spaniards’ plantations when the Africans mutinied, killed the captain and three crew. They had only spared the Spaniards’ lives because they could navigate the Amistad to Africa.

The trial that followed hinged on one question: Were the Africans Spanish citizens, in which case they were legally the property of Ruiz and Montez? Or had they been kidnapped in Africa, taken illegally to Cuba and sold there as slaves? In that case they should regain their freedom.

Because James Covey spoke their language, he could answer that question.

James Covey

James Covey was a long way from home in the fall of 1839. Born as Kaweli in what is now Sierra Leone, he had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. His kidnappers took him to the notorious Lomboko slave factory on the coast. Then, shackled on a slave ship, he headed for Cuba and a lifetime of servitude.

James Covey

Though slavery was legal in North America, importing kidnapped Africans was not. The British West Africa Squadron patrolled the sea in search of illegal slavers. Fortunately for James Covey, a British warship hunted down his slave ship, Sgundo Secorro, and freed him.

He returned to Sierra Leone and learned English in a missionary school, where people called him Covie. Then he enlisted in the British Royal Navy as James Benjamin Covey. Perhaps the “Benjamin” came from the “B” branded into his flesh. He served aboard HMS Buzzard, which hunted down and captured slavers.

In the fall of 1839, the Buzzard was moored on Staten Island. Covey, working on the dock, suddenly heard someone babbling loudly on the wharf. Then he recognized the words — “Eta,” “fele,” “sauwa.” Someone, a white American, was counting to 10, over and over, in the Mendi language – his language.

He approached the man, Josiah Gibbs.

Abolitionists

Josiah Gibbs, a minister, taught sacred literature at Yale College. He had a passion for languages, and knew Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and several American Indian tongues.

Gibbs also hated slavery. He knew about the prisoners in New Haven jail. Everyone knew about them. They had been marched up the street from Long Wharf to the jail as people lined the streets watching. The jailer charged a shilling to get in and view the captives.

Josiah Gibbs belonged to a network of wealthy, well-connected abolitionists who mobilized behind the captives of the Amistad. Lewis Tappan, a wealthy New Yorker, headed the committee to defend them. Tappan hired good lawyers (including John Quincy Adams), raised money and promoted the cause of the Amistad captives.

Lewis Tappan

Amistad Captives

There were 53 of them, including three girls. They had been tricked by the two Spaniards, who sailed the Amistad east by day, but then switched course at night and headed northwest.

The captives had figured out what happened by the time they reached Long Island. The Spaniards feared they’d be killed, but then the Revenue Service arrived and rescued them.

News accounts described the participants in the drama: “Jose Rues [Ruiz], is very gentlemanly and intelligent young man, and speaks English fluently. He was the owner of most of the slaves and cargo, which he was conveying to his estate on the Island of Cuba.

Pedro Montes, 50, owned three slaves. Formerly a shipmaster, he navigated the vessel since the Africans mutinied.

An 1840 engraving depicting the Amistad revolt

Some of the Africans had decked themselves “in the most fantastic manner in the silks and finery pilfered from the cargo.” Others, in a state of nudity, lay on the decks, emaciated to mere skeletons. Cinque, their leader, 25 or 26, seemed “unusually intelligent, evincing uncommon decision and coolness.” Strong and well-built, he would command $1,500 at auction in New Orleans, the newspaper reported.

The three little girls, aged eight to 13, the newspaper described as “the very images of health and gladness.”

Courtroom Drama

Ruiz and Montez filed a claim in court, demanding the return of their property– the ship and its human cargo. The Spanish government weighed in as well, asking the United States government to return their property.

The abolitionists disputed the Spaniards’ claims, saying the captives had clearly been kidnapped in Africa and illegally taken to Cuba. Therefore they were free.

The U.S. Attorney for Connecticut asked the judge to determine if the Africans came from Africa or Cuba. If Africa, he asked the court to return them to Africa.

But how could the Africans prove they came from Africa, since no one in Connecticut could understand them?

