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The Story of the Famous Berwick Sponge Cake – and Why it Disappeared

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Once, when people traveled by rail, there was a delicacy that you simply had to have if you could get it: the famous Berwick sponge cake. When the Boston & Maine stopped in North Berwick, Maine, travelers got off and headed for a tiny restaurant nearby. There they would buy the light and lemony confection.

The famous Berwick sponge cake with raspberries (it’s great with fruit)

Charles Dickens, during his 1868 tour of America, made his acquaintance with the Berwick famous sponge cake on his way from Portland to Boston. Eleven-year-old Kate Smith (later Kate Douglas Wiggin) happened to travel on the same train as the writer she revered. When the train stopped in North Berwick, she looked out the window and saw Charles Dickens standing on the platform. Years later, she remembered,

His hands were plunged deep in his pockets (a favorite gesture), but presently one was removed to wave away laughingly a piece of the famous Berwick sponge cake, offered him by Mr. Osgood, of Boston, his travelling companion and friend.

In 1901, Domestic Science Monthly magazine lamented the disappearance of the famous Berwick sponge cake. A reader wrote that she still made it from the original recipe. Even today, you can find Internet recipes for the famous Berwick sponge cake, long after the Boston & Maine stopped dropping passengers off in North Berwick.

Origin of the Famous Berwick Sponge Cake

North Berwick, as a gateway to Maine, got quite a lot of rail traffic. After 1873, the Western and Eastern Divisions of the Boston & Maine crossed in North Berwick, according to the North Berwick Historical Society.

North Berwick in 1910

That 1901 story in Domestic Science Monthly recounts how in 1845 a Boston & Providence clerk named William C. Briggs lost his leg in a railroad accident in Maine. Those early railroads could barely afford to defend damage suits. But Briggs said,

“Build me a restaurant in North Berwick, and stop every train five minutes there, and I won’t sue.”

So the railroad built a restaurant, and Mrs. Briggs made sponge cake according to a secret recipe. The cake became famous, and the Briggses shipped it all over the United States in boxes.

In 20 years Briggs retired, rich, but lost all his money in speculation. The restaurant closed, and “no one now knows the secret of the Berwick sponge cake.”

Another Version

But an alert reader from Rockland, Maine, wrote to the Domestic Science Monthly with the old Berwick sponge cake recipe:

Beat 6 eggs 2 min. Add 3 c. sugar and beat 2 min. 1 1/2 c. flour with 2 tsp. of cream of tartar; beat 1 min. Add 1 c. cold water with 1 tsp. of soda; add grated rind and juice of 1 lemon; beat 1 min. Add 1 1/2 c. flour and pinch of salt; beat one min. Bake 40 min.

And the magazine also corrected the quote from Mr. Briggs, “Just put me up a roof where my wife may support me, and I will ask no more.” (Though how it got either quote is open to question.)

Greatness Thrust

As the story of the famous Berwick sponge cake gets retold, Mrs. Briggs emerges more clearly.

The New York Times in 1894 picked up a story from the Portland Transcript with the headline, “How the Berwick Sponge Cake Had Its Greatness Thrust Upon It.”

The newspaper describes the eating of the famous Berwick sponge cake at the restaurant as “an event of consequence inseparable from travel over the Eastern Railroad.”

One day in the 1860s a Mrs. B was mixing some cake dough when someone called her to another room, the newspaper reported. She left the dough on the table. Her daughter, then five or six years old, emptied something into the dough, the name of which the author was not at liberty to mention. (Cream of tartar? Baking soda?) Mrs. B. decided to bake the cake anyway, as the ingredient wouldn’t harm anyone.

Boston & Maine passing through Saco, Maine, around 1879

“The result was the Berwick sponge cake in all its glory,” wrote the newspaper. All who ate it praised the delectable compound, and it became famous with travelers. They would buy whole loaves and carry them on their journey or take them home.

Mrs. B. retired from the railway dining room business in 1879, having made a comfortable sum, mostly from cake sales. Eventually she got very ill, and summoned her son-in-law to tell him the recipe. He then sold it to a commercial baker.

Just Desserts

Finally, Arthur Wellington Brayley gave Mrs. B. her due in his 1909 book, Bakers and Baking in Massachusetts, Including the Flour, Baking Supply and Kindred Interests, from 1620 to 1909.

“Of the many cakes made in Massachusetts, none have a wider reputation and in their day larger sales than the Berwick sponge cake,” wrote Brayley.