Mendi

Gibbs had gone to the jail with a handful of pennies. He counted them out, one to ten, in front of the captives. Nearly all the captives spoke Mendi, and they taught him to count to 10 in that language.

After he found James Covey, the captain of the Buzzard gave Gibbs permission to take him to New Haven. Covey brought excitement and confusion to the captives when he walked into the jail speaking their language. He spent the next weeks and months with them, taking down their stories and helping Yale students teach them English. From his own experience, he knew without question they came from Africa.

Singweh, for example, said he’d been taken to Lomboko, as had James Covey. A vessel with two masts had taken him to Cuba, he said.

Cinque told him four Africans had kidnapped him while he worked on a road near his wife and three children.

Cinque

The captives knew of the same rivers in Africa James Covey knew. And they gave them a reason for their mutiny aboard the Amistad: The cook had told them the white men would kill them and eat them when they reached land.

Trial

The trial date was set for Nov. 19, 1839 before U.S. District Judge Andrew Judson. He had prosecuted Prudence Crandall six years earlier for the crime of opening a school for black girls in Canterbury, Conn.

The abolitionists bought James Covey a new suit for his courtroom appearance. During the trial, Covey gave a deposition:

I have conversed with these Africans separately in the presence of Dr. Gibbs, and they are consistent in their history of the place from which they sailed in Africa, and of their voyage to Havana, the events which happened there, and their voyage to the United States.

Based on the captives’ “language and manner and appearance, I am sure they are native Africans,” he said.

Covey then accompanied Cinque to the stand during the highlight of the trial. Cinque, wrapped in a blanket, told of his kidnapping in Africa, his voyage to Cuba and his capture on Long Island. At one point he sat on the floor to demonstrate how his captors had manacled him during his voyage on the slave ship Tecora.

Amistad replica

Outcome

The judge ruled in favor of the Amistad captives, but the Spaniards appealed the case. It went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams argued on the captives’ behalf.

In the end, the court ruled in favor of the Africans. Free to go, most of them boarded a ship, Gentleman, and sailed back to Sierra Leone. James Covey went with them.

Today, you can see a replica of the Amistad at Mystic Seaport Museum. Or you can watch the film of the same name by Steven Spielberg.

Amistad replica By Rhvanwinkle, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36402773. With thanks to Steve Thornton and his Shoeleather History Project for bringing our attention to this story. This story last updated in 2022.

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New Haven, ‘the Wickedest City’ – The Devil and Man At Yale in 1895

In 1895, hundreds of ministers and church leaders came to New Haven for a conference of the Christian Worker’s Association. Little did the city know the conference would give the city the title ‘wickedest city in the world.’

Image of Yale -- Creator of the Wickedest City

“A View of the Buildings of Yale College at New Haven,” lithograph, published by A. Doolittle & Son, New Haven. Courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database.

Some of the most high-profile young pastors and religious leaders of the age gathered at the conference to recharge and re-arm themselves in the battle for the souls of America’s young people. And New Haven welcomed them, though the city soon had second thoughts.

The group started a fiery debate around the country about whether New Haven had let Yale college turn the city into the wickedest city in the world.

Wickedest City

Rev. Reuben Archer Torrey of Chicago started the kerfuffle at a reception opening the conference.

Rev. R.A. Torrey

Torrey, himself a Yale Divinity School alumnus, took firm aim at his alma mater when discussing immorality. The sons of the American privileged class were running amok, with devastating impact on the working class people of New Haven. The Christian Worker’s association focused much of its work on reaching out to poor young people and diverting them from lives of sin. But the streets weren’t the only places where Satan did his work.

New Haven, Torrey suggested, must have filled a potter’s field with the corpses of young girls, their downfall and demise brought about by their association with the heathen offspring of the American elite who filled Yale’s dormitories. Many of those despicable youth – now in adulthood – could be found serving in Congress.

Yale, and as a result New Haven itself, were awash with debauchery, earning it the” wickedest city” moniker.