He credits Mrs. Mary Ann Pettengill, born in Newburyport, Mass., in 1813. She married for her second husband William Briggs, a clerk in a railway freight office who shortly after their marriage lost a leg. They then opened the restaurant at North Berwick, where hungry passengers bought her sponge cake.

“Such was its excellence that its reputation spread far and wide,” wrote Brayley. In the early 1850s, a Mr. Meyer of Boston got the rights to sell the cake, and sold it all over the world. Then the express train came, and the restaurant began to wane. So Mary Ann Briggs closed the restaurant and moved to Boston, where she died in 1898.

But the famous Berwick sponge cake lived on. The Oak Grove Farm Creamery sold it from a bakery under the ownership of J.W. Alden, located at 2220 Washington Street, Roxbury.

This story updated in 2023.

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Discovery in the Attic: The Lost Work of Provincetown Artist Edith Lake Wilkinson

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In 1924, someone packed a truck with the life work of Edith Lake Wilkinson – her woodblocks, prints, sketches and paintings. And then someone packed Edith Lake Wilkinson off to an insane asylum in Baltimore, Md.

Edith spent the remaining 30 years of her life in mental institutions. Her trunkful of artwork would sit in an attic in Wheeling, W.Va., where her nephew, her only close surviving relative, still lived.

Edith Lake Wilkinson at 20

Years after her death, her great-niece solved at least part of the riddle of what happened to Edith Lake Wilkinson. And she brought her artwork back into the public eye, even as the art world rediscovered Edith’s contemporaries, known as the Provincetown Printers.

And, as it turned out, something else may have been taken from Edith Lake Wilkinson: credit for inventing the white line woodcut.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson was born in Wheeling, W.Va., on Aug. 23, 1868 into a middle-class family. She had one sister. In 1888, at the age of 19, she left for New York City, by herself, a journey that led, perhaps inevitably, to Provincetown.

Edith enrolled in the Art Students League, studying drawing and painting with some of the top teachers in the country. She then attended Columbia’s Teachers College in 1900, where she studied with Arthur Wesley Dow. She moved to Morningside Heights with a woman named Fannie Wilkinson, 13 years older than she. They traveled to Europe together; when they returned to New York, Edith went back to the Art Students League.

At least by 1914, and possibly earlier, she summered in the gay-friendly art colony of Provincetown. World War I had sent many European artists to Provincetown, where creative people flourished in the freewheeling, cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Provincetown at the time had three art schools, surely enough for everybody to partake in creative endeavors. And yet women artists had it harder than men. They could only sell art on Sunday, and they found it much harder to get recognized as artists.

The Monongahela, white line woodcut by Blanche Lazell

Provincetown Printers

Edith fell in with a group that called themselves the Provincetown Printers. They practiced a technique known as the white line woodcut. For decades, art critics attributed the invention of the white line woodcut to a Provincetown artist named B.J.O. Nordfeldt.

Like European artists, the Provincetown printmakers embraced the Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world.” The technique involved a separate woodblock for each color, a laborious and time-consuming process. Nordfeldt supposedly simplified the technique by etching designs onto one woodblock with a v-shaped tool that gouges a line between the shapes of the design. Then the artist attaches a piece of paper to the block, and colors in each area of the design separately. The artist then lays the paper down on the block and rubs the back with a spoon until the ink transfers to the paper.

The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Hokusai, a ukiyo-e print

Kate Hanlon, who practices the white line woodcut technique in Newburyport, Mass., explained part of its appeal: Artists can make prints economically on the kitchen table. “You don’t need a press or a printing table,” she said in a zoom interview.

The white line woodcut also fit with the Provincetown Printers’ aesthetic sensibility, she said. It was flat, modernist, and it incorporated the handcraft ethos of the Arts and Crafts movement still in vogue.

“They respected the art,” Hanlon said.

Blanche Lazell, for example, one of the foremost white line woodcut artists, also hooked rugs. Other members of the Provincetown printers included Ethel Mars, Maude Squire, Mildred McMillen, Ada Gilmore, Agnes Weinrich and Juliette Nichols.

He Done Her Wrong

Provincetown changed the art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. Her work began to reflect the bright clear Cape Cod light.  She moved to Boston, living at 337 Charles Street, presumably with Fannie.

Then on Feb. 15, 1922, her parents died suddenly, overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in their West Virginia living room.