Torrey’s speech found a welcome audience among the assembled Christian missionaries. Also in the crowd, however, was a writer from the New Haven Palladium newspaper. And he dutifully recorded Torrey’s sentiments and published them.

Rapid Outrage

The news coverage incensed New Haven’s business community. Defenders of Yale reacted immediately.

Rev. David Burrill Pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City eventually publicly attacked Torrey for his past behavior. He told colleagues that a week-and-a-half after Torrey arrived at Yale, classmates had to drag him to his room in a helplessly drunken state. For the next year-and-a-half, Torrey lead a “dissipated” life until rescued by Christian students at Yale. Torrey denied this.

Timothy Dwight

Timothy Dwight had only recently taken on the role of Yale president. A religious man who lead Connecticut’s Congregational Church, Dwight had inherited an institution in financial distress. Dwight had taken the unusual step a few months earlier of mailing out a letter declaring that Yale was, in fact, a trustworthy institution of Christian values, a suitable institution for young men to attend.

With no time for distractions, Dwight announced he would offer no opinion on the discussion about morality at Yale. Nor would he take any part in the discussion over the wickedest city. He wanted to do nothing to fan the flames. But the flames hardly needed any fanning.

The Controversy Unfolds

As one newspaper put it: “People in New Haven are recalling and rehashing old stories of the hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents who come to Yale with more spending money than brains, and squander it in dissipation, to the lasting injury of their associates.”

And people didn’t have to cast far back in their memory for examples. The latest scandal had taken place in February of that year when Yale had to expel Elliott Shepard, great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Police had responded to Shepard’s dormitory and found him loudly partying with three women. After questioning, it turned out Shepard had imported a half-dozen prostitutes from New York for him and his friends.

Nevertheless, the pressure mounted on the association to tamp down the controversy. Torrey relented, and agreed to speak out on the matter because he felt it unfair that his words were damaging the city’s reputation.

Backtracking and Fueling The Fire

Rev. John Collins

On the final day of the conference, some 800 to 1,500 in attendance, Torrey and a local minister, Rev. John Collins, secretary of the association, teamed up to try to squelch the furor.

They made a mild rebuke of the Palladium, challenging the accuracy of its reporting and criticizing the newspaper for not checking its facts with Torrey before printing its articles.

“Did you hear me yesterday say that New Haven was the wickedest city in the world?” Rev. Torrey asked Rev. Collins. Collins replied that he had not and assured him that the report must have been an error.

The Resolution

The two ministers then offered a resolution to the conference that attempted to set things right.

“Resolved. That from our own observations and the statements of our president and secretary, the latter of whom has long lived in New Haven and as a city mission worker, had an unusual means of investigation, we believe New Haven to be, in nearly every way, a more than usually clean and moral city.”

Rev. Torrey had questioned the wisdom of the resolution but agreed to go along with it. Turns out he was right to worry. The resolution sparked fierce debate. Many in the crowd said that Torrey had only spoken what many ministers in the city had said about Yale and New Haven privately – often in more vivid terms than Torrey chose. Others questioned why the group should “whitewash” the city.

A stream of speakers rose, some to tell that they believed Yale was an upright institution. Any college had its share of young men who chose to live sinfully.

Mrs. Poteat Speaks on the Wickedest City

Rev. Edwin Poteat

Tucked in the audience were Rev. Edwin Poteat, of New Haven’s Calvary Baptist Church, and his wife Harriet Gordon Poteat.

Harriet Poteat was no minor figure. Her father, Adoniram Judson Gordon, was a well-known minister and missionary who founded Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. When she spoke, people listened. And she was in the mood to speak.

“When I heard Monday that Rev. Mr. Torrey had made these statements about Yale and New Haven, I said, ‘thank the Lord that he has the courage and Christian conviction to stand up and say so,’ she told the assembled crowd.

After seven years in New Haven, Poteat said she and her husband had witnessed a parade of students arriving at Yale. As a courtesy to their parents, the Poteats would ask the young men to dinner. The first year, they showed up and were polite. The second year, they showed up and had taken up smoking. The third year, they didn’t show up at all.

“They go down, down, down and I believe more boys are ruined in Yale University than any other place I know of,” she said. “I would as soon send my sons to Hell as to send them to Yale College.”

Fuel for the Fire

Poteat’s remarks fired up the assembly and members again began queuing up to tell of the tales of barroom wickedness they had observed in New Haven. Torrey and Collins quickly pushed their resolution to a vote.

The resolution passed, but Poteat’s speech had stolen the moment as newspapers across the country carried the news that Hell had been compared favorably to Yale.

Speculation began to grow about fallout from the conference. Reverend Poteat issued a statement that his wife was not inclined to retract her statement, though there was talk he would lose his pulpit. But before any effort at recrimination could build steam, the students of Yale stepped up.

Yale and the Wickedest City

As if on cue, one week after the Christian Worker’s conference, two Yale students, Henry Sage and Henry Bond, decided to have a night of debauchery with two local women, May Wilson and Annie True. Their escapades wound up splashed across the pages of newspapers.

Sage, a relative of millionaire New York financier Russell Sage, and the rest of the party, had spent an evening traveling the back roads drinking. Returning in the early morning hours, they had to summon a doctor when May Wilson collapsed. The doctor revived the young woman at the hospital and determined she had been under the influence of alcohol and some sort of drug.

Sage and other Yale students passed a hat and tried to bribe newspapers into suppressing the story. When that failed, they reached out to family who successfully had some newspapers pull the story. But it was too late. Other, independent newspapers published.

The Aftermath

As quick as it started, the story of the Devil and Yale died out. Rev. Edwin Poteat went on to have a long career, eventually serving as president at Furman University for 15 years. Rev. Collins would continue his work, with his efforts eventually laying the foundation for what is today the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rev. Torrey preached throughout the world and wrote more than 40 books.

Timothy Dwight, meanwhile, developed a reputation as one of Yale’s most important presidents, helping steer the university toward a future in which the institution stressed academics and produced fewer “‘hair-brained escapades of the sons of wealthy parents.”

This story updated in 2022.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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6 Fun Facts About Ezekiel Cheever, Puritan Schoolmaster

Ezekiel Cheever taught Latin, writing and arithmetic to the children of New England’s first Puritans for 70 years. He taught in New Haven, Boston, Charlestown and Ipswich, Mass., earning distinction as the ‘father of New England schoolmasters.’

When he arrived in the New World in 1637, New England was an isolated wilderness separated from the mother country by a vast ocean. For the Saints, or Puritans, to establish “Zion,” pious, educated men were needed, wrote Charles W. Allen. Ezekiel Cheever took his mission to heart, and taught many of the great men of their generation. His pupils included Judge Samuel Sewall, poet Michael Wigglesworth and Gov. Jonathan Belcher.

Cotton Mather

One pupil, Cotton Mather, delivered his funeral sermon, in which he called him “Master Socrates.”

“New England has never known a better,” Mather said.

Ezekiel Cheever

Born Jan. 25, 1614 in London, he came to Massachusetts toward the end of the great Puritan migration.

Soon after he arrived he went to New Haven Colony and taught for 12 years. He then moved to Ipswich, Mass., in 1650, where he taught for 11 years. Then on to Charlestown for nine years. He ended his career as the first master of the Boston Latin School, where he taught for 37 years.

Boston Latin School.

He married twice, first to Mary Culverwell for 11 years and then to Ellen Lathrop for 54. From 1639 to 1664, he had 12 children, but only nine survived to adulthood.

He taught in his home for most of 70 years. In the early years, he had a young and growing family. Historian Charles W. Allen concludes ‘the youngsters must have been confined to a small upper or adjacent chamber and kept entertained for the six to seven hours the house was used as a school.”

He never made much money, and more than once he had to beg local officials for back pay.