Her sister Jane had died, leaving one young son, Edward Vossler. A Wheeling attorney named George Rogers took over Edith’s financial affairs, doling out her monthly allowance. In a letter, Rogers suggested she and Fannie live in separate apartments because people needed time to themselves. He also discouraged her from moving to Provincetown.

Two years after her parents died, Edith Lake Wilkinson was committed to the Sheppard-Pratt Institute, a hospital for the mentally ill in Baltimore. Her diagnosis: paranoia.

Edith Lake Wilkinson may well have had reason to think someone was out to get her. Prosecutors charged George Rogers with embezzling from his clients.

Edith won her release from Sheppard-Pratt five months later, but soon returned. Her prints, her woodblocks, her sketches all got packed into a trunk and sent to her nephew. Fannie died in 1931, and in 1935 Edith returned to West Virginia – to the dirty, crowded Huntington State Hospital. She died on July 19, 1957.

Prints in the Attic

Edith’s nephew Eddie Vossler married a woman who had a brother. One day in the early 1960s Eddie’s brother-in-law’s family came to West Virginia for a visit. His sister-in-law, Polly Anderson, cajoled his wife, Betty, into exploring their attic. There they found the trunkful of Edith Lake Wilkinson’s artwork.

According to her daughter, Polly said, “My God, Betty, do you know what you have?” Betty let Polly take the paintings to her home in Northern California, where they formed the backdrop of her daughter Jane’s childhood.

Jane, like Edith, was gay, and, like Edith, moved to New York City as a young woman and studied art. She visited Provincetown to find out more about her great-aunt, but no one had heard about her.

Jane became a filmmaker, and in 2015 made a documentary called Packed In A Truck: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. In the process of discovering her grea- aunt, she found a white line woodblock that Edith dated to 1913 — one year before the earliest white line woodcut by Nordfeldt

Rediscovery of Edith Lake Wilkinson

Anderson felt she owed it to her great-aunt to get her work back in the public eye. White line woodcuts had already made a comeback by the time the film premiered.

In the late 1970s, Print Review assigned a story about the Provincetown Printers to a writer named Bill Evaul. A few of the original members survived, and from them Evaul learned how to make a white line woodcut. He mastered the art himself, taught it and promoted the genre.

By the 1980s, museums and galleries revived the work of the Provincetown Printers. In 1983-84, the Smithsonian American Art Museum showed 75 Provincetown prints. And In 2004, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston held an exhibit of the art of Blanche Lazell.

Woodcut by Kate Hanlon

The work of Edith Lake Wilkinson, though, did not appear in those exhibits. Anderson’s documentary changed all that. In 2013, the Larkin Gallery in Provincetown held a one-woman show of her work. And in 2016, the Huntington Art Museum held A TALENT FORGOTTEN: The Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson.

And in 2016, Bakker Auctions held a show of eight women artists from Provincetown. In the catalogue, the auction house describes

This tragic example of the precarious standing of women in the early 20th century is also a classic story of the female artist disappearing into historic obscurity.

If you’re interested in the art of the white line woodcut, check out Kate Hanlon’s website: https://www.katehanlon.com/teaching.

Images: Monongahela By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34635675. Edith Lake Wilkinson By Unknown author – http://www.edithlakewilkinson.com/about/chronology, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70173045. With thanks to Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Greely Expedition Plants the Flag ‘Farthest North’

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Buddy Levy relates an inspiring and harrowing tale in Labyrinth of Ice, his account of the Greely Expedition of 1881-1884.

The expedition was a maritime venture carried out by a ground force, the U.S. Army. In the brief Arctic summer of 1881 a multinational company of soldiers commanded by Lt. Adolphus Greely, a native of Newburyport, Mass., steamed northward from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Lady Franklin Bay, an inlet along the east coast of Ellesmere Island. Ellesmere lies west of northern Greenland across a narrow sea.

Adolphus Greely

There the adventurers constructed Ft. Conger, the northernmost encampment in the world at the time. Their chief goal was scientific research. Commander Greely’s ulterior goal, or personal “grail,” was to plant the U.S. flag “Farthest North,” breaking a centuries-old British record. If possible he wanted to reach the North Pole.

The Greely Expedition

The explorers indeed eclipsed the British record by a few miles. They mapped much of the region for the first time and conducted painstaking scientific observations. They also endured sunless winters lasting over 130 days, fraught with almost unimaginable cold and hardship. During November 1881, for example—before the worst of the long night set in—temperatures averaged -240 F.

The Greely Expedition’s accomplishments and derring-do at Ft. Conger constitute the inspiring part of the story. The back half of the book relates the harrowing part. The summer of 1881 was mild by Arctic standards, permitting the expedition to reach Lady Franklin Bay with little trouble.

But the summers of 1882 and 1883 were unusually severe. Ice kept resupply ships planned for each summer from getting through. In 1882 the lead vessel, Proteus, found itself icebound and crushed—compelling its crew to undertake a hazardous getaway to the south.

Greely opted to evacuate Ft. Conger in 1883 rather than try to wait out another long night. His orders directed him to retreat south that summer, while stores were starting to run low. The party managed to reach a designated rendezvous point at Cape Sabine, far to the south, yet was forced to improvise shelter to await a third relief expedition that might never come.

Salvation

Salvation did come in 1884—for some of Greely’s party. By then 18 soldiers had succumbed to starvation or the elements. Seven survived, including Greely himself. Barely: physicians on scene testified that the rest would have perished within a day or two had ships not anchored off Cape Sabine when they did.

Si survivors of the Greely expedition with their rescuers

Such a nick-of-time rescue would never pass muster in Hollywood.

The survivors received a hero’s welcome in Portsmouth, N.H., where the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic squadron and flagship gathered to greet them. Afterward Greely and fellow survivors heatedly denied speculation that members of the party had cannibalized fallen comrades. While press sensationalism tarnished the expedition’s reputation to a degree, Congress eventually awarded Greely a seldom-seen peacetime Medal of Honor—the U.S. armed forces’ supreme decoration for valor.

Lessons Learned

Levy leaves the lessons from the Greely Expedition mostly implicit, but they stand out for all that. First and foremost, to describe the far north as forbidding operating grounds constitutes an epic understatement. Natural barriers obstruct human movement on a colossal scale. For instance, Greely’s band encountered one ice floe 15 miles long. It took nine hours to pass while drifting southward.

The ill-fated Proteus

The icy north’s fickle dynamism is likewise striking. Ice floes were perpetually in motion. Seafarers watched for “leads,” or narrow sea lanes, to open as bergs jostled against one another. Sometimes a lane would open, then—as with the luckless Proteus—close around a ship like a vise. On one occasion the soldiers confronted a seemingly impassable iceberg, only to discover a fortuitous narrow cleft through the berg and make their getaway. Another Hollywood moment.

Second, Levy’s account arouses historical vertigo. For instance, the late 19th century was not that long ago, yet cartographers speculated that an “open polar sea” lay beyond a rim of ice. The top of the world was a tropical paradise! The Greely Expedition helped dispel such fancies. The book shows that the past is a foreign country, in earth science as in so many disciplines.

Third, logistics, bureaucracy and politics were pivotal and intermingled. The expedition was an army affair, but Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln saw Arctic exploration as a waste. Lincoln dithered constantly, delaying the 1882 and 1883 relief missions while encumbering their prospects for success.

Henrietta Greely

Levy casts Henrietta Greely, Adolphus’ well-connected San Diego wife, as a hero of the story. Working through press and government contacts, Mrs. Greely shamed the U.S. government into mounting a third relief effort—an effort orchestrated by the U.S. Navy when many thought hope for rescuing Greely and his men was forlorn.

Henrietta Greely

Professional mariners took great trouble to outfit ships capable of withstanding pressure from ice floes. And they got moving. The navy flotilla set out in time to reach Cape Sabine early in the summer of 1884, helped by Queen Victoria’s loan of a suitable Royal Navy ship. No more dawdling.

Warming Seas

And lastly, some years ago the U.S. Navy’s chief oceanographer forecast that warming temperatures will cause the polar icepack to advance and recede with the seasons. (For more on Arctic strategy click here.) Warming will open Arctic sea routes to shipping on a more regular basis, but it could accent the geophysical dynamism Buddy Levy documents so vividly, making navigation even more perilous.

Labyrinth of Ice, then, furnishes a historical baseline for seafarers—and New Englanders with a nautical bent—to think about northern operations in the coming years and decades.

Adolphus Greely, safe at home with his family.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the author, coauthor, or coeditor of ten books and hundreds of shorter works. An archive of his works can be found at https://navaldiplomat.com/.

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The Portsmouth Fires That Turned the City to Brick

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Three Portsmouth fires, all at Christmas, destroyed 500 buildings within a decade in the early 19th century. Miraculously, no one died in the blazes.