Ezekiel Cheever died Aug. 21, 1708 at the age of 93. Here are six fun facts about the old Puritan schoolmaster.

1. His Teaching Style—Not Progressive

He did not spare the rod. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Grandfather’s Chair, wrote,

It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birch rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils.

Ezekiel Cheever’s Latin textbook

He also wrote a textbook, probably the first in America. Called Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, American schools used it for at least a century. Hawthorne commented,

…the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys.”

2. He Hated Periwigs

The controversy over periwigs raged throughout New England during the 17^th century. The periwig was a highly styled wig, a fashion imported from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Samuel Sewall.

The early Puritans hated them, but they eventually won acceptance. Cotton Mather, for example, wore a long brown periwig.

Samuel Sewall, like Cheever, wore a black skullcap. He wrote a eulogy for Ezekiel Cheever that ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

3. He Helped the Puritan Project Succeed

During Cheever’s lifetime, colonial settlements grew into thriving towns along New England’s coast. Cheever gave hundreds of New England boys the tools to build those Puritan cities on hills. His best students entered Harvard and were ordained as ministers.

Map of New Haven in 1644, when Ezekiel Cheever lived there

Even those who didn’t do so well at Latin contributed to the success of the Puritan project.

Hawthorne described, as only Hawthorne could, what would happen to Ezekiel Cheever’s math students.

These boys are to be the merchants, shopkeepers, and mechanics of a future period. Hitherto they have traded only in marbles and apples. Hereafter some will send vessels to England for broadcloths and all sorts of manufactured wares, and to the West Indies for sugar, and rum, and coffee. Others will stand behind counters, and measure tape, and ribbon, and cambric by the yard. Others will upheave the blacksmith’s hammer, or drive the plane over the carpenter’s bench, or take the lapstone and the awl and learn the trade of shoemaking. Many will follow the sea, and become bold, rough sea-captains.

Sixty years after Ezekiel Cheever set foot in primitive Boston, the town contained 1,000 houses and 7,000 people dedicated to building schools and churches, wrote Henry Crocker in his A History of New England.

Boston Harbor around 1720

Toward the end of his career, Cheever earned 60 pounds a year at the Latin School, a handsome salary (when the town managed to pay it). He taught in a new schoolhouse, rather than his own house, and he even had an assistant – his grandson, Ezekiel Lewes.

4. He Was Extremely Pious

His pupil Cotton Mather described his ‘untiring abjuration of the Devil.’

Ezekiel Cheever believed the Puritans could grow spiritually and achieve perfection on earth in their new home. Mather struggled with that concept. He didn’t understand how saints could live among sinners on earth. When he brought the question to Cheever, the old schoolmaster replied,

What! The Spouse of CHRIST have the Foul Disease! Never tell me That!

5. His Beard Revealed His Mood

No images of Ezekiel Cheever exist, but an acquaintance, Samuel Maxwell, offered a description:

“He wore a long white beard terminating in a point; that when he stroked his beard to the point, it was a sign for the boys to stand clear.”

6. John Cheever Claimed Him as an Ancestor (But He Wasn’t)

The novelist John Cheever boasted of Ezekiel Cheever as his ancestor, but Ezekiel was just a cousin of his ancestor, Daniel Cheever. Nevertheless, John Cheever had a bit of obsession with Ezekiel. He wrote that he had nothing in his veins but ‘the blood of shipmasters and schoolteachers.’

John Cheever

Cheever talked about Ezekiel a lot in interviews, and named two main fictional characters after him: Ezekiel Farragut in Falconer and Ezekiel Cheever in his Wapshot books. He also named his Labrador retriever Ezekiel, and urged his son Ben (unsuccessfully) to give his son the name.

With thanks to Journey of Promise: West From Sempringham by Charles W. Allen.

Images: Boston Latin School plaque by By User:Swampyank / Swampyank at en.wikipedia – User:Swampyank, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17345900.

This story was updated in 2022.

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