Portsmouth, N.H., was then a gracious seacoast town, home to wealthy merchants and the first federal shipyard. It had served as the colony’s seat of government before the Revolution, and remained so until 1808.

The fires would spare the wooden mansions of the wealthy, separated by wide lawns. But the poor and middle class who lived in crowded quarters would find themselves out on the street, again and again.

1st Portsmouth Fire

The first of the Portsmouth fires started early in the morning of Dec. 26, 1802. It began in an old wooden building downtown, swept through the city and destroyed 100 homes.

Firefighting then amounted to ‘engines’ – water pumps on wheels – which fed the bucket brigades. Homeowners hung leather fire buckets (now highly collectible) near their doors for use in the bucket brigades. ‘Rescue’ involved fire societies, who salvaged items from burning homes. Members carried bags to rescue household valuables and bed keys to quickly dismantle beds and remove them.

Women and men fought the fire in bucket brigades until they dropped, relieved by volunteers from neighboring towns. When it was all over, only the North Church and the Old State House still stood. “The whole beauty of the town is gone! is gone!!!” wailed The New Hampshire Gazette.

statehouse

Artists’ conception of the old New Hampshire Statehouse in Portsmouth (after the fire of 1813).

Most of the building owners had no insurance, and they had to rely on private charity to recover. Donations came in from near and far, amounting to f $45,410.43.

Congress stepped in – for the first disaster relief ever. In January 1803, Congress passed a law to temporarily suspend “the collection of bonds due by merchants of Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, who have suffered by the late conflagration of that town.”

Historic North Church in downtown Portsmouth.

New Hampshire businessmen also responded by incorporating the N.H. Fire and Marine Insurance Co.

2nd of the Portsmouth Fires

Four years later, the second of the Portsmouth fires broke out on Bow Street, raced up Market Street and gobbled up a row of wooden commercial buildings along the Piscataqua River.

The blaze wiped out Market Square, which had barely recovered from the previous fire, as well as St. John’s Episcopal Church, built in 1732. The damage was estimated at $130,000, about $2.7 million in today’s dollars.

portsmouth

Portsmouth’s Market Square in 1853.

The disastrous fire preceded two more blows to the city: the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812. Both events sent Portsmouth, heavily dependent on shipping and trade, on a long downward slide. The industrial revolution bypassed Portsmouth, spurring growth in nearby mill towns like Dover and Rochester.

john-langdon-house

Gov. John Langdon’s house in Portsmouth, N.H., spared by the fires.

Last of the Portsmouth Fires

Then almost exactly seven years after the second fire, on Dec. 22, 1813, the worst of the Portsmouth fires caused more devastation.  The blaze started in Mrs. Woodward’s barn at the corner of Court and Church streets, allegedly set on purpose by an angry servant.

The fire then marched down to the river, burning everything in its path.  The conflagration wiped out 300 buildings, reducing 15 acres to smoking rubble and, as one resident put it, ‘a forest of naked chimneys.’

The huge fire could be seen as far away as Salem, Mass. Volunteers from that town traveled 48 miles in six hours to help put out the blaze. Help also came from Newburyport, Mass., and the New Hampshire towns of Dover, Exeter and Durham.

Market Square, well after the Portsmouth fires

The fire sent the N.H. Fire and Marine Insurance Co. into bankruptcy. It destroyed many businesses that had relocated after the first fire of 1802.

After the Fires

Portsmouth had been growing at a good clip before the fires. Its population increased 13.1 percent from 1790 to 1800, and then at a spectacular 29.9 percent from 1800 to 1810. After the fire of 1813, the city’s growth slowed to only 5.7 percent from 1810-1820. to 7,327. Some people, including a young lawyer named Daniel Webster, packed up and left.

In 1814, the New Hampshire General Court passed the Brick Act, requiring every building over 12 feet high to be built of brick with a slate roof. Portsmouth rebuilt its downtown in brick, and tried to enjoy the holidays.

Jefferson Street in Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke Museum.

You can still get a feel for what Portsmouth was like before it went brick at the Strawbery Banke collection of house museums, right in the middle of the city.


With thanks to Dennis Robinson, The Three Fires of Christmas, SeacoastNH.com, 2005. Images: North Church By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34161214. Gov. John Langdon House By Daderot – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5643711. Jefferson Street By Ken Gallager (Ken Gallager from en.wikipedia) – Author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15734947. This story about the Portsmouth Fires was updated in 2023.

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The 1790 Census: New England by the Numbers

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Just after the American Revolution, Gilmanton, N.H., ranked as the 30th biggest municipality in the United States. The Lakes Region town was bigger than Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh, Trenton, Louisville, Cincinnati and Savannah, according to the 1790 census.

New Hampshire, in fact, had four towns among the 30 largest in the country, including Londonderry, Portsmouth and Rochester. Only four New England states belonged to the union then, but they were home to 19 of the 30 biggest cities and towns in the country. Back then, one in four U.S. citizens lived in New England.

The region’s power and influence in the early Republic can be inferred from the 1790 census, the first taken in the United States. It didn’t last long. The westward migration had already begun in 1787, from a minister’s house in Ipswich, Mass. As people migrated west for land and opportunity, new cities and towns began to eclipse those of New England.

Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn served as U.S. Marshal for Maine during the 1790 census. Painting by Gilbert Stuart.

The 1790 Census

In 1790, there were 93,000 people living in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including the District of Maine. A year after the federal government took the 1790 census, 86,000 Vermonters officially joined New England.

Massachusetts alone held nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population, and Boston ranked as the third biggest municipality. Only New York and Philadelphia had more people. Census takers counted Boston’s population at 18,320 — about the size of contemporary Hopkinton, Mass.

Jonathan Jackson served as U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts during the 1790 census.

Today, only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population lives in Massachusetts, and Boston has slipped to the 24th biggest city.

Census taking in 1790 was an inexact science. Congress ordered U.S. marshals to take it. Each state had only one marshal, so the marshal appointed assistants to count people. The 650 enumerators had nine months to collect the data and post the results in two public places. Then they stored the results in the federal courthouse.

The U.S. marshals in New England included Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn for Maine, Jonathan Jackson for Massachusetts, John Parker for New Hampshire, William Peck for Rhode Island and Philip Bradley for Connecticut.

Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both questioned whether the census could count everyone. During a time of difficult travel and communication, the enumerators probably missed some people. And they deliberately missed all Indians not taxed, for example.

In the end, the census takers managed to count just under 4 million people.

1790-census-pitcher

A pitcher commemorating the 1790 census

Urban vs. Rural

The vast majority of Americans lived in the country in 1790. New Hampshire was one of the more urban states, with more towns in the Top 30 rankings than Connecticut, which only had New Haven and Hartford. New Hampshire, in fact, had more municipalities in the Top 30 than Pennsylvania, which had almost three times the population.

Today, New Hampshire’s biggest city – Manchester – ranks 259th, the only New Hampshire municipality among the top 300 U.S. cities.

Massachusetts was similarly urban, though some towns had not yet started to grow into cities – Worcester, Springfield and Fall River, for example, were all smaller than Gilmanton, N.H. Lowell didn’t even exist.

But the towns in Massachusetts that ranked in the top 30 might surprise you. In ascending order, they were Plymouth, Beverly, New Bedford, Taunton, Middleborough, Sherburne, Newburyport, Gloucester, Marblehead and Salem. Salem was bigger than Richmond, Va., and Albany, N.Y. Middleborough, Mass., was also bigger than Albany.

New England, in fact, had five of the 10 largest urban places in the United States: Boston, Salem, Mass.; Newport, R.I.; Providence, R.I., and Marblehead, Mass.

Connecticut had a significantly more rural character then than it does now. New Hampshire’s population was denser, especially along the southern border. The Connecticut towns of Stamford, Waterbury and Danbury had fewer people than Gilmanton. Bridgeport, now Connecticut’s biggest city, wouldn’t incorporate for another 30 years.

Westward Ho!

The center of the U.S. population has steadily moved west and slightly south, as people migrated and new states joined the union. New England’s presence steadily declined.

Ten years after the 1790 census, only 15 New England cities ranked in the top 30, despite having added Vermont. And in 1820, New England had just 13 of the biggest cities and towns.

In 1790, Massachusetts had 9.7 percent of the U.S. population. Twenty years later it had only 6.5 percent, as four states had joined the union. And in 229 years, the Bay State has slipped from fourth to 15th place.

Gilmanton has grown a little from its base of 2,613 in 1790, when it had an ironworks and a half-dozen villages and parishes. In 2017, 3,734 lived in the town. But Gilmanton never again appeared on the list of the top 30 cities and towns in the United States.

For a list of the Top 30 cities, click here.


This story was updated in 2021. 

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Timothy Dexter, the Ridiculous Millionaire Who Sold Coals to Newcastle

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Timothy Dexter was considered a lucky fool for selling coal to Newcastle and bed warmers to the tropics – and somehow making money on the ventures.

Lord Timothy Dexter with his hairless dog

Lord Timothy Dexter with his hairless dog

He rounded up the stray cats of Federalist Newburyport, Mass., shipped them off to the Caribbean – and made money.

He wrote a semiliterate book without any punctuation – and it went into eight printings.

Timothy Dexter failed at the one thing that mattered most to him: acceptance by high society. Perhaps it was because he was vain and ridiculous. He did, after all, call himself a lord and stage his own mock funeral and surround his High Street mansion with painted wooden statues of the great men of history.

But the question still lingers even to this day: Was he incredibly lucky or incredibly shrewd?

Timothy Dexter

Timothy Dexter was born in Malden, Mass., on Jan. 22, 1747. The first Dexter had immigrated from Ireland a century before.  His family had little money and young Timothy received little education.

He went to work as an indentured servant on a farm at the age of eight. At 14 he left the farm for Charlestown, Mass., to work as an apprentice dressing leather for breeches and gloves. When he finished his apprenticeship, his employer gave him a new suit of clothes, called a freedom suit.

Novelist John P. Marquand, another son of Newburyport, wrote two books about Timothy Dexter. The first repeated the legend, the second, Timothy Dexter Revisited, offered a more sympathetic view of the man.  In Dexter’s case, noted Marquand, he received a good freedom suit. That “proves that Dexter had been sober and diligent,” Marquand wrote. “In fact, all evidence indicates that he was quiet and industrious for many years after his arrival in Newburyport, and not conspicuous until he suddenly made a fortune.”

Newburyport

Dexter sold his freedom suit for eight dollars and 20 cents, which helped pay for his relocation to Newburyport sometime around 1767. At that time the seaport town attracted many artisans and tradesmen. Business boomed and Newburyport rivaled Boston in commercial importance. In 1767, Newburyport’s shipbuilders built 70 vessels.

Within a year Dexter bought land and married Elizabeth Frothingham, a modestly well-off widow nine years older than he. She had four children and a house.

He set up shop in the basement of his wife’s house, selling moosehide trousers, gloves, hides and blubber.  Elizabeth also opened a shop selling notions.

By the end of the American Revolution he had saved several thousand dollars. He spent it all on worthless Continental currency. When Congress decided to make good on the scrip, Dexter became a very rich man. Lucky or shrewd?

timothy dexter library

The Tracy house as public library, 1899

Sudden Wealth

When Dexter suddenly came into his fortune in 1791 or 1792, he lost his moorings, according to Marquand. He and his wife had toiled steadily for more than 20 years. He had risen by his own efforts in a competitive marketplace and won respect as a businessmen. But now as a man of considerable means, the Timothy Dexter of legend and lore came into view.

Something, wrote Marquand, encouraged the fantastic side of Timothy Dexter’s temperament.

Cats and Bed Warmers

He bought a magnificent house on State Street that had belonged to Nathaniel Tracy and now serves the Newburyport Public Library. He built two ships, the Mehitabel and the Congress.  Stories are still told of the improbable — and lucky — trades he made.

He famously shipped coals to Newcastle, where they sold at a premium during a coal miner’s strike.

He once sent bed warmers to the tropical West Indies, where they found a use as tools in the molasses industry.

One year, Newburyport had a problem with stray cats. Town Meeting voted on an article to destroy them all. The motion failed by a vote of 50-50. The next day, Dexter put an ad in the paper offering to pay for stray cats and promising to treat them well. He sent them to the Caribbean, where warehouse owners paid a premium for them. Dexter may or may not have known about the infestation of mice bedeviling the plantations.

Dexter also sent gloves to Polynesia, where Portuguese traders bought them on their way to China.

He claimed he cornered the whalebone market just as the French fashion for large corsets — or was it hoop skirts? — arrived.

But like many wealthy people, Dexter may have wanted to bend the truth just a bit about how he made his money.

Trouble at Home

Life at home in the Tracy mansion did not match Timothy Dexter’s business success. His hot-tempered wife scolded him often, not without cause. He had a roving eye and drank far too much.

Elizabeth Dexter probably contributed to his need for acceptance. She came from the New Hampshire Gilman family, which had produced a governor, John Taylor Gilman. Timothy Dexter had had real estate dealings with his wife’s family, and they probably looked down on him. He began to call her a ghost and refused to acknowledge she was alive.

They had two children, Samuel and Nancy. Dexter hoped Samuel would turn into an educated gentleman. Instead, he turned into a reckless drunk. Sam convinced his father to let him take one of his ships to England to sell the cargo. Instead, he blew it all at the gambling table.

Nancy had beauty but no brains. She married Abraham Bishop, a Yale scholar with little money, and moved to New Haven with him. The marriage failed, he beat her and she took to drinking heavily. Alcohol did not improve her already feeble wits, so Nancy returned home where her family shut her away.

Amidst these troubles, Timothy Dexter claimed he grew increasingly “nervous.” And so he sold the Tracy house in 1796 and decamped to Chester, N.H.

Earl of Chester

Despite his drinking, Dexter still had business sense. Irving Wallace noted Timothy Dexter founded his fortune on sobriety and a hangover. He never drank in the morning and he never conducted business in the afternoon.

street

Chester Street, Chester, N.H.

Marquand speculated he moved to Chester, a thriving mercantile town, to invest in real estate. Whatever the case, he took to calling himself the Earl of Chester. A child who called him “Lord Dexter” could expect a quarter, an adult, perhaps dinner and drinks.

He continued to pursue women, possibly the reason a lawyer waylaid him and beat him savagely.

Lord Dexter

After his assault, Lord Dexter returned to Newburyport. He bought a princely estate once owned by Jonathan Jackson, Nathaniel Tracy’s business partner.

The Lord Timothy Dexter House

The Lord Timothy Dexter House

He created an outdoor museum on the grounds with 40 garishly painted wooden statues of such diverse figures as Louis XVI, Adam and Eve, Toussaint Louverture and John Hancock. The first three U.S. presidents stood astride a giant arch. Dexter had at least one statue of himself, with the motto, “I am the first in the East, I am the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the western world.”

Marquand believed Dexter’s madness had a method. He had invested in the Essex-Merrimack Bridge, and traffic was falling off. Dexter, thought Marquand, was trying to increase traffic across the bridge with his “outdoor museum.” It did attract many visitors, including pretty young damsels with whom Dexter tried improper liberties.

As his drinking and tempter worsened, Lord Dexter turned to eccentrics and sycophants for praise and comfort. Madame Hooper, for example, had a double set of teeth and a chicken for a companion. She told his fortune. Jonathan Plummer, a fishmonger and purveyor of pornography, wrote poems about Dexter’s greatness. He also had a little dog, probably a Mexican hairless, who never left his side when he was drunk.

In 1802, Dexter published a 24-page book that criticized the clergy, politicians and his wife. Full of misspellngs, it had no punctuation. He called it A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (you can read the whole thing here). He handed the book out for free, but it grew popular and went through eight reprintings. In the second edition, Dexter added a page that consisted of 13 lines of punctuation marks with instructions the readers could distribute them as they pleased.

Wallace described it as ‘an egotistical, opinionated, coarse defense of Dexter, by Dexter, against all “Enemys” who were anti-Dexter.’

Funeral

Shortly before Dexter died, he staged his own funeral, bribing his family to go along with the ruse. He wanted to see how people would react. He beat his wife afterward because she didn’t cry enough.

Lord Timothy Dexter died at age 59 on Oct. 26, 1806, leaving money for the care of Newburyport’s poor. The storm of 1815 damaged the statues, and they sold for a few dollars at auction. Those that weren’t sold were burned.

The Timothy Dexter house became a tavern, and then went through a series of owners. Marquand noted that several wealthy families lived in it and added Victorian embellishments. It was hard, he wrote, to tell where Dexter left off and the Victorians started.

In 1988, painters set it on fire by removing paint with a torch. The fire destroyed the cupola and golden eagle on the roof, but the Society for the Preservation of New England Architecture (now Historic new England) had the original blueprints. The house was rebuilt, and is now privately owned.

Years after he died, Sarah Anna Emery described Dexter  in Reminiscences of a Newburyport Nonagenarian. “Though ignorant and illiterate, and doubtless somewhat indebted to luck for his good fortune, still it is evident the man was both shrewd and sagacious,” she wrote.

The Lord Timothy Dexter House and Museum

Watch the author of this story discuss Timothy Dexter here.

This story was updated in 2023. 

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